pumpkinstrokemarrow

After some years good service and then rather more years no use, the green stove has now been expelled from our living room. Chimney to the tip - perhaps the sort of thing a travellor might use - stove to the back of the garden next to our heritage iron bath (with chicken feet legs). And then there is the question of making good. Hole in the side of the living room and damaged floor where the hearth was. Outer skin of wall now half patched - doing it all in one go being beyond my rather rudimentary bricklaying skills. Also went to the bother of drilling out the yellow plastic plugs from the wall and filling the holes with mortar. Yellow plastic plugs not much good. I think they were too hard and didn't grip the surrounding masonry in quite the way one might like. But I suppose the up side is that you can get them out quite easily. Inner skin of wall awaiting patching - and this will be a test of my very rudimentary plastering skills. Damaged floor maybe tomorrow. At the time I installed the thing, thought it would be a good idea to lift the lino tiles in the middle of the hearth so that the rather thin concrete under the rather heavy fire could bond direct onto the screed under said tiles, thus reducing the chances of cracking. The catch being today that the hearth concrete on tile lifted OK, while the hearth concrete on screed took rather more work and made rather more mess. Even to exposing some pipework - which had been bedded in the screed rather than in sand. With that wonderful thing, hindsight, I think it would have been better to lay the concrete hearth straight onto the lino tiles!

The rather attractive mixed pale green tiles - about four inches square - laid onto top of the concrete came from some tile shop in Taunton and I now learn that the bond of the tiles to the tile cement is a lot stronger than the bond of tile cement to concrete - despite what looks like Unibond between. Tiles and cement came off the concrete in slabs. Fire itself from Godin via some defunct fire shop in Marylebone High Street. Concrete and so on perhaps from Travis Perkins. The oak surround - maybe 5cm by 2cm - was suprisingly easy to smash out with a crowbar. Maybe old oak recycled from old bed heads is not as strong as young.

The fire was good fun for a bit. For a while the challenge with the sprogs was to see how long one could keep it alight. The fires were given names, the first fire starting with A, the second with B and so on. I even kept a list of the names - which is now in the roof somewhere. But I do remember that E was for some ancient Greek general, perhaps Epimandus. Took quite a while to learn how to set the thing up for keeping in overnight, it taking quite a while to work out that having some ventilation in the room was a good idea. So we got through quite a lot of names in the first few weeks. I also remember being slightly nervous about matters carbon monoxide and not being very keen on people sleeping downstairs when it was on. No doubt I would be had for child abuse now.

Then came the expense. Although we were lucky enough to be very near one of the few remaining Charringtons depots, the antracite they sold - in natural lump or in unnatural pellet form - was very dear. Cost more to keep this fire going than we were spending on gas and electricity. And then we got fed up with the palaver of lighting the thing. We had opted for an install-yourself external steel external chimney rather than a brick chimney - finding out too late that while the external chimney was fine when the fire was alight, it got very cold when it was not. This meant that lighting the fire took about an hour of smoke across the garden and with a fair bit of smoke in the house. All a bit dirty and smelly. Neither BH nor neighbours too impressed.

Being a glutton for punishment then moved onto upgrading the PC. Decided that I needed to move from XP service pack 1 to XP service pack 2 and rather to my surprise found that I could do this free over the Internet. All went splendidly until the very end when it thought that a file was open and would not close down. Reduced to power down. But restarted OK and all seemed splendid, even to neither trashing the C drive nor losing favourites. But then moved on to Norton - the upgrade to which had propelled the service pack upgrade. This seemed to be a lot more fiddly, interacting in a confusing way with all the automatic updates that Windows has now started doing. After about four reboots got there and now have a very loud Norton icon on the right hand bit of the task bar. Not at all discrete. Now must write the date down in a safe place so that I am not surprised when Norton next announce that they want some more money out of me.

A small blue version of our green stove.

I worked out during yesterday that in my roll-call of television detectives I had missed two notables - Marple and Maigret - although the third with M, Morse, I had managed - so it can't be a problem with M's. I guess Marple was missed because she was a lady and I was focussing on odd male detectives who treat their side-kicks badly - who as it turned out were very much in the minority. Missing Maigret was odd as I am very much onto Simenon at the moment, both by way of autobiography and a roman dur. Maybe it was the absence of badly treated side kick which saw him off. And having now got to ten big television detectives, I suppose the actual number must be twenty or more. Clearly a popular genre.

A propos of roman dur, happened to be browsing in Harraps and find that while we have big cheeses, the French have big vegetables. And while we have big wigs - meaning much the same thing as big cheeses - the French only have old wigs, meaning old fogeys. According to Harraps anyway they don't seem to have our sort of big wig at all.

Sorry to read about the giant lobster from Lyme Bay the other day. A pity that the young lady who discovered a giant lobster couldn't just leave the thing down there to grow even older. She had to bring it up for display, and when the local aquarium did not want it, had it boiled up for grub. One might have thought that in this digital age she could have captured it for her Facebook entry on her super-dooper underwater digital camera without needing to capture it for real.

Took what turned out to be a journey into the past yesterday. Train and tube to Camden Town to take a look at the post-fire market. Fire turned out to have affected rather less of the market than one might have thought from media coverage although there is plenty of other development nibbling away at the edges of the area - which I hadn't realised was from the glory days of railways and canals. Acquired two more Huxleys (my original stock having been chucked out some years ago), one of which was a collection of travel essays I have not read before. Not allowed into the round house as it was full of works of some sort, so proceeded up Haverstock Hill. Not allowed into some grand and converted town hall as the desk staff had run out of visitor passes. Continued through Belsize Park where we couldn't find a pub on the Eastern side of the road which I used to use. Maybe it has turned into one of the many food places there. Continued on to Hampstead High Street where the BH was most unimpressed by the coffee supplied by a large old pub on the Western side of the road. Complete with milk which seemed to have lumps of yoghourt in it - the milk still being quite palatable, but not in the coffee. A pub which went in for what looked like rather coarse lady artistes on weekend evenings. On to the Flask - through a book shop where the Huxleys were half the price of those in Camden Lock - where they went in for open mike sessions on weekend evenings - a phrase I had only recently become acquainted with. A Youngs house with much better beer. Having got used to Newcastle Brown at TB, spurned the Youngs Ordinary at 3.8% or something and went for the special at 4.5% - which I liked better than I remembered. Through what seemed to be a very posh part of town - complete with a well donated in 1689 or so by some Earl to the poor of the parish and the site of a pump house (I had not realised that Hampstead was a spa town at one point) and onto the Heath, where we have not been for a very long time.

Down the Western edge of the Heath, through Hampstead Ponds, down onto Parliament Hill Fields to a very splendid childrens' playground and paddling pool. Past a very large and splendid red mattress kite. Over the bridge and into what is still darkest Kentish Town. Found a huge Catholic church - St Dominic's Priory. Fancy chapel to the side at the altar end. Iron walkway around the top of the nave at aisle height. All most impressive, must go there again having read the blurb on their web site (http://www.op-london.org/index.html). And after a bit of fiddling about I learn from Wiki that the letters OP after a name stand for 'Ordo Praedicatorum', a not much used name for the Domincan Order.

Into a pub where we found a lady whose daughter went to the school where the BH used to teach 35 years ago. So onto the school - big, three storey red brick affair - which had not changed much apart from various accretions to the playground. And then onto what used to be a giant boozer on Kentish Town Road, The Oxford, which is now a middle sized boozer with a gastro bit at the back. So we indulged in gastro, watered down with Hook Norton. Not bad at all. And they were redeeemed from being a gastro pub by supplying a book of matches with the bill.

Yet another place to which we must pay another visit soon.

We had a combined senior moment the other day. Which consisted of my cooking some new potatoes from Mr S. in preparation for a potato salad, in the evening. Then the BH cooking the same potatoes again the following morning. About 15 minutes on each occasion. One odd thing was that the twice cooked new potatoes were fine. The second odd thing was that they seemed to be the same as the once cooked new potatoes - a second bag, bought on the same occasion - as we had yesterday. Maybe the trick on the first occasion was that they cooled off between the cookings. So the next task is to cook them for 30 minutes and see what happens. Third odd thing, I have never managed to grow new potatoes. I put the new potato seed in the ground, and while they do not come out as old potatoes they do not taste like the new potatoes my father grew when I was a child. Those were so flavourful (veggy, ecological and environmental, organic, dusted down by dusky maidens by the light of the moon), that they were happily eaten, still warm, by themselves. Nothing I have ever grown has met that test.

Potato salad made with coarsely chopped new potatoes, finely chopped old onions and lashings of full strength salad cream from Heinz. None of this slimming gear or mayo thank you.

Failry heavy consumption of green peas at the moment, soup made of same being my latest discovery. Easiest thing in the world. Simmer peas for an hour or so. Fry some bacon and onions in butter. Add into peas. Simmer for a few more minutes and serve. I get through about 250 grams of peas at a time on this basis. Maybe they are less fattening than orange lentils.

And last night our other, newly discovered recipe. E-number pie (see above) made with a couple of rump steaks from Mr S - which cost rather less than the same amount of stewing steak from Cheam. Very good - although I think stewing steak - chuck steak rather than silverside - is actually better for this sort of thing that the better cuts. All that gristle and connective tissue dissolving into the E-number sauce (aka mushroom sauce) makes for a better gravy.

A propos of Aldous Huxley been pondering about niceness, as a concept applied to persons. From which I slid sideways to the various television detectives that I know about: Morse, Dalgleish, Poirot, Linley, Barnaby, Wexford, Frost and Holmes; the staples of ITV3 (which has become my favourite channel). Of the eight, all are men. Only two (or sometimes three) have wives, both comfortable middle aged types, not in the least threatening to the lady spectatorship. Six have male sidekicks, three of which are serially abused. Five have bad habits: Morse can be very rude, Frost has bad table manners (which really irritate BH), Holmes takes illegal drugs, Linley is a Henry and Poirot takes a semi-legal drug (nicotine). While all eight are decent chaps, fit to rescue any deserving member of the public from the jaws of death and destruction, only the remaining three might be described as nice. Which on this basis is a concept which reduces to a rather negative blandness. Which leads one to the thought that niceness is no more a pre-requisite for success for a television detective than it is in other fields of endeavour. Indeed, it might be a positive handicap. One gets much more fun out of playing the bad guy, and one gets much more fun out of watching the bad guy, than the good guy. Edmund (in Lear) in more fun than Edgar and the Sherriff of Nottingham is much more fun that the dull Robin (Kevin Costner. Although this might have something to do with native as well as role dullness). At which point one might dive off into the nature of evil but I have not taken on enough of the good stuff for that to be a runner quite yet.

Been thinking about the business of being able to read words with jumbled interiors (see above). Observation 1: the brain holds information about words we know about. So there is an entry, for example, for the word 'cow'. Observation 2: when the brain sees the word 'cow', it accesses that entry. So the question is, how does it find that entry? A computer might simply search all its entries until it finds a match - computers being quite good at questions like: does 'abd' equal 'abc'? And tasks like: search this list until you find 'abd'. This computer having avoided the issue of turning a picture of 'abd' into the text of 'abd'. If the number of entries gets large it might go to the bother of having an index. So if the string we are interested in starts with an 'r', then search the entries for that letter, rather than searching all the entries. Such a wheeze usually depends on having all the entries for r in the same place, differant from that for entries for s. Observation 3: on the evidence of our anecdote, the brain knows about first letters, last letters and possibly length. Perhaps it indexes its entries by these attributes. So the picture of the word comes in. Maybe length is the easiest attribute so that is the first cut. Then it goes to first letter - again easier to get at than an intermediate letter - and that is the second cut. And so on. Maybe it pulls out the intermediate letters in parallel, pushing through the decision tree at the letters pop out, the easier to identify popping out first. This would explain why it does not care about order. Observation 4: it can't depend much on the shape of the word as jumbling the letters will jumble the shape. So the algorithm must go for letters.

Having missed the downstairs exhibition at the National Gallery by two days, went to have a peek at 'Bacchus and Ariadne' instead, our having had a copy for many years now. First item, a lot bigger than I remembered. About twice the size in fact - or four times the area. Second item, it looked much squarer than I remembered. Although when we got home our copy was the same shape as the real thing. Third item, the composition looked much more spacious - and much better for it. Without having the two side by side, can't be sure why this was, but the framer having framed over the outer half inch of the print might be the answer - although not clear why he would have done such a thing. Copies usually come with a generous margin. Fourth item, I always forget how much of the quality of the colour is lost in a copy. Maybe this is to do with colour being a more complicated quantity than a number on a scale. Colour built up with layers of semi-transparent paint with a white ground (assuming that is how this picture was built) is not going to be the same as a shade built up with coloured dots. Although that said, I do not have much of a clue as to how the colour in a copy applied to hardboard thirty years ago would have been built up. Colour lithography? Digital not invented at that time. Picking up an earlier thought, must see if we can get a decent jig-saw of this picture. How much would I learn about a picture which has been part of the furniture - and much looked at - for a long time from such a process?

The dead badger had been removed by yesterday but there was still a powerful smell. Presumably the thing had just been chucked into the hedge by the side of the road.

But the good news is that Dunwoody junior got trounced at Crewe. I might be old labour but I do not like hereditary offices.

More good news on the DIY front. Two successful bits of fence mending at very modest cost. Although nearly managed to brain myself collecting the new rail for the second bit. Thought that it would be a good idea to fetch the 3 metre bit of 2 by 3 to make the rail from Champions, who are a couple of miles away, on the bicycle. Hang it over the shoulder and set off on the pavement, thinking that having the rail swinging ponderously around in the road - in the way that such things do, despite the restraining rope - maybe not too bright. Then down past the common and all was going well until I noticed some overhanging tree. All set to brush it aside when I realised that the overhanging tree contained a rather serious branch at about scalp height. Might have done some serious damage had I not ducked rather than brushed. Clearly getting too old for such stunts.

And then last week set off with the intention of doing the Chessington circuit which involves turning right off the Leatherhead Road towards Chessington North railway station and onto Ewell West. Instead of which I manage to sail straight across the roundabout concerned presumably registering it well enough to get across it in one peice but without registering it in the route planning part. As I go through Hook start to wonder where the roundabout was and when I get to the A3 decide that I must of missed it and turn around. A bit like the times when one manages to drive many miles and suddenly realise that you cannot remember a thing about it. As if the driving is being managed in some disposable compartment of the brain while some other compartment is getting on with the something else that you can remember. Head peice clearly a tricky operation.

Another work dream the other day. It seems that I had crossed the great divide and become an IT contractor selling something to the governement. In this case the procurement was being run from the government side by a rather pedantic contractor with whom I had worked in the past. Infuriated to find that I was now at the receiving end of his pedantry and could do nothing about it - if I wanted to have any chance of getting the bit of business that was. And to make things worse, it turned out that I didn't have any chance because I was a one-man company and all the other contenders were all large IT service companies with oodles of staff and track record. Didn't make the first cut.

It seems that the text in the image in the previous posting can be read without much trouble by about half the population. Some bright spark has discovered that about half of human brains are a bit lazy: they do not care about the order of the letters in a word between but not including the first and the last, provided that they are all there and that there are no extras. Put another way, that the middle part of the word you are looking at is a permutation of the middle part of the word intended. Presumably this says something about how a word is processed but I am not sure what. I shall ponder further.

Something of a stink on the way to the baker today, in the form of a dead, somewhat mashed badger on the edge of the road. Pretty good stink considering that it was fairly cool and early and the thing was in the shade. Maybe it was done on Sunday on Monday, neither of which, as it happened, were baker days. Would not have expected a badger so far into town; presumably it had wandered off some wild part of Nonsuch Park we do not know about - where, as it happened, we took a stroll a few days ago. Excellent place with lots of mature trees and lots of open grass, where they do the trick of not mowing all the grass, just the paths, so one gets the benefit of the long grass and the various flowers in it. A bit more interesting than mown grass if not so hot for picnics. Formal garden part looking a bit run down - which is a shame as it will take a lot of work to bring it back up to standard. Presumably a bit on hold while the various local authorities involved make up their minds what to do with the building. If it was up to me and I had a few million to spare, I would knock the existing house down. It is old enough to be very expensive to run, small enough not to be much use as a conference centre or a hotel and not very pretty. So knock it down and build a small pavilion with a cafe, toilets and maybe the odd function room. Outdoor seating in shade and in sun. Could all be very nice. But I expect, apart from the authorities enjoying squabbling with each other about who is in charge, the thing is a listed building. How does one appeal against such a status?

Interested to read that Harrods finds it worth its while to pay their local council £750,000 for permission to keep their out-door cafe open for an hour longer each evening in the summer. Presumably the owners' compatriots do not appreciate the funny English rules about smoking and need somewhere where they can smoke at the same time as whacking down the finest Harrodian buns and pastries. I wonder what their Chelsea buns are like? Do they get the balance between liquid sugar and cinnamon right? And what did the original buns use, before liquid sugar was invented? Did the bakers bother to make their own or did they do something else? Clues to be found at http://www.sugar.org/ - which appears to be a site run by a sugar manufacturers trade organisation - although one has to look closer than I did to be sure about this. All a bit dishonest really. Sites should say loud and clear where they are coming from.

Interested to hear last week that the director of a theatrical play brings the thing to the boil, as it were, and then bows out. Day to day operations are left to the stage manager - whom I have always (possibly quite wrongly) regarded as a lower form of luvvy life. I suppose this fits with the practise in other industries where the more expensive construction crew hands the construction over to the less expensive maintenance crew. Certainly fits in with what a composer does: once he has published his master work - and taken his fees - he no longer has any say about what people do with it. If the conductor does a bit of judicious cutting, tweaks the directions to the players or corrects a few wonky passages, that is up to the conductor. Unless the composer is such a power in the industry he can publish with strings attached? What about a dead one? Or an out of copyright one? Can a musical estate get difficult about bad performances? A painter certainly can't prescribe how people look at his work. Or what they say about it, however naff said people might be. But going back to the play, one might think that a performance could drift quite a bit over time - not necessarily for better or worse, but to become differant in a way that might bother either or both of director and author. Does the company of players have regular service review sessions in the way that the service company for a computer system might? Does the company take itself off for a luvv-in (far worse, one imagines, than the hug-ins favoured by management consultants and personnel types) in some grand sea-side hotel so that they can do a drains-up on how the show and the showers are getting on? Would either the director or author be allowed to come? I guess we will have to wait until one of the television companies does a theatrical soap to give us a break from hospital and police soaps (aka simple object access protocol. I had thought that the TV sort of soap was another acronym but according to wiki, the soap here just refers to the former sponsorhip of popular episodic radio programmes by soap companies) to find out.

Hawthorne now duly pruned, with a slightly altered configuration. Not quite a pudding tree yet, but we are getting there. Prunings rather sticky - presumably the waste products of micro bugs. Macro bugs represented by a number of small snails - with black and white stripey shells about a centimetre across.

Space for prunings in back garden now rather occupied with the several cubic metres of minced willow tree we acquired last week. May be forced into brown wheely bin land yet. But must take care: the DT reports a scuffle developing between an old gentleman who wanted to put cabbage stalks in his brown wheely bin and the Polish environmental bin service agent who claimed that cabbage stalks were not garden waste and were therefore not allowed in the brown bin. All this does have the good side of giving the service agent something to be bossy about. We all like our day in the sun.

The DT has also been reporting a variety of rather officious official interventions. There was the disabled person who was ticketted because their disabled person sticker was indeed displayed under their windscreen, but upsidedown so it did not count. There was the dad in Ohio who was sent to jail because his son (who was living with his mother rather than his father at the time) failed some maths test. And then we have the do-gooders spending lots of our charitable donations putting up ugly posters all over the place. The world is quite ugly enough without adding to the ugliness gratuitously. The ones I find particularly irritating are those from the heart people telling us to dial 999 if we have chest pains. And the DT tells us that we are about to have a rash of posters teaching us how to count units in a pint of beer. Attacking us is easy (if not very effective). Attacking the supply side would be far too tricky: that might upset the all powerful supermarket chains. It is their divine right to sell vast quantities of cheap booze to all comers at all times of day and night.

All this hawthorne appears to have prompted an allotment dream, which seemed to take place at the allotment I had thirty years ago. At the start of the dream it seems that I had murdered someone - an unknown middle aged man - who was now lying on the allotment covered in a cloth or sheet of some sort. The problem was how to bury the chap having turned up with an inch bar rather than a spade - and with various allotment trusties hanging around, likely to take an interest in the proceedings. What brought this one on? Don't usually have murders. Perhaps an overdose of Inspector Morse? And don't see where wish fullfilment comes into it.

Going off on another tack, the TLS claimed last week that a sculptor called Antony Gormley is the most admired sculptor in the land - which must be another one that passed me by. So the man (responsible for the angel of the north) has a gift for self promotion and likes to stick up casts of himself all over London and this makes him a renowned sculptor? But I suppose I just have to accept that what used to be called the visual arts have been reduced to stunts and self-promotion. Self-promotion has, of course, always been a part of the game. But it used to be understood that one ought to be promoting something in addition to and separate from oneself.

I assume some other gent. of the same cut (or perhaps ilk) is responsible for the two large and ugly graffiti now decorating the front of the Tate Modern. I wonder how much Arts Council money was spent on paint and cherry-pickers and whathaveyou? Not to mention the essential event party, my invitation to which mysteriously went astray. £20,000? One could have harrassed at least 100 old gentlemen about the contents of their brown wheely bins for that sort of money. Or killed maybe 23,617 MRSA bugs in St Helier hospital.

Following the discussion of areas on 21st April, have now moved into times, my classical dictionary having happened to fall open on an interesting discussion of same. All reasonably straightforward, after the event. I suppose I had never thought about it before.

So we have three natual units of time - the solar day, the lunar month and the solar year, with the year being important for agricultural purposes and with these three quanities being incommensurate, causing the ancients much grief. So a month is about 29.5 days and a year is about 365.25 days. The number of months in the year was a bit of a problem, solved in various ways in the Old World by having various numbers of extra months of various lengths. The famous reform of Julius Caesar to a system of 12 roughly equal months, rather longer than lunar months, with occasional leap years was based on an Egyptian reform which dated at least as far back as 238BC. A good system for those with pencil and paper, but not so good for those without.

Just to be differant, in the New World, the Mexicans went it for a much more complicated arrangement with one sort of year being made up of 20 13 day weeks (the 260 days being thought to be the product of some solar recession phenomenum) and the other sort being our sort. The interaction of the two sorts of year resulted in a 52 our-year cycle to which they attached much importance. Presumably people who understood all this in a largely innumerate soiciety also had much importance.

Hours and weeks are rather arbitary divisions of days and months and only settled down relatively recently. Helped along by both Jews and then Christians going for a festival every seventh day, seven being a well known number of power. Other arbitary decisions were deciding at what point in the day counted as the start of a new day, deciding at what point in the solar year to have the new year and deciding when to start counting years from. An interesting factlet on this last being that historians go straight from 1BC to 1AD whereas astonomers like to have a 0AD in the middle. Maybe their sums work better that way.

A useful by-product of all this was the solution of the Common Prayer Book puzzle which has been outstanding for some time. What on earth do the annotations in the calendar at the front mean? The things like "11 Cal." and "Pr. Id.". I now know this derives from the Greeks dividing their variable length months into three unequal parts. Very roughly, new moon (kalendae) to nine days before full moon (nonae), from nine days before full moon to full moon (idus) and from full moon to new moon. In the English Church calendar, days are numbered backwards from these three points, on the fudge that our months are actually lunar months. So the first of the month is always "Cal." and the 26th of the month might be "7 Cal.", that is 7 days before the full moon. Or it might be 6, depending on the number of days in the month. Early in the month we have "Non.", the day before is "Pr. Non." and the day after is "8 Id.". And the day after that "7 Id.". All perfectly straightforward when you get the hang of it. I suppose the Church ran with all this as part of accommodating the pagan arrangements they were superseding - or onto which they were superimposing their own.

Innumerate takes me onto illiterate and SATs. My mother claimed - on the basis of long experience in secondary (rather than primary) schools - that around 10% of people will have trouble reading however hard you work at it. More recently I have read that maybe 20% of people in this country cannot read very well, despite our having had universal education for a long time. So how does this fit in with SATs which are supposed to be on an inexorable upward trend? It is a pity that in our guilt and performance indicator ridden age, things like SATs, which are probably quite useful tools for monitoring the progress of individuals (I believe the story that things like SATs are quite good predictors of life-time outcomes), seem to have become more important as tools with which to beat bog-standard schools with. More importantly, if the 10% is true, what is best done about it? Would we do better to try and pretend that it was not, so as not to hurt peoples' feelings? Or should we call a spade a spade and be thinking more constructively about how the 10% might be better occupied than sitting in a class room doing A-levels in tourism and photography?

Now time to trim the hawthorne.

Second visit last night, this time with BH. A dull, cool evening but we did have seats in the front row and we did not have a column. Less helicopters than last time, but about the same number of aeroplanes. Audience in the pit young and a lot of them appeared to be paying more attention to each other than to the play. Also an irritating tendency to laugh at the wrong places. BH thought that this was really nervous adolescent sniggering at something vaguely threatening but not understood. Slightly put out by the smell of pies from said pit - the idea being, it seems, to promote authentic slovenly behaviour from the groundlings. It will take a few more visits to get used to it. Kent and Gloucester remained unconvincing as old comrades in arms of the king. As noted last time, more like retired grocers.

Noticed some differant emphases and readings. For example, in the use of the word base by Edmund - which brought to mind the use of the same word in Richard II - which I remember, it being my O-level text. OED gives several pages to base and also explains that any connection with Edmund's bastardy is accidental. It seems that bastard is a conflation of 'bast' - a mule saddle also used as a bed by muleteers - and the perjorative suffix 'ard'. It seems that muleteers in antiquity were well known for their ex-wedlock generative powers, giving rise to the old French bastard, now corrupted to the new French batard. Perhaps with the growth of the middle classes and social mobility generally, the posh of the early seventeenth century were very concerned not to be thought base so the word carried a lot of emotional baggage. From whence it's cropping up in plays.

All of which led to pondering on a new MPhil topic on my way from Cheam today. By Lear's day, in England anyway, all generals were either kings or senior aristos: that is what they were for. The separate concept of a general did not really exist - in a way it had done in Roman times. Presumably the concept came back with the rise of the mid-century professional armies - and came to maturity when sucessful generals like Marlborough became dukes because they were good generals, not generals because they were good dukes. I am sure one could spin much out of this.

Talking of which, noticed two pieces in the DT recently which each managed to spin a very little information out over half a page. One was about trees and one was about diet and one suspects that both were based on reading the first paragraph of an entry in Wikipedia or of some leaflet from Ag&Fish. Quite a useful skill for a journalist. Sprog 2 tells me that the density of facts in the Financial Times is much higher, making it a poor read when sitting in the train having been in the pub for hours.

Be all that as it may, I think the review of Lear in this week's TLS is about where I am on that subject. I will try again in a month or so - which will be a first time that I have been to the same show more than twice. Films, of course, is rather differant. I imagine that I have been to, or at least seen, lots of films more than two times. Is it just that films are cheaper and easier?

Yesterday's Guardian had a reasonably sensible peice about how poverty and inequality ought to move up the agenda while promoting the culture and diversity of ethnic minorities (a new acronym for which being BME. B for black rather than brown) should move down. But I resent remarks about 'UK was steeped in a racist colonial history that ascribed zero value to Asian or African cultures'. While our record was not too good by today's standards, it remains true that many of these racist colonisers were very cultured people who did a great deal to find out and write about the cultures of these colonies. I dare say most of what we know about the culture of those colonies up to the end of the colonial era is a result of their efforts. Maybe I should find out what the Barrow Cadbury Trust gets up to - the author of the offending peice being its CEO. He ought to know that while whites bashing whites (verbally or in writing that is) is OK and blacks bashing blacks is OK, whites bashing blacks or blacks bashing whites is generally thought to be impolite, politically incorrect or racist.

The same issue also tells me that Dunwoody junior is contesting her late mother's parliamentary seat. Which gave Cameron the opportunity to remark that while he was content to have a hereditary monarchy, he thought that we had got beyond that as far as the governing classes were concerned. Now while he may not be the best person to cast stones of this sort, I do not care for political families. There ought to be a self-denying ordinance which says that if one's parent was a political big-cheese, one goes in for something else. Something of the same sort happened here when an outgoing councillor put up his son for his seat. I think he got trounced. Quite right too.

Last week's TLS had a slightly depressing peice about how the Jews have largely been written out of (for want of a better word) what used to be part of Galicia and is now the southwestern part of the Ukraine. The reviewer offers the excuse that the Ukraine is such a new and uncertain entity as a country that they do not have the energy to accommodate diversity - even in the record. Peering at my fine Polish atlas - produced for Permagon in 1968 by the Polish Army Topographical Service and which has rather better coverage of central Europe than one would expect from, say, the Britannica Atlas - I find that Galicia - which included Cracow - was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire prior to the first war and was shared out between Poland and USSR (as it was about to become) afterwards. Also that Germany has lost maybe a quarter of what it had at the start of the same first war. An area perhaps equal to half that of England. But as the two-time losers they had to buckle down and get over it - we hear nothing much about it now.

A possibly Polish trait is the inclusion of coats of arms and flags on the lead page for each country.

Found this very proper activity at http://oldradie.blogspot.com/ . It appears to be a photograph taken of the same scene every day of the year, maybe with the intention of doing every day every year. Is there a fixed emplacement for the camera? What about time of day? I think I would arrange a site like this a little differantly, to make more of the changes with the time of day and with the seasons, but the idea is good.

Freud tells that all dreams express a wish, possibly a wish which we do not let see the light of day. He gets quite pedantic about it, insisting that all dreams do this. Without being convinced by the all part of this, I did, for once, have such a dream last night. No doubt at all that the dream expressed a now unsatisfiable - if entirely foolish and fantastic - wish. But the content will remain private, having been relegated to the dream zone for a reason!

Another less private wish is that for a new sofa, our Bridgecraft now showing its thirty odd years. Now prompted by an advertisement in the DT to send off for a brochure from what I take to be the successor company at http://www.valebridgecraft.co.uk. Will we be stumping up the £5,000 or so they threaten to charge us for a replacement or will we be trawling E-bay? Sprog 1 alleges that there are plenty of good sofas out there being discarded by those who can afford to change their furniture with their shifting moods and tastes, or perhaps those of Womens' Realm or Vogue or whatever. And one can even ask E-bay to tell one about just those within 1000 metres or whatever one's sofa wheeling range is. Not too hilly around here so a kilometre might be OK - although I suppose that from BH's point of view, being seen wheeling a new-to-us sofa about the streets might rather detract from the newness.

Having got a result from Shippam's paste, moved onto the gas people last week, sending them an email through the 'contact us' part of their customer web site. First email failed at the submit point, second one got through and resulted in an acknowledgement with a reference number and expected time to reply. So far so good. Substantive reply turned up a little out of time. Polite, did not answer the two questions that I had asked and declined to vary my monthly payment - of some £80 - which I had thought was rather a lot. I dare say that they are right and that given that the account being more or less in balance at the end of the high cost winter period was offset by the recent price rises, the monthly amount is about right. But it would have been nice had they bothered to answer the questions I asked. Perhaps they should put a health warning on their 'contact us' page saying that while they endeavour to reply to all questions, their response staff are instructed not to spend more minutes on the reply than half the square root of the monthly payment in pounds - this being in my case about 4.5 minutes, mental arithmetic permitting. Including breaks, so one needs to deduct an allowance for making tea, quality time with colleagues, training time, Internet shopping, comforts breaks, random checks by supervisors and what-not. Say 20%. The 4 minutes remaining would have comfortably enough for the responder to check the amount of my monthly payment and to make minor adjustments to customer brush off number 3 before sending it on to me.

Maybe I am going to have to play the tiresome game of shopping around. Bring back trustworthy nationalised monopolies for utilities! Or am I living on another planet?

Hopefully have now weeded out all the Palestians from the previous post. A word which said sounds like something out of 'Star Trek'.

Further evidence of declining hearing at the plumbers a few days ago. Woke up to find that the toilet no longer flushed. Took it apart to find that the plastic washer which sits on a plastic grid and which lifts up to get the syphon going, was in a bit of a state. Presumably it gets brittle after a while. Retreive another syphon unit from the garage which turns out to be the same design but with a differant size washer. So off to the plumbers' merchant behind Mr S. Ah sezzee. Yes, these things come in lots of differant sizes. Not sure if we have got this one. What you need is a buildersec. Then you can make your own. What sezzeye. Buildersec sezzee. Eventually it dawns on me that what he is on about is a builder's sack. One of those stout white plastic affairs using for carting off rubble and what have you. Having got onto the same wavelength, he explains that all I have to do is cut around the old one and that will do fine.

As it happens, I had such a sack at home and so proceeded to cut around the old one as directed. Cutting the hole so that the thing fitted onto the placing lugs mildly fiddly but they did not seem to be too fussy. Trimmed the thing to be about a millimetre proud of the plastic grid and we are now in full flush. The most successful bit of DIY plumbing for a long time. And decent of the shop to prompt me to it, rather than just selling me another one.

Posting being disturbed by great clonks shaking the house as the neighbouring willow tree comes down. One forgets how a lump of falling tree can shake the ground. This once handsome tree, which was being eaten alive by some kind of beetle, has been the subject of much angst about heave. Is taking it down safe? Is not taking it down safe (there being a very small chance that lumps might have fallen off unaided and brained someone. Something of an issue around here as a child was killed a few years ago in just this way)? The collective view seems to be that, taking everything into account, that damaging heave was unlikely. Let us hope that we are right. In the meantime, we are now the proud possessors of several cubic metres of minced tree - the product of a natty red and yellow contraption on tracks which was chugged into the next door garden (at some cost to the frame of the garden gate). A garden, the lawn of which is going to suffer from interesting movement over the next ten years or so as the roots die and rot away. Presumably, also, a good line in fairy rings for years after that. The bane of BH's lawn life.

Minced tree, when fresh, has a very (originally keyed as 'various' to rhyme with 'carious') curious feel to it. Warm, lumpy and damp. Not quite like anything else I can think of. Let us hope that it does go in for spontaneous combustion when spread out. I would think that in heap form it might well.

Rather moved by a TLS story last week. It seems that at the height of the seige of Leningrad, the Soviets decided to go in for a state performance of the newly written Leningrad symphony on the spot. A propaganda stunt to revive flagging spirits. Had the score flown into the beleaguered city, musicians were withdrawn from the front to play it. Loudspeakers set up to broadcast the thing, live, across no-mans' land. Germans mounting attacks to try and stop it. I wonder what sort of music we would choose if such a circumstance were to arise now? Something by the Rolling Stones?

This prompted by the various ceremonies to mark the land-grab of 1948. The impression is given that the objective is to complete the grab by driving out the Palestinians and getting the rest of the West Bank. According to a writer in the Independant, at least one West Bank settlement - aka fortified village on a hill top somewhere - presumably not being connected to proper drains - sees fit to pump its sewage onto the neighbouring Palestinian land, thus contaminating their water supplies. She also reports that, having reported this once, she was the recipient of a good deal of unpleasant mail. It seems that Jews outside Israel can be a good deal more Zionist than those inside, where sensible press discussion of the treatment of Palestinians is normal - although not yet translated into sensible treatment.

I wonder that arrangements are being made for fair sharing of the water from the Jordan - which presumably rises in the Lebanon or Syria. I seem to recall that Israeli farming and lifestyle is burning up the aquifers (rather as they are in Californnia. Growing lettuces in the desert maybe not too clever in this eco-sensitive age) and that water rights will, one day, become a big deal. Presumably hard-core response would be deemed appropriate if the owners of the head waters decided to build a dam on the border.

Depressing how so much can turn on the fate of a relatively small number of people. As in Norther Ireland, the amount of trouble is out of all proportion to the numbers - the exact size of which is, however, reasonably contentious. So while not disputing that there were a lot more Palestinians than Jews in Palestine in 1948, it seems that the numbers of both Arabs and Jews in the coastal strip grew rapidly between the two wars, with Mandate area industrialisation (perhaps the Mandate was not all bad) sucking in lots of Arab immigrants from the surrounding countries which, along with the Mandate, had been created after the First World War from what had been the Ottoman Empire and which, hitherto, had been rather richer than Palestine. Giving rise to the specious argument that the Arabs had no more right to Palestine than the Jews, having arrived there at about the same time.

On a slightly more cheerful note, the TLS reports that some Palestinian energies - being denied the outlets available to first class citizens - have been channelled into football, this being part of the reconstruction by the winning side after the 1948 war of independance. The Palestinians being football nuts in consequence. Even to the point of having multi racial football teams. I am reminded of the sports clubs in dying days of the Austrian Empire which became the form of national expression permitted to minorities. Overt political activity was forbidden but they could hardly forbid people joining sports clubs. Up the Sokols! I am also reminded of being told by an old comrade (who was married, as it happens, to a concentration camp survivor), many years ago, how saddened he had been when the Israeli communist party split into Jewish and Arab wings. It seems that the party had been one of the last political organisations so to do.

Yesterday was a day for urban walk. From Waterloo East to the Globe theatre, then back to Waterloo, the last section along the beach, where we came across the first sand castles I have ever seen on the foreshore below the Festival Hall. Serious bunch with their own web site (http://www.dirtybeach.tv/). A first also for the tv domain name which I had not come across before. I assumed that tv was for TV but Mr G tells me otherwise - tv for Tuvalu, an island in the South Pacific somewhere which has been colonised by media flavoured activity. Sand felt a bit gritty to me for serious sand sculpture but these chaps seemed to be doing OK. Maybe I will assay a drip castle one day.

Continued West through various entertainments (which could become tiresome if one saw too much of them. And I wish they would get rid of the public space Dali stuff. He does not wear at all well) to the St George's Wharf development - which seemed much grander and impressive from the inside, along the river walk, than it does from Vauxhall bridge. I wonder how well all that expensive red stone will wear? Is it real or is it some composite shipped in from China? Pushed on towards Battersea Park, through a nest of alternative life style types living in barges - some of which were the cargo sort rather than the living sort. Had to leave the river to get around various industrial wrecks in and around the power station - which must be the last vestige of pre-war industry in this part of London. Got a new view of the power station over a wall. Again, actually looked quite impressive, sticking up in the middle of a swathe of cleared land. More so than from at a distance. Might even revise my view that they might as well knock the thing down as have it stand empty for another fifty years!

Finally made it to the park which was in very fine fettle. Lots of people, very jolly. Did not seem quite as poseur-full as Hyde Park. Just people out on a nice day, wer'n't there to show off particularly - although there was some interesting clothing. Panini in the cafe - the panini being rather better than I remembered. Good texture and flavour. But then the cafe staff appeared to be Italian so perhaps they knew. And finally made it to Clapham Junction, it having decided not to have a thunderstorm, despite getting hit by some very large rain drops, often an augury of much worse to follow.

Not a bad day out for £6.50 per head plus half as much again for teas. Plus the cost of our picnic - which last we noticed seemed to be very much the preserve of people our own age. Youth must prefer buying to carrying.

Came across the allegation in last week's TLS that there were Christians in China well before the battle of Hastings. It seems that Christians had been drifting East (via Persia, the Black and Caspian seas and the river Oxus) as well as West more or less from the beginning, although most of the lot going East were Nestorians - presumably one of the various heresies frowned on by Rome. One can find out more at http://www.nestorian.org/. Perhaps they are not three-in-one people. Anyway, it appears that there were two main waves, one well before Hastings and one somewhat after. With the result that a Uighur monk was travelling West to Rome from Peking at about the same time as Marco Polo was travelling East to Peking. So maybe we should be burning the Uighurs at the stake as lapsed Christians rather than treating them as common or garden pagans, fresh for baptism.

Closer to home, the hawthorne in the front garden at its peak. Better than it has been for some years with blossom laden branches cascading down from the top of the canopy - this being maybe 12 feet up. The road to Cheam has plenty of hawthorne, also all in flower, and the air is heavy with the sweet, sticky stink (or perfume, if you prefer) of the stuff. Presumably attractive to insects.

A couple of days ago, to Lear at the Globe. Good show, with a stronger second half than first half. The company included plenty of colour, so perhaps they have a very strong director of diversity. Show somewhat marred in my case by not being able to hear all of it - the result of any or all of aeroplanes overhead (including some rather thoughtless helicopters hovering overhead, presumably to give their passengers a view of the giant bus shelter at work), poor projection by younger actors, poor acoustics when straying from the cover of the canopy, a wooden column in the firing line, fading hearing and a fading brain unable to keep up with the (complicated) word of the bard. A modest dose of song and dance - including a cast collective one after the end - a trick which brought one down to earth rather neatly after the pathos of the end. Something I had not seen before. So there is a point in such terminal routines - beyond showing off the calves of the male leads. Some bits jarred - so Edgar started off as a fop and ended as a gallant knight (dressed up in black like a medieval SAS type) and Oswald rather minced. So for me, the point that Kent was an aging Henry, a bit of a thug (in a hearty and heroic way, entirely OK by the norms for Henries of the day. Bashing each other at war and bashing natives otherwise was what they were trained to. Huxley touches on the point in EIG) for whom bullying and generally mistreating servants was entirely OK - was not made strongly enough. Nor that Lear was being a real pain, in the way that people who have been powerful can be in their dotage. And Lear of the first half did not show enough of his old power. It was all peevish, soft core dotage. He might have been a retired grocer rather than a king in an age of thugs. I remember Holm as being rather stronger than Calder in that regard. Of a peice that Holm also made more of the line near of end of the skipping falchion. Overall, the first half was too soft to balance the pathos of the second. But a good show and we shall try to go again.

Waking up to the DT this morning, I think of the good old days when tired politicians in power woke up in the morning and thought sod it. The government is tired, I'm tired and the electorate are tired of me. I'll sod off to the Isle of Wight, walk the downs and let the other lot have a go. Perhaps it was never thus and politicians always clung on for dear life until painfully dislodged. But the idea that they could behave more gracefully appeals. What a nice surprise to have woken up to find that Tony had decided to take up golf, or to wake up now to find that Gordon had taken a leaf out of his hate-figure's book and taken up newts.

More prosaically, I am still confusing the Brita water filter with the kettle. I suppose they are both large white plastic objects with a vaguely similar shape. But when I am supposed to be doing something with one or the other, the brain seems to click in to the other or one, more or less at random. So this morning, fairly close to pouring water from the filter into the teapot.

Onto the new brand of green tea, with a slightly earthy taste. Very cheap from a convenience store in Crawley. £2.20 for 500 grams of the finest Lamchahar green tea, coming in little green pellets but nowhere near as explosive as the stuff called gunpowder, and with the nifty black box printed in English on one face, then German, then Arabic, then French. Not too sure about the Arabic. It is decorated with a camel which suggests that, but the script has a strong horizontal running along the writing line, that is to say beneath an a but above the tail of a y. Maybe Urdu. Certainly produce of China but could not find any clues as to where it was packaged for the purposes of corporation tax. (The Observer reported some months ago that international companies can largely choose which country in which to take which bit of tax liability. They all operate very important offices in various tax havens for these purposes).

Talking of Urdu, two snippets to report. The first was a lady on the bus talking fluently in what I assume was Pakistani - so probably Urdu. The point of interest was that she found it convenient to say times of day in English. Maybe times of day are a swine in Urdu. Maybe their clock is organised a bit differantly from ours, with the result that talking about our clock with their clock is a bit of a pain. The second was a rather younger lady walking in a Westerly direction down the Northern side of Garrett Lane. With Muslim gear on down to her waist - not the full performance, one of the lighter versions - and with a fairly short mini skirt on for the rest. One might think that a pious Muslim youth might get a bit cross about such a thing. Maybe they are not very pious in Garrett Lane.

Had a remembered dream for the first time for a while last night. Focussed on our living in a large house, partly drawn from our house in Cambridge and partly from bits and peices from yesterday, including, I think, scenes from Eyeless in Gaza. A large house, with a large sitting room with folding doors onto a large veranda overlooking the sea from some way up. The folding wooden doors - brown, varnished affairs - being rather ramshackle and being far from burglar proof. Large bolts only just reaching the rotting floor and locks not making it across the gaps between the leaves of the door. I remember thinking that this was yet another tiresome household chore that I really ought to get around to. And then there was a large spare bedroom (loosely modelled on the bedroom I occupied for much of my childhood) which I was thinking ought to be turned into my study. But very full of BH doing a very serious job of cleaning the room - serious involving piling all the contents - some valuble and fragile - to one side. Contents including the red folding picnic table which we acquired some years ago from my sister in law and which is now serving in our garage as a place to keep garage and garden things in play. Wall covering being some sort of blue carpetty material. Very heavy duty wallpaper which although rather unsightly would be far too much bother to change.

The result of literary geekery preceeds. I was quite suprised what a clear picture I got - by sorting the chapters into chronological order (the chapter headings being mostly helpful in this regard) and then asking Excel to plot chapter number. So what we get is four story lines heavily interleaved more or less throughout the book. The first is Antony up to young manhood - prep-school, university and a bit after (Mrs Amberley (Helen's mother) and the death of Brian) - the second is Helen before Antony, the third is Helen with Antony with a bit of Antony aftermath (after the dea dog) in Mexico tacked on at the end and the last is Antony's musings. The whole book spanning maybe 33 years. Having got all this this written down makes re-reading rather more intelligible than first reading. The question is, did Mr H write (first time around spelling 'right') the structure down first and write the book afterwards? Did he get such a regular pattern in his graph by accident or design? Did he write the book in chronological order? In the order printed? Did he intend for us to build a crib or are we supposed to intuit the structure? If the last, I failed. I did not notice, for example, that several chapter groups are about successive periods in the same day.

One could of course go further and do things like measure the number of pages (better still words) per unit time. Then into the number of words per charectar per unit time. An MPhil at the very least. A reasonable prize for having the tenacity to bother with such stuff.

Closer to home, we have a very spectacular cactus in flower in a large brass pot - the pot coming down to us from BH's maternal grandmother. The cactus itself is a bit nondescript with with a dome of long thin leaves, maybe eighteen inches long. There must be a proper botanical word for dome - the house cactus version of canopy for a tree - but I cannot bring it to mind. The flowers, scarlet, come on fleshy stalks springing out of the leaf, maybe 4 centimetres long. Maybe ten flowers in all at various stages of display, when fully open maybe six centimetres across and five deep, being made up of several concentric rings of half a dozen or more long thin, overlapping scarlet petals. A bunch of droopy pale stamens in the middle enclosing the pistil - assuming, that it, that I have remembered my names of parts of flowers correctly.

Yerterday to Banstead woods to see the bluebells. Some pretty white flowers which might have been wild garlic. Some very large beech trees. Also some very large and not very well hornbeams - having suddenly become sensitised to such things by having come across some much smaller but equally unhealthy specimens in Hyde Park recently. Don't recall being aware of them before. The book says widespread in Europe, but maybe that really means continental Europe. The things only having been re-introduced to the British Isles in the last century or so, having been exterminated in the last ice age. And the woodland management people don't seemed to have made it to these woods yet. Pleasantly unmessed around with - or at least not in a way that one would notice - which is a pleasant change from the eco-volunteer infested Epsom common.

Where we were today. Despite said infestation, nice to see the woods in the first flush of leaf. Going on the Star route, went past lots of the old pollarded oaks - which came in all sorts of shapes and conditions. There were some very sculptural groups and some of the dead ones were very sculptural by themselves - these last would have been worthy subject for a wood cutter or one of those arty black and white photographers who take close up pictures of interesting odds and ends on the beach. Saw some of these in the US once - very good but can't remember the name of the chap. Westin comes to mind but Google does not confirm. The hotel people dominating the results. Did come across an Ansell Adams - the right sort of arty photographer of the right sort of vintage but no sea side still lifes. Maybe it will all come back to me one day.

For some reason the abbreviation EIG brought to mind the eigen values. Once upon a time I used to know what they were.

Now finished reading this one - not too sure if I had ever read it before. That being as that as it may, an interesting book, despite being in a form I usually dislike. That is to say as a series of generally short episodes jumping backwards and forwards in time. Something I almost invariably dislike in films.

But having got to the end, started to become curious about the authorial process. Simenon claims that when he wrote Maigrets, he would write down some notes about people and places - most of which would not figure in the product - and then launch himself off. Would lose himself in the stream of writing without knowing how it was all going to end until he got there. A process which sounds not unlike of that of telling children stories which one makes up on the hoof. Once one is in the stream it just flows on a good day. On a bad day one keeps snagging logs and sandbanks and coming to a dead stop. But I do not think that Eyeless in Gaza (small prize for anyone who knows without looking where the quote came from - I certainly did not) was written like that. So I have decided to go for literary geek and do a bit of textual analysis - resulting in the unfinished Excel of the previous post. If I ever get around to logging all fifty or so chapters maybe I will better understand what is going on.

Amongst other things, Huxley, whom I imagine to have been a life-long atheist, was very concerned about how hard it is to be truly good. About how much time and energy is just wasted or, worse, wasted on being bad. Perhaps he was setting too high a standard for himself. And perhaps looking for another path was why he had so much time for DHL - despite DHL's ranting and raving - and even unto death, with Huxley and his wife being two of the few people around him at the time.

Commentary to follow.

Now had a second sighting of the interesting companion-way stepped lorry. It seems that one use of the steps is to provide a sort of pulpit for the driver to stand in while working the grab.

Stopped by an interesting farm shop on the way back from Ely, the Rectory farm shop. Now I remember the dim and distant days when farm shops were bits of barn where the otherwise unoccupied farmer's wife whacked out a few oddments of vegetables which had missed market. A convenience and gossip shop for the sturdy villages. Things have moved on now and apart from one cabbage, the contents of this shop were largely exotic. Of particular interest was the large range of bulk frozen foods. I never knew how small frozen croissants were and I had never seen frozen lumps of bubble and sqeak before. Outside, presumably partly as a pull, there was a field containing some black sheep, some white sheep, some lambs (not mixed race) and some large long legged birds, maybe emus or ostriches. I guess the business model is that one has a good bit of land mysteriously exempt from planning regulations so what better to do with it than turn it into a attraction shop with a large car park? Same path as trodden by so many nurseries en-route to becoming shops for garden furniture and Christmas decorations. But I am a little unfair, having been reminded of all this when constructing the second E-number pie (every bit as successful as the first), and using some of their potatoes. Actually packed in a bag called Rectory farm and which had not been through one of those industrial washers (see June 27 2007 or http://www.wymaengineering.co.nz/default.asp) and so had a tasteful sprinkling of the local black earth on them. Good potatoes too - a far cry from the value whites to be had from Mr S.