pumpkinstrokemarrow

Been a very wet weekend and the ground on the allotment has finally got too wet to do much with. The first time this has happened for several years - in the bad old days before solar warming there were usually a few such weeks in both of November and February, spanning the cold bits when the ground was sometimes too hard to dig.

The moles have broken through into the deer exclosure and there is a nice new mole hill next to the young peach tree. I don't really want to start digging around the fruit trees so we shall just have to hope that either the supply of lady moles or earthworms gives out.

The better rhubard bed showing large signs of life, the shoots now being getting on for a foot high. The first lot having been knocked back by a bit of frost does not seem to have slowed things down very much.

The frogs have arrived at the garden pond and we have the first, rather modest amount of frog spawn. I remember the spogs rather puzzled by their athleticism at this time of years. Almost as disgusting as drinking milk that comes from underneath large dirty animals wandering around in the mud.

Have finally, after getting on for half a year of retirement, made a gentle start to the dread business of decorating the outside of the house - or to be more precise the relatively small number of wooden bits that there are left. No doubt once they have been done, the thought of repainting the white rendering will come to mind somehow or another. But we have made a start with an hour or so on the woodwork. Let's hope the foul smelling but wonderful Dulux exterior wood primer will do its stuff on the rather decayed garage fascia boards. If not, I see one can now buy some kind of tricky cellulose solution which will build decayed wood up again, provided there is enough of a matrix left to build on. I think you can do the same trick with teeth - or at least the same sort of trick - the teeth gear being chalk - that is to say calcium - rather than cellulose based.

Not impressed to see that the police woman in operational charge of the Stockwell tragedy has been promoted - although I suppose it is possible that the promotion might be more by way of a kick upstairs. No idea whether the diplomatic protection service counts that way. The firearms record of the Metropolitan Police is poor - at least it seems poor from the outside - there having been several unfortunate shootings/killings in recent years - and I would have liked to have seen a more contrite response to this particular tragedy. And maybe they should stop getting their firearms training from the SAS. I do not think that they provide the right model for a civilian police force.

Sat in a particularly noisy train last night. No new messages but those that there were - from a loud and cheerfully bossy lady - were a pain. BH said I ought to do something about it. First I thought this was a waste of time but then thought that maybe if one keeps complaining it might sink into the consciousness of South West trains. So I collared two decent looking chaps wearing official looking greatcoats and minding their own business just short of the barrier and complained. They looked rather bemused and assured me that they would pass the message on. But what was odd was the way that the act of complaining worked me up into a right lather. I had only been moderately lathered beforehand.

This on the way to Happy Days - last on at the National as part of its opening season back in 1976 or so. Wonderful set which contained what looked very like lumps of real concrete taken from some demolition site - but I would be surprised if a stage could take the weight. The only snag being that the set was so interesting that it tended to distract one from Fiona Shaw holding forth, despite her fine form and tremendous voice. She must be well charged up by the end of the show so I wonder what she does to calm down.

Supposed to be theatre of the absurd which amongst other things means that you get a lot of repetition, significant silences and significant small noises. BH very taken with it all: thought it much more relevant to life today than 'The Seagull' which was our last outing. An oddity for me was that the main (and almost only) protagonist did not take much interest in her surroundings, most of her attention being taken with her handbag, mysteriously refilled each morning with exactly the same contents as the day before. Clearly no mispent youth among concrete cubes.

An up side was that, unlike a lot of modern productions, the whole thing was done and dusted in well under two hours which left plenty of time to make it to the Halfway House where the barman distinguished himself to the barmaid (a rather sexist discrimination here) by paying for a packet of crisps with his credit card. She was both amazed that he paid and that he paid for such a small item with a credit card. This last bit being something that the elder sprog used to do so maybe it is something to do with youth.

Various senior moments in the last few days. Including mistaking my tea cup for the tea pot. But the most odd for me was standing in London somewhere when I happened to smell my left thumb nail. Which had the very distinctive cold, clammy smell of dirty metal. I tried to think of what handrail I had been holding recently and failed - and it must have taken a good twenty seconds for me to realise that the hand in question was full of loose change.

The last - not that there were many this year - large pumpkin, having suffered the indignity of being made into a pumpkin man has now expired after about a fortnight in the rain. Top caved in; body part full of water; various small animals in residence.

No moles however - which I see today's DT has picked up on. Presumably quite hard for moles to make it into suburban gardens entirely surrounded by roads.

Otherwise Spring appears to be on the way in the wild and woolly part of the back garden. Snowdrops more or less over but continue to spread. Celandines continue to spread and are about to flower - if they gon't get eaten this year. Didn't find out who the culprits were. Daffodills about to flower and bluebells some way behind.

The rain has more or less washed away the thin carpet of what look to be the husks of oak tree buds. Presumably birds eat the juicy bits inside and spurn the fibre (not knowing about the virtuues of weetabix). Presumably they don't strip the tree as it is quite old and comes into leaf in an entirely regular way. But they might strip my fruit trees if they find them, deer fence notwithstanding. Another animal scare.

DT a mine of factlets today, in the gaps between their relentless onslaught on all things blairful. Pleased to see the gent who bought a bike (make never heard of) for £15 in 1950 something, did 100,000 miles on it and has only just traded it in for £1,400 worth of Trek. Presumably, like me, he eventually found that getting spare parts like wheels and tyres in feet and inches was getting difficult. I wonder what he got for paying twice as much for his Trek as I did.

A minor food fest yesterday. Crab legs, fore rib of beef and treacle tart, washed down with Carling and Vin de Pays (South). It was the smallest peice of fore rib that I have ever bought, being a single rib, and having declined to have it trimed, it looked in shape like a very large (maybe a foot or so in length) lamb cutlet and weighed just under five pounds. Bit nervous about the cooking, being relatively thin with a long tail, but it turned out better than anything I can remember. Hour and a half in a fan oven at 180C with no preheating. Gray, with a tint of pink and damp. Served with cabbage (removing allotment animal life took a while), carrots and brown rice. Not much good for more than half of Troy afterwards. The makers of which did nothing to disturb my belief that it is very hard to make films about the olden days, and that it gets harder with age. Adaptions of Jane Austen struggle and before that you are in deep trouble!

I was shown an article about how maybe global warming is nothing much to do with greenhouse gases but rather more to do with solar variations - one of which accounted for the little ice age a few hundred years ago. I would be more confident that the article is wrong if the greenhouse folk added something to their stuff explaining why. A footnote about solar variations being an order of magnitude too small is not quite enough.

A spat which reminds me of a change for the worse in the way that science is done these days, albeit that an awful lot of it is being done. In the olden days, it was enough to wangle an Oxbridge fellowship or a red-brick lectureship, or simply to have independant means, and then one was pretty much free to pursue for life whatever scientific endeavour one pleased. Science was not that expensive - although, pausing, I dare say there were enough science nuts who spent their fortune buying science toys of one sort or another. Those fancy brass bound microscopes were presumably expensive when they were new, never mind now. Nowadays science involves lots of resources and involves those dreadful people called team players. In order to do science one has to attract and hold the attention of whoever holds the purse strings. Which might involve being nice to some drug company (which is apt to have strong views about your results), pandering to the current fashion by dressing whatever it is you want to do in those clothes, or generally being good at the greasy pole.

I seem to remember reading quite recently about a Canadian scientist whose career was almost terminally blighted because she had the temerity (apart from being a woman) to publish something unpleasant about a drug which happened to be sold by a company which was funding her is some part or some way.

Similar considerations might mean that it is far easier to get money to do research on cures and treatments involving drugs than on those that don't.

Relatively quiet on the food scene. An excellent potato pie on Monday, served with roast beetroot, something I have never had before, and which was rather good. I gather roasting unusual vegetables in extra virgin olive oil, preferably from Ceorleone, is something one learns about by watching foodie programs on television. And an excellent pizza yesterday, the second outing for BH's new ceramic round. Not yet sure how much differance this makes, but the diameter of the thing - maybe 15 inches rather than the 10 we are used to - meant that the result was fairly spectacular.

Bedside table has acquired a further 5 inches (something more than 2,000 pages) in the form of a two volume Scott Moncrieff from the US, which appears to be around 75 years old, not a deluxe edition (no pictures) and somewhat worn (maybe even read). But, at £17, a snip from the usually expensive stalls underneath Waterloo bridge. I think it will suit me as well as anything, despite the various efforts, including one recent and well reviewed, which have come out since. Apart from anything else, I imagine that it was a lot cheaper than a new one. Not counting a posh French one which would probably be well in excess of £100.

New buildings on the site of former united dairy on the way to the baker shoot up at an amazing speed - the trick seems to be timber framing. We seem to have gone from ground, through ground floor and first floor, to rafters in about a month. Apart getting the structure up quick I guess you also have the advantage that one has got the roof on and can get on with the inside while getting on with the exterior brick cladding (I assume that is where the thing will go) in slower time. Maybe they will attempt to match the 30's Tudor (half timber with red herring bone brick infill) that the bits of dairy being kept and much of Cheam centre are built in.

About thirty seconds after making my last post, Google had taken me to a helpful booklet published by those favourite men from the ministry, the Ag&Fish lot, aka Defra, on mole control. Publication being prompted, it seems, by the impending doom of Strychnine as the poison of choice. Large numbers of other factlets. For example, it is estimated that in parts of Eastern Europe mole infestation of grazing land reduces its value by maybe 15%. Part of the problem being the contamination of silage with larger amounts of soil. Moles are a protected species in Germany. Most of the control methods appear to involve a fair amount of labour. One suggestion is that one digs a fine wire mesh a metre into the ground around whatever it is one wants to protect. One could, of course, take the opportunity to plant very large deer fence posts thus killing two birds with one stone.

On reflection, maybe the way forward is to keep digging up their tunnels on vegetable plots as long as there are no vegetables and hope that that deters them. But do I have the stomach? Moles are reasonably large animals and I am sqeamish enough about killing mice and frogs by accident.

Our first attempt at calves liver at home yesterday. Thin slices fried (which came from a tin which appeared to contain an entire liver) for two minutes in a mixture of butter and cooking oil. Like with good fish not tasting fishy, good liver should not taste livery and this calves liver did fill that bill. So not bad at all, although next time I think we will cook for a few minutes longer.

Heard an interesting argument for very large hospitals - very much on the agenda around here where they are thought to be a fairly blatant form of gerrymandering - that is to say stick the hospitals in poor urban areas where one's core vote is. It is also true that such areas also house large numbers of customers for the services such places provide. Be that as it may, the argument ran that because it takes around 10 years from commitment to opening, and 10 years is much longer than the average medical fashion, one needs to build really big hospitals which can cope with constant change. With the fact that the vogue treatments one designs into one's shiny new hospital will be out of favour by the time that the thing is built. I believe battleships used to suffer from the same problem and the answer was to call a battleship a platform. A receptacle for whatever lethal technology was in vogue (a word, it seems, which has been around since the 16th century and is derived from a French word about rowing. The name of the magazine came later, in vogue then acquiring a nicely ambiguous meaning). Modularisation is the answer, plugging one's technology into the naval equivalent of a three pin plug. But I remain unconvinced that going for very big is the way to address this problem.

My shrink book from Ashburton also tells of a medical fashion, in this case multiple personality. It seems that the diagnosis was invented by the French in the 19th century, after which it went out of fashion for a bit, only to come back, in rather differant clothes but with a vengeance in the second half of the 20th century. The multiple personality disorder (MSD) became big business in every sense of the word. And then, as is the way of these things, the world moves on (or back rather, as we are going back to the original French term) and we now talk of dissociation.

Three further factlets here. First, while most people with MSD are women, the various successful films about the subject have featured men with a violent or otherwise unpleasnt alter. Second, maybe men go in for the bipolar disorder (although this might be regarded as a degenerate, two alter version of MSD. Proper MSDs have a dozen or more alters, with more than one sex and with more than one orientation) and alchoholism rather than MSD. Third, a popular snack in Quebec called poutine consists of fried potatoes, cottage cheese and gravy. Sounds rather odd but we will have to find a way to give it a try - given that we don't normally eat many fried potatoes or much cottage cheese.

Quebec being the home province of yesterday's pianist, who was doing a proper recital from the core repertoire. None of this show-off or modern stuff which prima donnas are so often into. Enthusiastically received in a nearly full hall. Interesting how much more one is aware of, and appreciative of changes of volume at a live performance. Loud playing, quiet playing and silence all seem much more impressive in a concert hall than in one's living room. This chap also managed what I can only call to shimmer. I suspect all this is much more to do with the setting than the physical quality of the noise.

On the way, we found that South Western Trains have found a new message with which to crank up the already high level of noise pollution on their trains. After we have been told that we have arrived at the next station stop which happens to be called whatever, a second message now informs us that the doors are now ready to be opened.

And last but not least, QEH would do well to follow the example of the Wigmore Hall and have a person asking one to turn off mobile phones. A loud bossy voice coming from loudspeakers dotted around the hall is not quite the right introduction to the performer.

There have been moles in the school field next to the allotments for some time. Over the winter they got into the path running up the field side of the allotments. Now they have invaded last year's broad bean patch. Maybe I should dig them out while the ground is still empty. If they get among growing vegetables they will be a real pain. I wonder if they eat pumkins or marrows when they want a change from worms and grubs.

Two more rows of broad beans. Starting to wonder whether I should pause for a few weeks - although my recollection is that I don't do very well with later beans. The catch is that as things are they tend to come into full production about the time we go on our summer holiday - hence the recent interest in bean pudding.

After two or three weeks of large quantities of Japanese green tea it is now off the menu. For some reason is started to taste fishy - something I usually associated with being about to get a cold but I do not think that is the case on this occasion. Back to Earl Grey with organic lemons (or at least unwaxed lemons) again. Maybe as one drinks more of the stuff one's taste buds get more discriminating and odd background flavours creep into the foreground. Certainly true of some other things - like bread - which I consume in significant quantities. But not beer, possibly because I don't usually stick to one brand so the flavour is moving around the whole time anyway. No room for fishy flavours to emerge.

Was forced to vary my long established kidney with carraway seed recipe. I didn't have enough fresh tomatoes and the thing was a bit thin. Didn't like to use tinned tomatoes or puree which, to my mind anyway, have a rather sharp tinny flavour, so chucked in a few red lentils instead. They did fine.

I see that UK and US are at the bottom of the child cuddle factor table. Maybe the thing in common, apart from the similarity of the name, is that we both went into Iraq. Also both heavily into peddysteria - so maybe with good reason? Finland and Hungary are at the other end of the table. Do they have something less arcane in common than their joint membership of the Uralian group of languages?

Despite the rain, ground now OK for further broad bean planting so I have got another 4 short rows in. Ground would be too wet for more ordinary seeds but fine for beans - maybe that was part of their popularity in the olden days, along with their regularity.

Regarding the striking or not of willow wands, I notice that some of those I had kept for row markers have started sending out roots at their bases where they are in contact with the ground - although certainly not stuck into it. And two of the forty or so which I did stick in the ground have breaking buds. So they are clearly keen to go. I am using some of them for bean row markers now, some upside down, so we will find out whether they strike that way after all.

I learn that worms are good at underwater swimming. One, about a couple of inches long, got into the new water tub the night after I planted it, say two or three days ago. It was still moving a bit this afternoon. I fished it out onto the ground and the shock appeared to have frozen it. But half an hour later it had gone so either it wasn't frozen or a bird had had it. But would never have thought something like a worm would have survived under water for so long. Maybe the fact that it had only been filled that day with a watering can meant that there was a fair amount of oxygen in the water from where the worm could abstract it. I think they breathe through their skin but that is about the sum of my knowledge of that matter.

Two foodie items from Vauxhall. A horseradish sauce from Poland made on a beetroot rather than a mayo base and a large red radish from Portugal, around the size of a small parsnip. Both very good, the former available from better Sainsburys.

Just finished reading Zamoyski on how Napoleon got to Moscow and back for the second time - very good so for once in a while I shall have to agree with the Sunday Times - which I assume is a Murdoch rag along with its partner. It seems that while the outcome all looks very inevitable now, it certainly did not seem so at the time. Despite all his problems - of which he had as many on the way out as on the way back - he could easily have won. But both not well and getting old and tired, he missed his chances both at Borodino and afterwards when he could have attacked, and probably wiped out, Kutuzov in his camp at Tarutino. In which event, Alexander may well have caved in and negotiated. And even if he hadn't he would have been in no position to chase the French out Russia, let alone move into Germany after that. He would have shot his bolt. I am reminded of the German attempt a century or so later - which in the same way, although for differant reasons, might well have ended in a German victory. But the Russians probably had more to do with the victory in the second than the first case.

Surprised how much letter writing went on. Samoyski seems to have dug up lots of them, quite a few from rankers. And Napoleon was getting the post every day or so from Paris until very near the end.

And last but not least a factlet from Excel. If one has long running 99% style code behind a spreadsheet, occasional use of the doevents function, seems to allow one's PC to clear its throat and not get into a twist. Operating system not clever enough to make code of this sort wait for it.

I see that the latest wheeze from our beloved government is road pricing. We are told that it is nearly certain that it is essential and nearly certain that it will be with us within ten years. So their love affair with huge IT continues despite the storm clouds over the tens of billions spent on NHS IT. The way it works is something like this. You have outsourced all your own IT and the people that went with it have vanished (no sour grapes here you understand). You then hire a blue chip contractor - perhaps Tsetsentrica for example - to advise and support but who then proceed to colonise your organisation. Rather like a cancer or a parasite. They then spot (or perhaps manufacture) a huge opportunity to regenerate, revitalise or otherwise expand your need for advice and support - that is to say a whopping great IT project. They spend a lot of your money explaining why this project is a jolly good idea. You then invite tenders from people who are also deeply enthused about the opportunity to sell you huge amounts of IT. Perhaps they will sell it to you on a buy now pay lots more later basis. Maybe a few reference sites in exotic places. The bandwaggon is now rolling and more or less impossible to stop. In this case it seems most unlikely that anyone will be stopped by the observation that a cheap way to ration road use is to put the price of petrol up. No fat fees or fat contracts in that.

More parochially, the Cheam baker seems very uncertain about Chelsea buns. On some days they are called Belgian buns and come with white icing and a cherry. I had thought that Belgian buns were thought to be cooler for an Austrian patisserie than common or garden Chelsea buns but the truth is clearly more complicated than that.

And back on the allotment, two of the three mole plants look OK, one has started to wilt. But the wet weather continues so maybe we are in with a chance. Not so hot for bean planting though.

After much agonising the small willow tree (vide supra) has now been cut down to about a foot from the ground, so missing out on the pussy willow side of things this year. Maybe I should have waited. Also decided to take out the neighbouring 5 year old rosemary and thyme bushes, the first of which keeps losing branches and the second of which looks half dead. A pity because they are both pretty in the Spring when they flower and can also be useful on the foodie front. One TB informant has it that herbs of this sort only last about 5 years after which you have to renew - but that was not the case when I was a child. I am sure that the thyme that we had went on for years. I don't think we had a rosemary but the ones at Hampton Court are grown for ornament and look like that have been there for years. So what am I doing wrong? Maybe they didn't like being in the shade of the willow for a good chunk of the day. Maybe one should prune them back to the ground and see what happens?

Also trimmed the lower shoots from a small sycamore. Was surprised to find that sap from the cuts (leass than half a centimetre in diameter) had oozed the two feet or so to the ground in about ten minutes. So the sap is clearly rising. Will the fresh cuts attract the deer and squirrels - both of which are partial to a bit of bark gnawing and sucking at this time of year? Still no deer prints inside the exclosure although saw one shooting into the large bramble patch on the South Western boundary as I was leaving. They can get through very small holes in said patch given their size. Bit like cats and mice in that department I suppose.

And a last factlet. I learn that there are around 50,000 sorts of tree knocking around but there is no very satisfactory definition of a tree. Contributions welcome.

To Devon for the weekend which was wet. The newly acquired FIL boiler seems to be doing its stuff. Its controller fiddly in a differant way to ours. Maybe one day someone will design an affordable usable user interface to these things. Perhaps when our homes are all controlled by the yet to be announced 'Home Manager' from Microsoft - which will no doubt be as irritating as Word, always doing things when you don't want it to. A useful by-product is the hot water tank which has now been planted in the allotment to do service as a water butt. It seems that when there is a hosepipe ban - the existing one may well continue despite the rain - it is OK to run a hose from the stand pipe to a conveniently placed tub and to water one's plants from the tub with a watering can, thus saving the trek to and from the stand pipe. Perhaps the rule also says that the conveniently placed tub has to be stationary. One is not allowed a bowser which one can wheel around the allotment.

Also planted some of what AE calls mole plants. She had a few of them in her garden and wanted them removed as they breed. She thinks they are called mole plants because moles will not come up under them. We have them in our garden, as does next door, and we think they are a brand of helibore. Good breeders here too. That being as it may, three of the ones pulled up from AE's garden which have been lying on the compost heap for a week have now been replanted. One of them had basal shoots so it might still go. We also have moles in the allotment paths so maybe we will be able to test the mole theory too.

We will have to see whether the teazle patch survives the arrival of the new tub.

We revisted the large secondhand bookshop in Ashburton; pleased to find that it was still there albeit with new owners. Shrink section still up and running and caught me for £4. This was followed by a stroll up Haytor. Fine place but very wet and windy - glad to tooled up with sking gear left over from our coach trip to the South of France a couple of years ago. Also refound the granite railway. The term being interesting because the railway is both made of granite and for granite so the ambiguous qualification is entirely appropriate. One branch of the railway runs into a disused quarry which would make a splendid picnic place in the summer there being a bit of a lake and trees inside - the catch probably being that lots of other people will think so too!

And coincidentally top rib, having had same for the first time after many years last week, was on the menu in Dorset - in stew rather than roast form. It certainly stewed very well to firm well textured lumps - around the size of three sugar cubes. The cow in question was a grow-your-own Aberdeen Angus Cross. Which suggests a whole new game for foodies. Instead of running on about the spiffing rasberry tinted sunflower bouquet of one's cinquieme cru burgundy, one could go on about whether the cow in question had quite enough silage in its diet. Whether a cross or a parallel breed does better on greensand. Great fun.

Bread in Dorset well up to standard. From a baker in Bridport I think, via the local Post Office. And the nannies are thinking of shutting the Post Office. Shock horror.

Failed on the bean front on Wednesday; defeated by frozen ground in the afternoon. Surprised that the ground was as hard as it was after what I thought was just one night's frost. Still, managed to weed the not very good rhubarb patch - which may do better now the Bhuddleia next to it has been replaced by bamboo, and did another three discs in the deer exclosure.

Around which there were quite a lot of fresh deer footprints, but did not spot any inside. Then saw a deer, as I was going, running alongside the exclosure, then shoot off over a rubbish pile and down to the north eastern corner of the field. Amazing the grace with which the thing glided over what I thought was quite a big rubbish pile. But it was a long, low trajectory jump. Hopefully it will not care for the steep jump required to get into the exclosure.

It seems that deer have been eating K's broad beans, planted last Autumn. I have never been troubled in this way, although I have not planted Autumn beans for some time. Let's hope that their tastes are not becoming more diverse.

Another round of pork soup yesterday lunchtime. As successful as before. Then meat loaf (sheep) with brussel sprouts and brown rice yesterday evening. Today, hot pork sandwiches - the bread from Cheam being on good form today (despite the snow on the way to get it). This all made up for Tuesday evening's pie and chips - OK at the time but I don't think I will need another go for a while.

Second power strike of the winter today. Let's hope that our fine provider - whatever they are called today - are not going to get into the habit.

Culture in the form of "The Seagull" this afternoon at the Royal Court (also sporting a new name. Maybe this is all part of a revival from a dark patch I vaguely recall from some years ago. Interesting line in stripped walls which I am sure used to have plaster and fancy paint on them). Interesting audience which appeared to include a lot of luvvie looking people. This may have been to do with the luvvie content of the play but may also have been to do with the fact that one of the leading roles (the landowner's daughter) was taken by a stand-in who took the role at about 12 hours notice after the intended actress was carted off with appendicitis or something. Presumably proper stand-ins who know the part and have been rehearsed are too expensive these days. But be that as it may, the stand-in they did have did very well, despite the fact that she was carrying the score about while she did it. Clearly a real trouper.

Play as a whole pretty good, with, to my mind, the doctor, the successful writer and the older actress being the weaker links. Took a while to get going and sagged a bit just before the interval. A slightly forced, slightly unatural feel to the thing which BH says is probably down to one of the lead roles being stood in - or stood up - and the ensemble dynamics not being luvvied in. Perhaps we should go again at the end of the run and see how it progresses.

Got the first three rows of broad beans in today, although it has to be admitted that one row was quite short and none were full length. But ground in good condition and we will soon be on track. Some weeks later that last year's bean start. As last year, have planted Imperial Green Longpod from Samuel Dobies (aka Suttons). Have plated Aquadulce in the past, claimed to be OK for winter planting, but not for the last couple of years. And learned tonight that Thompson and Morgan - who I had thought of as expensive Welsh wizards with a fancy web site are actually based near Ipswich. So odd that my parents were not into them - unless they had some good reason that is.

While doing all this the children in the neighbouring primary school appeared to be having lessons on how to be football fans. Two adults were playing a sort of tennis on a temporary court on the playground and a succession of classes were led out to sit on the two sides of the court and cheer for about half an hour in the cold. The children made a great old din and seemed to be enjoying themselves but I seem to remember that when I did games at that age we were actually allowed to play them, not just watch some southern league semi professionals do their stuff on the playground. Perhaps I am missing something.

Red letter day on the council front. We have just taken delivery of a rather stroppy leaflet advising us that the council will no longer collect any wheelie bin which contains garden refuse. All garden refuse must be recycled on the spot or taken to the waste transfer station. BH says that this is not the council being officious, rather that one of the Blair nannies gives councils brownie points according to the amount of recycling that they do, irrespective of the value of said recycling. I am not so sure. Furthermore: first: I do not think that garden refuse has a measurable effect on global warning or any other eco-fad. Worrying about it is entirely symbolic. Second: my ecostanding is that the more carbon we keep locked up in paper, wood, garden refuse etc the better. That way there is less in the sky. So the best thing to do is to bury it at the bottom of anaerobic land fill sites where it might turn into coal in a few hundred million years time. Second best, leave it lying around in your garden, rotting as slowly as possible. That way you get a very modest one time gain on carbon in the sky. One could go on. At least the offending leaflet did not tell us the scale of penalties for first and subsequent offences.

Black letter day on other fronts however. The council is too busy with eco-fads to worry about anti-social behaviour but according to "The Telegraph" today, if we worry about it on their behalf we are likely to go to jail for our trouble. For example, if you have the luck to collar the toad who is spitting at your elderly mother and carry him (or her) off to his (or her) mother to extract apology and punishment, you run the risk of being arrested for kidnap of a child. A very serious offence and you will probably find yourself on the sex offenders register as a peddo.

But given that we can't cope with a few teenagers with spray paint, how will we cope when another "The Telegraph" eventuality comes to pass? That is to say when you can stave off cancer using some horrendously expensive drug for 20 years at £1m per person. If this happens to a quarter a million of us a year (in this country that is), we have an annual bill of £250bn which is clearly unsustainable. I wonder how the Sun will suggest that we deal with the problem? Thunder on about how evil it is to put money before life and death?

Nearer home, we had our first top rib of beef for perhaps 20 years this weekend. We first learnt about it as newly weds in Harringey West 35 years ago when the butcher there explained that this was a very cheap way to buy good beef. (It could also be cut to a size to fit a Baby Belling). Which it was at the time and for some years after - but we have not had one since butchers more or less expired 20 years ago. Luckily the man in Cheam was willing and able to do the business and the Harringey theory still holds good. We went for the on bone rather than the rolled option - which last has the advantage that lots of fat from neighbouring parts of the cow gets wrapped up with it - but you lose out on the bone lark. Half the price of fore rib and nearly as good - better if you like well done and bits near the bone. Cook it slow and you get a very tasty roast. Not sirloin steak but a differant sort of bovine experience. Only catch is that the joints don't come terribly big - around 7 pounds tops.

Amongst other things served with a sort of Italian (perhaps Sicilian) sausage which claimed to be Parma ham in sausage form, bean pudding (vide supra) and two sorts of dessert: white or red pudding. Needless to say, plus cabbage, swede and all that sort of thing. Plenty of good wine, but I forgot to round things off with the fancy Oddbins' calvados which would have done the chocolates a treat. Better luck next time.

Yesterday made a dish which I recall from childhood being called black sambo. Nothing more offensive than mince - the usual sort of thing with carrot and onion - but with rice added towards the end rather than having separate potato. A sort of savoury rice pudding. Served with cabbage and bread - this last being an innovation as parents not greatly into bread. No idea why it was called black sambo but presumably one would be in trouble trying to sell it under that name in a public place.

Talking of which, talk in TB is turning to what will happen when smoking is banned in the summer. The suggestion is that those with large garden sheds can do a public service by opening shebeens. If this takes off the nannies will have great fun devising ways to police barbecues - and no doubt creating all kinds of new offences to help us along the way. One can imagine - leave Sainbury with pile of tinnies. Get stopped by the police. What are all those tinnies for? Personal consumption officer, I have got a big habit. Nonsense, what is your address? Some time later, said police come around to inspect your indoor barbecue to make sure that no money is changing hands...

Yesterday to QEH to hear one Charles Rosen doing the Appassionata and Diabelli. Amazed at what an 80 year old can drag out of a Steinway. I liked his stage manners which included a joke for the first encore - a 10 second peice - I think a bagatelle opus something number 10. Then with perfect timing he announced that the second encore was number 11 which turned out to be rather longer. Couldn't help wondering how many times he would have performed these two peices in the course of his long career - even at the modest rate of once a year that would make fifty or sixty, which might explain why he managed without score.

Not so impressed at the way the QEH managers have been instructed to sweat the space and no doubt to make it more accessible (which might be freely translated as trying to be hoody friendly. And I am not so sure that trying to suck up to such people is quite the right approach. Apart from anything else it must make them think us stupid - patronising being too long a word for those from bog standard comprehensives). So instead of a large and comfortable concourse we now have a rather cluttered space with some rather unexpected people in it. The same disease that overtook our railway stations some years ago.

PS: where can I do spread betting on how long our beloved leader will stay in office? Given his enthusiasm for betting, there must be somewhere.

Done another four discs today. Some of them had a fair amount of twitch in them, surprising since I think I cleared them twice last year. Spared a seedling holly next to one of them. I have a habit of doing this sort of thing; then nurse the seedling for a couple of years, then root it up because it is in the way. Maybe I should move it to somewhere more suitable.

One the plum trees continues to look rather lopsided and generally a bit unwell in the trunk, despite vigourous growth elsewhere. This is the Victoria from which I forgot to remove the white nylon tie which tied the label on until too late - said tie now being buried in the trunk, just above the union. At the time I noticed, the tie was well bedded and it was winter. I thought that cutting it out would do more harm than good. As it turns out the tree might not look to hot but I least we get plums off it - which is more than can be said for the Early Rivers next door - my favourite plum of childhood. We have got nothing off that one in the four or five years it has been there.

Buds on the willow cuttings are showing signs of swelling. Maybe they really will go.

Been reading a biography of Dr Livingstone by one Tim Jeal who really seems to have it in for him. I don't think he much likes his subject. But it does seem that he was a very strange bird. Fought his way out of a horrific (by today's standards) childhood to become a medical missionary - the missionary part of which seems to have involved a great deal of tedious bible study- so perhaps it is not surprising that he turned out rather out of the ordinary. He had tremendous guts and drive and, on a good day, was a good observer of people and places, but he made an awful lot of avoidable mistakes, some of them pretty awful if not fatal (mostly to others).

Observation included doing latitude and longitude in the middle of a swamp (which among other things requires one to remember to pack the log tables) when one was nearly dead. All of which reminded me of Captain Scott who exhibited some of the same virtues and vices 30 years later.

I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that he had more or less sunk into not very reputable oblivion at the time that Stanley (or his newspaper rather) made him into the media event of the decade - which appears to have had the incidental side effect of piling on the pressure on the East African slave trade. Which last I believe, shipped more slaves to the Middle East than we ever shipped to the Americas - with shipping conditions pretty much as bad although they were much better treated on arrival, generally working indoors rather than in sugar fields. So it is ironic that many African Americans are turning away from us to Islam.

Another factlet is that Dr L decided that no-one was going to make any progress converting East Africans to Christianity so long as their tribal structures were intact. (His own tally in 20 years or so was one convert, who lapsed after a few years). Conclusion, smash the structures up first and then have another go. Maybe teach them the value of money while you are at it so that they want to do paid work to buy toys. In which I think he was quite right (assuming, that is, that one thinks that conversion was right). It seems that for some reason missionaries got on better at that time in West Africa - and it would be interesting to know what that was. Dr L was also reasonably clear headed - at least some of the time - about why Africa wasn't always the tribal idyll that it sometimes appeared to be. They went in for slaves, murder and theft just like everybody else.

For a book about an explorer, very badly equipped with maps. Much worse than the other biography I got for 5p from a car boot sale some time ago. A small red book (just a little larger than the famous little red book), I think more in the heroic vein, but at least it has enough maps to work out what is going on without recourse to an atlas. Must re-read this one to see just how heroic it is.