Unblogged London

I'm now well into my second week of work and able to count off the days to going home on the fingers of one hand. Meanwhile, from the weather map on the telly this morning, the isobars further out in the Atlantic appear to be cosying close to each other and heading this way. We'll have to see how this pans out - it might all be over by Thursday and there will be perfect conditions to send a chopper out to get us. I the mean time this is a perfect opportunity for another dip into my archive of old photos and this time a few snaps from my various trips to London that didn't quite make it into a previous blog.

Leopold Mozart was a violinist at the court of the Archbishop of Salzburg. It seems reasonable to pass your musical skills down to your offspring and Leopold seems to have managed this with some degree of efficiency. In fact, before long it struck him that the kids were getting good and perhaps taking them of on a mighty old European tour might be easier than working.  So in 1764, at the age of 8, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived in London with dad and big sister Maria Anne (who was quite a harpsichord player - after 1769 it was decided that getting married was a more suitable vocation for a young lady - not of course to the chap of her choosing). Mozart stay in London for a little over a year, writing his first two symphonies in this time and leaving somewhat wiser (or perhaps unwiser) in the ways of the world. He lived in the area near Orange Square where they have put up a statue to him. It's a lovely statue but could be improved if the council were to turn up with a duster from time to time. I think that's a real violin that's been bronzed - I can see it needing replaced umpteen times during the lifetime of the statue.

Round the corner from Orange Square is a shop selling the following furniture. Can you imagine waking up to this in the morning, especially after a heavy night?

There's always room for a gratuitous piece of stained glass in any blog - this, if I remember, is in St Brides church on (or just off to be truthful) Fleet Street.

 There is no great degree of uniformity amongst London's tube stations and some of them are very distinctively decorated - I suppose it takes your mind off the strange smell they have and the temperature often being several degrees higher than the surface. Here's some gloriously colourful wall mosaics in the Tottenham Court Road station (as if you couldn't read it for yourself).

An finally for this blog, a photo from the first time I was in London of recent years. They had a Dali Exhibition on (we didn't go in as it was really quite pricey and there was so many free things to see) and had this large statue of a Daliesque elephant outside.