pumpkinstrokemarrow

Back to the allotment after nearly a week for one reason or another. Arriving there reminded me what a good thing it was! Deer fence still up. So weeded three of the 17 trees and bushes inside. I try to keep each in the middle of a 3 foot disc of cleared ground. Apparently, in 1790 at least, the US custom was not to do this, while the French custom was to, on the grounds that grass around small trees slowed growth. A factlet remembered from the memoirs of one Marquise de la Tour de la Pin - a lady from the ancien regime whose husband took up farming in the US during his exile from France. So not all of them were hopeless cases.

On the catering front, taken to Japanese green tea, a gift from the Cambridge connection. Good stuff - which does not need added lemon like the Earl Gray (or Grey?) I have been drinking for ages, so I can withdraw from the organic (that is to say no wax sprayed on skin) lemon market. One snag is that it contains quite a lot of twigs that float so we have unearthed a not particularly gracious tea strainer.

Done two whole Sodukus today, one intermediate and one easy. For once the easy one did seem easy and I got to the end without seeing a mistake. Still wondering how they generate the clues. Is it as easy as do a hard clue, then add a few numbers to the clue to make it an easy one?

One senior moment when I started to fill the tea pot with cold water rather than the kettle. Pretended to BH that I was washing it out.

That apart, found the Telegraph today full of tat which could have been worked up into proper Sunday rag stuff, including some interesting ideas for nannydom.

First, it seems that there is a major health and safety scandal to be made with stair lifts which are not small person proof. The answer is clearly a new Big Office for the Regulation of Stair Lifts (perhaps said Borstal) to be based in Buckingham Palace Road, perhaps in those fine offices that the Department for Energy used to have. Such a big office would be able to publish voluntary codes of practise, to work with standards bodies, to have lunches and to ban advertisements. That ought to be good for some newsprint and a few more pensions.

Second, there clearly needs to be a massive expansion of the Court of Protection to another Big Office which can manage the relations of children with their parents, the former of which, it seems, are commonly ripping the latter off. Under such an arrangement, when elderly aunty gives one some ancient tea set because she does not have the heart to throw it away herself, one puts it into escrow while completing some elaborate form for scrutiny the the big office, followed, it goes without saying, by home visits and interviews. This would have the added benefit of providing jobs for all those solicitors who do not have enough to do because of the goings on at the Land Registry. Perhaps also a national database for elderly persons at risk, accessible by any authorised (at least three key authenication) person from anywhere in the country - or indeed out of it for that matter. Social workers are entitled to holidays too. This would have the added benefit of providing jobs for all the contractors working on the identity card database when that is wound up.

Third and last, the RSPB with all its inheritances and endowments should buy a migratory bird patrol boat, something like the fishery patrol boats we used to have - and may still have for all I know. This could be stationed off Malta and deal sternly with any Maltese gentleman caught mistreating a migratory bird that has visited the UK and is therefore British. For the time being at least, while Gibralter does not have home rule, it could be based at Gibralter. It seems that the Maltese are rather backward in this department and the Eurocrats from Brussels are trying to do something about it. But while they plod forward, a patrol boat from those that care would be the thing.

Perhaps more bizarre was the tiger being brought up on pigs' milk to make it tame and cuddly -so cuddly in fact that it is happy to mind baby pigs. Is this more cruel to the tiger or the pigs? Or do we have a dry run for April 1st?

Yesterday to Painshill again, only a couple of weeks or so since our last visit. Snowdrops out and looking good in semi-wild settings. Fair amount of damage done by recent gales. One lump of cedar has fallen across the grotto - where perhaps it will be allowed to remain as enhancing the grottine effect - and another rather larger lump has fallen off the largest cedar in Europe. Maybe it is no longer the largest. In any event a pity as it is rather a splendid tree. Must look next time to see how old it is - I have always been very impressed by the claim that some Sequoia in Califonornia are around the same age as Jesus Christ. Also saw a number of very tall beech trees, with unusually clean trunks. Most large beech trees seem to have very convoluted trunks, not much good for timber - which is consistant with my experience of beech as a good quality hard wood for making small things - not beams. Most notable however, were the two geese who had taken up residence on top of a thirty foot tree stump and were making a considerable noise. If I had been asked in a properly nuetral way, I would have said that a large water bird like a goose would not have been able to land on such a thing - but clearly it can.

Pondering about what went wrong with the January Kings this year. They look large enough but have not hearted up very well - and are certainly hosts to large numbers of small - and some not so small - animals. Maybe they need more food than they are getting.

Steak yesterday, the first time for a while. I think it was sirloin steak and it turned out very well. A firm buttery texture rather than the grainy texture I associate with my cooking of steak. This may have been to do with, I think, it being at the mature rather than fresh end of the spectrum, something I don't usually care for - it had the appearance on the slab of being a cancelled order. And I even managed a proper amount of interior pinkness. Served on this occasion with lettuce and a small amount of white rice. So perhaps useful stuff for a quick meal after all.

Cold, damp day so no allotment. Apart from baker and one or two other matters, keeping the warm.

Another version of yesterday's soup today; identical except that rather more of it today and we did not quite finish it for lunch. Maybe for breakfast - although it is very odd how very odd some people find eating real food for breakfast. Some even go pale at the thought of anything more challenging than Frosties before 1100!

Been mugging up for the gardening section of the next pub quiz (which might be a while, the craze for such things never having quite recovered from the demise of the excellent (medical flavoured) sessions at The Mitre. Which is, sadly, another of the many establishments to have fallen by the camra wayside, having once done a cheap and cheerful real ale but is now down to lager. Hopefully flat warm beer will see me out but it certainly seems to be on the wane). Returning to mugging, have acquired two factlets worthy of note. First, that when lawnmowers were invented in 1850 or so, proper gardeners were quite sniffy about them. And the compiler of the book has been a little lazy in that the illustration appears to be of the (very good) Flexa push lawnmower which I inherited from my parents and would probably have figured in woodcut illustrations in catalogues in the 1950s (from where I presume he has scanned it into his text) rather than the 1850s. Second, that three quarters of the world's aubergines are grown in New Jersey. This stikes me as a bit odd so I will endeavour to raise the Aubergine Growers Association on Google and see if they know better.

Prompted by the adoption squall, been musing about the criteria for discrimination. It seems that it is not OK to discriminate on things like colour, creed or sexual orientation. But that it is OK to discriminate on things like criminality (which includes some sorts of orientation), substance use and abuse and hunting. I started off by thinking that the separator was that what you are is OK but what you do is not OK - the fallacious rationale being that you cannot control what you are but that you can control what you do. Catches with this neat formulation being that 1) there are lots of things at the boundary where the rule doesn't help; and, 2) it doesn't capture at all the need to discriminate against anti-social behaviour. Like being a Nazi. Maybe I feel the need for four pint wisdom coming on.

Got on and published the previous posting as I keep getting disconnect flavoured messages when I have a picture in this posting window.

The willow tree of which there has been some talk here is the apple green disc to the right of the carpet heap.

After the postman explained to me that at 0400 this morning he was reduced to walking his bicycle up West Hill because he could get no grip in the powdery snow (which I found surprising: bicycles have a better grip on snow than cars), I spent the second half of the morning thinking that a modest amount of snow (which did look very chocolate box worthy in our back garden first thing) was enough to bring Epsom to a standstill. Queues here there and everywhere until late morning. How would we ever manage if we ever had some real snow and all that sort of thing. But it turned out to be far more banal - another lorry had turned over on a neighbouring part of the M25, resulting in its closure.

Today's soup was the same as yesterday's but even better. Simply replace the vegetable stock cube with some belly pork - say about 6 oz. Dice the pork, try out some fat in a frying pan, add the chopped onion and cook for a bit longer then proceed as before. Although in this case the savoy cabbage was replaced by white cabbage. So it all goes to show that real pig is better than the e-number equivalent.

Reading a chatty book about Brighton which used to belong to a Lord Stowton according to the man in Earlsfield who sold it to me. Written by one Ozzy Sitwell and A N other. As a former civil servant, working in an area overrun with well paid contractors (at least a lot better paid than me), I was interested to learn that the term contractor was vaguely offensive as far back at 1780 when it seems to have been applied to people who made large amounts of money selling possibly dodgy supplies to the government for the army. Plus ca change. It also seems that 1) there were some very stout eaters and drinkers about at that time; and, 2) lots of aristos were horse nuts and thought it was very chic to pretend to be a coachman or a groom, a fashion took up big time by the French, presumably further prompted by the milkmaids at the Trianon.

Enjoyed a film called "Contact". The sort of near science fiction that Americans are good at. That is to say science flavoured and a bit fantastic, but only a bit. No little green men or klingons. Managed to work in a bit of slush, a bit of romance, dirty dealings in academia and dirty dealings in government. Reasonable dollops of suspense. Leading lady good as clever and pretty but fragile scientist. I was particularly impressed with the way that the faith people were looked after.

Followed by a rather more quirky "The emperor's new clothes" with Ian Holmes in the lead. Sagged a bit in the middle but a lot better than the usual fodder in the far reaches of Freeview.

With a bit more help from BH the fence is now completed. Doesn't look too bad now that it is up. And for the first time I wore duffel coat, scark and heavy duty sweater on the allotment. Wiring up is not warm work. Digging here we come - or maybe after five months or so I will finally pick up the dreaded paint brush - for which there is plenty to do.

Discovered that I can buy small quantities of barbed wire from Wickes - around £11 for a 15m roll - which would make it a rather expensive business. I wonder what Challenge fencing would have charged for its 200m roll. But what they don't sell is sensible guage tie wire for which I had to repair to Robert Dyas in the High Street. A very useful establishment - while Wickes have reminded me again of the lack of depth of their stock.

Sunday fest was loin of pork which is rapidly becoming a favourite pork joint. But we will have to find a way to stop it finished up in a wedge shape - the fat side shrinking by around 30% and the bone side staying much as it started. Fortunately this does not affect the taste. Must learn to do better on the carving front - without having to resort to having it chined which destroys the appearance of the thing.

A easy new soup today. Simmer a couple of handfulls of pearl barley in water for an hour or so. Add Knorr vegetable stock cube (shock horror, an e-number). Fry some chopped onion in butter. Add three handfuls of slivered savoy cabbage to soup. Simmer for a few minutes then add the onion. Being a bit cold the two of us got through a quart or so of the stuff in a sitting.

Clearly got more work to do on the pictures front. Couldn't even manage a simple cropping job using Paint, although the HP scanner did quite a good job of capturing the image. Plus got lots of bother with the computer thinking it needed to reconnect using my obsolete dial up line. This seemed to be triggered by the fence picture. One more odd thing: unlike on the last attempt when the resultant pictures on the blog loaded more or less instantly, these are taking some time. I had thought that the blogger people did something clever to get the number of bits down to something sensible. Time of day - that is to say early evening - perhaps?

In danger of spending more time on tool than content. Must be careful.

We saw a photograph yesterday taken by somebody who was clearly more into this than I am. In fact there were two, one with and one without an unfortunate cupboard just behind the subject's head. In the one without, the cupboard had been carefully painted out and the thing reprinted. How one did that sort of thing ten years ago without a computer I have no idea.

Interested by the discussion of the merits of early morning arrests in the Telegraph this week. It does seem a bit keen to be banging up to someone's - at worse a respectable white collar offender - door at the crack of dawn mob handed. But the police do seem to be rather into this style of action and I can see that it will catch people off their guard and perhaps the crude style will make the subjects of it more submissive. Such things are certainly done in prisons and we think it OK in that context. Furthermore, as the T points out today, would you want said possible white collar offender treated any differantly from the possible crack dealer on their local bog standard estate? If, for example, said offender belonged to Crouch End - aka Islington on the Hornsey - there are plenty of such estates to hand.

A proper fence from a professional in North West Scotland. Note the heavy chain link wire - much heavier and harder to handle than the chicken wire that I used.

First run of chicken wire hung, second and upper run up and half tied. Just got the lower ties to put in. The activity was enlivened and speeded up by assistance of BH acting as apprentice and by construction of a Heath-Robinson like contraption to facilitate the unrolling of chicken wire a metre up in the air. Need for contraption arising from the considerable weight of a 50 metre roll of the stuff and it's tendency to crease when bent. Very hard to get the creases out. Picture of contraption to follow in due course; hopefully on next sprogvisit. Not so sure about a picture of the fence itself as the chicken wire is surprisingly invisible in some lights: so let's hope the deer have good eyes. Maybe I should string some of the crime scene police tape I found somewhere around it to improve visibility. Also odd how differant the fruit trees look from inside the cage; entirely differant feel to them. Much more domestic and orchard like than it was before.

Have been given a bare root vine. Stuck it in at the end of the clematis fence. We will see if we get any grapes - and whether they are eatable. Maybe they will wind up in chutney like the surplus plums.

Visited by some would-be allotment trusties today. They are busy setting up some cross Epsom allotment garden coordinating committee to harass the council to do better - or better still (and this seems to be the flavour of the month) to make all the allotment gardens into self governing outfits more or less free of the council. Not so sure about the merit of this last at all. The council don't do a bad job as it is and I am not sure I want some busy trusties patrolling the allotments every Sunday making remarks about the state of ones verges. There used to be one of these when I had an allotment near Friern Barnet (mental hospital to one side, heavy duty isolation unit the other) and he accounted for the one time I was seriously tempted to clobber someone with a spade. Quite a scary experience (for me).

Three senior moments between the two of us in the last few days: one of which was to put the boiling water in the tea cup rather than in the tea pot. The other two have vanished - which is not good considering one was rather spectacular and the other was only a few minutes ago. Still, it could be worse - and maybe I will remember what they were when I log out.

Postcript on the recent bonfire. After the rain there was pretty much nothing left, just a few bits of charcoal. No great lumps at all. Not bad at all given that we left the fire when it was still just about in flame, a glowing heap about three foot across and one foot high.

Perhaps rather foolhardy but cycled to Cheam on Thursday morning. Wind not too bad although caught by a hefty cross wind coming down Howell Hill. This morning quite a lot of small trees down so must have got a lot worse later in the day - as it did in Epsom when I was actually brought to a halt in my own road coming back from the bank.

An expedition which reminded me that Halifax have some way to go before they are a real bank. Great old flapdoodle about withdrawing cash whereas HSBC just get the money out of a drawer and give it to you. The last occasion was when Halifax seemed unable to process a foreign cheque in a foreign currency.

Deer fence now half up. Reminded when it was too late how hard it is to get the line wires even - the way I have done it the last line makes the first look slack. Also managed to buy two differant weights of line wire. The heavier stuff at 2.5mm is a swine to handle with a remarkable tendency to get in a tangle. Again too late, remembered that untangling things by pulling ends through loops is apt to make things worse. The door posts not quite parallel despite best efforts with level - but at least the door fits in the hole even if it does show up the lack of parallelism. Had to chop a few inches off the path outside the fence so that it opened; hopefully it will grass over again. Half way through hanging the first run of chicken wire and finger tips rather the worse for wear - the ends of tie wire being rather sharp after cutting. Like the line wire, hard to get the chicken wire even but it will probably look OK when it is all up. Probably easier when one is doing a long run with proper buttressed posts and wire tensioners. But mustn't moan: definately good fun putting it up - much more so than having to do it for real out on a moor in a howling gale! Maybe finish the job this weekend.

Passed what was left of the beef stock and the vegetables in it through the food mixer to obtain around 4 litres of quite thick yellow soup. The texture of the soups that come in things like milk cartons and say covent garden or organic all over them. The colour a testimony to the quantity of carrot and swede involved. That did two meals.

Passed what was left of the beef after the second meal through the giant Spong grinder, along with some carrots and onions. Turned most of it into a cottage pie. Interesting variant on the potato topping in that having no milk to soften it I used butter and water. This resulted in a rather pleasing finish on the finished article. Still worry about the potato icebergs floating uneasily in a sea of mince. Maybe there is a market for a gadget which extrudes planks of the stuff, maybe 5cm by 1. Rather like a pasta maker or a large nozzle on an icing bag. Must talk to Nigella next time I see her.

Sea of mince rather less sea-like by leaving behind much of the fluid by the elementary device of transferring the mince from pot to pie using a spoon with holes in it. A spoon, as it happens, which was bought as part of a set before we were married, some years ago now. What is left behind will do on bread for today's lunch. Maybe add the elderly parsnips lurking at the back of the vegetable box.

Not deterred by more rain from getting the bread part of lunch - although far to wet for other outdoor games. Underbridge at Cheam about a foot deep in water - not surprising given the amount of Autumnal junk in the drains and the fact that these underbridges must be among the lowest points in the borough. The one at Epsom took several engineering projects to fix it - which it has been, to be fair, for some years now.

I notice another compensation extravaganza. The Telegraph - not a particularly careful paper - alleges that BP have set aside £800m to compensate victims of the big refinery explosion in Texas a year or so ago - with 15 dead and some 170 injured. This is more than £2m a head and presumably the vast majority of the injuries were minor. Never mind, the price of petrol in the UK can carry the can. I also wonder whether the fact that BP is a British company gave the US health and safety gang a wonderful opportunity to have a go at refinery safety. No-one there is going to fuss about them having a go at a Limey company - but Haliburton now, that would be a differant story.

Nearer home, the Blair crew need to be reminded that Stalin style central direction is no longer in fashion. The education department - another Telegraph allegation - appear to be micro managing the way in which headteachers handle crimes against school uniform. Particularly odd given that the B-crew are very keen on all things uniform and faith (leaving aside a slight awkwardness about the M word). At least we don't still have a savage who hangs onto superstitions about virgin birth in charge of the department in question. You would think she would know better having had several children herself.

Incidentally, I am advised that some lower animals do indeed indulge in virgin birth. But a catch for us higher animals would be that any such offspring would have to be ladies given the way our chromosomes are organised. Something for the feminists perhaps.

Tried silverside on Sunday. Not something I recall doing before but we take the plunge into the fine not so new stock pot. 6 pounds, brown it a bit in dripping and boil gently for 20 minutes to the pound plus 20 minutes. Stick a whole lot of vegetables in somewhere near the beginning - the Radiation book being very firm that this should not include green vegetables so we used carrot, swede and onion. Celery and chopped cabbage stem (waste not want not) towards the end when I spotted the celery. Remove meat towards the end, turn some of the stock into gravy. Serve with entire boiled potatoes, carrots and cabbage.

The gravy was interesting as one couldn't make a regular roux as the stock was already pretty fat laden. So we stir a bit of flour and stock together and gradually feed more stock in. Tendency to lump but worked OK apart from the colour - it was really a bit pale and we were reduced to a bit of gravy browning - recently reappeared in a new shaped bottle in Mr Sainsbury.

I had been a bit puzzled why the butcher had bothered to tie some fat along the top of the roll but it made a lot of differance to the appearance. Bit of boiled fat running along the top of the joint was just the thing. Also true that the silverside itself was fairly dry - fine so long as not too cooked and not too cold (thinking ahead to the sandwiches of today).

Served with the last bottle of posh Bordeaux from Christmas. First taste it seemed a touch thin but impression rapidly improved with further tastes. Followed by a bottle of Hungarian white masquarading (?) as a bottle of Australian - in the sense of the way that the labels had been got up - I seem to recall that some French wine is into this now. All in all a good meal. And I seem to remember that in the good soldier svejk there is some talk of boiled turkey being superior to roast. Has roasting taken over because roasting has become equated to posh or more expensive?

Fruit enclosure fencing continues apace with the first line wire and three of the six intermediate posts in place. We will be into the chicken wire in a day or so. Door to the enclosure now more or less complete with only one accident which I doubt whether anybody else will notice.

I learn rather too late about something called postmix. This being a species of concrete that one pours and damps down dry into the posthole and then waters a bit. Presumably it turns into some sort of low grade concrete. So would a post sunk properly in the ground be improved by having a collar of low grade concrete wrapped around the surface section? I am not so sure given our clay. When it is hard it is rock hard and when it is wet it is soft, collar or no collar. Plus the stuff is around £5 a bag and you need a bag for a post so it would have been a significant increase in expenditure. Maybe if it all turns out to be a bit wobbly we might try redoing some of the posts.

AMH has lost his chance. The allotment that he might have been thinking about - that is to say the one that used to contain the willow tree that I cut down before Christmas - is being colonised by one of the ladies one down from me. What chance that he will put his name on a waiting list?

Various culinery events to report. Excellent toad in the hole on Thursday. Just the right balance between crisp and soggy. Sausages not so great but that does not matter in this context. Method of construction unknown as down to BH. On Friday decided it was time to try the small fish van which lives outside the baker on that day. Turned the pound and a half of haddock into a sort of fish soup - aka chowder although the method was not much like any chowder in the Boston cook book which has plenty. Lightly poach fish in water. Remove, flake and set aside. Boil potatoes in fish water, topped up a bit. Fry some onions in butter. Five minutes to the off add slivered white cabbage to the potatoes. Then the onions, then the fish. Four litres left enough to have a bowl for breakfast and the only e-number was the salt in the fish. (Odd that fish doesn't taste salty considering the amount of salt that it lives in). Yesterday was the first outing for lentil soup since Christmas Eve. Now down to the last pound of red lentils in the larder. Must talk to the shopper. Poached smoked haddock from van man for breakfast. Good fat peice which did not go soggy round the edges: haddock is supposed to be firm. Not bad at all.

All seven posts now sunk, and the childhood rule of two thirds up one third down has been maintained - which means holes of around 2 foot 6 deep. The first two have dried out a bit and are getting to be reasonably firm. Surprising how much the ground varies from hole to hole. The first two were sodden, the last five dry. The penultimate was stony - with flints, which I thought grew in chalk. Perhaps the thin overlay of clay (only a few feet think in places - chalk comes to the surface in places on the common, only a few hundred yards away) stirred the underlying chalk up a bit. Don't think the hole making contraptions I did not buy would have dealt with stones. One would have still needed the spade to fetch them out. And the clay varied a bit. There seemed to be a pale yellow sort and a grey sort, this last only occuring in patches.

And while this has been going on an allotment trusty told me that a common trusty had assured him that the deer can jump the six foot fence. So there really is not much to be done on that front. Private enterprise rules. The hope is that they will not jump into a small fruit enclosure because they might have trouble getting out again. We shall see.

There is always the barbed wire option - a strand running along the top. This is said to be a pretty good deterrent. But the stuff is a swine to handle and comes in 200 metre rolls which is far more than I shall ever want. And I might get sued for the possible damage I might do to two legged trespassers.

Door to the enclosure also under construction. Still pondering on how exactly to hang it - thinking slowly drifting towards perfectly ordinary hinges, having pondered long and hard about various contrivances with large size staples.

Opinion of Kevin Spacey is climbing. Didn't like him in Richard 2 but have now seen some films of his which I thought good - kpax, the shipping news and I think one other. A welcome change from the usual fodder available to those who scruple to bung Mr Murdoch a few more quid. Maybe we will go and see the well reviewed moon for the misbegotten or whatever it is called at the Old Vic after all.

Two puzzles to close. First, how can a gang called sterling cycles do mail order cycles for £40 pounds a go out of Southend. Apparently they have been doing it for a while. Presumably they come from China. What sort of a bike do you get? In any event a lot less than what I paid for mine. Second, how can a town where football is not a big deal pay such a huge amount for a footballer who is just going over his hill? How will they get their money back? What is in it for him apart from the money - which he can hardly need very badly - the football being pretty poor compared with what he has been used to. Maybe it is all down the the mutton dressed as lamb.

Soaked yesterday - for the first time since I restarted regular cycling - and blusted today. This last can be a bit unnerving when a cross wind catches you about the same time as something decided too pass you a bit too close. All testing the resolve for proper bread but holding out so far. Chelsea buns now in vogue at the baker. Been there every day for the last few days now - and the tray is getting bigger so hopefully somebody besides me likes the things.

Got two posts in at the allotment. With all the rain easy going and was able to knock the posts in the last six inches although I wonder whether I am going to be able to compact the holes properly as the ground dries out. They are also in deeper than I expected and will now have to attach extensions to carry them from 5 foot 4 above ground (2 foot 8 below) to 6 foot 9. But the posts are the right weight at 3 to 4 inches diameter and the next length up - 12 foot - would have been far too long and awkward to handle, even when cut down a bit. So not unhappy with the extension solution - even though it is rather grotty sawn two by one from Champions. Hopefully it will do the business. Will have to tie the line wire onto the extensions - they are not man enough to take the sort of staples that will be needed. Boy scouts rule again. Will be using some of the willow branches for intermediate posts - the proper posts being at 8 yard intervals. I wonder if they will grow, having been cut now for some weeks?

Interesting Soduku outcome a few days ago. Got stuck with lots of binary choices. Gazed at it for near an hour and got nowhere. Looked again in the morning and still nowhere. In desperation I checked what I had done against the solution and found that what I had done was OK. So then went for guessing a suitable binary and carrying it forward. Either it would work or error, in the latter case then rolling back, a possibility which meant that care with recording the solution was needed. (Maybe I will get around to an Excel gadget to support Sodukuing which has built in roll back amongst other helpful features). As it turned out, after about 15 moves the chosen route failed, so I did roll back and the other choice then worked. Not a proceeding I have been reduced to before.

Afterwards I thought that checking was a bit unecessary. If you have made a mistake there is too much information on the grid and you should be able to move forward quite quickly, even if wrongly. So if you can't move at all, it seems unlikely that you have made a mistake. A theory borne out by the few days following when I moved very quickly, having in each case made a mistake.

Now finished Pakenham on the Anglo Irish treaty of 1921. A great pity that both sides had got into a position where one wanted a symbolic something very badly which the other was very concerned not to give - a something which these days would not be thought worth getting into a state about and which in the event withered away pretty quickly anyway. And without knowing much about British parliamentary circumstances at the time and what would have been practical politics, it seems a great pity that Lloyd George with his superior negotiating team was able to drive so hard a bargain, a bargain which the Irish kept but only at the cost of the civil war.

Now finished Galbraith on Iraq. Leaving aside the catalogue of errors, his recipe seems to be to leave a weak central government in place and let more or less autonomous regions - one Kurdish, one Sunni and one Shia - grow and mature (the Kurds have had such a region for some time now) within that weak framework. This doesn't do much for the Baghdad and Kirkuk problems - both places being very mixed - but the Iraqis have to sort something out for themselves on those fronts. Hopefully Turkey and Iran will get used to the idea of some Kurds at least having their own place. And leave in place the compromise deal whereby the central government keeps existing oil resources and shares them out somehow and regional government get any new ones they might come across. And get out fast: we are no longer welcome. As he says, not a great solution but maybe the best we can do given where we have got to.

After much cogitation have now decided to go for the deer fence and now have around £150 worth of materials to erect the fence with. Decided against a strand of barbed wire along the top - apparently a good deterent at the margin - mainly on the grounds that I do not need 200m of the stuff. Decided against the hole digging contraption (two long handled narrow bladed spades mounted roughly as scissors. Ram the thing in, clamp the handles together and pull up the cylindrical plug of clay) - mainly on the grounds that £45 +VAT was a lot to pay for a toy I will probably only get to use once or twice. As it is I will not get a very good return in terms of fruit but I am sure I will in other ways. Decided against stock fencing in favour of chicken netting. The former is heavier guage wire which would have laster longer and been better proof against the council grass butchers but would also have been heavy and awkward to manage (tends to behave like a spring when you try to unroll it) and it had large holes which deer could poke their muzzles through - far enough to grab things that they shouldn't.

Started cogitation about whether to do a registry edit to stop Microsoft remembering passwords - which I don't like on a shared, open access computer. Rather to my surprise it was easy enough to find out how to do this but the instructions come with all kinds of health warnings about how you might have to reinstall windows if you get it wrong. The support team at the Treasury used to do this sort of thing routinely but I have never done it. Pity I havn't got a spare computer I don't care about to play with.

Raided the sprog2 DVD trunk for something called descent last night. Not bad at all and had me completely convinced that the thing had been made in the Appalachians using a real large cave. BH viewed the beard material that comes with the DVD and it turns out the thing was made entirely in England, mostly in a smallish room in the Pinewood Studios. Wonderful stuff polystyrene! Horror plot fairly straighforward, with the interesting update on the lady front. Instead of busty blondes being ravished by dashing middle European aristo vampires you had a team of atheletically enabled young ladies indulging in bonding and then getting knocked off by undergound humanoids. Maybe a more third millenium way to pull the femail (or female?) audiences. The only catch was that they all looked much the same to me, especially when they were crawling around in the dark covered in goo. Made it quite hard to follow the bonding side of things.

Starting to get the hang of this MP3 lark and am now the proud owner of 9 playlists. Not so convinced that the laptop is up to the second batch though- Beethoven violin sonatas - not doing so well with two instruments at once as with one. So next step when I get bored with the fence is to work out how to pump MP3 through my existing amplifier...

Now had second and what turned out to be final bonfire. Suprisingly how little all the rain over the previous couple of days slowed things down. Bit more smoke but there was a good breeze and all went swimmingly. Willow twigs must be fairly waterproof and the breeze must take off the surface water pretty quickly. Also cleared away sundry combustible rubbish from around where the willow tree used to be. Somebody had been busy digging up brambles and clearing up debris from previous allotment holders.

Sadly we were full up with roast lamb and did not feel up to going for the full twist experience. Maybe we will get around to that next time.

Chopping the kindling was a bit of a voyage into the past. All kinds of bits and peices of old furniture, some of which had been recycled more than once. Some of it may have even dated from Warwick Road jumble sales oif thirty five years ago. Rather like paper, each time one recycles it, it finds itself in smaller and smaller peices and eventually winds up in the bonfire to be recycled nature's way in due course. I dare say the eco-police would rather one minced the stuff up for mulch but I am not convinced. Apart from the oil cost of the mulching, mulching only delays releasing the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by a year or so. Landfill site would be better with a much longer delay.

Visited Sutton over the weekend. Long straggling high street with stubs off. Pubs, restaurants and estate agents at each end, posher at the top of the hill near the station. More important, discovered a Polish grocer at the bottom of the hill. Boiling rings and kabanos about half the price of Waitrose. Boiling ring seemed identical to the Waitrose product, the kabanos were more orange than brown, maybe fresher (they are pink and soft when new but go brown, dry and hard as they get older - some prefer them young, some prefer them old) but maybe also lower grade meat. But quite edible with more than a whiff of caraway seed and no doubt we will visit again if the shop survives - which by the look of the place it won't unless they a paying a very modest rent.

FIL has had a central heating failure. He faught his way, despite being rather deaf, through to the gas people, who turned out pretty quickly because of his age, but they took the opportunity to explain that he needs a new boiler and wouldn't it be a good idea if he bought one today from them. Salesperson will turn up this afternoon. (We only got taken for a £40 carbon monoxide detector - clearly the son of the smoke detector scam). All strikes me as a bit predatory, reflecting their being a lot more commercial and pushy than they were in the bad old days of nationalisation.

Baker must have been listening after all. Chelsea buns turned up after a long absence on Saturday. The baker version of mars bars but good. Which reminds me that Christmas is a very expensive way of putting on weight: maybe a modest ten pounds out for several hundred pounds in. I would not do very well as fat stock.

Maybe TE is right and I am cranking up to business. Two symptoms.

First, I am doing stuff on Powerpoint that I would not have dreamed of doing while still at work. Left all that sort of thing to the flotillas of contractors who seemed to have masters degrees in it.

Second, I am moving into the brave new world of digital music - in the form of something called http://www.eclassical.com/ - after some prompting from Guildford. I am now the proud possessor of the complete cello suites from one Boris Pergamenschikov which I can play at the same time as doing Powerpoint. Very cheap and the only catch is that the six or so suites have been chopped into thirty six or so peices. There is no doubt a way to splice them altogether but I have yet to find it. Other oddments so far: the MP3 player insists on regarding all peices of music as songs and regards the player as of greater importance than the author; a bit of Verdi freeware taught me that the theme music from the Godfather was a crib from same; the visualisations provided are clever but not very helpful; and, the eclassical people are very keen on flute concertos. But all very cheap, lots of it and lots to learn so I am sure I will. Maybe even to the extent of piping the stuff through a proper amplifier.

Further culture last night in the form of 'Much ado about nothing'. Something explained recently that the name was a play, amongst other things, on the contemporary invention of the important concept of zero. But who has noticed that the initials also spell the name of an important Jordanian town, a town which was a railway and garrison town in the Turkish era? No coverage in Chambers, thin in SPOW and even Wiki is a bit thin so no doubt Shakespeare acquired his knowledge of the place from Plutarch.

Show itself pretty good, but as is the custom these days, it ran well beyond a sensible 2 hours to 2 hours and forty minutes - excluding interval - by which time everybody was rather tired and it was rather too late to go to the pub. Good to see a show which involved team work - and which was not dominated - as would be quite easy in this case - by the two leads. Watch scenes rather over egged. Musical stuff good fun but presumably accounted for quite a lot of the stretching. Play as a whole rather more substantial than I had expected - and certainly not not a farce. And certainly hugely less fluffy than the 'Importance of being earnest', recently outed at home.

A plus point was that whoever put it on was obviously a fellow disbeliever in our forthcoming nanny rules on smoking and had the actors smoking whacking great cigars at every opportunity - with some defaulters on the fags. One result of which was rather more coughing and spluttering in the audience that one might otherwise have had.

Now had first bonfire - probably the first of three. Suprised how much the willow had dried out in the two or three weeks since I cut it down, despite the wet weather. So I had a good fire with very little smoke. This was no doubt due to the thoroughly boy-scout approach to the thing. Start with a corral of short branches. Give it a floor to keep kindling out of the mud. Crumpled newspaper. Kindling from garage. Topped up with willow twigs. Light in more than one place using not more than ten matches. Be suprised how badly newspaper burns when you want it to. But within 10 minutes one has a respectable totally under control bonfire - unlike the sort preferred by some members of the family. Short branches of the corral start to froth at the ends after a while as the sap is driven out by the heat.

The fire then starts to creep towards the fuel heap which itself starts to creep towards the fire. Much self discipline needed to stop the whole lot going up - which would be spectacular but would probably result in a neighbourly busy getting the fire brigade sent over. Another possibility would be that the fire spread to the neighbouring bramble patch which would have gone up with a tremendous whoosh.

After a while heat starts to build up in the ember heap - which poking reveals to be mainly charcoal. Drop a twig on the heap and it ignites throughout it's length more or less immediately. Stick a rolled up newspaper into the heap and it ignites but does not burn very well at all. Much fun still to be had.

Got to the allotment day before yesterday and realised that I was wearing what had been my second best office shoes. Executive decision was that cleaning them after digging in them was quicker than going back home to get allotment footwear. Not the way it turned out as I am still polishing them as I type. But they have, at least, had a clean.

I see the Navy is having to pay up front in surface ships for the proposed new submarines (which I believe are always regarded as boats, whatever the size). Much huffing and puffing from the recently retired but I bet if it was put to the admirals in a straightforward way they would still go for the submarines because being nuclear keeps them at the top table in Whitehall - rather than being relegated to fishery protection in Ag&Fish. Or whatever they call it these days. Department for rural affairs or something.

Must work harder on proof reading. Far too many typos.

Last visitor now departed so Christmas well and truly over. Woke up this morning around half past six and thought how great it was not to have to do anything. Dozed for another couple of hours before tackling the not exactly challenging Thursday edition of the Telegraph. Then off to the baker in a nice fresh morning... TE says that this is just the resting period after retirement and that after a while I will start to hanker for more activity. We will see.

Not making much progress on the Chelsea bun front. 'You don't seem to do Chelsea buns very often?'. 'No'. 'Maybe they are a once a month thing?'. Silence. I will try again in a week or so's time. Perhaps they are a bit too crude and English for a baker that fancies himself on being an Austrian patissier.

Parakeets are back with the New Year. Have been quite a few about after an absence of a few weeks.

Having emptied the Eastern end of the allotment compost heap, gave a large and useless book decent burial - in the interests of bearing down on the amount of interesting but unused clutter that we have at home. An economic atlas of Ontario published for the government of Ontario by the university of Toronto press in 1968. 2 by 18 by 24 inches which I make 864 cubic inches of economic geography. Beautifully produced affair with lots of maps of things in Ontario. Coal mines to the square kilometre, mean distance to the nearest bus stop, number of Wal marts within 6 miles. You think of it there will be a map. Many of them in three leaf pull out format. All on good quality paper with carefully thought out layout, type and all the rest of it. What must have been a very expensive bit of vanity publishing but fairly useless. Reminded of the economic atlas that 'The Economist' used to publish when I was little. Was rather keen on it when I was 15. Not sure where I got the Ontario thing from, probably one of the second hand book shops that used to be in Merton Mills. The same place as I got huge and battered bibles decorated by Dore (can I do accents in the blogging world?). It will be interesting to see whether the atlas is still legible when I next visit it in two years time. The iris which we removed out of the pond about two years ago was still recognisable yesterday so perhaps it will. Odd because I would not have thought that the bottom of the compost heap was neither anaerobic nor dry and so things ought to decompose. Not like the bottom of a landfill site.

Bit of over excitement on the soduku front. Thought I had come across another puzzle with more than one solution. But checking the next morning it turned out I had made a mistake - which thirty seconds checking would have revealed and probably corrected. A late mistake of the sort which one can recover from without going back to the beginning. Must bear in mind the ancient lesson that if you discover something surprising you have probably made a mistake so check very thoroughly before blowing your own trumpet.

FIL wanted to see how the registration of his house was getting on so we took a peek at the Land Registry site. Registration now arrived with one typing error and with some unecessary clutter about wells copied off an ancient conveyance. And this has taken since 31st May last. We are not in a hurry but one might of thought that an entirely routine transaction of this sort might take three months rather than six. (The Land Registry operation itself looks good - it is the getting there which seems to be hard).

The remains of the turkey failed to rest in peace. The last half pint of soup, resting next to the boiler chimney (yes, our house is ancient enough for the gas boiler to be permitted by OIC gas safety to use a chimney), started to ferment and was bubbling gently when found. We resisted the temptation to pursue the home brew angle.

Allotment continues with the start of this year's runner bean trench. About two and a half feet wide and one foot deep (that is to say taking the trench down to the subsoil) then fill with compost and back fill. The compost comes from the two year old, Eastern half of the outdoor pallet contained compost heap. Did the Western half last year. The outer few inches are more or less hay but inside most of the compost looks remarkably like earth - some of it clayey even. Some livestock but nothing like as much as in the house compost heap - which of gets a lot more kitchen waste - including meat, fish and fat which the heap trusties do not approve of - and is more enclosed and more damp. Maybe a lot more earth gets in with the weeds than one thinks.

Planted two and a half strawberry plants, courtesy of the Cambridge crew. The half plant being a runner which is trying hard to root. Maybe now that I have covered it up, it will. My first venture into soft fruit since acquiring an allotment.

Picked up the Pakenham book again. On which topic I was interested to read in the LRB that during the first world war, other things being equal, an Irishman in the English army had a four times higher chance of being executed for cowardice. I wonder how I could check such an assertion? That said, 300 or so in four years stikes me as an amazingly low number given the what was going on. LRB goes on to say that the French and Italians executed rather more and the Germans a lot less.

And picked up from the Galbraith book on Iraq the interesting fact that despite all the ballyhoo about African yellowcake before the event (which I believe turned out to be based on faulty or sloppy intelligence), no-one bothered after the fall of Iraq to secure the legitimate supplies of the stuff already known to have been there, several tons of which having now gone missing. Along with substantial quantities of other things that one would rather did not fall into the wrong hands. What a mess.

Last interesting fact, from Thomas on Cortes, launches a question. Hernan Cortes managed to grab Mexico with a suprisingly small number of men. William the Conquerer grabbed England with a small number of men - although granted proportionally rather more. So what did William do right that he got to keep England, whereas Hernan got kicked out by the civil servants and retired, albeit reasonably rich, to Seville?