pumpkinstrokemarrow

courtesy of http://eggs-in-art.blogspot.com/. Better than anything I have attempted.

Have now conducted a census of the apple trees which are all on the same M26 dwarfing stock and which all seem to produce orange-red/yellow-green apples. So, clockwise from the back left, using the rather dodgy records that I have so far...

1. Laxton Superb. Sraggley tree. Heavy set. Heart shaped. Apples up to three inches deep and 2.5 inches across but mostly much smaller.

2. Cox's orange pippin. Straggley tree. Light set. Torus shaped. Sample in good condition but well off ripe. Good flavour if taken slowly.

3. Lord Lambourne. Light set. Torus shaped. Rather small apples.

4. Elison orange. Poor set. Heart shaped - which is not the shape I remember these ones. Got the wrong name? 2 inches deep. Windfall sample in good condition but well off ripe, whatever it is. Good flavour if taken slowly.

5. Discovery. Tall tree. Poor set. None left.

6. Blenheim orange. Big strong tree although a bit straggley. Good set with large torus shaped apples. Far away the biggest apples of the set.

7. James Greive. Tree sickly ever since it lost its main shoot to the frost in its first winter. Poor set. None left.

Also inspected the nut trees. I think there was a poor set there but I couldn't see anything today. Maybe the squirrel has discovered them. My neighbouring allotment keeper tells me he stopped bothering with nuts as the squirrels took the lot. I had hoped that the trees not being in a wood or part of a tree line might have got away with it but maybe not.

And the Jerusalem artichokes of which five out of the six gift plants have survived. Maybe we get to have some artichokes next year. Seems best to let them be and generate this year.

But what is it about us English that we make so much fuss about the tenth anniverary of the death in a drink driving accident of a dim blonde divorcee with poor judgement in friends and with an unbringing which, in relationship terms, would not disgrace a bog standard estate? Is it really a back-handed way for the great unwashed to take a swipe at the royals? What is it about the royals that they so misjudge the handling of the whole business? Pleased to see that a columnist in yesterday's Daily Mirror takes the same sort of line - I had thought that the Daily Mirror was a pack leader in the maukish stakes. It is certainly a rather shabby paper compared with the Sun which somehow manages to make its smut and tittle-tattle sparkle a bit more.

Now starting to pick apples in earnest. A week ago had the last James Grieve which did not ripen properly at all, despite the outer third of flesh of the apple going an odd sort of pale pink. Ate another on site yesterday and picked three more. Three the regular sort of shape, a sort of fat torus without a hole in the middle (where the stalk is) and one heart shaped, fatter at the top than the bottom, taller than fat. The torus was good, albeit with a slightly empty aftertaste. Texture excellent, far better than anything one can reasonably expect from a shop apple. Shape good. Heart rather under ripe although eatable. Both apples mainly a streaky red with the odd large patch of pale green.

Must start keeping records of the performance of my seven apple trees, despite not being completely sure which is which, only having thought to write down their names after the labels had gone missing and the fat book which might have had pictures having been consigned to an anonymous box in the roof. So some permutation of Blenheim Orange, Ellison's Orange, Cox's Orange Pippin, James Grieve, Discovery, Laxton's Superb and George Cave. If I get really curious I can always pay a second visit (the first visit having been during my days in the fancy new, office free, Home Office building) to the RHS library in Westminster which has some very fancy pomariums.

At least that is what I think picture catalogues of apples and pears are called. People used to publish very elaborate ones in the 19th century. But despite the root pom clearly being orchard, even specifically apple flavoured, with a good range of pom words, pomarium does not appear in my OED at all, except in passing, it being Latin for the keeper of an orchard. Maybe another memory defect. And the RSPB buts in with a pomarine, being a sort of skua.

All seven trees are now bearing in a moderate way and now that they are deer free most of the trees are strong enough to take a bit of winter pruning so we will be able to start shaping them up. But no hurry to build the crops up - a few dozen to the tree will be more than we can manage.

This year's broad bean patch now largely cleared. Destined for Bulgarian Wheat and what remains of the onion sets. We will try Autumn planting of both.

Some years ago I had it explained to me that the proper thing to do with a posh bike was to slap a coat of paint on it so that the poshness did not show. We have not taken this advice on board and some of us have suffered in consequence. But had occasion the other day to inspect the cycle of a cycle courier who clearly had. Very cut down machine with no gears, no mudguards, no lights, no carriers and no bell. Frame had been painted a dingy black. But the thing had fancy looking handlebars, wheels and brakes. The wheels being the same brand as my own - Bontrager. The owner also had a serious looking lock. I wonder if he is as play-safe as me and carries spare tube, pump and assorted tools in his bag? And I wonder why he - in common with many cyclists under 30 - has his bag over his back rather than using panniers - which last being a far more comfortable way of carrying things.

at the races.

Prompted by a visit to Knightsbridge have been doing a bit of googling, two bits in fact, and both with entirely successful results.

Firstly, I wanted to know the name of the wigs that Jewish ladies wear on marriage, having first come across the things in a film called 'Hester Street'. The only catch is that the word I come up with - shaytel or sheitel - does not ring any bells - although it is hard to see how there would be another word. It also transpires that the whole subject of hair or head covering for ladies married or unmarried has generated a good deal of debate over the centuries, a debate which is not dead yet. Maybe this is how the Orthodox keep their wits sharpened.

Sadly, when I had an opportunity to visit Hester Street a few years ago, nothing of the film was left. I think the area had been taken over by a newer wave of immigrants from Korea.

Secondly, I wanted to know where all the Hans's behind Harrods came from. It turns out that the area was originally called Hans Town - a style of district naming much used in what is now more or less central London - for one Sir Hans Sloane of Sloane Square fame. Clearly a very successful gent as his heirs got themselves made into earls. So Mrs T was not the only grocer to achieve fame and fortune in the wider world.

But their very success prompts the thought that given that Google Inc are so dominant in this particular space, is it right that they should continue to be a company, albeit a relatively benign one? Does the old labour argument about ownership of the commanding heights run here? I certainly was given quite a talking to by a barman in an Irish bar in the Oxford Road area of Reading about how one could not leave this sort of thing out there in the corporate world. Something that needed to be run by the nation for the nation - leaving aside the problem of which nation one has in mind here.

Moving onto even more ponderous matters, not sure that today's DT should be giving air time to a wife beater. It is one thing for a suitably solemn social worker to write an article about the crime but it is quite another to give the criminal air time: the latter transforms the crime into an experience, a performance or something one might see on Big Brother. Something it is entirely OK to wring one's hand about in public without attracting any serious opprobrium. For vaguely similar reasons not sure about writing large obituaries on the decease of very unpleasant people.

Harvested the last of the broad beans yesterday, which when shelled will take us up to more than a gallon of dried beans. Some destined for soup, some for planting and some for a neighbour's chickens. The plan being to plant them in November, leaving me enough time to buy some proper seed beans should the retreads not work. Maybe I shall plant them two to a hole - something I have never done with seed beans - although I have heard of the practise from others.

Much perturbed by signs of someone having been in the fruit enclosure - without having been careful enough to replace the latch properly. Fruit all seemed to be there but it is not the thing - and I very much doubt if the excuse of ball in enclosure was available, it not being term time. On the other hand, the complaints of gooseberry theiving may be unfounded. BH tells me there has been correspondance in the DT about the long list of animals that will take ripe gooseberries. So maybe gooseberries are on the lengthening list of things which have to be netted to keep the bad guys out.

Although not all of them. The winter cabbages are all safe from attack by birds behind their nets but are not safe from attack by butterflies. Several of the cabbages being badly munched. Maybe I should not worry too much though as the things are growing very slowly and it does not look if there would have been much in the way of Christmas cabbage anyway.

Newsreaders are something of a dislike on sight category for me. It rankles with me that people who read what is put in front of them should be paid so much and should regard themselves as important - although I grant that reading what is put in front of you with any style is a lot harder than it might look - and also that it might involve fairly unsocial hours. People who chatter on air and people who interview other people on air are chucked into the same bucket. So, Jeremy Paxman qualifies, sight unseen. So, in fairness, I record that there was quite a decent article by him about the state of broadcasting - an abridgement of a keystone lecture in Scotland - in yesterday's Guardian. The thing that I bring away is the difficulty of saying something sensible or worthwhile when you have to scream to make yourself heard above the incessant clatter and clutter of today's media.

He also had the audacity to say that members of the great British public can talk an awful lot of twaddle and that sometimes it would be a good idea to tell them so, rather than giving them fawning air time.

And broadcasting is not all bad. Some branch of BBC has been putting on some films - three that I noticed - from Israel which made a very welcome change from our usual ITV2&3 fodder. One involved a Mossad assassin (I still wonder why we gave asylum to a retired KGB assassin and then made a great fuss when his former employers did away with him) who gets sqeamish about his trade. Along the way we are reminded that some Israelis at least worry about the same sort of issues vis-a-vis the Palestians as we do. So maybe there is hope yet.

I was also led to ponder about how one would feel if one learnt that one's parents had done something dreadful in the past and had hidden it away. I think it would do something fairly dreadful to my self esteem. So much for being rational. Oddly enough, there was a peice a few day's later about the granddaughter of the infamous Himmler and how she coped. Sadly, I forget how - although I do remember that there was something about how his immediate family did know what he was up to and did think that he was doing a good job. I suppose the only way forward would have been for her parents to have faced up to and to have been very ashamed, in public, about what their father had done. Not always the way forward though: there are some crimes - albeit in an entirely differant league - which I think it is better to bury and forget. Not helpful to keep raking them over.

On this suitably solemn note for a Sunday, off to the allotment. Time to see what the pumpkins are up to. What is happening to the many flower shoots on my pet pampas grass? Time to see if the new bamboo is flowering (something which the stuff that pandas eat does once in a blue moon, with catastrophic results, if I remember correctly).

Inspection of the house and its vicinity revealed that my recollection of it was rather poorer than I had thought - although I am not sure that I would have been successful at finding it on the aerial photograph even if it had not been. No wonder the police get so many false positives when they ask for sightings of this or that.

Been having various ponderous thoughts about how we might better fund getting old. Given that there are a growing number of us and that care for the old is expensive, something better than the current lottery as to who pays is called for. A first step might be to buy care for life at the point that one comes to need it. With a life expectancy of say 10 years at £1,000 a week, maybe £300,000 (I think there is a function in Excel which does this sum but I am too lazy on this rather hot afternoon to find it)? That would remove the worry of outliving one's dosh and finding oneself on the steps of the town hall. A next step might be for a basic total care package to come out of general taxation which one could top up if one wanted one's own room, flowers or other trimmings. One could choose when one wanted to enter care - and given that most people are in no hurry, I don't think there would be enough abuse to make problems. And the knowledge that such provision was available when one needed it would mean that one could soldier on at home for rather longer than might be prudent now. I hope the nannies are beavering away at this, in between the banning - which they so love- of things which other people love.

Various interesting happening in parts West. One of which was the sight of a lady of a certain age watering the flat roof of her fine, new, and very arty, house on what was a landslip. And the second was a demonstration of the class plumber service which pertains in some parts of the countryside. That is to say, BH phones for a plumber and before she puts the phone down he is pulling into the drive. To attend to something which I have never seen before - that is to say a perforated U-bend. It seems that in my unsuccessful attempts to do something about the rotten washer, I disturbed the fixing of the access hatch to the U-bend - with the result that it now has a small hole in it. Plumber cheerfully explains that he had not seen a U-bend of this sort since his apprentice days (which probably says something about how old he is); no you couldn't get a replacement washer; no you couldn't get a replacement U-bend; but yes, you could get a plastic one. But it would not fit. Time to move the hole in the wall. Why doesn't sir buy a nice new sink unit which I can fit for you? In the meantime he squirts a bit of white goo at it which does not quite do the job. But it does it well enough for a bucket to suffice for the time being while we review the situation. BH will be giving a presentation to the family shortly.

While she is prepping, I wonder whether Putin is going to wangle an extension. It seems the constitution says he is supposed to stand down in a few months. So is all this pecturising a prelude to the well travelled road of strong men who convert their legitimately obtained term appointments into appointments for life? Usually with unhappy endings. Although that early exemplar, Augustus, did not do bad for his time.

Tried to find a house I knew slightly using Google Earth, knowing the town but without knowing the address. Surprisingly difficult to interpret aerial photographs, despite the area in question having good resolution. As it turned out, I did home right in on the right general area, but was completely unable to pick out the house I was looking for, despite it being in what I thought was a fairly distinctive cul-de-sac. And even when I did get the address, the place on the picture where I think the house must be does not look much like what I remember. Will be comparing house with picture shortly so maybe that will reveal all.

And a brownie point for Google as their street map was the only one of the three I tried which named the street in question. Not a new street, although quite a small one. Plus the Google maps were much soberer and freer of advertising that the other two, especially Multimap which comes so heavily festooned with advertisments that my connection kept thinking it had broken down. Took a fair amount of flaphfing about to get a map out of Multimap at all.

During a trip to Marylebone found a well stocked hardware store and bought a new folding rule for £10, the repaired hinge on my old one having more or less had it. Penalty of standing on the thing in the distant past. But the new one, while serviceable, it rather badly finished compared with the old. The hinges are stiff and do not shut very true, the rule is not made of box wood (as such things should be) and the engraving of the scale is very crude - not even bothering with sixteenths. But it does do both metric and imperial which is a plus. I wonder if a decently made one is to be had and how much it would cost? Must investigate the branch of Buck and Ryan in Guildford (the former Messengers) when we are next there.

On the same expedition had an interesting lunch in a Lebanese cafe. Bread, olives, humus, brown fried things which the menu said contained beans but which were green and fluffy inside and a green salad. All very filling and cheap.

Entertained by the sight of two Arab ladies who had been driven on the pavement part of their Edware Road cafe to have a puff on their hookah. And a fair amount of smoke they were making too. Never seen ladies smoke such a thing before.

Followed up by a new millenium Plowman's Lunch at the Angel in Teddington. Served on a board it consisted of bread (Italian style, stale and warmed up), fetta cheese, small amount of olives, small amount of humus, some brown liquid stuff and some wrappy things containing tomato and spinach. Again, all very filling and cheap.

Saw part of a film called Greystoke something the other day. Not sure if they would get away with making it these days. Large amount of time devoted to nude shots of under age boy. Large amount of time taken up by fetching shots of animals prancing about in the jungle at a cost of goodness how much ill-treatment to get them to prance properly. And last but not least some of the human stars could be seen enjoying a smoke on screen. Nor was I convinced that all the animals were the same sort of monkey/ape but that could be ignorance.

Clearly much affected by all this, because that night I had a dream involving a black bear standing upright by the Eastern side of the road to Huntington outside Cambridge. The black bear was clearly derived from the rather impressive black panther in the dodgy flick. The black panther being an animal I had something of a crush on as a child.

And then, when thinking about the bear on waking, was reminded, or perhaps redreamt, part of a formerly regular dream involving a fictitious bread and breakfast establishment in a small village in the middle of low lying fields near Fareham in Hampshire, Fareham being a place I used to visit in connection with my work. This dream is also associated with a fictitious and complicated train ride (once regularly taken) home which involved a hairy change from one crummy two coach deisel train to another, across numerous tracks and platforms, at Peterborough. There are a number of places and events of this sort which are not real but which persist and which I visit from time to time. Who knows where all this stuff comes from? But I do not believe a book by a US dream expert which I read recently which alleges that dreams are just mental garbage without any real significance at all. This particular expert struck me as having got himself into denial about all things Freudian. Maybe one of them got him the sack at one point. And as far as dreams are concerned, maybe there is some garbage involved but I do not think that that is all there is to it.

Followed up the liver with ox kidneys. Stewed in the universal butter, onion and tomato mush. Not, of course, forgetting the carraway seeds. See above for more detail on this point.

Followed this up by a splendid but small poppy at the allotment. Deep crimson with a velvety black centre. Wonderful thing, the richness of colour perhaps a consequence of it being rather small - perhaps two inches across.

Pampas grass plant at the allotment got lots of flower shoots now. Should get a good show shortly; this despite refusing the regular burning recommended by both BH and FIL. Something to do with creating the natural conditions of the pampas. I have read somewhere that there are seeds which need the heat of a fire to prep them for germination - but I remain unconvinced that this treatment translates to the fleshy part of pampas grass plants.

Returning to dodgy, came across Seven Dials again in a short story by H G Wells. The last time I came across it in fiction was in (I think) the Three Hostages by John Buchan. Both authors seemed to regard Seven Dials as an alluringly dodgy part of London where all sorts of interesting things are likely to happen. Perhaps the sort of area they would frequent when they fancied a bit of beer and skittles with no questions asked. When I first knew the area, some of this tackiness survived, sadly now all swept away by clothes shops and bean shops. This change being heralded by the many years they spent building a new heritage pillar topped with seven blue oval dials (can a dial be oval?) at the centre of the junction in question.

Having just been to see Othello am able to play the pseud for once. The usually entertaining back page of the TLS (where a light column has replaced the traditional light review of a light book), entirely wrongly claims that Othello kills Emelia.

Sparked on today's DT which had some disparaging remark about complicated statistics - with the clear inference that whoever put them together made them complicated because he or she was lazy or incompetant or both. Which does not help to promote understanding that it is difficult to render a complex world into neat statistics. I am reminded of my days in population statistics. You might think that the population of Britain was a simple enough idea. But then you have to think about what Britain do you mean. What about Northen Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? What about the Scilly Isles and Gibralter? And after that you can start thinking about which people to include. People who live in Britain or people who happen to be here at some date or other? We probably only have a very vague idea of the number of tourists in the country at any one time. In the future one might ponder about whether to include people who have been frozen and in the meantime you can ponder about whether you want non-civilians, like US airmen, who might be living here for years - and who make quite a differance in the areas in which they are concentrated? This last making a differance once you start asking for areas smaller than Britain. What then about the inmates of hospitals and asylums? Do they count where they are inmated or where they usually live? All of these things can be dealt with and covered by footnotes in proper publications - but getting a straightforward figure to use in a newspaper article may not be straightforward . It all depends what one is using the figure for. And it all gets a lot more difficult when you start talking about something really tricky like crime. To the extent that I do not suppose anyone has much idea about whether certains kinds - maybe quite a lot of kinds of - of crime are rising or falling.

Calmed down by a further ration of calves liver for tea. BH has certainly got this one down to a fine art now.

Which, together with the coverage of the pectorals of the president of the workers republic, prompted me to speculate about the nature of the regimes which prompted such republics in the first place - and came up with the conceit which follows.

We suppose we have a country called Megaisle. Megaisle is inhabited by two guilds, the Plumbers' Guild and the Bankers' Guild. The people in the two guilds do not have all that much in common, or to do with each other, but they do occupy the same space (up to a point anyway) and there is a currency union - the central bank for which is operated by the Bankers' Guild. The general idea is that the people in the Plumbers' Guild produce all the goods and services which people at large need to consume. Beer, books, bacon, beans, badger grooming and all that sort of thing. People in the Bankers' Guild, by contrast, only produce money. They rush around a great deal and burn up a good deal of energy but the results of all this, apart from money, are supplies of status and position, goods which they care greatly about but which are not needed by or available to Plumbers. They can however use the money they create to buy goods and services from the Plumbers.

The Bankers do recognise that some Plumbers may get a bit fed up with this so they have come up with three palliatory measures. First, they offer a small number of scholarships each year to Plumber children to attend Banker school, with the possibility of incorporation into the Bankers' Guild for good behaviour. Second, they allow good looking Plumber females to marry into the Bankers' Guild. And third, Banker children may, if they choose, spend part of their gap years doing community service in Plumber areas. All of this does not quite do the business though. It has to be admitted that there are some disgruntled Plumbers who take especial pleasure in making a real mess of mowing the verges and painting the yellow lines in Banker areas.

I thought I might apply to the Institute of Neo-quantitative Societal Modelling (part of Kingston University) in order to do an MPhil on the subject. Perhaps the application of the model to post-Norman Conquest England. Doing some distant but dodgy regime of this sort enables one to get carried away without upsetting anyone.

To the Globe to see Othello; usually a good watch. And was reminded how live the issues of the play remain. For example, promotion to high position of those with nice manners. Globe in the rain in the evening was very pretty since we had excellent seats with backs - a point to remember next time I book the place. No backs bad news. The producer appeared to have taken a leaf out of the Young Vic panto decor book and lavished much care on creating period deco and ambience, again very pretty. But acting a bit patchy and a lot of it lacked passion and clarity. Iago I thought was all wrong - a flabby, slowly rollicking sergeant type who completely failed to ooze evil. But on keyboard reflection, maybe that is a fair crack. A rather ordinary person who compasses great evil without too much reflection or passion. The actor concerned earned his spurs on telly in Blackadder. Roderigo was played too much for laughs. I started off thinking that Desdemona was too old and too knowing. But then, what sort of a Venetian Sloane would marry a much older soldier and a Moor to boot? And she carried off the innocent flirting rather well.

The most serious complaint was that what with all the decor padding and one thing and another it ran for more then three and a half hours. Far too long for those of declining attention spans, with a fondness for a beer after the perf or those with trains to catch to suburbia. Next time a matinee and miss out on the interesting lighting conditions.

Outdoor paper recycling has taken an interesting turn. We have a large tub - originally used 25 years ago for boiling up the ingredients for DIY beer (which was alcoholic but was nothing like as good as brewer beer) - into which I tear banking and other paper of that sort into very small peices. Quicker than the cheap office shredder we might otherwise use and the results should rot down faster. The paper takes a long time to break down in water - which it has to share with mosquito larvae and other livestock - but eventually it does and one has a sort of cloudy, fluffy, thin porridge like grey stuff sitting in the bottom half of the tub. Of odd and interesting appearance. A sort of aquatic cotton wool.

Yesterday's Guardian had a good job on offer: a post in forensic anthropology. I remember reading a few weeks ago that today's way to sex up a dull job title was to stick the word 'forensic' in front, so clearly these people read the same newspapers. The people in question being Bournemouth University. What on earth does one do with a degree in forensic anthropology from such a place? Three years research posting as a night shelf filler in an inner city Tesco?

Does the public fascination with matters forensic on telly, reflect the ruling classes fascination with regulation and rules? Clearly need to be properly fuelled to dilate on that one so it will have to wait.

The pictures below are of the second tower attempt in the recent past - the one before this being last Christmas. The idea is to hit the ceiling, with the top of the tower being strong enough to support a shark (ex pirate lego). We did not attempt the shark on this occasion, the shark being in the roof, but we did achieve a very respectable height of good stability. Stage 1 castle lego; stage 2 technic frames; stage 3 log cabin style; and, stage 4 a spire or spar. New architect for the castle lego base gave a good foundation. Then a new technique for building the technic frames which was far less wasteful of beams gave some more inches. Tried to brace the spar at the top in the way of a yacht's mast with cross trees - something which we pulled off at Christmas but on this occasion seemed to do more harm than good. So added two cranes to make the thing a tower crane rather than a tower - albeit of rather limited utility as we had no beams to make a jib. All in all a successfull outing for the lego, only marred by the difficulty of loading the pictures. For some reason the Blogger image upload seems to prompt this computer to think that it has lost its connection and one has to click through a few pop-ups before it decided that it has not. But it still won't let me stick more than one image in a posting. Maybe there is someone out there who can guess what I am doing wrong.

To Headley Heath yesterday, where the image of the National Trust is getting more and more bossy and officious. Which is a pity because it is a very good heath. On arrival, one is greeted with signs threatening one with £50 fines if one does not pay the parking fee. Then the heath itself is littered with A4 laminate posters explaining various goings on and prohibitions. All the fault of HP with their cheap printers which the worthy retireees (not sure about spelling: I think three e's looks better than two although it gets massively less hits than two) - whom I assume to be the driving force behind all the posters - can afford. On the other hand their playing at farm worked for us on this occasion. We came across half a dozen splendid highland cattle with very impressive horns, one of which was leg deep in a small pond set in clumps of bushes and small trees while it grazed on tufts of protruding grass. All very bucolic. In between times we were entertained by a light aircraft doing various loop-the-loop type manoeuvres. Blackberries well behind those down in Epsom. Maybe they do not do so well on chalk as they do on our clay.

Another new recipe. Having rather a lot of left over boiled rice we decided that we had to use it. So cooked up our new mess of spices, garlic, onion and tomato. Fried the spcies a bit browner than usual. Added some chopped leef beet. Stirred in the rice and left on the heat for a bit. Turned out a bit like a veggie risotto and not bad at all. Maybe the next step is to make a meat version - or perhaps a prawn version. Moving gently in the direction of a biryani - which is something at which I have yet to succeed.

Took a certain amount of faphphing about to get yesterday's ticket up. Clearly do not qualify as a young person any more. Scanned the thing in without problem - the imaging program cleverly deciding which was the business part of the image - but it winds up as a .pdf file with the image upsidedown which with my version of Acrobat I can't edit and which will not load into Paint. The computer then invites me to upgrade Acrobat to what I thought was an updating version. OK, let's give this a go. After a trouble free update taking about ten minutes I find I still can't update. So time to start again, this time pressing the scan button on the printer rather than the scan button in HP Director. This resulted in a .jpeg file, so we make progress. But now we need to clip the thing to size - the fact that some bit of the scanning process having seemed to understand that this needed to be done not having done the business. The only way I know to do this is to select the image in Paint, then paste it into a new instance and save the result as a new file. All very laborious and we are still left with an irritating white margin on the bottom; but, for a rather crumpled and damp ticket which arrived stuck on a peice of meat, the result is a tribute to the £100 contraption from HP.

Moving on to deciphering the ticket we start the campaign with P C Turner. Google reveals quite a lot of people of this name, quite a lot of them policemen - something that hadn't sprung to mind beforehand. But down on page 3 we learn that a Mr P C Turner had applied back in 2004 or so to convert his abattoir in Farnborough into a block of flats - application which was apparently granted. Adding abattoir to the search criteria gets us to one in North Camp - one which was not, this year, the subject of protests about the ritual slaughter of sheep. So while one could clearly go on and on, not that much further ahead yet. While the Turners presumably did for the cow (or bull or bullock or whatever) in question, we have no idea where it might of come from. The Cheam people have lots of Scotch beef posters.

The beef - having been reduced to fore rib by the order for top rib going astray - itself did very well. 10.5 pounds of it cooked for 3.5 hours at 180C, opening the door twice for inspection. Texture excellent and flavour good. Knocked off about two thirds of it at first sitting. Amongst other things, served with a roasted version of one of the new green pumpkins from Cambridge. Maybe small green pumpkins really are designed for eating, unlike the large yellow ones which have always seemed to me to be fairly useless for culinery purposes, despite valiant efforts by the BH. Just as well because it seems that the small green jobs are going to be prolific.

Interesting memory incident this morning. Had recently purchased a small selection of letters by Marie Antoinette, her mother and others. Earlier this morning, while wondering about whether it was time to rise, was trying to recall the name of the bookshop concerned - a place I visit from time to time in Great Marlborough Street. Renowned in London as a source of foreign language books. But the name would not come to mind. Then Hatchards floated into view, clearly wrong. Then I thought that it was maybe something double barrelled with a C word as the second word. Maybe Butler & Claude. Then, perhaps a minute after this process started, the right answer, Grant & Cutler pops up. Claude Butler was the maker's name of a bicycle that I had about thirty years ago - quite a posh brand at the time - so not clear what brought it up, other than the similarity to the target name, with Butler & Claude conflating neatly to Cutler. And for some other reason I persist in typing 'Butler' as 'Bulter'. Hopefully they have been proofed out.

Having running out of excuses again, done a bit more fascia board today. Primer onto the penultimate lap. More of the excellent blue gear from Dulux - the only catch being all the disclaimers about what might happen if you get any of the stuff on oneself. And being runny, it seems to be all over the handle most of the time so I hope my hand survives the experience. Got a fair amount on the wisteria so that might be a test of sorts.

Rather than moving onto the ultimate lap, put a coat of paint on the gutter from our extension - a long stretch of plastic pipe running at a gentle slope down to the gully. Viewed at the right angle it droops between each pair of brackets - perhaps they should have been rather closer than 3 feet centres. But I am not going to put another lot in between the first lot - not today anyway. Far too hot. The main lesson is, I think, not to paint exterior plastic. The black it comes in may not be one's favourite colour but it does dull down a bit and does not need repainting - plastic seeming to throw the best laid paint off after a while.

All in all, been a big week for DIY. We are now the proud possessors of two small stretches of posh blue lino upstairs - the carpet and flowtex it replaces having been declared unhygenic. Very nice it looks too - the surprise being that you can pay a lot more for lino than you need to pay for carpet. You can even have it pretending to be tiles. A far cry from the days when lino was what people in Coronation Street had in their kitches.

Down to one small loaf a day from the baker. Is it the hot weather or is it a bit of subconscious slimming following exposure of moderate amounts of flab on Welsh beaches? At a more practical level with BH not being into bread much at all, one small loaf is not enough and two small loaves is too much. There is a limit to how much bread puddding and bread and butter pudding one can absorb. The terrible trials we retired folk have to grapple with.

On the Grauniad front, we have had a number of cases recently of the courts deciding what needs to be done in the health service, usually about whether this or that fine new drug ought to be prescribed as part of the service. I would much prefer a world when such things could be decided in a sensible way without having to pay for all the paraphrenalia of lawyers: hard to see what they bring to the party apart from costs that a decent management consultancy couldn't manage. To me - from the sidelines - it all seems fairly simple. We already have a central body which decides whether routine use of such and such a drug is a good use of public resources. Let them carry on. Maybe one has to omit the weasle word 'routine' which opens the way to possibly painful and probably expensive arguments in individual cases - given our propensity to make a fuss when we wind up on the wrong side of such a decision. Then, when a drug has been declared to be fit for use - this being a quite differant matter from a value for money judgement in the context of a national health service - people who are rich or keen can pay for it. And while one may not care for rich people being able to pay for some horrendously expensive cancer drug which buys them a bit more time than poor people can afford, I think stopping them is the greater evil. Here endeth the lesson.

Pleased to see that they keep on coming from http://hunakulu.blogspot.com. Maybe we shall get there to see these places for ourselves one day.

Three factoids from today's perusal of the DT and the TLS.

I knew that Bomber Command lost around 55,000 people during the last war. What I didn't know was that they only took around 125,000. With losses of that order it is a wonder they were able to keep going at all. They were presumably not very happy either to have been largely left out of victory celebrations, opinion having presumably become rather ambivalent about their achievements.

Item 2, a famous cyclist, having got near the peak of his profession and having retired, got himself made into a lady and lives very quietly in the country. Indulging in a bit of psycho-twad, one suspects that the punishment he must have given himself as a top-flight cyclist served to blot out - for a time anyway - all kinds of problems and issues resulting from uncertain sexuality. A species of masochism. But given my goings on about Napoleon recently, should I be retailing this kind of gossip at all? Is the man not entitled to a bit of privacy in his retirement?

Item 3, I learn of a gelding called Lady. The circumstances were sad, but putting that aside, I wonder how often animals are called by sexually inappropriate names by their human owners. I dare say there are examples of human nicknames being inappropriate in the same sort of way but I can't think of an example. Suggestions on a postcard please.

Have made a very successful combination of two chick pea recipes - although combination is perhaps a rather strong word here. Used two pizza toppings rather than one might be a better way of putting it. Be all that as it may be, soak a pound of chickpeas overnight. Put on to boil, then simmer for an hour or so. Meanwhile, pound up some black pepper, green cardoman, cumin seed and turmeric. Fry in butter with finely chopped garlic. Add chopped onion and smoked bacon (a good batch in this occasion from the man in Cheam). Cook for a bit. Add four or five chopped tomatoes. Cook for a bit. Strain the chick peas, stir then in and simmer the whole lot for half an hour. Add a good portion of cooked chopped leaf beat and simmer some more. Serve with white inorganic rice. All went down very well; two good meals for two people.

Completed mowing the deer exclosure, having a go at the cultivated blackberries on the way. Very nice and sweet and make the Autumn Bliss raspberries seem rather insipid. And there was a Siamese quintuplet among them; that is to say a group of five berries which had fused into one. Must work out how to train the things. I think they fruit on second year wood so the very straggly first (this) year growth needs tying up or something. But the stuff is very fragile and the stems seem to crease if I try anything on. Maybe I should read some instructions somewhere.

And picked the first pumpkin of the season. It was green, roughly spherical and weighed in at 7.75 pounds. A few small scars on the skin where slugs or snails have had a go. We will see what BH makes of it. There look to be lots more. And there seem to be at least two varieties of pumpkin on the pumpkin patch - now about 12 feet square. I think the picked one is one of the foreign ones acquired from Cambridge.

An important bit of the bit of the kitchen which holds the sink up - having been rather wobbly for some time - finally gave up the other day. Maybe 12 years after it was put in by the subbies from Peter Jones. Somewhat shocked on closer inspection to find how weak the basic construction was - with the main vertical slabs holding the thing up each being in two peices with a horizontal join at about plinth level - and with the weight and positioning of the doors (being rather heavy slabs of chipboard) being just right to push said joins apart. One vertical slab now replaced with the floor from the sea chest from Gosport which was ripped up a few months ago: soft and old pine but there is a lot of it and it should outlast the rest of the unit. Pine fixed to the worksurface with a cunningly shaped peice of oak taken from some pre-historic bedstead - maybe even of Cambridge vintage. I knew there was a reason why it has kicked around the garage for all these years. Whole job took a suprisingly long time - rehanging the false door without the natty fittings that the thing came with was particularly fiddly - a good reminder why builders always go for replace rather than patch (apart from the commission they get on the purchase of replacement).

Have also repaired a rather older bread board - a wedding present from the West country - having decided that the rather smaller chopping board being used in its place did not really cut the mustard. More to the point, the handy trough intended in the wedding bread board to hold the bread knife, also served as a repository for bread crumbs. This the chopping board could not manage so repair it was. We will see how an exterior unibond rub joint fares; I couldn't be bothered to slot screw the thing - despite the age of the crack meaning that the join was not all it might have been. And didn't trust myself to plane a new join - would probably made a fair join worse.

Some other heirlooms of the same era did not fare so well today, finding their way to the tip. This included, for example, the two butchers trays which held the clothes drying racks in our nuptial bedsit. A shame to let them go but they have been in the roof, unused, for maybe twenty years.

This being the tenth anniversary of something, we visited the Princess DoW memorial paddling pool in Hyde Park today. Rather to my surprise, the thing (a roughly circular but undulating waterway set in granite) looked remarkably well in the afternoon sun, decorated with plenty of children. However, given that we presumably chucked the best that money could buy at it, I would not give it full marks. A good (if expensive) idea, but the design was not properly worked through. For example, the thing has not been planted in the ground quite as it should. It does not sit well. More thought should have been given to blending the lie of the land with the lie of the waterway. The path around the outside is a little tatty. The little bridges across the waterway have not been planted quite as they should; perhaps they were an afterthought. And while the idea of varying the texture of the bed of the waterway is good, there is perhaps a little too much variation.

Last but not least, I believe there would have been more satisfaction from a waterway in which the water only flowed in one direction. This would not have needed much more jiggery-pokery than has been employed as the thing is now.

Sit back and wait for rumblings from those who keep elaborate shrines to DoW in their back bedrooms - such people do exist for I have met one. And he was not a thirteen year old female either.

Have now paid one and one half visits to the refurbished Halfway House at Earlsfield which used to be a convenient place at which to wait for trains. On a good day one had picked something up at the secondhand bookshop next door and had something to browse over one's quiet pint. So what was a perfectly decent Young's pub has now been tricked out with sofas and candles and seems to have very quickly acquired a large young trade. Perhaps also attracted by the throughtful reconstruction of the outside to provide a venue for puffers. Net result for me though is that the place is too crowded to be comfortable or to get served. Also rather noisy. So did not even bother to consumate my second visit, preferring to sit and wait on the platform instead.

The puffers bit of which reminds me of a wheelchair bound visitor to TB who smokes. In his case, having a fag is one of the few activities where he is not at a disadvantage to the rest of us: but will he continue to muster the energy to visit when he has to roll himself in and out of the bar when he needs his nictotine fix? I forget whether the exemption for residential homes for the handicapped survived the good intentions of the New Labour nannies.

The barman at the Duke of Devonshire in Balham High Road, another but much larger Young's establishment, told me that they are about to have £500,000 thrown at them to do a presumably similar job there. Another boozer bites the dust. In fairness, I suppose one should say that the place is probably far too large - like many pubs of its generation - for the custom it is now getting. They could make a lot more money than they do out of drink by knocking the thing down and putting up a block of flats. So given that the heritage folk won't let them do that, maybe we just have to put up with them making the place over for youth.

Mowed two thirds of the grass in the deer exclosure now. Second cut of the year and the grass is very tufty. Seems to want to grow in single plant clumps rather than in lawn mode. I suppose clump mode is more natural and ought therefore be encouraged. Another factor might be that I let the ground go to grass after having dug it over very roughly one Autumn without ever digging it over to a reasonably flat surface the following Spring. So the ground still retains all the humps and bumps of that first digging. Ants seem to like it.

The Morello cherry tree, which looked very sick for its first two years of life, is now starting to look a bit better - if still very small for a two year old. Maybe I will get some cherries off the thing one day. But to make up numbers, the James Grieve apple has started to look very sick. It acquired some sort of stem infection when it lost its main stem to the frost the year it was planted and has never really shook it off. Plus the two large rosy apples I took off it the other day turned out to be seriouly unripe despite their colour. James Grieve are supposed to be a bit sharp but not that sharp.

But the sickle I use for the mowing is good, if heavy on the wrist. Made by some people called Fussell with an elm handle enclosing a single peice of steel, tapered (in thickness) both from end to end and from side to side - the result being a well balanced tool which holds its edge. Unlike a lot of modern garden tools - or hand tools generally for that matter - which are made out of much cheaper steel and don't taper in any direction. Don't have no edge to speak of at all.

Now finished the book on Napolean which takes too much interest in his private life (see above) - and which finished on a rather manic note, with much whinging about our treatment of the man after Waterloo - forgetting the several million excess deaths that he was more or less personally responsible for. One rule to calm such books down might be that one can only put something in a biography which is in the public domain or which has been given one by the subject or his executors. That would then leave it leave it open to the subject to direct that executors should not cooperate with biographers. But it doesn't run, firstly for public interest reasons. And secondly, if one withholds cooperation the intending biographer will just go to one's enemies and get them to dish the dirt. So pre-emptive strike with a sympathetic biographer might be a better way to preserves one's reputation. Hence the custom of appointing an official biographer. So we are left with an example of a real problem which is probably not solved by making rules about it. One just has to trust to the decency and good sense of biographers.

But I do remember an anecdote to the effect that my informant was asked by a correspondant of his to destroy all letters after consumption. Otherwise, the correspondant said, one never knew where they might end up.

Started a book on colour written by the late headmaster of Rochdale Art College in the twenties - trawled from the second hand bookshop in Tenby from among large musty piles of things Welsh - both about and in. Interesting account of how to make colours work with each other to best effect - with lots of practical exercises (which I don't suppose I will do - a pity because exercises are the way to higher planes of understanding) and without going into any physics. I wonder if the current generation of art students bother with this sort of thing - or whether they are just content to express (their generally tiresome) selves.

Animals are back on the allotment. Deer hiding in a willow tree at the edge of the school field in the middle of the day and a nice new mole hill in the middle of the path. Presumably the man with a gun in the woods at the bottom of the field that the school children made such a lot of noise about (being in earshot during their lunch break) was not successful. Was he a Epsom common trusty converted from the veggie cause?

Discovered that weeding cabbages in my shiny new anti-bird enclosures is a bit of a pain. Can't just get in there with a hoe. And the rate of growth of these particular cabbages is very uneven. Some of them a foot across and rather more of them hardly moving. One has mysteriously died without a proper root - the quarter inch stem just fading away into a few short root hairs just below the surface.

Picked the first Autumn Bliss rasberries which BH approved of. Not a great number but I was impressed to get any considering that they were just suckers transplanted in the Spring. Must find out how to prune the things - not being something that I have ever grown before and I can't remember what my father did 45 years ago. Will have to ask FIL.

Picked the first runner beans of the season. Plants in full flower but are not growing up as strongly as they should. Too many stems drifting across the ground. And maybe the sprouting willow bean poles are taking water that should be going to the beans.

Pumpkin plants forging ahead, doing well on their diet of kitchen waste based compost. Biggest pumpkin so far about 9 inches across. But we had better not count our pumpkins until they are a bit bigger and harder and generally out of slug reach.

According to yesterday's DT, smoking a single joint (it doesn't say anything about inhaling) increases the risk of catching schizophrenia (I had thought this was an obsolete diagnosis in the land of multiple personality disorder) by 41%, with the risk unchanged as you smoke more and more of the stuff. Elementary logic tells me that this means - assuming that the figures are based on something other than DT wishful thinking - rather that there is some correlation between the desire to smoke a joint and the likelihood of catching schizophrenia. But maybe I am missing something.

It also alleges that the stuff you can buy now has all been grown under arc lights in suburban lofts and is much too strong - but not making the point that if the stuff was controlled rather than criminalised we would have some control over quality - in the same way as we do for food, drink and drugs more generally.

Which led me to wonder how many tobacco and pub users are going to think that if they can't have a fag in the pub any more, they might as well have a spliff at home. I think there ought to be a Yougov poll to investigate, funded by the DT.

Visited the Courtauld Institute yesterday. They havn't improved the lighting of the pictures but I had forgotten how much good stuff they have got there. They even had a Van Gogh - not my sort of painter usually - that I really liked. Peach trees near Arles or something.

Then on to inspect the refurbished South Bank Centre. It turns out that refurbishment means a super new water feature (which we tried, along with lots of children and sundry adults. I think we were the oldest by a comfortable margin), selling off chunks of the periphery to various bars and restaurants (which seemed to be doing a good trade) and doing up the interior of the concert hall (which we were unable to see). The rest of the Festival Hall appears to be more or less untouched, apart from having stripped out some of the shops and fiddled around with the bars - helpfully getting rid of the tank trap which used to be around the long bar. Rather elderly green carpet still in place. Not bothered to give the elderly detailing a wash and brush up. The whole thing has a rather unfinished, transitional look about it. We must visit again in a few months time to see whether things have got better.

Portugese custard tarts in Madeira in Vauxhall. Very good.

Finished off in Clapham, where amongst other things we had an excellent tortilla. And I have finally worked out that there are two sorts of tortilla - one which I like and one which I don't. Odd that it has taken so long for the penny to drop.