I don’t normally do restaurant recommendations on my blog (unless they’re in Anglesey), but last night we were booked in to the Waterloo Bar and Kitchen next door to the Old Vic, which turned out not to have disabled access.   So, after two beefy waiters failed to lift the wheelchair, we retreated to La Barca on the other side of the road.   We had the nicest and most delicious meal and the warmest possible welcome, so this is a way of conveying our gratitude.

It feels faintly sacriligious to write a blog this morning, or irrelevant, after the events of yesterday afternoon, but a meeting this morning took me through the graveyard of Old St. Pancras Church where I was able to pay my respects to Sir John Soane RA and the great mausoleum which he originally designed for his wife Elizabeth, following her death on 22nd. November 1815.   It was apparently nearly relocated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1869 and was twice restored by the Soane Monuments Trust in the 1990s.   This is the old church, as much restored by Alexander Gough in the late 1840s:-

And the tomb:-

And a nice piece of lettering on the way back to the station:-

Because of the bright sun this morning, I paid more attention than usual to the face masks on the façade of Burlington House which I pass underneath on a daily basis, but I suddenly couldn’t place them.   They didn’t look Victorian as I assumed they must be, but more Kent-ian which they aren’t.   I’ve discovered that they are copies of the face masks in Somerset House, done by Sydney Smirke when he added the Diploma Galleries to Burlington House:-

En route to the Olympic Park, I walked along the Hertford Union Canal, otherwise known as Duckett’s Cut after Sir George Duckett who introduced the Act of Parliament in 1823 which allowed him to borrow £50,000 to fund its construction.   Duckett was a banker and member of parliament who went bust in 1832 and the canal was never a commercial success.   It runs between Victoria Park and the Roman Road:-

I’m never completely convinced by the Olympic Park, although I want to be.   It always seems to be trying too hard, too many paths leading nowhere, too many notices encouraging one to admire it.   It probably needs another fifteen years to grow into maturity and for the elaborate planting to make sense:-

Meanwhile, I was able to admire the boat-like shape of Michael and Patty Hopkins’s Velodrome close-up instead of from a distance on the motorway alongside:-

I went on one of my increasingly occasional visits to Egg Trading, Maureen Doherty’s wonderful shop in Kinnerton Street where Edmund de Waal had his first exhibition and where everything is beautifully and theatrically displayed, but where I am no longer allowed to buy anything:-

Those people who have been long-term followers of this blog will know that I have had an idea that it might be turned into a book (vigorously promoted in the Comments section by Mark Fisher).   Today I finally got hold of a copy of East London which is due to be published by Thames and Hudson on April 27th. (actually the copy is on temporary loan from the editor of the RA Magazine).   It is everything I hoped it would be and more, a most beautiful piece of design and book production overseen by Harry Pearce of Pentagram, who has completely understood how to turn a blog into a book by retaining the smallness of the pictures and the casual movement of the eye across the page.   Also, he encouraged me to commission maps which provide the finishing touch, including a fold-out map as the endleaf.   I am not allowed to tell you that it can be pre-ordered from Amazon (only £19.95), but I can encourage you to buy it from John Sandoe books (http://www.johnsandoe.com/product/east-london), who are kindly also stocking fifty copies of the special edition, which Harry tells me is – as it should be – even better, as well as much more expensive (http://www.johnsandoe.com/product/east-london-special-edition/):-

The yellow stickers mark references to the RA.

A week or so ago, I was interviewed for a German website called Fine Art Multiple.   I found it interesting to be grilled about the nature of our collection because I don’t regard myself as a collector, partly because I don’t have a deep pocket and partly because we have never collected in any particular category, except possibly modern ceramics (and books), with any consistency.   But, lo and behold, I now read about myself online and recognise that there is possibly more consistency of aesthetic intent than I had realised.   See https://fineartmultiple.com/blog/collector-interviews-charles-saumarez-smith

The attached photograph is a visual puzzle:  where was it taken ?  And what does it depict ?  The answer is that it was taken out of the window of the boardroom of Fortnum & Mason looking north across the roofscape and balustrades of E.M. Barry’s buildings in Burlington Courtyard towards the temporary roof and cranes of our building project beyond:

I had a chance to see the Hockney exhibition, having missed all the opening festivities.   I feel I’ve grown up with these paintings, the different phases of his career, and his never-ending visual and technical experiment and hedonism, beginning in the early 1960s with some work which is very familiar (We Two Boys Clinging Together and Flight into Italy) and some (Arizona) much less so.   One still gets the sense of discovery when he arrives in California and the room of big double portraits looks particularly good.   I had forgotten the picture of his parents in the Tate has Piero’s Baptism reflected in the mirror and Piero and Proust together with the Phaidon volume of Chardin are inherited references, like talismans.   I had never seen his early Self-Portrait drawing, done in 1954, in which he observes himself observing, looking out at the world, self conscious and determined.