venta

On Sunday last weekend, we used up a Groupon thingy which was in danger of expiring, and took ourselves to the London Motor Museum. It's kind of localish, being in Hayes, and a very simple train ride away (and a slightly more complicated walk back along a canal and through some parks and some shopping streets and so on, but that was optional. The walk did feature a wireframe elephant, though.)

Now, neither ChrisC nor I is a real petrolhead, but we are pretty good at looking at almost anything and being interested. So I was quite happy going along to a motor museum. Except...

The London Motor Museum is basically one guy's collection of cars. It's been extended and so on by donations, and I infer that some of the vehicles there are other people's property but stored in the museum when not in use. But... a collection of cars is all it is.

Yes, there's a big variety - they're organised into different rooms by theme, so there's European cars, super cars, US muscle cars, hot rods, East Coast low riders... there are modded cars, and weird cars and even a small collection of tractors. There are cars from films - either the originals or replicas - General Lee, KITT, a Gran Torino, a mini used by Mr Bean and two Batmobiles are just the ones that spring immediately to mind. There are a lot of cars.

What there isn't is much information about anything. Some of the cars have tatty bits of A4 telling you a little about the manufacture. Some have notes advising that they have horizontally-aligned gnurled Western pistons[*] without any suggestion of what that might mean or why you'd want them, and most have no info at all. They're all completely lacking context, and for many of the cars it was (to me) just a car, with no real indication of why it was interesting.

I wouldn't dismiss the museum out of hand but at normal price the entrance is £10 for an adult, which seems quite steep to me. On the other hand, it does contain a lot of shiny things and we did potter round it for a couple of hours, so YMMV.

Oh, and If you're ever mounting a raid on the place, do bring me the matched Day White and Nite Black Lincoln Zephyrs. I'd like to cruise round London of an evening in the black one, and motor out into the country with a picnic hamper in the white one.

The day before, we'd taken ourselves round to an old school friend of mine's for lunch. Having offered to take a pudding, I made a sweet potato pie, which is made on broadly similar principles to pumpkin pie. Pastry crust, filling made of purreed sweet potato, spices, evaporated milk[**] and eggs. I shaved some unscheduled dark chocolate over it too as it looked a bit, well, beige.

The chocolate tricked the nearly-five-year old in the family into wanting some, but he was patently disgusted with the remainder. The grown ups clearly weren't very excited either, so we got to bring the (substantial) leftovers home with us. Hurrah! We like it, anyway :) Note to self: sweet potato pie has never really been a winner, except with very adventurous eaters. Or people who haven't been told what's in it.

Anyway, we had a jolly day out eating and hanging out in the garden. I got to learn just how many times a nearly-three-year-old wants the same story re-read. (And if anyone is curious about what is in the odd egg, whether there is room on the broom, or why dinosaurs love underpants I am now very well informed indeed on these three topics.)

I kept up the cooking failure by making a lemon meringue pie for my mid-week scarper to Cheltenham to see friends there. I have cheerfully turned out pavlovas for years - people think they are jolly impressive, and I say no, dead easy actually, impossible to get wrong. I have made lemon meringue pie successfully on any number of occasions, too, but last Wednesday was not one of them. The meringue went oddly flat and hard, instead of tall and fluffy - as if I hadn't whisked the egg whites enough. Ah well. That'll teach me to be blasé about meringues. It seemed to taste OK, though, and all got eaten.

The resident small child there is too young to demand stories (yet), and had to put up with being palmed off on Grandma while the rest of us went to see the Levellers.

The support act was a singer/songwriter-with-guitar called Gaz Brookfield, whom I'd looked up earlier in the day and been very impressed by. Live, he apologised for his croaky voice, but was otherwise awesome. Would recommend to a friend :)

And then the Levellers were on stage and my first thought was... Gosh. Aren't they old? And then they started singing songs I've been singing along to for twenty years, and I thought yeah, but I'm quite old, too. And blimey aren't they loud? I'm not sure if I was standing in a bad place for the acoustics, but the fact the wooden floor seemed to be acting as a giant sub-woofer was (a) alarming and (b) unpleasantly ticklish on the feet.

The Levellers have a new album out, but they seem to have conceded that fundamentally people want to hear stuff off the first three albums. They did (according to my better-informed friends) play four songs from the new album, but by my quick count-up just now they did nine of the eleven tracks on the original version of Levelling the Land. They also trotted out songs I've never heard live before, like Dirty Davey and Belarus, and encored with The Devil Went Down To Georgia.

I tend to think of the Levellers as being a one-album band (Levelling the Land, of course) despite the recent Static on the Airwaves being their tenth. But actually, that's unfair: they do have a lot of good songs. Certainly enough that they can burn through five huge songs straight away, and have you going "oh yeah, and that one!" for the rest of the evening.

[*] Not actually a thing, I just made it up. But you get the idea.
[**] Ugh. You can't taste it in the finished thing, fortunately.


Right, I think that's the mad catch-up done :)