pumpkinstrokemarrow

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.