Started off with a short run from Vauxhall Bridge to the Queen Mother Sports Centre, the idea being that there might be a hardware shop in the vicinity of Warwick Way which could sell me a new lamp holder, preferably a brass one, for the bedside lamp mentioned on 25th February. No joy there, so then thought to try the electrical shop on the Palace side of Victoria Street to find that it was probably lost inside a redevelopment. Next thought to try Strutton Ground, first stop there being the Robert Dyas in Artillery Row where I was able to buy the sort of white plastic lamp holder with a switch which I did not want. Looks far too large and clumsy on a lamp designed for the much more compact brass lamp holders - the same sort of problem one has when replacing old windows with new white plastic double glazing.
Furthermore, the white plastic jobs include what I think is a fairly serious design error in that you can not do the thing up after fixing the ends of the flex into it without a fair bit of twisting up of the electrical flex leading down and away from the lamp holder to the supply. Which is fine in the case that the flex is free enough to untwist, unlikely in the case that the flex emerges from the shaft of a table lamp.
But second stop was a hardware shop at the bottom of Strutton Ground itself, which did not look very likely but where the manager, probably a Pakistani, suggested that I try their other shop around the corner, which I would have missed had he not told me about it. And the other shop turned out to be more the nuts and bolts end of hardware, rather than household goods, and the manager there knew exactly what I was talking about and yes he did have just the thing I wanted, brass without switch. I was sufficiently pleased that, without thinking, I bought two of them. And impressed that Asians seem to be able to run small shops with a depth of stock that our aborignal shops no longer seem to be able to match. The third occasion that I can remember noticing this. But I can also remember reading that it is, in part, a cultural thing, this is how shops in south eastern Asia are. The catch being that you are carrying and have to maintain a large number of lines relative to one's turnover - maybe an easier trick to pull off these days of computers.
Jumping ahead, I got home to mend the broken lamp in short order and was very pleased with the result. Brass lamp holder without switch looked much better than the white plastic one with switch which it replaced. But the next day I thought of a use for the second brass lamp holder - in the table lamp which adorns our dining room, a rather florid china affair which had once been an oil lamp and which we had acquired from some junk shop on the Isle of Wight. I had replaced the lamp holder it came with years ago and in the course of fiddling with what had been the (ceramic) oil reservoir yesterday, managed to knock the bottom out of it, with the result that my replacement lamp holder no longer worked. Too late I remembered the old adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Recovering, reached down some rather lumpy cement based stuff from Polyfilla from the cupboard and proceeded to fill the broken reservoir with a grey grouty stuff. It did not go off in anything like the 10 minutes claimed on the box, but it is going off and I shall complete the replacement of the white plastic lamp holder, hopefully to everyone's satisfaction, in a day or so.
However, back at Strutton Ground, the next stop was the Wallace Collection to peek at Poussin's 'A Dance to the Music of Time' which had cropped up in something I have been reading (of which more in due course), so take a Bullingdon from Rochester Row to St. George's Mews, this last because the stand next to the Wallace Collection was full up. And not only was it full up, its computer failed to recognise my key and gave me neither the extra 15 free minutes needed to find a stand with a vacancy nor knowledge of where that stand might be, as a result of which this leg of the days proceedings cost me an unwarranted £1.
Into the Wallace Collection to find that the big gallery running along the back of the first floor was being refurbished and that the Poussin had been moved, temporarily, to what was called the Smoking Room, presumably what the room had been when Manchester House was a house rather than a museum. The Smoking Room was shut because of a shortage of staff, but a helpful trustee did allow me to take a peek while he hovered, it not being allowed to leave me there alone, which was fair enough. Odd how the picture being hung in rather a dark room gave the thing a quite different aura to that it has in a light room.
From there wandered in a room containing 16th century arms and armour, mainly from Germany and Italy. I was very struck at how much money nobles must have spent on this sort of thing - and the labels claimed that they were not just fashion items, stuff like this was really used. Now I sort of understood the sort of dreadful carnage celebrated in the 'Neibelungenlied' (see July 25th 2010 in the other place) which went on in the 12th century, but this was 300 years later. I found it deeply shocking that the same people who were commissioning Sistine Chapels and wondering whether the earth moved around the sun, were also busy dealing out frightful wounds to each other with this expensive ironmongery: smashing someone over the head with a spiked cosh or shoving some great sword into someone's guts. And some of this was done in the name of sport, in tourneys. Or in small vendettas & wars which were not that far removed. Or in the name of Jesus.
I was also struck by label referring to a contemporary view of European heavy cavalry of the Turks, presumably at that time trying to get at Vienna. They thought this cavalry to be an almost impregnable wall of iron, dealing out death and destruction. Perhaps the Turks were better at fancy metal work, rather than the sort of stuff that did well on the battlefield.
Third and last leg from Hinde Street to Concert Hall Approach Number 1. No penalty.
Having left the curing polycrete in the broken reservoir for a few days, come back to find that in stage 2 of the curing the stuff has swollen, cracking the reservoir from side to side, and in stage 3 shrunk again, leaving an open crack across its surface. Luckily all these cracks are more or less invisible in the now mended side light, glowing happily at the side of our dining room. But users of polycrete beware! One might not always get away with it so lightly.
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