Walk in the friendly neighborhood, matinee afternoon

Lovely day, after torrential rain for about 30 hours. Started with a breakfast of pancakes and apricot sauce, that sauce l made for the Christmas ham. It's still going. Very good with pancakes, not very sweet. Also with the milk pudding. Probably with ice cream, too, if I had any which I rarely do.

The sun came creeping out, temps in the 50s f. So after lunch I walked for half an hour, staying on sidewalks because there was almost enough mud everywhere else, and met all sorts of friendly Indian neighbors, lovely teens wishing me happy new year, a little baby in her carriage giving my hair an amazed doubletake, her father waving her hand at me, general cheeriness and masks even outdoors.

To explain about the hair amazement, I've had this experience a few times with Indian babies. They've seen white hair, if grandparents have visited from India, though most of the Indian population here is the younger generation and children. 

But Indian grandparents don't have fluffy curiy white  hair and pink and white faces.  Youngsters meeting me for the first time look in amazement, wondering what has settled on this pink auntie's head! 

Then home to a matinee with tea,  on YouTube.

So wonderful, Rach 2 played by Eileen Joyce, one of whose recitals,  when I was a little kid in the late 40s my older sister (Dogonart on Blogger) took me to.  

It was a postwar commonwealth thing, I believe, a series of world class  performers  from Australia, such as Joyce, and violinist Beryl Kimber, touring England, playing recitals to packed houses at our Town Hall.

I was young and impressionable enough to still remember to this day the events, what the musicians wore (Joyce in blue taffeta, full skirt) the astonishing virtuoso playing. Anyway until today I hadn't realized that the pianist in Brief Encounter was Joyce.

The movie is still so good even if dated and a bit stiff, the comic relief overacted, the symbolism laid on with a trowel, steam trains rushing back and forth, music deafening, colonialism jarring. 

But yet it was still wonderful anyway. Great touches, the struggling cellist playing at the restaurant with the equally struggling violinist, turning up again as the cinema organist!  Highly recommended. 

As one of my friends, now long gone, said about the two principals, when we talked about it long ago, "they didn't even DO anything!" True. 

All about longing and the steamroller effect of sudden passion on affluent proper Londoners whose emotions were firmly battened down under the hatches of polite society,  suddenly finding themselves in a typhoon. In a railway waiting room. Over cups of tea. Irony abounding.

Anyway a well spent afternoon.