Red Monday

Fortnum & Mason style:

Raspberries on bottom

Raspberries on bottom

Raspberries on Bottom:
I’m just thinking, it was the first night, and as we wandered along, Sister and me, Sister and I? As we meandered towards a museum, talking about theater, actors and whatever, I stopped. She eventually turned and backtracked, as I was transfixed by the display, a red rocket ship, with red food stuff arrayed around the fins. I snapped a couple of images, but they didn’t turn out.

However, after dinner, we stopped, first for coffee, then at a bookstore, and finally at the big Fortnum & Mason flagship store in Piccadilly. I looked for peppers, finally I asked, thinking I could do a British version of Pepper pR0n. Granted, think location and cost of transport, then think green, then think, all they had were a few green bell peppers. Hardly heat.

The raspberry-on-the-bottom seemed more red than it turned out, but it was fun.

Rocketship foods

Fortnum & Mason Display

Henry Moore:
At the Tate Britain.

I have fetish-like affection for London’s Underground, although, I liked it better when there were day-long and week-long passes instead of bill-by-the-trip. The hotel itself is situated over the Jubilee Line and early morning, 5:15 AM, the first train trundles along. Why the property and lease stuff is so strange (by American standards).

I’ve long maintained that the English Tube is the simplest, easiest way to get around. As a professional pedestrian, it’s not just a good system, with all its arcane loops, but it’s a great system. One of the English lasses, she explained that she drove into town, but if she had to go “to the city,” she’d take the bus. “The City” referred to the financial district, less than two miles east. West. That way.

Henry Moore, his work and notebooks, at the museum – couple of big pieces, some erotic, some clearly pagan in origin, but there was a small room dedicated to his sketches during the Blitz. The Underground during Germany’s bombing runs in the beginning of the War.

Two icons were left untouched, the Parliament complex and St. Paul’s. However, the the plucky – indomitable – British Spirit ™ prevailed, and they huddled, en masse in the Underground.

“If one was asked to descibe what hell might be like, this would do.”
Henry Moore

In his notebooks and sketches, he caught some of the images. Of the whole exhibition, that was what caught my attention. Powerful and evocative, rat’s warren of citizen displaced and unsure what would still be there, when they emerged, sleeping in the subway stations while the bombs fell overhead.