This is usually a good time of year for me. Our wedding anniversary and my birthday are three days apart so this is usually a time of extended bacchanalia with meals out and bottles of wine and pilgrimages to places associated with our wedding. On Saturday we sallied forth early-ish to be out of the way of the estate agent showing someone round, and caught the bus to Leicester. The weather wasn’t great but we got another bus up London road and walked down to our favourite cafe, Fingerprints Delicafe on Queen’s Rd. This has a lot of history for us as we used to go there for breakfast every Friday; sadly they don’t do the samosas with sauce and crumpets with jam which were our staple food, but we were ready for something more substantial anyway and had the full veggie/vegan breakfast. Then we went to see Our Tree. When we got married we were given a flowering cherry sapling. This was a lovely present but not terribly practical as we didn’t have a garden to put it in; so as we’d got married in the Friends’ Meeting House we offered it to them. Sadly they didn’t have space in their garden so it ended up being put in the car park. We should have got a plaque to put on it but we didn’t, so in the end we weren’t sure which of two trees was ours and did obeisance to both.
Across the park and down the famous New Walk stands the New Walk Museum, an imposing colonnaded building housing some excellent exhibitions; we were never out of there when the children were growing up. And thanks to the National Gallery they’ve been loaned a Renoir – Les Parapluies. They’ve put it in a room of its own with a mini-exhibition about it including a short, family-friendly animation. The painting just catches Renoir in the middle of changing styles and if you look from right to left you can see him switching from impressionism to a more representational style; the central figure gazing out of the canvas (a hatter, it turns out) being representational while the figures on the right, including a child, are more impressionistic.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/pierre-auguste-renoir-the-umbrellas
There’s a lot going on in the painting; people caught in the act of walking to and fro, one person closing an umbrella, another lifting theirs up over the heads of the crowd. I much prefer this sort of painting to a posed picture, especially the sort of art John Berger criticises as being a statement of ‘look-what-I’ve-got’. Could be a stately home, a wife, a mistress, a cow – the statement is the same.
https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/
After that we were terribly clever. A storm had been forecast, of which I was unaware, and we managed to time our walk exactly with the storm breaking. I’d just taken a phone call saying we’d had an offer on the house so I was feeling quite cheerful, but just as we got back into town the storm broke. I ducked into a doorway to put on my waterproof trousers while OH stuck with a trusty umbrella but it didn’t stop our feet and hands and shoes and socks and bags and everything in the bags getting soaked. It was Biblical. The streets were rivers, and to add to our misery we got lost. I always get lost going to the Phoenix – all the streets look the same round there and I couldn’t get my phone out to use the satnav or that would’ve been soaked as well. Thunderclaps followed on the heels of lightning bolts. There was nowhere to shelter. To add to our woes all the buildings were wrapped in scaffolding and plastic so we couldn’t even see the Phoenix when we found it – but we did eventually get in the dry to see our film, Freud’s Last Session, which I shall review in another post.
We came out of the cinema two hours later to completely dry streets, as though the city were trying to gaslight us (storm? There was never any storm!) There was an attempt at having a couple of beers in the Ale Wagon but we were so wet we decided to get the next bus home. Having dried and changed I did venture out again for half an hour to see Steve Cartwright play at the Moonface and thence to the chippy for some delicious chips, deep fried haloumi and curry sauce which we ate while watching Dr Who. All in all an excellent birthday.
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 
I’m glad you had an excellent birthday: mine is in about 3 weeks, and it’s the big 7-0! I don’t know if the rain we’re getting is more monsoon-like than I ever remember, but the showers [and longer spells] are darn heavy! I was caught in a shower while crossing an open field yesterday afternoon, on the way to Lidl, but luckily it was short and not too sharp, and I was in safer territory by the time the lightning was making its presence felt. I hadn’t heard of Freud’s Last Session hitherto, but it sounds interesting, so I hope it will grace our local fleapit; otherwise, I’ll have to hope it makes it to television. I missed The Duke when it came here, but caught it on BBC2 last evening, and I thoroughly enjoyed it: Jim Broadbent was predictably marvellous, and Helen Mirren gave an admirably controlled performance until she loosened up near the end, and needless to say, I was cheering Jim Broadbent’s character’s principles all the way through. Cheers, Jon.
I hope you have a great 70th – any plans? I’ve not heard of The Duke but Helen Mirren is probably my favourite actor so I’ll check it out.
Sounds like you managed a very good celebration, despite the weather. I have only been to Leicester once, for a work thing in the early 1970s. I drove up from London, went to the meeting, and drove home that night. So I cannot claim to have seen the city, or know that much about it.
Best wishes, Pete.