pumpkinstrokemarrow

continues and the second potato trench is now two thirds dug, two fifths leaf moulded and one third back filled. One good shift should do for this one. Discovered a rather cross looking frog on the way, more or less black with leaf mould and presumably hoping that he would spend the winter undisturbed at the bottom of the heap. Didn't look too lively sitting on the margins of the heap so I dare say a crow had him (or her).

Also a rather bold deer, on watch between my allotment and the leaf mould heap. Let me get to within maybe twenty yards before doing a runner. Pretty brown thing with a couple of nice yellow patches on the rear end.

And I am not the only person with a rat problem. Met an older gent in Homebase in Tunbridge Wells, in possession of a large number of credit cards and a middle size box of the same rat poison that I bought the other day. His rat problem was also compost heap flavoured but he had gone for the tray option - a cheap plastic affair compared with the rather grand tray that I had constructed. Have decided that Homebase - despite being a sprout of the Sainsbury empire - is a better place to go than Wilkes. This last as well as having piped music and the other marketting accessories of a supermarket has always struck me as being a rather cheap looking place, full of cheap, low grade, own brand goods. The sort of cheap look that large co-ops used to have in the days when then were still trying to cut it in department stores. Homebase is full of own brand too - but it is slightly dearer and hopefully of slightly better quality. While the man in the proper trade plumbing supplier round the back of the Epsom Wilkes is very sniffy about all such places. I suppose they have pinched a good part of his trade over the years.

In between times been pondering about sin. I am told that Lord Lewis of the Wardrobe has written some handy guides on the subject which can be found in devotional bookshops. The thought being that I am conscious of a fair amount of sin on my own part - mostly fairly minor, perhaps not much more than bad manners - but it is surely healthy to worry about such things. So maybe the Catholics with their purgatory (a place where, amongst other activities, one is purged of sins which one has stopped commit(t)ing but have not yet stopped thinking about commit(t)ing) and confession have a point. Make the punters think about sin and then maybe they will do less of it. Not something I imagine contemporary schools can fit in between the endless round of tests and examinations, the filling-in of multi purpose and many paged (sometimes self) assessment forms, preparation for yet another inspection, sex education, diversity awareness, substance abuse studies, obesity awareness (where not included in the foregoing), animal rights and all the rest of it. But then, do our Southern European - and Catholic - brothers do less crime than us? I am told that one would not think so in Southern Italy which is the land fill site for the dodgy waste from all the rest of us, courtesy of some deal struck with the local hoods.

Last but by no means least, another heretical recipe for bubble and squeak. Take left over mashed potatoes and sliced leeks, stir in the chopped fag end of a black pudding. Gently fry the whole lot in dripping with the lid on. A savoury and no doubt salty variation on the real thing but not bad, for a change, at all.

In the event, it did one day hot, three days cold and one day sandwiches. Very good cold it was too so we never got as far as the anticipated rissoles.

Rats winning so far and continue to tunnel at the back of the compost heap despite regular smashings up with a spade. Bacon didn't seem to interest them and they got the bread crusts off the traps without springing them. So have had to move onto poison, interesting blue dyed grains of wheat from Rentokil in a container consisting of 2 feet of eight by two with the lid of a toffee tin screwed onto it. The idea being that the weight of the eight by two will stop the tray being overturned by eager rats . Rather expensive at £7.50 or so for 400 grams of the stuff when one can easily use 50 grams a go and curiously the container informs one that the product is not suitable for use by professional rodent operatives: amateurs only. Don't have to worry about collateral damage as only rats and mice are going to work their way into the compost heap.

Now moved onto the second potato trench. Dug something over a third and started on its four barrows of leaf mould. Must get on as only a month to go before it will be time to start on broad beans again.

Went to Beowulf last week. Off to a very bad start with half an hour of very loud and brash advertisements which almost had us walking out. They must have got a lot louder over the years when our failing hearing is taken into account. And most of the very thin audience had huge tubs of popcorn with which to provide a bit of background munching noise. Presumably a fair amount of litter is generated from same. Lucky old cleaners. Film itself rather like a 70's horror film with superior special effects and carried along by the wheeze of having the hero strike a Faustian bargain with the golden lady representative of the devil. But it did have the virtue of propelling me back to the original (with which the film did have some connection) - at least a translation of the original - and a world where the higher classes at least were very preoccupied with deeds of valour and treasure. Not a very nice world really - given that deeds of valour were, almost by definition, fatal for someone. A world of tribes large and small, riven by bloody feuds. So we have moved on a bit: we have, at least, devised other ways of acquiring status than bashing each other. Status being important to Beowolf and his friends as they were not really signed up to heaven and status was needed in order to acquire the immortality of appearing in songs and stories. About where we have got back to as it happens, with heaven's run of around 2,000 years coming to an end.

I imagine the IT security industry has been knocking back the champagne big time over the last few days. They are going to get an orgy of business as paranoid civil service middle managers fall over themselves to spend money on IT security. All those second division IT security bores and pedants will have a job for life patrolling the lower reaches of civil service life. It is not even as if we had a good class security breach - from some member of the Russian special forces (speaking seven languages and able to kill a rhinocerous with her bare hands) infiltrating some inner sanctum of Whitehall or perhaps someone from the refuge on a jihad. Just a very banal - if very serious - security breach. Why didn't the people at the NAO blow the whistle when they received unprotected material? Maybe their boss was too busy on first class treats with his wife in the margins of teaching the Uighars how to do audits to worry about low grade breaches nearer home. I hope it is not just the careless oik at the bottom of the heap and the unfortunate mandarin at the top that take the hit. What about the middle managers who permitted such carelessness and who ought to know better? Not really good enough to say that the oik in question breached standing rules and leave it at that.

Quite by chance, now the possessor of a splendid new table lamp. Came across the base at an antique show - an elaborately carved hollow wooden column, about 18 inches high and reminding me of one of those lotus bud capitaled Egyptian columns. The wood is very hard, has a wonderful texture to the touch (greasy is the word that comes to mind although there is no grease there) and appears to have been stained on the outside a uniform dark brown, while the inside is left with muted yellow and brown stripes. Can't imagine that the interior could have been hollowed out by hand so neatly without some sort of mechanical aid so the thing can't be very old. The lady who sold it thought perhaps Burmese, perhaps on the strength of the two figures included in the carving, one a male with a bow, the other probably a female. A bit of jiggery pokery required to fit a lamp holder to the top of the thing as the cable hole had been drilled to wide for the lamp holder plate to be fixed over it. And oddly, the groove in the base to allow the cable out had been very crudely cut - as if that had been done later and not by the original carver - although the holes in base and top through which to lead the cable up were very neat and tidy and looked very much to have been made at the time of original manufacture. Fortunately the crude groove was very small and could be tidied up.

Getting on with Miers on gambling law. Now deep into the mysteries of the history of the law of betting on horses. There seemed to be various issues. First, lots of people wanted to play. And some of them came from the highest reaches of society, of government even. There might even have been the odd racing bishop. Second, lots of people cheated. Lots of people ran betting swindles of one sort or another. There was a need for some sort of regulation. Third, the racing of horses would hardly exist at all without betting. That is what makes it all worth while. Fourth, in the nineteenth century anyway, there were lots of people who thought that any sort of gambling was evil and had to be stamped out. One subset of this lot were particularly concerned that the working classes might be betting and enjoying themselves, rather than being about their proper business of creating wealth for the upper classes. Another subset was concerned that they could not make blue water between gambling on horses (which was clearly evil) and gambling on the stock exchange (which was clearly an essential part of a successful capitalist economy). All goes to show what fun one can have when trying to ban something that lots of people want to do. I imagine that the lawyers of the day made quite a good thing of it all. All reminds one of the debate that we have today about recreational drugs. Well, sort of debate. Not of a very high standard.

The format of the file (.tar) which I acquired on 14th November turns out to be some ancient magnetic tape archiving format which I am not at all confident of unpicking. So I thought I had better try for second class membership of the geek club.

Started off with Excel pivot tables - something of which I have been vaguely aware for some time but which I had never used in anger, having been put off by the user interface. Either it has got better or I have got more time because I actually suceeded in producing a table this time. User interface still quite tricky but looks to be powerfull if you invest enough time in it - the only catch in my case being that the data has to be passed through a formatting program before it can be given to the pivot tabler - not yet having found out how to get this last to classify one's data. That is to say it is fine if you have things like 'North', 'West', 'South' and 'East' in text in your data but not if your directions are in degrees from 0 through to 360 and you need something to convert direction in degrees to a cardinal point. I awarded myself a pass on this one.

Next moved on to the Excel find and replace command. This refused to find four instances of the string " tone=" out of the twenty or so that were present on the worksheet in question. Which was odd because I was able to find them using Visual Basic code. The only excuse that Excel could have had was that the cells in question were quite large with maybe 20,000 charectars each. I couldn't see anything odd about the context of the tones which Excel couldn't find, so just corrected them by hand. The failure to find will remain a mystery. Fail.

The third test was escaping from a printer crash which locked up the PC. Control+Alt+Delete was not doing anything, the cursor was not moving and so I resorted to power down. Count to 20 and power up. PC boots up OK. Go into Explorer and the PC freezes again. Power off and on again. Try again and the same thing happens. Power off and on again. This time close the PC down again as soon as it has booted up so that Windows gets a clean close down. I thought I had done the trick. Go into Explorer and try to open the Word file which I had been trying to print at the time of the original crash. PC locked up again. Go through the whole performance again, but this time when I surface again, simply delete the Word file rather than trying to get into it. And then, after about an hour and a half of this, I am back up and running again. Or rather recreating the Word file that had been lost. Who would be in PC support? Pass.

So I think that with a little bit more effort I will be able to award myself the order of the geek (second class).

In the meantime, mildy annoyed by the Post Office. Turning over stamps in preparation for the Christmas frenzy, we find we have a whole lot of elderly first class stamps. It seems that although we bought the first class stamps in good faith, thinking we had a contract with the Post Office for the transmission of a first class letter, the Post Office has reneged on the deal. The old first class stamps have to be augmented with a few extra pennies for them to be valid. A very dubious practise on their part. The whole point of buying a stamp which says first class rather than 43p or whatever is that one is insuring against the vaguaries of Post Office pricing.

Second wet ride running to Cheam. One of those days when it is wet, but not wet enough to be worth putting the cape on. So one gets home rather damp.

From http://kikorodriguezpintor.blogspot.com. Plenty more there

and not a kipper in sight. A wet run to Cheam this morning, sufficiently so that maybe two thirds of the drains on Howell Hill were blocked or overflowing and that by the time I came back, the drain deglugging lorry had appeared to sort out underneath the railway bridge. I also caught the Cheam baker in flagrante delicto - that is to say taking delivery of some cakes from a wholesaler - and I had thought that he did everything himself. But, as it is with nurseries, I guess it is hard to match the costs of a modern factory in a back shop bakery.

Coming down Epsom High Street on the way back, the sun came out. The whole world seemed bright, clean and clear - the wind and the rain was all forgotten. Reminded me of the same renewal one gets out on the hills after rain. Most exhilarating.

The missing reference at the end of the last post was Eccl. c1.v9. And the quote was very nearly right.

Another word play, this time from the BH. She was leafing through Uncle Tom and came across the phrase about Topsy just growing. Or just grew to be more exact. So along with sold down the river, Uncle Tom is responsible for at least one more common locution: "just grew like Topsy" - popular at least in the contractor circles I used to move in. Topsy in the book presumably alluding to the chaos that Topsy brought with her, from the very old topsy-turvey - the topsy bit apparently being short for top-side (as opposed to underside or underneath) and the turvey bit being obscure. Presumably the attractive rythmn of the thing had as much to do with it as any prior meaning. Poor that I did not pick this up myself.

Yesterday was a brisket day - 9 pounds or so of brisket on the bone - the butcher at Cheam having volunteered to procure same. Up at 0400 to put the thing in the oven, wrapped up in tin foil (joins in the foil and bone in the brisket uppermost), and cooked the thing for 11.5 hours - a personal best. Served with mashed potato, swede, carrot and curly cabbage. Gravy the juice from the joint, untouched apart from draining off some of the fat that came with it. Wine from Chile. Very good it all was too - although not good for too much afterwards. Flavourwise it competed with the much more expensive fore rib - although the differance in price is eroded by the amount of electricity used and the amount of waste on the brisket. We will see how it does cold and then the plan is to make rissoles out of what it left. Something I do not recall ever having - although BH says it was a staple in the middling sort of restaurants that one used to use in the early sixties before they invented Italians. A good way for restaurants to recycle left overs from one day to the next. Very eco and unwasteful it was too.

The gooseberry plants turned out not to be pot reared. They had been grown in the ground and simply packed with some compost stuff into pots for sale. The neat little pot covers being there to keep the roots damp. In any event, all in now and they should do better than the pot bound pot grown variant. And just to rub in how much I had paid for the things, a neighbouring allotment holder gave me three blackcurrent and three gooseberry slips, also all in now. We will see how many of the them take - ought to do 9 out of 10 or so (pro rata). The blackcurrent slips stank of ribena - despite being in a dormant state - so we will see what the plants smell like in due course, if we get that far.

Starting to think that I need an editorial assistant for this ere blog. I suspect that I am running on about the same thing more than once, having forgotten the earlier occasions on the latest. Doesn't look to clever from a serial reader point of view and there might be inconsistancies. But I can only rarely be bothered to check. Must get a gopher.

In this case, of a middle aged white male teacher who, so the DT tells us, had the oomph to give an insolent pupil a slap. The police, to give them their due, on receipt of a complaint from stroppy parent, declined to act and left it to the school. But one way or another, the teacher has resigned and the insolent pupil is now, presumably, the king of the playground. What on earth is a teacher supposed to do with such a pupil? I have heard it argued that a good teacher can manage without slaps - but I have also heard that such managing is a terrible drain on energy which might otherwise be spent teaching and I also believe that our teacher cadre is not that strong. We do not pay enough to get enough teachers of that class. And all this at a time when the BBB (vide supra) may have finally realised that paying expensive lawyers to write long books of rules (expensive lawyers, we should remember, get paid by weight, so for them the longer the better) and then paying MPs to vote those books onto the statute book and then paying policemen to try to police them between cooking other books to meet the latest performance targets, does not always achieve what one wants. They have started to bleat about putting action back into the community. But when someone tries that, the someone get bashed - and the offender walks. Teachers should be allowed to give something a bit closer to as good as they are getting - although I am not sure where that leaves small lady teachers in front of a class of large louts. And we must remember, that in so far as this particular incident is concerned, that we only have the DT version of events.

I was also amused in the same DT to see the loving care with which someone had photgraphed a large shark torturing a seal before eating it. I suppose the shark was only playing, but if it had been a person doing exactly the same thing, the RSPCA would have been down there like a shot. Interesting point, that when the shark does it, it is OK and it is OK for us to watch, but if we were to do exactly the same thing, having invited an audience, that would be nasty. We creep ever closer to Brave New World which featured intrepid wild life photographers capturing this sort of thing for our general entertainment eighty years ago. We all need violence in one form or another (although I dare say the amount varies a good deal from person to person, from the relatively benign to the pathological and dangerous), so until we really do develop a violent passion surrogate, we will have to make do with this sort of thing. Much better than the acting out from Italy which has been in the papers over the last week.

And sorry to see that some enterprising forgers of fine art may go to prison for their pains. I have always had a soft spot for people who manage to put one over the art and art dealing establishment. For me, if you cannot tell the differance between a copy of a Constable and the real thing, the two things ought to have roughly the same value. The thought experiment would be to suppose that we were in the world of Star Trek and that we had a machine which could replicate small objects down to molecular level, give or take the odd quantum disturbance. In that case the copy really would be identical to the original, so what would the art dealers say then? I recall reading somewhere that the Chinese are much more sensible about all this. Good quality copying is a perfectly respectable trade there - as indeed it was in our early modern era when old masters ran factories making copies of the pictures that sold well for the benefit of the emerging middle classes.

Lastly, I have lost an original thought. I have thought for a long time that, when entertaining or cooking, one usually does better when under constraint - of time, money or whatever - than when one has a free hand. And I have peddled this thought as an original in pubs for that long time. I now come across a sentence in the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust which must predate my thought by at least seventy five years: "... but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines." Note that this is not too much of a show off, the sentence in question is only on page 19 out of 1141 (in volume 1 alone). And for those that care the Pleiade version reads: "... mais elle tira de cette contrainte meme une pensee delicate de plus, comme les bons poetes que la tyrannie de la rime force a trouver leurs plus grandes beautes ...". And there are no notes or variants so the English is a little longer than the French original. As well as reading a little clumsy when compared with the original. But that is not to say that I can offer anything better.

One is consoled by remembering that, as the preacher said, there is nothing new under the sun (somewhere in Ecclesiastes. Can't put my finger on the reference).

First potato furrow now complete, having taken three sessions. Two more potato and one runner bean furrow to go. Maybe we will be done by Christmas.

Having had a fairly hard frost last night, decided that winter had arrived and it was a good time to buy some more gooseberries - the five I had from Deacons in the Isle of Wight now being down to 2 looking OK and 1 not looking so OK. So off to Chessington Garden Centre, where after fighting our way through large sheds full of Christmas fare of one sort or another, finally arrived at a section with plants. In due course we discover a total of four gooseberry plants at £10 a pop, 1 Careless and 3 something I had not heard of. Rather surprised at the price - gooseberry plants being very easy to propagate and grow - just stick a strong looking 1 year shoot of around 6 inches into the ground in the Autumn and by the Autumn of the following year one should have a decent plant, give or take a bit of watering and weeding. Unfortunately, in my poor ground the plants I already have have not produced suitable shoots this year so buying it is. However, after some umming and ahhing, decided that a trip to Wisley would be worth while. Having got there decided that the relation of Wisley - which used to be a specimen garden grown by a learned society - to Chessington was roughly that of Waitrose to Sainsbury. Wisley was a bit more tasteful but was given over to Christmas fare and inorganic goods in much the same way as Chessington. They were even errecting some huge marquees in the car park, presumably for some Christmas festivity or other. Anything to turn a buck. The gooseberries turned out to come from the same wholesaler that Chessington used and were the same price, but to be fair, instead of 4 plants they had several dozen, and instead of two varieties they had half a dozen or so. So settled for 2 Careless and 2 Invicta. We will see if they do better than the plants from Deacons.

We also wonder how long it is before the place is bought out by some attraction company who would make more out of the brand and the large site than the learned society does. Rather in the way that the RAC and the AA have both been sold off.

Depressed to read this morning of a middle aged gent being kicked to death by half a dozen or so drunken youths outside his house in some Northern suburb. What sort of people are we bringing into the world? I wonder how much we have lost in this connection with the demise of the local pub. There was a time when the local pub was a place where such youth would smoke, drink and play, no doubt causing a certain amount of annoyance, but at least under some sort of adult control. Now, with cheap booze from the supermarkets they just do it in the streets without any sort of control at all. And banning smoking in pubs is just one more nail in the coffin. What with said cheap booze, the fact that they are often sitting on a much larger bit of real estate than the pub business can justify, people not needing to escape from cramped shared homes and one thing and another, they are on the way out. Perhaps I should write a PhD on why golf clubs are doing OK and local pubs are not. So long as it did not involve my taking up golf - something I have managed to steer well clear of so far.

Convinced that I was a real geek, just spent an hour attempting to download an electronic version of Finnegans Wake from Trent University in Canada who have a site devoted to Joyceiarna. I was very pleased with having downloaded a compressed file (.gz), downloaded the uncompression program and even managed to find the command line prompt from which to run it. Even managed to run it with what I thought were the right option settings. But then I find I possess 10Mb of file which looks like html (although it starts a bit odd) but which crashes Internet Explorer. Looking at the thing in Notepad, there appears to be lots of text there, but not starting at the beginning. Maybe I am looking in the wrong place. So I deem myself to have failed the geek test at the second hurdle.

On the other hand, earlier in the week, I attended my first drinking man's wake, for one John Etherington, who was a TB veteran long before I arrived in Epsom. I didn't go to the funeral - although Epsom town centre was blocked up for a while by the cortege led by a horse drawn hearse, plumes and all - but I did get to TB for that part of the operation. All most impressive. Packed with black suits (and at least one great grand child) and a fair amount of drinking going on. After a while people got rather maudlin (I only got half the plot on 17 May. Not only do Cambridge people say maudlin for magdalene, but maudlin as in maudlin drunk is the same word. For the tears of Mary Magdalene) and emotional - as is proper on such an occasion. Much kareoke with songs proper on such an occasion. Two nice touches which I have not come across before. First, a board with photographs from John's life. Nice to see some pictures of him as a younger man, having only known him as an older man. Second, his collection of pickled onions was auctioned off. Half the money to go to something for the grave, half to go on a horse - John having done a fair bit of money in that way in his time. All in all, a good send off.

Yesterday off to the Tate to see the Millais. Entertained on our shiny new train from Southern by announcements telling us which car out of how many we were riding in. But the stupidity of this announcement did not quite rise to the irritating bossiness of the lady computer who does the announcements for South West trains. Perhaps because BH discovered in a leaflet she had found in Epsom station which entitled us to half price entry to said Millais - a not insignificant saving of £11. When we got there - no need for any of this timed entry nonsense - the first question from the ticket lady was did we have a voucher. So we deduced that Millais is not selling as well as ancient Chinese pots. Despite being a bit too crowded for comfort (with quite a lot of commentary from older ladies whom BH suspected of being on a flower arrangers' outing), an excellent exhibition. I had not realised the range of the man - with the portraits and the landscapes being completely new to me. Nor did I realise how much he moved away from the painstaking (botanical) detail of his PRB phase in later phases, with some of the later works being much more impressionistic. On the other hand, I was not convinced by Josephs's famous wood shavings. While they were certainly most expertly painted, I am sure he was using 19th century wood shavings as a model. Quite unconvinced that the sort of plane which would have been available in 10AD or so would have been capable of producing the shavings shown. But perhaps he knew better. In any event we will be back.

Wound down in the Lord High Admiral in Vauxhall Bridge Road which used to be entirely dubious and is now a rather cheap and cheerful gastro pub - which being run by foreigners can even run to decent bread and olives. And they also managed an acceptable if not brilliant pint of Bombardier.

The men from the council have helpfully pushed the old leaf mould - maybe three years old now - into a heap from which it is a lot easier to extract than it was. Brown peaty stuff with quite a strong sweet smell and full of convolvulus roots. They have also started the new Autumn leaf heap after an absence of at least a year so that is good too. Thus prompted, have started on next year's potato trenches. Dig out a row about two feet across by a spade deep, add 12 barrows of leaf mould, back fill to give long thin barrows. This year had a strong growth of weeds on the barrows by the time one came to plant the potatoes, at least three months after barrow creation. But the potatoes weren't too bad at all. Just finishing up the midgets now. Three quarters of the way through the first barrow. Must be getting older the way the first serious dig of the Autumn made me sweat.

Rat traps remain undisturbed. Maybe the fox really did earn his keep.

Interested to see that the chief Muslim in the country - an ex airline pilot from Dhaka I think - has seen fit to tell us Anglos of all the good things we might learn from his faith. Charity, modesty, family values and that sort of thing. I dare say it is true that that sort of thing is a bit stronger in the Muslim community that it is with the rest of us - but we will see if it survives another 20 years of assimilation.

At about the same time, I see from the DT that a young Muslim lady is getting exercised because hairdressers for young lady Anglos do not seem to want to employ her as a trainee because she wants to keep her own hair covered. I wonder whether her parents really want her working in such a den of iniquity where married and unmarried women sit around in a more or less public place with their heads uncovered? Maybe other parts too. Even allowing men who are neither eunuchs nor relatives to touch them. I am sure it would be very corrupting for her. Do the parents know? I wonder what stricter Muslim ladies do about hairdressing? Do they have to go to places which are staffed exclusively by women and which are without windows so that stray men cannot peek in at what is going on? Perhaps such hairdressers have also laid on a supply of Polish lady plumbers and electricians for when that sort of thing needs attending to.

Do they need lady dentists and doctors as well? I recall from the Golden Lotus, that a high caste Chinese lady from the time of our middle ages, would not dream of letting a doctor (who would be a man) examine her. He would have to manage with whatever he could make of a hand poked out between the curtains. Perhaps the Chinese medicine mens' interest in finger nails is a relic of this. I remember being told that all kinds of foul ailments can be diagnosed from the pattern of lines and what not on finger nails. I was told that mine reveal something horrid wrong with my kidneys. And if you are brave enough to exhibit your toe nails who knows what they might reveal?

Nearer home we have an interesting squabble between animal lovers. Another young lady, this one an Anglo animal lover, got herself sacked from the local childrens' farm (zoo might be a more informative label), for something or other. On the strength of a diploma in animal welfare or something from the local technical college, she has now reported her former employer for various offences against animal well being. DEFRA have sent in the heavies to see what is going on. Headlines in the free paper. Dark talk of unpleasant infestations under the skin of sheep and low grade goat toe clipping. The owner of the zoo (which boasts, amongst other attractions, a large barn full of things for children to play on when it is raining: much more fun than pigs. Plus, no doubt, a shop and bistro with which to entertain the waiting Mums and Dads) is resisting stoutly. These are real animals she says, not pets. It is not realistic to cosset them as if they were. No real farmer could afford such a thing (at which point I started to wonder what her own background was. Doubt if she is a stock woman born and bred). And after that I start to wonder whether I ought to be a veggie after all. If we are not paying farmers enough to keep their animals decent, maybe we should not be eating them. And according to the Grauniad, the price of animals at market continues to be a very small fraction of what we pay at Mr S. So small that in a bad year hardly worth the cost of sending them there. If true, it is a shame that the producer is not managing to get a bigger share of the cake.

Sadly, not. Somewhere in Canada. With thanks to: http://beautifulbritishcolumbia.blogspot.com/. Which I lost and then found again via some blog catalogue which Google turned up. What a complicated world...

Pork soup had another outing a couple of days ago. Cooked the pearl barley for rather longer than usual which turned the cooking water into a thin, porriagey tasting gruel. A bit like something one might get in one of the more Chinese Chinese restaurants in Soho. Not sure that I like it as well as the less cooked version but still went down OK. The two of us did maybe three pints of the stuff in a sitting.

That apart, been a fishy week. Smoked haddock (no doubt about to be banned by the health people because of all the organic smoke that it contains). Baked cod from the man from Hastings. Not mushy - mushiness being associated with the cod from the man from Grimsby - which had rather put me off buying cod altogether. The man from Hastings claims to sell same day stuff which might be the differance. Then two kedgerees - one at home and one at the Estrella. The latter was a Portuguese version involving sun dried cod, sliced hard boiled eggs, potatoes and some other things which I forget. Eaten with olive oil. So not a proper kedgeree but tasted very like one - and very good it was too.

Some factoids from the TLS. First, some furtive branch of the US government wrote a 100 page classified report on Iraq and lodged it with the Senate for their education prior to their voting on whether to allow the president to go to war. The public part of the reading room record says that 6 of them - out of 100 - bothered, one of whom claimed that it changed his vote from yes to no war. One suspects that Hilary C was one of the couldn't be bothereds as she voted yes. Second, one can amuse oneself by drawing the routes around Dublin taken by the charectars in books by James Joyce. It seems that some of them make shapes, for example a cross in one and a question mark in another. Perhaps he went in for animals as well. I suspect a leg pull on the part of Mr Joyce. A forerunner of conceptual (or perhaps performance) art. How challenging would Sir Dame Emin find it to write a story about her pub crawl around Leicester which traced out the shape of an unmade bed? She might not manage the vocabulary for a crawl around the bed in question. Third, there was a reproduction of a page from a book of hours or something, a propos of a collector who committed the frightful crime of breaking ancient books down into their constituent pages and then sticking a page or two into each copy of expensive limited edition coffee table books - out of which he made a lot of money. That being as it may, and leaving the fact that it appeared to be in Latin aside, it would take a lot of practise the read the stuff. A large proportion of the text appeared to be identical vertical strokes (presumably a relatively easy mark to make with a quill pen) and presumably making up i's, n's, m's and u's. I couldn't make head nor tail of them.

Coninue to peg on with the strange prose of Carlyle on the French Revolution. A very florid style but one does get used to it and he does have an interesting story to tell. Rather to my surprise, he also knew about super cooled liquids, the slightest perturbation of which causes them to solidify, shattering into hundreds of small peices on the way. This by way of comparison with the state of France immediately prior to said Revolution.

The sausages of October 31 with the Porky White labels have now been consumed as part of a toad in the hole. Sad to report, the sausages were so full of some sickly sweet flavouring that one was unable to tell whether they had absorbed any Porky Whiteness from the label. I suspect not. Texture not right either - too finely ground - this last usually being a sign of cheap ingredients (the sort of thing not fit to put in a pork pie - or is it the other way around?) which need to be ground down fine to make them edible.

October 31st reminds me that I ought to have a pop at Halloween. The papers are full of ecotwad of one sort and another, the answer to which has to be that collectively we have to consume less of everything. Then the shops were full of all sorts of heavily advertised junk and junk food which our children will pester us to buy. Wouldn't the world be a much healthier place if the whole operation had been missed out? And if our children had done something wholesome like spending weeks making a guy... How many of them have got a clue what a guy is or means? We have to persuade them that having fun does not have to depend on spending money and conspicuous consumption of one sort or another. Or at least that there are cheaper ways of being conspicuous, if that is the objective. Which will be hard as long as we have big companies who want to be bigger companies and who have bigger advertising budgets than I do.

Halloween is an easy target, which, despite its ancient origins, in it's present form in England, is an invention of said big companies. But some of us might feel much the same about Christmas. I seem to remember some Californian called Vance Packard having a go at all this sort of thing in the revolutionary sixties (of the last century). Perhaps it is time we wheeled him out again.

The rats have returned! Having enclosed the brick compost bin at the bottom of the garden to stop the foxes getting in, the rats have now set up house. Don't quite see how I am going to make the thing rat proof and I don't want to move over to one of those little plastic barrells from the council. Don't like the idea of all that fossil fuel being locked up in heavy duty green plastic apart from anything else. As it happens we have a couple of rat traps, left over from some previous abode - vicious things which would do something very unpleasant to a finger if handled carelessly. These have now been primed with the finest bacon from Mr S and placed one at each end of the service road which the rats have built right at the back of the bin, where it is not usually opened. No luck on the first night. Maybe the foxes did something useful and grabbed them.

Have now finished the first pass of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and perhaps got a bit nearer to why to be called Uncle Tomist is insulting. While the thing is a tear jerker, written by a decent white middle class lady and so the whole thing is very much from that point of view, I do not know of a better take on what life might have been like in the slave states in the years before the civil war. One can overlook the unlikely plot given that it was much better written than I had expected, with the various white takes on slaves (and I had forgotten that a proportion of these last were also white and could pass as free) and slavery being described in a much more sensitive way than I had expected. Speaking for myself, this 400 page, four day reminder of this part of our history was salutary. A reminder, for example, that many otherwise decent white men were responsible for much evil by omission. That power does indeed corrupt children. That lack of power corrupts too (something which it has taken the Irish some years to get over). And that many Northerners who professed to abhor slavery were not so keen on black people in their own neighbourhoods, let alone their own kitchens. The South was a nice long way away.

But I can also see that a black reader might not be impressed by the implausibly Christian stoicism of the hero. They might think that taking a hatchet to a drunk and brutal planter might have been a better way forward than turning the other cheek. Although writing that, I am reminded that early Chrisitans impressed by their willingness to be gentle martyrs for the cause. Perhaps the author had them in mind (who should, whatever one might think of the book now, be given much credit for being first to reach a large public).

And on a less solemn note, I have learnt that a critter is a variant of creature, originally used in connection with the two legged sort, God's own creatures, rather than the small four legged sort.

I read in the DT that our tea is about to be delivered in nylon tea bags rather than paper ones. Tea fiends are pleased - it seems one gets a much posher cup of tea this way - eco fiends are cross because nylon is not very eco. Interestingly we had noticed that the French in Paris already use the things - and their lemon tea was fine even if their milk was not.

Prompted by the interesting allegation in the TLS that the words blackmail and bereave come from the reivers who plagued the Scottish boarder country until the union - reivers being rather unpleasant Doone types (overlooking the fictional Exmoorian origins of these last) - I took a peek in the OED, and the result was, I think, a score draw. To reave is indeed an old word for robbing and stealing, usually with violence, and a reaver or reiver was the person what dun it. So one can see how bereave came to have its present meaning. However, while the border reivers were probably the last of the breed (I imagine that Ireland, while at the time similarly lawless, had a differant word), bereave started to drift towards its present meaning without a Scottish connection. Shared point.

Turning to blackmail, we find that mail is an old word for a tax, rent or duty (in addition to its chain mail connection). Quite differant from the mail which derives from the French malle (now a suitcase) and which originally meant a packet and is now to do with the Post Office. One had white mails or white rents which were paid in silver and so were white, and one also had black mails and black rents which were paid in kind. The term drifted to meaning a mail paid under duress and was certainly used to describe the protection money paid to the border reivers by farmers. But then there is a bit of a jump to its present meaning. Another shared point, making one point each.

Interestingly, Littre tells me that the French word for blackmail, chantage, is entirely differant and is derived from the custom of making people sing (for the entertainment of those present and perhaps for their supper) at table. From there to 'faire chanter someone' was to make someone do something they did not particularly want to do. And going back to English we go back to the criminal connection with evil doers singing to the police and making people sing. The singing connection presumably lurking in the background of chantage. Pay up or I'll sing.

And then being in the G department I learn that a greffier - a sort of court official - also means a graft or scion. And a greffe was the place where the court register was kept. All this being connected by the English common law custom of grafting new bits of law onto old bits, this building up the tree or body of common law. So the greffier kept pasting new bits of law onto the old bits of law which were kept on the greffe. Unlike that dreadful Roman law. All great fun, one could go on for ever.

if not among public servants. Today's DT tells us that the late boss of Citigroup said something along the lines of: "It is my judgement that ... the only honourable course for me to take as chief executive officer is to step down. This is what I advised the board". Maybe our favourite commissioner does not read the DT - although I do wonder whether the correspondants concerned had him in mind when putting this quote on the front page of the business section.

But I ought to give said commissioner one plus point. I had taken the fact that the Brazilian was killed with eight or nine shots (with dum-dum bullets, any one of which should have been fairly instantly lethal) to the head as evidence of an unpleasantly machismo style among firearms officers. But I learn from Tooting that the guns in question are machine pistols which shoot that sort of number of bullets as soon as you pull the trigger. Not quite the same as sniping. So that bit of evidence falls. A pity that nothing that I had read pointed this point out.

I also seem to remember that Conrad tells us of an anarchist who used to wander around turn of the century London with his thumb on a contraption which would blow up if the pressure of his thumb was removed. To counter a threat of this sort one would need to blow a person up rather than blow a hole in his (or her) head. Not sure how one manages that in a public space and dealing with any number of such people could become extremely unpleasant.

The winter sun caught a large new curved wall, the end of a new block of flats, at the wrong angle, at Epsom station the other day. What had looked like a respectable wall, decently laid, was suddenly revealed as a jigsaw puzzle of lumps and bumps. Amazing what slanting light does to bring out the relief - I think photographers of ancient inscriptions use the same effect for better ends. But thinking of the bricklayers, I have no idea how one builds a quality curved wall. Building a straight wall is relatively easy - you just string your line along the wall and lay your bricks to the line. But, sadly, you cannot yet string your line in a curve. Nor could you easily use a wooden curve (a large scale version of those plastic curves that architectural draughtsmen used to use) unless the curve in question was either a circle - which this one was not - or a good deal smaller. Maybe the university (rather than site) trained architect who designed the thing did not give quite enough thought to how his vision was to be turned into bricks and mortar - if my informants at TB are to be believed it would not be the first time. They seem to regard all such as the lowest of the low.

The runner bean harvest is now in and we are the proud possessors of several pounds of dried beans - which I hope do not fail the mould test I learnt of the the recent cancer report. Maybe the new BH technique of cooking the beans by themselves and throwing away the water (rather than cooking them in the stew, in situ) deals with this problem. Giant bean poles have now been uprooted - or rather cut out of the ground with a spade. The fibrous roots which had grown during the summer had made jerking them out rib hazardous - and returned to the pile. The ground has been given a preliminary going over to remove the top cover which had accumulated since the beans were planted.

Cabbages not the complete disaster I was fearing. Some - albeit a minority - of the January Kings have respectable if not large heads and some of the Brussells' sprouts may be large enough to eat. It being the first time that I have grown these last.

Pondering on my last post this morning (the other option being to get up), saw my mistake. Although one might avoid overflow by mapping the positive integers onto a short segment of the real line in the way described, there is no increase in precision. You need bytes to get precision. Which led to the interesting thought that an object which has a property age which can be detirmined by inspection of the object and which can take arbitarily large values, must itself be of arbitarily large size. One could cheat by sticking a label on the object and keeping the age index somewhere else - but then the index would get rather big instead. I think the conclusion, appropriate for a Sunday, has to be that souls do not have ages otherwise heaven would get very crowded. All this without a pint in sight!

Also thought of a catch with my pet scheme to save the planet (see 3rd October). I have just been reminded that road haulage companies are a fairly militant lot who seem to be able to bring the country to its knees in very short order - the position of strength that I suppose the railway unions were in before road haulage took off. On the last occasion, it was quite impressive how quickly petrol stations ran out of petrol - and how quickly they were up and running again when the strike was called off. The reminder was the haulage companies and farmers huffing and puffing about fuel prices - rising through natural causes. So what would they do if one pushed up prices by a good whack on purpose? Hav'n't yet thought of a way to soften the blow - the whole point of which is to reduce the consumption of oil and by implication the volume of road haulage. So my simple and attractive proposal falls, in the usual way of such things. Complexity is the order of the day. But perhaps the excelling (if not excellent) Ms Vadera can put her thinking cap on and come up with some complicated wheeze for her ex-colleagues at the Treasury.

Prompted by the latest report into how not to catch cancer (one can download all 537 pages of it for free), had another round of green lentils yesterday. Take a pound of lentils, wash then soak for a while. Boil for a while then add sliced carrot. Meanwhile fry up some fillet pork, bacon, garlic and onion in butter. Stir whole lot together and eat. Bit uncertain about the cancer score though. Pulses do very well, but one can also do very badly if they have been stored badly and have got a bit mouldy. Mould can cause all kinds of health disasters. Carrots, onions and garlic good. Then pork bad, butter very bad and bacon awful. And then we got through about 3 pints of the stuff and I imagine all abuse by volume is bad. But we rather enjoyed the meal.

And the DT had a good point. Are we addressing the right problem? Welfare for the old is already in a bit of a state because of our numbers and here we are dreaming up ways to increase the numbers. How long will it be before the nannies have us on compulsory fags to qualify us for access to support services? It's just plain greed living so long and soaking up so much of other peoples' dosh. Whatever would happen to the number of people in the world if the Chinese pack up fags and start living to be a hundred? Given that parts of China are quite cold in the winter I hate to think what that would do to global oil consumption and the knock-on effect on global warming.

I learn that our masonic brethren call senior moments, out of respect for the craft, craft moments. An acronym for can't remember a thing. Can't remember what the eff stood for. Have had two of these recently. One quite harmless, involved pouring the boiling water into the tea cup rather than the tea pot. The other rather less harmless, involved walking into a pole in the pavement while distracted by a closed noodle bar near Earlsfield station. Right ribs somewhat bruised.

I also learn from Mr Joep Leerssen's excellent essay on national thought. One thought from same being that one aspect of conservatism (not something I ordinarily care to be associated with) is that one should not try to write a rule book, even a revolutionary new rule book or a constitution, from scratch in the way that Napoleon is said to have done. This is far too difficult. Much more sensible to rely on an orderly and organic growth of customary or common law. The 'is said to' qualification because one does not really write rule books from scratch. I hope that not even the most self confident legislator is going to attempt this. Rather, one assembles chunks of stuff one likes the look of into a new frame - all a bit like quilting really. So the distinction is not quite as sharp as presented. But it is a good point nonetheless. And then there is the related point of New Labour's touching faith in the power of rules to achieve change.

And I have a puzzle. Why would James Joyce refer to his soul as being a feminine entity? Something he does quite a lot of in potaaym. Must make enquiries about whether souls are thought to be sexed at all. I suppose they might be aged but one would need to be sure of having lots of bytes to store the age in as souls last for ever - although I suppose one could cheat by mapping I+ onto [0,1) by a transformation such as: T(i)=sumk(i(k)/((2^k)*10)) , where {i(k): k=1 to K} is the decimal representation of the integer i. This would be sort of OK but there would be a loss of precision in the absence of lots of bytes. Presumably this is the sort of thing that the scholastics used to get excited about.