Yesterday a big gang of friends and family, me among them, heard G(od)D(aughter)2 do her end-of-year recital, way up at the top of the Royal College of Music just near the Albert Hall. It was terrific. If they picked her up out of the rather small room she sang in and dumped her down in that same Albert Hall, and replaced the pianist and his piano with a huge symphony orchestra going full blast, GD2 would have sounded great and entirely at home and in command, and they’d have cheered like crazy. That’s how good she seemed to me.
Immediately afterwards I of course photoed photos of GD2, but these photos weren’t that good. Closer-up, she was still in performance mode, but looking tired, understandably. Worse, I wasn’t able to get a proper view of her, together with the lady who was also photoing her.
Later, when we all went to the nearby Italian restaurant, GD2 was able to relax and enjoy, and this time, my view of her was perfect. She did a selfie session with the same lady who had photoed her immediately after the recital, and whom I had sat next to for the performance. “What a voice!” said this lady, when GD2 had finished. In the restaurant, she and GD2 sat right across the table from me, and more photoing occurred. I photoed this photoing:
It’s not that I object to the face of the lady on the left, who turned out to be a friend of GD2’s mother from way back. It’s just that I don’t shove faces up here without prior approval. GD2 has already said she has no objection to her face appearing here. Lady on the left has not said this, so her face gets hidden, same as when I photo any other photoers, without their permission.
Lady on the left has, it turned out, a blog, which I have already looked through, partly to see if she has photos on it of herself, in which case I could presumably put a photo of her here without causing offence. No photos of her there, that I could see.
At her blog, she follows a completely opposite rule to the rule here. Here, I say something every day, whether I have anything sensible to say or not. She, on the other hand, seems to follow the strange rule of only saying something when she has something she considers worth saying. I know, very strange. If everyone followed that rule, hardly anything would get said at all.
But I digress. My main point here, today, is well worth saying, which is that GD2 is doing very well.
Note the electric plug sockets in all the above photos. These sockets were all over the place in the restaurant, 4×2 of them at our table alone. I assume that these sockets are for recharging mobile phones, like the one being deployed in the above photos.
Any group of more than about five people is going to contain someone who needs to charge their phone. If there are no charging facilities, that’s probably a dealbreaker and the whole group will go somewhere else. So you must have charging facilities – ideally at every table.
If you stay in an old hotel, it’s not unheard of to have to unplug the TV in order to plug in your laptop or phone charger as there will be no other sockets. On the other hand, new build hotels have sockets absolutely everywhere. As do new houses.
It’s been interested to watch the etiquette of this change over the last 20 years, too. 20 years ago, people would feel guilty about plugging a charger into a socket in a cafe. When this first started happening (which I think corresponds to the introduction of laptops with WiFi about 20 years ago), you would sometimes find staff in cafes telling people they couldn’t do it, or covering power sockets, combined sometimes with genuine British embarrassment about whether they could/couldn’t/needed to ask/didn’t etc. Now it’s okay to just plug in, in much the way it is okay just to sit in a chair if one is available.
It’s a shame the world didn’t standardise on a smaller number of plug and socket types, alas.