pumpkinstrokemarrow

Sadly, have to report that the butcher in Cheam appears to be unable to take further orders for top-rib (of beef) - and, one suspects, orders for anything at all unless you are a restaurant or a pub and are able to make it worth his while. So we will have to settle for the odd bit of fore rib when my wanting it and his having it happen to coincide. Fortunately, he usually carries quite a good stock so this will not be quite as bad as it sounds. Maybe it is not down to him at all: it is more a question of the wholesalers he deals with only producing what are now the standard cuts - and it is getting them to do anything else which is the problem, again unless one wants dozens of the things. In this case that might be a bit tricky as I think you only get two top rib joints to the cow, one from each side. But then, that is 200% better than aitchbone where you only get one. Presumably getting one of those has become even more challenging.

Remains curious that in this foodie age where, I believe, billions of cook books are sold each year, that the English anyway are so unfussy about their meat and bread. OK, so the are commercial pressures on the supply side but if there was some serious demand side demand those pressures would soon sort themselves out.

But there is some good news. The office of the pope has arranged for the supply of fibres from a robe once worn (or possibly just tried on or put in his cupboard) by the late Pope John. So I can now send a cheque off and get some certificated fibres back - these can then be framed and put on my wall or otherwise included in my private shrine for venerative purposes. It may well be that one can do the whole transaction over the internet - with a discount if you settle for certificated virtual fibre (rather than real fibre) for inclusion in your virtual shrine (possibly Facebook). This would be a more eco-friendly option than promoting trade in real fibre and ought to earn some much needed points from the eco-crew.

The second bit of good news is the finding of a huge tip (aka waste transfer facility) behind the brewery at Wandsworth. At least what used to be a brewery. Now that Youngs have sold out to (aka merged with) Wells, the brewery has probably been converted into a conference centre to where those in the world of work can be taken for hug-ins and other forms of corporate shenanigan. But the tip was most impressive. Huge yard, sparsely but very tidily occupied by the sort of large yellow boxes which sit on the back of flat bed lorries. You get assigned one, you drive up to it, walk into it and dump one's bags. No great bossiness about which sort of rubbish goes into which bin - although there is a garden waste option for the ecos. And then, to the side of the tip some very large shed - tricked out in red and brown, with ramps, gantry cranes and all sorts - which is presumably the preserve of the commerical wasters. Not clear what does on inside but no doubt all very efficient. No chimney so presumably not incineration. But visitors beware: the place shuts at 1600 on weekdays. Rather later at weekends.

I also notice that a disturbed young lady managed to evade her guard and commit suicide while being taken for her cigarette break. Which prompts the obvious observations, that if we had not made it so difficult for people to have their cigarette break while in a public place (or maybe the hospital counted as a work place), this would never have happened. Was the state of her lungs really the right problem for the assembled medical folk to be focussed on?

For lovers of things French - the people that is to say rather than the cooking - we have just been taken to a very fine pub - the Zetland Arms in Bute Street in South Kensington. Good beer and good mixed company including lots of young French people of whom there seem to be very large numbers in this particular area. Presumably inhabitants of the French Institute, the Charles De Gaulle Lycee and any other establishments of the same sort there might be around there. But it took Google to remind me that Bute Street in Cardiff is a very differant sort of place altogether. I remember a pub called, I think, the Steam Packet, which did not run to real beer and I had to settle for Newcastle Brown, and ran to mixed company with a rather differant tone. When I was last there it was still an area to be careful in after dark.

This in the course of a visit to the V&A where, in the cafeteria, we found the most splendid bacon slicer I have ever seen. A glorious contraption in red enamel and stainless steel which must have cost thousands. It was rather after lunch time so we did not get the see the wonders which they ought to be slicing on such a grand machine. Must take quite a while to clean, especially if the cafeteria is of an organic persuasion and is not allowed to use inorganic cleaning materials.

The beer in the Zetland prompted ponderings about the ceremonial slaughter of bulls in Spain and related places. The allegation was that this was not a blood sport and had nothing to do with satisfying our blood lusts - which I am quite sure exist. Not least because of the popularity of horror films and violent films.

Ceremonial slaughter of things that we love has a long pedigree, documented many years ago, at great length by Frazer. The crucifixation is a very well known example; the communion service a rather decadent derivative; and, the treatment of a stag in the recent film 'Queen' is a good fictional example. On a slightly differant, but I suspect related, tack is the regular disposal of the great and the good. We like nothing better than to see off somebody famous, the more humiliating the circumstances the better. Now the ostensible purpose of all this used to be the propiation of unseen forces, divine or otherwise, with gifts of great value. But I am quite sure that a by-product, which accounts in part for the persistance of customs of this sort, is the satisfaction of blood lust in circumstances which do not arouse guilt. So that, paraphrasing another blast from the past, we get all the fun of killing something without the pain. The fact that we might not be terribly aware of this by-product would not, to my mind, interfere with its efficacy (a fancy word for efficiency?).

The slaughter of very large numbers of animals for food is another matter. This is done in private - without ceremonial - except in the cases of Halal or Kosher slaughter - why do they still bother while we do not? - so that we can eat the resultant grub without feeling bad about it. Maybe the problem is that killing lots of large animals for food is a rather unpleasant business - and no amount of ceremonial is going to wash that away. We need to kill, but our soul is killed if we need to do too much of it.

Perhaps a more interesting question is why do the Latins go in for this form of extreme entertainment, while on the whole at least, we Anglos don't. It is true that we go in for national hysterics - the Queen's jubilee, the death of Diana, the Soham case and the McCann case being recent examples that I can think of - of a rather embarassing variety (and I do not think the press are entirely responsible - they might feed off the habit but do not cause it) - while the Latins, I am told at least, don't. But what is the connection? We both do football in a big way so that does not help to explain the differance. Maybe there is a need for extreme emotion other than in a family connection - with it not mattering all that much what flavour we take? But that doesn't run either because football involves great tides of emotion for those who care for it.

Starting to wander so it is clearly time for a top-up back at the Zetland.

Further thoughts on the drain cover front, prompted by observing that the one at Cheam crossroads I wait at after coming out of the baker, is cracked in three places, two corners and in-between, this is cast steel or iron that must be of the order of 3 inches by 1 inch in section. Now while cast iron is reasonably brittle and can be broken up with a sledge hammer one might think that it would take a very large blow from a relatively soft tyre to achieve the same effect. But now I am looking I find that quite a high proportion of drain covers are damaged in the same sort of way. Maybe the steel is not what it used to be - this certainly being the case with hand tools and screws - with the exception of saws where the very hard steel holds its bite very well.

On roughly the same occasion, I overhead a Cheam dad talking to his young son about the POA. I decided that this particular abbreviation meant plan of action - oddly not one the consultants that I used to work with had cottoned on to. Presumably POA scores because you have three very simple sounds - pee oh ay - which apart from making one sound like a very up-to-the-minute manager- are slightly easier to say than plan of action - the last word of this last containing two whole syllables.

BH has discovered the right way to deal with ripe runner beans. Rather than cooking them in with the mince - a sort of chile con carne - she boiled them up vigourously in a separate pot, poured the cooking water off and then add the cooked beans to the cooked mince. The result did not have the not particularly pleasant back taste that the boil together approach has.

On the down side, I discovered that it was possible to boil lentils over in our giant stew pan, now nearly a year old. Last time the froth got to within a couple of inches of the top - at which point I happened to stir it. This time no stirring and the froth did indeed make the last couple of inches.

And I have been pondering about the organic-ness of carrots prepared in the giant machine reported on on June 27th. If one starts with perfectly respectable organic carrots are they still organic if one washes them in the frightful inorganic chemicals that are no doubt recommended for use with the giant machine? Clearly something for the soil society - or whatever the relevant regulator of the term 'organic' is called. Google unhelpful for once.

The TLS tells me that one Leah Scragg, a most splendid name, has published a scholarly edition of a play called 'The woman in the moon' by one John Lyly. With a name like that I was hoping that she would come up with some real pseuds corner stuff in her notes. Partly because the review was the usual essay about Lyly rather than a review proper, the pickings were not that good. The best we can do is 'a multifaceted image of the monarch's public and private selves' and '... does not support the proposition tha their author was too wedded to a particular style of coterie drama to respond to rapidly evolving theatrical tastes ...'

More seriously, I read that the nuns and monks of Burma are on the move again. Now while they have been very much in the van of protest and should get recognition for that, I wonder if, in thirty years time, they will be seen as a force for conservatism and reaction in much the same way that the Catholic church is coming to be seen as in Eire. It can't be any more healthy in Burma to have such a large proportion of the population sequestered in celibacy than it was in Eire. The church was fine while it was a focus for Irish national aspirations, but it is not so fine now that they have achieved a good part of their objective by getting the Brits out of most of Ireland.

Having filled FIL's old water tank with fresh cut comphrey leaves (said by mediaevals to be good for inflammations and broken bones) it now smells rotten. Various wasp like hover flies seem to quite like it. The idea is that the green liquid which will result in due course is very good for runner beans. I hope so because the comphrey is really good at coming up good and strong everywhere except where I plant it on purpose. Maybe it likes being chopped up and replanted along with the rest of the compost.

We also have a wire thief. Had left what was left of the line wire from the deer exclosure hanging up on the pole bin. Noticed yesterday, when I wanted it, that it had gone missing (at least I don't think that I returned it to the alternative hanging place in our garage roof). Only a few pounds worth but depressing that even in a small closed community like allotment holders you get the odd thief. Presumably communes of bubble or other substance loving folk have the same problem: no way of weeding out the bad apples which is not worse than the problem.

This in the course of replacing one side of the compost bin. A neighbouring landscaping contractor was loading his skip up with the pallets from the stone he was laying and was happy for us to remove them, so we acquired five pallets plus sundry other bits and bobs making up the stone crates. On acquisition, we learn that stone pallets are made in a much heavier fashion that the regular sort and are rather smaller - maybe three feet square rather than four feet square. Maybe this means that they do not recycle in the same way. That being as it may, three of the new sturdy pallets did a good job of replacing two old ones, the new shape serving to lock the two sides adjacent - which had been wobbling a bit - properly in. The bits and bobs served to make a sort of upper palisade, compensating in a feeble way for the lack of height, but with the unintended side effect that the whole thing now has a slightly more amateurish look than it used to, despite actually being rather stronger.

Also learnt that the bashing that nails take when you extract them from pallets leaves them rather soft, and very prone to disastrous bending when trying to use them. Maybe not just the softness but also their having been hammered straight. The resultant nail is not quite true and must have slight bends at which there is a tendency to buckle under stress. All adds to the amateurish look noted above.

The Bulgarian wheat is coming up well. There are a lot of shoots, about two inches high now and looking curiously fragile. We will see how many of them survice the various horrors which lurk in the dark.

Reminded by a peice in today's DT about how much I disapprove of husband and wife teams in the workplace. The peice in question suggesting that some of Blairs heirs share their late leader's love of money - to the extent of being economical with the spirit if not the letter of the rules in such matters. Maybe it is a prejudice inherited from my mother, and I have never had to work with a husband and wife team, but I am sure that I would have found it a pain. A little clique - or perhaps boil - in the otherwise healthy body politic. Maybe the BBB will find time to make rules about it when they have first hand experience.

This one being from http://diversidaddiacritica.blogspot.com/. Something in Valencia.

Have been strong country smells on the way to Cheam for the last few days, with the addition today of a whiff of fresh cut grass. On closer inspection the primary source turns out to the the ivy flowers on the railway bridge on the way into Cheam. Quite pretty little things in a restrained sort of way; not the thing for lovers of florid blooms from the topics. Presumably insects like the whiff of corruption. But in the end, urban smells disguised as country smells. Real country smells come from men spraying slurry on their fields or from pigs in factories.

But clearly the smells stimulated higher powers as I was led on to ponder on the fact that while all power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. (I had thought that this was a quote from one Lord Denning, an 18th century politician, but failing to confirm this or the existance of Lord Denning by sources nearer home, Google told me in very short order that the gent in question was one Lord Acton, of curious, somewhat foreign, lineage, a 19th century historian. Senior moment). This drew on an interesting lead review in this week's TLS about the value of counterfactual history - a maligned branch of the historical profession which spends its time pondering about what might have happened if some other thing, other than what actually happened, happened. What might have happened if Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo sort of thing. In a pub, this can lead quite quickly into entertaining speculations of all sorts. I think I have pondered on such matters here before but, for once, search fails and I can't find it. So on we go.

The author of the book being reviewed was alleged to take a very firm line with counterfactuals. What actually happened is usually over detirmined and pondering on lines off the detirmined path is fruitless chattering. The wind of wind-bags. Which is a rather odd line to take in a book about 10 key decisions in the second world war. How can there be a decision if there is not a choice? How can there be a detirmination if there is choice? What do we mean by a wrong decision if the actual decision was inevitable?

The reviewer quite reasonably points out that what might seem like obvious decisions with hindsight didn't usually look so obvious to the players at the time, who probably thought that that there were lots of options, all with very uncertain outcomes. So even if one were to argue that what happened was inevitable, it remains of interest that the players did not think so at the time. How did what they saw as choice get converted into the inevitable decision? (A side issue being the interesting way in which one swings very rapidly from uncertainty to certainty. One flogs around the pond without a clue - rather like detectives on a serious crime - then, all of a sudden, one decides that one knows the answer and usually become blind to anything which does not support that answer. Forward at all costs. Lots of mistakes get made this way).

I also hold the view that one could make a very good model of the world which was largely detirministic - that is to say if one ran the model twice one would get the same answer - but which included, at various interesting points, a random element. Where the model tosses a coin in order to decide what action to take at some particular junction. The thinking here is that while many things in history are largely detirmined by fundamentals and some things are largely dertirmined by the whim of individuals who manage to concentrate some power in their own persons. (Hitler being a good example of one such, with the process by which he acquired that power or autonomy from a position of having neither being of much interest in its own right). But some important things are decided by random events. So a meteorite hits what is now Mexico and wipes out the dinosaurs. The tricky point here being that while the movement of the meteorite is very un-random and can be detirmined with a high degree of accuracy - provided one sees it before it hits one - its arrival and its arrival time were random with respect to Mexico. There was no connection between the affairs of the meteor and the affairs of Mexico. And I can see plenty of interest and value in speculating how dinosaurs might have evolved (or become extinct) if their evolution had not been so rudely interupted.

And the whim of a powerful person can be close to a random event. I hate elephants because one trod on my teddy when I was small so I started the third world war. Clearly time for the pub.

Very into various oral slips at the moment. Word transpositions are the most common. Called spoonerisms, I believe, after some Oxford don who had the same complaint, so maybe I am in good company. More worryingly, starting to find it takes a noticeable time to generate a sentence. One knows what one wants to say in some sense, but turning it into a speech act is taking a bit of time. One sometimes gives up and says something else, something else which is more accessible for one reason or another. Not something I was aware of when younger - lets see how much worse it gets before I stop noticing!

Into Joyce this week, at least at one remove. That is to say I am reading about Joyce rather than reading the man himself. Perhaps by way of a warm up act. Prompted by the purchase of what turns out to be the standard biography (by one Ellmann) of the man from a charity shop in Kingston for the princely sum of £2.49. Well made book from the US - where the standards in such matters seem to be rather higher than here. Same with their clothes so maybe it is just a matter of their being a lot richer than us. But I am also skimming a book about books about Joyce - which tells me that Ellmann commits the crime of passing off stories about Joyce as fact when in fact he has just adapted the relevant incident from one of Joyce's books - which it seems are packed full of recognisable material from his own life and times. So he rehashes a anecdote from one of Joyce's books and serves it up as if it came from some independant source. This might be a good way of achieving a coherent vision of the man, but is it the right way to the truth? Clearly plenty of life left yet in the Joyce industry. When you get tired of chewing over the man himself, there are plenty of chewers to get your teeth into. Shakespeare seems to be a magnet for the same sort of thing. Price of fame I suppose.

Invented a new soup yesterday which went down very well. Take two pints of water and add a chicken stock cube (Knorr). Add some butter. Add some coarsely sliced organic carrots, washed not peeled. Boil for a bit. Add some finely sliced white cabbage. Boil for a bit. Add some sliced mushrooms - fresh ones rather than the ones on the discount shelf after the weekend. Result was very good. The catch would be that it would not stand very well. The vegetables would go soggy and the whole thing would go a bit flat.

Bicycle gears starting to pay the price of being so cunning and so numerous. That is to say the gear changing is not quite as miraculously smooth as it was when the bike was new a year ago. And I can't get onto the third drive wheel at all. If any more is involved than fiddling with the tension of the two gear change cables at the gear end I shall be in deep water. Haven't got a clue how to do anything to the cunning gear levers which have been built into the brakes. I haven't even found a way in yet. Bring back 5 gear bikes with a gear stick on the frame which one can get at - out of my 21 gears I use three on a regular basis and two more on an occasional basis - three plus two making five.

Pondering on why some of the drain covers on Howell Hill block and some don't - our now moving into the blocking time of year - I have found my true vocation as a drain cover designer.

Firstly we have design objectives: maximum steady load, maximum impact load, maximum aperture (of the sort that can take bicycle wheels. Some years ago a friend of an acquaintance of mine was killed cycling in London when he put his front wheel in a cover, stopped dead and was hit by a lorry). Secondly we have the design of the grid. How many primary bars should there be? At what angle should they have to the intended direction of traffic? 45% seems to be the popular view. At what angle should the bars be to the vertical? Should they be curved or straight? 45% and strongly curved seems to be the popular view. How big should the sump be? The bigger the sump the less often one has to empty it but the higher the installation cost. How deep can the cover be? How much steel can one afford to put into the thing (domestic drain covers having gone very weedy and thin over the years)? In the round, I put my money on the three or four primary bars, 45% to traffic, 45% to vertical and strongly curved variety for non blocking. They also seem to be the most common on this stretch of road. Solid looking things. I imagine it would take a very serious impact to impact.

Various other Cheam events to report. An open lorry piled high with wheel barrows. Nothing particularly strange about a lorry delivering wheel barrows but I have never seen such a thing before. Not seen anything like it since the tanker lorry full of marmite passed me on the way to Warrington. And then there was the van from Movenpick. They had gone off my radar since their large restaurant underneath Bressenden Place shut a few years ago. Judging by the van they must have some sort of local delivery operation going on. No doubt Google would reveal all. Last but not least was the Hystar speculative housing development - maybe a dozen units - at the top of East Street, construction on which appears to have ground to a halt, although the site is not completely shut up. Was Mr Hystar speculating on the basis of a short term loan which he has not been able to renew? So all his roofers have left pending payment?

Was quite impressed by the queue outside Northern Rock in Kingston yesterday, which we happened to pass on the way to Oxfam. But a little cross that speculators have made a lot of money out of Northern Rock misery by selling short (or long. Whichever way round betting on the share price falling is). Hard to see how we can stop such things in a market economy but one doesn't have to like the people who get rich at it. Maybe we could take a leaf out of the book of the people in the 18th century who wanted to ban gambling and thought that the answer was to make gambling debts unenforceable in law (leaving a nice hole for the Krays of the day to climb into). We could make any deal in securities which did not take place on the spot at the prevailing price unenforceable. But apart from closing down legitimate futures operations there would no doubt be plenty of room for manoeuvre at the margin - no way to tie down exactly what it is one is trying to do in words of one syllable - so lots of fat fees for the advisors and their hangers on for little real gain. Maybe BBB will earn their crusts for once and think of something.

Consumed the first two Blenheim Oranges yesterday. The first was half rotten and the half that was not was in good condition. Something like a russet, but without the mealiness one gets with winter eating russets. The second was more or less sound (barring small livestock in the core) but was not very ripe. Eatable but chickened out half way through and cooked the remainder. Slightly too much but still a bit differant from your Bramleys. Or was that wishful tasting? Must try again.

Another full day, this time between Clapham Junction and Battersea.

The first discovery was that there is a much better class of book in charity shops in this area, particularly in the Rumanian orphan ones, than there is in Epsom. From one of which I make the interesting discovery that, each year, the grunt work on maybe 500,000 US tax returns is done in India courtesy of the Indians being able to view scanned versions of the input documents through something called the virtual tax room. Maybe being a rank and file accountant is not going to be too great a career choice in the US for too much longer. And they do the same trick with X-rays and such. The US doctors, not wanting to disturb their golf or their sleep, have the things looked at over the wire by more Indians. Partly enabled, it seems, by massive investment in communications links during the dotcom boom. Good to think that said boom has good legacy.

The second discovery was that it is quite easy to get lost between Clapham Junction and Battersea park, heading North by West by North from the Latchmore rather than North by East. The differance meant that we had our picnic sitting on a large slab version of the stuff they make kitchen worktops out of - which I assume to be a granite version of chipboard - outside a flashy new building by Battersea Bridge. The building had a very large empty atrium area facing onto the river. Will have to make a point, next time in the area, of finding out what use they make of it. Not obviously the best place to put a car showroom, although plenty big enough for one. There was also a large steel barge, more or less in original condition, being used for something stationary which was not bulk storage. All very suspicious but we were not moved to make enquiries.

On the way to the picnic we come across a very odd nut tree. Unlike a proper nut tree it had a proper trunk but the twiggy bits and leaves looked quite like hazel twigs and leaves and the nut bit looked like an outsized hazel nut cluster, the wrapping with beech nut tendencies and the nut being of normal (long) hazel dimensions. Opened the thing up and one had something looking very like a hazel nut, slightly flattened. Smelt about but not quite right. Not bold enough to eat the thing.

On the way from the picnic we came across Ramsome Dock, a dock we have never been to before. Now clearly the home of many exiled Islington folk. Including a rather bizarre, but quite well stocked butcher. Who did foreign things like trimming the fat and meat off the thin end of the fore ribs - as if they were lamb chops.

And onto another first, to wit an exotic church from the Phillipines. It seems that some of them got a bit fed up with the Catholic church and founded their own version - Inglesia in Christo - which now has some million or so adherants. Their current leader being the gandson of their first leader. Not really very proper as they do not believe in the Trinity. But they had done a very nice job of colonising a redundant, relatively new, Anglican church and had a small sub-tropical garden which regularly won prizes for the best kept garden in Wandsworth or something. A fitting introduction to the gardens of the same sort in Battersea Park, our ostensible destination.

Having finally got to the Park, quite unable to recapture the bubble experience previously reported on, despite their being very fine red granite benches to lie on and give it a go.

PS and why has blogger started to lapse into German?

The irritating Google branding on their search page the other day has vanished. Maybe it was some quirk of the browser. In any event, let us hope it stays away. There is quite enough aural and visual noise in the world without decent folk adding to it.

BBB (B for Brown, B for the Blair gang he has largely inherited and B for bunch) are making another error of judgement. Running on about how awful it is that the High Court think we have no grounds for chucking out of the country the unpleasant person who murdered a head teacher some years back. Why on earth they think that the Italians (a country he left when he was 5 and with which he has no links, languistic or otherwise) have a bigger duty to mind this particular peice of trash than we do I can't imagine.

We also have the Dawkins-Hitchens team having a protracted rant about God, or rather the absence of same. Which, in my case, is preaching to the converted, having been taken to task in my primary school about not knowing the prayer of the lord. But I suspect the irreligeous pair of getting a bit carried away with their own (undoubted) cleverness and are forgetting what people invented God for. There are lots of things which the godly make good provision for which we have difficulty making good provision for in our so enlightened age.

A few weeks ago I seem to remember having a pop about privacy and the privacy or otherwise of letters that you write to people whom subsequently become important enough for them to be published. In this week's TLS there is a peice about a collection of letters by one Harriet Martineau (of whom I had not previously heard, but it seems an important person of the mid 19th century). For most of her life she was on at all her considerable number of correspondants about how they should burn her letters as she did theirs. But there are enough left for Chatto and Pickering to publish 5 volumes of them at around £500. Apart from her clearly ambivalent attitude to correspondance destruction, where is the market for this sort of stuff?

Sorry to see that Google have gone for a kiddies flavoured title on their main search page. Up to now I had always thought they were fairly restrained and decent for freeware. When I was little, little people aspired to be big people and big people did not aspire to be little - that was just something you had to put up with if one made it to very big. Sans eyes and all that.

A very bubblefull experience yesterday, worthy of the bubble era of the early seventies. Was lying on the Millenium pier, waiting for the Clipper Express or whatever it is to take us to Tate Modern, watching the fluffy white clouds, quite high in the sky. For some reason one group was very lively with wisps, strands and lumps moving around and stirring up in a way which was both very intricate and very grand. Massive sense of huge natural forces whooshing huge amounts of stuff about. May have helped that they were in the same part of the sky as the sun and so very bright white against the bright blue sky. Rather like a real life moving version of one of those pictures of an exploding nebula (or does a nebula explode by definition?) you get in astronomical picture books.

Perhaps appropriate that we found a painting called 'The Light of the World' at St Paul's - this being a hangover from the Spring interest in things Holman Hunt. Hanging not too clever as one needed to position oneself just right to see the thing. As it seems one Carlyle observed, interesting that an artist who as an angry young man made such an awful hullaballoo about the need for realism in painting (maybe part of the same wave that carried George Eliott in. I think she had a thing about realism), should paint a mystical religeous painting like this one. But then he was onto a good thing. I think this was the second edition out of which he made a great deal of money and which was seen by half the population of Australia when it went on tour.

Finished hoeing the fruit trees and picked 2 Blenheim Oranges which weighed in at 10 and 8 ounces. Around 3.5 inches wide and 2.7 inches deep. Orange/red and yellow/green. We will see if we can tell the differance from a Bramley when cooked. Also three Lord Lambourne, the largest of which was fully ripe and which on eating I was fairly sure was an Elinson Orange. A light, crisp and rather watery sort of taste. Hint of ainseed. When I have had the other two will consider whether to make a permanent change in the record. And last but not least one Cox.

Planted most of the Bulgar(ian?) wheat today, about half an inch deep, around three inches apart in the rows and the rows maybe five inches apart. Keith next door had a good looking stand of the stuff earlier in the year and we will see if I can do as well next year with the three ears that he gave me. Supposed to be very hardy so planting it as winter wheat seemed to be the thing to do. Let's hope that the deer don't like it.

Panic on the Excel front. My project explorer window went walkabout in a most inconvenient way. After much rushing about discovered a property called docking which seem to put things back together again when tweaked in the right way. Don't know how I managed to change it in the first place. Same sort of thing with the mobile phone the previous day which spontaneously started doing very odd things when entering text. Reduced to going down to Carphone Warehouse where they sorted it out in about 10 seconds flat. They clearly thought I was rather too old to be let loose with such a thing.

Having moved off soap wrappers which became an important feature of my last year in the world of work, have been wondering why the boiled beef tasted slightly of soap. Not an unpleasant taste, but definitely soapy. I think the answer must be that, given that you make soap by boiling up animal fat with caustic soda, the boiling of beef in the hard water we have around here and which is, presumably slightly alkaline, does the same sort of thing. Maybe there is some chemist out there who knows the answer.

The water that said beef was boiled in has now been turned into soup by the addition of small amounts of flour and gravy browning (via some gravy we had with cold beef), larger amounts of pearl barley, left over potato and cabbage. All very satisfactory and down to the last quart or so.

Yesterday to London to pay St Paul's our annual visit, carelessly arriving in mid afternoon when one has to pay the full whack of £9 a head. I had forgotten that if one arrives a bit nearer evensong one can get in for free. Remains a most impressive building. Nothing else like it in this country as far as I am aware. I wonder if the French do one? Maybe one has to settle for the Pantheon there. Intrigued by the funerary aspects of the place. We were greeted by a rather dandified gentleman with an angel in a rather raffish pose around a cannon - the main point of interest being that the gentleman was more or less completly unclothed and the angel (who looked rather nondescript at close quarters) rather less so. It seems that the gentleman was the captain of the ship which broke the line at Camperdown - a victory of getting on for Trafalgar dimensions - against the Dutch. Unfortunately he was killed in the process, with the upside that he became the national hero of the hour. I forget what the Dutch were doing on the French side at the start of the revolutionary wars. Wellington had by far the biggest memorial - far outdoing that for Nelson - but his included one recumbent and one equestrian statue, both full clothed, perhaps reflecting the fact that Wellington lived on into a more staid age. Things were a bit fairer in the crypt where the two sarcophagii were both equally large and impressive.

There did not seem to be any very clear criteria for getting one's monument in the cathedral but it seems to help if you were a popular military gentleman or if you had some connection with the cathedral itself, perhaps as bishop or organist. A few arty types get in too.

The oddest monument was to the captain and crew of HMS Captain which appeared to have foundered in a storm and to have been the subject of a major scandal in consequence. The inscription which preceeded the list of the dead - in strictly descending order of rank (and I did not know that the assistant bosun ranked above midshipmen) - was very odd indeed. I learn from Chambers that the ship in question was a rather experimental iron clad battleship which, in the event, turned out to have far to much sail and far too little freeboard. A time of naval transition - and, perhaps, given our glorious history, we were a little slow to move on from the sort of ships that had served so well in the past.

And a factoid for the pub quiz. I learn that the important article of French clothing called a redignote is named for the English riding coat, there having been a tremendous craze for things English among the French chic in the second half of the eighteenth century. Seriously posh French insisted on having English grooms for their riding horses and English jockeys for their race horses - rather as we now like to have French labels (if not French chefs) for our food.

Been wondering about whether the term home made - when used by a food supplier - has any meaning. Is the term about as meaningless as 'fresh' when applied to produce which is supposed to be sold in a reasonably fresh condition? (I remember causing the man from MacFisheries to smile when, as a child, I trotted out my 'one and a half pounds of fresh cod fillet please' as per parental instructions). It presumably excludes Mrs Smith knocking out a few cakes on her kitchen table, with a fag hanging out of her mouth and with the cat chasing wasps around the place. Apart from anything else there would be the severe foetal danger of smoke particles being released into the stomach of the mother on consumption of said cake with the probablity of their getting into the blood stream and across the placental barrier. It presumably excludes something bought by the hundred, boxed up onto pallets from some socking great factory in China. But between the genuinely home made and the seriously factory made there is a fair range of options. One might go for 'home made' being a code for 'made on the premises', but I think that it is too widely used for that to be reliable. It may be that made on the premises only has to mean that the last stage of production took place on the premises. So one's work experience kitchen assistant chucks a bit of cress on the ready meal as it comes out of the microwave and home made it is? I must find a mole with experience of these matters.

All this wondering provided some relief from the shock caused by the allegation of our electricty supplier (tsfka Southern Electricity) that our summer consumption of electricity has quadrupled since retirement and the consequent proposal to double our standing order. BH casting baleful looks at the various computers - the one I have checked saying it uses 1.5 amps - which if it is on for a good part of the day might well have something to do with it. There is also the increased amount of tea being drunk (electric kettle) and increased amount of food flummery (electric cooker). We will get to the bottom of it somehow.

Large pan had another outing yesterday to boil up a peice of silverside. Boiled beef and carrots again and very good it was too. Maybe not as fancy a flavour as roast but it is has a distinctive flavour of its own and does not sit as heavy on the stomach of declining powers. And we now have a gallon or more of broth to do something with. There must be a fair bit of fat in it which failed to set overnight, so large pan now taking up most of the fridge so that it does. Again, broth now goes down better when not quite so fatty.

Newspapers continue to have a field day with our real life version of Midsomer Murders. Occupies pages and pages - not to mention the air time. So we can all become instant experts on the vaguaries of DNA testing and police procedures. Maybe the McCanns are regretting having elected to make a media event of the whole sorry business.

Sighted two small rats on Epsom common yesterday, heading for the small pond. Maybe they are water rats who have learned to browse on the large amounts of bait that the buzzer boys chuck in in their quest for carp. First time I have seen a rat, let alone two, for some time.

The man from Hastings could not manage any proper fish - that is to say cod or haddock - despite having been at the market at 0200 - so had to settle for two wings of skate. But BH did them up OK and they went down very well - to the point where we were not good for anything very energetic for the rest of the evening.

Following day off to Polesden Lacy where it turns out to be a heritage day - that is to say one gets in free thus saving a reasonably serious £20 or so. More interesting place than I remembered with good stands of trees around the main house and plenty of walking in the countryside around - presumably once if not now being farms belonging to the property. Found an interesting hollow flint - something I had not come across before with the inside looking a bit like the inside of one of those limestone caves with lime scale dripping all over the place. And some very fetching small spherical white mushrooms growing in a clump out of a dead bit of tree (there being a fair number of large beeches lying around in peices on the ground. An indication of the age of the place). Reminded me of Fylingdales. Maybe I will go in for arty nature shots with a digital camera yet.

House also better than remembered - and all paid for by McEwan's 80 shilling ale. The trade connection not stopping all kinds of royal connections with telegraphic and other communications therefrom lovingly preserved for posterity. Quite decent collection of pictures with some good portraits. The catch was a flux of over enthusiastic trusties (mainly, but not exclusively, older ladies) who sneaked up on one and bent one's ear as soon as one took an interest in something. And generally being reminded that the National Trust is picking up second rate versions of mass market procedures and forgetting its charitable roots. A pity.

The day rounded off by half a gallon or so of red lentil soup - having done the green version last time. Very reliable gear. And using the large pan purchased as a late retirement present, the stuff is much less likely to boil over - it having a strong tendency to foam. On this occasion the yellow foam rose nicely, looking rather like a soufflee in fast forward, getting to within about two inches of the top of the pan, at which point it subsided on stirring. But in one of our regular pans there would have been a great puddle of the stuff on the stove by then (this not being as big a deal as it was in the days when we had a halogen stove, the control box for which had a tendency to flood, the seals not being up to much. New solid affair much more robust).

Oddly, started on lentils and such things as a student 40 years ago - much to the despair of housemates of the time who thought the products bore more resemblance to wallpaper paste than food - and despite having no family background in such things. Don't recall ever eating lentils as a child and nor does BH. Maybe I read something in one of the flower power magazines of the day about beans and pulses putting one in touch with the outer spheres and something in me never forgot.

Most of the plants are dying now - presumably the cool nights have done for them it still being hot enough during the day - so the pumpkins are not going to get much bigger. We have the worst year since records began for the large yellow pumpkins which were the original point of the whole exercise. Quite a lot of fruit which made it to six inches or so and then started to rot. Maybe half a dozen or so which made it beyond that point but none as much as twelve inches. Where did we go wrong? Maybe a combination of late planting due to slugs knocking out the first planting and of not enough sun. Consolation prize in the form of the Cambridge green pumpkins which were not hugely prolific, getting maybe one to the plant, not huge, coming in at around ten inches - but at least we got a reasonable number of them and they had the advantage of novelty.

Picked the last Elinson Orange which although deep red remained rather underripe. And I remain very unsure that I have got the name of this tree right. Maybe also the spelling: Elinson's?

Hoed the discs for five of the fruit trees. Ground very hard. Gave the sickly James Grieve a couple of cans of water. Maybe it will recover next year - the morello cherry having finally made it to health, if on the small side, after about three years sickly.

Ducks being half price at Mr S the other day we had one - doesn't seem extravagent at £5 a pop - with the result that we had left over duck to dispose of. Curiously, not many recipes about for second hand duck - in fact exactly one in the Boston Cook Book and one from a similar sized French cook book from 1959 (interesting how the style of both writing and pictures has changed since then). That from Boston, salmi of duck, was much the same as another salmi of duck from France, although this last was listed in the new duck rather than the second hand section.

So went for salmi - the active ingredient of which being something called Spanish sauce and all went well. A hybrid between soup, stew and various popular tinned soups - the glaze and texture of the vegetables being very like that in one of those tinned farmhouse style vegetable soups. Also called chunky these days. But a superior version, naturally. Melt butter, add pepper. Add chopped bacon, chopped celery, chopped onion and thinly sliced carrot. Simmer in closed pan for a while. Meanwhile boil up duck carcase. Strain and add chopped tomato. Boil for a bit longer. Add into the other vegetables. Add the chunked second hand duck. Simmer for a bit then serve. Rather complicated for a reheat but worth it.

All of which reminds me that the DT has exhibited enough of the mug of Jamie Oliver to last me for a lifetime - and that is without reading the guff which goes with it. I guess, to his credit, he is just collecting the dosh and leaves some foot soldier to actually pen the guff. Good work if you can get it. But maybe someone ought to tell the marketting department at the DT that there is such a thing as over-exposure. His mug needs to be rested for a good long while.

Tried another Cox today - have got a good bit riper since I last tried one. Much better. And the Lord Lambourne is in flower - maybe a dozen flowers - which look a little odd next to the ripening fruit. Global warming has clearly reached Epsom.

Pampas grass flower shoots just starting to break. Very handsome against the late afternoon sky, as are the hop plants, now in full flower.

Weeded cabbage enclosure number 2. Plants doing better than in enclosure number 1 - maybe they like being where the potatoes were earlier in the year - but plenty of slugs doing a fair bit of munching. Rather outside the enclosure I came across two slugs curled up with each other in the lee of a large clump of grass - one light brown and one dark brown with some odd white things between them. Maybe the odd white things were baby slugs. In which case, all very cuddly.

Very quiet in London yesterday. Either people are still on holiday or they couldn't be bothered to fight their way in through the tube strike. Never stopped me. And a nasty surprise at the Upper Crust at Waterloo having declined the preposterous bread sold in the preposterous restauranty thing in one of the new bits of the South Bank complex. (They have something called the common table that you can eat at). Upper Crust have started putting mayo in their cheese and tomato baguettes - with cheese and tomato having been one of their last conventional offerings. Perhaps it is just as well that I don't pass through Waterloo very often these days.

Interested to see the claim in yesterday's DT that the industrial revolution was in part fired by natural selection driven improvements in the human stock. Pointing out that one can improve a line of pigs a good deal in say 25 generations - a period of some 500 years in our case. Which leads to the unpleasant thought about what the stock will be like in 2500 after 500 years of no selection at all (assuming that we survive that long. Doesn't look too great at the moment) now that mortality among the young is so low. Will the world be full of hoodies and mindless louts? What on earth will we do with them all?

Next blog button is starting to throw up sites which throw up unpleasant messages which purport to come from Norton about unpleasant scripts which presumably come from the blog that the next blog button has taken one to. As a paranoid, one wondered whether the messages do indeed come from Norton. Not a big deal to spoof such a thing. Maybe the security folk from Google (would here be known as nannies, if in the employ of the UK government) are on holiday.

Odd dream last night which was vaguely may late work related - but, unusually, not obviously wishful thinking. (Freud might have been a bit dogmatic insisting that all dreams involve a big dose of wishful thinking - but I certainly find that a good proportion do). That being as it may be, the dream seemed to involve my working for a gas utility and being tasked either with placing a substantial contract to outsource the gas supply or to sell the gas to someone else who was doing the outsourcing. Dream, as ever, being a bit vague about such a distinction. I had about 10 working days to get the whole thing wrapped up without help and was being unaturally relaxed about the whole business, thinking that the required tender documentation only running to 10-20 pages or so. And someone was trying to interest me in some glossy technical pictures of gas flavoured steel.

I was starting to get puzzled about this, when the scene shifted to Adenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge and I found myself gazing at their fine indicator board. At least, I think they used to have such a thing forty years ago, at which time the hospital was the latest thing in hospital engineering. The board looked like a hospital version of the indicator board which was retired a few years ago at Waterloo station and the main purpose of which was to put up the theatre lists for all the surgeons on that day. Mr Smith's list: 1: Bloggs, leg off. 2: Sykes, leg on. 3: Janes, big toe nail amputation. And so onto the next list. I guess the idea was that in that far-off pre-technology age the hospital needed some central point where everybody could see what was going on in the all important operating theatres. But I would have thought having a public display of this sort would get the human rights people very sweaty these days. There was also the interesting angle that being at the top of the list gave one status but also usually meant that there was something fairly seriously wrong with you. Rather like the highest status prisoners (status vis a vis other prisoners that is) being the ones with the longest sentences.

Nearly got lost on Headley Heath today while trying out a walk on a new path while supported by compass. On the whole, the compass was helpful. At least one knew that one had been heading vaguely North and West and that to get back heading vaguely South and East would probably get one back to the road, if the not the car park, from whence one had started. While I know how to do direction from the sun and the watch, doing it on the move while guessing the time seems to be rather unreliable. And on this occasion the compass method got us back to the car park.

We also managed to put up what I took for a juvenile, if more or less full sized, partridge sitting by the side of the path. It did not get around to moving on until we were more or less on top of it.

Interesting to see how the DT is hedging its bets in the mawkish stakes. Having spent many pages on the whole Diana business in the closing days of August - it is the silly season I suppose - they sneak in several column inches about how it is high time we drew a line under the whole business. In the meantime, perhaps the top end of media studies departments are crafting projects about Diana coverage analysis as we speak. One could have some sport in such a game. One could, for example, measure the mean distance in page inches from Diana images to various sorts of advertisement - a thought prompted by the proximity of dodgy advertisements in free papers to not so dodgy ones. One could analyse such distances by the nature of the image and the nature of the advertisement. One could even spin the whole thing out into a sketch on whatever passes for the Morecambe and Wise show these days.

Back at the allotment picked 8 apples from tree number 1 today - the tree believed to be the Laxton Superb. Weighed in at 2 pounds 1.5 ounces. The biggest was 2.88 inches wide at the widest and 2.78 inches deep at the deepest - the actual dimensions (courtesy of a pair of calipers (of that is the right name for the tool in question, not being in the form of a pair at all, rather a sort of metallic slide rule. One side of which is calibrated in inches, tenths and hundredths of an inch - it seems that engineers did not like the eighths of carpenters) from the Gosport connection) giving the lie to the heart shaped appearance. The smallest was 2.27 inches wide and 2.08 inches deep. Do the measurements change as the apple ripens on the meat dish?

I am reminded of the concrete beam illusion which I may have mentioned above - whereby a concrete beam on a flat bed wagon looks as if it is humped up in the middle - although peering through the hole running down the length of the thing makes it clear that there is no hump.

Sampled one of the smaller ones. Near to ripe now; not bad eating at all. Texture and bite remain excellent.

Yesterday's read of a heavy book about gambling law gives another example of the triumph of chaos over regulation. Gambling having become a serious evil some hundreds of years ago, the nannies of the day devised regulations to stamp it out. But as in other fields, it proved hard to cast the rules around a sensible result. The sensible result in this case being one that allowed the softer forms of gambling while getting rid of the harder. One result, for example, was a great fuss between the two world wars about whether large scale whist drives ought to be stamped out. As far as I can make out, the regulations of the day were clear - whist drives constituted gaming which was illegal. But who had the bottle to bang up all those innocent old folks who liked a flutter - and who sharpened their wills to win - over whist in the village hall? And what about the seedier end of the business where whist drives were run for profit under the cloak of charity and possibly involving professional card sharps. Perhaps they should have invented an Offwhist (aka retirement fund for committeemen and legal draughtsmen past their prime). Perhaps they will yet.