pumpkinstrokemarrow

Of a sort anyway. Just finished the second reading of 'Denier du Reve' by Marguerite Yourcenor, an author whom I only know through charity shops. The first of hers which I read was an impressive autobiography of Hadrian - impressive at the time that it. Took another peek more recently and was not so sure. This was the second, in French this time, and for a Belgian I found her vocabulary quite hard. Much recourse to the dictionary. Took me a long time for example, to puzzle out the word luciole, a collective noun for fire flies (feminine) and glow worms (masculine). Odd, because their words for both, shining flies and shining worms, are more or less the same as ours. But it took ages to twig. I wonder if the flies and worms are related, perhaps by the latter being the larvae of the former? I have the idea that the worms dangle off twigs by a thread like that of spiders, thus occupying much the same space as the flies flying among the twigs. But this is, maybe, little more than guessing.

An oddly compelling book, with some striking images. So, for example: "Le peu d'argent que Paolo Farina donnait a Lina chaque semaine lui servait a payer une illusion volontaire, c'est-a-dire, peut etre, la seule chose au monde qui ne trompe pas." Page 20 in the Gallimard edition. Must learn how to do accents; the French looking very deficient without them. It is certainly possible as accented letters pop up by mistake sometimes, when one hits the wrong keys. But how does one find out how to do it? And then, towards the end of the book, the dying painter, Clement Roux, is maundering among his memories, maundering on the sic transiting of his gloria mundi. And then: "Au fond, je n'ai pas beaucoup vecu. C'est astreignant, la peinture. Se lever de bonne heure... Se coucher tot... J'ai pas de souvenirs." Not the same take as Simenon, another Belgian as it happens, in his memoires. He got up at the crack of dawn every day when he was 'en roman' to crack out his 5,000 words, and then had the rest of the day free to amuse himself. He did not seem unhappy about the arrangement.

I now learn that my sense of the English astringent was not quite right. The aura of the word was about right, so the translation worked, albeit slightly wrongly, as I had the core meaning of drying, rather than binding. The OED entry more or less allows drying by extension, but binding is core.

After all this brain strain, I find that the supply of red lentils is rather low and decide to pay a New Year's Eve visit to Mr S on the way back from Cheam. It took a while to warm up on the way out, fingers very cold. Despite the fact that quite a lot of passers by seemed to be managing without gloves at all. And that the lady in the baker assured me that my money was warm if my fingers were not. (On the other hand, the day previous, the crown of leaves of my principal cyclamen corm, my pride and joy, looked very sad first thing. It clearly did not like the frost, although I dare say that it recovers. Must check). But warmed up by the time I got back to the turning to Mr S, nearly back to Epsom. Entered the warm red glow of the giant store full of beans; the warm red glow being a product of a cluttered and crowded store, the bright red uniform jerseys (or maybe fleeces) worn by a lot of the staff and, perhaps, a touch of red in the decor. Set out in search of dried vegetables. Get up to aisle 40 or so and find myself among the toothpaste. None of the above aisle signs having mentioned dried vegetables. Ask youth with clip board. He ponders then suggests that I try aisle 1. I suspect that this is just a wheeze to get me as far away from him as possible, but I go along. Trundle back down to the other end of the store where I find that aisle 1 is fish. Nothing to do with dried vegetables. Ask a young lady in blue. We agree that maybe dried vegetables live in the same part of the world as rice, and she takes me to the rice aisle, passing a well known, nectar loving denizen of TB, recently employed by Mr S, on the way. How long will he last? Still no dried vegetables. Ask a slightly older lady in red. A shelf stacker who seems quite happy to be relieved of stacking duties for a few minutes. She ponders, seemingly uncertain, and then leads me off. A few aisles to the south of the rice we find the rather small section of dried vegetables and the pleasant lady in red wanders off, continuing away from the shelf that she had been stacking. Perhaps she got back to it eventually. Red lentils all present and correct on this occasion, £1.38 for a kilo of the things. But I wonder for how much longer. The dried vegetables rated about 2 feet of aisle. Hugely less space than was devoted to either rice or pasta, let alone that devoted to various sorts of potato crisps. Not a very popular line. Somewhat chastened, march off to the self service checkout. Manage it first time without needing any assistance and recover bicycle. And so ended another successful visit to Mr S. Time, 13 minutes and 37 seconds.

One association here is the famous old pub of this name in Norwich, which I maybe used once in our six years there. But a more recent one is a picture in the Guardian accompanying a story which alleges that nearly a third of science teachers think that creationism ought to be taught as part of science lessions, alongside evolution. Now Prof. R. Dawkins might sometimes be a bit of a pain, but he is quite right to brand this result - assuming that the survey people have done their stuff properly (quite a big assumption in my mind) - a national disgrace. And as Prof. C. Higgins hints, while there might be a place for discussion of such stuff in a History of Science or Religious Information class, one ought also include, under the same head, flat earth science. And this is not the sort of stuff one should be cluttering up primary brains with. They will have enough trouble with real science without getting them onto to pretend science. Plenty of time for that when they are older. So who are all these sciences teachers who think this? Is the New Commonwealth becoming as strong in the science teaching profession as it is in the medical profession? Now I come to think of it, no reason at all why not. All rather depressing.

And apart from anything else, is there too much interest in pretend science and media studies? Which are all well and good, but is it leaving enough people interested in real science to make our toothpaste and drive our power stations? I dare say with computer aided design, the Internet and all the rest of it, one needs rather fewer working scientists per capita. One toothpaste design will serve the whole world - making for rather a flat and dull world, but one which does work. And but we do need some. Maybe we are relying on the Chinese and Indians, still keen on making things, rather than talking about them, to knock out the scientists and to make the toothpaste. We can spend our time chattering about why there is some inner need for creationism and other cranky matter.

Happily, there is a more mundane sort of creationism going on in the back garden. Having failed to remove the dead oak leaves from the small snowdrop bed there, they have already started to shoot. Have now removed the leaves, hopefully without doing too much damage to the shoots, and hopefully all will be well in due course. Bluebells on the move too; same story.

BH believes that dead oak leaves do in her lamb tails if not removed. I am starting to suspect them of doing in various clumps of ivy. Maybe I need to take a walk in an oak wood to see what sort of plants thrive at ground level. I remember that beech woods can be a bit dead at ground level so maybe prognosis not good. Although dead oak leaves can't be the whole story as at least one clump of sick ivy is nowhere near the oaks.

And the day before yesterday, another chunk of creation swooping low over the park, in the form of two or three flocks of our ring necked parakeets. Oddly, in the late afternoon winter sun, against the grass, they looked a splendid shade of deep green. Against the sky, black and against the houses, invisible. A passer-by explained that they all lived up on the Hogsmill somewhere, flew south each morning to feed, perhaps on Epsom Common, with a resting place in the trees along the back of Horton Lane on the way. The passer-by also claimed that it was all very regular. Same time every day - presumably GMT as I don't suppose birds are into summer and winter time.

I wonder if any one bird always roosts on the same branch every night, or more or less every night? Or do they just get as far as the same tree? Do all birds have regular habits in this way? Robins are territorial, but that is not the same as tying down their sleeping arrangements.

Franklin's Christmas present was a cat flap, the idea being that he can spend cold spells in his kitchen, with the prospect of other rooms if he behaves himself. But he has not yet quite got the hang of it, requiring some encouragement to propel him through it - in either direction. No doubt he will get there, with the end result that we will see rather less of him. Own kitchen better than other kitchen.

A present to myself was a new spectacle case; at least one drawn from my small store of such things, to replace the one on active duty, the spring of which had stopped working. Nosey as ever, thought I would take the recently retired one to peices. Rather neat peice of design. Pressed steel plate shell, covered with some tasteful blue material with a pleasing soft matt finish. Hinge joining base to lid about two inches by half an inch overall, taking the two halves together, fixed to the shell by lugs punched out of same, pushed through matching slots in the hinge and bent over. Couldn't work out how the spring was supposed to empower the hinge - or even where it was. Presumably inside somewhere.

In the dream world, back on high buildings, perhaps prompted by that posted on 21 December. I was in this tall building and wanted to get out. So get down the stairs, into a sort of basement where I thought the exit was. Go across to the exit, an opening in the wall about 6 feet high by 12 feet wide, where I discover that my building is somehow suspended in mid air, high in the sky. Some way below, and over a bit, there is the top of another building. Maybe 50 feet. There is a ladder running between the two, nicely fixed at both ends so that it does not slip, with the idea being that one gets out of my building by climbing down to the one below. Not clear what happens after that. But this is not on at all. With my poor head for heights, I would need very active encouragement to get onto the ladder - after which I would probably panic and fall off. Presumably I wake up at this point.

I believe poor head for heights to be partly an age thing: the bits of the brain needed to override the natural, selectively advantageous disinclination to be in dangerous places conk out. I was never too hot when it came to things like abseiling - although at that time I could get myself over the edge without making a fuss - but I could do things like climb up the scaffolding around the outside of a small tower block under construction. BH claims not to be bothered by such things at all, and she is certainly a lot less bothered by the vertigo opportunities one comes across on the daily round than I am.

Since 19 December got a bit further into the book about Bryn Estyn. Now pondering about how one ought to handle a situation where young men, probably more or less criminal and certainly disturbed when young, are offered the prospect of making large sums of money if they can make sticking allegations about their former carers. As the author (Webster) points out, one aspect of all this which is unusual is that with most crime there is no doubt about the fact that a crime has been committed and about the nature of the crime. The difficult bit is catching who done it. In these cases, the difficult bit is deciding whether or not a crime was committed.

While the book is disturbing, a weakness for me, at least about a third of the way in, is that we have a long catalogue of allegations which, perhaps after some years, turn out to be more or less completely false. It is also made clear that there was some abuse which did result in convictions. What we do not yet have is any kind of balance sheet. 253 false allegations, 43 unresolved and 67 proved sort of thing. For me, the relative proportions do make a differance. If the allegations are basically sound, but someone has got a bit carried away at the margins, that is one thing. But if the great majority of the allegations turn out to be false, that is another. So I hope before the end we get some presentation of the wood, after all the trees.

Legal disturbances of a differant sort from a book about terrorism by one P Bobbit. He writes rather densely but his matter is interesting. Presently at the bit where he is pondering about whether torture ought to be allowed, and if one does, how might it be managed. Now I think I used to be with the pacifists on this one: a civilised society should never torture any one. Partly because the business of torturing taints the torturer, and by extension society at large. Partly because it does not work; people being tortured are apt to tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than the truth, whatever that might be. But no more. Now I think that there are circumstances when torture is the lesser evil, despite the taint and despite it not always working. Suppose one is holding a person whom one has good reason to believe knows the magic word which will stop the world blowing up in a few days time. Person refuses to reveal the magic word. In these circumstances I think one has to give torture a go; better tainted than dead. Unless, I suppose, you believe in a life to come where taint might be worse than death. I don't, so I would reach for the thumb screws. Or at least hire someone else to do it for me.

Now this is a rather hypothetical example. But, unfortunately, the world has changed in ways which make it a lot closer to reality than it was.

The other point that Bobbit makes which sticks in the mind, is that while you might allow your government to do things in secret, those secret doings must be in the scope of some policy which is public, debated and agreed. Furthermore, those secret doings must be the subject of a management regime, the general shape of which is public, debated and agreed. I am not at all sure that our government always passes these two tests.

Following the agricultural mystery, imminent accessibility of a mechanical expert has reminded me of an outstanding mechanical mystery. This thing is from Gosport, about two inches across the yoke, possibly naval. But what is it for? As ever, small prize for first correct answer.

Some of our seasonal beverages came from Aldi. Or perhaps Lidl - my difficulty with distinguishing the two continuing. In any event, we have two half dozens from the one in Leatherhead, at something like £3.50 a pop, a good deal less than I usually pay in my off-licence of choice, Odd Bins. So yesterday tried a bottle of 'Coteaux du Languedoc 2007' which went down fine. Magic number was 13.

For the second time running, my visit to Aldi was livened up by bumping into a very Surrey sounding lady who explained that she didn't really shop at Aldi, but that she just happened to have to visit her poodle parlour which just happened to be next door, so she thought she would pop in as she had just run out of aspirin. I must attract the sort of middle aged ladies who need to explain away their being caught bargain hunting.

And some of our seasonal beverages came from Mr S, in this case the magic number being 40. Now the beverage in question came in a cardboard tube and the packing arrangements did not include removing the security tag from the neck of the bottle inside the cardboard tube. Maybe if I had not used the self service checkout (of which I am a great fan. If one only has a small number of purchases, much the quickest way to the exit), the checkout operative might have thought to have removed the thing. That being as it may, the thing did not set off any alarm and arrived back home, where it could be subjected to closer inspection.

So we have a hollow gray plastic disc about 1.5 inches across and a third of an inch thick, attached to a steel wire version of one of those plastic zipper straps used, for example, to tie notices to street furniture. The steel wire loop having a fat core with a thin spiral wrapper, this last for the lock to bite on. Not mild steel, the other stuff whose name I forget. Tried to cut the steel loop and failed. Break into the plastic disc, which takes a little while with wire cutters. First thing to fall out was a lightweight wire loop, rather like the white paper and wire fasteners one has for freezer bags. The only tricky bit was a small red thing, like a red lentil in size and shape, with the number 101 stamped on it and soldered onto one end of the wire loop. This, we thought, was the thing that the detector detected. Gave the coil a magnetic echo or something otherwise geeky. Then came a little steel cylinder, maybe 3mm across and 1cm long. This appeared to be the thing which locked the wire loop in place, held in place by a small spring. This we thought would be released by putting the plastic disc next to a large magnet. This would pull the cylinder the 1mm or so needed to clear the spiral wrapper of the steel loop. We thought that one would have needed a serious magnet for this to work, but could not come up with any other story.

In between times, gave 'The Great Gatsby' a second outing. Remains a first division rather than a premier league product (if I have got the analogy right), but not without interest. The most interesting thing for me on this read circled the paragraph including '... the colossal vitality of his illusion... He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way.' (page 79). The idea being, which I have come across elsewhere recently, that the fantasy about something can be far stronger than the thing itself. Which can, of course, be interesting for the subject of the fantasy. Not necessarily a bad thing: it might be quite convenient for the fantasiser to hold to the fantasy, whatever the state of the subject of it. On the other hand, it might be thought of as a burden.

A screen shot from what I understand is the largest shed full of beer ever seen. Somewhere in Norfolk. But despite the recent efforts by BT, still got the dodgy messages about dial-up connections when uploading it.

Today being the day it is, I ought to report on the state of our Christmas tree, in our case a gift from Homebase, from FIL, a year or so ago. A very fine spruce of some description with real fir cones. Very nifty construction; a fine example of the Christmas tree art. Only let down by a slightly improper shape; a little tall for its height and a bit too bushy for the top foot out of its five. Although the maker might argue that the tip of a Christmas tree should be more bushy than the body. Our is also more regular than an organic tree, with branches arranged around their nodes in regular sixes; but in this case I don't think the effect would be improved by irregularity. There is not enough space for that to look anything other than contrived.

To think that in the olden days one used to have organic trees, which I suspect burn better than their inorganic cousins, decorated with real candles with real flames, rather than the electrical ones one has these days. Maybe the use of real candles now counts as conspiracy to arson. If not some grander sounding count. Something that the neigbourhood watch people ought to keep an eye out for.

Also a day for moralising. When I was little, we used to talk about the terrible contradictions inherent in capitalism. Now with capitalism having a touch of flu, maybe appropriate to revive that sort of talk. So, for example, while I believe that a good part of our current trouble is down to excess consumption in the UK and the US, we are now being exhorted to dig ourselves out of the hole by spending more. Another part is down to bankers having lent money to people they should not and securitising things they should not have; they are now being exhorted to dig us out of the hole by lending more.

But such moralising is not permitted of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I seem to recall something about PM Brown adminstering a stern rebuke to said prelate when he presumed to meddle in affairs of state. I suppose he is supposed to restrict his moralising to clerical rather than secular matters - whatever that might be supposed to mean in this confusing age.

Clearly a morning for musings. While drying up and trying to remove some splodge from a tea spoon which had not been washed up very well, the phrase 'honour bright' sprang into mind. I thought that it came from one of those songs one used, as a boy scout, to sing around the camp fire. For some reason the idea seemed very childish; that one could have honour bright. In practise, for me anyway, the reasons for doing almost anything are rather complicated and, quite often, not something I would care to explain in any detail to anyone else. While one may not have done many foul deeds in one's time, one has done plenty of grubby deeds, or at least off-white deeds. Or deeds, which have done no-one any harm, but of which one is not proud. Deeds which are naff but harmless; and while the naffness is clear to all, not always easy to articulate exactly why. So following the Freudian term 'good enough parenting' one might have 'honour bright enough' but not 'honour bright'. Bright enough to get you through the pearly gates. All matters on which I believe the Catholics lavish more thought and care that the average Prot.

Then it occurs to me that the phrase occurs in one of John Le Carre's novels. Perhaps the fat lady, Carrie, in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. So off to Mr Google who tells me that the phrase is widely used, and the name of more than one book. Nothing about boy scouts, but it does prompt entries for various toothpastes. And contain the factlet that for a Roman aristo., honour was more about rank and position than good deeds. At which point I remember that an honour was also the name of a certain sort of land holding. The honour of so and so, where so and so is a place. OED confirms, a factlet among 3 pages of honours of various sorts. First recorded use of 'honour bright' being in 1819, then Dickens.

Talking of the OED, I saw in a recent LRB that I can now buy the second edition for £400. It started off at £2,000 a few years ago, but I guess the take-up at that price is not that great and has now tapered off to more or less nothing. But not yet moved to replace my 1937 version of the first edition, acquired second hand from Guildford Grammer School, for getting on for half the £400. Used it too much to be keen on letting it go and havn't got room for two of the things.

All this preceded by an interesting dream, the most complicated for at least a week. Another fantasy of power, drawn from my last two departments. A very important person had charged me with sorting out some very important crisis, with full powers. So I convened a meeting of suitable people and announced that we would meet for 40 minutes at 1500, every day for the duration. Then started off by getting everybody to form up into groups of three, each group being a country. The US, France etc. Gave them 10 minutes in their groups to come up with their solutions to the crisis, then we would have a plenary session at which each group had 1 minute to deliver. Groups were encouraged not to have their 1 minute if they had not come up with anything. Crisis much more important than looking good in committee. My own personal wheeze is to sell the Falklands to the Argies for lots of billions of pounds. Time for those little Englanders to do their bit for the mother ship. But I hold that back to stun the end of the meeting with.

The very important person had lent me his secretary to do the organisation. A bit of a frump: I didn't manage to organise her and she didn't manage to organise the meeting. So we wound up in a rather large space which was something of a public thoroughfare. From time to time crossed by construction equipment. It was also adjacent to a dentist, whose patients were going to and fro. Not very well provided with chairs, visual aids and all the usual meeting stuff.

The US team contained an eminent US citizen, so I invited them to go first. He started off by catapaulting a very elaborate paper dart across the room. Much chattering in the ranks which my unaided voice was not enough to quell. He does his bit. I am so busy trying to get some order into the meeting that I don't understand a word. He has another go. Same result. And again. So I have to take him aside and tell him that I will see him in private later. More chattering the ranks. I move to the head of a proper meeting table, large windows behing. Then the next team, I forget from which country, but the spokesperson was someone that I used to work with (one of two real people in the dream). He started off by kicking a football across the room, it passing me by rather to closely for comfort. He then started taking me down a peg or two, I started to feel uncomfortable and woke up. Seemed very important when I woke up; rather silly now!

And to close, a fragment from a dream of a week or so ago. There was a large grassed, low dome, in shape something like the roof of Bourne Hall but rather larger, raised up on a large number of short legs, overlooking a bend on a river. Maybe a car park underneath. By the means of various gymnastics, I was able to get from the bank of the river up onto the dome. Reasonable number of people up there. Then, all of a sudden, a shiny grey slick rose up out of the grass and flowed over the dome, leaving us standing in it. And then, just as suddenly it vanished. Just leaving a few dribbles over the edge of the dome. The shiny grey slick being the dominant image of this dream, now associating to one which I reported before, which, on inspection, turns out to also have involved a grey fluid, albeit of a rather differant sort. Perhaps dreams are all linked together under the surface.

I seem to remember that featureless, expansive fluids of the slick sort are said to be from that part of the personality which is laid down very early in life. Infantile in fact.

Heard massive squawking in the back garden yesterday. Went to look out and a dozen or so crows and magpies sitting in the trees around making a great old racket. Couldn't think what it might be - then saw Franklin trundling down the garden path with a wood pigeon in his mouth, looking rather pleased with himself. Went off home with it and not seen again. Some time later, modest squawking from house. We deduce that one of the young ladies of the house has found Franklin's present for her on the door step, on her return.

I found it odd how the other birds made such a fuss about the pigeon getting killed. I would have thought that they would not care what happened to pigeons. But clearly they do. Avian solidarity kicks in in the face of the cuddly predator.

That apart, been a weekend of two glitches. First, when trying to pump up the front tyre of the bicycle for once in a while, it suddenly deflated. Tried again. Deflated again. So we are into taking tyre off mode - at least it was the front tyre rather than the back. Get the tyre off, this being the posh tyre from Continental which is guaranteed against punctures for the first year of its life. Or it would have been had I bothered to fill in the registration form. Felt around the inside of the tyre for sharp pointed objects embedded in the tyre. Nothing. Try to inflate the tube. Can't. Fiddle with the tube valve. Can't. Try another pump. Can. And there does not seem to be anything wrong with the tube either, despite going for the water tub treatment. Somewhat puzzled and think that maybe there was something wrong with the valve. Maybe something wrong with the connector. Go to put the tube back and it seems to be about six inches too long. Maybe being inflated for so long has stretched it a bit. Try the tube that came with the tyre. Struggle with that for a bit and manage to put a neat couple of holes in the tube with a tyre lever. Try another tube and the first pump falls apart. Try the second pump with the first connector. This seems to be OK. Then get this second tube on with hardly any bother at all. Now pumped up nice and hard and seems to be OK. Will I get around to mending the puncture in the Continental tube? At £7 or so a pop it might well be - but can I be bothered?

The lesson here is two-fold. First, do not buy cheap pumps. They might work, but they also fall apart. Second, when above a certain age, do not try and mend a tyre when you are trying to get off to the baker. It will go wrong.

It seems a very long time ago that I actually mended punctures - rather than just changing the tube - under railway bridges, in the rain, on the way home from work. In fairness, I think these high pressure tyres take a good bit more welly to get them over the rim than the things I used to have in those far off days.

The second glitch was with the broadband connection from BT. Gave up the ghost after posting the previous post. One of those posts containing a picture which always seemed to prompt the PC to play with the dial-up connection which predated the broadband connection. Tried plugging and unplugging various things. Turning various things off and on. No good. Try again a couple of times during the day and then get onto the good people in Banglalore. Go through the usual stuff - which seems to have got a bit less painfull than it was the last time, nine months ago or so. More playing with plugs and power points. Line test. The all important DSL light on the router starts to show a bit more life, but not to the point of actually working. The help desker then takes me into Internet options and we, at the click of a button, remove the dial-up connection option. Everything springs into life. Been OK for the last half hour or so. So maybe we are in profit on this one. The irritating dial-up boxes may never appear again.

The lesson here is half-fold. Maybe if I had been bit more careful about checking plugs and leads and what have you before, the thing would have sprung into life before Bangalore. But we will never know.

On a more cultural note, a bit of rubber necking in London a couple of days ago, which took us to the newly renovated St Martin in the Fields. As ever, the church was most impressive, inside and out. Oddly free of the sort of funeral and military monuments which most famous churches are full of. I came across just the one, at the back, behind the back pews. But not too sure about the new east window. A sort of slightly distorted cross worked into the leads of otherwise plain leaded glass, the rest of the windows being plain leaded glass. For me, the wobbly cross did not go with the classical interior. Seem to recall that it is the work of an Iraqi lady glass worker - maybe a relative of the Iraqi lady architect who is all the rage (not here in Epsom) at the moment. There does seem to be a certain similarity of approach, with large curves where you are not expecting them.

Then down to the shiny new basement building, next to the cafe in the crypt proper, with its impressive new parish room. Impressive to look at that is. All dark wood and space. But I wonder how it feels to have a meeting there with windows all around the top for people to peer in through. Perhaps that it the price you have to pay for a bit of natural light. And I thought whoever did the two wells - one for the stairs and lift and one open, got them all wrong. Plus there was a lot of space which, despite the expensive building project, was not going to get a lot of use. Apart from the nice line in Christmas cards and a middle sized facility for the local Chinese Christian community.

Not having one, I don't think I ever want to be anywhere near this thing, let along drive the crane.

Yesterday, on remarking that I was a bit into nocturnes at the moment, I was informed that nocturnes were not invented by Chopin at all, rather by a contemporary from Dublin who spent most of his professional life in Russia, name of Field. Infant prodigy. I then remembered that I had some vinyl of Field, accidently retained, many years ago, from the Harringey record library. They must have either had a heavy Irish contingent or a heavy budget to have stocked such stuff: the complete piano concertos (i?) of John Field, pianist, 1782-1837. From a gang which calls itself 'Ceirnini Cladarg', complete with a very gaelic address and complete with the rather solemn notes that were the thing in the eighties of the last century. Notes on composer. Notes on concertos. Notes on notist. Notes by Liszt on Field, thoughtfully reproduced in both the original French and English. Notes on John O'Conor. Notes on the New Irish Chamber Orchestra. All that was missing was the perfume advertisements that you get with the concert hall equivalent. But I should not sneer: the notes were quite helpful, not knowing anything about any of it. And they confirm that the man did indeed invent the nocturne and that Chopin did crib from him. I have even listened to one and one half of the concertos.

I did not learn whether he was Catholic or Protestant, but did learn that, on his deathbed, following an early pope (Gregory the something I think) he quipped to the priest: 'Not calvinist but clavecinist' (adjusted slightly for effect).

Having been put right about nocturnes, went to recover among the books in the Tooting Oxfam shop and acquired for £2.99 (marked down from £4.99, original price £25) a copy of 'The secret of Bryn Estyn', in mint condition by one Richard Webster. This was a book which I had marked down for purchase when it was published but had never got around to it until now. The first 100 (out of 700) pages make for a very depressing read. The story is about a huge child abuse scandal in the nineties in North Wales. Two preliminary remarks. First, there was some child abuse. Second, the children involved were difficult and disturbed. They had been put in residential care for good reason. Quite a handful by Surrey standards and not children that I would willingly take on. But the story so far seems to be that a disaffected care worker - an able person who had an interesting family background of her own, who did not get on with her managers and who had been sacked after various warnings and what have you - managed to stir up an enormous scandal out of little more than her own misplaced zeal. The impression so far is that the damage caused by the scandal to the children and to the carers caught up in it, far outweighed any inappropriate behaviour there might have been lurking at the bottom of the whole unhappy story. And the scary thing is that she was able to do this. In the climate of the time, she was able to convince all kinds of great and good that she was right. Newspapers and television did OK though - sadly, with the heavy broadsheets in the lead, not the red tops. Even 'Private Eye' gets a dishonourable mention.

Further depressed by some bad news from Cheam. In the first place, the butcher and the baker will be shut from Christmas Eve until the Monday following. Whatever will we do for fresh food? At least the greengrocer understands our needs and is opening up on Saturday. Amuses me that amid this huge festival of food flannel and food books we are prepared to put up with old meat and stale bread.

And there is worse to come. In the second place and as a result of the dioxin scandal in the other island, supplies of pork have dried up at the pudding factory and neither black or white puddings are to be had. Unless I settle for giant killer black puddings intended for hotels which happen to be made out of English pork.

Off to a bad start when the PC at this Internet shop announced that something was wrong with the security certificate for this site when trying to view my blog to remind myself what I had last been on. Something that last happened in the regional capital's library. Then, when trying again, found myself at the site of one of those Texas mega churches. Then, I notice that I have spelt 'blogspot' as 'blogpsot' or something. Odd how an error of that sort transports me to heaven. But corrected the spelling and here we are.

On the way here amused to see that one of the wine bars, in Garratt Lane, near Earlsfield, which I usually pass rather later in the day when it is full of bright young things, was full of a mother and baby group. It seems that things have moved on since my sprogging days. After that past a workmens' cafe, usually empty when I pass, was full of workmen tucking into heavy breakfasts. So some things don't change after all.

But then past a builder's pickup where someone was unloading white plastic tubs - the sort of thing that garden centres sell fertilizer in - which the label said were full of tarmac. Presumably for a patch it is cheaper to use the stuff pre-packed in tubs than mess about with the loose. But not sure how they do the hot bit. Maybe this is some special water bound tar macadam which does not need heat? Despite being a contradiction in terms. Like the strange varnish which I bought the other day, the brushes for which could be washed out in soapy water.

And after that past the spot where, on my last visit, I picked up a lady's purse. Walked past it assuming it was empty, then thought maybe I ought to take a look, and it was full. Change and a great slew of cards. Now what to do? I could hand it in to one of the convenience stores to hand. But then I thought not. Asking a busy shopkeeper for a receipt seemed a bit heavy handed. Lumbering him with it seemed a bit hard on him anyway. And would the lady think to go in all the shops she had been in that day? Police station down the road had been shut for many years.

Take a closer look inside and find a pass for St George's Hospital (late of Hyde Park Corner), complete with mug shot and phone number. Ah ha. Phone the lady up and arrange an assignation. Next problem find a phone, given that I usually travel without the mobile. Again, don't like to ask a busy shopkeeper. I thought that an estate agent might be the thing, so march off east along the lane. About a mile further along, come to an estate agent. Lady there quite happy to phone up the hospital for me. No said the phone. The lady of the purse has gone home and won't be back until Monday. Can you give me a phone number? No. Can you send her a message? No. Can you help in anyway at all? No. That would be a breach of her privacy. Frustrated here, take an even closer look at the purse and find a driving license, complete with another mugshot and an address. Which turns out to be more or less the same mile back along Garratt Lane. Return purse to grateful lady and, having lost more than half an hour, reduced to catching bus to next appointment.

Now onto lessons learned. Number 1, look at the purse properly in the first place. Getting the details quickly more important than the breach of the owner's privacy. Maybe go into a pub, take a refreshment and do the thing in style, rather than messing about in the dark outside. Number 2, handing it in to the nearby railway station not too clever either, even supposing they would take it. Which they probably would not unless you lied about where you found it, which would confuse things if the owner ever tried to claim it. And then all lost property handed in to the railway in this part of the world winds up in a large shed at Waterloo. Not terribly convenient if you live in Earlsfield. And do the people manning the shed contact the owners of property carrying contact details? Number 3, is it a very good idea to have a photo pass with your name and address stored along with all your credit cards? I was told afterwards that one is now required to carry one's driving license when driving, rather than being allowed to present it at a police station of your choice within 48 hours. But is it a good thing? Does the combination of driving license and credit cards give a bad person something to go on? While bricks and mortar shops require pin numbers, I don't think internet ones do. So the bad person could go on the spree on the Internet, perhaps from this Internet shop, from where I would be reasonably hard to trace. The bad person could hire a car using the license, providing they used their own credit card, thus scoring their traffic offences to you. Must think further, when last night's fumes have died down a bit.

Been having a few days of Guardian to vary the diet from the DT. So rather than deep thought, I shall recycle a few snippets that caught my eye.

First, we had the eco-protest at some power station last year. Now while I do not altogether approve of mass demonstrations outside peices of critical national infrastructure in these tricky times, it would be good if we could manage without being too heavy handed. In the wake of complaints about heavy handedness, the New Labourite responsible claimed in Parliament that no less than 70 decent police men and women had been injured in the course of their peacekeeping duties. But someone has now played the Freedom of Information card and it turns out that there were no injuries at all in the course of peacekeeping duties, but there were odd cases of toothache, diarrhoea and such like among 1,500 or so police men and women on duty. And the powers that be wonder why we are all so keen on having a Freedom of Information Act.

Second, we had the sad case of a clutch of US newspapers being taken over by someone who had made a lot of money out of property. But he used the wheeze of not buying out the then existing shareholders with his own money, or with shares in his own company, rather by borrowing money from the bank. Now all gone pear shaped. Now the Grauniad claimed - paraphrasing slightly - that this was all down to lumbering a God fearing and decent newspaper carrying a whole shed load of committed, caring, consequential and possibly consecrated correspondants with a whole shed load of debt which it could not carry. All down to filthy capitalist. But I don't think that this is quite fair. In ordinary times, it doesn't make that all much differance how you finance a takeover. It's all about tax arrangements and who is going to carry the risks. Paying the bank interest on its loan is not that differant to paying the shareholders dividends. But in this case, the shareholders had been, generously as it turned out, paid off, and the balancing loan got caught up in the credit squeeze. OK, so an error of judgement, but an error that lots of other people made.

I then start to wonder about where all the money has gone in the huge Ponzi swindle we have just heard about. Now it may well be the case that lots of dosh has disappeared on expenses, kick-backs, commissions and what have you. Money down the drain. And it may well be that Mr Ponzi made a lot of unlucky investments, another error of judgement that lots of other people have made recently. But how can you lose $50bn when you have less than $20bn under management? You must be losing some very big option bets. Perhaps the answer is that the money has gone into the pockets of the winners of those very big bets. The Grauniad alleges that Mr Ponzi's accounts were audited by an obscure firm of accountants with 3 people on the payroll, one of whom is retired. So maybe greedy people investing large sums with the likes of Mr Ponzi ought to do a bit more homework, rather than blaming the regulators for not doing theirs.

And then, I see that global oil supply is going to peak in 2020, according the an outfit called the IEA. Which seems rather worrying on the face of it. But what exactly is behind such a figure? What does it mean? Part of the story seems to be that the recent fall in oil price is causing producers to cut back on the capital expenditure needed to bring new fields onstream. And there is a long lead time on this stuff, so if the price picks up in ten years time, there won't be time to fix things by 2020. All interesting stuff, so hoof it off to the IEA where I am very quickly invited to pay for information. Now working on their lower grade, free site.

And lastly, intrigued to see an allegation that one Liam Byrne, the minister whom I think issued his staff with a 10 page memo about his support requirements. What brand of coffee at what o'clock and that sort of thing. The allegation seemed to be that he has got the Prime Minister to work in an open plan office with about 20 other heavies. Amazing stuff. Not even our very own Prime Minister gets the privacy of his own office any more. Which I find very hard to believe. Such a person has little enough private life as it is without working in a gold fish bowl. Although, to be fair, real rulers like Louis XIV thought that not having a private life was the whole point.

Franklin now has mooching rights in the kitchen. If you look carefully you can see that someone is about to open a door; and, as we all know, life is always better on the other side of the door.

I have been moved to moan about the quantity of signage on our roads before. Today, following a round trip to Tunbridge Wells, I am moved to moan about the quality. I have decided that it is not just me. Rather, that whoever it is who decides where to put signs saying things like 'turn left for Epsom' is not always very good at it. I grant that getting it right at a complicated junction is not easy - but getting it right they are not. The most common failing seems to be to put up such a sign where it does not mean the first on the left. More by way of an early warning. Another tricky area is where you have two exits on the left, one after the other. I often find it hard to know when one is supposed to be pulling over for the second one. The eastbound exit from the M3 onto the M25 is a case in point, with the M25 anti-clockwise exit immediately following the M25 clockwise exit.

I suppose one of the troubles is that a proper diagram of a junction on a road sign is going to be too much to take in as one zooms past. So they have to settle for some simplification. Perhaps there are some simple conventions which, if stuck to and known by the motoring public, would do the trick. Perhaps they should get some contracting cognitive scientists onto the case rather than contracting tar macadam layers. Would it take more effort than is being poured into persuading us to stop smoking?

Nearer home, was strolling around the Ewell branch of Epsom and Ewell library the other day, on the occasion of a coffee stop with free parking. Quite a good selection of fiction. Come across 'The Great Gatsby' by Scott Fitzgerald, which I had heard of, but for some reason, never read. Nice edition from Everyman, a bit smarter than most of the large number of rather elderly red Everymans that I have at home. Slightly enlarged format, smart white cover, Random House replacing Dent as the publisher, middle brow (aka accessible) introduction by an academic who also happens to be a novelist in his own right, and rather a natty calendar, setting out the life of the author and the publication of this book in the goings on in the literary world and in the world at large. In four column format.

It turns out that Scott Fitzgerald is an almost exact contemporary of Aldous Huxley - who did not figure in the calendar, while DH Lawrence and JAA Joyce did. The first novel of the former (SF) sold some 25,000 copies, while the latter (AH) was pleased with 2,500. And oddly, although they both appear to write in a satirical vein about overlapping milieux, they do not appear to have ever met. AH seemed to manage quite a comfortable life style on his 2,500, so presumably SF was more in the pop star firmament, presumably along with the likes of Simenon.

Whizzed through Gatsby in a few hours, perhaps a little too quickly. But the book left rather an odd taste: one didn't much like either the author or the people he was writing about. If a fair picture of what the prohibition era in the States was like for the fairly rich, they must have been rather rum lot. Must read it again.

Boiled beef with carrots day, although not quite in the usual format. Acquire 5lb lump of chuck steak from Cheam. Take very large saucepan and put about three pints of water in it. Add 7 whole carrots, 6 quartered onions, 5 stalks of celery and 4 ground pepercorns. Add beef, which is just covered by the water. Bring to boil and simmer for a long time. In this case it was cooked in about 4 hours which was rather before we wanted to eat it. So remove from water and place in cold oven. Concerned that it might disintegrate if I left it in the water and thinking that even very soggy meat firms up as it cools. Some time later knock up some mashed potatoes and brussells sprouts. Start reheating the meat in a very low oven. Convert some of the liquor from the beef into carrot sauce. That is to say roux some corn flour in beef dripping (from a previous occasion). Put 2 pints of liquor and bits through the food blender. Stir into the roux. Simmer for 10 minutes. Serve up. Not bad at all. Some of us preferred the carrot sauce with our brussells sprouts, others preferred it on our meat. But I think next time I will work a bit harder at getting the boiling done at the right time: the texture would have been better for the joint having been stood for 15 minutes after boiling, rather than being reheated.

While not worrying about boiling beef, have been doing a bit of DIY. Start of by a visit to Wickes to buy some wood glue, a shop which I do not much care for with its cheap and rather scruffy image. Plus all it sells is own brands which reminds one rather of basics from Mr S. Anyway, go there for the glue and was surprised to find that 500ml of the stuff cost more than £5.

Then take the desktop extension which was the scene of sprog 2's A levels. Deconstruct it, recovering a peice of lowish grade 1cm ply around 3 feet by 4 feet. This being big enough to hold the number 2 desktop computer with comfort. At which point maybe I ought to explain what the requirement is. The screen for the number 2 desktop computer sits on the sea chest from Gosport which stands 23 inches high, that is to say 5 inches lower than your average table. The keyboard and mouse sit on a repurposed wooden chess board, maybe 16 inches square, perched on the edge of the sea chest and further supported by a single hinged leg. This arrangement, which has served after a fashion for some time now, is both too small and too low for comfort. I sure that if I was in the world of work I would make a lot of fuss to the appropriate authorities. Risk of repetitive back injury. But as it is, now had enough. Need something bigger and higher.

So, edge the recovered ply with some softwood recovered from some peice of IKEA furniture recovered from North London. This will stiffen it up. Build a simple contraption to put on the sea chest and to support one end of the new table top 5 inches above the level of the top of the sea chest. Add a couple of legs on hinges to the other end of the table top. All this using old pine from the sea chest which I smashed up (see earlier posting), as opposed to the one which is still up and running. The old pine being lovely stuff to work with, far superior to the soft white pine one gets these days. The hinges being the black shed door hinges I bought some time ago for the fox gate at the side of the house, but which did not do (see earlier posting). At 2 or 3 pounds from the shiny new Travis Perkins on the Longmead estate, good to find a home for them.

In the course of this, am reminded how much better a fix one gets with modern screws. Cross head, parallel sides and very sharp point. Putting short ones into soft wood one doesn't have to do more than mark the spot with a bradawl. (Aside: why bradawl? A brad is, I think the sort of nail one puts floor boards down with. How does that combine with awl to make a small tool for making small holes). So the question is, why were the wood screws of my youth tapered? To the extent that if one was being picky, one made the hole for them using drills of three differant sizes. They must have been more expensive to make and they did not, I think give as good a fix.

And now, in the middle of modern varnish. Milky stuff, also from Wickes, which one cleans off one's brush with soap and water rather than with white spirit. And doesn't smell as bad as the creamy stuff which was the wood glue. But it seems to do the job OK.

A particularly bad example of the genre this week. That is to say the reviewer writes a short essay on the subject in hand, giving the books or their authors a cursory mention along the way. Maybe the editor ought to insist that the review spend at least half its space reviewing the subject of the review, leaving surveys of the world at large to the other half.

In this case the subject of the review was the history of books and libraries, one a snip from Yale University Press at £20, the other a rather more expensive effort from the British Library at £45. In the course of a review between three and four columns long, the author of the first book is mentioned maybe four times, that of the second once. The review closed with two very picky errors. Perhaps the reviewer saw that as his main task: scim the books until you have found a couple of errors. Whack out a short essay on the subject in hand, maybe lifted from Wikipedia, job done and down to the boozer. I wonder if they get paid? How many people - even including libraries - are going to shell out £45 for the second book? Perhaps Lord and Lady Healey, whom we learn to be the proud owners of 17,000 books, will. They can neither be short of a bob or two or too fussy!

And today, the DT tells us that the open air swimming pool at Hampton, near Hampton Court Palace as the name suggests, is heated and is open all the year round. To the comfortably warm 82F. I'm not sure that I would want to swim there with the air temperature around freezing, but it seems that people do. In fact there has been a rash of people in the DT doing odds things around very cold water. Now around cold water is fair enough. That is your problem. But pumping hard pressed taxpayers money into the sky through Hampton swimming pool is quite another. I think we ought to send the eco-police in to close the operation down. Must be a more serious offence than putting potato peelings in your land fill only wheelie bin.

Came across the passport of my mother in law, who died some time ago, the other day. Having nothing better to do, I read the instructions. These were to the effect that, in the event of the death of the holder, the passport was to be returned to the nearest passport office for cancellation. Still having nothing better to do, and passing through Victoria Station, I thought I would do as I was asked. Trundle around to the back of Victoria Station to the passport office which I discover has been renamed the Department of Identity or some such. And in large part staffed by people who were no doubt born in this country, but whose family connections looked to be rather more exotic than mine. No problem but amused that things should pan out in this way. Gent. at the door looked a bit amused when I explained what I wanted but thought that I should go through the metal detector and present myself to the general enquiries counter. Luckily I was not carrying my trusty bread knife on this occasion and make it to the general enquiries desk and explain myself again. Given a queueing ticket, number G8006 or some such and told to proceed to the second floor. Arrive on the second floor to find a sort of departures display listing lots of numbers starting with Ps. The chap next to me was an F. We wondered whether we were on the wrong floor, or otherwise in some sin-bin. While we wondered, an F-number and a G-number came up, although not the right ones. Wondered a bit more and my number came up. Off to desk number 8 and explain myself again. The customer advisor (I imagine that is the sort of job title they get these days) thinks for a moment and then produces a very scruffy form for me to fill in. None of your tasteful printing in shades of green. Just a rather scruffy copy of a rather scruffy form. Fill it out and the customer advisor trots off to check something. Presumably to look up some combination of me, the mother in law and the passport on some crime register. Not quite sure why this could not be done on the shiny new computer she had at the enquiry point. Most places make a point of letting you see what is on their screens these days. Anyway, we passed the test and I was free to go, the whole operation having taken maybe 15 minutes. Will I just drop the next one in the compost heap?

What does the department gain by having the passport handed in? In these days of electronic passports, presumably the pages and covers and what not are not quite as useful as they were in the day of the jackal. And in these days of linking records, presumably it would not be that hard to run the deaths file from the Office of National Statistics against the passport file. There must be a lot of stuff besides the name to do a match on. And I don't see any privacy angle as death records are on the public record - although I am not sure that you can go and buy the tape. Maybe it is just that in the rush to get everything onto the computer, the department didn't bother to revise the rules printed inside?

Started off Sunday with kippers from the Isle of Man, via one of the fish stalls at Kingston market. No dye, grilled, but not too dry. Not large, but very satisfactory. Kingston market also boasted one of those German markets which seem to be popping up everywhere. Are they all German? Are there any left in Germany? Amongst other things a sausage stall where we bought one of those roast smoked bacon lumps and a rather fine looking lump of bacon sausage. Have yet to try either. We have now bought the roast smoked bacon lumps from a Portuguese delicatessen, a Polish delicatassen (sklep?) and a German market. They all looked the same, so maybe they all had 'Made in the Republic of Ireland' printed in very small letters inside the wrapper somewhere. So much for ethnic shopping.

Later that day moved onto a 6.5lb peice of fore rib from Cheam. Cooked it for 2 hours at 180C and it was just about right: brown outside and pink inside. Being somewhat nervous about opening the oven when roasting meat - the loss of heat confuses the cooking time - I don't usually go in for roast potatoes - which I have never really got the hang of anyway - but on this occasion I did do roast parsnips. Take one parsnip, Exminster variety and about 2lbs in weight, cut into lumps about four inches long and one inch square. Fry briefly in dripping (I don't butter my parsnips for these purposes) in the frying pan, then transfer to the roasting dish about 30 minutes before the end of time. This way one gets the roasting dish in and out of the oven in about 30 seconds, without losing the time it would take to baste the parsnips in-situ. Serve with crinkly cabbage and white easy-cook rice. Plus a couple of bottles of Tarragona casa reserva from Lidls for £3.49 a pop, including wire around the bottles. Or was it Aldis? I have got completely stuck on keeping the two places into two compartments. Irrevokably locked into one.

Had the beef cold yesterday so made some gravy. Did not have the stock from the roasting dish which had been chucked, so cooked up some corn flour in beef dripping. Added some ground black pepper (much better result with a pestle and mortar, rather than one of those rotary jobs. Bashing the corns releases the active ingredients in a way that simply cutting them up does not). Added the blood which had oozed out of the joint the day before and had by then more or less congealed. Added some water from the nearly cooked potatoes. Turned out rather better than I expected. Cold beef very good, although I imagine younger people might be rather put off by all the inedible bits and peices breaking up the meat. All too obviously from an animal rather than MacDonalds. All seems to show much more when served cold rather than hot.

Having difficulties of our own with banks at the moment, interested to read about the lady who has been receiving someone else's bank statement for the last 10 years or something. According to the DT, the bank has apologised but is not confident that it can do anything to stop the statements turning up to the wrong address. I find this rather hard to believe, so I wonder what the true story was. It seems unlikely that the thing is a complete fabrication.

And then there was story about the pedantic council and the lady parker. It seems that the lady parker stuck her pay and display ticket inside her windscreen. Some time later it falls off, before the visit by the regulator. She issues a parking ticket. She (the nosey parker) appeals, loses and elects to pay her fines in 2p peices or something. Now I'm sure she had her bit of fun taking her wheelbarrow around to the town hall cash office, but was it all really necessary? I know the rules say that the parking ticket must be displayed to be valid, but surely there is a bit of room for common sense. No-one was disputing that she had bought her ticket - although no-one was saying that she had produced it from the floor of her car in evidence either. So why not just waive the fine?

My impression is that the revenue regulators riding the SouthWest trains are quite sensible about this sort of thing. If you appear to be honest, or even to be dishonest but with some particle of remorse, or at least good manners, they give the benefit of the doubt. They only prosecute - which while possibly deterring, must be a major expense and bother - as a last resort.

Maybe Surrey parking regulators are a bit like the police with guns. New toy which they have yet to learn to use responsibly.

It has long been a source of some irritation that people with pretty faces and a pleasing manner get paid large sums for reading the news and such like on television. Reading to the camera is a skill, but is it really such a big skill? The source of the irritation might, of course, be sour grapes. No-one ever thought to offer me anything for reading the news.

That being as it may, I was interested to see that another lady news reader has successfully done her (presumably) former employer for £250,000 because they decided that she was getting a bit long in the tooth to count as a pretty face. One might have thought that, having no doubt earned a large amount of money in her time, she would bow out a bit more gracefully. I think I shall open a book on when the first lap dancer will take her employer to the European Court of Human Justice (or whatever it is called) on similar grounds. Perhaps Mrs Blair, whom I believe to specialise in such stuff, will lead for her.

Another class of people who irritate, the regulators, must be rather disappointed in the Queen's Speech. Only a very modest amount of that so worthy legislation which takes such a lot of space and effort. The thought struck me that we should inaugurate the stone as the official measure of such stuff - stones in weight of a single copy of the relevant documents, printed in 12 point type on 200g paper. With the rather high paper weight being appropriate for such important material. It would amuse me to think that the official measure was the same as that used for wet fish.

I think that some of the worthy legislation was all about making it even easier for ladies who want it both ways - that is to say to bring up a family and to have a full-on career - to claim all kinds of flexibilities from their employers. I suspect that the do gooders who dream all this sort of stuff up have little experience of running a shop - in the wider sense - where everybody can more or less come or go as they please. Absolute pain in my limited experience. Apart from all the bother of having to remember who works when, the thing is a scivers' paradise. "Where were you?" "Didn't I mention that I had to flex off for little Wayne's appointment with his school's flexible media librarian?" Or perhaps: "I should have thought you would of worked out by now that I have to spend the time between 1200 and 1500 on Fridays in Sainsburys. I've got a family to care for, not like some people. And yes I did pop in for a quick half on the way back. What's your problem?" Its all very well saying that managers have to learn how to deal with all this kind of stuff - but if they don't have to, they might have more time to spend on other things.

Another stray thought was that regulators are also known as meddlers. A word which is pleasantly close to medlars, a fruit which is best consumed when slightly rotten.

And while we are in 'disgusted from Epsom' mode, we might as well dilate about ladies whose organisations run into a spot of bother but do not feel it necessary to resign. Now while I am not in much of a position to comment on the case in Harringey, we do seem to have a widespread problem with having lost sight of where the buck stops. So we have the well paid permanent head of a large department of a large local authority. Something frightful happens out on the ground which is within the area of responsibility of the large department. Clearly no good for the head of the department to claim good intentions. That is not even always enough to satisfy the man at the Pearly Gates. And no good to say, well, matey three levels down screwed up. I'll get him dismissed for incompetance. Three levels down not good enough for something frightful. A more impressive scapegoat is needed. OK so that doesn't fly. What about the line that there must have been a process failure for which middle management is responsible for matey to be able to screw up. I'm senior management and I did not appoint that particular bit of middle management. So I'm in the clear. Lay off my pension pit. Hmmm. OK, so let's get nuclear: this is a crummy area with a crummy budget and bad things are going to happen. Us: a bit more sympathy, but should the head be head on that basis? Should one take a job which is impossible? Doesn't that amount to false pretences? Clearly a giant playground for bar-room chatter for the disgusteds of Epsom.

Some people get upset about the UK government acquiring access to everybodys' email. Now yesterday I sent an email containing, say, some obscure surveying terms. By the time I sent the thing, Google had put up a one line banner advertisement for a product very closely tied to said surveying terms. Now I can quite accept that an email carrier has to have the right to see the email. It has - at least unless we get in rather deep - to be able to do this in order to be able to maintain the service. But writing a program to read emails in order to target advertisements is going rather further - although one might well be happy about this if the targetting is accurate and the advertisement is muted - which they are. I suppose one is less happy about the government doing much the same thing - they might even buy the necessary technology from Google - because one suspects that they will use it for the purposes of collecting tax. And while we have a duty to pay tax, we should also have a right of privacy. It is not fair if when I am discussing my negotiating position vis-a-vis the tax people with my accountant via email, the tax people have access to those emails. Not sure that I will get too excited yet though. I think that all that is going to happen is that some very large government computer is going to spend lots of time sorting through trillions of rubbishy emails looking for key words like 'bomb'. I think they will have enough to do with that, without looking for key words like 'tax man'. No doubt in time this last will be possible, and if I was younger I might worry - but I'm not!

While we are on privacy just had an interesting interchange with my listening bank (HSBC). Phoned up by a lady with what sounds like a US accent from what she described as the collections department. An account is in debit to the tune of a couple of thousand or so. What am I going to do about it? She kept banging on about this last without offering me any explanation of why the account was in debit (which I would have thought would have been quite obvious if she had taken a look at the account's recent history) and without letting me go and check the account to find out for myself. Not interested in assurances that the matter would be sorted out instanter with our local branch. In the end I was reduced - I am sorry to say - to rudeness, shortly after which I put the phone down.

Then go online and find out in about 60 seconds that what is happened that a cheque for a couple of thousand pounds was drawn on the wrong account, but honoured, leaving the account in debit to most of the amount. Nip into the right account, transfer the necessary funds to the wrong account, where they should arrive on Monday. Go down to the local branch, clutching the offending cheque book, to explain what has happened and what I have done about it. Oh no sir. Can't talk to you about this because you are neither account holder nor signatory. But can't you just note the account with what I have done. I am not asking you to do anything to or with the account. No sir. But it should be OK because the collections people won't bother you again before Monday and they won't bother you at all if the money gets there first. Not at all impressed with all this. More or less doing away with branches might have saved a lot of money - which was a good thing - but the quality of service in this particular matter was clearly a bad thing.

Maybe on Monday I shall trundle down to the bank again, armed with my power of attorney (which it did not cross my mind to take today), and find out how long it will take to unblock BH's bank card. Will the power of attorney empower them to talk to me? Will our credit rating be sullied for ever?

I wonder if all this accounts for the slight glitch I had a few days ago with my own bank card, connected to another account to which BH is a signatory. That is to say, the HSBC hole in the wall at Vauxhall tube station told me that a withdrawal transaction was not valid with this card. Spent the journey to Kings Cross wondering whether someone has been tampering with that account. Go to the HSBC hole in the wall outside Kings Cross station and the folding stuff is forthcoming without comment. Or maybe I am getting paranoid; maybe on the first occasion I just hit my account at the same time as some routine background operation had locked it for a few seconds.

And what appears to be a rather extravagent use of citrus fruit somewhere in the Netherlands, according to http://sweet-faraulah.blogspot.com/.

Failing snow here at Epsom, winter shots from a place I presume to be Finland to be found at http://heisusanne.blogspot.com/.

Following the recent report of a semi-senior moment we now have the real thing. From worrying about whether or not I have locked the back door, I now have to worry about whether I have locked BH & FIL in. This being what I did the day before yesterday. And given that one of the locks on our back door is not unlockable from the inside, there was a certain amount of huffing and puffing while BH worked out how to get out. Fortunately, by the time I had returned from the baker, the incident had been downgraded from sev. 1 to sev. 4.

Yesterday at the baker I learn all about the mysterious dark bread. It was, indeed, Russian bread but not particularly ryeful. Other ingredients included rolled oats, milk and what the (brown) baker called black jack - this being, it seems, a bakers' term for molasses. He promises some for general release on Friday, so I may be able to get in closer touch with the stuff.

Moving on from the fish porriage ration, we got back to chick peas, where we have not been for some months. Take three tins of chick peas for £1 from Mr S - at which price the tinned one's must be approaching the price of dried ones. Make some sauce in the usual way: fry fat pork in butter, added chopped onion, add chopped tomato & etc. For a change add a bit of sliced kabanos and some coarsely chopped button mushrooms. Stir in the drained chickpeas somewhere near the end. Not quite as substantial as the fish porriage but tendencies in that direction. Only snag being that at least one of the tins of the chick peas involved brine rather than water, so the salt content a bit higher than would otherwise have been the case.

On the strength of having used an Oyster Card at least five times in the last seven days, I have been reverse engineering the system - which I still think is rather complicated and expensive for what it does. Other people have much simpler solutions which make far less money for IT services companies.

Now a key bit of design is that you have an Oyster which records your balance (inter alia) and they have a central bunker which also records you balance. The trick being to keep these two things reasonably in step. Here, the important bit of input seems to be that if one tops up one's Oyster over the Internet, one has to nominate a tube station at which to have your Oyster updated when you next touch down. (Which, for me, makes Internet top up fairly useless. I might just as well do it at the tube station). This tells me that not all landing strips are capable of knowing about all central bunker updates to all cards. They can do on the spot deductions for the fare in question, but they cannot cope with remote updates from the central bunker. Presumably the numbers are such that a static landing strip on an underground entry point, with links to the station servers, can cope with a limited number of remote updates, and nomination keeps the number under the limit. Whereas the mobile landing strips on buses cannot cope at all. A second feature is that bus journeys are flat rate, in the sense that only one fare applies to any one bus, so only one touch down per journey is required. Whereas train and tram journeys vary a bit, so take off and touch down are required. As it were. Deduction from Oyster made at touch down. But there is a complication which I have not quite got to the bottom of. And that is that the system goes in for refunds if you spend more on individual journeys in one day than a one day travel card would cost. I presume that the central bunker collects up all the fares from all the underground stations and all the buses at the end of the day. These last, presumably, when the bus driver checks his machine into the bus station. And it is likely that there are some lags in all this, so you can't be too sure exactly when the refund will be made. Anyway, central bunker does its sums. But how does it post the deductions back to the Oysters, the opening presumption being that landing strips cannot cope with much volume and that nomination is required? Does it just post the update to an underground station it knows that you use regularly and hope that you use it again? Are the special top-up machines at underground stations capable of checking an individual account at the central bunker, rather than relying on transactions posted to it by the central bunker? Maybe an infusion of N. Brown will bring the solution with it.

One other observation in the meantime. The top up machine kept telling me that my Oyster was unregistered (although I thought it was) and that the top up transaction had been cancelled (although I know that it was not). Not the least confusing bit of user interface design.

This being the stuff that the likes of Scott went to a lot of trouble with, main thing being to get maximum calories to the eatable gram. Sadly he forgot the vitamin C, not a good plan on a six month journey. His stuff was made, as I recall, from meat fat and other meat extracts and you made a kind of brown porriage with the stuff. The Epsom version is rather differant. Take the remaining basa fillet (see earlier post on the subject) out of the freezer and allow to thaw. Soak 6 ounces of pearl barley overnight. Add some thinly sliced smooth skinned celery (see earlier post on the subject) and bring to the boil. Turn heat off and stand for four hours. Warm up again, adding a little water if necessary. Fry the basa in some butter and stir into the barley, which by now is moving towards a porriage texture. BH and FIL not attracted, so I did the lot for breakfast yesterday. Did not feel overful, but comfortable, and did not need to eat in a substantial way until about 12 hours later. Clearly the stuff to stoke up on when out in the cold, up a hill, or both.

Rather differant was the very brown bread being mass produced for some up-town order today by the baker in Cheam. Bread a rich dark brown, about the colour of the outside of a rich fruit cake. Baked in the sort of tin that you might otherwise make sandwich loaves in. The lady of the shop claimed that it was perhaps a Russian recipe, very good but that there was none of it for sale to the general public. My guess is that it would be good, but that I would not want to eat as much of it at a sitting as I eat of white bread - that is to say ranging up to one small loaf.

Been pondering lately about the vice-admiral (see previous posting) who is master-minding our efforts to contain the Somali pirates. Clearly missed my vocation as same.

Factlets 1 to 4: a big tanker costs around £50m and the oil to put in it might cost another £50m. It might take 50 days to sail the thing from the Persian Gulf, around the Cape of Good Hope to Europe, and the trip might cost £5m.

Suggestion 1 (which the DT suggests is starting to happen): harden up the vessel. Start by hardening up key areas so that lightly armed pirates can't get at them or the people in them. Then move onto armament. This might take the form of tacking light naval guns/big machine guns and searchlights to the side of the tanker. You would need proper mountings for them, hanging out and over the side so that they can enfilade the sides of the tanker, and maybe 6 would give reasonable coverage. Two each side and one each end. One then needs some sort of burglar alarm which would give you enough time to move to action stations (beat to quarters in Hornblower speak). At which point I assume you are allowed to engage. No nonsense about taking prisoners. Maybe the small boats involved do not show on radar, but maybe they could be picked up with sonar, over and above the noise of the tanker itself. One might need ten people to man this lot and on the assumption that you needed them for half the trip, you have spent another £250,000 on staff, plus the cost of putting the stuff in. Maybe a million or so.

Suggestion 2: tighten up on vehicle registration and tracking. Every legitmate vessel is required to carry a tamper proof beacon which provides identification and tracking. Identify the balance using a satellite parked up above and take care of them.

Suggestion 3: start getting tough with places known to be providing aid and succour to pirates. Maybe occupy them and put them under martial law. If it gets really nasty, one would maybe need to move to concentration camps (in the original, Boer war, sense of the word. But still not something to embark on lightly. A rather heavy version of the internment that we had for a bit in Northern Ireland).

Suggestion 4: start on supply lines. There can't be that many places in Somalia capable of making the necessary gear, so start cracking down on the few that there are and on imports. I guess the snag with this one is that there are thousands of miles of rough frontier out in the desert which would be hard to make impermeable without making more trouble than you are unmaking.

Suggestion 1 has the merit that it is something that ship owners can get on with - without waiting for the sort of difficult international agreement needed for the others. Suggestion 2 would need be mounted by a suitable empowered consortium - but I don't suppose you would get public opinion on your back. Other two suggestions more tricky. Other countries in the area might not like the West (which it would have to be) getting as heavy handed as this. What about the inviolability of sovereign states when they are not very sovereign? We will see if anything of the sort catches on. But I start to wonder how much of our prosperity depends on the free and untroubled movement of goods. The benefits of trade would be significantly weakened if the costs of carriage, say, doubled to take care of just this particular menace. Which on my factlets I would think they could, at least in those areas where you get pirates. Maybe I need some more factlets. But the good news is that Greenpeace will probably stop breaching the peace at sea while this is sorted out, in case we start confusing them with pirates.

Something new to me at any rate. The Kansas City Southern Line Christmas train. Is this something SWT might have a go at? Lifted from http://secksiebrat.blogspot.com/.