Postcards from a Previous Life (2) Coffee shop loyalty cards

Strange the habits you fall into. Takeaway coffee (albeit sometimes in a reusable cup) or coffee-while-waiting-for-late-people or to punctuate shopping or study was a staple of my existence pre-covid. Before work and between work and hitting the BL reading toom of an evening, on transport in lieu of breakfast, and to sweeten train delays or early starts. 

As a consequence I have no fewer than seven loyalty cards, little oblongs of coloured cardboard or plastic, all with one or two stamps that will likely now never get filled up.

The Brompton Cemetery One

This should have been easy to complete. I used to walk through Brompton Cemetery quite regularly after work on light evenings, picking out the graves of John Snow and Emmeline Pankhurst and trying to find Henry Cole's, but the cemetery fights a losing battle with brambles, and although I could identify where it was (there's a handy map available when the office is open) I couldn't get near it. 

Caffe Nero (x2)

I imagine Caffe Nero are really suffering in London during the pandemic. Like so many of the chain coffee shops they are or were at saturation point, and I'm sure I've read somewhere that the chains deliberately overextend themselves and then close the less profitable ones down. The one in Kensington used to be in an odd-shaped glass box next to the parade with High Street Kensington Station in it, and the mezzanine narrowed to a point that had to be left empty because nothing could really fit in it and even if it had you'd have had to squeeze past the other tables to get out (image link here). I used to go there for lunch sometimes (healthy lunch of cake and coffee and library book) or to meet up with my cousin, but it's been pulled down now, as part of High Street Ken station rebuild. 

G like Gelato

This was a smallish place on Wimbledon Bridge over the railway, since closed - a casualty of Covid at a guess. The coffee and croissants were nice and they did quite well, especially in the summer months when there were queues for gelato, but there was only room outside for a couple of tables and the waning of commuters and transport must have affected all takeaway sales but especially those so near stations - people used to buy coffees to drink on the tube and train, since that was dead time - and while in summer 2020 there was a slight resurgence, probably because it was still possible to believe things were going to bounce back to normal, by summer 2021, despite 'freedom day', a lot of people had realised this is what is normal now. 

Wayne's Coffee

I'm not sure if this coffee shop is there or not, although there is still a coffee shop and sandwich place on the site. It was all very dark wood and hipster with low hanging lights you bang your head on when you stand up (and remember folks, I'm just five foot tall) and mats for recharging your phone through osmosis or however that works, but there's been a name change since I was going into the office regularly and I'm not sure if that means it's a new place, or the same place with a few tweaks.  

Costa Coffee

I am actually still using this one. Not centrally or regularly but very occasionally in Morden while waiting for a bus (our regular bus into Morden was pulled due to a damaged bridge, and the replacement was half-hourly. Normally I'd just walk, but not if I had lots of groceries). 

It's a new branch they've opened near the station (reaching out into zone 4 now zone 1 is quiet I suspect). They send me emails encouraging me to order online and telling me the latest festive things they're selling (lots and lots of cream and sugar). Weirdly the first time I went I found they had a nice little patio garden, and then they never opened it since. Maybe they think it's too cold. 

Illy

No idea where this one came from. Illy is a coffee brand, and I doubt every independent coffee shop that serves it uses this same loyalty card, so it must have been somewhere specific I thought I'd come back to in the before times. 

Ritazza

I've only seen these at stations and from what I remember of my experience the coffee was scalding and bitter but thankfully caffeinated, and they were open when some of the other places weren't, so ideal if you're changing trains at some awful soul sapping hour (something else I very much miss). 

Take any card, take my card.

From the desk of..

I've seen a few 'working from home' type posts with unnervingly spotless desks, so I thought I'd share my own ode to the humble workspace. 

I am not, sadly, a freelance illustrator, but I do like to paint. This is from yesterday as I'm actually on holiday for two weeks, which in lockdown means more painting and less typing. The tabletop easel is also a carry box for paints. I have a few different art storage boxes - I keep acrylics in this one. (Daler Rowney Tabletop Easel from Cass Art, in case anyone wants one, I've certainly got no complaints with it).

In front you can see a few of the art brushes, Some drying in the giant sunpat peanut butter jar - they're a great size for it, but I try not to buy peanut butter because I smother it on toast and scoff far too much - and the others in a tea caddy that I think we found in the shed of our last council house when we moved in (we in this instance means my mother, brother and I). Also in the tea caddy are pens and a proddy tool for making rag rugs (which idea I abandoned). Behind the peanut butter jar I've put water in an old conditioner pot from Lush, and behind that again you can see the various containers with pens and so on.

You can see the pots and pens much better in this one:

This is a proper 'working from home' one. The fibreboard suitcase is french, and lined with cream coloured paper. I keep music scores in it, unless I'm going away and need it. It's great because it's small enough to go under a plane seat if necessary. It is not suitable for hold luggage - I learnt that lesson with a brown fibreboard case that fell to bits - but I hate waiting for hold luggage anyway.

A lot of the music comes from a great bookshop in Bell Street near Edgware Rd where the basement was awash with the stuff. I've been learning the piano for over ten years, but my practising is very sporadic (like my painting) so I can't play a fraction of what I have yet. The laptop is a Surface, and belongs to work, but the wireless mouse is mine. The mug I think someone bought me.

Under that is a box of drawing inks (Winsor and Newton) and under that is a tin that used to contain chocolates in the shape of the Statue of Liberty. Gemma at work brought those back from New York in the last year and I bagsied the tin. It's got post-its and envelopes in it now.

Behind that some Muji make up storage that I've got Diamine inks and other bits in, and of course you can see the pens and pencils and felts I have in various jars. The desk is John Lewis, and bamboo. It's the right height for me - probably a bit low for most people, and not adjustable, which might be why it was in the sale when I got it.

The stool is adjustable - its a machinist's stool, or rather a modern copy based on one, with a heavy metal base and a screw and lock mechanism. I bought it for the piano, but it's proved ideal for use as an occasional table and wfh as well. I know OT's recommend a seat with a back, but actually I can't even use the back of my desk chair at work because the seat is so large I wouldn't be able to bend my knees properly if I sat back. In any case the curve of the backrest is wrong (what makers of furniture, and some clothes manufacturers, don't seem to get is that if you're short, you either have a form of dwarfism and need something bespoke, or are, like me, short all over, so unless they can scale down their furniture all over, which it seems they can't, something less complicated is actually better.).

But what I will invest in if this goes on is a screen, so I'm not peering downwards. Or a keyboard, so I can raise this screen a bit.

Anyway this post didn't seem very exciting or book-related, so I've scrolled back through my photo album to find other pictures in which my desk has a bit part at least:

This is obviously a culling post pic, and is already on the blog here. It's from over 18 months back - that is a London Review of Books paper bag from when I had a subscription. It conked out in the end - as did the subscription - so I have a Uniqlo bag now. Normally I take these books to the bookswap in Wimbledon station. At the moment though I'm not using public transport unless I've got very heavy shopping and more than a mile to walk (it's happened twice in four weeks) so I haven't had a cull in a while. Also how could I really be sure they weren't contaminated? I think I'm virus free, but no-one can be sure.

What I am pretty sure of is that I still have all these. Certainly I have the Jan Morris (The Venetian Empire) and the Greene Essays. The picture seems to be for this blogpost, which I never included it on, maybe because those other books aren't the ones mentioned, or because they can't be seen properly (I'm certain that blue book is not the Pym, but the one at the back may be Metroland).

The laptop at the top of the picture is my own, which is getting a bit slow now to be honest. I can't make up my mind if I want a newer version of the same - which means I can actually put it in my lap - or something more like the work one which I can also use as a tablet for sheet music and drawing. Or if I'm being really wasteful replacing it while it does still work.

The laptop in this pic belongs to work and was slower still. In fact - looking at this properly - I'm certain this was taken at work, not at home, but I'm going to leave the picture for the doodles. They replaced our laptops all in the last year, thank goodness, or I would never be able to minute meetings remotely.  Those doodles and many more were mostly done while waiting for the rotten thing to load OneDrive, SharePoint, or our finance system.

Clearly taken for another blog post, and an update on that is 'Letter from New York' was great. 

This I know I took to send to my cousin when I found a postcard I had written years before and never posted. 

I seem to have put all my Hitchhikers together here, but have no idea why.  Or why the CD boxes are sideways instead of end on. This is the oldest picture (in fact each is older than the one before) and is not well composed, frankly.

So that's my desk, and all the pics I have thereof.

Syracuse

Another walk through London

This time through Victoria Embankment Gardens and over Waterloo Bridge last Sunday after my British Library tour. Really this post is just an excuse to post some pics. The one below is from the memorial to Henry Fawcett, with the inscription 'from his grateful countrywomen' beneath it. Intrigued by this I looked him up. Henry Fawcett was a campaigner for Women's Suffrage, an MP, and a famous economist. He was also blind from the age of 25. 

And this on Waterloo Bridge. 

Obligatory shots of the Alhambra

I have also tried to draw it, but luckily I haven't got a scanner with me, so I don't have to post it until I've had another go. Or six.

Some Lions

The Winged Lion of Venice

and a smaller, gilded version

Heraldic Lion, Bologna

Stone Lion, Oxford

and mate..

Lion with remarkable manual dexterity 

outside the Houses of Parliament

Nelson's Memorial, St Paul's

Wrapping up London.

If anyone is in London this week you might be interested that the last Summer Late opening of St Paul's Cathedral is the 31st August (this Thursday). Access is a little more restricted (the galleries, meaning the interior and exterior of the dome, are closed) but it is cheaper, quieter and I think more evocative in the evening hours.

My brother and I also joined the Royal Palaces for a year, which for a joint ticket is not excessive. Especially since we're both in fairly easy reach of most of them. We've already been to Hampton Court - mostly the gardens, the Tower of London, and Kew Palace.

As usual though, I've mostly just been walking about and snapping whatever interests me. 

Not Going to the Shakespeare Metamorphosis

London is always the oddest mix of empty and busy at the weekends. Clusters and crowds by the river or at Covent Garden, but empty streets all around.

The plan on Sunday was to go to the Botticelli exhibition at the Courtauld, then on to the Shakepeare Metamorphosis exhibition at Senate House, so I started from the station across Waterloo Bridge, and turned right up the Strand. The Courtauld is in the right hand side of the gate of Somerset House (the left side is the shop) and is one of the smaller galleries of London, a series of rooms most of which are on the scale of a house rather than a gallery, ideal for showing prints and drawings and engravings at close range.

I've never been in any of the rest of the building. It used to be the place to go to see wills and marriage licences (much referenced in Agatha Christie) and there are fountains in the courtyard and a temporary ice rink erected in the same spot in the winter, but the other three wings of the building are a mystery to me. Another place to go back to.

Because the galleries in the Courtauld all radiate from the same spiral staircase I had to go through a very small exhibition - just one medium sized room - of Bruegel engravings, including one I particularly liked of  the adulteress who Christ saved from being stoned to death by suggesting that he who was without sin should cast the first stone.

A later colour painting had also been made but the engraving was much more immediate - without that jewel-box prettiness which distracted from the story.

The Botticelli exhibition I didn't enjoy so much. The pictures he did for Dante's Divine Comedy are beautiful, the subject matter less so. It began of course with Hell and Purgatory, all that emphasis on punishment only made more unpleasant by being worked out and drawn in exquisite detail, and at last moved on to Heaven, where Dante seemed quite happy to ascend with his childhood sweetheart, not sparing a moment's thought for the poor suffering souls he'd left behind.

There is a point where this aspect of religion feels to me to be less about the fear of God and more about the smug pleasure of seeing others suffer 'appropriate' punishment, and here I felt that point was passed. I was particularly uncomfortable to see soothsayers with their heads put on backwards and artists bent double under rocks for daring to take pride in being the best of their time.

I don't remember what the people being speared in a pit of flame had done wrong, or the ones buried upside down in a hole with their feet on fire, but there isn't really any sin you could commit in your mere 60 or 70 years on Earth that would warrant that for eternity, and it felt so out of kilter with Christ's treatment of the adulteress you couldn't help wondering how these beliefs could have arisen from that teaching.

There was also a small tome - an early astronomical text - with the note that the writer had been burned at the stake for heresy. Perhaps the juxtaposition of this with Botticelli's beautiful and inaccurate drawing of an Earth-centric universe was intended to make the reader intensely uncomfortable. It certainly did me.

Afterwards I walked up Drury Lane to Bedford Square, then along Gower St to Senate House, all very quiet, where I found that the Metamorphosis was closed on Sundays. You can walk through under Senate House though, which I did, and then across Russell Square and down through Kingsway in a straight line back to Aldwych.

Not being quite ready to go home I then went into St Clement Danes, where I don't think I've been since I was a child. It's a place of immense quiet, with books of remembrance lining the walls in glass cases, listing the names of those who have been killed in the line of duty.

Things that stood out for me were that an entire double page could be filled with men with just one surname, which really brought home the scale of loss, and the few 'foreign' names, including one woman in the WAAF included in a memorial to the right of the altar whose name I wish I had thought to write down.

After that I explored the crypt and the photographs and tapestry on the stairs - I wondered if I was really meant to be up there at first - and was lucky enough to be there on the hour when the carillon rang.

I wandered into St Bride's as well (past the Royal Courts of Justice and some Johnsonite public houses) but found it under renovation and a string quartet practicing in the central aisle, which was lovely, but did make me feel I shouldn't disturb them.

Continuing up Fleet Street, which has lost a lot of character since the newspapers left, to St Pauls,  I rejoined the crowds of tourists, then walked across the Millennium Bridge to the South Bank (which was even busier) and past the Globe, the Clink, Southwark Cathedral, Tooley Street where the London Dungeon used to be (and there is now something that looks just as creepy and tourist trappish, and where that disturbing nursery rhyme London Bridge was being played), and into London Bridge Station and home.

And this is actually a picture from a completely different walk earlier in the week after work -

 Camden to Great Portland Street via Albany Street.

Italy again

I don't think I've been very fair to Bologna – I don't mean on this blog, where I haven't even mentioned my recent(ish) holiday, but certainly in conversation.

I spent three days there in late October and then another 3 days in Florence and I’ve been so full of Florence – which from the paper shops to the bridges to the views across the historic city has a magic all it's own – that all I've had to say about Bologna is that it rained but I went up the tower anyway and they're big on food. 

And yet it is a place with considerable charm and history. The statuary may be more solid and less antique, and the transport hub for train and bus has been laid out with considerably less consideration for the natural beauty of the area than you would find at - say - Charing Cross, but the vast square in the old town has immense and beautiful buildings and the view across the city from the tower is well worth the climb. 

One of the beautiful buildings. 

I also stumbled across the old University. Established in the 11th century (10 years or so before Oxford) it not only had an anatomical theatre but gorgeous crests painted on the walls and ceilings of the halls and what I want to call cloisters - but apparently only religious buildings can have cloisters so I can't. 

Here's a favourite anyway:  

 and here are some more:

Even in the older parts the city feels solid and prosperous and well fed and yet I kept finding small decorative snippets I wanted to snap. 

So although Florence has captured me romantically it's Bologna I've been looking up to see what I missed in my 3 days there. Only this evening I stopped looking because of course I'm going to go back and find out for myself. 

Doing the Lambeth Walk

We did get to the Tate for the Barbara Hepworth yesterday evening but both ended up coming to the same conclusion - which was that Hepworth's work is really meant to be seen outdoors. The larger pieces have holes or shapes cut into them that are clearly meant to frame something, and the shapes are smooth and organic.

There was also a film showing of Hepworth sculpting in her garden in Cornwall and you could see how right her work looked under the Cornish light, and how wrong by comparison in a white walled room in a gallery.  

It also seemed a shame that her smaller, obviously very tactile work (wood burnished like conkers, granite smooth as sea pebbles) had all been shut in perspex boxes. Perhaps because they are so tactile and people might be more than usually tempted to touch them. It flattened them though. They weren't at their best. 

I shouldn't complain really, my aunt is a member so I got in free. 

I went back to the Tate this morning, partly because I was thinking I might go to the Sensorium (but in the end I just stood under the dome listening to the birdsong and then nosed at the lower ground exhibition about the building of the Tate) and partly because I need a birth certificate and Lambeth Registry Office is temporarily located in Vauxhall. 

It is also, it turns out, closed on Saturdays. Not that it matters, I can get a birth certificate online. Going up there was just an object for my walk, like Virginia Woolf's pencil in Street Haunting.

Vauxhall is changing. Not exactly gentrifying either, despite the buildings shooting up. It's faster and more absentee-tenant than that, although round the back there are still cafes and parks and the City Farm. 

I gravitated back to the river as usual and walked towards Lambeth Bridge to take the long way to the Tate. 

Then I saw these and crossed the road to get a better look:

Noticed this down a side street:

and while taking a picture of that (standing in the road as you only can at the weekend) noticed this as well:

Why there is a pacman ghost on the side of that pub is more than I can tell you. 

The road is Lambeth High Street by the way. Perhaps at some time it was a bustling thoroughfare with shops?  I can't find any pictures that suggest it though.

Since I was in town anyway I took the tube to Oxford Circus and walked down to see Hepworth's angel - it's actually called Winged Figure but I've always thought of it as an angel - on the John Lewis building. Again, it's not a thing you can imagine looking it's best indoors. 

Unfortunately I couldn't get a decent shot myself without inconveniencing a hundred other pedestrians but more information is available here. 

And then, via Mount Street where Jack Buchanan has a blue plaque I've never noticed before, Victoria and Vauxhall again and home. 

City Walls and Small Gold Trains

Unlike Naples, which plasters the image of Vesuvius on every available piece of tourist tat, Verona has two symbols it likes to use. One is the Arena in the Piazza Bra - built in AD 30 and astonishingly still in use for concerts (they were just about to start the Opera season when I was there, the walls outside flanked with sphinxes and emperors, all gold-painted skin and lapis lazuli lined eyes, safely enclosed behind temporary fencing that wouldn't keep a determined nine year old out. Not that it needed to, none of the props were mauled),

The other is that universal symbol of romance, the heart. This is largely Shakespeare's fault. His version of Romeo and Juliet may have been based on earlier writings, but it was he who made the play, creating the characters and the poetic language that can make something feel true even to people who know perfectly well it's not.

Like, for example, the crowd standing under Juliet's balcony in the Casa de Giulietta on Via Cappello. The balcony was not there in Shakespeare's time and the similarity of Capulet to Cappello is probably meaningless, but that's not the point - the point is the other people, the crowd itself, and the crowd that has been flowing in and out through the gates of the courtyard for years, writing on the boards fixed to the walls, pinning up post its, fastening locks around the metal gratings of the doors. It's that idea of being madly in love, so in love that nothing else in the world matters, that people truly come for.

Verona itself can only add to that intoxication. This is a very, very pretty city. In the evenings it smells of jasmine and sings with calling, diving, swallows. The walls and tiles of the houses are made of the warm red brick we flatter ourselves our own houses are here (when in reality London clay is a miserable yellow brown) and many have frescoes, fading now to hints of pastel and gold. There are innumerable pavement cafes where you can linger as long as you like, delightful bridges over the shallow but fast flowing Adige, piazzas with fountains and statues everywhere, a city wall with decorative crenellations, and if you walk up one of the nearby hills - say to the Castel San Pietro - it's green and leafy and charming and the view is wonderful.

It has a silly little gold train which winds around the streets for 5 euros per person, and shows you everything in half an hour, and that too is part of Verona's charm. It's small, even intimate. You could be 20, and skint, and walk everywhere and not go into a single museum or church or restaurant but still feel like you knew Verona, in a way you could never know Paris or London without spending money.

Weekends...

Last weekend Polesden Lacey, which is owned by the National Trust. My aunt - not the same aunt who had to paddle to safety in Richmond with me or the aunt who moved out to Italy, but a third aunt - described it rather well as a place you could imagine moving into. It's stately but not unwieldy, with pleasant bathrooms and leather chairs worn soft with use as well as a grand piano and a room all mirrors and gold, dark panelled halls and a white wall-length linen closet.

The gardens were nice too, kitchen gardens, silvery lavender, and sheets of bluebells in the woods. Enormous tulips; but then all the tulips seem enormous this year, great tall goblets on fat, sappy stems.

This weekend started straight after work on Friday when I went to the 'Defining Beauty' exhibition at the British Museum (this is the exhibition I meant to go to a few weeks ago when I fetched up doing Portobello Rd and Bayswater instead). Rather nice, and only half price for art fund members, but I studied Ancient History at degree level so some of the labelling and the history was bound to be a little too shallow and simplistic for me. I also don't think we have enough source material to know what Ancient Athenians really thought about (to give just one example) women - and even if we do it doesn't seem likely that their views remained static throughout the whole 200 year period. Consider how views can change in just 50 years in our own era.

The statues are gorgeous though, and after the exhibition I still had the rest of the museum to wander round. Sappho's lyric poetry was being performed near the Parthenon Marbles to the strumming of instruments - although not, I think, a lyre - and a quartet of guitar and drums and violins was playing something toe-tapping in one corner of the main hall -  that huge glass-enclosed space that somehow has intimate corners despite being vast and sunlit.

Yesterday was a pub lunch in Chichester (and a very nice art shop in which I bought a sketch book for my upcoming trip to Verona, and my youngest aunt - the paddling in the Thames one - bought wrapping paper and other things which caught her eye). And today I saw my 6 year old cousin who, as usual, seems to be pursuing a career as my personal trainer: cricket, timed laps around the war memorial while we waited for the baby aunt (she was watering and putting chrysanthemums on my grandparents' grave), relay races, cops and robbers, more cricket, tea and ice cream and then crazy golf. In return I showed him how to take his pulse.

And on Tuesday I go to Verona.

Hence Random Picture of Balcony

Wellcome

I went wrong on my walk to the Wellcome Collection – I went right across Hyde Park, up diagonally through Marylebone, Portland Place and the UCL campus and then within 5 minutes walk of my destination I wandered into the main gate of the UCL cloisters (in my defence there was a huge banner about an upcoming exhibition at the Wellcome slung across one of the buildings) and on coming out turned the wrong way and ended up somewhere past Gordon Square.

It did mean however that I noticed and took some photos of this rather nice piece of carving:

It’s over a gateway at the back of the Church of Christ the King. One of those lost rear entrances that happen when another building is built up to a church wall and the resulting appendix of road is used as a tiny private car park and (judging from personal observation) pissoir and place to smash glass bottles. A shame.

The Wellcome itself – when I got there – was a mix of old and new museum styles, collections of loosely related objects in glass cases, open areas of pleasant informality with ipad embedded desks for further information and sofas to sit and read, a library with a mezzanine that reached the ceiling.

It's is a nice size too - not so big you become fatigued by the thought you'll never get round it all, not so small you wonder why you came. Strictly speaking it's a medical museum, but as well as things like old training models and dentist's stands and fingerprint catalogues they have art works inspired by medicine  and pads of paper with questions on them to encourage you to participate. 

It seems to work. A wall of answers to the question ‘What would you like to inoculate yourself against’ provided some whimsical answers (politicians, negative people) some very straightforward (simple lists of illnesses) and some rather sad (a 22 year old wanting to inoculate against death of family members).

You’re allowed to take pictures provided there’s no flash, so I snapped this picture of a glass art work of a bacteria - there were 3, e coli (beautiful, like a furry caterpillar in glass, but it didn’t photograph well) and I thought this one was swine flu – except it doesn’t look like the images of swine flu online.

Must learn to label. 

This photo doesn't really do it justice either.

The museum is free, and open late night Thursdays and Fridays.