pumpkinstrokemarrow

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.