Bear-bee

As I was at Waterloo today, I stopped off at the Cuneo statue to get a photograph of the mouse. It is peeking out from under a book called Sketches by Cuneo. There’s an awful lot of dust around it, I must say! Clearly the cleaning staff at Waterloo do not think it worth their trouble.

Cuneo's mouse

To answer mum’s question: The original painting of Waterloo is 10ft x 9ft and the image I used yesterday had been reduced so much, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to spot a tiny mouse. If I ever make it to the Railway Museum, I shall try and remember to look for it.

To answer Mirinda’s question: I haven’t been able to find out why he chose a mouse. He started including mice (sometimes cartoon-ish, sometimes realistic) from 1956 and people scour his works, looking for them. There was a cartoonist in Sydney (I think) who always included something in his drawings and people would spend ages trying to find it. It wasn’t a mouse.

The reason I was at Waterloo was because I’d offered to take a load of clothes up to the flat for Mirinda. She’d packed a load for Australia from the flat and they’d wound up at Farnham – I was merely re-adjusting things a bit.

This meant a few train journeys. In fact, I was amazed when I returned home that it had taken me almost six hours! It was all very straightforward – for a change the Jubilee Line was running (at least the part I wanted was) – and my connections were pretty good. I do need to include hoovering time in there as well and statue photography but even so…it seems a bit excessive.

Not that I was missed at home. Mirinda had her first guitar lesson for ages this morning and then went down the gym for a wrestle with some weight machines.

One of the main things wrong with catching trains on the weekends is the weirdos who travel with you. Today, on the way back, in front of me was a strange Spanish looking chap in a cape and very pointy shoes. His hair had a strange brown streak through it, the majority being black. I doubt that I’d have noticed him except that he spent the entire trip on his phone, talking to five different people.

Sometimes this can be really annoying because you hear the same conversation each time but he didn’t do that. He was bored so I think he just rang the first five people in his phone. He spent a lot of time making small talk, to wile away the hour to Farnham. And not just local, either. He spoke to one person who was clearly in a different time zone because he went on and on and on and on about them already being drunk and it was only 8am.

Another caller was roundly berated for eating nothing but chocolate: “Oh, but you are very naughty, baby. Chocolate? That is bad, baby. But let’s stop talking of chocolate, baby.”

The third person he called was his sister to wish her happy birthday. I know this because the second caller reminded him it was his sister’s birthday.

All of this is perhaps just annoying however, what really got up my goat was his insistence in mispronouncing baby! He said it in a very odd way. Think the two words ‘bear’ and ‘bee’ and run them together. That’s what it sounded like. And he used it at least once every sentence, sometimes oftener. It really, really grated on my nerves after a while (5 minutes) and I was forced to play with my new phone rather than read.

I guess the worst thing was that it was a quiet carriage.

But, rather than end this post in a negative way…here’s the statue of Cuneo from beneath:

Terence Tenison Cuneo at Waterloo Station, London