woobiquity

cxi. People watching as a professional pastime

Mr. Antonio Carluccio
Carluccio's
Covent Garden, London WC2

Dear Mr. Carluccio,

I have only this evening found my vocation in life, and you are the first person I have told about it for the simple reason that it involves your shop on Neal Street in Covent Garden, London.

Before you pass this to the people with the rejection form letters, I hasten to add that I'm not looking to join your (perfectly charming) staff behind the deli counter. I'd be hopeless with an electric meat slicer. Rather I would prefer to sit quietly in a corner and watch.

On the face of it, that may sound preposterous (insano), I know -- particularly given the lack of floor space. But consider that this tiny (and the original, after all) Carluccio's is quite possibly the single most interesting public spot in London, and perhaps you will begin to share my zeal for ensuring that the goings on there are witnessed and recorded by someone with my ability to mull.

Never a dull second. No sooner had I put my foot through the door tonight than a man in a hurry blasted past me and up to the far end of the counter. "Have you got any of the roasted lamb?" he sang in a theatrical voice pitched almost exactly as though he'd exclaimed "It's bloody Brigadoon!". It was Simon Callow playing himself.

"I wouldn't advise you having any of that," the boy behind the counter said to a bemused customer, pulling the strangest face as he took the tray of frittata wedges off the counter and set it on the workspace behind. "I'd rather you had that at lunchtime when it was fresh."

Then a sweet urchin in a jester's cap arrived at the door, flung his arms in the air and launched into the opening bars of a counter tenor's aria. 'Well, good evening to you!' the boy behind the counter said, and pulled another unusual face.

The urchin made straight for Simon, hovering around him with his tongue down to his knees like a panto fox and continuing to talk-sing nonsense. I heard the word 'Dickens'. (I forgot to mention the paperback of a Dickens(?) novel poking out of the pocket of Simon's overcoat. There are so many details!)

At first I thought the urchin was one of Simon's people, until Simon switched to playing a street extra frozen in mid-gesture during a musical star's poignant moment in the spotlight.

I took my olives and paid, leaving Simon Callow to choose some antipasti and make jolly pronouncements like, "oh don't bother with that, just give it to me as it is." The urchin and the boy behind the counter were deep into the frantic telling of a recipe for roast something.

But back to the point of my letter. As you will see in the enclosed CV, my credentials for the job are impeccable, including as they do several years of fully sedentary work in offices and an attentive spell as an interviewer in a telephone poll. Please note hobbies including piano playing (moderato mainly), slow food and 500-piece puzzles.

I would be happy to come in and consider the possibility with you. We could sit together and just see.

Yours hopefully,
J.s.H.

PS - I took your tip about using Tallegio in aubergine parmigiana. It was divine.

One Puglian olive said to the other...

cx. Of science in the back garden

I pulled this out of a pot in the back garden yesterday. Besides its natural elegance it reminded me of a time in my life (elementary school, if you must know) when this was science -- something that sprung from the earth to proclaim the certainty of new life.

Of course, by pulling it up I've killed that. But that's ok. Every inner child has its masochistic side, after all. Plus it's for science!

cix. Of people squirming in wooden chairs

To Westminster Cathedral with Aidan last night for a top notch Handel’s Messiah and an early start to the festive season. It was the Bach Choir and the Philharmonia Orchestra, both exceptional. The choir is massive to boot.

And yet in the cavernous cathedral the sound failed to envelop us. The porous stone in the unadorned ceiling seemed to absorb the music like a sponge.

Furthermore, if you think the Messiah is all raging hallelujahs and happy unto us's then you’ve been weaned on the modern holiday version. In its entirety Messiah is a two hour-plus liturgical slog. The arias and many of the chorus bits are, well, divine, but the work was definitely no precursor to Madonna where breathtaking spectacle is concerned.

Squirming in the wooden chair (slightly less than the woman next to me, I might add!), I thought if this were a set piece for a Hollywood film and we were all extras, you can bet the actors would wander in just as the Hallelujah Chorus erupted, slap each other or whatever the script demanded and then bolt into the next frame faster than you could mouth the word "recitation". Of course, nothing like that happened.

cviii. Of answers Google doesn't have

It seems most people choose an out-of-print book or a concert ticket for their first foray into the kingdom of eBay -- any item that can be stuffed into a padded envelope and whizzed across in the next day's mail.

I bought a piano. By accident. After a short, frenetic bidding war with myself.

Then a month passed while I did my best to organize my winning item's 110-mile journey from its former life in a city on England's southwest coast to London.

The piano arrived a few days ago, and it's taken me this long to decide whether I'm elated or embarrassed. She's a pretty little thing, which may have been why the removals men kept snickering like that. Pretty because you've never seen such lovely light walnut. Little because at just over three feet high a tall person like myself has to triple-fold his legs to get to the peddles.

Of course, a piano is a musical instrument, not a piece of furniture. What matters most is how it plays, and my first impression on that count was that I'd bought a dud in dire need of inside-out refurbishment. But old pianos are like old people. They don't take kindly to change. This one seems happier day by day.

"My mother said that piano's as old as she is," Emma, who put the thing up for sale on the internet, told me when I phoned to arrange collection. "Please take good care of it." I held my tongue instead of delving into the past, partly because I'd bought the damn thing on a website and didn't think it ought to come with an emotional price tag.

I guess I was an idiot if I thought it wouldn't. You sit there looking at the few faint, childlike scratches on the casing and you wonder what this old object wants you to know. Steck. That's the make set in gold letters into the front of the case. The eBay description dated it to 1937. Inside the lid, the words "By appointment," appear above a royal crest. "DALE FORTY, BIRMINGHAM" in one corner is so faded the "Y" isn't really there.

These are things I know. But how much don't I know? Like why does a piano made in 1937 have two plastic handles on the front panel?

Through a string of Google searches I learn that Aeolian Steck was once a company associated with the Victorian-era instrumental innovator in New York, George Steck. And that more latterly Stecks have been linked in Britain to an auction-house glut of antique pianolas, or player pianos. It seems the company no longer exists, and neither apparently does Dale Forty's showroom.

One guy's site that ranks makes of piano on a six-star scale, gives Steck four stars, compared to Bluthner's and Yamaha's five. I pick up a few more fragments here and there, but not much.

And that raises perhaps the most intriguing question of all. If there's next to nothing about a something on Google, is that the surest sign that whatever it is that's not there is well worth knowing?

On a highly related note, I've been thinking about joining the fabled London Library, for the chance to walk through the library's stacks, absentmindedly fingering books that Virginia Woolf may once have touched.