pumpkinstrokemarrow

The water filter people - Brita - sell two versions of the filter for our sort of jug which look identical but which have differant names - Matra and Matra Technology. As they are rather expensive and since we are easily confused by name changes of this sort, thought we would try the contact point given at the Brita web site. It turns out that they are another efficient mob. Get one email after a day or so acknowledging my important communication and an answer a day or two after that. The grammer of the answer not impeccable, but the gist of the thing was clear enough. Package changed but content not changed.

Interested to read a few days ago, a propos of the Diana business resumed (concluded even?), that the PR person employed by the owner of Harrods is a lady Oxford graduate earning around £300,000 a year. Given the form of the owner, I imagine she is a young and a good looker. But is it a good use of her expensive education? Did she go to some fancy public school and what is being bought is really a Sloane package? So that Sloane-ness can be acquired by association. I imagine that rich non-Sloanes - for example most famous footballers - are rather keen on that sort of thing. I wonder how I would feel doing that sort of work? Wake up in the morning feeling a bit grubby? Or would the size of the pay cheque enable me to wash away any doubts I might have about the nature of my trade?

Interested also to read that Pickering & Chatto have seen fit to publish 1,200 pages of the diary of one Elizabeth Inchbald, an all round thespian from the 18th century, of whom I had never previously heard. A snip at £275 for the three volumes. I wonder who buys this sort of thing? The odd PhD student or academic is going to want such a thing, but there cannot be that many of them. They do have the public service excuse that the originals from which they are publishing are starting to fall apart, despite the best efforts of the Folger library, and that if they do not do a proper transcription now, they may not be able to in the future. Perhaps a more sensible solution would have been to publish the thing on the web and save all those trees. Provided, of course, one could have come to some arrangement about funding.

Finished off the two half rows of leaf beet yesterday. Brisk wind out on the allotment - enough for one to start worrying about the ground drying out - at least drying out enough to interfere with seeds and seedlings. Cold brisk wind today. Very dull and not at all Spring like. But got to Cheam nonetheless to attend to bakery and fish-van matters. For a change, bought a small rye loaf. Very fresh, about the same size and shape as a small white bloomer and a rich brown colour. Not bad at all; much lighter than their wholemeal which is better as toast than as bread. Plus the usual fresh cod and smoked haddock.

In the course of which I learn that one of the side effects of the new rules about smoking is that the man who smokes the fish can no longer smoke in his smokery (which he owns, and of which he is the only employee), despite the smokery being full of smoke. Maybe he should just shut the door and hope for the best, or rather hope that Hastings Council have got better things to do with their money than send the smoking police around to inspect smokerys (smokes? smokeys?) in the middle of the night. Maybe they (Auntie Harman and her friends) will get around to banning smoke in the smokery in order to preserve the piscine rights of the haddocks. Or perhaps because it will no longer to be legal to run the risk of catching stomach cancer from smoked food and it having been deemed easier to control production than consumption. Perhaps they will trigger a wave of smoked haddock smuggling. A whole new illegal industry around which a whole new control industry could be erected. Job creation at its finest.