pumpkinstrokemarrow

Connection started to go a bit wobbly on Sunday then completely out Monday. Spent about half an hour on the phone to two helpful subcontinental ladies plugging things in and out. Even taking a screwdriver to the plate on the front of the main connection box screwed onto the wall by the front door. Didn't get back on the air, but did get a fault logged with the island engineers. Then wiggled the Ethernet plug in the back of the computer again and the router came back on the air again. Maybe a coincidence. Up until then the DSL light on the router wouldn't stop flashing even when the computer was turned off. But maybe turning the computer off does not amount to the same thing as unplugging the Ethernet cable. Who knows. But hate to think that the ladies were quite right to ask me whether everything was plugged in properly.

To Ranmore Common a few days ago, the first time for some years. Nice gentle walk along the South face of the downs. Some large and some very oddly shaped beech trees. Some very large yew trees - the largest I have seen since the ones we came across in Bristol somewhere. Some relics of trees decapitated by storm. Lots of young ash trees. And the National Trust who look after the place do not seem to have the urge to fiddle with it the whole time like the people who look after Epsom Common. Content just to let it be.

On the other hand there was a very suspicious white van in the car park on our return. Looked very like one of those outside broadcast vans you see parked up outside the House of Commons - complete with dish and various other ironmongery on the roof - but unmarked, occupied and engine running. What were they up to? Bugging the mobile phone calls of people on the North Downs? Relaying a broadcast from Lingfield? Relaying data from the contractor I saw the other day monitoring traffic in Garratt Lane (also with all kinds of electronic wizardry and vans) to the People's Data Centre operated by Virgin at Fetcham on behalf of the Metropolitan Police (using the now redundant police horse stable block)?

We have done a small survey into the growing obesity problem about which the DT is on about big time - on behalf of the nannies who are, it seems, very concerned. There is even talk of banning the eating of snacks in public places - thus leveraging the power of the smoking rules enforcement service (now subcontracted to Securitas). The small survey took the form of walking down the Longmead at about the same time as the Blenheim High chucked out. I noticed one plump girl among the several hundred children. And this from what the nannies might well regard as a bog standard comprehensive on a bog standard estate. So where are all the fatties? Maybe we will go and check out Epsom and Ewell High next.

Second Soduku attempted a couple of days ago. Done it again. So, having done them for a while after retirement gave them up last year some time. Will I get hooked again? Maybe the trick is to stick to what the DT calls moderate (so as not to hurt our feelings) but which, I suspect, are fairly easy in the Soduku order of things.

The DT continues to print very lurid headlines. One last week about panic measures to save banking as we know it. The general tone was that the measures were going to fail. Almost that the DT wanted them too. And they are supposed to be - like every other national newspaper - on the side of the angels. Then there was one about some terrible security breach at HMCR. On closer reading it turns out that special people have special arrangements with HMCR and these special arrangements are not compatible with use of the online filing system. Now while this might be a pity, even poor design, it does not amount to a security breach. Perhaps the DT has hired the headline writer from the Sun. I have also heard it suggested that they were very loud about the health of the economy and about the consequent merits of buying lots of shares just before the last crash. So they preach gloom and doom so as not to be caught out in the next crash.

Feeding back in normal channels after festivities. First cod from the man from Hastings at Cheam. First lentil stew with spicy sausage - livened up a bit by the use of brown lentils rather than the usual red ones. Change of colour changed the whole stew experience. Kidneys - mixed light brown and dark brown - but otherwise according to the regular recipe. The amount of these last that we consume at a sitting seems to be rising. In this case we did something over two pounds of kidneys at a sitting, barring a very modest portion to have on bread for breakfast. Today we tried very slow roast in foil with a shoulder of lamb. Came out rather like the duck you have on pancakes in Chinese restaurants. Good texture with most of the fat drained off - just leaving the skin with a (n unhealthy) fatty crunchiness - but maybe we will do it for a bit less than 4 hours at 160C next time. Followed by apple amber - which was not in the least diminished by being made with an orange rather than a lemon and being a little overcooked (according to our usual practise).

The men from the council are up and running too. The lock on the allotment was being troublesome at my last visit. I did nothing but someone did and today we have a shiny new lock which works. The council must have some special deal whereby they can buy a lock which fits the keys which we all hold. And having got in, actually finished the third (short) potato trench and even got some leaf mould onto the rhubard beds. Just got the bean trench to go and then I can move onto planting the all important broad beans.

And nearer home some of the snowdrops are in flower and the celandines are pushing up strongly. Unlike the snowdrops which look a bit lack-lustre. No idea what is the matter with them. Maybe they don't like being in the shade for most of the year. Daffodills at the bottom of the garden not looking too clever either. Maybe they are not keen on the shade either. Or perhaps they like to be fed - something I never do. Nor do I deadhead them which is supposed to preserve their strength. Same principle as porkers I suppose.

Back on the allotment today having been rained off for a week or so. Half completed trench is now empty again having been full of water last week. Ground has set quite hard on drying. Maybe that is the cold. Dug out the rest of it and started to fill it with leaf mould. Three barrows today and three more should do it. And that should be that for potatoes. Then onto the rhubarb beds - a bit late in the day as it is already sprouting strongly - and then a runner bean trench.

Horse radish looking well with strong green shoots lurking in the crown, just below ground level. Vicious looking, pale green things which belong in some vegetarian horror movie.

Cheam baker must be on a good bag of flour as his bread has been particularly good for the last few days. Light, soft (on the inside) and springy. The French don't do anything quite like it.

BH tried an interesting new soup from Lyme Regis today. Not much more than chicken stock cube, spinach, tinned chick peas, milk and water. Thick bright green stuff. Much better than I thought it would be. We shall try again, maybe including some onions fried in butter to give it a bit more body.

Two odd dreams last night, possibly fuelled by the fancy cake at the rather central London flavoured Italian cafe-restaurant we found in Tunbridge Wells. There is, it seems, a small chain of them and, sad to say, the owner makes occasional appearances as a television chef. Good cake though.

In the first dream, was in a small party arriving at a beach. Got down to the sea which was inky black. Swimming was permitted when the signs were not up, which they were not and there were some swimmmers in the sea. One of them looking more like a fat, black and worn post standing in the sea rather than a person. Then looked up at the beach behind and was rather alarmed to see this black shingle bank rising far above me, maybe a hundred feet or more. Began to get rather more alarmed about whether I would make it back up the bank when the tide came in. Then made it into the water and all was fine. Floated away on my back with my toes in the air.

In the second, was doing something to do with maps on my mobile phone. Something satnavvy I suppose. Then the thing rings. I try to get back to the telephone screen. Keying back just seems to take me back through the maps things. Like the back button in Internet Explorer on a bad day. Then find that I can answer the phone by pressing the green button without bothering to get back to the telephone screen. Turns out to be a colleague from way back to whom I have not spoken for some time. The line is bad and I can hardly hear him - although I can hear him talking to a lady in the background. He wants to arrange a meeting. I try to arrange to meet at Little Ben at Victoria, a place where I have met him before. The phone goes dead and I am not sure if we are on or not.

Part of the second dream may have been prompted by a new sprog 1 toy - a thing about the size of a sardine tin but which can get the Internet. No idea where the rest of it came from.

On the other hand the cake could not have been all bad as I did the DT Soduku on return in very good time. Fairly sure that I got it right, in the sense that I checked three numbers and I have never had a wrong with three rights. First time I have touched one, a Soduku that is, for a while. Maybe as with baked haddock, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

http://popoptix3d.blogspot.com/ is into arty rubbish too.

Saw an interesting example of lack of civic consciousness yesterday. Walking over the railway bridge at Ewell West, saw a chunk of bank which had recently been cleared of scrub, some of it quite big and leaving a fair amount of chippings. This job, presumably down to our friends at Network Rail, presumably needed four or five people. One to hold the chain saw, one to watch in case something goes wrong, one free to go to the gents (or ladies as the case may be), one to drive the van and so on. But they walked away leaving an unsightly collection of newly revealed litter, which it would have taken perhaps 10 minutes to clear up. Instead of doing that they charge off in their van to the next bout of scrub destruction.

And learnt something about wheat the day before. It seems that in order for wheat to be useful, its genome requires a gene which inhibits the shattering and so scattering of the ripe ear of wheat. Not too clever from the point of view of wheat in its natural state, but very clever for the domesticated sort as it gives one time to harvest the stuff. Mutation of a single gene is all that is needed for inhibition, something that could easily happen in the wild, perhaps reducing fitness, but not fatally. Now with maize, by comparison, shattering is controlled by a number of genes rather than just one, and the story was that it is rather unlikely that the necessary mutations would happen in the wild. So we only had maize in ancient central America by virtue of a breeding program to manufacture the stuff. So rather cleverer chaps than we had thought.

The current trend is for apology. In which connection I wondered about the casuality bill for freeing the slaves in the US. It seems that there were upwards of 500,000 deaths in the civil war from a population of 30m people, including 5m black people, including 4m slaves. So, putting it very crudely, one death freed ten slaves. Now I grant that the quantities are not commensurate, but that does seem to me to amount to a considerable apology of sorts. Pity that the reconstruction bit afterwards didn't go as well - in that respect anyway - as pious Northeners or sanctimonious Europeans might have hoped - these last having carried much of the trade and made much money from it, but having eschewed it by the time in question. I also learn what one might have thought of on a good day all by oneself - that is that the proportion of black people in the US has, in the main, declined since independance, reflecting the flood of immigrants from the poor and/or cold parts of Europe. From something under 20% to something over 10%. Or, in slightly more detail, falling to just under 10% at the time of the second war but climbing slowly since up to around 12% now. This last, courtesy of a very googlessible and useful table published by the US bureau of the census.

The road signage industry is really scraping the barrel now. Having sold HMG enough speed cameras to be going on with (I don't suppose they are going to need a serious upgrade for at least six months), the industry has come up with a requirement to plant no entry signs in the central reservations of non-motorway dual carriageways. Not exactly a high value item but there seem to be lots of them on the way to and from the West country, so I guess it helps to keep the production lines open. Not altogether clear what the rationale for these signs is as they appear in entirely uninteresting stretches of road - but they do add to the visual clutter and they do confuse. What is it that I do not have entry to? What is it that I am missing?

And I continue to be confused by the exit from the M3 onto the M25. The thing is signed as two exits, the first onto the clockwise carriageway of the M25 and the second onto the anti-clockwise carriageway. So one gets to the first warning sign and so far so good. But somehow, after several warning signs, one is very tempted to take the first of the two exits rather than the second. Something clearly wrong. HMG should be instructed to buy some psychiatrists who know about how senior citizens read signs with every batch of signs. That way they might get into the right place.

The good news is that I have acquired a third marine fender to hang at the bottom of the garden. So we now have one small red one, say about a foot across, one big red one and one very big white one, this last being the most recent and sturdily made in the USA. Unlike the other two it has a plug you can unscrew. All three now hanging from the large oak tree which overhangs most of the back of our garden. The small red one both swings the most and attracts the most green mould. Is the antifouling stuff built into the plastic of the other two? Does the green mould encourage swinging? Or is it just that the small red one has the longest rope?

Ex boy-scouts my be interested to learn that while hanging up the white one by throwing a mackeral line over the target branch and then bending the serious line onto it, I learnt that the trusty sheet bend does not work very well when joining thin red nylon line to relatively fat blue plastic rope - this last being the sort widely used by builders and farmers. Had to indulge in some trickery.

Minor moan about the owners of said tree who happily lopped a chunk off my very much smaller tree that happened to be overhanging their garden. Great life it is in the suburbs! Hedge wars rule. And they might be about to warm up. If the developers fail to snaffle the house next door for redevelopment, it might go to someone with a dog. Now the fence between us is down to me but largely not dog proof. So who is it down to to upgrade the fence to keep the incoming Rottweiler in? After all, a dog that size has to be allowed to exercise in the garden when the owners are out at work in the big town, but who is to pay for the six foot fence needed to keep it in? Are the sort of people who buy Rottweilers likely to be an easy touch on such a matter?

The DT continues its scare mongering coverage of the Northern Rock debacle. It talks of the £50b loan needed to keep this former exemplar of the enterprise culture afloat as if all that money is being poured down the drain. A significant proportion of the UK GDP for a year. Now while it may be true that the bean counters insist on it being scored to public expenditure in some way, it is not true that the money is lost. My understanding is that we are merely renewing the loans to those worthy Northern people who have mortgages with Northern Rock. And hopefully most of them will continue to pay, albeit at something of a loss. What might not be such a good idea is if having nationalised them, we were to continue to lend good money after bad.

From http://todolodemasquenoves.blogspot.com/

Expedition to Surbiton today. No particular reason but there turned out to be a good number of charity shops, from one of which I procured a very reasonable tweedy jacket for the grand sum of £5. Mostly wool with a Dunns like herring bone pattern, made in Hong Kong and not worn sufficiently for it to have been worth the previous owner unstitching the pockets. My first tweed jacket for a while, Dunns having expired and those, when they have them, from Lester Bowden, being far too dear for a pensioner.

Preceeded by lunch at a chipper staffed by young non-Brit Europeans of some sort. Friendly and quite a decent bit of haddock - not something one can rely on these days.

Succeeded by the first ox tail stew for a while - in fact I do not recall buying the stuff since I have been buying meat in Cheam. Not a cheap meal at something more than £10 for two packets of the stuff. And given that there was a good round of black pudding sandwiches for breakfast, a heavy calorie day. But good gear - not to mention the outing for the giant stew pan. Plus some more of the allotment Brussells sprouts. Being a bit loose makes them more bother to prepare than the Mr S variety, but it also makes them less chewy and less bitter. A differant sprout experience.

Amused on Monday by one of the quirks of the capitalist regime under which we labour. Now a number of the more serious problems we face are a consequence, in large part, from our consuming too much. Problems like global warming, the credit crisis, inter and intra country tensions arising from conspicuous inequality, filled up landfill sites, running out of oil and blah. But when we actually start consuming less and the big shops start moaning about only getting a half percent growth of sales on last Christmas, the business page of the DT goes into a nose dive. Deep dark recession is upon us!

And further amused by a recent factoid from the TLS. It seems that by cooking our food for the last 25,000 years or so we have given ourself a considerable competitive advantage. Cooking is a sort of pre-digestion which means we can carry a lot of energy around without having to carry a huge digestion apparatus with it and without spending a lot of time at it. It was then said to follow that we could therefore carry a lot more brain about and that we got into a virtuous spiral upwards. Perhaps one ought to verify this story by comparing the relative weights of the digestion apparatus of various animals. I can easily imagine that we have less than a cow - which eats grass and has a lot of apparatus - and large constricting snakes take a very long time about digesting their meals, but what about a lion that both chews and eats meat? Are their stomachs so much larger than ours? Do they spend days after a meal snoozing while the digestion works it off?

Used to be the name of TB when we first moved to Epsom. And a very interesting place it was too. However, the concern today is with handicapping the gee-gees having talked to a former apprentice jockey about same, at TB. My starting puzzle was that if, in a handicap race, the idea is that all the horses start equal, why do jockeys have to fuss about their weight? The answer seems to be, in part, that there are lots of races which are not handicapped. The other part is, I think, that you want races to be fast and so, in consequence, you want jockey to be light. Or to be more precise, the total weight, including the weights, that the horse has to carry, to be small. So the handicaps are set on the basis of jockeys being light. There is a catch though. If the jockey sweats too much and is very light he is unlikely to have the energy to drive the horse to a good race. And the horse will have a lot of dead weight flapping about in the back of the saddle - whereas it is much better to have such weight as there is in the jockey. Two features of all this impressed me. First, the quality of the horseracing websites. There is clearly lots of money in racing and well worth the industry's while to put up good quality web sites. With the same pedanticity about the rules as one finds in pubs about card games for money. Second, the business of handicapping is an information system, with some of the same issues as the computed sort. So there are information flows in and information flows out and there are lags. The handicap is not just a static peice of information that everyone knows - with the additional wrinkle that the handicapper will not have as much information about any one horse as the people running the horse. The consequence of all this is that an entirely legitimate part of the game is playing the handicap system.

Another informant from TB has been telling me something of the mysteries of primary care trusts, which also include information systems. It seems that the trusts have some of the qualities of the insurance operations that run health in the US. That is to say, they collect a great deal of information from their providers. Now I have it in mind that in the US they get about the same amount of health care as we do but at twice the cost - with a large part of the differance being the cost of administering health insurance - which in their case includes logging the administration of every pill to every patient. Let us hope that in our rush to emulate our overseas allies we do not go too far down that particular road.

He also tells me of an unfortanate side effect of the bean counting drive (which is, to my mind and in moderation, in itself, a good thing). Let us suppose that there are two versions of a very nasty disease knocking around, say version A and version B. As far as the patient is concerned they are pretty much the same. But the vaguaries of the bean counting system can mean that the treatement available for A is quite differant to that available for B. Not very clever.

To London the other day. Past another peice of rubbish masquerading as art, this time by the row of rather precious shops, cafes and what-have-you that have sprung up next to the Festival Hall. An arrangement of things which you might find on a building site - wheel barrows, cement mixers and so on - with a bit of Christmas decoration to top it off. One does wonder who authorises the payment for such nonsense. Does he or she get invited to interestingly exotic arty parties on the strength of or in the hope of authorisation? Possibly involving controlled substances?

Clearly spoke about Wetherspoons far too soon. Wanting to take refreshment at Holborn at about 1700 later the same day, went into the little corner pub which has been there for years. Certainly sold warm beer and might even have had a tenant. But it was small, crowded and seat free. So we go around the corner into the ground floor of Africa House (which I think used to be occupied by some part of the civil service) where there was a Wetherspoons with both warm beer and seats. And it came with a friendly and helpful barmaid. Next thought was that there must be much more drinking now than there was. When I used to work near Holborn, the corner pubs was all there was, so there must be hundreds more pub seats (or at least bar seats if we are being picky) in the area now than there were then. Not too mention all the booze being pulled out of the supermarkets now which did not exist then. Maybe it is all down to our being a lot richer.

With thanks to http://marthazulagua.blogspot.com/.

Driven onto blog by double costume drama. Can't manage two of the things in one sitting. Been pondering why we like the things so much: according to the DT the English (if not the British) are keener on them than others. Maybe it is that the great swathe of middle England can just about remember what villages used to be like on a good day having forgotten what they are like on a bad day. In France they still have the things so don't want or need to fantasize about them. Is the preference for such things correlated with sex, age, race, religion, orientation or any of the other variables of that sort? Are immigrants from, say, Ghana fascinated by rural fantasies about England? Would they like rural fantasies about Ghana?

But to return to emetics, I learn, also from the DT, that Mr Oliver is being paid £1.2m by Mr Sainsbury to promote their wares. So I wonder how many people like myself there are who will make a small extra effort to avoid Mr S for a few weeks? It is not just that I do not like Mr O very much; it also irritates that Mr S finds it necessary to pay a celebrity to endorse their products in this way. If they were any good they would not need endorsement. Well - up to a point. But whether they do or not, I would be much less irritated by endorsement which less obviously poured money into the pocket of a named individual. Silly, but A B C promotions would not get me going at all.

Can report that the Christmas jigsaw has been finished for a couple of days now. Final score was one peice duplicated, one peice missing, and one peice extra. The extra peice might reflect a mistake somewhere but it did not fit the available hole, despite being very close shapewise. Wrong shade. I wonder how mistakes of this sort come to be made? If the jigsaw was stamped out of a picture in one go, with a bit of care, sweeping up the peices into a plastic bag ought to work every time. And it seems unlikely that you would make a 1,000 copies of one peice then move onto a 1,000 copies of the second peice - although with a computer driving the printing and the cutting I suppose it would be possible. Whole process most diverting so I do not suppose I will be bothered to write off to the maker to demand my missing peice.

Odd Filofax dream the other day. The fad for the things being well past its peak, it is not quite as easy to get them as it was - although things are very much better than they were in the dark days of the seventies and eighties. So I have a dream about being desperate for a certain sort of Filofax paper and someone had told me that there was a shop in Green Lanes (in Harringey) that would do me. A shop on the Eastern side of the road maybe half way between what used to be the Earl of Salisbury and what used to be the dog track. So I go into the shop, which turns out to be some sort of Turkish cake shop and bakery, staffed by pastel dressed middle aged ladies - all of whom are rather bewildered by my request. I then see that the back of the shop, screened off from the front is selling all kinds of oddments, so I push my way in there to have a better look. No Filofax so wake up. The only link I can come up with is the pub we went into in Clacton, the right hand wall of which was taken up with what looked like assorted raffle prizes. So this is another one that I am not going to get to the bottom of.

Amused by a peice in one of our free newspapers about the case of an unexplained cluster of fox deaths. It seems that four or five foxes have been found dead in a fairly small area (maybe as small as one garden) and there is much concern about how they might have met their end. There is even talk of tails - I forget whether it was tails without foxes or foxes without tails. Either way there is dark talk of cruelty to animals by the local police and of the RSPCA crash cart being sent in from their Guildford HQ. I stick to the line that foxes are vermin, most of them are fairly mangy and not very pretty, and that all those concerned ought to have something better to do. (And that is not getting into the charectars who see fit to rescue feral dogs from Greece and drive them here to be handed over to dog free dog lovers for some hundreds of pounds a pop. I understand that the Greeks think we might be eating them or using them for lipstick (dogs being the proper source for the fat in posh lipstick). How wrong they are).

A propos of them, I see from the Evening Standard (8/1 business 34) that Mr Branson must be another member. It seems that he has all sorts of grand schemes on the go. One of which is a group of 12 apostles to save the world - and he may even become one. Nelson Mandela has already signed up. Another is to flood chunks of Africa to sort out the problem of rising sea levels. Maybe Palestine would be a better choice - that way he would kill several birds with one stone.

I also see that a young lady, now around 18, has lived on more or less nothing but chips since she was a baby. She looked OK in the picture. But what did she look like in real life? Have all the diet people got it wrong after all?

And last but not least that the McCanns are negotiating to make a film about the losing of their daughter. Will they never learn?

Now being the proud possessors of an invalid buggy which is invalid - that is to say that it is not working, having been sat in a shed, from new, for 15 years - we went over to darkest Egham to see the people from whom it was bought to see if we could get a key. The theory being that, since we had been informed by the very helpful maker somewhere in Kentucky, that they all had the same key, the service people in Egham might keep some spares. Which indeed they did. So now we can turn the thing on. Sadly, still no locomotion despite the battery charger saying that the batteries are full. The concensus is that the charger is telling porkies and that the batteries are finished. There is also the problem of the contact breaker which I broke in an effect to get the thing moving and now declines to un-break. The story seems to be that there is some cunning sequence involving the key needed to un-break the thing - a secret only known to authorised dealers. All in all, given that the market for second hand buggies seems to be very soft, not clear that it is worth spending much more time on the thing. Although I had been rather looking forward to driving the thing to TB. (I would have to go very early as the thing has no lights. It does not strike me, despite being a well made contraption, as being terribly waterproof either).

The back of Egham, various varieties of Thorpe (including the water park), was a very odd place. Stranded just inside the M25. We were looking for a place to picnic up Clockhouse Lane East and found that it ended in a rubbish dump just in the lee of the motorway embankment. Clockhouse Lane West continued on the other side, but without connection. Not a wasted journey though as there was a small pile of good condition pallets, three of which are now on the allotment. Two of them non-standard sizes, presumably why they were on the dump, and one of them, something I did not notice until I had used it to replace one of the rotton panels of the compost heap, had chipboard blocks - cubes with a side of perhaps four inches - holding them together. We will see how long they last. Never seen such a thing before.

Then there was Thorpe village which contained a large number of very old houses - but no shops or pubs or anything like that. Half the village, houses and all, seemed to have been bought by some suspicious looking educational outfit - supicious in the sense that it smelt a bit of exotic faith. But the church, despite being described on the brown sign as being of the 10th century was firmly shut. Runnymede is in the vicinity and presumably the place was not chosen because there was nothing there at the time - a further coincidence being that I had my first sight of a contemporary copy of the Magna Carta in Salisbury the previous week. About A3 in size, covered with very neat and very small handwriting. And modern enough that one could even make some of the words out - unlike that stuff the Saxons used to knock out.

Then on to Cherstey and inspected the church and charity shop there. The church was most unusual with the nave roof having been replaced in the first half of the 19th century with a most unusual pastel blue vaulting supported on what looked like wood encases steel columns. A sort of fan vaulting where the fans had no veins as was usual in the older form. There was also an 18th century memorial to someone who claimed to be the 31st child of someone. He couldn't have done too badly, have been too runtish, having made it to more than 60. I wonder how many wives the father had to get through to get to 31 children. Borrowed a devotional book called Screwtape by C S Lewis - which I learn since was a best seller in its day. Hard to see that it would be now. Not sure that writing amusing letters as from a senior fiend to one of his nephews, an apprentice, is quite the evangelical thing any more; indeed, a bit odd that it ever was. Maybe a high church, late life convert sort of thing.

Which book prompts me to wonder, having seen that Diana has covered a good chunk of the front page of today's DT, whether the fiends in purgatory take pity on her at coffee time, between grillings as it were, and let her tune into all the media coverage she is getting back on earth. It would warm her heart to think that she is nearly as good at pulling the coverage dead as she was alive.

Yesterday lunch time, pork soup. Kidneys for dinner. More pork soup for dinner today. Would all be very healthy but for my learning recently that kidneys, like pork, are a good source of chloresterol. Perhaps I can metabolise it all into steroids and get whatever benefit they bring.

I was perhaps a little harsh yesterday. In Wetherspoons pub no 17 (at least it is said to be among the first twenty that he opened) in Tooting yesterday and that one at least does have a reasonably local feel to it. The staff know their customers, among whom there are a fair number of regulars. The back room which serves as a cellar contains a Belfast sink and a small ancient safe, both of which looked as if they predated the building's days as a pub. The place has a bit of charectar. I have had a bad pint there once. On the other hand, I have been near the average age of the clientele for the whole of the twenty years or so that I have been using the place - which is to say that the younger contingent has mostly moved on. Don't know where to. Still, overall, not a bad place at all. Not like a hotel bar at all.

So took on sufficient refreshment to have further thoughts about jigsaws. I shall write to the BBB recommending that they make arty jigsaws compulsory for all the squillions of art students that we have these days. Make them do a 1,000 peice jigsaw of a famous picture so that they get to know the picture in an intimate way and then take them to see the real thing. The idea being that being stuck with a jigsaw for hours would make them actually look at the picture - something they propably don't bother with presently. Once a week for the duration of their first year. I think they would learn a lot. Maybe the talented ones would then grow up to be artists rather than show-offs who think that chucking wet compost at wet plaster is interesting, meritorious and deserving of substantial payment. In the meantime, perhaps it is just as well that most of them wind up flipping burgers when they graduate after their three years education.

Considering taking my own medicine and popping over to the Louvre. Have to see what the BH has to say about that.

Next item is Mr Oliver. I am not very keen on television chefs at the best of times but I think this one gets the prize for irritating me the most. But sorry to see that he has joined the celebrity emetic club founded by Viscount Gelfdorf and is going on about chickens (having sorted out our school dinners). The man must be quite rich so why can't he just retire to the country, take up growing pumpkins or marrows (or both) and get out of our newspapers? Follow the good example set in that regard by the late George Harrison.

Resumed my own gardening activities and now about half way through a short third potato trench. Must put plenty of leaf mould in it as the soil is very thin - maybe as little as six inches. Must get on as it will soon be time to plant the broad beans which I have not yet even ordered.

On the livestock front, the moles have been busy and are now on-allotment again. The deer seem to be leaving the perpetual beet alone for the moment but have been munching at my prize dandelions - that is to say the ones that came up by themselves behind the compost heap - rather than the ones I moved to a special place. With hindsight, I suppose that like root vegetables they do not like being moved and having the tip of the taproot disturbed - it being quite hard to avoid this last given the length of the things. But they are alive and will, no doubt, in time breed and maybe I will have some prize dandelions in the special place.

Pleased to see that http://zzsimonb.blogspot.com/ cares enough about sprouts to post a picture of some. Maybe he will move onto growing. Is it a coincidence that the gent in question comes from my mother's birthplace?

A couple of years ago I did work with three IT service companies, spending a fair bit of time with them. All quite substantial outfits. For some reason I now try to call them to mind and can only name two out of the three. Maybe the third - the one that had a building badly damaged in the oil tank fire near Hemel Hempstead - will surface in a day or so.

Meanwhile, keeping the brain in gear with the Christmas jigsaw which is now around 90% or 900 peices complete. One peice, searched for for a couple of days, did turn out, for once, to be underneath the carpet, unlike the vast majority of carpet candidates which turn out to be under one's nose. Now struggling - to the point that by the evening when there is no natural light (mystery why it makes so much differance - maybe it is just that our eyes have evolved to work in that sort) progress more or less stops - so down to the sort peices by shape routine. On reflection, I decide that there are only six possible shapes. No lumps through to four lumps with two varieties of two lumps - opposite and adjacent. The two lump adjacent sort seems to be the commonest - I wonder whether this has something to do with the fact (guessed rather than checked) that it is the only shape with which one could tile the jigsaw by itself. No lumps and four lumps seem to be rare. No doubt with a bit more effort one could work out an equation linking the numbers of each type - like that rule I dimly remember which links the number of corners, edges and faces of a polyhedron.

Devotees of management matters will be pleased to hear that Wetherspoons is now a mainstream enough organisation that it's bar staff can aspire to be shift leaders and team leaders. A small prize to whoever first discovers which is the senior position and what the job titles translate to. I wonder whether one of their bars actually has a manager who is devoted to it full time or whether they run the operation more like the flocks of CofE churches which are served by teams of clergy (which conspiracry theorists might suspect of being a wheeze to up the number of lady clergy without actually having to let them be in charge, heaven forfend. Never mind about the various other special interest groups which have to be accommodated these days). They certainly do not look or feel much like the pubs of old, despite the cheap beer and the number of punters. The deadness which comes of not having enough TLC - rather in the way of hotel bars and hotel rooms.

And more from http://laricp.blogspot.com. Text in Spanish so no idea what it is about.

This PC is starting to misbehave. Nasty things like crashing on boot up. The story seems to be that I have acquired various moderately bad things from the Internet - something short of the full worm treatment - and that it would be a good plan to rebuild the PC. I think that at least some of this is down to the odds and ends that one gets from some of the tacky blogs one comes across using the next blog button. Which is a pity because one comes across some good stuff from time to time. Might be even more if I could read Spanish of which there seems to be a lot. Perhaps correlated with their use of the confessional. Not much French though. Maybe confessional theory not sound.

Back at the PC, I suspect that a rebuild followed by reload of the various bits and peices that I use is going to be a full day's work at senior speed. No doubt involving talking to that nice part of Microsoft which fusses about licenses. Will I get around to it any time soon?

A day or so ago, back to Millais, wanting to get in before it closed. On the way, irritated as usual by bossy computer lady from South West trains advising us of this and that. But I was amused by the suggestion that passengers would do better not to eat the security announcements. Not so amused by a copy of the Sun that I came across amidst the flood of freebies. It saw fit to publish a page 3 picture of some minor celebrity - I think she might have been involved in Brucy's dancing program - topless and taken from some feet South of her toes. The overall (redundant adjective, but the sentence sounds better with it in) effect was to make what is presumably an attractive woman rather unappetising. Sad to think that the Sun photographer sees fit to take such a picture and sad to think that he thinks that we want to see our minor celebrities taken down a peg or two in this tacky sort of way. Rather than seeing them in the way that is intended. Odd that I should be unamused by this when I am quite unperturbed by their publishing revealing full gut pictures of happy chappies on holiday in Ibiza or wherever.

The Millais well worth the second visit. Would even have been worth paying full price. Enough there that I think one would find something new over quite a few visits. But presumably I will never see no many Millaises in one place again. Rather crowded - with older people, very much of our own cut - and at my upper limit of crowd - a noticeable but very much minority proportion of which (whom?) had no gallery manners. That is to say one is looking at something from maybe six feet and they come and plant themselves right in your line of fire. Then have the cheek to look irritated when they turn to find you standing right behing them.

Rather struck by the picture I think is called Marianna. A lady in a striking dark blue dress standing before a window. On this occasion the blue dress looked rather like a cardboard cut out placed in a room which was otherwise very space like. And once one had noticed this, one rather locked on to the cardboard, to the detriment of the experience as a whole. I did wonder whether the picture had been the subject of some energetic cleaning which can sometimes have this result but the catalogue was silent on this point. Or was it a trick of the lighting on the day?

Continuing to make progress with the Christmas jigsaw - a picture of Napoleon crowning himself. Google alleges that the ceremony took place in Notre Dame although to my eye the setting of the painting looks much more like the Pantheon or somewhere a bit more modern like that. All goes to show that one should not believe everything one reads on the web.

Good to be reminded how the jigsaw process goes, having now got to the 67% point. Start with the edges which I find the most accessible. Got that done, having dealt with a few errors, in a day or so. Then move onto the most striking part of the picture, that is all the heads and fancy clothes. It is reasonably easy to pick out the peices involved from the heap. Then move onto the various architectural stripes. Select the peices by presence of stripe of appropriate colour and then fit them together by matching the shapes at the corners. (I have gone as far, when in trouble, by sorting all the blue bits of sky according to their shape. A procedure which works! Once sorted, fitting the peices together is quite quick). By this time one has used maybe half the peices and has got to know the picture fairly well. Well enough that one finds plenty of peices that one can place when scanning for something else. This last being surprisingly hard. One is looking for what might be thought to be a striking peice, crimson on the left and cream on the right, in a sea of dingy peices. One should find it in no time at all. And after various hypotheses concerning sloppy packaging, the vacuum cleaner, the new dog and so on, the thing finally turns up. And then one has a missing peice which you are convinced should be mainly a brilliant white and which should stand out a mile in that sea of dingy peices. And then, when you eventually find it it turns out not to be a very brilliant white at all. A muddle of green and red or something. All in all an entertaining business, the relevant bit of the brain working in very mysterious ways.

Perhaps I should have a word with the makers about Millais. I thought, going around, that a lot of his pictures would make very good jigsaws. The right mixture of textures and colours at a sensible level of difficulty. Not Hockney however. We noticed, on stairways, some large pictures of his of woods which I did not care for at all. Looked very thin and weedy compared with those of Mr M. Not much good for jigsaws or anything else.

But I think I will stick with what I call tiled jigsaws. That is to say, jigsaws which amount to a regular tiling of a rectangle. Each corner of each peice in the interior meets three others in a regular way. Each peice being, roughly speaking, a square. I have, on occasion, done jigsaws which do not stick to these rules and find them very hard. Perhaps they are quite hard to make as I have not come across them very often.

Having resumed runs to Cheam following break, have more time to ponder on the spheres of Hampton Court (see above). And on the difficulty, never resolved, of making a concrete sphere of, say, one metre in diameter. First thought was lost wax. Assuming one can make a suitable wax sphere, one then uses that to make a mould, perhaps suspending the sphere in a suitably box and then filling the box with plaster of Paris or perhaps clay. Then warm the thing up to lose the wax, then fill with concrete. Leave to harden then knock the mould off - smashing it off would do. Then polish up the concrete with a grinder, taking care to maintain sphericity. All sounds OK but not too sure how to make the wax sphere. Maybe just take a cube which would be easy to make and carve it down. It would be easy enough to test for sphericity using cardboard patterns rotated on an axial wire, so one ought to be able to monitor the carving using some modification of same. And one could always patch the wax if one made a mistake. The next problem might be the cost of the wax. Lard would be cheap but not hard enough. Second thought was to carve a sphere of concrete out of a cube. This would not have been practical in the olden days but modern power tools should make it a runner. Third thought was to make the mould in segments, like segments of an orange, maybe a dozen of them. Hardboard mounted on a frame ought to be spherical - hardboard of say six inches by six feet would bend quite easily - and strong enough. Finish off with a grinder as under thought 1. Will I ever get around to it? Good for a lark but rather expensive in time and materials.

Two features of interest on the way back from Cheam. First, someone on the upper reaches of East street has had their front hedge layered. Quite a posh job so must have had one of those second career city types from the rural part of Surrey where rural crafts are quite lively. Second, caught a young woman creeping into the hire shop in East street clutching sprog and plastic container for paraffin. Presumably from nearby affordable housing. I would also imagine that there is quite a strong positive correlation between the consumption of paraffin and the consumption of psychoactive substances. Perhaps there is a glue sniffing type connection as well as a poverty one, paraffin being quite smelly stuff. We, of course, are in the clear, having disposed of our deluxe paraffin heaters, not having been used for thirty years or so, last year.

DT scores a TLS today. That is to say, there is a headline saying the the Diana memorial in Hyde Park needs to be rebuilt, followed by a reasonably large chunk of text explaining that this is all nonsense and that the memorial is fine. But as with the TLS, the DT reporters are entitled to their Christmas break.

It would be interesting to be able to measure the percentage of space in newspapers which was canned material. Produced on quiet days and kept in the cupboard for days when news is a bit thin on the ground. Or perhaps have a bar chart barring acreage of newsprint by age - where by age we mean the number of days prior to publication that the acre in question was substantially composed. Or one could measure age by working out the age of the youngest information in the acre and taking that as the age of composition.

What would be the granularity of the analysis? Would the unit be an entire article or would one go down to the paragraph or the line? Given the low density of information in newsprint, the unit could not be too small or there would be no information to age. And whatever unit we did decide on, we would need to take a view on the age of a paragraph which contained no information. Would we just exclude them from the analysis or retain them with a high value score for age? And then do comparisons between newspapers. (On such a measure, this blog would not do terribly well - but then there is no claim here to be news). Clearly a very suitable subject for one of those projects which modern schools like to pad out their carricula with. Lots of scope for elaborate use of Excel graphics and we could be sure that the next generation would be graphic if neither number nor word literate.

Rounded off the old year with a spot of heritage. Sherbourne, Wilton and Salisbury in that order. Stroke of luck on the Sherbourne leg when the hotel decided to charge us only £25 for the night for the two of us, including quite a decent breakfast. Might have been something to do with the fact that the bar and kitchen were shut in the evening following the festivities of the day before. The chap who had been on the day before looked completely done in and presumably there was a no-show for the evening shift. Good for us though, as having nosebagged substantially during the day, a scratch en-suite picnic sufficed for the close of the day. Heritage thoughts to follow.

One of them an old year hangover. That is to say, where in the vegetable world can one find perfect spheres? Answer, the mistletoe plants, of which there are plenty, in the trees at Hampton Court. Some of them of impressive size, perhaps a couple of feet across.

The second concerns the nannies and their tame statisticians (of which I used to be one). It seems that for the purposes of gathering statistics, any road accident or incident in which any of those involved has had a drink, is recorded as an accident involving drink. So my running over a drunk who leaps out from behind a parked lorry counts. This is, of course, OK as far as it goes. But one then needs to be a touch careful about interpreting large increases in accidents involving drink as a reason for banning drink. One might spoil what is probably a good story - that many or most road accidents are caused by drivers who have had a drink - by overstatement.

I should also mention that I am mildy in favour of a zero alcohol rule for driving. An inconvenience for those who live in the country but most of us have reasonable access to pubs, buses and taxis, and a no alcohol rule is a much more straightforward to abide by and to enforce than a some alcohol rule.

I was reminded of this by driving behind a bus today which had one of those moving light signs that they have on railway stations - the thing that tells you where the next train is stopping, a string which is far too long to fit on the display all at once - incorporated into it's rear end in a panel perhaps two feet by one foot. At a time when the nannies are cranking up the penalties for all sort of in-car misdemeanours like using a mobile phone, talking to your partner, lighting up or having a sweet - bus companies are allowed to add in this dangerous way to the already huge amount of off-car clutter on today's roads - my point being that I find off-car clutter as distracting and thus potentially as dangerous as the on-car sort. And while we are on this vein are we sure that satnavs add to road safety? Is continually glancing at a small screen which one can only see (in my case) with difficulty, adding or subtracting to the chance of having an accident?

Having caught our fourth mouse in the series, in the garage, shortly after Christmas, the trap has now lain unsprung for several days. Maybe we have seen the mice off. On the other hand, the rat poison in the compost heap is still moving - although there are now none of the excavations that we had before. Maybe there are some more mice down there. So now, having spent £15 on rat poison, starting to think seriously about replacing our brick compost bin which is very easy to use (and also makes a very good boundary marker against encroachments by any pushy neighbours there might be in that corner) but very hard to make rodent proof, with a couple of green plastic jobs. Which might cost £100? If they have open bottoms - which I would have thought necessary for compost - are they still rat proof? Will they try to burrow in? How do you keep the compost wet enough if it is in, in effect, a plastic bag? Watch this space.