Stormy Weather

[gurnemanz]

Morning all!

Anyone noticed (in this part of the world at least) that it's much colder than the feather warcasters predicted? 8 degrees C (46 F for our American friends). I'm just off to St James's Piccadilly on my bike, and will be needing gloves for the first time.

Brrr!

Likewise to our weekly town market for fish and veg - gloves and also woolly hat needed. (I got some proper serious carrots with soil attached). My wife tells me it was minus 4C overnight in her home town, Leipzig (same latitude as London)

[Anna]

Our weather station reports that it's 6.5 (43.7), unlikely to get any warmer as it's thick mist and no wind to stir it up and it's very gloomy and dark. Yet again, always happens this time of year, my gloves have disappeared! Perhaps I should thread them on elastic inside my coat .......

[Nick Armstrong]

Morning all!

Anyone noticed (in this part of the world at least) that it's much colder than the feather warcasters predicted? 8 degrees C (46 F for our American friends). I'm just off to St James's Piccadilly on my bike, and will be needing gloves for the first time.

Brrr!

Aye, my cross-town 5 miles of pedalling this morning was... bracing, and the luminous yellow thermal gloves were most welcome! The mist was hanging around, but there's some weak sunshine now.

[marthe]

Morning/afternoon all, our run of balmy, sunny weather has ended with clouds and rain showers. The porch thermometer says 60 F (mid teens C?) but it's damp and drizzly so feels 10 degrees cooler. Sun comes out tomorrow but with much cooler temps. I've been on a mad scramble to find gloves, wooly caps etc. Off to attend a lecture about Newport's trees and do a bit of volunteer gardening (weather permitting) with an English gardening friend. We don't get the same kind of mists that I remember from my time in England. Instead gloomy, drizzly, greyness is the prevailing mode.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

well marthe gloomy drizzzly greyness sums up the middle kingdom today ...

Bud's brother Richie Powell was the pianist in this stellar quintet

[Serial_Apologist]

Aye, my cross-town 5 miles of pedalling this morning was... bracing, and the luminous yellow thermal gloves were most welcome! The mist was hanging around, but there's some weak sunshine now.

Back home after a thoroughly enthralling solo piano jazz concert at St James's, Piccadilly. You know what? It took me the usual 30 minutes to cycle the 6 miles to Vauxhall Bridge, and another 45 minutes for the last 2 miles to Piccadilly Circus! Much of the final lap had to be resorted to on foot. The streets around Victoria Station are a complete nightmare now, whether for cyclists, motorists or pedestrians! As a consequence I arrived at the church 2 minutes late. Piccadilly Market esconces itself into the little square in front of St James's; and of course people have every right to dawdle in street markets.

I was directed up to the gallery, and there made to wait ten minutes until applause for the first number announced our admittability. The performer made long and apparently quite amusing introductions to each piece, unfortunately inaudible from where we were, up in the gods so to speak, and the echo of the building, while great for swelling the sound a good piano played well is capable of, tended to blur the pianist's runs together, as if from over use of the sustain.

The concert was billed as a free-entrance part of the London Jazz Festival. A collection was made as we exited; people were being generous, fivers and tenners being dropped into the receptacle. I'm always too embarrassed on these voluntary donation set-ups, when all I have is a £20 note, to ask if the person collecting minds if I help myself to some change, and was doubly embarrassed when she effusively accepted all my loose change, which must have come to around £2.75. Next door to the church is an expresso cafeteria, Cafe Nero; I felt lucky receiving a tenner's worth of change after presenting my £20 note for a double tuna and cucumber sandwich, an apple and cinnamon pie-let, and paper beaker of black coffee. I hadn't realised that St James's was one of Wren's churches - built in 1694, badly damaged in WW2 and subsequently reconstructed, it says on a large sign attached to one of the walls. Apparently reconsecrated as well.

Halfway around the Buckingham Palace roundabout- well, it's more of an amoebabout at the moment, with ill-placed bollards at the various points of traffic ingress and outgress to confuse and infuriate road users of any sort - I suddenly realized that I had left my phosphorescent yellow jacket at the cafeteria - a vital piece of armour in London's nighttime traffic which instructs motorists to shout and swear at cyclists instead of merely smash into them. Luckly it was still on the table where I had left it. "I would forget my head if I had one", I told the man sat there with a surprised look on his face.

Another day of everday events passeth amid the metropolis...

[Chris Newman]

Serial_Apologist,

St James's Piccadilly has indeed disappeared behind its courtyard market, rather like Southwark Cathedral. It seems a busy place with a lot of courses and lectures taking place as well as its concerts and services. In the late sixties and seventies I worked over the road at Burlington House and we had the excitement of watching a new little spire being affixed to the war-damaged tower. The new spire was made of fibre-glass to look like lead and was lowered by helicopter. I expect some boarders will remember the Promenaders' Choir formed for the Memorial Service for Sir Malcolm Sargent. Colin Davis conducted us and the main speaker was Kenneth More.

BWS
Chris.

[Serial_Apologist]

That's interesting, Chris. I suppose I should have known St James's to be a Wren church, with my interest in architecture, and possessing as I do a VHS video I bought many years ago in the LT Museum in which a little man tours us around the various Wren churches in London which Betjamen campaigned to have restored. It's a nice enough church in its austere simplicity - none of the Baroque extravagance which was to adorn churches built during the 18th century. Much of the stuff on display in the market was pretty pricey, btw. £145 for a bracelet?

[greenilex]

Good morning all from a still-balmy South...can't believe the local Xmas lights will be twinkling soon...ventured out this morning to net an apple from the neighbour's tree for breakfast. Tasted amazing.

My little trees still have their leaves and are looking well.

[salymap]

And my long beech hedge is still mostly green and not that lovely colour it usually turns into about now.

[vinteuil]

... an absolutely perfect morning - walk from Hammersmith Bridge to Barnes Bridge north side and back south side - raking sunshine on Hammersmith Mall and Chiswick Eyot, and interesting autumnal tints on the Barnes side. Two swans, two cormorants, one heron, one owl; many seagulls of various kinds, ducks ditto, parakeets... lovely

[Nick Armstrong]

... an absolutely perfect morning - walk from Hammersmith Bridge to Barnes Bridge north side and back south side - raking sunshine on Hammersmith Mall and Chiswick Eyot, and interesting autumnal tints on the Barnes side. Two swans, two cormorants, one heron, one owl; many seagulls of various kinds, ducks ditto, parakeets... lovely

Quite! I only saw some pigeons and magpies in the Park, coupled with large numbers of cheerful-looking and extremely cheeky squirrels... but meteorological perfection there was in abundance!

[marthe]

And my long beech hedge is still mostly green and not that lovely colour it usually turns into about now.

Most of our leaves have turned and fallen, but there's still one oak with green leaves. I'm waiting patiently for the leaves to fall so that I can rake them up and be done with the annual clean-up. Bright and sunny today, brisk NW wind and temps about 20 degrees cooler than earlier this week (40s F today). Yesterday's weather was November weather at its very worst with cold, wind-driven rain.

[amateur51]

Five weeks to Crimbo it may be but here in NW2 the afternoon sunshine is blazing and the air is most pleasantly warm. My clematis is on its third blooming, there are strawberries offering up their third (still green) crop and my hebe has also delivered a few more blooms. Who'da thunk it?

[vinteuil]

Five weeks to Crimbo it may be but here in NW2 the afternoon sunshine is blazing and the air is most pleasantly warm. My clematis is on its third blooming, there are srawberries offering up their third (still green) crop and my hebe has also delivered a few more blooms. Who'da thunk it?

... yes, most weird - my acanthus is having an unheard-of second flowering - in November!