pumpkinstrokemarrow

I often puzzle about whether I have locked up in the 5 minutes or so after leaving the house. Usually, on checking, I find that I have. The other day however, cycling down the road, almost to TB, I decided that I could not remember locking up. I could remember locking the garage, but not the house. Cycle back to the house and find that this is indeed the case; house unlocked. Extra mile or so on the round trip to the baker. One used to talk of tying knots in one's tie to remind one of something or other, so perhaps something of the sort is needed here to encourage the fading short-term memory. Maybe one should enact an exotic key dance on the drive, if and only if one has locked the house door. The dance might be sufficiently striking to lodge in memory and one could be confident that if one had done the dance, one had locked the door.

But I think not. When computers do comparable things, like put up dialog boxes which you have to click through to confirm some potentially disastrous action, like deleting the file you have been working on for the last hour, it does not take long before you are clicking through them without even noticing them. I think the brain could easily jump straight from 'leave the house' to 'do the key dance', quietly omitting the 'lock the house' segment.

We had a void in the butter yesterday, perhaps a cubic centimetre or so. As far as I can remember, the first time such a thing has happened. I presume that butter, while sold by weight, is cut by size (the seller relying on the reliability of his equipment to maintain a sturdy relationship between volume and weight), and so, on this occasion, was a gram or so short of its 250.

This may have prompted one element in one of the three connected dreams I had this morning. The first seemed to involve a whole lot of us, some of whom I vaguely knew, sitting in a sort of natural amplitheatre on top of a grassy hill. There were some people sitting on the stage, in charge. The discussion turned to who did the weights and measures, trade descriptions things in the Roman world. I announced that there were special magistrates who looked after that sort of thing on behalf on the municipality, but was slapped down by the gents. on the stage who were very firm that such matters were looked after at a tribal level. I think, at one time at least, Rome was organised into tribes. While this was going on, I was pondering about what to do with this small cauldron of a thick gray fluid I had between my knees. About a gallon or so of the stuff. Contained various rather unpleasant bits and peices which needed to be removed before I could decently sell the stuff. How could I do this?

Abandoning the cauldron, then sneaked off down the hill, but managed to leave various possessions up the hill, which meant that I had to interupt the other two dreams to go and recover things. The hill mutating into a coastal headland in the meanwhile.

The second was set in a variation of my secondary school - although there was no-one about that I knew. There was some sort of game being played on some large chunk of the school field which involved setting out the pitch, of which there were lots, beforehand. Each pitch involving chunks of timber, netting and what-have-you. A cheerful young West Indian gent., who had had the duty for a long time, was very keen that I should take over the setting out and putting away of the timber and netting for a few days. He showed me round to the back of the school, where there was a great old collection of tumble down sheds and barns, to the barn where this stuff was kept, but not locked up. But what he could not do was supply a map or diagram of the pitches so that I should know where to set them up. All he could do was wave vaguely at the middle of the field, in which there was the odd large tree dotted about. Moved onto the third dream, or rather fragment, without resolving this knotty problem.

The third, was a variation of a dream which I have had quite a lot over the years, although not much recently. I think a relic of anxiety about aspects of the various houses we have lived in over the years. Leaking chimneys, dodgy roofs, rotten window frames, subsidence. All the sorts of things which surveyors get excited about when you are trying to sell a house. The house in this dream was a single storey affair with a masonry core but with timber outskirts or verandas, and was linked to the headland mentioned above, the house being just down, maybe a mile away, from the headland. A patch of heath in between. With much of these timber outskirts being in a very parlous state, to the point of sections of rafters crumbling away, including some over the supposedly sound masonry core. All very worrying. Could not afford or did not want to get builders in to do it. Would have to give the whole business some quality time which I could ill afford. Woke up at this point.

To close I record a factlet from a letter in the TLS, to the effect that Stalin, during the second war, was a closet prayer. There was a locked up church inside the Kremlin to which he had himself taken each afternoon for a private prayer. Which is rather odd; if not implausible, as I am reminded that it became legal to pray for Mother Russia during that war, despite the generally anti-church stance of the Party. Will I ever find the time to read a recent biography of Stalin which might through some light on the matter?

Sad to report, George King, the mixed-metal, retail supplier of Tooting appears to have gone out of business. Stock looks to have been stripped out of his shop and the closed sign up. Where I am going to go for the odd bit of stainless steel now? There must be a demand for this kind of thing but the only other shop I know of that does this sort of thing is the rather grander Mackay's of East Road, Cambridge. Good but dear. Would not have matched King on price.

Rather better news though was the high standard of road manners in the rush hour between Tooting and Epsom. Impressed with the amount of giving way going on at junctions. Perhaps commuters who drive all the time know that manners works, perhaps in contrast to the school runners and Sunday drivers I am more usually in contact with.

And furthermore, I think I can promote myself corporal from lance-corporal in the army of the geek. After wrestling with a recalcitrant USB flavoured microphone for a while, suddenly thought to try plugging it into a differant USB socket on the same PC. And then it sprang into life, not all USB sockets being equal. A trick first seen from a helpful gent. in Exminster who pulled off the same stunt with a USB flavoured digital camera.

Back at the ranch been taking another look at Hacking on 'Rewriting the Soul'. Shocked again by the sloppy standard of reasoning reported among otherwise respectable doctors and scientists - in this case, in the area of child abuse and multiple personality. It is as if the players in a fashionable field leave their brains behind when they go out onto the playing field. Incidently, a propos of the claim that child abuse (in its current sexualised sense, rather than its Victorian sense) is social-class blind, he observes that this was a convenient story for public relations reasons, when the pioneers were trying to get the subject onto our collective radar, for which there is little evidence. To me, at any rate, the story is counter-intuitive: I would have thought it far more likely that child abuse, like many other evils, will be much more common in hard pressed poor families than in comfortably off ones.

More mundanely, I was struck by a headline in the DT the other day (11/11): "Harold Wilson had Alzheimer's while in office, study says". The story below the headline was rather more modest in its claims, but I was sufficiently struck, as a keen student of senior moments, to look up the article. I rapidly find my way to something called ScienceDirect, an offshoot of Elsevier, I think these last being a Dutch academic publisher. For the small consideration of $37.49, I can download a pdf of this about to be published article, by a researcher at the University of Southampton. Which I do, to find that the article is a sensible, if rather slight review peice, the sort of thing he can probably knock off, on the back of some graduate student he is supervising, on a dull Friday afternoon. So how is the thing priced? Do Elsevier arrange for the puff in the DT and whack the price up to catch the wave of orders, then drop it back to something more sensible afterwards? Does the researcher get any of the money? Does his (presumably) full-time employer?

To return to Alzeimers, it seems that you cannot know whether someone has it for sure unless you do a postmortem examination of the brain. And while the article was not explicit, it implied that in the case of Harold Wilson no such examination was done. And I had thought that there was always a postmortem when somebody important died - in the olden days to try and ascertain whether the son and heir (or anyone else) had been trying to speed up the course of nature. Anyway, the hypothesis of the paper was that Wilson did have Alzeimers and the idea was to examine his speech to see if there were any traces there. Maybe in the future, analysis of speech could be used to give early warning of Alzeimers onset. Not sure that this is particularly useful from a medical or social point of view, but it is interesting. And yes, on the basis of a fairly limited sample of speech and some complicated statistical calculations (performed by some package, rather than by the researcher, who only had to know how to spell the name of the statistical test), there was a change in speech pattern which might have had something to do with Alzeimers. It would be worth looking a bit harder. So a weak, if entirely respectable conclusion. So the headline - which may have sunk into the factlet store of plenty of people besides myself - is quite untrue. The study says nothing of the sort claimed.

The moral of the tale is that when you see a phrase like 'recent research suggests' or 'the latest study suggests' in a newspaper, you should be careful. The main business of journalists is to fill the page with fodder that sells newspapers. A good angle or catchy headline is much more important than the quality of the foundations.

This article was also interesting for the way in that the researcher was trying to replace expensive analysis of text by people with cheap analysis of text by computers. The catch being that computers do not yet understand the text that they are analysing, and so the analysis has to be fairly simple minded. Starting with simple things like word use analysis - although there are plenty of pitfalls even here. Now while I believe that word use analysis can be used to distinguish the work of one man from that of another and to date the works of one man, it seems rather a blunt instrument to detect a degenerative disease. It might - but it would not be a surprise if it did not. I think we will have to wait until computers have been trained - as they will - to be a bit cleverer.

BH unearthed something called basa fillets from the bottom of our rather full freezer. These describe themselves as fresh water white fish from Vietnam, via that well known fish merchant, Young's. (Who describe themselves as purveyors of fish for life. Not quite clear what or which life they mean here but it sounds good). So having done our own fish stocks in, it seems that we are now doing in those of the Vietnamese, who are perhaps short of hard currency with the Chinese having muscled in on the cheap labour manufacturing scene. In any event, it was abundantly clear that the basa fillets were destined to be manufactured into a sort of kedgeree, along the lines previously noticed. That is to say, simmer fish in water - which process produced lots of white froth of the sort I usually assume to be salt. So what about this fresh water business? Remove fish and add white rice. Simmer then drain. Meanwhile cook some finely chopped onion in butter, termeric and black pepper. The termeric for colour rather than for taste. Flake the fish into the rice, stir the mixture into the fying onion, leave on low heat for 15 minutes or so, serve and eat. Apart from the fish flaking in rather an odd way, fibrous rather than flaky, quite unlike salt water white fish from the North Sea, the kedgeree was fine.

Followed later the same day by a variant on the beef strogonoff theme. Make a sauce with butter, chopped onion, chopped tomatoes and mushrooms. Cut a slice of rump steak, across the grain into peices about 1cm by 2cm by 3mm. Fry - or rather boil - the steak in a little butter. Drain off the liquid into the sauce. Meanwhile cook some white rice. Bit of green salad on the side, without any dressing. But no curly cabbage. The idea being that by not cooking the meat in the sauce it retained a more independant, steaky flavour that might have otherwise have been lost. Which it did, but it was a little dry. I think if I do this again I will stir the cooked meat into the sauce, rather than draining the liquid from the cooked meat into the sauce.

In between times, have a bit of old school nostalgia, biology variety. Thinking about all those spirogyras, amoebas, buttercups and white dead nettles which occupied so much time when O-levels were O-levels and had not been dumbed down to the bog standard. Then got to thinking about an optional small water animal which, for some reason, we did not do. But I could not bring the name of the thing to mind. Was it a nautilus? An amphi something. Perhaps an amphioxus - but on closer inspection that turned out to be a rather basic sort of fish. Not the right sort of thing at all. Then I thought maybe a hydra. Closer inspection of that revealed a whole herd of animals, including jelly fish, sea anemones and coral, known as cnidarians, radially symetrical but without the alimentary canal running from front to back. Just a single opening. Also that, with one odd exception, an animal is a cnidarian if and only if it has one or more cnida - a cnida being a greekish word for a cell sized harpoon. The odd exception is a sea slug which cheats; it aquires its cnida by eating jelly fish. The cnida of the jelly fish then migrate, in full working order, into the ruff on the back of the slug. It seems that it is very unusual for a group of animals to be defined by such a simple if-and-only-if rule.

Now the fresh water hydra is a reasonably complicated thing - a lot more complicated than a spirogyra or an amoeba. So not completely convinced that this was the missing animal. So off to the library to consult some biology text books. Where I learn that children no longer learn about spirogyra and amoebas. And the text books had a quite differant feel to that I remembered. Apart from there being a lot more pictures the content seemed to have moved on. Much less on looking at specific animals and vegetables and much more on generalised processes - such as respiration - and some on current fads such a genetics and ecology. But then a neighbour, hearing of my problem, was able to come up with an O-level biology textbook from the relevant era. Which contained amoebas, spirogyras, buttercups - and hydras. Not quite the animal that I remembered but it must be the one. And the old textbook was not as differant from the new one as I had thought, looking at the new one first. The old one had chapters on things like respiration too. Maybe the big differance did reduce to the quality of the illustrations. There were also lots of test questions, reproduced from O-level examination questions - the O&C board which I sat getting a fair look in. But how much revision would it take to get me through the examination of my day again? I suspect I would be OK on waffle, but poor on detail like the number of sepals or the organisation of the stamens of a buttercup. So maybe I would do better on a modern examination, which I suspect to be less keen on the antiquated collection of useless facts and much more into waffle...

Took a stroll past that gaunt mono-tower, formerly known as Bankside Power Station, the other evening. The tower looked very gaunt indeed, thrown up against the deep blue winter sky at night, dotted with rather dodgy looking pink-tinged white clouds scudding past. Pity that such a building should now be host to such a bunch of confidence tricksters, elephantasised egos and other dubious types. Once it used to be useful, producing electricity.

At least the giant graffiti appear to have gone from the curtain wall. While one of the names still on the roof, Rothko, was the subject of a learned peice in the TLS the other week. Impressive how many words and how many pounds can be spent on large, ragged, crimson squares on an orange ground - such squares appearing to be the master's favourite recipe. To my mind the sort of thing that hotel chains use in a desperate attempt to brighten up those long dull corridors behind their public areas. Which one has to negociate to get to one's room, trying not to get lost under the influence. Alternating with vapid water colours of a less abstract variety.

Was further impressed when I got back to Epsom, later the same evening. There was some sort of power failure at the station, affecting just the station - including all the lights all those computerised machines and screens (which might otherwise have given off some light. Think how much light a PC on the flying windows screen saver gives out in a darkened room) - but not the rails or the neighbourhood. But there was a solitary valiant guard manning the station with a megaphone and he had rustled up some sort of candle lights to put on the stairways - which are quite steep and would be a bit scary in the dark. The station is not usually manned at that time of night - despite the prevalence of fuelled-with-cheap-lager-from-supermarkets youth - so maybe he had to be summoned in special. Or maybe he stayed on beyond the end of his shift. The chap in question has worked at the same station for all the twenty years I have been using it, so maybe he is still imbued with the old fashioned virtues (and vices) of British Rail.

But not so impressed yesterday on Epsom Common. The trustees have been at it again and another chunk of woodland has bitten the dust, in the interest, it seems, of recreating some mythic former state and according to some action plan which no doubt has the seal of approval of the relevant regulator. It seems that they have got over the excitement at playing with chain saws at weekend and are now content to get contractors to do it for them. They just plot in rooms which are no longer smoke filled. It really annoys me, I think, because I don't like change. I just want the common to drift on in a timeless sort of way, without coming across the scars and mess of management activity.

I could give them a dose of their own medicine. I could, as a rate payer, complain that they have not published a risk assessment on every tree, so that I can make an informed judgement, as a person going about lawful activity on the common, as to the risk I am running walking or playing under any particular tree. A large number of which either have dead branches or which have broken-off branches lodged in them. Perhaps they should erect a post with a plastic cased risk assessment under every tree. One side of A4 only, in elderly eye friendly type. A bit unsightly, but they might give over chopping trees down for a bit while they are putting them all up.

And they might let up on dog owners while they are at it. Then we would be spared the silly sight of dog owners scooping poop in the depths of the common. At least fish, horses, badgers and deer are, it seems, exempt from these particular regulations.

Fellow Epsonians may be pleased to learn that the Epsom branch of that well known supplier of office supplies, Staples, is now tooled up for Christmas. So as well as office supplies, they also do, for the duration, Christmas decorations, Christmas biscuits and Christmas sweets. Not quite in the same league as Chessington Garden Centre, but they have made a start.

And to close, a not too impressive performance on the soup front to report. Made some green pea soup with stock made by boiling up a chicken carcase ('Taste the Differance' from Mr S.) with onions, carrots and celery. Despite the use of fine smoked streaky from Cheam, the resultant soup had a rather smooth, saucy texture with rather a sweet taste. BH was happy enough with it, but, to my mind, pea soup should have a faintly sandy texture and a faintly salty taste. So it was palatable but wrong. I think the trouble was the chicken stock with its wrong sort of fat, but I should mention that the celery was GM or something. Had stangely smooth stalks. BH claims that all sorts of bizarre celery are now available from good stores.

Started the week playing hunt the compost bucket in the kitchen. Not in the usual hole when it was time to empty the fatty water from the frying pan into it. Searched the kitchen. Into the garage in dressing gown to search the garage. Found the bucket, emptied the water into it, returned bucket to the usual hole. Then discovered that the right bucket had been sitting in the corner of the kitchen all the time, entirely visible, albeit in the wrong place. Some seconds later, situation entirely recovered.

But started to wonder what will happen when the food waste disposal regulations (2007 part 4a section xii(g)) come into force on 1 April next and all those people who live in tower blocks have to keep separate, enclosed containers for their food waste, for periodic collection by the council contractor. Will the idea be that they keep their food waste in their flats for the duration, rushing down twenty floors to place the container in the official area not more than 30 minutes before the scheduled arrival of the contractor's lorry? Or perhaps in the corridors outside their flats? Or perhaps in some waste disposal area outside? In which last case, there will clearly need to be a further contract for some vermin disposal people.

Then started to wonder whether the mania for regulation is new. I was shown a long quote once from an ancient Roman general called Suetonius, moaning about the incessant reorganisations of his part of the Roman military bureaucracy. Dickens wrote about the Circumlocution Office. Sundry other famous authors have written about the massive bureaucracies of the central and eastern powers in the 19th century. So there is evidence against. On the other hand, it is alleged that the volume of regulation in the UK, whether measured by number of pages or by weight, continues to increase. Perhaps it even continues to accelerate. One answer might be the use of sophisticated word processors which make it so much easier to produce this stuff, to some large extent without the bother of having to read it.

But another might be the age-old desire to be bossy. In the bad old days, most people of any account had plenty of opportunity to be bossy in a personal way. The head of the household - that is to say the father - bossed everybody in the household about. The deputy head could boss her daughters and the servants about. The sons could boss the daughters. The top servants could boss the bottom servants. The sprog could boss the dog. The top employee could boss the bottom employee. The capitalist could be very bossy all around. The general could boss to the extent of ordering corporal punishment all around the ranks (commissioned officers were exempt. Non commissioned and warrant officers in no mans (where should the apostrophe be? Should it be at all?) land). But now, we are awash with rights. No-one is allowed to boss anyone around anymore. We all have to be team players and be on first name terms with everybody. We have to ask school children whether they think that the lesson they had just had fitted in with their personal development plans. If we step out of line, our victim can always play one or several of the equality, diversity, equality in diversity, diversity in equality or human rights cards. So the natural urge to be bossy has been driven underground.

But for some, there is a way out. In the case of those in the lucky position so to do, they can make lots of regulations to boss people about. This is not quite as much fun as doing it face-to-face, but it is the best most of us can do these days. And one can derive vicarious satisfaction from the knowledge of that army of regulators milling around the country being officious. Maybe they even have special rooms where they can watch it live over a few tinnies (maybe even the odd substance), piped in from all those CCTV cameras which were put up for our safety and security.

Back at the ranch, a small skirmish with British Telecom. At around 12 noon yesterday, my PC announced that my broadband service had been suspended because my bill had not been paid. Now my bill has been paid by direct debit for around a year. There had been a bit of a glitch in my keeping track of this as the payment date is that of my monthly bank statement, so the payment drifts from the top of one bill to the bottom of the next, and with a bank statement lost in the post, there was a distinct possibility that something had gone astray. Didn't think much about it because British Telecom payments people have a direct debit mandate and should be able to sort out any snafu for themselves. They might even do me the courtesy, as British Gas did when something of the same sort happened, of writing to me. Instead of that, without warning my PC tells me that I am suspended and that I can either pay one telephone number, in which case I will be un-suspended within 12 hours, or phone another between the hours of 0800 and 1800 Mondays to Fridays. Not Sunday. Not wanting to make a payment outside of the direct debit which I imagined would cause great confusion, I settled for waiting until Monday. Then started to realise how many of my affairs are locked into the Internet. I could not, for example, check my British Telecom account. Or my bank. Or anything much else. Much grinding of remaining teeth.

But, by Monday morning (not having bothered to try again in the interval. After all, a suspension is a suspension), I try the call centre promptly at 0805 to be told that, sadly, the call centre is closed. Then try the PC again to get the suspension message with the phone numbers and times of the cell centre back again, just in case I had written them down incorrectly. Lo and behold, broadband service back again and no suspension message with the phone number. But check bank account and direct debit alive and well. Last payment last month as scheduled. Check British Telecom account and while it looked OK, there did not appear to by any way to find out what direct debit payments one had made or not made. The relevant bit of this complicated site was geared around bills and direct debit mandates, not actual payments. Try the telephone number I had been given on Sunday before and after 0900, to be told that British Telecom remained very sorry but that this call centre remained closed. So we seem to be stuck. Will I ever know why my expensive and fully paid up broadband service was so arbitarily suspended?

Was there some computer snafu at the British Telecom end and they have turned their call centre off until the zillions of people affected calm down?

Should point out that this is only the second or third time in two or three years that this broadband service has misbehaved. Other people have much worse horror stories.

Franklin been missing for the last couple of days. Is it the weather - woke up to snow this morning - or is it our complete failure to provide refreshments? Failure to respond to his making calves' eyes at the refridgerator?

However, there is some news about the aspidistra, that is to say the one that started its life as a bit broken off from one in Cambridge. Not quite sure what the gardeners' term for doing this is. Not a cutting which I believe to be a matter for shoots not roots, and not a divide as the division was not symetrical. The root as a whole was not being divided into roughly equal parts. Be that as it may, our bit prospered and eventually became too big. Occasionally flowered. Probably pot bound. So the BH decided that something had to be done. But rather than retire it altogether, she broke off another bit and started again, this being a few weeks ago. The thing has now responded by coming into flower, something which it had not done for ages. So we have one large green bud about to open and one small. Sessile purple flower to come - if that is the right botanical term for flowers without stems which sit on the ground.

On showing the thing to FIL, he started to warble a song about having the largest aspidistra in the world. He tells us it was made popular by someone called Gracie Fields. I had placed it in the thirties but Mr G knows all about it and places it in the fifities. Must be getting old as I thought it rather good to be able to have some fun with a song about an aspidistra - rather than the sort of drug and gun laden stuff which seems to be the staple diet of rappers. Perhaps in the same way that FIL&MIL used to like Morecame and Wise, which at the time I thought rather silly.

Interested to read about a peice of windpipe being grown from a stem cell. Now I can see how you might grow some cells in some friendly medium in a petri dish. I can see how you might grow an entire person on a slab of sow's peritoneum in a bottle in the way of 'Brave New World' - although not quite sure why Huxley lighted upon peritoneum as the right stuff on which to grow eggs. Perhaps eggs will grow on any old peritoneum; it does not need to be peritoneum from some particular part of the body? Hence the possibility of ectopic pregnancies. But it seems to me that growing an organ in a bottle is more tricky. I had thought that the development of organs was very much mediated by the environment in which they were growing. Then there is the question of connecting the thing up. If one is talking about something complicated like a heart, one has to grow all those connecting pipes in vaccuo - or in bottle - then join them all up to the corresponding pipes in the receiving body. The joining up might be tricky but it is the pipe in vaccuo which I am having trouble with. Growing the end of a pipe; the end of a pipe to nowhere. And what about the nerves? Do the nerves in the receiving body simply colonise the unpopulated organ, without any need for wiring up by hand. Maybe the DT will reveal all in due course, when further diversion from gloom and doom is needed.

Franklin was lying in the road in the sun, just outside the lee of his owner's wife's car, when I came back from Cheam yesterday. A dangerous habit last seen in the geriatric marmalade cat at the end of the road - a cat which got all of us very busy, phoning up vets and the RSPCA, rather to the annoyance of the owner.

The purveyors of spam on the Internet continue to think that I am in need of Viagra (the most popular item), or a watch. These two lines must account for three quarters of the slowly growing daily intake of spam into my Googlemail in-box. Maybe 10 a day altogether. One can only suppose that gents of my age are into both items in a big enough way to make all this advertising worth while.

Excellent toad in the hole the other day, well risen crust which was neither burnt, too fragile nor too chewy. No pub or restaurant could come anywhere near it, microwave or DIY. BH really getting into the swing of them now. It seems that it is important to let the batter stand for a few hours before attempting to cook it and to get the oven really hot before attempting to cook it.

Followed up yesterday by steak and kidney. Chuck steak cut cross-ways into small peices, maybe 2cm by 1 cm by 0.5 cm. Fry in lamb dripping for a bit. Remove pipes and so on from kidneys, cut into slightly larger peices and add. Chop some onions very fine and add. Add a little water. Simmer for 95 minutes. Mix a little corn flour with water and add that in - there being less risk of lumps this way than adding the stuff straight in. Add some sliced carrots. Simmer for 15 minutes. Add some chopped mushroom stalks. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the sliced mushroom caps. Simmer for 3 minutes. Serve with, guess what, crinkly cabbage and white rice. Have a good feed and expire in front of the telly with some Chilean red.

The other day while watching a repeat of an episode of Lewis - something about the twice born - I had a sense that some of the scenes were not quite what they were the last time around. Now this might of been the effect of the Chilean red of choice that evening, but I think not. Pondering on the subject some more, in preparation for applying for a BSc (hons) in media studies at the university of the third age, I came up with the scheme that an episode is made up of a sequence of scenes and each scene is made up of a sequence of takes. (Remembering seeing a write up of a famous film, of normal length, famously made in a single take. Can't remember what it was called. Also, more recently, reading or talking about people called continuity girls, whose job it is, for example, to make sure that I have the same number of buttons done up on my waistcoat in successive takes). So I want to re-screen this episode of Lewis but for some reason, perhaps to do with an increasing bite of time given to the advertisers, I need to trim 10 minutes off the forty five minutes episode running time. So, I can take out whole scenes, perhaps on the grounds that they are only providing a bit of depth and colour, not essential to the flow of the thing. I can take out whole takes. More tricky, I can lop bits of the beginning or end of takes. I assume that what I can't do is lop bits out of the middle of takes. I presume that with a suitable workstation, I can do all this very quickly, more or less at the touch of a button. None of that nonsense on the cutting room floor, cutting and splicing fiddly strips of film. But there must still be a fair bit of skill involved. Does the original director of the episode retain sole rights to such editing on the grounds that he could not bear to see his masterpeice chopped up by some apprentice on a bad day?

It seems that the admiral mentioned on 11th November is busy, with a large oil-filled tanker having gone awol. Now on the supposition that all these pirates come from a town called Eyl from which they draw plenty of aid and comfort, how bad would it have to get before we would resort to the tactics of Germans in occupied countries (for example, France) during the second world war? That is to say you had a country which had surrendered in due form but some of the inhabitants of which did not recognise that surrender and continued to shoot at Germans from behind trees. The Germans then said to the place concerned that they would shoot so many hostages every day that those responsible did not turn themselves in. The Germans meant what they said, which left those responsible in an unpleasant position. I imagine that the results were mixed. I have never seen any respectable person defend the Germans for this sort of thing, but we must have been tempted to do something similar in the rather nasty period immediately before the 1921 truce which preceded the creation of the Irish Free State.

And I don't suppose the Germans bothered, but one can make a collective responsibility argument for this sort of thing. As we may have, while continuing to bomb harmless and undefended civilian targets in Germany right up until the end.

I wonder how the moral cookie on this matter would have crumbled, if the Germans had not been so awful in so many other ways. An example of a what-if proceeding, something I am rather keen on, but which is frowned on by many respectable historians. Only fit for bar room chatter over Newky Brown.

After something of an interval, after the demise of the Brita filtered water/green tea fad, have now settled back to very weak Earl Gray with tap water and without lemon. Perhaps being that much darker, despite being very weak, one does not notice the scum forming either on the tea itself or around the inside rim of the cup, at least not until it is empty and cold with the tea safely drunk.

Saucepan rissoles turned out well. A sort of thick, yellow-gray granular sludge. Very tasty with bubble & squeak and curly cabbage. The sludge having a taste which reminded one of coconut for some reason - no coconut having been anywhere near it. Maybe it was the sage wot dun it. Bubble & squeak was a bit unconventional, being made of potato, carrot and parsnip rather than potato and cabbage, but it went down OK. Helped by the use of sheep dripping rather than lard?

This was followed later on in the day by more lentil soup, this time made with green lentils, carrots, smoked streaky bacon (from Cheam) and onions, more or less the regular gear with only the substitution of green lentils for red by way of variation. Will be finishing it off for supper later today, after which it is possible we will move on.

We now have pictures of the mystery plant, mentioned at least twice in the past, although they were subject to the vaguaries of the Blogger upload or, alternatively, to my lack of skill with digital pictures. One even managed to get itself trimmed. Small prize, collectable at TB to the first person to identify the thing.

Franklin, the new marmalade cat from next door, does not appear to have a runny nose this morning. First time since I made his acquaintance a few months ago.

Blood lentil levels are rising and are now, after some disturbance, at near normal levels. A lentil soup at Exminster last week did a lunch, a supper and a breakfast. A lentil soup at Epsom over the weekend did a further lunch, supper and breakfast. On both occasions using the dry cure bacon from Exminster. Will have to revert now to streaky from Cheam. And a lentil and pork mince experiment for lunch today. Chop onion, chop fresh sage (bush in garden now looking a bit woebegone. Perhaps we had better plant a new one next spring) and stir into elderly pork mince - which has been pushed out of the freezer by the arrival of various Exminster delicacies. Fry for a while in an ounce of butter. In the meantime, start cooking about 4 ounces of orange lentils. Stir the whole lot together and simmer down as dry as it will go without burning. A sort of saucepan rissole. Report results in due course.

Big day at the Cheam baker. The shop was full of 800 cup cakes. Yellow affairs, about two and a half inches across, with what looked like raisins inside. Turned upside down in large trays, from which we deduce that they were not cooked in paper cups but in trays with cup shaped dents. And further deduce that bakers carry enough such trays to cook such a large numbers of cup cakes.

And a successful day at the bank. Managed to change a standing order on a machine without needing any help from an assistant. And, even better, managed to pay a cheque into a machine for the very first time. On the various occasions which I have tried in the past the machine has always spat the cheque back, with the result that I usually use the rather faster human bank clerk rather than a mechanical one. But today there was a queue so I give the mechanical one another go and eureka!

Continue to be intrigued by http://sophiebock.blogspot.com/. I'm not clear whether the nifty plans and models are destined to be turned into buildings.

Have just renewed my acquaintance with middle sized vans, in this case a Mercedes Sprinter. Started off the session with reducing an old sofa to small enough peices for me to load single handed. Working with the trusty 15 inch wrecking bar, this took about an hour. The interior of the sofa was surprisingly complicated with springs, sackcloth, some kind coarse brown curly padding made of I know not what and two kinds of white padding. Resisted the temptation to save twenty foot long, thin springs in case they came in useful at some hypothetical point in the future. On arrival at the tip, I learn that vans are not allowed in the recycling area and was directed over a weighbridge and down into the interior of the waste transfer station, a large smelly concrete cave with large vehicles trundling about, interesting puddles and where I now remember I had been once before. I then learn that recycling is only for people with cars. People with vans simply chuck the stuff on a heap. This saves you the bother of carting all your bits off into a multitude of differant bins and them the bother of putting it all back together again for transfer to the landfill site... To be fair, I guess they are doing the best they can. Vans mixing it with cars in the recycling area would probably lead to problems (remembering that this is the tip which caused a tip rage death) and having two recycling areas would be rather expensive.

Then paid my last visit for what will probably be a while to the Regional Capital of the West of England (aka Exeter) Library, the only municipal library that I know which is open seven days a week. I wonder what it does on bank holidays? Started off by getting thoroughly wet on my way up the Exe Valley Cycle Trail, so I steamed nicely during my visit to the warm library. (FIL observed afterwards that this getting wet was the obvious result of the beautiful pink, if very transient, dawn that morning over the Exe. Shepherds' delight and all that). Hopefully in not too odourous a fashion. At least no one got up and moved away. But for some reason the IT people were there at the same time as I was - the result of which blogging became something of a challenge, the intended appearance of the post page not having been achieved. Presumably some wrinkle in the rather tricky software which makes networked public PCs in libraries behave like the PC in your home. But we got there.

Set off back to the smoke at around 0600 with the full moon still going strong. The second auspicious sign was what looked like a barn owl flying over the van from right to left as I passed Exter Airport heading east. Hav'n't done a long drive in the dark for some time so that took some time to get used to. Then had the spectacle of driving up into the dawn on Salisbury Plain - made that much more special by sitting much higher up and with much larger windows than would have been the case in our humble, but serviceable, Fiesta. (By way of an aside, I was told yesterday that small cars such as the Fiesta are holding their price much better than large gas/money guzzlers. So maybe not so humble in these hard times). Somewhat irritated by the time it took people to turn their lights off as it got light.

Which prompts a moan. Which starts with an observation. We can't all be cleverer than everybody else, however hard New Labour try to drag the bog standard comprehensives out of the bog. It remains an arithmetic impossibility. In the same way, we can't all be more visible than everybody else. But the fact that so many people are trying makes for a huge amount of visual clutter on our roads and which does not result, to my mind anyway, in any overall improvement in the visibility of the things that one needs to see. So we have a multitude of wannabee emergency vehicles with loud stripes across their back ends. Cycles with flashing back lights. Cars with fancy headlights. Lorries got up like Christmas trees. Road signs with illuminated smiley faces. People who think it necessary to put their head lights on at the least sign of rain. I just wish they wouldn't. If it wasn't that one can hug the cats' eyes, it would be a job to keep moving at all.

Today, have been doing a bit of recycling of my own, being faced with the requirement to perch one small chest of drawers on top of its twin, rather than perching it on the floor, next to its twin. Making the necessary contraption, made a small dent in my supply of bits and pieces of timber reclaimed from old furniture, in this case a naval chest - the recovery of its twin into use being the subject of an earlier post.

So today, I used a slab of pine from the chest which boasted large brass, countersunk screws - maybe two and a half inch twelves (these had to be discarded despite the cost of replacement, should that ever be required, as their heads were rather bashed about and one was bent) - and which was made out of what appeared to be a single sheet of one inch pine board, maybe 18 inches wide. From the good old days when one inch pine board meant planed board which finished at one inch, not which started at one inch and ended up at about three quarters of an inch after finishing. From the good old days when it was still legal to cut timber to imperial measurements.

We have recently acquired a new neighbour in the form of a very friendly marmalade cat with a runny nose. He takes a great interest in all our outdoor doings, our being careful not to let him in on our indoor doings. He especially likes sitting on one. However, the other day I managed to shut him in the shed for an hour or so and he bounded out at great speed on release.

At which point I get to wondering what would happen if it had been a few days rather than a few hours. Later on, I learn that cats very rarely die of thirst as they are able to lift water from almost any kind of damp patch - of which there are plenty in our garage. Maybe they have some special glue on their tongues, or some special nano-holes to which the water molecules can adhere.

Still later, was talking about this in TB where I am moved to observe that we share 99% of our genes with cats. Pondering still harder and seeking to make an impression, that we share 80% of our genes with potatoes.

Much later, on the way home, it occurs to me that I have no idea what a gene is and what it means to say that one individual shares so many genes with another, or that one species shares so many genes with another. Sent speedily to sleep on this knotty problem.

On waking, I consult the weighty tome which I bought with some of my leaving money from HMT. After some effort - brain needs to be a bit younger for this sort of thing - I learn that a gene corresponds roughly to a chunk of DNA. That DNA is made up of what might be called bits, each of which takes one of four values. A sequence of three bits defines an amino acid and a sequence of amino acids defines a protein. There is the question of where to start: starting at bit 5078 gives a quite differant protein than starting at bit 5079. There is then the question of headers and trailers. Of the areas of padding of which DNA seems to be full. Of control area.

Put simply, a gene is a chunk of DNA which defines a protein and, going further, enables the containing cell to manufacture that protein. This will only happen, in general, if the gene has been switched on by some other protein binding to the right place in the control area. So we have what amounts to a computer with a rather strange instruction set. Which makes it much more complicated than a proper computer, perhaps in the same sort of way the go, with its very simple rules, is much more complicated than chess. It would be good, if one had more time, to join the many people who must be writing models of this sort of thing on real computers.

But while this was an interesting diversion, I have still not answered the start question. Maybe the original 80% statement means no more than that a potato has the genetic code to synthesise 80% of the proteins than a human can. Without saying anything about how alike human and potatoes look. Do they have the same number of legs sort of thing. To be continued...

Back in the kitchen, circumstances conspired to force me to buy bread at Mr S for once in a while. Taste the differance bloomer. Sold in a plastic bag, into which, to be fair, it had not been long put. Not too bad but not really the real thing. They are trying but I think the answer must lie in using improper flour and in being in too much of a hurry. Nowhere near as good as Cheam on a good day. But possibly more reliable. Less subject to human errors of the sort which result from the sole apprentice having been on a bender and not getting to work until 0400.

Affair with roast rolled pork belly continued over the weekend. Hot Sunday with rice and curly cabbage. Maybe half a pint of fat leached out this time, compared with a spoonful last time. There was not much bone either. Maybe different end of the belly. Cold today, with rice and curly cabbage. In between, soaked some pearl barley in the stock made by washing the roasting tin. Simmered for 90 minutes or so. Added the remains of the chopped dry cured bacon from Devon. Simmered some more. Added a good portion of finely chopped curly cabbage. A surprisingly tasy dish for a cold wet day: possibly so because of an unhealthily high salt content? Maybe salt goes well with boiled grain and porridge?

Affair with the DT resumed today after some days' absence. Rewarded by a clutch of splendid items. First, the banning of vans selling bacon sandwiches on Surrey roadsides unless they also sell things deemed to be healthy by Surrey's chief environment health officer, no doubt after expensive and well fed&watered consultation with James Oliver. Will there ever be a pause in this relentless interference in our daily lives? Second, I see that the UK is appointing a full blown vice-admiral to lead a small, multi-national and motley collection of ships to combat Somali pirates. When one thinks that Nelson himself was a vice-admiral and he had a full blown battle-group, one can see that there has been a huge grade inflation. But the peice confusingly suggests that the admiral will be based at Northwood, so maybe there will be a mere rear admiral actually in command on the water. Third, we are told that President Bush used an anti-bacterial sanitiser after shaking hands with the president-elect. Maybe in this health conscious age the president does that after every hand shake. Or perhaps every so many minutes if he is doing a walkabout involving hand shakes with the great unwashed. I believe that hard-core, professional hand shakers, like monarchs, could get blisters on their hands on busy days and so wear gloves instead. This might avoid the rather uncomplimentary use of sanitisers.

I learn from a differant source of a wheeze from Belize. They send you a postcard purporting to come from the UDS (Universal Delivery Service Corporation) telling you that they were unable to deliver a package due to your absence and asking you to ring a number to arrange for another attempt at delivery. You ring the number to find that you have spent £15 or whatever on some special tariff phone call. So I go into reverse and start to wonder how one might regulate this activity, far more pernicious than failing to sell yoghourt in bacon sandwiches on Surrey roadsides. I suppose the mechanics of the thing are that I use my phone company A to phone entity B. A charges me for the basic connection. B is then allowed to make an additional charge on A, which A then recovers from me by adding it to my phone bill. This sort of arrangement would not work very well with letters. I buy a stamp from mail service A which then puts my letter through the door of entity B (with sensible no-charge reciprocal agreements between mail services in the case that entity B is somewhere not covered by A. No computers and no bills) . It would be quite hard for B to pull the same stunt.

What about if I phone entity B by mistake? Is it reasonable for B to levy the surcharge? What if my fax machine phones entity B and thinks that it is have a meaningful interchange with it all night? Thinking with my fingers (or at least two or three of them), maybe there should be an interupt on any call which involves an additional charge asking you if you wish to proceed? Can't think of any snags in that just yet. A protocal to be enforced by all telephony service providers. Perhaps I should drop a postcard in the suggestion box of the Office of the Regulator General of Telephony Services.

Pleased to see that http://oldradie.blogspot.com/ is still at it. A picture of the same country scene, more or less every day. But, just to be picky, if I was doing it I think I would organise it with more snaps to the page, to get a stronger sense of change. One might also think about whether it ought always to be at the same time of day - GMT that is, none of this summer time business.

Seem to be dreaming more with BH on detached duty in Devon. So this morning, a dream about how terribly important I was when I was in the world of work. A dream, which I think I have had in various guises since I retired. The general idea is that I was past my retirement date but because I was so essential to the business (such as it was) that I kept going in to that fine open plan office in Horseferry Road. I was getting a bit worried that the personnel people thought I had retired but I had meetings stretching into the future in the trusty Filofax. Would I continue to get regular pay rather than retirement pay? Where would it all end? So perhaps the discredited Freud had a point after all when he made the categorical claim that all dreams are driven by a desire to make (subconscious?) wishes come true.

My connection with Filofax must be coming up to fifty years now, the connection having been started, I believe, by my elder brother, always one for gadgets and toys. The present incarnation is a black leather job, about twenty years old. Handy pockets for small amounts of paper. Plastic pockets for business cards - at least business cards for people who print them the proper size, rather than for those who think it is clever or distinguishing to have them some funny size. Well, distinguishing it is, but not in the way intended. Maps of tube and rail networks. Maps of England, Wales and Scotland. Street map of London. Diary. And lots of plain white paper to scribble on, perhaps tear out and give to people. I dare say you can do all this on a mobile phone but I don't think I am going to switch - despite this particular Filofax being a bit big for the pocket. Only fits comfortably into a duffel coat pocket. I have a much cheaper job, red rexine (does this stuff still exist?) covers, used to keep back pages of diary. Started it in case an expenses claim ever backfired and I needed some evidence of what I had been up to; kept up with it ever since. From time to time I actually look at it, as opposed to feeding it new material. So my attachment to the red job is out of all proportion to the use I get out of it. More a talisman than a tool.

Rather annoyed by a rather sniffy peice in the Guardian the other day. Maybe even a leader. There is a lady, mentioned here before, who has multiple sclerosis and who is fighting hard to get some clarification of the law on assisted suicide. How will her partner be placed if he takes her to the clinic in Switzerland? Now, the Guardian's point is that, in practise, English law is quite flexible (this being a good thing, despite our snooty remarks about rather flexible application of the law in certain Latino countries). There is quite a lot of discretion about whether or not to prosecute - which gives room for common sense, public opinion, climate of the times and whathaveyou to kick in - but it is hard for them not to do something if someone appears to be breaking the law in a very public way. So would it not be much better for this lady to keep a low profile, do her thing, and not worry about the very small risk that anyone would be prosecuted afterwards?

Now, in a narrow sense, the Guardian may well be right. But without people who are prepared to make a fight for a point of principle the world would not move on. And the Guardian might even be wrong in the narrow sense. Having a cause might give the lady a bit of helpful structure to her life. But, in the more important, wide sense, the Guardian should be grateful that there are people prepared to put up a fight to change our antiquated and uncivilised laws about suicide and euthanasia and not poke around in the minutiae of the motives or circumstances of those putting up the fight. It is the fight which is important. And as the Catholic Church knows full well, a sacrament is not much tainted by some taint on the celebrant. In techno speak, the property of being tainted is not transitive. And without wishing to impunge this lady in any way, lots of good things have been achieved by bad people for bad reasons. As the proverb says, perhaps rather tastelessly in this particular case, the way to hell is paved with good intentions.

Which reminds me of an anecdote from the heroic days of the Soviet Union, from when they were building huge industrial complexes (not archipeligoes) in the frozen north. Some people went there because they were young communists who believed in the noble cause of industrialising the frozen wilderness. Remembering that in those far off days, before ecology was invented, it was indeed a noble cause. And some people went there because you got double time. According to the anecdote, the believers were a pain. They were always arguing the toss about this or that, rather than getting on with digging the salt out of the frozen hole. The chaps doing it for the money were a much better bet. They were the ones who got the job done. And so the righties among us can clap. Money not morals is the way forward!

The TLS advertised an interesting post last week. Someone is looking for extra-mural PhD level tuition from a holder of a doctorate in feminist studies on twentieth century women writers. Rather a clumsy way of saying you want someone who has done a femmy take on twentieth century femmy writers, but one gets the general idea. The duties involve, each month, reading five texts (of unspecified length), doing a face-to-face and doing some email. Who would want such a person and why? How much are they paying?

Alternatively, if you are into hiring rather than being hired, you may be interested in hiring a wood-dwelling wild-life photographer who can be found on THUNDER64@02.CO.UK . I had heard of wood-dwellers in the Surry hills before now, Shere to be precise, but I had never heard of one in the London Borough of Merton, let alone met one. This chap seems to be doing very well for himself, with a warm tent with all mod-cons, hard-core outdoors type clothing and a couple of places where he can wash up and recharge the batteries for all the mod-cons. Craftily hidden in the woods to avoid unwanted attention from passers by. Generally seemed to be in very good shape and having a good time. Finds the life very economical.

Spent a happy half an hour yesterday doing battle with the cancellation part of the Travelodge site. I may have been pressing the wrong buttons, but most of the site didn't seem to think that I had a booking to cancel. I then found a place in the site which owned up to me, but then declined to play when I pressed a cancel button. Eventually managed to battle through to what seemed like a successful cancellation, but got a cancellation email addressed to someone called Kirsty - although most of the time they seemed to know my proper name. We will see if my refund turns up. Not sure yet what to do if it does not: the site seems to be completely bereft of any number to telephone, short of making a complaint about the treatment accorded, which I do not want to do quite yet. Although, if other people have the same fun as I did, perhaps they do complain. And tripped up with the parallel cancellation of a bus journey with National Express. In my innocence, I had thought that the compulsory insurance was to do with cancellation. But no. Insurance was to do with if they ran over your leg or lost your baggage. Sorry sir, no refund on your sort of ticket. But to be fair, there was a telephone number to phone and I was able to get through to a real person very quicky, who was as helpful as he could be.

Another new soup today. Boil carrots, onion and a bit of bone from belly of pork. Strain of the stock after a few hours. Add a large segmented onion (cut, that is, after the fashion of a segmented orange). Bring the stock back to the boil. After a few minutes add some sliced button mushrooms. Good, light, soup for a lunchtime snack, the carrot having given the stock a pleasing sweetness and the bone having given it some body.

The mystery of the grass, first mentioned on 18 August continues. With meetings with two agricultural experts coming up, paid a return visit to the field with the mystery grass to see if there was any left. And there was: the crop had been harvested, leaving stubble of the usual sort but with a few stray plants around the edges. Took one home to be photographed and so better pictures than my DIY effort will be available just as soon as we have camera connectivity. In the meantime I forgot to take the plant to show agricultural expert No. 1 and agricultural expert No. 2 did not know what it was. Maybe the posting of pictures will produce some knowledge. Maybe I have to do a more careful trawl through Mr G.

Having been prompted to turn up the Koran the other day, found my Penguin copy a bit dry. Very little in the way of footnotes and explanatory material. Not even in the right order. The editor claimed that there was no canonical order and so he decided to do what he thought best. So the chapter of the cow, which I remember as being first, was relegated to somewhere in the second half. Then, while I was pondering where I might go for something better, just the thing turned up. A two volume Koran, with maps, family trees, footnotes, an index and a preliminary discourse (by someone described as George Sale, Gent.), as well as the text itself. Published in 1812, printed in Weybridge and published by what looks like a collective of publishers - if that is the right collective noun for the breed. I learn that the chapter of the cow is in fact chapter 2, after a very short chapter 1.

Most notable sentence so far, from the beginning of chapter 3 (presumably sura is a tranliteration of the Arabic word for chapter. I imagine that this would be the word used in a modern translation): 'It is he who hath sent down unto thee the book, wherein some verses are clear to be understood; they are the foundation of the book; and others are parabolical'. According to the footnote this translation rests on the exposition of al Zamakhshari and al Beidawi. And I thought that Muslims were a literal truth people. General tone seens to be very differant from that of our Bible, with heaven, resurrection, angels and code of behaviour getting a lot of air time.

And to close, a minor event on the road. For the first time in many years I was in a brush with the mirror of a moving van who overtook me a little to close. Another six inches and I should think I would have been brushed off, rather than just brushed. Don't recall whether I share the blame by swerving out - something which I seem to do quite often. So far without untoward effect.

After two days of Devon slaughtered lamb cold with hot vegetables - a dish from childhood which seems to be coming back into our vogue as we head into our second childhood - decided that enough was enough and minced the balance. Added minced carrot and onion, simmered gently for a while. Added minced cold cooked carrot and swede. And, for a change, added minced uncooked runner beans. The bean part that is, from beans that were too long in the tooth to contemplate eating. Went down very well; a reminder that minced cold meat is quite differant from the minced raw meat one buys at a butcher. I guess that part of the differance is the differant quality of the meat; roasting meat rather than the scraps and srags that go into butchers' mince. (Not that there is anything wrong with this last. Plenty of nourishment there). And part is the differant texture you get from mincing cold rather than mincing raw. As a food texture buff, a differance I am very alive to.

We also learnt, the the Spong people whom I had thought only made mincers - we have a large example in my desk in our front room - also make, or at least used to make, cutlery. They were responsible for the Exminster bread knife.

And back in Epsom, have topped up the lentil levels with half a gallon of lentil soup of which I have done maybe a third for breakfast. There not being any carrots I had to use white cabbage in their place. Seemed to work OK. And the bacon was dry cured from Devon. A bit salty - and I think I prefer the smoked streaky from Cheam. Let's hope he has some today.

Spent the first part of this morning lifting a thirty year old carpet, most of the backing of which had turned into a black powder. Luckily a fairly heavy powder which did not seem to get everywhere - but maybe the BH will take a differant view on that point. Whoever put the carpet down read the Daily Mail and the Observer - an odd combination - former being for the middle classes and the latter for the middle classes with pretensions. Sufficiently long ago for the Daily Mail to be advertising jobs for print workers - I think that it used to be the paper for those trades, rather as the Evening News used to be the paper for the building trades, and for the Observer to look posh.

Second part of the morning converting a chest of drawers back into its natal flat pack format. Wonderful things wrecking bars once you get going. A smart crack on the interior of a drawer and it flies apart. A smart crack on the knob and it flies off. From the wreckage have recovered maybe a dozen 1.5 inch chipboard screws with a wide thread. Must be made of very hard steel because when whacked with the wrecking bar they simply smashed out of the chipboard rather than bending.

Day before yesterday afternoon to Dawlish Warren. Remains a wonderful place, even if a third of it is a golf course and another third is in the hands of the RSPB. Tide well out; occasional bird calls drifting about in the late afternoon air. A small dead dogfish washed up on the beach which did not appear to be attracting the attention of the gulls. We wondered why not. They don't seem too fussy most of the time.

Most of the breakwaters were put in about 40 years ago, but there is a remnant of the series before that. Perhaps 80 years old? The uprights were six inch diameter round post in good condition, but with interesting wear on their tops - which looked rather like the serrated teeth of a herbivore like a cow - only circular rather than rectangular. One then wondered whether cold salt water was a preservative: brine does for meat so why not for posts? Wouldn't do in the tropics though, where even salt water is infested with all kinds of wood eating livestock.

Back to the pub at the head of the Warren for tea - which was very good value at £1.35 for a pot for two. We forgave them the lack of saucer for one of the cups. Pub rather like a Wetherspoons in style and the only place open, tricked out with a seaside decor. One interesting old-looking board on the wall claimed to be a sign from a Dawlish pilchard merchant who had been established in 1590. Rather a clever fake; diverting and easy to do once you get the knack.

The Exeter system is taking an ever dimmer view of Mr G's subsidiary sites. Blocked by certificate error when trying to go in directly - but get in OK when I go via a search and click on the search result. With the caveat that the page header seems to have got corrupted and does not respond to Windows refresh. When I was in the world of work, I had colleagues who went gray over the mysteries of firewall policies and the somewhat (and necessarily) pedantic style of the policy holders.

Apart from including in the foregoing 'work of world' for 'world of work' in the foregoing, the last couple of days have been a time for senior moments, after something of a holiday. Must be the country air - the usual effect of which is to bring me down with a cold. First, coming off the Matford roundabout, heading east down the Exter by-pass, just miss riding into the side of a bus which I had not seen. The underlying problem being that it was one of those roundabouts where you do not have right of way, in the ordinary sense, on exit. There is an additional lane on one's left through which people turning left can speed, without let or hindrance. Leaving the unhappy push bike rider between two potentially fast moving lanes of traffic. And the neck not being as supple as it once was, did not get it around far enough to cop the bus bearing down on me. Bus driver made interesting sign as he passed. (The Devon roads people would no doubt say that I should have been using their expensive and generally spiffing cycle lane - but somewhat inconvenient at that particular point). Second, not quite as serious, attempted to put my short range glasses on before I had got around to removing the long range ones. Fortunately, both they and my eyes survived. Although I seem to remember that this time, I bought a spare frame against such eventualities. Last time, I had perfectly good lenses and a perfectly bad frame, but the frame had moved on some weeks since I bought it and the perfectly good lenses were junk. And third, I failed to correctly remember the number of my PC for the 5 seconds it takes to walk across to the librarians to get some more time. Luckily they were indulgent: they were not able to recover the 30 minutes from the lady to whom I had inadvertantly gifted them, but they did give my PC 30 minutes for free. Perhaps she was a season ticket holder.

Dreams as well. Woke up this morning having had something of an altercation in a railway, probably underground railway ticket office. When I arrived there was queues at most of the machines but not at this one. Not smelling a rat I make for it. Get there and read the instructions while a middle aged (same age as me, that is) couple make a detirmined effort to push in. This miserable looking wife with an old red coat comes in first from the right and while I am dealing with her the husband comes in from the right. I think I resorted to foul language and the scene shifted to me trying to work the machine. It turned out to be somewhat ancient and tricky and required one to click through a whole lot of stuff in a little glass fronted window - maybe one inch square - where the return coin slot should have been in an attempt to tell the thing that I wanted to go to Epsom. While I was grappling with the window problem also became aware that the thing only took ancient money, with which I was unsupplied. Give up in disgust and wake up. On thinking about the dream on waking, associate to a regular dream I have about adventures on the Northern Line and which may have been mentioned here before - although a quick search does not reveal where. Must find myself a sub-editor who only speaks when spoken to and then only to agree with me - while at the same time tactfully dealing with spelling and other mistakes.

The last couple of days have also been a time for detective work. Poking around in a reasonably complicated program trying to find the reason for odd behaviours. Quite hard to get the right balance between eye-balling the thing and running test shots. While the right test shot sometimes reveals all, getting the test shot right can take some time. Maintaining a decent test environment is a bore. Chasing all the strange hares and theories one comes up with along the way becomes a bore - although there are quite often unexpected benefits. Unpicking all the diagnostic code one wound up having to put into the test often leads to more errors. All this good stuff which someone else used to have to worry about! All in all, as I am sure I have mentioned before, rather like some of those television detectives. The ones that get things wrong until the last minute that is - say Wexford or Morse - not Holmes, Poirot or Father Brown (to be fair, this last not having been a television detective, at least not as far as I can remember) - who thrash around in just the same way until they light on the right path, just before the end of the episode. The Holmes crew seem to solve problems without taking many false turnings at all. The odd one, just to prove they are human, but with little of the angst of the Wexford crew.

My own detective work particularly frustrating today in that after much faffing about I am more or less sure what the answer is. But also that I am never going to prove it. Far too much time and bother involved in doing a rerun which will be close enough to the original to reproduce the problem. So I won't bother -while remaining irritated. Most unprofessional - if I were not retired.

This picture of a vehicle with a lazy owner can be assigned to whichever country is home to those who are the butt of your ethnic jokes. So this being England, the picture has to have been taken in Ireland.

Must write to the National Trust about the disgraceful state of the exceptional signal box at Dawlish Warren railway station. Shut up, as far as one can see, just rotting away, propped up by two props the terminal concrete blocks of which take up about three car spaces in the not very large car park. Given that the signal box may date all the way back to that illustrious engineer Brunel, I think someone should do something about it. Another peice of national treasure in danger of sliding down the pan.

Must also write to Mr Google about the dreadful state of his clocks (maybe also mentioning the fact that Exeter Library does not seem to care for some of his security certificates. Rejects them a fair proportion of the time). The time stamps on my posts give the unfortunate impression that I blog in the small hours of the morning - which I presume to be the time in the Mountain View (a guess. But I have a soft spot for the name having once met a Finn who was going there) bunker which houses the relevant server farm. I wonder if they do tours of what must be a very impressive bit of kit. I think the Amazon do tours of their very impressive warehouse, somewhere in the South of England, provided you can drum up some interest beyond the casual and don't try around Christmas when they have a lock down or something. So maybe Google with their very public service ethos do something of the sort too.

Yesterday I became more closely acquainted with the workings of plastic bell compost makers - the big black plastic things, roughly the shape of a bell, but with a lid on the top and sometimes with a hatch at the bottom. I dare say one can get them from the council these days. Getting more closely acquainted involved emptying two of them and digging the compost into FIL's potato patch - this year's that is, not next year's. The compost had been made from a mixture of garden and kitchen waste, was very dry (despite there being a reasonable supply of the little red worms which do the business) and was not as good as the stuff I get out of our rather larger brick compost bin. So the considered view is: whereas 1) despite being four feet or so high and taking up a lot of space, they do not hold a great deal; 2) they are reasonable awkward to load and empty; and, 3) they do keep the rats and mice out, I conclude that they are not as good a deal as the brick compost bin. I can live with putting out the traps.

Today's violent snippet is from a vignette about camels at a hard-core Coptic festival in the Alexandrian desert. According to the vignette, a herd of camels was driven to the festival for slaughter for the evening feasting. So far, so good. The not-so-nice bit is that the camels were simply sat down on the sand and hacked to peices with axes, not necessarily starting with the head first. It was claimed that the camels just sat there and took their punishment. So, first point, is there any truth in it? Did anything of the sort happen; did the camels just sit there? This last seems very unlikely unless they were drugged in some way. Second point, why invent such a story? What would be the point? All I can think of is that Durrell wanted to rub in the violent stain (or strain) to life in an otherwise relatively civilised Alexandria - and was quite happy to invent something to make the point. Or perhaps the point is more complicated. He put the vignette into a letter from one charectar to another. First charectar is an author, obviously unsound being an arty type, and invents the whole thing for the confusion of his correspondant. The point is to tell us something about the author charectar in the novel not something about Alexandria. One could dream up even more complicated scenarios but I don't believe that that should be necessary. So I give up.

The arty type committed suicide, as did a daughter of Durrell. Making him the third author of his period to lose a daughter in that way (the other two being Joyce and Simenon). Arty types clearly are unsound.

I believe it to be the case that one can reliably identify an author from an analysis of the frequency with which he or she uses words. A statistical wheeze which inhabits many PhDs about Shakespeare's authorship or not of various minor oeuvres. In the case of Durrell, I believe that his use of the word 'gonfalon' would be a marker of this sort. Mr G tells me that it is a special sort of flag, hung horizonatally from a crossbar, often with ribbons or streamers and often in Italian towns. Despite the word being of Germanic - perhaps Lombardian - origin. But why would Durrell be so keen on the word? He was a greekophile not an italianophile.

Yesterday to Dawlish to see the mucky ducks. First, to the seaside which looked well in the bright winter afternoon sunlight. Clear view of land dropping into the sea somewhere east of Exmouth. Then we convinced ourselves that a grey smudge to the east of that was also land. Rather than a cloud or wishful thinking. I decided that it was Portland. But inspection of a map this morning makes this look a bit unlikely; wrong bearing. The smudge, if indeed it was land, must have been a bit to the north of Chesil beach rather than a bit to the south. Must take a map and a compass next time. The second time I have said that in less than that many weeks.

Then we find that Dawlish, as well as running to many bucket and spade shops, cafes, clotted cream and fudge shops, also runs to a butcher with a reasonable stock - although like most of his brethren he has been pushed into delicatassen to pull his turnover up. Fairly hefty leg of lamb, shrink wrapped and said to be local produce, for £20. I dare say a good deal less than we would have paid in the poncey butcher attached these days to Powderham Castle, in which connection I observe that it follows that Prince Charley is not the only posh to move into the grocery trade. The Duke of Devon (or perhaps Earl. I forget which lives at Powderham. But I do remember that either the Duchess or the Countess of Devon is not at all posh. Maybe a barmaid from Eton) is at it too. We will see what the BH makes of it tomorrow.

Then back over the hills via Mamhead. It would have been too much for me on a bicycle and it would have been a good day's walk on foot, but even from the car, the woods were a bit special, as were the views. Not, however, equipped with beauty spots where one could pause and admire the view. But we did pause at a well-refurbished collection of huts, next to the Gissons Hotel, called the Exeter Crest. The reception area had been very smartly done up with bar, restaurant and friendly staff attached. Tea and toasted tea cakes smartly done up too and we paid rather less than we would have paid in Dawlish. All goes to show that hotels remain a good wheeze for teas. The Gissons Hotel, used to be a well known night spot forty years ago, before burning down in what I (possibly quite wrongly) remember as suspicious circumstances. I wonder how the two places get on, being slap-bang next door and out in the country?