pumpkinstrokemarrow

Two foodoids before the conclusion. Firstly, the DT included a very odd recipe for bubble and squeak the other day - involving things like olive oil and onions. There was probably a drizzle of something. But the readers of the DT are awake! There was a drizzle of letters about how the proper way to cook bubble and squeak was with dripping (with chloresterol and other good things). Secondly, Mr Sainsbury is trying even harder to be cuddly. He has amused me for some time with his Yeo Valley natural yoghourt (so organic and natural that it contains no fat), alledgedly from some cow shed in Dorset, and he has now come out with Porky White's Surrey sausages. As it happens, Porky White used to live up the road, on the way to Chessington and knocked out his excellent sausages from a shed behind his bungalow. One of his customers was the Marquis of Granby (when that establishment was still a pub rather than a pen for the herding of youth), who used, in turn, to knock out excellent sausage rolls, with the sausages still warm from the oven. Best sausages for miles around. Now, although the shed up the road has been long gone, I did once meet a young lady who claimed to be some scion of the White stock and who claimed that sausages were still in production near Dorking somewhere. Someone has pulled off the trick of flogging the brand name if not the sausages to Mr Sainsbury. Our sample is presently in the freezer but we will report on whether the sausages have survived branding in due course.

And for the record, before the verdict on the Brazilian H&S case is in, I would like to record that, from what little has been in the press about the case, if the verdict is guilty (which I think it might well be), it would be very proper if both the commissioner and the commander on the day (Ms C Dick I think) were to resign on the spot, take their very fat pensions and go. Quite apart from the shambles that this case has emerged from, it is about time the great and the good started taking a bit more responsibility for their doings. And talking of fat pensions (noting in passing that I do not disapprove of people who get the push retaining them), Mr Merrill Lynch clearly had a very good pension deal - collecting £100m or something in the wake of getting the push for losing £10b or something.

Day 7: decided that Versailles was not quite the thing for a last day outing so headed for Sainte Chapelle. Getting in involved X-rays and so had to deposit my knife with the security people (along with maybe twenty others) against a labouriously written out receipt. (As it happens, the Cafe de Commerce of day 6 had the same brand for its steak knives - Laguiole - but in their case rather than presenting customers with a clasp knife, they presented them with a peice of stainless steel which had been moulded to look like an open clasp knife, complete with marque). On entry, it turned out that the chapel was not really a chapel at all but a reliquary - in this case for the original crown of thorns, purchased for some horrendous sum (around three times the cost of the very flashily turned out chapel) from the Emperor of Byzantium. Perhaps this is why the Ste Therese reliquary we saw a few days ago was shaped rather like a Ste Chapelle without the spire. Not nearly as holy as the last time I was there. In full daylight, with scaffolding over the altar end, with lots of tourists and lots of painted wood at ground level, the effect was a little tawdry, despite the huge stained glass windows which we could see. More impressive from the outside to see the chapel rearing up in all its ornateness from the side of a court in the middle of the Ministry of Justice. Then onto the Conciergerie with its rather grusome office de toilette where they cut your back hair off so that it did not get in the way of the blade of the guillotine. And also releived you of any valubles that might have survived up to that point. No point in giving them up to the blade operatives.

Then a circumnavigation of the quays of the Isle St Louis, at least nearly a circumnavigation. We were stopped by a stair at the Eastern end. Puchased picnic from boucherie and boulangerie (artisanal but no pains. Had to settle for a baguette - one being not quite enough and two being a little too much. All wrong) and settled down on a quay to eat it while we admired the large barges chugging up and down between the tripping boats. Especially intrigued by the tractor units of no size at all which pushed one large barge which pushed another. Not always clear how the barges (or tractor units as the case may be) got their cars off the top of the cabin onto the road. Then over the water towards the Pantheon where we found an expatriate (rather sloppily) run establishment called the Bombardier which actually sold quite decent pint of same. Hard to see how as they did not seem to be selling very much of it. But it was rather dear at 6 euros or so. Then the last church of the holiday - St Etienne du Mont. Another older baroque affair which has got rather lost in the haze after a week. (Maybe blotted out by the heavily restored and very handsome Hawkesmoor church in Bloomsbury which we visited yesterday. The English way of churches at approximately the same time). Passed on the Pantheon itself and finished up with a turn and a snooze in the Jardin de Luxembourg followed by a beer and a smoke in a cafe de quartier just South of the tube line (the square for which contained some unknown hero of Indo-China).

Dinner in the little farm which BH had been eyeing all week. Small owner occupier restaurant near the hotel. Not as good as the Cafe de Commerce but not bad at all. Good black pudding.

Today's factoid from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' - a book which I have never read but about which I was reminded by a review of a fancy edition in NYRB. It seems that to be sold down the river is to be sold from a relatively benign establishment in the middle reaches of the Mississipi - say Kentucky - down the river to the brutal establishments in the lower reaches - say Louisiana. Establishments where someone not used to the regime might easily be borne down in the course of a year or so. The book itself is something of a tear-jerker but quite readable. Don't yet see that it is a good thing that to be called Uncle Tomist should be such an insult - although I do see why it might be.

Today's outing was Hampton Court Palace - and it stopped raining enough for us to enjoy the outsides, free at this time of year. There was a flock of what I assumed to be starlings trying to do their formation flying thing, but not quite making it. Maybe there were not quite enough of them. Impressed by the giant vine - the branches of which we are told run to 200 feet or more. Must have a very efficient circulation system.

Today's tea boiled beef followed by steamed jam pudding. Very proper sort of meal for the first day of new time.

Day 5: walked to Gare d'Austerlitz. Had intended to take in the Musee d'Orsay but failed to turn North up the Rue Vaneau at the vital moment and wound up in an enclosed garden called the Jardin Catherine Laboure. Splendid thing to have in the middle of a residential area (including sundry nuns and soldiers (these last living in an interesting clutch of identical thirties blocks called batiment 1 through 6 or whatever)). We also learnt that the French have the idea of giving their more fragile bits of grass a holiday in the Autumn. Something, perhaps, that the trusties at places like Box Hill and Hengistbury Head might pick up on. Another wheeze they go in for is putting the hearts of famous people in fancy pots and exhibiting said pots in eminent positions. Which seemed rather an odd proceeding for a Catholic country which went in for resurrection of the body. Picked up some very good Brie and some not so good bread in a street market along the way which were consumed in the sculpture garden running along the river to the North of the station. Sculpture not anything special but quite warm enough for a picnic by the river when one found somewhere out of the wind. Then to the special service at the La Pitie-Salpetriere chapel to mark the arrival of the relics of one Sainte Therese for a week's visit to Paris. Central space more or less full; a choir (dressed much more casually than I think would be the case in a comparable English affair); lots of older ladies; some families; and, a scattering of the odd folk that accumulate at affairs of this sort. We arrived just as the elaborate (and heavy) treasure chest containing the relic was being delivered in the back of an entirely ordinary small hatchback. In due course it was processed in, with the assistant bishop in charge. A very smooth and capable gent, at least he seemed to be in so far as I could pick up on his French. At the end of the service (about an hour and a half) many people rushed to the front so as to be able to place their palm on the chest.

To a young persons' trendy cafe for dinner somewhere to the South West of the Place Cambronne. (Found having a compass quite useful. Never seen an urban tourist with such a thing but it can be an excellent dispersant of confusion, especially in the dark after a glass or two). Relegated, as is proper for older tourists, to a sort of non-smoking cupboard well away from the main eating area. But served by a very energetic and competant waitress who spoke good English. I suspect her father was a US serviceman, but she was a bit coy on that point. Started with a brown fish soup, not too spicy. Followed by something I think was called a cassoulet - which rather to my surprise turned out to be a sort of ready mixed fondue. Small personal white china cauldrons containing a rich cheese sauce full of all kinds of vegetable and meat lumps. Felt rather full at the end of all this. Returned to the hotel to admire the flat screen television in our room: being flat screen made it a lot less intrusive than a cathode ray tube job would have been in our rather small room. Quite a good selection of channels, some of which talked English (or at least Skye).

Day 6: attempted to get to Versailles, having worked out a route from the Michelin. But got stuck at Javel where it appeared that trains to Versailles were running at something like 2 hour intervals rather than the usual Sunday service of half an hour (looked like a ten minute service during the week). So gave up and decided to hoof it to the Bois de Boulogne. So having climbed up through a solid residential area wound up at the Square Tolstoi. The whole place a sort of cross between Wimbledon Common, Crystal Palace and Sandown. Lots of very earnest joggers. Wandered through to something called the Pre Catalan where we had our picnic. Were not able to get into the outdoor Shakespeare theatre which had finished a run of something Moliere the day before. Over to the Cascade - a sort of fairy tale grotto with lake and waterfall - which rather put the grotto at Painshill to shame. Up through the Bagatelle and onto Defense, getting there through what must have been an outer suburb old town called Puteaux - the inhabitants of which presumably had rather mixed feelings about this Canary Wharf thing being built on their door step. Tremendous view from Defense down to the Arc de Triomphe. And the best musical fountain I have ever seen - although to be fair the only other one I can remember is the rather tawdry affair at Annaheim Disneyland. But then there was a very odd thing. The Defense arch itself, spiffing though it was, was not aligned with the Arc de Triomphe. The paving underneath it was, but there were spacers at the side making up for the fact that the arch was about 10 degrees out of alignment. Now why would they do that? Is it really a device for predicting eclipses of the moon or sunset at the winter solstice? The security guards did not even know that it wasn't aligned until I asked them why and Google has yet to throw any light on the matter.

Dinner at the Cafe de Commerce in the Rue de Commerce. Excellent thirties style place with lots of mirrors, wood panelling and waiters in long white aprons. Grilled pig's ear to start followed by veal cutlets. Chickened out of the pig's trotters. More white Sancerre. BH had a large grilled half squid instead of the ear. Best meal of the lot. Slightly marred by slovenly chap from the US who made a great palaver of sending his veal back.

Back at the hotel wound down with an Italian serialistion of War and Peace, episode 1. Excellent casting for Natasha, Sonia, the Countess Rostov (and older ladies generally) and a spendidly awful Prince Vasili. Being a book I know fairly well got on quite well despite not understanding a word.

Day 3 - a day without the metro. Towards the Invalides, starting from one of the many vistas - this one being at the junction of Garibaldi and Pasteur, looking North towards the dome of the Invalides, glowing in the early morning winter sunlight. Got diverted at the Place de Breteuil by a large street market in the Avenue de Saxe. Bought some excellent tome de Savoie from the market and some excellent bread from the boulangerie in the street proper. Something about bread as they used to make it in the olden days. Back on route and next stop was the church of St Francois Savier. A large baroque affair with a very impressive chapel behind the alter containing a Virgin Mary standing on a globe in the clouds. Would have been even more impressive if it had of been dark with a bit of the lighting that catholics are so good at. Decided not to do the Rodin museum as we arrived at lunch time and the indoor part of the museum was not going to open for over an hour. Not so sorry, the last Rodin exhibition I saw in London was fairly porno. But I would have liked to have seen the Gates of Hell. Then onto the Invalides proper. Which struck me as a very vulgar exhibition of an emperor who lost having got through 5 million people (or whatever he managed). Didn't manage to get into the church of St Louis immediately behind the Invalides. This, it seems, is only open for marriages and such. No tourists. Picnic in front of the main building, sitting among the cannons. Then on and over the Pont Alexandre III and walked along the quay until we got to the Isle de Cite. Very impressed by Notre Dame - on what must be about the fifth visit in fifty years.

Walked back to hotel and then to a bistro in the Rue du Theatre for cous-cous. Splendid presentation with meat on one plate, heap of neat cous-cous on another (none of this faffing around with herbs, spices and other bits and bobs) and a small cauldron of boiled vegetables swimming around in the gravy in which the meat had been cooked. All served up by someone I suspect of being a pied-noir or the offspring of one.

Day 4. Took the tube to Gare D'Austerlitz. Having gone through Waterloo station so many times over the year it seemed only right to visit the French equivalent. On approaching the station I was reminded of the EDF story (October 15) by two men repairing a column at the South Eastern corner of the main train shed. The column stood perhaps 8 feet above the base of the roof arch and must of been a good way above ground - which must have been visible on the track side. One man was draped over the top doing something with an electric drill about a foot or so below. The other was standing on the cornice at the base of the column keeping an eye on things. As far as I could see there was absolutely nothing in the way of safety harnesses. Wouldn't ever have caught me on that job with my poor head for heights.

Onto the smart new National Library which is very impressive and very visitor friendly (although I have read a smug article about how the smart new towers containing the book stacks get very hot). Some local financial services outfit had spent a fair bit of money making 7 foot replicas of a couple of ancient globes and putting them in a fancy display. All good fun. Then around the station - which did not seem particularly grand as stations go - to the street market underneath the arches. Bit more scruffy than the Avenue de Saxe one. But got picnic which we consumed in the Square Marie Curie along with various winos. One of whom wished us bon appetit. Then into the St Louis church (or chapel) built (I think) in the 17th century just inside the La Pitie-Salpetriere hospital. Interesting octagonal plan - cruciform with equal arms with four more chunks in the corners with a large hexagonal lantern in the middle (the second such we saw in our stay). Then into the Jardin des Plantes which was curiously scruffily kept. Maybe it was the time of year. But there was a very fine fantasaur mainly made of stainless steel. Then across the river and through to the Place des Vosges. Had our first rude French person - the manageress or owner of a Salon de The where we had the temerity to ask whether they put real milk in the tea - it turned out that they put in the same sort of long life that BH keeps in the cupboard for emergencies. Lemon tea for me. Jewish quarter - which had a rather terminal look about it. Marais. Very quick look in St Paul and St Louis - another large baroque church but a but churched out by this point. Second post office experience: exactly the sort of slow scruffiness that one gets in the Epsom post office. Back across the river to a very crowded tube. Couple of beers called delirium tremens (from Belgium) then back to the hotel.

To the French equivalent of a gastro-pub for dinner. That is to say what had been a small neighbourhood bar turned in a restaurant. We got lots of attention as we were the first customers for an hour or so. Very good meal - despite the raised eyebrows at our having white Sancerre with it. In my case a very fancily presented light salad followed by kidneys. We also learnt that Paris does not have urban foxes. We had already noticed that the parks do not seem to do squirrels.

Back at the ranch, very fine bit of baked cod with cabbage and potatoes for tea yesterday. The sort of thing that restaurants are hopeless at.

But first a couple of factoids, learnt from a Dutchman. First, that pagan comes from a word meaning countryside, the idea being in those days that civilised Christians lived in towns and all kinds of odds and sods lived in the countryside. Heathen (despite some ifs and buts in OED) appears to be a loose translation, heathens (quite obviously after the event) being people who live in the wild and woolly heath. Second, in the possibly incorrect belief that the Irish were wild and woolly and needed civilising, a 12th century Pope made a present of Ireland to Henry II. The English kings then held Ireland of the Pope, as lords, until a later Henry, number 8, declared himself independant of the Pope and hence king rather than lord of Ireland. Sadly, the story is rather spoilt by the Pope in question being an Englishman, the only one who ever made it to the Papacy.

Reacting to a Parisian disdain for cabbage, have now had cabbage soup for lunch two days running. Recipe 1: put pearl barley in water for a while with a vegetable stock cube. Bring to boil and add thinly sliced carrot. After a while add thinly sliced white cabbage. At the end, add chopped saucisson sec (left over from the Isle St Louis). Result a little salty but eminently eatable. Recipe 2: put pearl barley in water for a while omitting vegetable stock cube. Add coarsely chopped pork fillet. Boil for a while. Add thinly sliced white cabbage. At the end add sliced button mushrooms. A rather superior dish to the first - but then it was a good deal more expensive. Very attractive visually and pork fillet does a much better job than belly pork. Worth the extra money.

Returning to Paris. On arrival day 1 did not do that much beyond eat. Took in a bar-tabac in the Rue de Commerce on the way to have a smoke (a luxury denied at home) where we came across our first old lady drunk. Was also able to buy some Fleur de Savane which I used to like but which on this occasion were far too dry. Attempts to wet them not very sucessful. Then to a largeish cross-roads cafe where I had a salad composed mainly of string beans. Good, especially as the waiter managed to get the dressing omitted. Forgot what BH had - another sort of salad I think. A sign in the eating area informed us that, as part of a softening up process, clients were invited not to smoke between the hours of 1200 and 1500. Perhaps the French are about to cave in to the regulators.

Day 2, on foot to the Pont de Grenelle, then along the Allee des Cynes, across the river and onto the Trocodero, partly taken over by a combination of end poverty now people and rugby people. Flipped a coin and wound up in the moullage museum, rather than the anthropological one. On closer inspection it turned out to be nothing to do with mussels, despite a continental prediliction for same, rather an assembly of plaster casts of interesting bits of mediaeval buildings (some of which, it seems no longer exist in the stone). Much of which seemed to be given over to representations of the judgement day. Angels helping people out of coffins, monsters and that sort of thing. Plus clearly entire donkeys. We were lucky in that the whole place had just been made over and was looking most impressive. On a second floor a rather contrasting collection of models made in connection with various post war building projects. On exit, a second bar-tabac, just clearing of its office worker lunch breakers at around 1445. Then to St Pierre de Chaillot, a large church built in the 1930's and replacing an outgrown predecessor. Unusual carvings around the front door; rather dark and with large octagonal lantern made of concrete dominating the interior. I rather liked it; BH not impressed. Then to the American cathedral in Paris, consecrated 50 years before St Pierre and built in what we would call Victorian gothic. All very large, but curiously unimpressive. Did not have a very churchy feel about the place. Metro home, followed by meal in a bistro de quartier. Hot meals mainly off despite Mum the cook being in the house, but we had another good round of salad. In my case an Auvergne salad - which, amongst other things and rather to my surprise, contained lumps of cold boiled potato.

Namely http://bruno-wp.blogspot.com/. But there must be something odd about it - apart from the pumpkin business - as it gets onto my blog in a rather odd way. Appears as a chunk of html in the editing window after upload - despite the uploader clearly knowing that the thing is a picture of pumpkins - but then appears OK in the blog itself. Whatever would happen if I tried moving pictures?

Reflections arising from a week's trip to Paris via Eurostar.

We got in while the thing still runs from the convenient Vauxhall, rather than the relatively inconvenient St Pancras. In the course of which I was reminded that the area around the Gard du Nord seems a lot more fun for a tourist than the area around Waterloo - which I would have thought would seem like a bit of a dump unless you were equipped with a very good guide. In which role the Michelin A-Z of Paris did very well. Just the right size to tote about and clear enough to read without the support of in-door spectacles.

We did well with our Paris Visite travel passes, nominally valid for 5 days but which in fact did us for all 8 days. I think this must have been something to do with a strike on one day and there being a couple of free days in consequence. The passes might not have been the cheapest way to do things as we made perhaps one Metro journey a day and the passes cost 20 Euros each, but being able to buy them at Waterloo and not having to struggle in uncertain French at the Gard du Nord after a longish train ride was certainly a boon. The Metro also managed to have the doors opening on the same side of the train, all the time I think. Another boon when travelling in the rush hour. Having bits of elevated Metro was a novelty - the Tube in London does elevate a bit near Putney bridge but I think that is about the size of it. And we certainly do not have two level bridges over rivers with road below and tube over. Last but not least, the musical beggars on the Metro were both more common and more tuneful than their confreres on the Tube. Didn't get any money from us however.

The supermarkets do not seem to have made the same impact on shopping in Paris as they have had in London. There are still pots of small food shops - butchers, bakers, cheesemongers, fishmongers, red grocers, green grocers and all the rest of it. (Although I am informed that some of them while looking all very artisanal are actually cunningly disguised chain outlets). And in the most unlikely places - so one can still buy the makings of a decent picnic on the Isle St Louis. The bread was generally very good - unlike that on Vendee campsites which was very variable last time we were there. The standard only dropped, perhaps appropriately, when we bought a sandwich on exit at the Gare du Nord, the bread of which was rather stodgy, despite looking OK from the outside. There were Halal butchers (although called something else) but sadly, we only saw one horse butcher and he was deceased. That is to say the premis had (ceramic) horses' heads sticking out of the wall but no longer appeared to contain horse, just meat of the regular variety. We would, however, have been able to buy rabbit liver by the pound in one of the steet markets - which last were much bigger and livelier than the few that are left in London. The butcher there assured us that it was the finest thing going in the world of liver.

And then there were some odd shops: a suprising number of lock shops (presumably for people who manage to lock themselves out of their apartments after a glass too far) and shops which will actually mend your clothes. The owner of one shop described himself as a master dyer. Saw very few empty shops and no charity shops. The nearest thing to this last was a sort of popular library which ran out of retail premises. Not all all clear whether this was a grass roots thing or an outreach project by the municipal library people. On one day they were selling off lots of stock cheap but again, not up to elbow work on uncertain French.

In peril of sounding racist, the black people were rather differant from those in London. Presumably reflecting the fact that they mostly originated from differant parts of Africa. But differant also included a differant way of dressing: I don't recall seeing any of the loud and expensive trainers, jeans and jackets which young black men in London are so fond of. Perhaps I would have had we strayed further into the suburbs. I wonder if they have a distinctive accent?

Further evidence of the way in which the performance indicators with which our governing classes are so in love can have unexpected results. I am told by an electrician in TB that he has an indicator about how he must not withdraw electricity from paying customers. He also has a rule that he must not climb up any pole higher than 2 metres without putting on his fall restraint harness. This can take a little while if one wishes to retain one's integrity after a fall. The result of the combination is that the harness is discarded but if one falls one will not be covered as one has not done what one should. The fact that the fall restraint does not kick in until after a 3 metre fall only marginally dents the point...

Been re-reading about whether it was Paul or Jesus who invented Christianity by one Hyam Maccaby. Started by idly turning the pages, thinking that I really did not care whether it was Jesus or Paul who was a Pharisee. But then the story became interesting again - presumably why I bought the book in the first place. On this story, Jesus was more or less a main stream Pharisee who was executed by the Temple party because he was seen as a threat both to the Temple and to Roman rule. A political, not a religeous offence. Paul was a convert to Judaism who did not pass the Pharisee exams (as it were) and so wound up as a sort of sleasy fixer for the high priest. During the course of a nervous breakdown had the bright idea that Jesus was the son of god (with dual citizenship of heaven and earth) and that on this basis he could set up a new religeon, attractive to the many people - mostly Gentiles - already dabbling in the various mystery cults of the day. More or less in opposition to Judaism and taking care to tweak accordingly those gospels which had not already been written. He turned out to have been onto a very good thing. On the way, packaging up a lot of pre-existing material about how to better behave, into a package which lots of people would buy into. So not a waste of space.

On the matter of behaviour, have been reminded by the postal strike of the idea that we should get according to our needs and give according to our abilities. Having started off by thinking that the postal workers were killing off their livelihood in the same way as the print workers before them, I was then reminded by one of them in TB that while a lowly postal worker might get £25,000 pounds a year for his trouble, them at the top of the heap might get £1,000,000. A multiple of 40. Now does the chap at the top of the heap really need 40 times as much dosh as the chap at the bottom? After all, he can only take a leak in one pot at a time. And I do strongly believe that massive inequality of this sort is the cause of a lot of trouble in the world - despite the counter example of the US where the population seem massively tolerant of massive inequality on the grounds that it is a level playing field and that a sufficient number of people do in fact move from the bottom to the top of the heap in the course of a life time. And trouble apart, a world where the everybodies (everybodys'?) main business is to squeeze as much out of the system as possible in order to go in for as much conspicuous consumption as possible, does not seem very attractive. Must be the cold talking.

Back at the allotment have now had the annual fire to remove the various dead pallets and other combustible junk that has accumulated since the last one. Starting to clean up the ground underneath the gooseberries. And discovered that Jerusalem artichokes have very handsome yellow flowers - if, at two inches across, a little small compared with the plant. In the course of all this came across two large live frogs, one dead mouse and one dead snail. The dead mouse had crept into a plastic bottle, presumably not been able to get out, and expired. Amazing what a foul smell such a small thing could make. The dead snail had climbed up a three foot iron bar (of reinforcing bar dimensions) and into the inverted plastic bottle which lived on top of said bar. The idea being that the interior of the bottle would stay clean and thus be useful as a water container for use during picnics. The snail was presumably overcome by heat in his personal sauna bath.

Further inspection of the cyclamen reveals that sessility of the last post was twaddle. Dropped flowers masquerading as same.

Readers will however be glad to hear that the State Cement Corporation of Pakistan is keen to get hold of the global added value chain for sanitary ware. Companies able to provide appropriate expertise are invited to apply to a retired colonel. This, courtesy of an advertisement in the social services part of the Guardian.

The same journal also tells us the Devon branch of the youth offenders service is getting fed up with expensive prosecutions of trivial offences. Now while it does seem a little silly to spend, say, £20,000 putting a supervision order on some young hoodie who has emptied someone else's wheelie bin into their front garden, the busies have to remember that the state has a monopoly on law enforcement and anyone adminstering a sharp clip round the ear of said offender is likely to find themselves hauled before the beak as a suspected child abuser. If they want a monopoly, they do have to provide a service. Perhaps we need an Offoff (Office for the supervision of offender service providers) to look after this important matter. It can join Offwat and all the other Offs.

Somebody has gone to a lot of bother to make a crack in a large slab of concrete - or at least something that looks very like one. It comes with a lot of pretentious twaddle about how the crack symbolises the gap between the rich west and the starving aids orphans in Ruanda. Or some such. Perhaps appropriate that the arty folk have seen fit to install the thing in Tate Modern along with all the other junk in there - and presumably pay a lot of money for it into the bargain. A symbol of the differant sort is the large chimney above Tate Modern which makes the whole thing look rather like a giant crematorium - the top of which is just visible against the evening sky as seen from inside the Globe Theatre. Which, of course, is what it was in its days as a small power station - a giant furnace.

Made use of tomato puree for the first time for a long time yesterday. The context being some steak and kidney, the kidney component of which was not as fresh as it might have been and had arrived at a milk chocolate rather than a Bournville chocolate colour. This meant that the resultant stew was a bit palid and needed darkening up - so in the absence of tomatoes which was first choice I used tomato puree. This gave the stew an interesting texture, rather like that of a curry but without the spice. And the rather strong tomato taste rather obscured the kidney taste and smell - which the rather large number of people who do not care for either might regard as a good thing. So one had the slightly odd experience of chomping down on the odd lump of kidney, with the usual texture but without much taste of kidney and without the preparation offered by the usual kidney flavoured gravy. But not bad all the same.

Feeling the need for cabbage have invented what turned out to be quite a successful macaroni dish. Boil macaroni until almost cooked. In the meantime fry some onion (in orange like segments rather than chopped) in butter and black pepper. Once the onion is on the go, add some coarsely chopped outer leaves from a Savoy cabbage - enough to more or less fill up a frying pan before cooking. Fry for a bit longer with the lid on. Stir from time to time. After that, add maybe an egg cup of water to help it along, keeping the lid on the the frying pan. When cooked to taste (or to tooth as our South Latin friends say), add the strained and almost cooked macaroni. Add maybe 50 grams of finely grated Italian style hard cheese (cheaper than the real thing, from Mr S and quite good enough for present purposes). Stir and cook for a few minutes longer. You now have a frying pan full of a savoury macaroni dish - albeit rather green in appearance. But not sure that BH would appreciate the full cabbagy flavour.

Following the report on 2 October, have now finished Lord Jim, with two observations. Having got to the end, despite what I wrote before, there is a sense in which the book is saying that Jim is and remains one of us. Whatever he has done to be exiled among the natives (a loose term in this case for a generous mixture of non white Europeans), he knows and they know that he remains a white man. He cannot cut loose from where he has come from. And perhaps this was a matter of importance to Conrad as he gives it another outing in Victory.

Second observation, that we wailing liberals would do well to remember that whatever the evils of colonialism (including the unsavoury charectars who populate some of Conrad's books), there was also good. Many of the places we colonised were dumps before we arrived. No settled government, no health and little law. End result, many miserable people and a few unpleasant toughs at the top of the little heaps. Remember also the messes that have often resulted from the collapse of empires: with hindsight perhaps the Soviets, the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans were not doing such a bad job at holding things together (remembering also that the first and last of these three also did some pretty dreadful things). It will certainly be a while before the places concerned enjoy the same government, health and law as we do.

The BBB have bottled out again - the leader adding another feather to his cap of ducked challenges. Getting to be quite a ducker, although granted a surviving one. Now, while getting to choose the date of a general election is very much one of perks of office, has been for a very long time and no-one blames a prime minister for choosing a time when he thinks he has the best chance of winning - having cranked the country up to think that an election was likely and then drawing back at the last minute, does carry, to my mind, a considerable loss of authority. The leader has drawn back because he is not confident about winning; because he and everybody else knows that a good proportion of the electorate would rather have someone else in the driving seat. In these circumstances a leader is going to lose authority in his own court. He is not going to be able to drive things through with the same force as he would have been able to with a better mandate. I think he would have done better to keep his cogitations a bit more private - although this is getting harder now that calling an election has to be synchronised with so many matters of spin - like the pre-budget report - movements in which are bound to cause comment.

But perhaps he will now have some quality time to give to the health service. In our new health market, the big providers, that is to say the big hospitals, are going to be driving for profit (whether or not it is actually called that). This means that they are going to want to maximise the number of profitable and chargeable interventions. I think this tends to come to mean pills, procedures (lots of x-rays is good) and low risk operations (lots of varicose veins is good). Clean wards and decent nursing care not so easy in this new world. So how are the service indicator design people (and there are plenty of highly paid management consultancies who can provide plenty of such people) going to design indicators which push back on this desire of the big providers to provide lots of said chargeable interventions with very little regard to anything else? A desire which might become a matter of collusion between them and their customers, that is to say the primary care trusts?

The cyclamen in the back garden provide some botanical interest. First, one of the two corms (white flowers) which the BH gave me a few years ago, maybe a couple of inches across at that time, has now swollen to a flat ball about four inches across, with maybe the top third above ground. Which is a lot of corm for a plant which does not get a lot of sunshine on leaf square metres (perhaps botanists have a proper name for this quantity) in during the year. And given that they are above ground presumably the corms are full of all kinds of organic nasties to keep the rats and mice at bay. Second, both white and pink (this last seeded itself from I know not where) cyclamen appear to have a small number of sessile flowers in addition to the flowers on stalks. Maybe the sessile ones are the ladies? Not completely convinced about this yet: a sneaking suspician that said sessile flowers are simply flowers which have fallen off their stalks, managing to turn over as they fall into holes in the ground. Will take a closer look when it stops raining.

Large cock pheasant strutted his - in that rather odd pheasant strut - way across the school field as I arrived this morning. And a couple of deer were quietly dozing in the sun on the far side. (It was rather warm considering that the dew looked quite close to a frost when I got up this morning). Something had dug an interesting hole where I had been clearing yesterday and there were what looked like cat footprints in the Bulgarian wheat. This is now looking a bit less fragile than when I last reported on it and has mostly survived. But have lost the outer half row (there being maybe half a dozen short rows, maybe two feet each in length).

New fashion for digging this year. Clearing the tops of the weeds off the ground using a Chillington hoe, leaving the ground clear for first digging a bit later on in the year. The idea is that cutting the weeks down now will make that first digging a whole lot easier with less large clumps to break up. On the other hand, one loses a few weeks growth towards the compost. So maybe the change from the spade is what it is all about really: giving one lot of muscles a break at the expense of another lot.

Picked the last few eating apples today, leaving just half a dozen of the large Blenheim Oranges. Not sure what is going to happen if we ever start having real crops. My parents used to store maybe 30 or 40 tray of apples in the garage in the Autumn but we do not have space for anything like that. Maybe the roof would be a satisfactory alternative? A bit awkward to get at but cool without being frozen which ought to be OK.

Happening to be leafing through the E and Z volumes of Chambers came across a couple of factoids. Firstly, I had thought that the solar system was pretty much a disc. But it seems that the orbits of some components - particularly the smaller ones - the asteroids and such - can be at a considerable angle to the ecliptic - maybe as much as 40 degrees. Secondly, it seems that a year is not a year. That is to say that the twelve signs of the zodiac are rotating through the year with a period of 25,000 years or something. Now Ramadan does the same trick (alhtough with a much shorter period) but this is presumably because its position in the year is defined by the moon and the lunar year is not in a sufficiently simple relation to the terran year. In the case of the zodiac, we seem to be saying that the sun points to a slightly differant place in the sky each successive year. There was some talk of the axis of rotation of the earth wobbling a bit in relation to the ecliptic but I don't see what that could have to do with it. So is the sky moving? Is the sun moving in a large circle with respect to the sky? Does the earth not quite move in a complete circle each year because the sun moves a few miles in the course of the year? And if it does not, what exactly do we mean by a year?

Back down at the home compost heap, the one that is enclosed, pleased to report the reappearance of a couple of clusters of green slugs. Not particularly large - maybe two inches long or so - but definately green rather than the usual reddish brown through to black. We did have some of them earlier in the year so maybe they are spring and autumn things.

A second cultural outing this week, this time to the Globe to see "Love's Labour's Lost". (Not altogether sure that the apostrophes are in the right place - one might have thought that both love and labour were plural in this context - but I have gone to the bother of checking in my copy of the text). A very energetic and rather young performance, in which much loving attention had been given to staging, music, mime, dance, deer and bounding. And, as with the Magic Flute, rather taken with how much like a pantomime it was - in this case with the words being particularly decent rather than the music. All most enjoyable. Not really bothered how authentic or not it was.

Slightly concerned to discover that we had seats without backs but this was more than compensated by being in the front row and having a substantial wooden rail to lean forward on. Ringside seats in fact - if one neglects the groundlings swirling around below one. Red cushions well worth their pound a pop. Being slightly above them, slightly (maybe three is enough for one paragraph. But it is sometimes slightly irritating to be groping around for an alternative word when one actually means the second time what one said the first time. Repetition rools) disconcerted by the way that the eager groundling faces followed the action around the interesting stage - there was even a certain amount - heaven forbid - of interaction between the groundlings and the artistes during the action.

But the words were a bit of a problem. I had had a quick look at them beforehand - and found them very dense. Well laden with all kinds of verbal trickery, a good proportion of which depended on knowledge of the vocabulary and events of the day. Now I am reasonably well read but, without more time or inclination to study, it was reasonably heavy work. The result was that, with the words being rather gabbled amidst a welter of other action, a good proportion of them were lost. And I would be very suprised if more than a small proportion of the audience were in better case than I. So while I can see that if one does know the words, one might be unhappy at their loss, for most of us perhaps this rather non-verbal production is the way forward? At least until we re-learn how to cope with complex speech. Have we been ruined by a diet of TV and newspapers which has been controlled to hearing and reading ages of 10 or something?

Spent far too large a chunk of today chasing down a bug in an Excel program. And the flambouyant explanations one comes up with in these circumstances remain impressive. Despite all one's experience, one's mind still turns to the possibility of the fame which might acrue from discovering and properly documenting a bug in the mighty Excel! But, alas, plodding detection work eventually grinds the answer out of the system - and in this case, as so often, the solution was very banal. Not what my Latin teacher used to call an intelligent mistake at all. What I think he meant was an error which was not simply carelessness or thoughtlessness, but a mistake which arose from asking the right question at the right time, but coming up with the wrong answer.

Moving into bubble land, I believe there is quite a strong analagy between software detection and the crime sort. The same chasing of hares. The same blundering around in the dark with the heavy breathing of one's managers (who understand nothing you understand) just behind one's ears. The making your mind up far too early in the game and being blind to anything which does not fit in with what you have already decided is the answer. The implicit assumption that any fault must lie in somebody else's bit of the system. For a jape (albeit of a rather prosy sort) one might translate a Morse mystery into an Excel mystery.

Talking of fame reminds me of a fragment of a dream I had the other day. I was sitting in the tube watching a rather non-descript somebody reading a full-page advertisement for some job or another. I remember being distinctly put out that such a non-descript could even contemplate applying for a job which justified a full-page advert when I had never got much beyond the classified.

This was a day or so after another of those dreams when I visit an imaginery but persistant place. In this case an imaginary pier in Portsmouth. It seemed very familiar in the dream and on waking I was sure I had dreamt about this pier before - but maybe it is all an illusion. The dream can fake the impression of familiarity along with everything else.

A day for a sirloin steak. Unusually, a single steak cut from the bone on the spot, having caught the butcher preparing a bunch of steaks for some order. Usually get a rather smaller steak from a fillet which has been taken off the sirloin in a peice. Excellent steak - sharing an oddity with the last one I had, some weeks ago. That is to say, odd little bubbles of white froth, micro volcanoes, appearing on the surface of the meat towards the end of its cooking. Hard to beat hot steak with fresh white bread as a lunch-time snack.

Is it only in England, that the shooting down of an innocent (OK, so some say he was also an illegal immigrant) sitting in a tube train having been followed from his home because he looked like a terrorist suspect only makes it to the courts as a prosecution brought by the Health and Safety people? Perhaps we should be grateful that it made it to the courts at all (and remember the scarily large number of places in the world where they barely have courts at all). Perhaps the use of the Health and Safety prosecution was a compromise agreed between the CPS and Police to avoid upsetting the latter. Not so impressive is that, while the Diana inquest attracts the full panoply of a government website (http://www.scottbaker-inquests.gov.uk/) to bring you all the latest news, no such facility appears to have been granted to this prosecution. A search on Google did not reveal any such thing - indeed there did not seem to be all that much out there at all. Maybe the real Diana conspiracy is the way that she is being used to divert attention from more important matters.

While it was news to me that the victim did look rather like the suspect, I remain of the view that it is not acceptable for people to be shot in this way. That there is an unpleasantly macho culture in the relevant parts of the police (do you really need seven especially lethal bullets in the head to do the business and remember the other lethal accidents that the same force has been involved in over the years) compounded with hopeless management and procedure. OK, so everyone was running scared at the time and operations of this sort are likely to look like a mess when peered at afterwards: but we have to do better. Otherwise what are we fighting for?

Earlier in the week, by accident, to the Magic Flute. The first time I have seen such a thing for ages. I had not realised how like a pantomime set to decent music they were. And as elsewhere, the good guys have a job not to appear very dull (Kevin Costner used to be a real pro at these sorts of parts. He must have been born dull): the bad guys get all the decent parts. Most entertained by the stunts with doves at the opening - lets hope that the RSPCA or the RSPB don't get their claws into cruelty to birds while rehearsing them. And not being terribly hot on choral stuff generally, was struck by the similarity of some of the music and singing to the cantatas that had been written a hundred years previously, presumably to be used during a mass.

I notice that Liberty's managed to get £7,000 or so for a Mad Hatter's tea party which used to grace its window. Which led us to ponder how one might get such a thing made and how much it might cost. We decided that the idea was the main thing. After that you needed a few props - mainly tea set china - and four figures, mainly head. Presumably the people who knocked up the Spitting Image figures could do the business. As could an half decent art college? So we decided that the whole thing could be done for a couple of thousand. And so unless one was in a tearing hurry, no need to pay seven for the one from Liberty's. Maybe one could have a contest between ten teams from the Surrey College of Art or whatever it calls itself these days. Give each a budget of £1,000 and see who has done the best job in two weeks. All we need now is a sponsor.

The TLS was vying for a place in pseuds' corner last week. There was, for example, a call for papers on 'The sword of Judith: feminine agency and the aesthetics of terror'. Or if you don't facny that there is something called 'Modeling interdisciplinary inquiry: a postdoctoral program in the humanities and social sciences'. Has the methods industry escaped from the management consultants and made it to academia? And we learn from the same issue that Mr and Mrs Hawking will very shortly make it to the Cheltenham Literature Festival. I wonder what an older, very disabled and very eminent astromer has to offer the assembled literati? What on earth will he talk to them about? What will his wife contribute? And if you do not fancy Cheltenham you can go to Woodstock where they have a rival event - this one graced by Ms Truss and the Folio Society. This last being a gang (to whom I have to own that I once subscribed) who produce books which manage to be both bad and pretentious - from a book production point of view that is. Not a pleasure to own at all - with the exception of 'The Rainbow' which is quite reasonably done.

The pampas grass has been bashed about by the recent rain and has maybe lost a third of its plumes. Still looking OK though. Was reminded when doing a bit of Autumn tidying up around its base how vicious pampas grass is. And it seems to keep its edge well after dying. Got away with one small cut.

Finished picking the George Cave - now at about their best although I had already eaten the better specimans. Picked about half the remaining Blenheim Orange. The whole lot assembled on a meat plate offer a wonderful array of deep reds and oranges. Quite unlike anything presently on offer at Mr S. If only I had a digital camera with which to capture the moment.

On the other hand, we find that the largest local garden centre, adjacent to the Chessington World of Adventure, now sports an off-license department to add to the bistro, the clothes shop, the furniture shop and last but by no means least the Christmas accessory shop. The new department stocks the all-important Newcastle Brown so it can't be all bad. Of the garden centres near us, this one seems to have done by far the best job of exploiting its space - formerly given over to such tedious things as plants - and turning it into a suburban shopping opportunity. Presumably without too much bother from the planning people as they qualify as part of the not-to-be-upset-at-any-price agricultural sector - a qualification they can presumably keep until 5 years after the end of the reporting year in which they sold their last plant.

On the way back from Cheam, I came up with an excellent way to refine my oil tax proposal - this last being that, if we are serious about the ecomegasdisastrous on our hands, we need to cut consumption of oil and that the easy way to do that is to tax the stuff. Easy and effective. However, the great unwashed are not into this. In the same way as they want more hospitals but get the hump if you raise income tax (another efficient way of raising money - or at least it used to be) to pay for them. (Perhaps also, the great unwashed are rather confused as to whether the answer is socking great hospitals which make lots of dosh for the PFI contractors or socking great new contracts which make lots of dosh for the doctors who just happen to be sitting in the right spot at the right time). So the new wrinkle is to intoduce a swingeing great tax on all things oily but reduce income tax in such a way that two changes taken together are tax nuetral but eco-efficient. Bad eco-behaviour is punished and good eco-behaviour is rewarded. And the prices of low oil services will fall. Then, when people have got used to the idea of the new tax and have forgotten that you promised that the change would be tax neutral, you disconnect the oil tax from income tax. I think this would be a great way for Great Britain to aquire a bit of moral kudos in the wide world. We could of done it in the sixties with unilateral nuclear disarmament, but sadly, I think the moment has passed when a gesture of that sort would have all that much moral impact - although it would save a good deal of money. But this oil tax thing would be new and topical. We could strut our stuff at the United Nations. The developing world might be brought to think that we still deserved that all important seat on the security council.

More important, we had a most amusing nervous green woodpecker the other day. It was very thirsty and was keen to get a drink from the garden pond. However, it was clearly very nervous about cats which might be waiting to pounce. So from the kitchen, one saw a woodpecker head sticking up from out of the hollow containing the pond, peering about for about thirty seconds, then down again for a five second guzzle. This went on for some minutes. Now if the woodpecker was a human (to indulge in a bit of counterfactual), I imagine that the stress of all this would have given it a heart attack. The fact that, in so far as I was aware, there was no cat in the vicinity, being irrelevant. There might well have been...

Perhaps the answer to the question in the previous post is that we are obsessed with food in an arm-chair way - books, celebrity chefs and the like - because we have a sneaking feeling that out relationship with our food is not what it used to be. I have long suspected the heavy emphasis on cuddly kids, family values and whathaveyou in Hollywood films results from a comparable issue.

Beef turned out OK though. At 7.75 pounds plus 200 grams = (let us say) 8.25 pounds - our weights going nicely up to 8 pounds but no further - and the powers of two arising from having 16 ounces in the pound - giving one an elegantly stacking 4 pound, 2 pound, 1 pound, half pound, quarter pound, eighth pound, sixteenth pound and thirty second of a pound sequence of weights not available to lovers of things metric - so we cook the thing for 2.5 hours at 180C and it was done to a T as they say. Must find someone who knows where the T comes from. For a change served with very small (although not very new) potatoes boiled in their skins and Cesar salad. This worked well, not least because one was not messing around with fragile boiled vegetables just before the off. Followed by a cooked cheesecake - something which seems to be more or less unobtainable to those without BHs of a culinary persuasion.

Prompted by the TLS been taking another look at Lord Jim. The prompt in the TLS was a slightly irritating article on the occasion of some centenary or other. Said article occupied 36 column inches (one wonders whether some arcane literary custom means that review articles are supplied in whole yards) of which 8 and one half inches were occupied, in a prominent position, by a slightly relevant anecdote about Turgeniev. I guess the main point - rather like things in this 'ere blog - was to advertise the reviewer's knowledge of such matters. He then spent the rest of the article arguing for what was to me a rather perverse reading: the book, it seems, is all about, what it means to be 'one of us'. Some of this argument hung on the book's framing Marlovian narrative. There is perhaps a point. The hero was a disgraced mariner, and Marlow is a respectable one. He was also a white man in the Far East at the end of the 19th century surrounded by not so white men and Portuguese. On re-reading, I thought there was a definate racist tinge to the thing - in the same way as there is when John Buchan writes about undesirables and villains who just happen to be Jews. At least, what we would call racist now. But this was not, I think, what the reviewer was on about. On re-reading also, I was struck by a comment from one Captain Brierley (a sturdy and successful mariner who commits suicide for reasons unknown some little time later), to the effect that most people got through a career in the merchant navy without being called to do anything special - anything calling for nerve, courage or pluck. The trick was to be up to the mark when the call came; the problem was knowing whether one would be.

Pleased that I have taken a look. One forgets how many very good books there are knocking about.