pumpkinstrokemarrow

Still having touble with the Alpacas. On the way to Cheam yesterday, was unable to call the word to mind. Vicunas present and correct. Decided that the missing word started with an A and was the same sort of shape as the Vicuna word. Then decided that it ended with another A but that did help much. Then started going through the alphabet AB, AC, AD, AF and so on and Alpaca popped into view long before I had got to L. Maybe the relevant part of the brain could not stand any more of this nonsense. Today both the A and the V words are present and correct.

I was prompted by Ellmann to take a look at Shaw's translation of the Odyssey. The preface was interesting, Shaw having a background which qualifies him for the work in various ways. And right in the sense that the Odyssey is much more like a modern novel than I had remembered. Not like the Iliad at all. A bit thin in its charectarisation but plenty of story line and plenty to interest a modern. One rather off-centre example would be a line which shows that the ancient Greeks understood that one person could be looking at the sunset and another looking at the sunrise at the same moment in time. Impressive for people who could not travel very quickly - and most of whom, presumably, never travelled at all. What I have not yet been able to get a grip on is the connection between this Odyssey and the Ulysses of Joyce. Joyce clearly made much with it, but I have not yet arrived. The connection remains rather arid for me. A formal connection without life. Maybe there will be a Eureka moment at some point.

And interested to read in my Bedford book about Huxley about the merits of eye exercises for those of very short sight - a method devised by one Dr Bates in the 1920s which is still very much alive and well in Googleworld. It seems that if you are prepared to go to a lot of bother and effort, a very short sighted person can achieve much improvement in his or her eyesight by training the muscles surrounding the lenses. Sticking bits of curved glass in front of the lenses is just a lazy way of achieving the same end - a lazy way which the opticians industry entirely approve of. Huxley seemed to think that their blacking of Bates was entirely a matter of protecting their business. No money for them in self-help regimes. Not sure how right they were. The self-help regime in questions sounded - at a distance - fairly rigorous and I imagine that those of us with only moderate eyesight problems are content to stick with sticking glass. But Huxley - whoose eyes were very badly damaged by some infection when he was an adolescent - persevered, to the point of writing a short book about how wonderful it all was. I think Bedford said that he sold 10,000 copies of it in the first year or so. Must see if I can get hold of a copy.

Interesting dream last night from the seaside. Didn't involve any people as far as I can recall. At another of those places which I visit nocturnally from time to time, although I have a feeling this place has a real antecedant - although I can't place it. A small muddled beach to the left, good for messing around in. A large, handsome but empty beach on the right. A sandy promontory in-between. Going around the promontory, from left to right, come across a narrow range of steps, rising away into the distance, looking rather like the steps up one of those Central American pyramids. But on closer inspection the steps are a few inches high each and a right pain to climb up. Make it to the top and discover there is a black rubber lined slide at the top, looking rather like the flumes you get in swimming pools. But open rather than closed. Being a bit twitchy about heights and rushing down same, don't like the look of this, so have to get down the narrow steps again. Luckily, the steps now turn out to be covered with another strip of the black rubber lining, which on lifting and grasping an edge in both hands turns out to be moving gently downwards. So just hold on and the dream drifts away as I drift back down the steps.

While in parts West we had occasion to sample eco eggs. That is to say the lady in the village who keeps the alpacas (which foxes are said not to be too keen on), also keeps very handsome black chickens called black rocks. Most of the time running around in the same field as the vicunas but sometimes straying further afield at which point they are at the mercy of the foxes, as much a pest there as here. There favourite food is (cooked) pasta. Eggs had surprisingly yellow yolks, going down well in a ham omelette.

Was also reminded of the splendid Witherspoons church in Exeter with the splendid pulpit. Just the thing for dramatic readings or recitals. Maybe I should organise a series of readings from Dickens by someone dressed in the style of the master himself.

On the way back we see that all the people who had been working for the signage industry appear to have been diverted to tree regulation compliance. Having spent a lot of time and money planting trees along the A303, we are now spending a lot more chopping bits of some of them off and chopping others down. Perhaps there is a concern that a bit of branch might fall through the roof of a passing truck. Perhaps there are a whole lot of regional and national initiatives about how the oiks on the ground ought to look after their trees. Generally we seem to be moving towards the same sort of active management of open spaces alongside roads that the people who look after Epsom Common are into. Great pain. Why can't they all just leave things alone? Go and play golf or bridge which does not bother anyone other than the other participants. Or carry on picking up all the litter alongside roads (something which we do seem to be getting better at).

PS in the first version of this, I talked of vicunas rather than alpacas. Having decided that the name of the animal I meant started with an A and lived in Peru, Mr Google revealed the truth in very short order. Also that vicunas are a relative of alpacas. Apart from Mr Google, all I could think of was flogging through the A section of the dictionary until I came across the answer which would have taken a while. I don't suppose the encyclopaedia would have been much help. The Peru article would probably not tell one anything about iconic fauna. Alternatively one just walks away from the missing word until, some time later, it pops up of its own accord. Hopefully at a time when one has access to a pencil and paper. But why did I veer off from an A-ainmal to a V-animal in the first place?

We have made it to the news at last, at one remove at least. Driving along what used to be called the Exeter by-pass, we came across a B&Q delivery truck at a very interesting angle with the cab in the air. It had been trying to unload a pallet of bricks into someone's front drive using one of those cranes mounted just behind the cab and had toppled over. Three police cars in attendance. Next morning fine picture of same across the front of the Express & Echo.

This on the way to, amongst other places, Tavistock. This was a very posh place considering it is old town on the edge of Dartmoor with no apparent means of support. Very flashy parish church, dedicated to the patron saint of the BH's family (St E********s). White barrel vaulted nave and aisles (three of them rather than the usual two), with the black beams nicely showing off how crooked the vaulting was. Very posh stock of records in the Oxfam shop and so now the proud possessor of two Deutsch Gramaphone boxed sets of Mozart string quartets interpreted by the Amadeus string quartet. One earlies with numbers in the one hundreds and one lates with numbers in the three hundreds. Maybe he stopped writing the things in the middle of his career. And as is often the case with boxed sets, the records look pretty much unused. A good find, given that I had been a bit light on this particular item. On the other hand, the bookstall in the pannier market was doing Oxford Classic's (apostrophe in the right place?) Trollopes for £3.50 - that is to say 50p more than the shop by Earlsfield railway station. But no rush as I still have one in hand. Probably able to wait until the next visit to Earlsfield.

Dartmoor itself rather wet and misty. Getting a bit to old to enjoy tramping through that sort of thing - never mind the company I was keeping at the time. And the Fox Tor cafe in Princetown is moving veggywards. BH's veggy lunch was a rather better bet, as it turned out, than my pasty and chips. Pastry of the pasty rather hard and chewy.

In the course of getting there and back we came across three mobile homes (perhaps chalets would be a better name for these things without wheels. But they live on trailer parks) on four lorries and four large new tanks, again on four lorries aka tank transporters. The sort of thing the Dinky version of which one would die for as a nine year old. Now I can understand the need for mobile homes, but now that we have done for the Iraqis, I wonder what we need these large tanks for? Just in case we decide to have a pop at the Persians? Maybe the same chap is in charge of this buying decision as the one who decided that we needed to buy a whole new lot of shiny H-bombs. Or maybe they were A-bombs. In any event, there are to be a lot of them and they would do a lot of damage if they were ever used.

And moved on three counts to record my opinion that we would do better to legalise heroin. First, we could then simply buy the crop from the Afghans rather than impoverishing them by destroying the stuff (and I dare say, some of them with it). Remembering that they do not need much impoverishment or encouragement to start banging off at whatever foreigners happen to get into their sights. Second, a good proportion of our ladies of the night might not need to be ladies of the night if there was some other way of getting their fix. And third, the present arrangements have completely failed. The street price of the stuff remains so low that it is cheaper to get high that to get drunk. And the only winners are the people who make a lot of money supplying the stuff and the people who get paid a lot of money to try to stop them. A win-win situation for both these lots. But the taxpayer lot loses. We have to carry the cost of all the burglaries needed to pay for habits. We have to carry the cost of all those people in prison because we have criminalised them. And we have to carry the costs of all those people putting them there.

But pleased to see a full page article in today's DT in support of assisted suicide. Never thought that this particular organ would countenance such a thing. Maybe, some time in the not too distant future, we will start treating ourselves with the same consideration that we treat our cats.

And now off to the allotment to harvest what is left of the Brussells tops. Not had any proper vegetables for four days.

One of the things that the econuts (or perhaps econannies) run on about these days is the fearful waste of electricity involved in leaving all one's PCs switched on, more or less all the time, power saving strategies and widgitery notwithstanding. It occurs to me, given the fifth law of thermodynamics or something, that all the electricity being pumped into one's PCs must emerge, sooner or later in the form of radiation: heat, light, sound or whatever. And that all of this winds up heating one's house (or bedsit, as the case may be). Furthermore, that the amount of heat is a constant multiple of the amount of electricity consumed, irrespective of the way in which one chooses to effect the conversion. So, in the winter, having one's PCS on is a perfectly respectable way of providing a bit of background heating. Argument falls in the summer, so perhaps the answer is to blog in the winter and bean in the summer.

Talking of which, the fourth row of broad beans went in yesterday afternoon. Preparing the ground going a bit quicker now that it has dried out a bit. Dug the ground needed for one row - a patch perhaps 3 feet by 15 feet - in two takes in around 4 hours altogether. But still getting new mice sign in the rows previously sown. Assuming that is that the micro mole hills are indeed caused by mice digging for beans. I rake them out on every visit so that I get to see the new ones.

Saw a rat without a tail on the way out. Not very nervous as it let me cycle right past at about six feet. At least it looked like a rat without a tail. So; either, despite two reasonably good looks, I did not see the tail; or, a fox had eaten the tail; or, it was of rat like appearance but was actually something else, but a something else without a tail (a TB informant avers there is such an animal); or, possibly, it had shed its tail (like certain lizards) and was in the process of growing a new one. We will never know.

Another TB informant spent some time explaining to me last night that games computers run monolithic programs on near naked computers. That is to say that they do not avail themselves of the services of Windows, Unis, Linux or any such thing. Which I found rather surprising given that the formerly specialised computers you see at points of sale and registration - for example in shops and airline terminals - all seem to run on Windows these days. The convenience of having a proper operating system completely dwarves (dwarfs?) any performance hit one might take. The argument is presumably that games need all the power they can get and are not going to spend a bean on running windows. And they are probably written by serious geeks who like beavering away down in machine code and who would resent working in a proper development shop. Maybe we will get to know. Interesting point, so I must try and think of some operating system services that a games geek might be interested in.

The recent story about not wanting fish to be too fresh turned out to be a porcupine, or at least a hedgehog. The man from Hastings assures me that the fresher the better, with the exception of skate, which, for some reason he did not expose, needs to stand for a day or so before eating. He was confident that this applied to neither cod nor plaice, these being the subject of the previous conversation.

Oddly enough, considering that the econuts have suddenly started on about bottled water, I have been thinking about buying the stuff. The problem being that the scums and stains from hard water are rather unsightly when drinking feeble tea without milk, as I do. So story 1, was that buying large bottles of the cheapest bottled water from Mr S, at say 50p for 2 litres, was a lot cheaper and simpler than messing around with water purifiers. To this one has to add the cost of a clean kettle (and the label to tie to the handle instructing prospective users not to use it for tap water) - and we learn that the thoughtful Mr S does these for £5 - a good deal less than most hardware stores. So, at 2 litres a day (less tea than I have been doing over the last year) one comes to £105 for 200 days. BH then starts waving the Brita flag and we start to take some interest in that, worrying the while about what chemicals Mr B is putting back into the water to replace those that he is taking out. We learn from his web site and others that the whole subject of water is fertile ground for the healthnuts. Lots of articles with long words about the healthy way to clean and consume one's water. The upshot of which it seems that the best gadget is something which filters the water - a process with the fancy name of reverse osmosis and which just takes out without putting in. (I am reminded of the seive stacks we used to use for breaking down tar macadam and concrete. Coarse at the top and fine at the bottom, these last being so fine that they looked more like a very thin sheet of copper rather than a seive. Very expensive they were said to be too. At which point Mr G reveals all in a few keystrokes. http://www.retsch.com/ seems to be the place for the finest German seives. Prices on application but I would guess that a seive is at least £100. Presumably the water filters use a miniturised version). In any event, this gadget costs £500 or more, depending on how many hundreds of gallons a day one wants to purify. They don't seem to come in tabletop version. So no question of that. Then, luckily, we find some weasel words on the Brita web site about how they replace bad ions with hydrogen ions which sound much healthier than sodium ones. So maybe the Brita premium jug will have it at £35 plus £30 for a years supply of the magic potion plus £5 for the new kettle and 5p for the label. Watch this space.

PS I guess I should say that I think that the econuts do have a point. It does not really seem very clever to be selling lots of differant kinds of bottled water when we have reasonable water coming out of the tap. Particularly since, I believe, it is largely a fashion thing fuelled by clever advertising rather than any real concern about the quality of said tap water. And the hard water sold around here is supposed to be very good for the heart.

The kitchen has been close to the heart this week, another topic of conversation being the unit which contains the sink, the refridgerator and the washing machine. This unit, acquired from Peter Jones perhaps 15 years ago is now showing signs of its age. The carcase needs further maintenance (one panel has already been replaced with a fine slice of pitch pine which will probably now last a lot longer than the rest of the thing) and the veneer on the worktop has worn away from the front of the sink. Only a matter of time before the water starts to soak into the chipboard substrate and the end will be nigh. After a not very helpful visit to John Lewis, a very helpful man at Leatherhead B&Q almost sells us a replacement unit. At the last moment, credit card twitching, we notice that the proposed replacement in only 600mm deep - compared with our existing 660mm. No B&Q do not do 660mm and he was not allowed to say who might. Beyond that fact that the name might start with an I. So end of valiant attempt. Next thought is to visit Mr King in Tooting and buy a bit of stainless steel (96cm by 9cm) to slap around the affected bit of worktop. So off we go. Bit of stainless steel costs £7.50, cut to size with no ragged or sharp edges, nice bit of sticky plastic protecting the satin finish, the only catch being that it was around 1mm thick, rather thicker than I had intended. Turned out to be a real swine to bend around the top edge of the worktop, the resultant job being rather less neat than I had hoped, despite the intervention of sundry bits of timber, G-cramps and rubber hammers. But I now know that panel beaters do indeed earn their money. Next problem was drilling the fixing holes. Despite the box saying something about tungsten tips, the drilling was more a case of melting one's way through the stainless steel and the resultant hole was a bit bigger than intended. Countersinking seemed to go a bit quicker although the countersink bit I used will not be much good for anything else now. But new shiny edge to the worktop, covering up the hole in the veneer, is now in place. Screws held into the chipboard (never very confident about the screw holding ability of chipboard, even the high density stuff said to be sold by John Lewis) with unibond and bath sealent along the front of the steel to keep the water out. B for attainment and A for effort I think. We will see how long it keeps the subject of kitchen replacements off the agenda.

Tried the corned-beef pasties from Cheam yesterday for the first time. Not unlike the ordinary eating pasty experience - that is to say, starts off well but one has had enough of the thing by the time one has finished. Somehow the hit from the spice on the mouth seems to grow as one gets through the thing and by the end the whole effect is very spicy. Also, in this case, the texture of the hot corned beef and onion did not seem quite right in a pastry envelope. Too smooth; too much like hot fish paste and one missed the various lumps and bumps of a proper pasty. So it will be a little while before we try that again.

Have interesting ideas about how to sequence things late evening at Waterloo. Arrive at station to find the train to Epsom is due to leave in three minutes. Rush down to platform 1 which you find had just been closed to new business because the train is about to leave and the thoughtful train company does not want any accidents involving passengers and trains which are about to move or which are maybe actually moving. Nip back to platform 3 which is still open and nip round the back, back to platform 1. Climb, somewhat breathless and sweaty, onto full carriage at the head of the platform. Nothing happens. After a while a lady guard appears and saunters gently down the platform, stopping to chat a couple of times on the way. Platform 1 reopened for new business and the train gets a little fuller. Some minutes later the train gets underway. And I was just in time for one for the road at the other end.

Halifax up to some odd tricks too. We recently got a computer generated letter from them, the body of the letter containing details generated from our account, but with a label stuck to the top of the letter containing our name and address for viewing through the window in the envelope. Now why would it not be possible for the bit of the computer which printed one lot of details to print the other lot of details, that is to say our name and address? And if it did not, where did the label come from? How was the label associated with the letter? This last would be a bit of a pain if they were doing thousands of them. I don't suppose we will ever know.

The train event preceeded attendance at a Barenboim event. Very good concert from a musical point of view, a little marred by the last-night-of-the-Proms sort of audience. Far too much clapping and cheering for my taste. And it was probably much worse for the last concert yesterday. Why is it that this particular series has turned into a music groupies fest? I would also prefer this sort of thing in a smaller concert hall - say the QEH. Nothing wrong with the sound in the refurbished FH, but it is very big. Somehow not quite right for a solo performer. But then I guess FH is a lot bigger than QEH, perhaps holding 1,000 more happy punters who have happily spent lots more pounds. One aspect of the sound jarred slightly - the occasional big shifts from very loud to very quiet. A little too effective - but it was alleged that this was an old actor's trick to quieten down an audience which was shuffling a bit too much. And one aspect of the music was new to me - the way that a good proportion of the non-terminal movements ended in a rather uncertain way, designed to put one on edge, waiting for the next episode. So a crashing of chords, then a short silence, then a little twiddly bit. The end.

from http://fabiettos.blogspot.com/.

More trouble down at the allotment with the live stock - or rather wild stock. My allotment neighbour had been telling me about some vegetable chat room he belonged to where there had been long discussions about mice and broad beans. It seems that quite a number of people had had their bean plantings decimated (or worse. One could live with one in ten) by mice, who, it seems, are attracted to the smell of the beans. The answer was to grow your beans in deep pots (so as to give the strong central root space), take them out of the pots, remove what is left of the bean and plant the plant less the bean out in the ground. The plant less the bean does not smell and does not attract the mice. To which my response was that this seemed like a lot of bother for broad beans which seemed to come up pretty well without anything of that sort. Or planting two beans to the hole - which would start to get a bit expensive the number that I plant.

Next day, down on the allotment to complete the third row, and there were signs of excavation in the first and second rows. Entirely consistant with the activity of small rodents. Odd that I should never have noticed such activity before but that it arrives the day after notification. Still, got to keep moving forward. Third row now in. Maybe we need a bit of rain to re-consolidate the surface to keep the wee mice out.

Third row associated to third year in some film I saw many years ago about the thirty years war. There was much devastation and destruction of growing crops. The story was that the peasants were persistant types and would carry on planting after destruction for three years. After that they would give up. Take to the bottle or become a bandit or something.

And a few days ago had a dream about some speciality shops that I am quite sure I used to dream about some years ago on a reasonably regular basis. Entirely fictitious: one in back streets behind Victoria Station, another in back streets to the immediate East of Trafalgar Square and one more woolly one further to the East. But on awakening, with the shop in question still vivid, when one tries to probe for more detail, the vision collapses. Vividity is no more. Rather as if it is just a peice of scenary built for a film or for a theatre and which will not bear close inspection.

Scenary associated to obscene - the derivation of which, I learnt recently, is 'on stage'. From 'ob' for to or towards and 'scena' scene or stage. Which meant things which were on stage, on view as it were, which should not be. The meaning gradually contracting to its present meaning. Which derivation strikes me as an oddly off-centre and ironic. I would have expected something more direct about the unpleasantness of whatever it was.

Also to a book about dreams which I also read some years ago by one J Allan Hobson of the Harvard Medical School. As well as providing a lot of useful material about sleep, Mr Hobson seemed to be very concerned to consign the views of Mr Freud to the dustbin. He went on and on about it. His view was that dreams were rubbish. Bits and peices floating around, assembled into apparently meaningful assemblies but which were not. I am sure he is wrong; that there is room for both views. That dreams are bits and peices, but they do, some of the time at least, have psychic import. That they do tell us something important about ourselves, or at least about our then current condition. Perhaps Mr Hobson had a bad experience with a Freudian shrink when he was a young and troubled adolescent and has hated the Freudians ever since.

Must be gradually acquiring a taste for literary biography, this being a genre I have largely eschewed for nearly sixty years. So my parents having read Aldous Huxley with great gusto 75 years ago, and my having read him with similar gusto (I must have understood very little of what I was reading. At least at the level of emotional intelligence. A deficiency which seems to be oddly appropriate, given what the biography (see below) says about the author) 45 years ago, I have now acquired a two volume biography by one Sybill Bedford - who, as it happens, my mother was also rather keen on. Courtesy of an Oxfam charity shop in Kingston - where the central shop is very expensive, but this one, the off centre one, has much more sensible prices. With the result that I now have three heavy weight biographies of literary heavy weights. A by-product of an expedition to do with the far more serious business of new worktops for the kitcher.

This biography is full of interesting snippets and insights. Some of these last arising, I think, from the fact that Ms Bedford is herself a writer - not just a biographer - which is not quite the same thing. So Huxley has the enviable distinction of a walk on part in Proust, under his own name. As opposed to some recognisable and unflattering fragment of him appearing under a nom-de-clef. I wonder what kind of accolade would be the equivalent today? He also spent a lot of time on Latin at Eton. It seems that for a time, Tuesdays from 8 until 8 were devoted to Latin and a good part of that time was devoted to Latin verse. That is to say that the teacher would hand out some chunk of Tennyson, Wordsworth or whatever and invite the class (each pupil separately) to translate the chunk into Doric streptameters or whatever. It seems there is quite a choice of sorts of Latin verse that one might translate into. But it seems that he loathed the Anglo Saxon to which he had to devote so much time at Oxford. So not one of the Tolkein gang at all. There is also a not very flattering anecdote about Joyce from a dinner at which they were both guests.

Gloss wearing off the new computer a little. Had a crash on take-off yesterday. Something about inappropriate media to boot from - maybe some untoward interaction with the flashy screen. But got it going again on the third attempt. And then I noticed that the default fonts in powerpoint are not quite right. Over the centuries people have put a lot of effort into making fonts legible on the printed page in all kinds of circumstances and conditions. But I doubt whether the same investment has been made in screen fonts - they are just photocopies of the old paper fonts. The result in this case being that the pixellation of the screen interferes in an odd way with pixellation of the font, with letters appearing on the screen in what appears to be a slightly random boldness. Not very attractive at all. Presumably one can have the same sort of problem with a laser printer although I have never noticed it. And presumably one does not with paper and type because these are high resolution analogue media. No mutually prime numbers to interfere with each other; or put another way with mapping a pixel box of one size onto a pixel box of a slightly differant size. No known neat way to do this.

Broad beans continue to advance on the allotment and I now have two rows in and the third row well under way. In the course of which I had the second shirt-off event of the year - the first having taken place some time in January. Weather most odd: very warm during the day but sharp frosts at night. At least we had sharp frosts on Sunday and Monday morning. Mist today.

And it was very warm at Hyde Park on Saturday with lots of people pulled out. Not a place we have been to properly for quite a long time so plenty to see. I had forgotten how many sick looking trees (presumably elms being kept alive somehow in the face of Dutch elm disease) there are in the Western part of the park - although one is pleased to see that they are gradually being replaced by new planting. And I had forgotten how big the round pond was. No model boats though. Queensway still there but no tea and cake shops. Had to make do with the artists cafe and an inferior cake with an Italian name starting with a T - which was a pity because they are usually very good and sometimes come in small bowls rather than in cake format. Quite a lot of young ladies in Lycra showing off their exercises - presumably from the US. They go in for that kind of thing there. And quite a lot of young men from various communities showing off on various kinds of skates, complete with a small contingent of groupies. Excellent light for looking at ponds. Tuna fish sandwich picnic in said park so an economical day. Let's hope the tuna were the renewable sort.

Breakfast spoilt today by reading in the DT that one of our newsreaders gets paid £1m or so a year. Good work if you can get it, but it is a mystery to me why the people who broadcast news programs think it is necessary to pay this sort of money for someone to read from an autocue. There must be thousands of more or less presentable people in the country who would do a perfectly reasonable job for far less that said £1m. Perhaps the way forward would be to pay one person for the voice and another person for the face (and possibly a bit of shoulder). No-one need know that the face is miming and one would be getting the best of both worlds.

Further to Mr Trollope, it has now dawned on me, that for a humane and decent chap who knew a fair bit about Ireland and the Irish, it was odd that he did not feel the need to make any comment on the famine which preceeded the publication of his Irish book on the Finn by some 20 years. All very liberal and saw the need for something to be done, but in due course, when the time was right, and without any apparent understanding of the depth of feeling of the Irish poor - that is to say most of the Irish.

I am reminded of the invisibility of the Palestians to those of my parents' generation, also humane and decent chaps, who admired the Israeli endeavour. Who thought that blooming deserts and kibbutz were the bees knees - without seeming to understand that the land in question was neither desert nor deserted.

Another round of baked cod on Friday - which turned out very well. So well that I was moved to dilate in Tooting about it, only to be informed that sea fish cannot be eaten too fresh or it tastes terrible. One has to give the ammonia time to blow off or something. Sounds quite plausible but I have never heard of such a thing before and I have heard of people grilling fish on the seashore as they catch them. And, from experience, fresh mackeral - as in hours old - taste a good deal better than shop ones. More digging needed again.

Discovered that chicken stews - the technical term might be fricassee - are much improved by the addition of some smoked haddock. Not altogether sure whether the improvement was due to all the salt in the smoked haddock or to the fish itself. Certainly chicken breasts seem to need something to gee them up a bit. One then wonders why it is that sea fish do not taste salty. If vertebrates are 90% water and sea water is 30% salt one might think that they should do. Now where do I find a fishy salt analysis?

And talking of vertebrates, the DT tells me that fish need about 1.5 grams of carbohydrate feed to make 1 gram of fish. Chicken 2.5 grams and cows a princely 8. So clearly growing cows is not the way forward if we want to feed the starving millions. But why is it that fish are so good at turning carb into protein?

The DT - along with the rest of the media - certainly went into a twist over the Arch Bish remarks about Sharia law. When I first saw it, I assumed that he was saying something relatively innocuous like it is quite likely that someone else's legal system, one that has grown up somewhere else and in differant circumstances, has something to offer. Maybe they have come up with some better way to handle child criminals or divorce (although the latter seems a bit unlikely given the Sharia approach to rape) . Or some neat way of dealing with fraudulent carpet sellers. I dare say that, in their day, both Sharia law and Jewish law were quite advanced - compared, say, with what passed for law in this country in the year of our Lord 1000. However, he seemed not to be saying that at all. It seems that what he was saying about was parallel jurisdictions. Now this, while more contentious, is perhaps not so off the wall. We used to have ecclesiastical courts to deal with matters of that sort and commercial courts for that sort of thing. In fact, I think we still do. So given that our criminal justice system is not doing so terribly well at the moment, might it be worth giving some thought to whether communities could elect to have their own justice for matters which affected only themselves? Provided, I guess, that there was always appeal to proper justice? Would we want to dilute the state's monopoly on the use of legal force and coercion? And we do not want to return to the lynch law which pertained in parts of the UK not so long ago.

Which takes me back to my latest Trollope where I find a discussion of the merits of the party system we have now. Do school children still have time for this sort of thing? I seem to remember that in my school we did give this sort of thing a modest outing, along with RI and music. In any event, a subject worthy of discussion. In those days - the 1850s that is - people worried about whether MPs voting for the party line was proper. Whether it would not be more proper to vote according to one's belief rather than what the party higher ups had decided? Or in the case of Blair and Brown, what some little coterie of hangers on at No 10 had decided. At a time when MPs were not paid but ministers were, was it proper for an MP without money but with views to take the government gold as a minister but to keep his mouth shut. What do we buy with our party system? The benefit of a loyal opposition whose duty it is to oppose everything because opposition is needed to sharpen proposals up? I don't remember when I last saw the Guardian give this sort of stuff an outing, let alone the DT.

Trollope was cunning enough to interleave all this with plenty of romantic interest. So there was something for everybody. I wonder what the profile of his readers was? Were there more of them that read Dickens or Eliott?

Fron http://ruthhengeveld.blogspot.com/. All of a sudden the Dutchies are all over the blog world.

Lovers of Jane Austen may be pleased to hear that they can buy her collected juvenalia from the Cambridge University Press for the modest sum of £60 or so. Plus postage. The 2006 edition, so it would seem that this is not the first attempt. Clearly literary studies are sufficiently alive and well for someone to spend a great deal of time lovingly assembling this stuff. Is this really any better than stamp collecting? Now some successful adults manage to destroy their juvenile jottings before the establishment get hold of them - but Jane clearly failed in this department. One feels rather sorry for her to have all this stuff exhibited for dissection; this one at least prefers to stick with what she saw fit to publish and am content to leave what was left at the bottom of the cupboard where it is.

But perhaps it is all of a peice with the rest of the Austen industry. Most of us are far happier seeing films about Jane or costume dramas derived from her books, rather than bothering with the books themselves. And to be fair, I am among the most, for I have probably seen more costume dramas than read books over the years. And the costume dramas do prompt one to go back to the book. Then one can have a good moan about all the liberties taken by the adaptor.

I remember once being tempted to buy the collected works - or at least woodcuts - of Eric Gill for what was, at the time, the very large sum of £80. But the book, despite being beautifully produced, was spoilt for me by the inclusion of all kinds of more or less pornographic jottings. The man might have done some good work, but he had an interesting private life which he was happy to share in these jottings - and which, to my mind, would have far better been left in the cupboard in question. Whatever were the canons of Westminster Cathedral thinking of when they commissioned him to do their stations of the cross? Can good works be produced by bad people? A nice question for the Jesuits. For myself, I guess the answer is yes, but I do not need to see the feet of clay.

Readers may remember the saga of the older persons' buggy, now in the great skip in the sky. On which topic, I am pleased to say that two more keys for it have turned up from Leisure-Lift of Kansas City. They paid the $0.97 postage, paid for the jiffy bag, enclosed the keys and didn't bother with an invoice. Granted, processing a small cheque from the UK would probably cost them more than it was worth, but still not a bad bit of customer service. Even if it did take around a month for them to get here. I wonder whether a UK purveyor of older persons' buggies be as helpful to a caller from the US?

Having suddenly decided that it was a pain having one computer running new Excel and another running old Excel, found myself in John Lewis buying a new one - having found the PC World in Kingston a bit grotty and BH having heard that John Lewis was now the place to go for such things. Which indeed they were. So now the proud owner of a Hewlett Packard desktop with a (for me) huge 22 inch screen. Monstrous great thing which can display an awful lot of spreadsheet at once. All for a lot less than I paid a year ago for my Evesham laptop. Also have become a Vista user. Also learnt that computers no longer have recovery discs - there is somewhere inside where they keep all that sort of stuff. And I thought I was so geekfull knowing about such things. But I did manage my second installation of Microsoft Office 2007 with no pain at all. Beyond it being nearly at the point where having a computer which is not connected to the Internet is not going to work. So much of the whole business assumes that one is.

Also interested to see the large range of very large laptops which you can now buy - and which did not seem to be available a year ago. Very large in the sense that they had very big screens and appeared to be intended to show films. Not clear to me why one would not use one's television for such a purpose but there must be a point somewhere.

Back at the allotment, now got the first row of broad beans in. A couple of weeks later than last year but if I keep at it I should have the seven rows in before the end of the month. And it looks as if someone very nearly got stuck where I got stuck last week. Very impressive tyre marks, completely distracting the eye from the modest disturbance that I made.

Tried out cod's roe for the first time yesterday. Bought two of them from the man from Hastings, rather like pink sausages. Boil them in the bag as per instructions and they swell up to around twice the size. Remove, slice and fry. Nice fishy smell in the frying and the twice cooked roe looked attractive. But didn't like the taste or texture very much. So will leave roe to BH (who likes the stuff) in future.

To Uncle Vanya at the shiny new Rose theatre at Kingston last week. Except that the theatre was not all that shiny. Attractively laid out auditorium but the supporting spaces were not quite finished. Various patches of bare concrete where there should not have been. A shortage of chairs to sit down on in the bar during the interval. But we liked the play - which somehow I have not seen before. One continues to be impressed how someone writing a hundred years ago in a very differant country has something to say - and in translation. But the acting seemed a bit disjointed, certainly during the first half. The leads did not quite convince, although the (easier)supporting roles did well enough. The delivery was rather fast, too fast for me. But impressed enough that we shall go back for a second helping when the thing gets to Guildford in a month or so. It will be interesting to see how it plays in a rather differant theatre and with the company settled down.

And talking of being impressed by old masters, have started re-reading the non-clerical Trollope, which I have probably not looked at for 35 years or so. For books with a rather light tone, there is much wisdom. I am reminded, for example, that while the ballot box is the way forward, there is attraction in the idea that electors should declare their vote publically. If they believe in a thing, it would be good if they were able to say so out loud. Rather than hiding away, all furtive, in a voting booth. There was also something about the way that politicians might hold very differant views about important matters and tear into each other big time in the chamber - but be quite able to get on over a dinner table afterwards. The aggression is contained, ritualised and constrained; it does not need to spill over into other areas of life. Which is all well and good, but one wonders how much one could really care about an issue if one could still get on famously with someone taking a radically differant view. And then, does one get a better result from people who really care? Might people doing it for fun deliver a better result than a bunch of zealots and bigots?

Drifting sideways, I do have a sneaking regard for Muslims because they do seem to care about their faith. They really do believe that their god is the one god. Unlike the good old CofE which seems to happily admit the validity of all sorts - which to my mind (that is, from the outside of all of this), seems rather to take away from the value of one's own faith. But a pity that some of them still go in for rather barbaric punishments. The DT tells me today that the Iranians are at it again.

In which vein, I have also been checking up on Execution Dock at Wapping and so far the story does not quite run. It seems the custom was to hang the pirates (rather slowly) and then leave them hanging while three tides washed over their heads. Now for this to work the scaffold would have had to be erected fairly low down on the foreshore, which seems a bit unlikely. But at least they were not tied up at low water and left there to drown as the tide came in - which was the first story we came across and which does seem like rather a grim way to go. But something which did presumably happen as it made an appearance in a large film about vikings with someone like Kirk Douglas in it. Bit more digging needed.

more than I do. http://sharninder.blogspot.com/

Big two days on the garden front. Started off tamely enough excavating the home compost heap, the one that had the rats in it. Took six half post office bags out of the back of it, dark brown, well rotted peat like stuff with the odd bone. Dry and fairly worm free so it must be a while since this part of the compost heap has been dug out. The back can only take half bags these days - maybe 50 pounds - there not being room for one of those natty orange barrows (cut price version of the things that market porters used to use. Upright things with a wheel on each side and a small shelf at the bottom to carry the load) that you can get in B&Q these days. So far so good.

Then off to the allotment and finish digging out the runner bean trench, maybe 2 feet across by nine inches deep. Erect pole at each end. Sturdy affairs, well dug in, as is my custom. One of them was one of the willow branches which took root in the ground in last years bean polery. Will it take root again, having been out of the ground over most of the winter? Barrow the six bags in in fairly short order, fairly pleased with myself. But the six bags do not make much impression on the trench, so decide to top up with a few barrows of leaf mould. Wheeling the first such barrow back when the 3/8 inch steel bolt holding one side of the wheel in place sheers off, presumably having been worn through by the mild steel axle plate. Bolt must have jumped a bit as it was nowhere to be seen. Maybe that was what all the squeaking has been over the years. Tranship mould to another barrow, empty into bean trench and decide to call it a day.

Now, for once, to save the exercise, had parked the car a little further up the track than usual, in fact, as it turns out, entirely off track. Get stuck trying to drive the more or less empty car out. Faff around with spade, bits of board and carpet but no good. The super dooper XH25 continental radials might be the bees knees for hurtling around the M25 but they are useless in mud. No grip at all. Are we going to be reduced to getting sprog 2 to get his shiny new Renault dirty getting me out? Or to getting the AA out? Do they venture their vans off road onto allotments?

Certainly not. We find the towing eye in the boot as per instructions and screw it in. There were still enough bits and peices of rope in the garage. Plus a DIY pair of blocks with three and four sheaves each, giving a useful eight fold reduction. They looked as if they had been made by the naval engineering uncle, perhaps with amateur dramatic scenery in mind. Not really heavy duty affairs but worth a try. And on closer inspection there was a suitable apple tree hidden in the blackberry patch at a suitable angle to the car and of sufficient size to take the pull. So some Heath Robinson moments later, four pulls gets the car back on the path (BH ably manning the wheel. Another job which would have been made much harder with only one of one). Needed four pulls as there was only twenty feet or so of washing line suitable for use in the blocks, so after tensioning one was only getting about a foot of progress to the pull. All in all a very satisfactory afternoon. Boy Scouts again for the hour.

Purchased new barrow from the garden centre this morning. No choice, green plastic thing on a green metal tubular frame with a blow up wheel. Fifty five pounds for a large washing up bowl with trimmings seemed a bit steep but we will see how long the thing lasts - the frame already having a fair number of rust splodges. The blow up wheel should be an improvement on the moulded plastic wheel it replaces. This last was noisy and did not grip the ground very well.

Runner bean trench now suitably full of leaf mould and half back filled. So if the weather holds and the ground carries on drying we should only be a couple of weeks late with the broad bean planting.

Yesterday to Mile End, from whence headed East and then down the Lea (what has the local Bromley got to do with its lea? What is a brom?) to the tidemills. Then down Limehouse cut to Limehouse, and then West to St Katherines. Across Tower Bridge to London Bridge and home. All very impressionfull. Impressed that industry in the Bromley part of London was thriving in the 18th century if not before. Now know that Limehouse cut is a shortcut from Bromley locks to Limehouse. That one can sail - or at least float - up the river from Bromley to Bishops Stortford, once a river port. Depressed by all the converted warehouses West from Limehouse: partly because the area was dreary with no street level life to speak of, partly because it reminded one of the days when we made rather more in this country (relatively speaking anyway) than we do now. This despite the fact that the warehouses were the predecessors of those giant distribution sheds in industrial estates we have now rather than places where anything was made. Had a walk along the river bank between Limehouse and Wapping, having found one working set of steps which the nannies had forgotten to lock up. Walked along the bank for maybe half a mile past several steps which were either locked or derelict so walked back again - nervous that it would get dark, the tide would come in and that the hoodies would come out. One gets more nervous about such things with advancing age. I wonder why they make no effort to make the beach available? Plenty of interesting detritus down there - lots of small bones from big animals and one souvenir scaffold clip.

Part of what little street life there was was convenience stores. But unlike the one near us run by a very decent subcontinental, the one we went in was run by a small herd of Italians, boasted a bar and a small restaurant as well as the shop operation. All very dinky with food served on very large white plates which might have come from Islington or Chelsea. BH had a very carefully made and splendid latte, with stripes, froth and so forth. I had some good Milan salami but wrapped in rather poor bread - probably one of those frozen baguettes you stick in the microwave. And one could not have a sandwich without there being a small heap of olives, lettuce and what have you to one side. At least there were no crisps. I wonder if they do such things back home? But a beer (Peroni?) made the package as a whole quite acceptable.

Also past the 'Prospect of Whitby' where, 40 years ago, I used to think it very cool to go and sing coarse songs. Didn't look much like I remembered it, having become a heritage pub. Also past 'Captain Kidd' from both below (where there was no water gate) and above. Perhaps near where Execution Dock used to be given the rather naff noose hung up in the yard.

Clearly getting too old for coarse. When we got home watched maybe two thirds of 'The English Tailor'. Decently made thing with an interesting story - but badly marred by it being found necessary to field a sexually agressive and rather coarse Piers Brosnam. Back to the days when spooks wore bowler hats and did not find it necessary to explete all over the place. And I seem to remember that mountaineers of the Shipton era used to pack Shakespeare in their bags to read at Camp XXIII or whatever. I imagine they now pack Nuts or GQ. Now does this reflect a change in the social class of mountaineers or a change in social mores or both?

A week or so ago to Atonement, which seems to be attracting much attention and gongs. This - with one jarring exception - managed not to be coarse. And it kept going with remarkably little action or story. The three actresses doing the heroine did well. But too long and too full of flash backs. The lurid digression to Dunkirk was largely unecessary. All in all a bit pretentious, too much pose. Too much of a costume drama - complete with a dollop of second world war home front nostalgia for those few old enough to remember. One could have done more to explore what a decently brought up, but clever and slightly dodgy girl, who knowingly (if without much malice aforethought or premeditation) does something awful at 12 years of age, does to make up. But maybe it will impell me to read the book - the author being quite a literary celebrity these days.

Last but not least, a new way to make chilli con carne. Take a pound of dried runner beans and soak overnight. Bring to boil and throw water away. Add more water and bring to the boil again. Throw that water away. Do it once more and cook the things for about an hour. Retain the water - because while one seems to need to boil off something from the beans one can overdo it and be left with next to nothing. Take a pound of chuck steak - in this case a fine half inch slice from Cheam, marbled with connective tissue and fat. Just the thing for a stew - cook for a bit in dripping. Add finely chopped onion and tomato. Cook for about an hour, adding bean water as necessary. 15 minutes before serving add beans back. 5 minutes before serving add mushrooms (mainly because large, two for the price of one packs from Mr S do not keep too well). Serve with freshly pulled January King and white rice. No chilli, pepper, salt or other substances needed. Except to lift the livestock from the January King.

From http://www.abraxasparadise.nl/. Perhaps I shall have to go and find the action.