pumpkinstrokemarrow

Two interesting dreams in the last couple of days. First, I was staying in a small stately home which had been converted to a hotel. For some reason I took a violent dislike to the owner and a bunch of us decided to bash his front door in, using something like a very large and heavy door as a battering ram. Having bashed his front door in, we discover an open fire in front of us, at the back of the hall. Push the battering ram into the fire and retire. Major conflagration starts, then oddly peters out. A lot of mess and a fair amount of damage but the small stately home has not burnt down. I retire to my bedroom in the right wing. In the morning I am a bit coy about coming down to breakfast where the owner will be supervising. Second, a dream in which, for once the BH has a role. She is to do the warm up numbers - in the form of piano accompanied lieder, after the fashion of Schubert - at a concert in a church where the main business is something choral and ecclesiastical. Location Cambridge. Rehearsal goes OK. Then, despite not having much time to spare, we decide to go shopping in a neighbouring department store and park in the basement. Do our shopping, that is to say buy a large leatherette holdall, and try to find the car. Fail. Get separated. I start to explore this rather odd basement on several levels which does not contain many cars. The floor of one level is a lot of loose planks, more or less suspended in mid air. One chamber contains some rather odd generators strapped to the wall. Very dark. Another has a sloping floor. Eventually emerge to find BH, who in the meantime has acquired a baby to put into the holdall, and we just about pack into the back of a very crowded, back-loading bus. Location Norwich. All very uncomfortable. The concert has started and we are still on the bus. Perhaps they will do the ecclesiastical bits first and BH can do her lieder afterwards.

Yesterday, being a hot day, to Worthing to take a peek at the Oxfam bookshop there. On the way, had the bright idea to stop for our picnic at Cissbury Ring, the highest point, it seems, of this part of the south downs. FIL very pleased with himself for making it more or less to the top. Double sticks rather than Rollator. On the west, views down to Selsey Bill. On the east, views down to the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. Must have been a major effort to build the thing, back in the days of jaw bones of donkeys. Not now clear what all the hussocks and tussocks littering the summit might have been or might have been caused by. Removed, in flagrant contravention to the Removal of Geological Materials from Heritage Sites Restaining Order (as amended July 2006), one modest sized flint to decorate one of the ponds back in suburbia. Various unknown small birds, put up the odd skylark and noted several spotted woodpeckers, precise variety (there seem to be several) unknown. But certainly not the green woodpecker that we get in said suburbia. Various ramblers and other humans, two rabbit burrows but no cows, despite the poster announcing presence of same. Grass worn very thin so by high summer it might be a bit bare.

Then down to Worthing where we parked up in the High Street. Much bigger town than I remember with a right of mixture of ages and sizes of buildings. Lots of people smoking in the streets and in the various cafes and bars sporting outside seating; rather more than would be the case in Epsom these days. Down to the prom. and walked along, along with lots of other folk out taking the sun. Plenty of people on the beach, some even swimming. Some tinnies visible and some transistors audible. One rather bossy beach patrol person charging about on a rather noisy quad bike. Not at all clear why he could not have walked or used a bicycle. Eventually found the Oxfam book shop, which proved to carry a lower grade stock than the one in Kingston. Still, having recently been reminded of Fielding, the father of the English novel, acquired two of him in the Oxford Classics series at £1.99 a pop. Good series and look, at first sight, to be an entertaining read. Further report in due course. Came across a branch of 'The Works' where I have done well in the past, nothing on this occasion.

On the way back attempted to visit Findon church, said to be ancient and had certainly got itself stranded, well away from the village. Next to the rather grand but deserted looking Findon Place. Presumably the owner of the place had the gift of the living in times past. Present for deserving impoverished cousins sort of thing. Failed to get into the church, although it looked as if there had been a wedding earlier in the day. A pity as it did indeed appear to be quite old, though heavily restored by the Victorians. Flashy raised pointing to the the flint facings.

Last knockings on the recent large chicken yesterday. Boil up bones with some left over cabbage. Leave overnight, heat up again, pound with potato masher and strain. Take off half a pint and blend with some left over (boiled potatoes) and leeks. Add back to the stock. Add four ounces of pearl barley and simmer for 65 minutes. Added what is left of the chicken and gravy. Serve. Did very well for a light dinner accompanied from some white bread of a German variety from the baker in Crouch End which used to be Halls and which used to sell, forty years ago, spiffing white bloomers.

Spent part of this morning listening once again to Schumann's piano quintet, opus 44, first heard a couple of weeks or so ago at the QEH, courtesy of the Takacs Quartet plus Marc-Andre Hamelin. Very good it was too, especially the second and subsequent movements, the first being a little loud for me. An odd coincidence, that in among my eight feet of plastic, there is just one Schumann disc. At the QEH, for once in a while, we sat at the very front, barring the sparse seats for wheel chairs. Interesting to be so close: a greater immediacy, but a greater rawness too, which meant for me that I had to concentrate a bit. You get a more blended sound from further back. Interesting too in that the peice seemed very democratic with everybody getting a go, with the viola - sitting on the far right for once - getting a good go. First part of the concert made up of a Beethoven quartet (18.3) and one and a half Haydn quartets. Slightly too much for one sitting for me, but well worth the outing nonetheless. Would be interested in the Takacs doing the complete Beethoven but not keen on the format of paired concerts. We shall see.

Bit of a femmy time among the book reviews. The NYRB carries a two and one half page review of a four volume history of wimmen by one Marilyn French, totalling some 2,000 pages at around 4 cents a page. I think I shall pass on that one. Rather more interesting looking, credit card did twitch a bit but not fatally, the TLS carries a two and one quarter page review (including two large pictures) called 'Mothers and others' which appears to centre on the facts that humans are unusual in that they cooperate to bring up their young and that young humans are very good at attracting friendly rather than culinary interest from unrelated adults. Plus a striking snippet about the need in the olden days for old ladies to earn their keep if they didn't want to get knocked on the head in a moment of inattention. No room at the inn for people not pulling their weight. All good stuff but decided that it was too much of a diversion from more important matters; not least the rather large pile of half read and reread books. More discipline needed.

Where I used to work, we used to have plenty of IT security people making a very good thing out of improving our IT security. So ironic to learn that some of their relatives, a bunch of personnel security people, have been careless enough to lose a whole lot of sensitive personnel records. Clearly the need for IT security begins at home. Alternatively, further confirmation of the old adage that an accountant's own accounts are never up to much.

But computer records do present new challenges. While one can log everything and quite possibly find out everything about a leak after the event, such logs get very big and trapping the leak before the event probably beyond the wit of man. So if I have a personnel clerk who has access to the records to do his work, how do I get the log to trap him when he has a mind to flog the lot to the DT? One approach would be to require countersignature to every request for data. Another would be to require that any one clerk only had access to some of the data. Another would be to allow inspection but not to allow copy. Or inspection but not collection, collation or reporting. Another would be to ban exchangeable media. All kinds of wheezes. But like wearing safety clothing, they tend to get in the way and get discarded. And while we are sorting all this out, we remember that in the olden days a clerk pulling a whole lot of files and copying bits of them would show. There would be a lot of activity which would be difficult to hide from the prying eyes of management.

Presumably the fees office at the House of Commons is worrying about all this too. Have they or will they sack their leaker? Would they dare prosecute him or her given the public interest which has been generated?

Back at the PC, been having an interesting time with Excel. Now when Excel is busy, the PC does not keep the screen updated all the time. And when it does updates, it tends to do them in chunks. Or more specifically by chunk of window. If one was very bored one could probably work out Windows' update strategy for windows. But yesterday it played a new trick. While wading through a worksheet containing perhaps 50,000 rows using the sidebar, the update was very patchy. Now fair enough that the screen update cannot keep up with the unpredictable movements of the side bar. There is going to be some fuzz of some sort. But what I was observing was that update of some blocks of cells was taking a lot longer than that of other blocks. As if all the cells were kept in some underlying database. A database which perhaps had overflow areas from which retrieval took a little while. Or which was suffering from blocks from time to time. Sometimes one had to page off the offending cells and page back to get them refreshed. Furthermore, as it happens, the PC was not doing anything else at the time. It should have been entirely focussed on keeping my view of my worksheet up to date.

On a completely differant tack, the other evening, came across two collectors. The first, perhaps a twenty five year old female, was into collecting shoes. It seemed that she owned about fifty pairs at any one time with the excess finding its way into her mum's cupboards. The lady in question did admit that she had not actually worn all her shoes. Clearly purchase and ownership was the thing, not use. Perhaps the female version of collecting books. Individual purchases large enough to be interesting but still affordable. A activity of fine enough granularity that one can indulge it fairly often. I don't have to carry one indulgence for a whole year. Much more bang for your buck on a weekly cycle. The second, perhaps a forty something male, was into collecting comics, magazines and associated materials. Say a button given away as an extra with a special edition of some comic. Also film clips. This last appeared to mean that someone acquires a print of a famous film, say Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Preferably a first edition or something, whatever that might mean in this context. You then chop it into thousands of six frame bits. Each six frame bit is stuck into a snappy frame for hanging on the wall, further adorned with a certificate of authencity and flogged off. The stuff does not need to be old or even pretty, just time expired. To be something that you can no longer go out and buy new. He told me that there was an active E-bay market for all this stuff and one could make modest amounts of money - say tens rather than hundreds a time - at buying and selling it. I shall stick to books. Too old to change horses now.

Yesterday to Isabella Plantation on Richmond Park. My first visit for a very long time and FIL's for some years. It seems that BH used to adorn the place in her pram. Azaleas - the place's most flashy glory - rather past their best but good place just the same. Lots of interesting trees and shrubs, large and small. A lot of some kind of giant water leef beet; about twice the height of the allotment variety. At least that is what it looked like. Not brave enough to pinch a leaf for a trial cooking. Also including a very aggressive young duck which was very unkeen on even smaller ducks (of another species) scrabbling around for breadcrumbs in the same place as he or she was. On a couple of occasions grabbed an offender by the neck, only letting go when its mum had a go. Never seen such a thing before. Also jackdaws, magpies, crows, rabbits and deer.

A day or so ago, was amused by the sight of a green woodpecker jumping down a tree. A most ungainly activity which reminded me rather of my attempts, many years ago, at abseiling in mid Wales. Woodpeckers do it much better going up. And then yesterday, BH tells me that a couple of them were at it on the lawn, right outside the back extension window, which given that the back garden rises away from the house, means that she had a grand-stand view. Much billing and cooing and marching backwards and forwards. Hunting for ants together. Regular - and regularly consumated - courtship performance.

She had the leisure to observe this sort of thing as I had been elected cook of the day. To celebrate, I indulged in a some variations. First course was a very large chicken - which the three of us managed to eat less than half of and which had cost just under a fiver from Mr S.. About the same as a lamb chop from Cheam. So the first variation was the use of brazil nuts in the stuffing, cooked externally in a white enamel pie dish on account of gluten free requirements on the chicken itself. Not having hazel nuts very often we usually use walnuts. I had thought that brazil nuts would be too hard and smash into powder rather than lumps but they were OK, despite the loss of fun-factor arising from use of ready shelled rather than entire nuts. Shelling your own better. Stuffing otherwise normal with bread crumbs, onion, celery, black pepper (bashed not ground) and egg. Covered with a few rashers of bacon to keep it damp. Plus a few knobs of dripping. Never much liked that fancy stuff involving meat or chestnuts.

Second variation was cooking a second course, something I do not recall having done for a very long time. Opted for the straightforward treacle tart, which must be about as calorific as Mars Bars. 6 ounces of short crust pastry, made with lard and self raising flour - despite BH's claim that one only used plain flour for such things. Whitworth's ancient cookbook ruled on this occasion; the claim that it better to follow the recipe when in unfamiliar territory being convenient on this occasion. Filling made with two ounces of whole loaf bread crumbs (admitting to use of blender to speed up the crumbing process, slow when we are talking whole loaf otherwise), one ounce of porriage and a lot of golden syrup. Despite which, still a rather stiff mixture to spoon into the tart base. Wound up with a slightly more rough cast finish than that achieved by the BH. Loosened up with a little custard made from a tin called Bird and which involved another dollop of sugar. Concession to slimming took the form of semi skimmed milk. The two of us allowed gluten managed two thirds of it at the first sitting. FIL had something else.

DT now into day 19 of the affair of the expenses, the whole business having occupied a huge number of pages. Fair enough, I suppose. If the team is on expenses it is not on man bite dog. Or man push wannabe but faint-hearted suicide off bridge. I wonder what it has done for its circulation? In the meantime, I am starting to think that some good might have been done by said right wing rag. Having taken their scalp as a consolation prize, MPs will be culled and the remainder might be prompted to give some thought as to their calling and to the behaviour proper to it. Maybe the House of Commons will actually start to do something other than preen itself and playing poodle - or perhaps fawn - to the executive?

Following the confusion of smell the other day, today we have a conjunction of tastes. So, it being Monday, decided that bread, butter and marmite was the order of the day for breakfast. So far, so good. Then washed it down with a glass of water. Which, next to the marmite, tasted faintly of mouth freshener or some kind of mild disinfectant. A comparable but milder conjunction effect to that of oranges followed by toothpaste. The only catch being that an hour or so later the water left in the glass still tasted a bit odd. So maybe it is all twaddle; it is simply one of those days when Thames Water squirt a shot of chlorine into the waterworks. One of those days when one's bath smells of swimming pool. But havn't tested that bit yet.

Yesterday, we made an attempt on Brighton. Started by forgetting that warm Sunday mornings are a good day for Chessington World of Adventure and sat in a queue at Maldon Rushett crossroads for getting on for half an hour. To keep us amused, some of the occupants of the vehicle explained the route that they would have taken had they been driving. Got clear of that lot and onto the M25 which didn't seem to clever anticlockwise either. Stuck it out to the Brighton turning where we found that everyone was going to Brighton. Luckily we were in the middle of the three lanes getting off the M25 for the M23 and were able to branch left towards Croydon instead of right for Brighton. Today, the DT has pictures of a packed Brighton so I think we made the right decision. However, at the time, not so clear. Heading north towards Croydon with nowhere to go.

Luckily, the we had the relevant Landranger to hand, and managed to locate a place of possible interest called Farthing Down. Just up the road a bit on the right. Past three large institutions, all converted into housing estates, two mental and one military. The two mental properly equipped with large heritage water towers and one of which had been examined by FIL when he was in the world of work. Then after a while, a promising bit of down does indeed come into view. But we had the devil of a job getting onto it. Two times through Coulsdon, once through Old Coulsdon, three huffs and four puffs and finally we practically have to do a U-turn to get up onto Downs Road off Marlpit Lane - and we were there. Heading up onto the downs up this unfenced road. Splendid bit of down land. Lots of iron age field systems and a spot of ancient chalk woodland. Parked up for a stroll, sufficiently level for the convenience of FIL's rollator. Lots of Croydon folk out for picnics and worse. Our own picnic was entertained by some very tame crows which disposed of our spare bread and cheese - the Waitrose Swaledale (see above) not having improved during the week. You chucked a bit of cheese - maybe a cubic centimetre - in their direction and they appeared not to have noticed. Then after a few seconds, the nearest one went straight for it, then stood there for a bit with a lump of cheese in its beak, wondering what to do with it. Too hard to squish in beak. Maybe it found it a bit sticky. Eventually puts it on the ground and picks it to more digestible peices.

One area of down, was lightly covered with scrub and was full of chattering starlings, with the odd small brown bird for variation. Close to, the starlings were black enough, but they were confusingly pale, at a distance, in the bright sunlight. Not sure what attracted them to the area. Would not have thought there was much point in eating the just set hawthorne berries. Another semi-tweet was a small pink-breasted finch, possibly a chaffinch or a young bullfinch. Neither bird being seen very often in our garden.

At this point we noticed somewhere called Toller's Farm on the eastern fringe. Now Toller is not a very common name, so we thought it proper to go and investigate. This turned out to be a bit of a performance too, in the absence of an A to Z. Landranger not really detailed enough for this sort of thing. Got there in the end, at the end of Toller's Lane. Plenty of mobile phone pix to prove that we were there, the trick now being to get them off the phone to somewhere where they can be decently seen. A job for Carphone Warehouse tomorrow. Sadly, it turns out that Toller's farm is neither a farm nor owned by a Toller, so we have not chanced upon a rich uncle. Because what was called a farm and clearly had been a farm, was now a very nice residence with a very handsome garden and a friendly owner. Worth a good deal more than our pad I dare say. Next stop Toller's Yard in Newmarket. Bit nearer the family stomping ground so we should have a bit more luck there.

To close, I record that the TLS is for sale in the Vauxhall Sainsbury's. The first time I have come across this particular mag. in a supermarket. I get mine by mail, otherwise one can sometimes get them in the W H Smith's at railway stations. Clearly Vauxhall Sainsbury's has a posher clientele than one might have thought from its immediate surroundings. Maybe they draw custom from the eastern side of the South Lambeth Road. Plus there was an allegation from the Wheatsheaf that the area contained an artiste with first name Rachel. I thought that she was the one that made her name by filling a house which was about to be demolished full of concrete, then stripping off the outside. For this she got made a Grand Dame of Artistery or something. Possibly pensionable. Mr G., on a quick glance, not conclusive.

First, the PC freezes on my first attempt at this post. A freeze out of the blue, something which seems to happen about once a week or so. Hopefully not the tip of the iceberg, or, if it is, no more fearsome than an iceberg lettuce, thinking of the wet lettuce leaves weilded in ritual punishment at one of my former places of work. Second, we learn that, having not attended the last bank holiday car booter at Hook Road due to activities the evening precedent, the next bank holiday car booter, due on Monday, has been displaced by a festival of history. The site is already full of tents containing people getting ready to display hazel wand splitting, sheep shearing, forming squares (as in battles), pig roasts and numerous other wonders. So no chance of getting a bargain book.

A neighbouring site, normally used as a recycling point and the car park for Christ Church, is already lined with small caravans. But I think these are probably real travelling people, the sort that visit Epsom for the Derby, rather than people intent on demonstrating medieval cooking habits. A pity that their number includes some proportion of dirty and violent, the small number of very flashy caravans that turn up on Derby Day notwithstanding. No harm in travelling but it would be nice if they had a bit more civic spirit. I wonder if their numbers are going up or down? I would have thought that the attractions have much reduced over the last fifty years or so. There was more point when the world was more rural and there was generally more space but all seems a bit squalid now. And one might have thought that one would get fed up with being shunned.

Third, we have the disaster of the cabbage. Walking past a Portuguese grocer the other day, noticed some very fine cabbages in their out-front display. Large floppy, dark green things, maybe five inches across and ten inches high. Didn't appear to be hearty like the Portuguese pointy cabbage I have been buying in Cheam. Carefully stood up in a small amount of water in white polystyrene containers to keep them fresh. Buy two of the things for about £2.50. Get them all the way back to Wimbledon where I have to change trains and so visit the Prince of Wales where I manage to leave the things. Don't realise until I am nearly back at Epsom; far too far away and far too late to think of going back for them. But a shame to think of such fine cabbages being consigned to the dustbins of the Prince of Wales. Which is where I imagine they will have wound up, not all that many people being interested in other peoples' cabbages. And now I am puzzling about what sort of a tense 'will have wound up' is. It sounds right but I can't put a name to it. Some sort of future perfect perhaps?

But we made up for this culinary disaster with a culinary triumph at http://www.sreekrishna.co.uk/index2.html. Perhaps the third time I have visited the place in the thirty five years or so that it has been open. The food there was good, of a generally veggie tone. The clientele included some, although not many, who might have been, or whose families might have been, from the part of India in question. But the parathas were really good. And despite perusing a very flashy Indian food recipe site turned up by Mr G., it remains a complete puzzle how the things are made. Circular, about eight inches across and a quarter of an inch thick. Fluffy, in the way of a croissant, but a dull pale brown rather than a bright yellow brown. And they appear to have been made in a roll; the things might have been slices of some exotic swiss roll. Rather in the way that Chelsea Buns are made. And then there was the matter of cooking. Baked, boiled or what? Maybe simpler just to go back there and have theirs.

And then there is a threat. A couple of weeks ago I managed to completely confuse the smell of mint sauce with another common food - which one I forget. And today I managed to completely confuse the smell of boiling beetroot with asparagus. Is the nose giving out? Has the consumption of yeast based products smashed the linings of the nasal passages?

I close with a prohibition of yore, which I came across this afternoon and which just goes to show that the art of nannying is not that new. It seems that as late as the fifties, some public libraries were defacing those parts of the newspapers they had available for reference which contained information about betting. Starting prices and that sort of thing. Partly out of a strictly nanny concern that poor working people should not spend their time and money on betting, a concern possibly nurtured by the parents of those very same people who thought that the national lottery was an appropriate way to collect tax on the quiet. Partly out of a librarians' concern that their reading rooms might be swamped by smelly betters. I wonder if the libraries kept unexpurgated copies which you were allowed to read in a private reading room upon presenting two autograph references from responsible citizens? MPs, bankers, estate agents, that sort of thing. People commanding respect in the community and who could be trusted. On the same sort of basis that exotic porn can be consulted in the British Library or the Vatican Library.

Doesn't say anything about viewing or sale or return. But I dare say at this price something could be done. But if you are not quite up to this speciman, the same site does offer some cheaper. For myself, I think I would have to be getting on for a thousand times richer than I am, to think of sploshing out this sort of dosh on an old if eminent book. Alternatively, maybe something good will turn up at the Hook Road arena bank holiday festival car booter in a day or so.

Yesterday, attempted to use our DVD player to play an arty film. Put in film, work both controllers vigorously. Get rather yellow film to appear. Yellow OK; maybe elderly arty films come in dingy yellow. But no sound, other that a faint version of the sound from the television part of the apparatus which I thought I had turned off. Summoned BH. Have you checked the start cable? No. So I check the start cable. No change. Have you tried one of those unarty films from the Daily Mail which we know works? No. So I try one of those unarty films. No change. Then I go back to working both controllers viorously. Maybe BH has inadvertantly set one of the obscure settings to something obscure which whacks the sound from DVDs. No change. Leave it all for a bit. Some time later try again. Still no change. Enter sprog 2. Have you checked the start cable. Yes. So he checks it again and everything springs into life. It seems that you need to check both ends for correct insertion into their respective holes. No idea how much of all this was down to age pure and simple and how much of it was down to the time spent at trough during the course of the afternoon.

Main trough event was cow chop, it being a Wednesday. That was fine, although as it turned out might have done better to go for two (conjoined) chops on this occasion as we more or less did it in in one sitting. But started with asparagus and finished with cheese and cherries, the first and last of which were sourced from a cheap stall in the market which I usually avoid and the cheese of which was sourced from Waitrose. Now, having got the asparagus home, it was clear from closer inspection that while it might of came off the same lorry as the stuff from Cheam, this stuff had been sitting around in the open air since Saturday market. A bit shrivelled and hollow feeling. A bit pale. Would it cook OK? Well, I need not have worried on that front, as cooked I don't think one could tell, even when one knew. But the cheese, called Swaledale, was not up to snuff at all. It was rather expensive and nothing like the stuff that I used to get from Upper Tachbrook Street. Crumbly like Wensleydate, rather than smooth and slightly creamy with lots of small bubbles. Tasted OK, but not what I wanted. A mistake not to be repeated. I ask Mr G. and it seems that Swaledale cheese is quite a big deal. Furthermore that if I had bothered to go to http://www.swaledalecheese.co.uk/, I could have bought the stuff for perhaps a third of what I paid Waitrose. On the other hand, the St Emilion from Waitrose, which reading the label afterwards was said to be just the thing for beef, was fine, despite the fact that I did not know what sort of pinot it was. And the cherries, also OK, but nothing like as good as the ones that I had bought from Crouch End earlier in the week. Maybe the yuppies from north London are more discerning than the patrons of this market in south London.

All these food worries were augured by the rather odd dream I woke up to, in four parts, one of which is totally lost, apart from still being known to have been present. First part, there is me in a bookshop with a bunch of people. Bookshop in the upper part of a building, but open to the sky, rather in the way of the Globe Theatre. Books in the courtyard getting wet in the rain. I get stroppy that no-one does anything about this, because, it seems, that I have donated the books to the bookshop for some reason. Cut to second part. I am making some rather grand bookcases, after the fashion of wardrobes. I am close boarding the back of them. Which all seems terribly fiddly as I am doing a bay at a time. Suddenly a brain wave. Why not make the bookcases to measure for the holes they are to fit it. Then the boards with which I am close boarding can be done in much longer lengths with much less fiddly cutting in. Associate to the strakes of a carvel built boat, the length of one I find myself looking along. Cut to an expedition with the staff of the bookshop to a pub. We are going uphill to a pub on the corner, somewhere in Norwich. Some of the people I had thought we were with were there already, sitting outside. We decide to join them, initial doubts notwithstanding. Cut, I think, to the missing fourth part. Something to do with the bookshop again. Tried to recover it this morning, but went off into a differant dream altogether, something about forgetting where I had parked the car when at work in Victoria Steet. Then getting the tube by mistake to some place, a bit like the shopping centre in Mitcham on the common or near a park, where the locals were a little harsh about my clothes. No help at all. Fourth part lost forever now I should think.

Gas board visited the other day and pleased to record that they did not announce that our boiler was on the way out or sell us a sulphur trioxide or any other sort of detector. We hav'n't even got a letter from HQ pointing out that the ventilation of our boiler is not up to enlarged euro standard. So not a bad visit at all.

On the other hand, had another brush with the congestion charge yesterday. Bearing in mind my previous complaint (30/4/2009) that one cannot find out whether or not one has been in the congestion charge area, I find that you can indeed enter the zone without knowing, first, somewhere in the southern hinterland of Waterloo station and, second, somewhere in the northern hinterland of Kings Cross Station. The only clue was one post near St Thomas's hospital carrying a red 'C' which I correctly took to mean that I was in the congestion charge area and another near Vauxhall station with a struck through 'C' telling me that I was leaving it. Remain unimpressed with this job creation scheme for starving IT service companies.

Yesterday a mission to refill my compost bin, the level of which has been dangerously low since the winter clear out. Dangerously low in the sense that it might have been below the critical level needed to sustain arthropod life. So off to north London - hence the brush with the congestion charge - to collect no less than 13 dustbin bags of soft green garden waste, mostly lawn clippings. Compost bin now two thirds full although I fully expect it to revert to less than one third full once the waste has settled down. But it should be quite hot; the dustbin bags were quite warm to the touch after just four hours.

In course of all this, pushed by some police attended event out of Clapham High Street into Kings Road, which runs through an area known as Clapham Park. Very leafy with some rather handsome - if rather tired - houses of the order of 200 years old. Presumably a rather posh area at some point. Managed to get slightly lost coming through Streatham, winding up back on the Dorking Road at Tooting Bec rather than at Morden Hall Park as I had intended, at the cost of one hoot from some impatient youth in a banger. But perhaps just as well as there would have been plenty of scope, reading my ancient skip sourced A to Z while I drove, of getting even more lost around Mitcham. Must get onto A to Z replacement, the skip sourced one starting to look very tired. Unfortunately, last time I looked, Geograhers' don't seem to make this posh blue hard backed one any more. Might have to switch to the AA version which will take a bit of getting used to. Much prefer the Geographers' layout of twenty years ago. No date in the thing but a female hand has inscribed it February 2009.

Clapham High Street itself was awash with bicycles and motorcycles. They more or less filled up the bus lane, were weaving in out out of the cars in their lane and were spilling over into the north bound carriageway and onto the southbound pavement as need arose. Some of them seemed to have neither manners nor road sense. How long will be it be before the worm turns, and people start to withdraw the generous road facilities they have been accorded of recent years? Perhaps they should start by getting rid of the more or less useless cycle lanes, ignoring the inevitable protests from the road marking industry, which will thus lose much good business.

Prompted by an article somewhere recent about how the expiring fashion for gene science has not done quite what the applicants for research money had claimed for it, to close with a ponderous thought, fully worth the light of day - or perhaps the time of day - in some up-market saloon bar. That is to say, to think that a genome for some large animal is a bit like the machine code for a large computer program. Yes, you have all the information in principle and some features of the computer program can be picked out from the machine code. But for practical purposes, if you have lost the source code and the documentation of the program you are stuffed. Your chances of working it all out from the machine code are about nil.

Back in dream time. Woke up this morning with a religion flavoured dream - Christian and Muslim but not Jewish - which seemed to involve doing something a bit dodgy on the 14th of each month. But that is about all I can remember. Odd how such fragments can be so firmly lodged in a vacuum. Yesterday, memory in rather better shape. Woke up in the middle of a building project in Bangkok. It seemed that I was very keen and in a great hurry to build a new office block there. It was to be a single storey affair built out of a number of identical garden sheds, arranged in a flat C. That is to say most of them lined up like a set of beach huts, but with a short projecting wing at each end. Not sure how one does that with beach huts without major modification. There was a man from the council trying to be helpful who had three problems with what I was trying to do. Firstly, I wanted to start erecting my sheds more or less immediately and I only had outline planning permission. There was always the possibility that the council would insist on demolition after the event. Secondly, the proposed office block was very old style. Very cellular with one person per garden shed with very little communication between the sheds, short of walking out into the front court yard. Third, I think was about the services to be supplied - or not supplied - to the sheds.

Now several people with whom I am acquainted, either directly or indirectly, are, or were recently, in Bangkok. So that might account for that bit. But no idea of where the rest of it comes from.

Then to vary the diet got to pondering about the expenses scandal, which like many British media events has become something of a circus. Blown out of proportion to the matter in hand. But as my contribution to the circus, I advance some observations.

Observation 1, in the US they do things on a rather more generous scale. And it is quite easy to find out about it. See for example http://www.rules.house.gov/Archives/RL30064.pdf. From which I learn that while a congressman has a big salary and a big expenses pot, when compared with what we do, personal expenses are excluded. Which presumably means that the US press is not adorned with tales of the confectionery and sanitary purchases of their representives.

Observation 2, MPs appear to have been advised to treat to treat maximum expenses as part of salary. Some MPs appear to have done just that and claimed up to the maximum every year. A rather tacky way of bumping up their salaries, particularly when the expenses rules have been worked over to deliver the maximum. By, for example, the device of the wobbling second home designation.

Observation 3, MPs are not paid that much. Their basic salary is said to be just three times the national average. Now while it is true that some of them would have trouble earning their salary as an MP in any other calling, it is also true that some of them could earn considerably more. Timing might be bad, but I would be in favour of paying them more in salary and less in personal expenses.

Observation 4, any receipts based system for claiming living expenses is going to look tacky when exposed to the full light of day. This MP bought a Mars bar, that one bought a luxury pair of shoes. That one bought some fancy underwear. I wonder if any of them claim for the extra cigarettes smoked as a result of the extra stress of having to live in their second, rather than their first, home?

Observation 5, some MPs have made fraudulent claims. But, to my mind, the penalty should bear in mind observation 2. Maybe deselection would suffice.

Observation 6, the MPs, in whose name skip loads of regulations to better regulate our lives are passed into law every week, ought to show more respect for the regulations governing their own lives. Since they have chosen to live in public off the public, they have to set an example.

Yesterday back to Epsom Common, to a part not visited by the ecobizzies, that is to say along the top of Newton Wood, towards the Star. Most impressed, as always, by the pollarded oaks, the relics of which have assumed the most bizarre shapes. Very easy to project all sorts of dubious animals onto them. Hard to see how some of the wrecked trunks can carry the burden of tree above. Towards the end of the stroll, we came across a clump of entire trees, the canopy of which was alive with chattering starlings. Must have been hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands... Something I have not seen for ages.

And to close, pleased to report the return of fish porriage. That is to say, soak five ounces of pearl barley in a pint or so of water. That is to say, by bringing it to the boil, turning off the heat and leaving for 10 hours. Add a modest amount of sliced celery, more for the colour it brings to the party than anything else. Bring back to the boil, add a chunk of fresh cod and a chunk of smoked haddock, skin up. After a few minutes remove the two peices of skin and stir the fish into the barley. Simmer for a bit. Drain off any excess fluid there may be and serve. One feels pleasantly full without feeling stuffed. Must be the low fat content.

A couple of days ago sampled the liquid fare in central London. Quality of beer good but price bad. Generally well in excess of £3 and to add insult to injury the ruling style seemed to be to fill the glass up to about a centimetre from the top and when challenged to add just a dribble. Now it used to be a common enough practise to serve short pints on the grounds that most people don't complain and then, if they do, to fill the thing up properly. A good, if tiresome, way of boosting the bottom line. This new practise is even more tiresome. I just wish they would charge a fair price and serve a full pint.

Another new practise was more amusing. This consists of roping off a chunk of pavement for the pub's customers to stand outside and smoke in - and in the places we visited there did seem to be more outside than inside. But to make sure the customers played the game, the pubs hired black guys, some in what looked like blue hotel uniforms, to patrol the edge of the roped off areas and to make sure that no feet were straying over the line. Easy enough work - and I suppose no more boring than most security work.

Closer to home we now have a rival to TB in the form of the reopened TJC. This last offering good quality warm beer at well under the £3 required for warm newky (which while quite acceptable is not good quality warm beer) at TB and about the same distance away. How long will they keep it up? The pub opposite our local Wetherspoon's had been trying to compete on price for some years, I had thought successfully, and is now closed. (I note in passing that two other decent pubs in town are up for rent. Not looking too good). In the meantime, TJC may prove a useful alternative source of information. We learned yesterday, for example, that the true flag of England is the white dragon, in contrast to the red dragon of Wales and the red cross of the alien Normans. They even had a sample flag. Mr G. does not seem to be too sure about this. A page from Wikpedia indexed by Mr G. as saying that there was no evidence of the white dragon ever having been used as a national emblem had been deleted. Other sites which were more positive about the white dragon appeared to be infested with runes and goblins, so I am not going to put too much weight on them. So where do I go now? Don't think that they will have a clue down at TB. Not their sort of thing.

I should add, to be fair, that Mr G, was equally vague about when the red cross of St George came in. The only thing that seemed firm was that it was being used as a national flag by the 16th century. Presumably Henry V and all those sort of chaps used some forerunner of our royal standard as their battle flag, the nation still being conflated with the person of the monarch of the day.

Trusting again today at the regional headquarters, that is to say Polesden Lacy. Rather like Clandon (see 18/9/2008), there were both posh trusties and a hard core collection of mainly Chinese china. Or perhaps porcelain. Plus some jade and such like. Some of it was interesting and some of it very handsome, but you need a big cheque book and a big house to make much of a hobby of it, so disqualified on both counts.

Being the regional headquarters and wanting to set a revenue raising example, there were no less than five shops: a farm shop, a garden shop, a souvenir shop, a tea-room and a restaurant. Presumably for the same reason there was the added touch of someone playing Chopin in the drawing room. I am told that lowly functionaries of the National Trust are also lowly paid, it being thought enough of a privilege to have Polesdon Lacy for an office. I wonder if the same is true of the higher functionaries? What do they pay themselves and what do they get in the way of perks? Invites to swanky 'charity' balls? Fancy dining rooms? A lot of other charities have taken to paying their top men and women entirely commercial rates, on the grounds that they have to attract the best. Along the same lines, I wonder whether the otherwise excellent Macmillan Nurses organisation is being corrupted by being a contractor for nursing services to the NHS? Is it really a charity any more?

But one small quibble: there were lots of books, some of which looked quite interesting - for example the collected dispatches of the first Duke of Wellington, running to quite a few volumes - and some of which might have been rare. But they were never used. Certainly common or garden visitors were not allowed to touch and it seemed that the only people with a look in were the cleaners who dusted them twice a year or so. Which seems rather a pity. Perhaps I ought to suggest that they run book lovers events every now and again so that they get a bit of use. So, they would lose a few, but so what?

Then onto an orgological event at the canteen, where, for £8 or so, I got quite a decent lunch. Some kind of chicken pie made with estate grown chicken, improved in my case by getting a double portion from the end of the tin, the last portion not being big enough to sell separate. Served with vegetables which they had gone to some trouble not to overcook. In fact, raw according to FIL. Washed down with some very nice apple juice, not from the estate but at least somewhere in Sussex. Some sign explained that they try to source their food as locally as possible so that customers can get the authentic taste of the locale. All a bit strong, but the grub was OK.

Then around the garden. Not a design effort like the last one at Loseley, but very handsome for all that. Some super beds of irises, particularly striking for me as I had never seen them grown in masses before. And a bed of massed peonies, also a first for me. And, last but by no means least, some sort of flowering cabbage. Very handsome it was too. And once one had done with the formal gardens on one side of the house, lots of good walks and trees on the other side. Some owner in times gone by must have been a tree nut, and the current owners seem to be doing a serious job of keeping the planting going. Lots of carefully fenced young trees. Didn't see any of the deer that the fences were presumably for, but we did manage one rabbit and one buzzard - which last has become quite common in Surrey according to TB. First time I have seen one here though.

Yesterday to Great Bookham Common, a chunk of woodland, rather smaller than Epsom Common, run by the National Trust. Splendid place with lots of big trees, mainly oak, but with some ash, birch (of a good size) and beech. Quite a lot of holly and hawthorne too, growing up in the crevices. Two oddities. First, the trees seemed taller than at Epsom. Maybe this was a result of the oaks being closer together - although there was one splendid park speciman, growing in a horse paddock, with a massive hemi-spherical canopy. Second, there was lots of bird song, if not many tweetings, although we did hear our first cookoo of the year. Maybe the first cookoo for some years. Anyway, all seemed very lush and green on what was a damp and dull afternoon. We shall be back!

The contiguous villages of Bookham and Fetcham had some interest. Most notably in the church St Nicolas at Bookham, the second small church that we have seen in as many weeks with more or less original Norman, or at least transitional, columns. It also had some interesting stained glass, some of it 16th Flemish which arrived in Surrey via Norwich and some of it dedicated to the memory of the Field Marshall Lord Raglan, presumably the one who, according to Wikipedia, more or less died of grief during the Crimean war. Then there was a good selection of funerary monuments, including one which included a curious bas-relief of the skirmish in the American war of Independance in which the subject of the monument, fighting on our side, died. I don't think I recall seeing a monument to such a death before. All in all a large and handsome place which felt lived in, possibly because they had the heating on for the benefit of the morning creche. We learnt, by the by, that St Nicolas is, inter alia, the patron saint of pawnbrokers and that his sign is three yellow balls. Is there a connection with the rather larger number of red balls on the Medici crest (see somewhere in October above)?

The rest of the village contained a very mixed bag of housing. Some old, some new. Some large, some small. Some suitable for the second and possibly third homes of politicians, some for those that clean them. All very nice, but without the convenience of Epsom from shopping and transport points of view.

Back home to more Alex Munthe. His autobiography being the second book which the BH and I have read at about the same time for some time. Not something that we have made a habit of. Presently BH is on the man himself and I am on Jangfeldt about the man himself, as previously here advertised. It seems that his autobiography (The House at San Michele) is not only a collection of sketches rather than an autobiography in the normal sense, but that large chunks of the man's life are left out and the chunks that are there are a promiscous mixture of fact and fiction. A. Munthe really was a very strange bird. Something of a fraud in fact; his sketches might be engaging in small doses but they are not honest, although I suppose that he may have a bit of excuse in the sense that Jangfeldt says something about the tide of naturalism being on the ebb and new forces being on the move. I suppose what he means is that people were tiring of the dreary if truthful realism of the likes of George Elliot and were looking for differant fare. The wheel of fashion had moved on., and Munthe, keen to make a few bob, had moved along with it.

I see from the DT that someone who does not believe in eating pig became some sort of a cook for the Metropolitan Police. Perhaps a supervising cook rather than someone who actually gets his hands on the grub. Now it seems that police men and women, in the round, are rather keen on bacon, sausages, black pudding and all that sort of thing. A fact that presumably would have quickly become apparent in a visit or an interview. Now why would someone to whom the eating of pig is offensive chose to work in such a place? Would not supervising someone else to cook pig be as offensive in the sight of The Lord as doing it yourself? However, the someone did so chose and the Metropolitan Police, in their wisdom, initially said that his employment would not involve pig. But now they have transferred him to somewhere where his employment would involve pig. Problem. So he has now been suspended on full pay for a year or something while the difficult business is all sorted out.

What a lot of nonsense sez I. Why do people like this cook have to be pushing at boundaries all the time? Why can't he not eat pig quietly at home rather than burning up all this taxpayer money? Maybe he should go and live somewhere where they take all this sort of thing with the seriousness he presumably thinks that it deserves. No prizes for guessing where.

And then there was a piece celebrating the closure of the last large unit for the asylum of people with learning difficulties (as the current euphemism for the mentally handicapped goes). Explaining that these places and the people that worked in them were a blot on the landscape, not be tolerated in the 21st century when we know how to do these things properly. I found all this rather irritating. Firstly, because it showed no respect for the many decent people who gave their working lives to such places and to those with learning difficulties who lived in them. Secondly, because I am not convinced that we have not chucked the baby out with the bathwater. I think there is more place for such large units (which often had extensive and excellent grounds with splendid trees) than is presently allowed. And while many people with learning difficulties would rather be supported in the community than in a large unit, this is not a cheap option and this is not the right option for those with severe difficulties. They really do need asylum. And I bet that plenty of small care-in-the-community units run out of large houses for gain by contractors are every bit as bad as the large units which used to be run by the state are alleged to have been.

But there are some winners in this sorry area. Viz, the people that write all the regulations with which it is now festooned. To adapt an old adage, if you can't do it, write regulations about it. Not to mention all the people who make a crust by policing the application of the regulations.

Some months ago a new to us outfit opened up the road by the name of Screwfix, a building materials version of Argos. Now, due to the proliferation of bird feeders in the garden, I had run out of butcher hooks, which I find a convenient way to hang such things up with. They don't blow off but they can be taken down for refill without bother. So the problem was, where to buy butcher hooks? Could ask the butcher in Cheam but didn't. Occasionally espied the van of a butchers' sundries seller but couldn't catch it. Then the brain swung around to Screwfix and I made a detour to said establishment on the way back from the baker. Found a desk equipped with Argos like catalogues. Flipped through it a couple of times and no, there were no butcher hooks, but there were things called S-hooks. 5mm or 6mm. Not being very sure what this meant, went for two packets of 6mm. A few minutes later the entirely wrong thing was handed out of the hatch. A few minutes after that the right thing appeared. Just the ticket. The 6mm turned out to be the guage of the steel out of which the things had been made. A narrower mouth than butcher hooks, thus reducing the risk of the suspended object leaping off the hook and no sharp points to be ground down or impaled on. Raw butcher hooks being quite sharp. So first experience of Screwfix was OK.

The downside is that it is a bit like mail order. You are firing blind and don't always like what you get. Presumably what is in it for them is that they can carry a lot more stock in a much smaller space than would be possible in a shop format with the goods out on display.

Next door was a new to us self storage place and I was moved, being in the vicinity and parked up, to enquire about prices. I find that I can hire a space, maybe the area of a bathroom and 10 feet high, for around £100 a month. I didn't go into details but presumably one has access during working hours and one does not get much in the way of facilities. Maybe a toilet somewhere but that would be about the lot. So camping in the space would not be much fun. But what I had learnt was, what I might have worked out if I had thought about it, that hiring space in this way is not orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring a bedsit. A significant cost. But on reflection not so differant from hiring a garage in the good old days (the seventies) at £1 a week, compared with maybe £10 for a bedsit at the time. I shall carry on packing the roof and packing the garage for a while yet.

Moving onto higher planes, take a peek at last week's TLS, where I learn that the OUP sees fit to publish volume 3 of a history of cant and slang dictionaries. 75 quid or 140 dollars. Which confirms my belief that life in academe is getting hard; that you have to struggle to find a field which has not been ploughed out. A history of a particular sort of dictionary indeed! Then I am reminded that, in so far as I am concerned, modern philosophy is complete tosh. What on earth are they on? How do they manage to sell the stuff? And lastly I come across a novel, kindly reviewed, by one A. Foulds, 'The Quickening Maze'. A sort of novel which is becoming common but of which I do not approve. A fictional account of real people. That is to say a confusion of fact and fiction. My belief is that the two things ought to be kept separate. Fact should be fact and historical fiction should be colour. And I like to know which is which, so that I can put the proper spin on things when recycling them at TB.

Sussex pie day came around again yesterday. 7 pounds of chuck steak, decorated with 2 quartered onions lined up on top, done at 120C for about 7.5 hours. Good gear, but a couple more would not have hurt. And given that we could not use the mushroom ketchup indicated as it contained malt which contained gluten, decided on a bit of DIY. Take 2 onions, 5 sticks of celery and 6 small carrots. Simmer in maybe half a pint of water plus a small knob of butter plus a large pinch of hand-ground black pepper. Ground until the essential oils could be smelt at 12 inches. After a while, add 15 button mushrooms, coarsely chopped. Simmer the whole lot for another hour. Stand overnight, bring to boil in the morning and strain. Add stock to the port and pour the whole lot over the chuck steak before semi-sealing it into its foil bag. Semi-sealing because I did not cut the foil quite big enough and had a job sealing it. Strain juices off the meat at the end of the cooking period, now maybe a pint and a half. Add to stewed vegetables from the day before and pass through a blender. Add a little corn flour. Bring back to the boil. Serve as gravy - good and rich it was too - with the meat, mashed potatoes and Portuguese pointy cabbage. BH, inter alia, very taken with the Rully Rouge we had to ease it down with. Chosen because it came from Bourgogne, which, last time I was there, appeared to be the centre of the world of Charolais. Ergo, wine ought to go with cow. Which it did; nice and light for a red. According to the label did well with offal. Furthermore the tannins blended with the raspberry aromas on the palate. All in all, good stuff.

Followed by a boiled jam sponge. Which, inter alia, demonstrated the importance of appearances. We had no red jam on the last occasion and the sponge did not look or taste quite right with yellow jam (quince I think), although I doubt whether one could have told the differance in taste blindfold. This time we had red jam and it looked spot on. Bright red jam dripping a little down the light yellow sponge. Most attractive. This course being eased down with custard and some pudding wine from Adelaide. Chardonnay Semillon from d'Arenberg. Good gear but not much of it: tall thin bottle exactly half the volume of a regular one.

Just finishing off the remains of the gravy as soup today, when we took delivery of our swine flu information leaflet from the central nanny depot, maybe 2.72 days after the whole subject has vanished from our newspapers. Let us suppose they have delivered 20m of the things at a unit cost of 15p. That makes £3m. Add £1.6m for consultation fees and £0.4m for set-up and we get a round total of £5m for this contribution to global warming. Why didn't someone tell them that for this sum they could have had lots of second home allowances without needing to clutter our letter boxes at all?

Which moves me onto having a grump about the gas board. We are about to have our boiler serviced. A boiler which was chosen for us and installed by the gas board and which has never gone wrong, at least as far as I can remember. But now that they have sold us all the carbon tri-oxide detectors we could possibly want, they have moved onto moving some other goal-posts. This boiler that we sold you has now been declared to be unsafe. You had better take the door off to make it more safe, this peice of advice appearing to ignore the fact that the gap under the door corresponds more or less exactly with the input vents at the bottom of the boiler. (The door is now off for 2 days out of 365/6). And any time now we are going to condemn your boiler so that we can sell you a nice new one. Which will be very expensive as you can't have the new one where the old one was any more. And so on and so forth. I am sure I have boned on about this before.

But I have come to a resolution. If the gas board do indeed get difficult, despite having stuck to them, despite all the offers from the myriad strange people trying to sell me gas (although, sadly, we have yet to be called by the energy division of the potato marketting board), I shall move my account elsewhere. The whole point of the gas board used to be that they looked after me, not themselves. If that has stopped being true to this extent, I might just as well use one of the other bandits out there, foisted on us in the interests of fair play and competition.

Remain puzzled about the tigers. Why would anyone bother to transpose the story from Thailand about tigers to California. OK so it has been simplified a bit and the simplified version is more cuddly, but still, why bother?

Remain puzzled also about the shocking pink house in Capri. Further investigations revealed that there are at least two famous houses in Capri. One the San Michele which started me off, and the other the Casa Malaparte. The latter was the house of one Curzio Malaparte, a very odd cove, even for an Italian, a book of whose I have indeed read in the last year or so. And his house was a shocking pink. But I don't think this could be the cause of the TLS article which started me on the Munthe hunt. Where is the connection? So I must have conflated my memories of the pink house with San Michele.

I also learn from Amazon that there was a book about Munthe published last year, which might well have been the subject of the TLS article. Except that the TLS archive says nothing about it. But having now decided, contrary to my earlier opinion, that a book about Munthe might be more interesting than Munthe on himself, have now ordered it. Despite the fact that it is being heavily discounted by Amazon - which, by the by, now sees fit to include lots of Caprivan advertisements when I visit.

Yesterday to Loseley Park, the home of the much loved ice cream from Dorking Halls. It turns out that the ice cream has been enjoyed at least since the time of at least Elizabeth I, who once stayed in the adjacent Loseley Hall. Unable to get into the hall on this occasion but we see see some impressive lead down pipes from the gutters - maybe five inches in diameter - and we did see what looked like a couple of elderly loft extensions. Presumably put in well before we had rules about non-tampering with listed buildings.

Excellent garden, mostly designed by one Ms Jekyll, a scion, it seems, of an eminent Victorian family and a familiar of Mr Lutyens. Wonderful composition, mainly of green and yellow at this time of year. Would be rather differant when the roses are out. Formal macro-structure with informal micro-sructure. Lots of interesting and unusual plants. Unusual, that is, at least to me.

Despite the low maintenance design of some of the garden, impressed to learn from the trusty that the garden was looked after by just three gardeners and a flock of trusties. They must be a lot better at it than I was in my allotment days.

The first time I have seen apple trees clipped into a sort of aerial hedge, that is to say the first six feet of the tree trunks were clear.

The small broad bean bed reminded me of the large number of very large broad bean fields we had seen the week before in Cambridgeshire. Given the size of these fields and how easy the things are to grow, hard to see why they were so expensive in Cheam last year.

Large rectangular water lilly pond, complete with carp and ducklings, cunningly hidden behind a bank.

200 year old wisteria in full bloom occupying the whole of a large wall, maybe fifty yards long. Wall also interesting in instead of being flints set in mortar, it was stone or bricks set in mortar, but with the mortar decorated with small flints, so one had the stone or bricks set in lines of said small flints.

Various ornamental varieties of cow parsley, some large.

Various ornamental plants which reminded one of rhubarb, some large.

Not crowded and well equipped with benches on which to sit, doze and admire the garden.

According to my informant, from a zoo in California. A bereaved Mum goes in for some cross-species bonding. The only catch is that, according to Mr G., the California part of the story is a hoax and the story on which it is all based comes from Thailand. To quote a site which claims to sort out net-fact from net-fiction: "The pictures are not from a zoo in California but the Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Thailand, a popular attraction that boasts of 200 tigers, 100,000 crocodiles, trained pigs, elephants, and other animals. The zoo features creative shows and displays of animals including these pictures of an adult tiger with piglets dressed like tiger cubs. One of the goals of the zoo is to demonstrate how animals of different species can live peacefully together. One of the experiments was introducing baby piglets to a mother tiger (who herself had been nursed by a pig) and it worked. At one time the mother tiger nursing piglets was in an enclosure next to an enclosure where a sow was nursing baby tigers. The zoo says those cubs grew faster from the pig's milk. The story about the California zoo, the grieving mother tiger, and the orphaned piglets is a hoax that somebody decided to attach to the pictures".

A few weeks ago I was reminded about 'The Story of San Michele' by something in the TLS. What little I can recall, suggests that the something was a review of a book about a house called San Michele, a shocking pink affair on top of a Caprivan cliff, visible for miles around, \although Mr G. suggests that it is a tasteful affair, painted white. But I decided that reading the original book about the house might be a better bet. So, having thown my parents copy away some years ago, part of one of my periodic culls, off to the Surrey Library Service website, request the thing, which duly turns up a day or so later, courtesy of Caterham Valley Library. It seems that the book was a huge best seller in its day (1929), the library copy being the 84th English printing from 1976, but now reads a bit oddly with a strange mix of fact and fancy. But clearly an interesting chap.

So then attempt to find out what it was in the TLS which attracted my attention in the first place and get onto the TLS subscriber archive, which I seem to be able to get onto without any kind of log on procedure. Complete failure to find anything remotely relevant either under the saint or under A. Munthe. So now rather frustrated.

On the other hand, some of Axel's fancy is about the goblins, trolls and what-have-you which inhabited the world of the Laplanders of his day. Which happens to coincide with two other related events. Firstly, with a recent reading of a book about dark age Europe. Attila, Odacer, Gaiseric, Clovis and all that gang. Goths, Franks and Vandals. Secondly, with a long peice in this week's TLS about a peice of Norse reconstruction by Tolkein senior, assembled and published by Tolkein junior. A must read for anyone with interests in Old English, Old Norse and so on. I may even give it a go myself. But do I have time and energy enough to do the £35 needed to pass go justice? Not really the sort of thing that Surrey can be expected to cough up out of the public purse.

Anyway, it seems that both Tolkein's and Wagner's ringology (the former not having much time for that of the latter) were firmly based in some scattered remnants of ancient north European verse, themselves with some foundation in the history of dark age Europe. Remants which go a fuller mile than the bard on incest, rape and pillage, but which are considered by cognoscenti to be terrific stuff. Presumably why in the good old days, Oxbridge students of English were required to do Old English. Presumably, no more.

To the doctor's today for my three yearly left aural excavation. Can now hear the cars on my left as I overtake them in the eastbound queue at Kiln Lane.

But was moved to ponder why we call general practitioners' premises surgeries. I don't suppose most general practitioners have done any surgery for a very long time and even now do not get, at least in so far as I understand things, much beyond dealing with warts and problem toe-nails. That is not to say that they are not valuble members of the community; just that they are not really surgeons.

And as I got warmed up, was moved to ponder on why it is that, rich country as we are, we have hived off out-of-office-hours primary care by doctors to what appear to be a rather dubious bunch of agencies who hire interesting people from all sorts of interesting backgrounds. One might have thought that most surgeries were big enough operations to do their own out of hours work, leaving the agencies to cover the odd hole rather than the whole business. Do they bother to monitor the work of these agencies? Who is their employer? Does some agency doctor hauled out to the wilds of Stamford Green in the middle of the night when I am feeling really grim - like death warmed up as my mother might have said - have access to my records? Would I want him to? All in all, it seems to me that all this is another blunder to lay at the door of the Blair-Brown-Bunch. Not that I entertain much hope that the Old Etonian crew will do much about it when they get back in next year. Maybe they own all the agencies.

And I am sorry to have to report yet another coup by the road marking industry. They managed to persuade the relevant local government outfit that Ruxley Lane really needed more white markings. So, as you approach the southern end of Ruxley Lane, you have a row of smaller houses on your left. This part of the road is often occupied by the queue of cars and other vehicles waiting for the lights at the Chessington Road junction. Now the white line gang have painted large 'KEEP CLEAR' messages on the road at the bottom of every drive, with the gap between every message being approximately the same size as the message. Completely pointless addition to the already large amount of white line clutter. To be fair, although it is the first time that I have seen these messages, they have probably been there for a while. Perhaps they got in first. But still rather silly.

For April Fool next, I am going to see if I can procure some imitation lighted cigarettes. Naturally, the idea is for them to be as realistic as possible, bearing in mind the careful drafting of the regulations: '... smoking includes being in possession of lit tobacco or of anything lit which contains tobacco, or being in possession of any other lit substance in a form in which it could be smoked ...' (Health Act 2006, Chapter 28, Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 1.2b). So while it would be good if the fake cigarette could be puffed in such a way as to emit smoke, it must not be lit. I am sure an imaginative chemist could come up something. We then assemble a dozen or so people good for a stunt and stroll into a pub, order some drinks, sidle off to a quiet part of the pub and then get out the fags. Sit back and observe reaction of pub staff and others. Maybe one would need to have a bit of care to choose a boozer where the staff might have a sense of humour. Also where the customers were known to be heavy smokers. You score a bulls-eye if the pub is moved to call in the local authority enforcement brigade before they find out that no-one is breaking the law. You score a double bulls-eye if, without advance planning, the pub calls in the enforcement brigade after they find out.

In the meantime, I must get to whoever writes the contents pages for these things and explain to him or her that it is not usual to have two layers of chapters, in the way that this act does. One has to have differant words for the various levels. No excuse that the regulations are so complicated, with so many levels, that they run out of suitable words.

So we have another flu scare to keep us occupied for a little while. Absolute godsend for the proprietors of newspapers and the purveyors of face masks. Now while it is true that first time around a very large number of people died, it is not so clear that this is likely to be the case this time, so I wonder if we are not getting a bit over excited. Two interesting snippets from the media miasma.

First, according to the DT anyway, if you organise an event you have to have insurance. This insurance covers, inter alia, the putter on of the event against the risk that someone at the event catches an infectious disease. Now, on the qt, insurers have struck out the bit of the policy which does infectious diseases, with the consequence that the putters on of events are being obliged to pull the events. This strikes me as rather silly. How have we got ourselves in a position where I can sue the owner of a pub because I catch a cold in his or her pub? Is it all part of the judicial creep which is making lots of jobs for all the legal boys and girls?

Second, according to another part of the DT, large pig farms are veritable tropic rain forests when it comes to the breeding and mutating of bugs. Thousands of pigs in a hot confined space for the bugs to play with. Not like the good old days when sturdy cottagers had just one or two pigs, with each one or two pigs far too far away from the next one or two pigs for the bugs to jump from one to the other. But do we believe the stories of lots of ill people around the offending Mexican pig farm? Are great lakes of untreated pig waste water really a bad thing? What about all those evil corporations able to suppress inconvenient truths?

Various religious events to report arising from the visit to Ely. First a visit to St Mary's Fowlmere, a notable flint faced church with a big entry in google. Mainly notable to me for the ancient door with a very large lock - from 1270 according to Mr G. A big church but with rather a cold feel. Inside rather dominated by the 18th century monument to the local worthies. Maybe not too many customers. Then onto St Lawrence's Foxton, another flint faced church. Access denied. But it was next to a handsome newish primary school which makes our own Stamford Green Primary School look very scruffy. Somehow Cambridge people seem to do rather well with new buildings. They don't get it right all the time, but they do get it right more often than the rest of us. Pass 'Our Lady and the English Martyrs' on the way into town, but not convenient to stop, parking in Cambridge being a major swine fever. A pity as the interior is impressive. But then, the next day, via the very convenient park and ride at Milton, onto Great St Mary's, a large and impressive church in the centre of Cambridge. Proud owner of two organs and the railings serve as a bill board for the many musical events on the go. Then onto the Round Church. The roundness being fairly unusual although there is one at Jerusalem and another at Islay, the latter being rather newer. The one at Cambridge dates from about a century before the lock at Fowlmere and certainly looks very Norman. Columns just like those at Durham. Outer regions the haunt of winos, who did not look too happy that we had colonised their bench.

And so to picnic on Jesus Green, a very suitable place for such an activity. Followed by the first punt trip for some years. I must be losing the knack a bit because, while I managed neither to crash nor to fall in, I did find it harder to keep the thing in a straight line than I ought to have done. Perhaps it is not like a bicycle; your muscles do forget how to do it. But the echo under Silver Street bridge every bit as good as I remembered it.

Back in Epsom, we move onto the next chapter of the water lilly saga. Having achieved concensus that the lilly was not going to move, it was moved into a bucket and, armed with the carefully preserved receipt for £18, off to Chessington Garden Centre to claim a replacement. Which was provided without any fuss. With two leaves and one shoot. Then ensued big palaver about whether or not to have bricks under the pot. It turns out that lots of people have views about this sort of thing, but the general idea seems to be to have the thing fairly close to the surface to start with, to give the good old photosynthesis a chance to get going, and then, by degrees, to lower the thing to the bottom of the pond. So we have started with two bricks which means that both the leaves are able to float on the surface. The newts seems very happy about playing with the new plant; hopefully they are not vegetarians.

And finally, we forge a link between horsey Epsom and the ecclesiastical affairs, having learnt by chance that the original Saint Leger was a 7th century bishop in France who was martyred in a rather messy way and is now the patron saint of those with challenged sight. Relics kept in Autun - which we must have missed when we visited some years ago. Must go again. A rather later leger came across with William the Bastard and one presumes a sprig from that tree invented the famous horse race. But the tree appears to have snuffed it, or at least to have gone down in the world, as no legers feature in Burke's Peerage.

Various footnotes to the last post.

First, an item 4 for the complaints book for Holiday Inn. Each room had a smart Phillips television, equipped with a socket which was both of the right dimensions for earphones and convenient in being front mounted. This meant that, after a rather disturbed first night, we were able to calm FIL down with some smart new earphones from Curries. Nice and light with good reception, the only downer being the lead being only 2.7m long. We shall investigate whether one can buy extensions in Maplin in Kingston. However, what the television could not do was freeview. Channels 1 to 5 OK, then you were onto films and adult films, both of which required reception intervention and, presumably, payment. Not a freeview channel with its regular diet of the likes of Poirot in sight.

We were reminded on return why this was a bad thing, as on our second night back we had freeview but no Poirot. Instead, we had the option of one film with lashings of sex or another with lashings of violence. Both of which left us feeling rather old and time for bed.

Then a coincidence. We had noticed, driving down Seven Sisters Road the other day, and looking for a splendidly seedy pub called the 'Hornsey Wood Tavern' (which appeared to have vanished), a modestly seedy hotel with the splendid name of 'Costello Palace Hotel'. We wondered, casually, who might stay in such a place. On return, we learn from the DT, that part of the answer was two suicides. Which was sad enough in itself. But what made it even sadder, to my mind, was that this event required a posse of policemen and women to turn out in space suits, for the hotel to be emptied as a precaution for our safety and the area to be cordoned off, causing traffic mayhem for miles around. No doubt a large vehicle from the Fire and Rescue Service for London was in attendance. Why could they not just discretely summon an undertaker to the back door? No doubt the two corpses will suffer the full indignity of full autopsies. Bring on the Swiss clinic! We were lucky in that we passed by an hour or so before discovery.

There was a more cheerful coincidence in that, while searching for Milkwood Road, we came across a James Joyce Walk, a clutch of affordable town houses off Shakespeare Road, just the other side of the tracks from where we were trying to be. I hope that JJ is suitably amused to have given his name to such a place; quite a good comparator to the seedy Dublin of his youth. The best that the 21st century can do. Then got to wondering about this downside of being a celebrity, that all and sundry get to take liberties with your name and worse. You might have got the dosh but you have sold yourself to get it.

In a similar vein, I noticed in a recent TLS that CUP are publishing a hard-core collected edition of Jane Austen from CUP, the review of which is attracting a certain amount of attention in the letters page. If I was a famous writer, I would not want some CUP funded minor academic to be scouring my land-fill sites and compost bins for every odd scrap that I had ever written. I suppose one would have to put up with the York Notes treatment, but at least they could have the decency to stop at my published work. But perhaps the point is the same as before: you have taken the silver peices so your life is no longer your own. Besides, most of us enjoy a bit of razzamatazz.

Took a little while to run the thing down in Amazon. They turn out to be rather dull looking books with light purple covers, £500 for nine volumes, including at least two volumes of snippets. Oddly, if one chose to shop from the US, one could have one volume for £250. Didn't quite get to the bottom of that one. In any event, I shall stick with my ancient Folio edition, lightly illustrated by Joan Hassall and weighing in at a mere seven volumes. One of Folio's better efforts.

Having had a pop at RSPB from time to time, that well known recipient of bequests which would have once found their way to the good old CofE, I thought I ought to record a very pleasant visit last week to their Foulmere reserve. We did not see very many birds - although we did manage one clutch of ducklings which pleased the BH - but we heard a lot and the fen like landscape was both peaceful and interesting. Interesting in that, inter alia, the landscape was managed, perhaps as much as Epsom Common (another subject for popping), but in an unintrusive way. One was not walking through a moonscape. One aspect of this was a very clear chalk stream, perhaps the River Shep, the management of which included lining the banks, below water level that is, with bundles of twigs. The stream also contained the remains of watercress cultivation and quite a lot of pale brown fish, perhaps upto a foot long.

On the CofE point, I should also say that finding the RSPB accounts was entirely straightforward. Just ask the search on the home page for accounts and up they come. It seems that their annual income is of the order of £100m, about of quarter of this being bequests and that their worth is about £120m, with nearly all of this being the value (how calculated one wonders) of their nature reserves. About £25m a year is spent on conservation work on existing reserves and a much smaller sum, perhaps £10m a year is spent on buying new ones. So not quite such a big operation as I had thought. Perhaps most of their reserves are on marginal land, the agricultural value of which is small.

Before we checked out of the Cambridge Holiday Inn this morning (somewhat to the north of Cambridge, just outside a village called Histon, next to my childhood village of Girton), we declined to fill in their happy sheet. But I think I ought to record our thoughts on the subject nonetheless. Item 1, this fairly new, low rise hotel had no lifts. OK, so I did not think to ask, but I had just assumed that lifts were part of the Holiday Inn package - this being a chain which used to replicate from one site to another with an altogether obsessive concern about maintaining the standard. Something I came to see the point of when travelling tired. Quite nice to turn up at a hotel which one had never been to before, but the layout and contents of which one knew in advance. Item 2, bread terrible. The only choice was cheap white bread or croissant. Not a roll in site. I was reduced to bringing in my own. Not that that was all that much better. Although the Barkers of my childhood still existed, to the extent of spreading to neighbouring villages, their bread was no longer up to much. The usual provincial stuff, probably made in too much of a hurry with the wrong sort of flour. Item 3, it was nice to have a large lake to walk around, but a pity about the litter left around by overnighting fishermen, some of whom, at least, sounded Polish (as did some of the chambermans at the hotel). Lots of bottles, tins and plastic of various shapes, purposes and sizes scattered around the remains of camp fires. I was moved to play the litter bore, one bit of plastic being an entire Tesco carrier bag, which I proceeded to fill up with various detritus. Perhaps the fishermen who saw me will be moved to DIY on their next occasion.

And amused to come across a stretch of Cambridge's latest in a long line of transport wheezes, the bus rail. This seems to involved ripping up a stretch of railway and replacing it with a concreteway that ordinary buses can run along. At least what look like ordinary buses. Presumably the point is that the concreteway is both cheaper than a road and inaccessible to unbuses. Maybe I will read all about it at http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/transport/guided/.

The main business of the day was a visit to the BH's natal house, a proceeding which involved driving through London on this busy, but non congestion charging, day. Managed to get to our first flat in Lordship Lane in N22 without too much bother. Flat still there, but a little more shabby that I remember it. And the shops around do not look quite as lively. Butchers and bakers all gone. Then onto Patisserie Valerie in Torrington Place for elevenses, in my case lemon tea and frangipane tarte (almond). This last turned out to be a rather sophisticated, and improved, version of our own Bakewell Tart. Lighter with less icing than the Cheam edition. With the added plus of coming in four flavours. By happy coincidence, we had parked very nearly outside Newman House, the central London Catholic Chaplaincy, the basement of which I used to know quite well, many years ago.

Thus fortified, was able to negociate Trafalgar Square, Stockwell, Brixton and Herne Hill (the last three of which proved a bit hairy) and find our way to Milkwood Road. After getting direction from a middle aged lady with beautiful accents from I know not where, and whose careful direction I failed to follow quite carefully enough, found the house in question, still there and not much altered, beyond a new house having been built in what had been the road next door. Many happy snaps of FIL and BH standing outside. No-one appeared to be at home so we were not able to invite ourselves in for a dekko.

And I close with a technical moan. These last lines of this posting appear immediately above the first lines of the last posting. Which gives rise to an irritating discontinuity which would be erradicated if the last posting appeared at the bottom of the heap rather than the top, with display starting at the bottom rather than the top. Maybe I shall have to find my way onto some bloggers only forum to make my pitch. There must be one.

Passing through Ely Market, having done the very dear second hand book stall (stock not much cop either) and the second hand jigsaw stall, could not resist the temptation to sign on from the library there. So now a life member of the Cambridgeshire library, slightly more pack drill than at the regional capital, but not bad at about 5 minutes after which plenty of free PCs.

This morning to the cathedral to renew our annual season tickets. Oddly enough, the girl who let us in is off to Stoneleigh in the morning, just two stations up from us at Epsom. We explained that there had been a riot at the Stoneleigh (I think, a John Barras house) within the last few weeks, probably having necessitated the turn-out of the Surrey police helicopter, not to mention ground based units. Maybe she had better be careful after dark. All those fuelled up bank holiday types.

Cathedral well worth the visit. Particularly struck this time by the lantern and its stained windows, plus the east and west windows. Not to mention the aisle windows which carried various images of lancaster bombers and the like. Makes a change from their staple diets of saints and knights in armour. The carvings in the lady chapel did not seem quick as outlandish as I remembered, although I was struck by the oddness of an age when the ruling ecclesiastics would think it right to vandalise such a place. Luckily, their main concern appeared to be the representation of faces, so there was still quite a lot left. Tried the accoustics again, in a moderate way as I was not alone, and they were very good. Must be a good place to hear music - although I recall the place being very cold in the winter.