R and I went to London today, leaving from Warwick Parkway just after the end of the expensive commuter timetable on a train rammed with fellow oldies, to see the exhibition Wright of Derby at the National Gallery. It was a glorious day, so we walked down from Marylebone to Trafalgar Square, renewing our old friendship with the city where we lived (separately and then together) for a number of years.
The exhibition is small but beautifully formed, and we both enjoyed it very much – though I thought for a moment that it might be about to cost me my marriage, when I voiced the opinion that Wright’s An Experiment with an Air Pump is a better example of chiaroscuro than Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. R, who’s a huge Caravaggio fan-boy, turned and stared at me as though I’d said something utterly outrageous, but I just shrugged and held my ground. On leaving the exhibition I asked the attendant at the door if she could point us at the Caravaggios, and less than a minute later we were standing in front of Supper at Emmaus, at which point even R looked, I thought, a tiny bit underwhelmed. “It might be better if they cleaned it,” I said reassuringly, to which he gloomily replied, “How do you know they haven’t already?” “What do you think Caravaggio would say,” I asked, “if he suddenly rematerialised here, and got shown the Air Pump?” “I think,” said R, more cheerfully, “that he’d say, what a lucky b****** Wright was, having better paints to work with.” Marital harmony restored, we went to the café for coffee and muffins, and then strolled down to St James Park.
My plan for this part of the day had been to catch a Ring-necked Parakeet on camera, which I’ve managed to do previously, but today the parrots were having none of it and stayed high up in the trees, shrieking annoyingly at each other. So instead we walked twice round the lake, and I amused myself by adding all the waterfowl I could see to a BTO list, and submitting it to see which species they’d accept and which they wouldn’t. Some of the answers to this question were a little surprising: for example, Red-breasted Goose – yes, but Great White Pelican – no (even though the Pelican in question is the one they can’t catch and pinion, and which is renowned for flying back and forth between St James Park, where it’s said to be in a relationship with one of the captive birds, and Regent’s Park, where it pops into the zoo for lunch). And of the two weird ducks I’m posting here, the Hooded Merganser in the main image was accepted, but the White-headed Duck below wasn’t, though I have to assume that neither is any more or less wild than the other.
The Merganser, who got top spot by virtue of having the more outlandish hair-do, was displaying winsomely to a female Goldeneye, with whom he appears to be living in sin. The White-headed Duck – owner of a more sedate haircut, but an even more outrageous bill – may just cause me to lose my family crown as “the fount of some knowledge” (© H. Orme, c. 2010), because I confidently informed R that it was a Ruddy Duck, which it isn’t, though to be fair there is a marked similarity between the two species. The White-headed Duck is a marsh-living species of the Mediterranean region and south-western Asia, and has become endangered over recent years – mainly due to habitat loss, but also in part because it hybridises very readily with the Ruddy Duck, which is an introduced species from North America. Following an international agreement that Something Needed To Be Done about the status of the White-headed Duck, there has been a concerted attempt across Europe to cull the Ruddy Duck, and its UK population may now be almost as low as that of The White-headed Duck. You’d certainly have to think that it’s equally endangered.
Following our sunny stroll around the Park we went for an early dinner at Côte on St Martin’s Lane (reliable as ever) before heading to Marylebone for the train back to Warwick. We used to do London trips like this on a regular basis, but stopped a few years ago because of the pandemic; then other issues got in the way, until we simply got out of the habit. We enjoyed today so much though, that we’re already looking for an excuse to do it all again soon.
R: L2, C6, D21.
