pumpkinstrokemarrow

But to re-position myself away from what might sound a bit BNP, I should say again (vide supra) that my belief is that the world will become an increasingly troublesome place unless we do something about the gross inequality that presently pervades it. If we with the money do not pour a good chunk of that money into sorting that inequality out, we might find ourself in a bit of a pickle. Quite apart from any considerations of morality and decency. Which is all well and good, but apart from not wanting to part with the dosh, we have not yet learnt how to apply it very effectively. An awful lot of the aid money there is seems to disappear down some drain or other.

Nearer home, finally gotten around to striking the shuttering from the buttress to the right hand wall of the compost bin at the bottom of the back garden, having dutifully watered the curing concrete over the past week or so, a process which is supposed to increase its final compressive strength by up to 32%. Started off by learning that taking out a cross head screw from an awkward place is a lot less awkward than taking out an ordinary screw from the same place. The tip of the screwdriver stays in its hole in the top of the screw. Then learnt that there are at least two sorts of cross head screws as the screwdriver I was using did not work on taking out the last screw, despite being the screwdriver which put it in in the first place, and despite all the screws looking the same. But came out as sweet as pie when I changed screwdriver. Screws out, three of the six peices of chipboard making up the shutter fell off without bother. That left the three large peices - back, front and right hand side - firmly embedded in the soil at the base of the buttress. A bit of waggling and the front came out. Rather more serious waggling and the side came out. But the back, the most awkward, was not playing the game. Out with the cold chisel and club hammer and starting smashing it up. At which point it gave in gracefully and I was able to pull it out, more or less in one peice.

I then find that the second lift has come out a pale grey while the first lift has come out a pale brown. So we have a two tone buttress. But the good news is that the bond between first and second lift looks good. I shall be very surprised if it comes adrift by natural causes. So now, I can relax, the buttress project can be closed and I can fill up the compost bin to my heart's content, not having to worry about whether the right hand retaining wall is about to keel over on me. Post implementation review scheduled for 31st July next, a day which, as it happens, will be the 38th anniversary of my wedding, God willing as they say in the wee frees.

Yesterday was also the day of the lamb cutlets, for the second time in the recent past. Mushroom soup as an appetiser, made by simply simmering a few mushrooms - more or less entire but with the stalks chopped - in a little butter, water and black pepper (pestle and mortar variety). Followed by the cutlets grilled, summer cabbage boiled and mashed potato. Important to grill the chops rather than bake them. The latter tends to result in a rather dry product; with a grill one can monitor operations and tweak heat, position and so forth. More bother but more result. The bit I was not too sure about was adding the remains of the mushroom soup to the potato before mashing. It did impart a bit of flavour, but also a rather grey tinge colour-wise. Not too attractive, so not next time.

Just woken to another odd dream, most of which I cannot trace. So I have, on retirement, retired to live in the house that I was brought up in. Oddly, I still have two young children, neither like my actual children and one has morphed from male to female. The main content of the dream is the left hand side of the quite large back garden (maybe 60 feet wide by 100 feet deep). The previous incumbent is clearly a DIY engineer and has installed water, gas and electricity down the garden. Half way down the left hand boundary there is a large white plastic pipe coming out of the ground, maybe nine inches in diameter and carrying all three services, together with various dials, wheels and levers. All looks a bit Heath Robinson. Further down there is a white bath full of hot water, marinading some small contraptions or other. Then there is another gas fired boiler at the bottom of the garden. A machine for making plastic mouldings. Injection mouldings? And a table covered in samples of said moulding. Pipes everywhere. All kinds of junk everywhere. I start clearing the junk up, helped by my two children. Next door neighbour, whom I do not recognise, either in the dream or now, making pleasant noises. Come across a very odd shaped cherry tree, grown to considerable size. Much larger and with a much larger trunk than the ones in our road in Epsom. It is a proper tree rather than a graft and so while the tree is an odd shape, there is not the ugly union of stock and graft. Cordon fruit trees in much better shape than when I last saw them, but no fruit. Top fruit bushes all gone.

During the day previous had been pondering about 'The Wire', having been lent a box containing series I by sprog 2. Gritty police soap, not unlike our own soaps once one has adjusted to the different milieu. Three ponders. First, some of the scenes feature adult white male policemen being very coarse, in a smutty and adolescent way. Now this may be how some policement carry on, but I am not sure that I want to know about it in spades. I don't want to spend my quality winding down time in the evening hearing this kind of stuff. I don't want gritty, I want fluff. This, by the by, on top of a terrific amount of f-words and swearing generally. Far worse than any milieu that I am personally familiar with. Second, there are quite a lot of what I call cameos. Little scenes - maybe a few seconds, maybe as much as a minute or so, inserted more or less clumsily into the flow because someone thought they were cute or clever. Quite possibly triggered by something observed from real life. But the insertion was very clumsy and whatever cleverness or cuteness there might have been obscured by my irritation with the clumsiness. Third, a lot of the charectarisation is fairly simple minded. And very diversity conscious. But, for all this, there are good bits. Very taken, for example, with the time servers. Working out how best to get out on an enhanced pension while doing more or less nothing at all in the way of work. How many Brit. police soaps feature time servers of this sort? OK to knock civil servants or senior policemen on the box, but we are generally easy on the police heroes on the front line.

Talking of diversity, the Guardian tells me that it is told by serious lawyers, that piglet flu will generate lots of opportunities for our legal eagles. So if, for example, I were a gay who contracted piglet flu, I would, in all probability, be able to sue my employer for not having put a gay-friendly flu-containment policy into force in my workplace. Wilful, if not criminal, negligence. Puntive damages indicated. Perm on variety of diversity and this adds up to a lot of opportunities. Time we, collectively that is, started bearing down on these lawyers. Maybe time some of the fat cats did a spell of proper crim. work. Defending unpleasant no-hopers who have done crummy things for crummy wages.

After lunch, off to the library to investigate taxonomy to find that they are unloading another batch of their books, some of them more or less new. I got a nice Everyman edition of Rousseau's confessions and a biography of Dickens' first half by Hibbert. 70p for the two of them. Got my money's worth out of the Dickens already, someone whom I knew virtually nothing about. So I now know that his father did a spell in a debtors' prison. That and the convicts tramping about in the Chatham of his early boyhood gave him a life interest in prisons which he toured in the same way that I tour churches. Plus, of course, the convict in Great Expectations and the prison in Little Dorrit. Indeed, it is claimed that prisons or prisoners get into most of his books. All this for an author with whom I do not get on very well!

Then last week, the railway ticket buying adventure. Go to national rail web site and find that I can travel from Epsom, via two stations in Dorking and Reading, to Exeter for £30 or so. Bargain I think. Sure I have paid a lot more than that in the past. Maybe more than double. Rush off to Epsom station to buy a ticket. This turns out to be very complicated. The lady behind the window takes a long time persuading her machine that the thing can be done. But it can. I get three ticket shaped things and two bits of computer printout for my money. One of the ticket shaped things says that the tickets are only valid with a reservation and one of the bits of computer printout says that I do not have a reservation. Just to be sure, and being retired and having the time, I go back to the station to check that all is OK. Differant person behind the glass. He peers at the the materiel for some time and then announces that all is OK and why am I bothering him. The tickets are the reservations. I look forward to a heated discussion with a ticket collector.

In the meantime, I am on a train to London yesterday and hear an advertisement (hear I think. Perhaps the irritating talking on-train computer has started doing advertisements as well as announcements?) about how on some Saturday soon I can go anywhere for a tenner. Maybe I didn't get such a bargain. Go back to web site, and ask about Paddington to Exeter St Davids to find that I could go first class on a Saturday in August. With a two hour journey. For under £30. Whereas I am paying more than that to go cattle class with a near four hour journey. Although to be fair, to the two hour journey I do have to add the Epsom to Paddington leg, say an hour. And also to be fair, I can pay getting on for £100 for an open single. Presumably the sort of money I would pay if I simply turned up at the station and bought a ticket to go.

Which all goes to show that fare structures have got far too complicated. Bring back the days when there was just one fare and you did not have to go riffling through great heaps of options in order to be sure that you were not being done. When you trusted British Rail to do the decent thing, whatever faults they may have had in other respects. Something one can clearly not do with their successors.

The second dream was entirely new. Driving with BH along a rather dark and depressing road, enclosed on both sides by high embankments. Possibly up north somewhere. The odd thing was that the road, in fact all the space between the embankments, was about half a metre deep in dark, murky water. As we go along, I think I see a baby, floating on something or other on the water. White. Other cars are going past doing nothing. After about half a mile we stop and wonder what to do. We think that the current is too fierce for us to attempt going back. So we decide to push on to the railway station just ahead. Get there. Leave BH in the car while I go up to the station, on the top of the left hand embankment. Try to talk to the chap who I think is Mr. Station through some tatty railings. He turns out to have a badly disfigured face and to be very stupid. And not to be Mr. Station at all. Actually, it is a Mrs. Station ensconced in a wooden booth the other side of some more railings and who is far to busy to bother about babies. I decide to cross over to the other embankment, across something rather like a lock gate. Without railings, which would usually bother me but not on this occasion. The vertigo part of the brain must be off-duty. Find myself in some buildings which could easily be the railway station. Two more chaps come through, one old and one young, and I ask the young one where the station is. He turns towards me, I see that he also has a badly disfigured face. He is rather rude, quite unhelpful and disappears with his companion through a door. I go through another, to the right, and find myself in a street. The two chaps turn out to run a large shop full of a huge variety of brown leather handbags. Beyond the handbag shop, the street stretches away to the left, lined on the left hand side by a continuous series of market stalls, the sort of thing you might get in France. I give up on finding the station and go back to the BH. We decide to drive on.

And then there were two advertisment puzzles. The first was a first. That is to say someone had taken a display advertisement, quite large, maybe four inches by two and a half, placed among the sits. vacant part of the DT, and advertising his availability as CEO of a suitably large concern from August. Never seen such a thing before. I wonder if he got any replies? The second was also a first, although of a rather differant nature. About 1700 yesterday evening, two cards were pushed through the letter box, both advertising car hire and both the same size. Rather differant designs although probably from the same card shop. Same sort of feel to the things. But differant telephone numbers. Differant business names, neither involving KBRC. But one had a 'KBRC' logo with a http://www.manorcars.biz/ address while the other had no logo with a http://www.kbradiocars.co.uk/ address (this second address not appearing to work). So I think they are the same outfit. But why bother to put out two cards? Was the thought that this would give them two chances of getting the business?

Sadly, a recent coup on the secondhand book front has turned out not to be such a coup after all. Readers may remember my delight at acquiring a brand new copy of Burke's peerage for two or three pounds, rather than the published price of three or four hundred pounds. But I now discover at http://www.psbooks.co.uk/ that they do the same book for about a hundred pounds. So still a coup, but not quite such a big coup.

But it has earned its keep today. A propos of a visit to Syon Park to watch Lord Egremont unveil a plaque, have been looking into his background. I thought that perhaps Egremont was perhaps a courtesy title for second sons of the Duke of Northumberland who owns Syon Park. Or something like that. But the truth turns out to be much more complicated. His father was the second son of the fifth baron of Leconfield. His elder brother gets killed at El Alamein without issue. He (the father) was created first baron of Egremont (at least the second creation, there having also been earls in the past. Now extinct) in 1963, possibly for unpaid secretarial services to the then PM, possibly also on account of his wife being the Rt Hon The Dowager Lady Egremont of Cockermouth Castle. Became the sixth baron of Leconfield on the death of his father in 1967. Making the present incumbent the second baron of Egremont and the seventh baron of Leconfield.

It seems that the Wyndhams, this being the family name of the Egremonts, first came to fame when one of them helped Henry VII win the battle of Stoke back in 1487. Some years later, Henry changed his mind and had his head chopped off. But the family lived on and went from strength to strength. To the point where one of them married a sister of the Duke of Northumberland, who presumably brought Petworth House with her, once a Percy property and now a Wyndham property. She also was mixed up with Cockermouth Castle. From all of which we deduce that, the present Lord Egremont may get on with his fairly distant relative, the present Duke of Northumberland, and so been able to facilitate this ceremony at Syon House, still a Percy property and nominally their London Seat, their having flogged off the big house in the Strand. Or perhaps Northumberland Avenue.

I am reminded of a conversation, presumably fictional, between two Frenchmen about a third Frenchman. Frenchman 1 says he did not think that any of Frenchman 3's ancestors had been beheaded. Frenchman 2 says that he is not really surprised as he had never thought that Frenchman 3 was really a gentleman.

The baker tells me that all of them are made out of the same stuff, the only variation being his baguettes (vide supra). The only ingredient differance being that some are glazed, some have flour sprinkled on them at some point and some have seeds sprinkled on them at some point. It seems that essentials oils or omega numbers in the seeds can, due to the high temperature of a bread oven, seep into the bread. So there can be a flavour differance on that account. But I think, most of what I am tasting is more a texture than a taste differance, in so far as it is possible to disentagle the two things. And this might reasonably be accounted for by the temperature dynamics varying with the shape of the dough and according to whether the dough is in a tin or not.

Having sorted out this knotty problem to my satisfaction, had a go at Elizabeth Bowen, bought from a charity shop somewhere, prompted by the review in the TLS of the book of her correspondance with her long time lover, a correspondance in which, it seems, she dropped the reserve charactaristic of her published prose. I don't think I have ever read her before, although I think my mother did. This book, a collection of short stories, with the title story being 'A day in the dark', used to be the property of Surrey Libraries and was based in Leatherhead, a few miles from the library headquarters, which I now know is in Esher. The book appears to have been taken out very regularly, maybe 100 times in all, between the beginning of 1971 and the autumn of 1977. At which point the record stops with annotation 'sold with all faults'. I wonder what prompted the sale? Did the borrowings suddenly come to an end in 1977 or do Surrey Libraries have some arcane book replacement policy? The copy in question being worn, but in perfectly readable condition.

Or so I thought after the first couple of stories. Very taken with one about the horrors of breakfast in the sort of genteel boarding houses that people moving from nice homes to London to work were apt to wind up in until fairly recently, the story being published in 1923. But then I started to get bogged down. The stories all seemed terribly faded genteel and fifties and despite including a fair amount of sex, at least according to the standards pertaining (or perhaps obtaining) when they were written, a long way away from the needs and issues of our dashing 21st century. Maybe of more interest to ladies, so now passed onto the BH for the testing of that hypothesis. I shall return to my Gloucester Road Mauriac. Also rather dated, very wrapped up in the crises of faith and fashion of the young in France 111 years ago, but it all seems so much more glamorous in French which one only partly understands.

Then last week we saw a film, on television that is, it being quite a long time since we got as far as a cinema. Not helped by our local multi-screen being firmly middle of the road. Maybe if we lived in central London we would still bother. Anyway, this film was called 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. A good example of how much can be achieved with lashings of costume and settings, little plot, virtually no sex and no violence. We do not learn much about Vermeer, beyond the fact that he mixed his own paint and that he needed rich patrons to survive. But we do learn that the life of a maid in a middling sort of household must have been a precarious and wearing business when she had to triangulate between the various founts of power. Head of household, wife, chief cook and so on. Watchable enough, although a bit unsatisfying after the event, one wondering why one had bothered. Should have stuck with Mauriac, only one was a bit tired for that.

I was suprised how small she looked on top of this plinth, presumably intended for a larger than life size equestrian statue, although I ought not have been, having seen the life size human statue they had on it a few years ago. And pretty naff it looked too. Plinth made to look even bigger by strapping a steel framed safety net around the thing. But presumably a plus that you can move about. Not everybody would be very comfortable standing on top of a pillar, even if there was the potential to look rather better. Very natty little loader on hand to get you on and off the plinth.

Then onto the Nat. Gall. Ext. to see a freeby exhibition of French landscapes, with a lot by Corot, from the nineteenth century. Not too crowded and a lot of good stuff. Made the amateur stuff at Bourne Hall look a bit thin.

Then, prompted by the TLS, onto the church of Notre Dame just off Leicester Square, having taken on refreshment at the Leicester Square Wetherspoons. Not too impressed by the Cocteau mural, apparently knocked out in something of a hurry, and heavily populated with a fly motif, some of them serving as virgin tears and some of the others serving as drops of blood from the stigmata. TLS was sniffy about the guide book they were noticing describing Cocteau as a film maker, artist and designer, but that is, I think, how he was described in the label to the mural. Clearly the guide book writers were content to lift their words from the label, rather than doing too much research into who Cocteau really was. Interesting that the managers of churches do not generally think that such a thing is complete without a label explaining its provenance. The thing itself does not stand on its own two feet without a puff of this sort. Perhaps recognising that many of their customers are tourists like myself. And what would be the point of a fancy treasure chest containing some of the mortal remains of a saint, without a label explaining which saint was in the chest? Did the golden calf of yore have a brass plate on it somewhere explaining where it had been made? Church itself circular with a dome over most of it and rather impressive. Unusual tapestry with the virgin in a wood full of birds and animals behind the high altar. Must have cost the French a packet when it was built, by the look of it in the fifties, although their web site (http://www.rcdow.org.uk/frenchchurch/default.asp) says built in 1865 and consecrated in 1956. Do we have a confusion of sixes and fives here?

Then onto further refreshment, mainly in the Coach and Horses, the ambience of which has so far survived the retirement of its most famous tenant. To the extent of my being offered a box of 25 very flashy looking cigars, maybe coronas or toros in cigar speak, down from £120 to £100 when I said I had not got the money on me. If they were what they appeared to be, maybe £20 a pop, bought single from a cigar shop. Maybe stolen goods and maybe not in very good condition. But did not think to sniff or sample and didn't buy either.

Excellent baked cod today, despite it being the day after it was bought. Cod has been good for the last few weeks with the man from Hastings having big fillets, a good white colour and with lots of yellow spots on the skin. By the by, he told me that a lot of the fish sold in restaurants on the quay side of quaint Portuguese fishing villages actually comes in by air from, say, Egypt or Iceland. Not from the quay side at all. Which reminded me of the occasion when I saw this makeshift wooden crate in a Brick Lane grocery, maybe a metre square and two thirds of a metre high, packed with straw, ice and whacking great fish. Presumably they had been air freighted in from Dacca.

In the course of all this, found that the new water lilly now stands at five leaves and one flower bud. One new leaf, two middle aged leaves and two elderly leaves, starting to look a bit ragged. Plus, one small flower bud. It looks as if we are going to get a flower. Maybe having moved the thing rather nearer the surface, and letting the surface drift down with evaporation and consumption was the right thing. More heat getting into the thing meaning more photosynthesis and more growth (NVQ Science, chapter IV, section 6b). Maybe the thing will even come up again next year. Given that it is now on two bricks, should we drop down to one over the winter? To keep it well clear of frosts. Six months to ponder about that one.

The tea-time dilemma reported in the last post was resolved in favour of sirloin steak sandwiches. Took the trouble to heat the grill before sticking the steaks under and gave them about 12 minutes altogether. Turned out splendidly. Brown nearly all the way through. Hint of pink in the middle and plenty of juices held inside. And, as luck would have it, the baker had had a flour problem that day and had more or less run out of bread by the time I got there. I was reduced to buying what passes for a baguette. Turned out, not to be very French, but to be excellent for making steak sandwiches. Cut steak into gobbets, wrap gobbet in small peice of bread, and gob the thing entire. Spiffing feed.

I see from the DT that the wheel of fortune has turned again. When we first moved to Epsom, getting on for twenty years ago, another crash was in progress. One of the symptoms was that the National Westminster Bank, as it then was, having lost a lot of money in some speculation in or on South America was reduced to clawing money back from small businesses in this country in order to mend their balance sheet. This meant that lots of small builders, having been encouraged to take out loans to build their businesses, suddenly had their loans pulled and a good number of them went bust in consequence. Didn't get to hear what pain the South Americans had to take. Or whether the bankers had their bonuses stopped. So now, the successor to the Nat West, our much loved RBS, has got into another, much flashier pickle. And according to the DT, one of their wheezes to mend their balance sheet this time, is to pick over the small print of commercial loans, to find a few technical contraventions and then whack the offending business with all kinds of penalty payments. A bit like the charge we had to pay because of drawing a largish cheque on the wrong account (vide supra), a charge out of all proportion to the cost of this mistake to the bank. An entirely unsatisfactory way for charging for their admittedly satisfactory services.

And while we are on the subject of big bad corporations, I have been pondering about the online gas application I mentioned in the last post. I think in this case, it is the big bad IT people. They suddenly discover that they can deliver quite fancy applications to customers over the web. They go to management and say how about a flashy new application to wow the punters. Go for it say management. Hire a whole bag of contractors to whoof the thing along. So the IT guys manage another nice development without the bother of thinking too hard about what the customers might think. A bit like when modern word processors were invented. We all festooned our documents with all kinds of fonts, styles, gadgets and clip art, in complete disregard of the perfectly sensible standards for presenting documents which had grown up over many years. It took a few years to settle down again, not a million miles away from the original standards. But making some allowance for all the new whizzy possibilities, some of which were actually helpful. I think we are still on the first half of this cycle with web applications from utilities.

I also learnt that one who was regarded as a crusading hero in his time, one Raynald de Chatillon, was a fairly unpleasant type by today's standards. A rough of lowly origins who managed two very successful marriages to posh birds out east, and who went in for quite a lot of torture, piracy and pillage before being famously chopped up by Saladin, generally generous in victory, after the battle of Hattin.

All of which reminded me of a snippet from my half read, ancient biography of Henry III. It seems that in those times, roughly the time of the crusades, when the young bloods, the hooray henrys of their day, were feeling a bit restive, they would announce that there would be an informal tourney in a few days time, somewhere in the woods outside their town. A bit like an illegal rave now. And in the same sort of way as now, the priests would move heaven and earth to get a bull out in time to ban it. That failing, at the appointed time, the hoorays would all turn up, fully kitted out for the fight, and have what amounted to a small battle. While killing people was not really the point of it all, a fair amount of damage was done and people did indeed get killed. Quaintly, one could also take prisoners, who would then be ransomed in the ordinary way, with those ransoms being enforceable in the courts in the ordinary way. A binding contract.

So things have got better over the years. We now fuss about whether the hoorays should be allowed to whack foxes rather than each other.

All this, light relief from grappling with my online account with the gas board. It seems that I have ticked some box which said I would be happy with an online rather than a real bill. So I now have to log into some elaborate application which tells me all about my use of gas. At least, I assume that is the idea. But I can't make a lot of sense of it yet. Rather than just skimming the bill and dropping it in the pile of such things, I now have to learn a whole new application in order to do the same thing. I am going to have to invest a couple of training hours on it. But I suppose I am going to have to do it. My utility bills seem to be steadily rising and utilities have been known, occasionally, to make mistakes.

Now time to ponder on what to have for tea. Inclining towards ox kidneys with carraway seeds, but I have the whole five miles to Cheam to ponder about that.

Which reminds me that lovers of rock cakes should know that those from Waitrose do not conform to the standard. First, their shape is a bit improper (BS ISO 77007:2008). They are not low rise, rough cast pyramids, roughly circular in shape. Second, they are glazed, which is most improper (BS 4825-2:1991). Third, the interior is not quite right. Can't quite put my finger on it, but they do not have the dry, crumbly texture of the real thing (BS EN 13390:2002). Is it all down to the high speed low grade flour baking adopted by the supers?

But eco-budget not looking so good. I have now spent about £15 on materials to build this buttress, which will prolong the life of the compost bin for some years, which sum perhaps converts into £7.50 petrol's worth. Now today's average price over the 109 petrol stations within 10 miles of the compost bin is 103.3p per litre (see http://www.petrolprices.com). Which means that I have spent 7.26 litres of petrol on this aid for home conservation. Now, as I understand things, the garden and kitchen waste which goes into the compost bin is partially consumed by a variety of macro and microscopic animals, converting quite a lot of it back from carbohydrates, fats and proteins into carbon dioxide and water. So my contribution to the carbon situation so far negative. What is left goes on the garden. No idea how much of what is left is just inert humus - what they call fibre at Kellogs - and how much is actually plant food. Not at all clear that the eco-benefit of all this humus is going to amount to all those litres of petrol. But good fun making it.

Had we gone for the other option and had the large lorry from the council collect the stuff, would they have done any better? Would they have extracted all the energy from said waste (perhaps using the contraption from the film in which they made soylent green out of corpses. A subject on which Mr G. is positively fulsome) and fed it into the national grid? Would that have shown a profit after paying for the large lorry and paying all the people to sit in it? I shall keep an eye on the Guardian eco-section just in case the eco-warriers change gear and decide that making compost at home is indeed bad for the planet.

Apart from that, I have been puzzling about the relationship between the words idle and idol. At first blush, one might have thought there was one. However, close inspection of the OED reveals that idle is an old German word, or to be particular, old Frisian, amongst others. Started off by meaning empty. Then empty thoughts, that is to say idle thoughts. Then onto idle machinery and people. So a machine could be said to be idling without being rude about it. A neutral statement. But then the term acquired a generally critical tone. Idle was bad. Idol, on the other hand, seems to be an old French word from the Greek via late Latin. Started off by meaning the phantom or insubstantial. An image in water or a mirror. A mental image or fancy and then onto a material image or fancy. Which sense was then appropriated by the Jews and Christians to describe objects of worship for pagans. Brass Apollos and golden calves. As with idle, a word which started off morally fairly nuetral, became highly charged. Idol was very bad.

But I still hanker after a connection. OED might say one comes from up north and the other comes from down south, but the starting point of both is more or less 'empty'. Is there a common Aryan root unknown to the compilers of the OED all those years ago?

I feel I should close with an honourable mention for http://venusreinvented.blogspot.com/. Someone who is clearly very keen on libraries. Libraries of all sorts: domestic, collector, local, regional and national. I already know something about libararies in the UK, using their generally excellent Internet connectivity. But maybe I should take a leaf out of her book and start visiting libraries as I travel around, rather as I presently visit churches. I can already claim visits to the Bibliotheque Nationale and to various civil service libaries (these days sadly diminished by loss of their floor space to people and their books to auction houses); maybe it is time I checked off the British Library.

On the way back we discovered that in this apparently peaceful Surrey village, the church of St Mary the Virgin was very firmly shut on a Saturday afternoon. Presumably not so peaceful as it might look. And to be fair, village is a bit of a misonomer for a suburb of London, albeit just outside the GLC boundary. On the other hand, somewhere near the church we came across a well fruited walnut tree. Took one home for dissection and find that the nut, about the size of the sort of walnut you might buy, had a green outer layer, maybe 3mm thick. Then about 1mm of what looked as if it would become the woody shell (assuming the things ever ripen in our climate. I think of walnuts as being proper to hotter climes). Then a damp and delicately coloured embyro walnut, embedded in a sort of white foam, which discolours fairly quicky when exposed to the air.

On return, perused the Epsom Guardian over tea and Eccles cake, and was pleased to find a peice about Epsom Common. Did the wholesale felling of oak trees count as conservation or vandalism? The writer of the peice looked to have been prompted by a resident who clearly thought it was vandalism. I entirely agree (see January 12 2009), to the point where I even wrote to the Epsom Common Association about it. So I am now prompted to join the Epsom Guardian discussion. Maybe some good will come of it all. Maybe I should play the health and safety card on the cows (see June 24 2009). Against a background when we are told by our railway carriage to mind our step many times in the course of a journey we take every day, in case we subsequently try to sue, if people worry about trees to the extent of chopping down old trees near schools in case something falls off one of them, I should have thought that loose cows on the common were definately out. Although, to be fair, I think some school children were hurt or worse in a school playground near here quite recently when an old tree fell over. Unlikely things do happen from time to time; the trick is to strike the right balance in trying to stop such happenings.

Meanwhile, was amused by a rant about Goldman Sachs' profits at http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/07/16/on-goldmans-giganto-profits/. It seems that they have done very well out of the bail out of the financial system. Firstly, the rescue of AIG meant that they got paid lots of money by AIG which they might otherwise have lost. Secondly, they have done terribly well providing underwriting services needed by all the other banks needed to raise equity to pay off the money they had to borrow from government at the height of the crash. Thirdly, they have probably borrowed lots of dosh from government on the cheap in order to fund further speculations. All adds up to lots of profit for high income tax avoiders, funded in some large part by decent middle income tax payers. Need a younger brain to think through all this stuff. I suppose that is why they get away with it, if indeed they are getting away with anything,

Some readers may be familiar with the custom of disguising your wheelie bin with a sort of sticky plastic wallpaper, typically with some green foliage pattern, typically ivy. It rather lifts the tone of the drive to have a block of ivy rather than a block of green plastic. A custom which was brought to our road from Scotland, where, we believe, it originated. Now the news item is that I have spotted a couple of these things at Number 609, Wandsworth Road, somewhere near Wandsworth Road Station. The first time I have seen such things in the inner city.

Back at Epsom, much debate about whether Tescos should be allowed to put up another supermarket in a vacant site on Upper High Street. How big does their bribe have to be to make their shop acceptable? So far they are offering 18 affordable houses and a bit of work on paths and roads in the vicinity. What is puzzling me is the value add for the country at large. There are several large supermarkets within, say, five miles. There is a large Sainsburys about a mile away at Kiln Lane, with a much more convenient car park than the multi-storey affair proposed for Upper High Street. There are a few food shops in Upper High Street itself, including one of Epsom's two remaining butchers. Given that the total amount of food that we buy does not vary much, the new Tescos will presumably survive by taking trade from these other places and the existing food shops in Upper High Street will presumably close. So Tescos spends a lot of money to create new distribution capability in the expectation that we will make less use of existing capability. The people living in and around Upper High Street will get both the noise and the benefit. Assuming that Tescos are indeed better than other folk at distribution, the car shoppers among us (I imagine the big majority) get a marginally better service. The various other distributors take a hit, some go under. Some wind up on benefit. Tescos make money, or presumably they would not do it. Which leaves me with two thoughts. First, retail margins must be quite big for all this to be worth Tescos while. Second, the amount of waste involved in all this is large. Not really a very good thing when we are supposed to be calming down to save the planet. But the good news is that the market forces of capitalism roll foward. Our shops get bigger and smarter all the time.

Pending concrete activity down the bottom of the garden, a concrete dream last night. Now we have a garden shed which is rotting because I built it into the side of a slight hill without taking proper care of waterproofing arrangements, which means that part of the floor and associated parts is rotting. So, from time to time, I ponder about whether to replace it. So last night, I decide that a concrete shed was just the thing. Would take no time at all to knock such a thing up. Plenty of scrap timber in the garage to make the shuttering out of. No need to bother about windows, just make a concrete box. Might be a bit dark but never mind. I don't seem to be concerned about the roof or the door. But then, presumably close to waking and bits of the brain booting up, I start to wonder about how thick the concrete ought to be. Settle for four inches. You can make concrete thinner than this, but not if you are doing it by hand without any mechanical tamping aids. Then start to think. The shed needs to be at least six feet high. Point A, this is more thin concrete than can be cast in-situ in one go. And it has to be in-situ as it would be too heavy to lift single handed. Point B, this is rather a lot of shuttering. Point C, will need scaffolding from which to pour the concrete into the shutter. Point D, we are talking about maybe 12 square metres of wall which amounts to more than a cubic metre of concrete. This is rather a lot of concrete to be knocking up with a shovel in a wooden tray. Still more or less asleep at this point, but now starting to wake up and unravel the whole problem. Maybe a DIY concrete shed is not really the way forward.

But by way of compensation, I do have the buttress to make for the compost bin at the bottom of the garden. The compost bin is made of brick, two sides and a back, maybe 18 inches high. Wooden front and wooden top to keep the rats out and the mice warm. Unfortunately, while the left hand side is properly bonded to the back, the back right hand corner is occupied by a short concrete post and there is no bonding between the right hand side and the back. With the result that the right hand side is now slowly twisting and falling, outwards. Maybe 20 degrees from vertical at the front. So I decided that a concrete buttress is the answer. Would be best in the middle but that is rather awkward, so have settled for the front. Made a neat little shutter for the buttress, maybe a bit less than a cubic foot in volume. Bought three bags of aggregate which I thought was plenty. Started mixing and filling operations, when it rapidly became apparent that my guess of three bags was well out. I should have measured rather than guessed. I should have got more like six bags of aggregate, and a new bag of cement. So the buttress is now going to be in two layers. Hopefully the two layers will bond OK without the aid of any connecting reinforcing bars.

Made the first layer concrete in three mixes, one for each bag. The first dry, probably the right thing at the bottom of the hole. The second rather wetter, probably the result of chucking in half a bag of sand I happened to have lying around and wanted to tidy up, and the third, by accident, very wet. The right mix was probably somewhere between the first and the second mix. Bearing in mind that I was rather short of concrete, had run out of sand and shop aggregate, decided that the way forward was to add more aggregate to the third mix, in the form of gravel from around the bay window to the extension and broken ancient brick, irregular lumps ranging up to a maximum of two inches across. The concrete having aleady been mixed, it had some difficulty wetting the ancient brick, despite being very wet itself, but it probably got there, this difficulty being the reason that one is supposed to mix concrete in one go, without adding things later. I don't suppose this part of the buttress is going to be terribly strong, but hopefully still fit for purpose. And the second layer, if made in a more conventional way will reinforce it a bit.

And then I found that I had forgotten how strong shutters need to be. Wet concrete is heavy stuff and will push one inch screws out of chip board without any problem at all. Poor workmanship, but after the dust has settled I do not suppose anyone other than me will notice. Second layer to be continued when we get our shiny new car back from being made shiny new again after an altercation with a post.

The executive summary seems to be that Brit greed and stupidity trashed about the only decent attempt to build a secular democracy in Iran.

The story seems to go roughly as follows. Despite having been a civilisation for thousands of years, by the early 20th century, Iran had not managed effective government. Along came the Brits who spent a lot of time and treasure finding then developing splendid oil reserves, striking a deal with the powers that were which gave them 80%, and the Iranians 20%, of what became a very big cake indeed. Plus the Iranians were not allowed to inspect the books, a lack of access which the Brits appear to have exploited to their own advantage. A squalid little detail. Plus the Brits live in luxury, their Iranian workforce live in overheated squalor. Little effort to train up Iranian engineers. By the end of the second world war, the Iranians were getting a bit cheesed off with this but made no headway. This lack of progess eventually propelled Mr Mossadeq into the chair. He promptly nationalises the Britoil operation. Made hero of Iran overnight. The Brits think that this amounts to theft - poor nations are supposed to respect the property rights of rich ones - and go in for all kinds of sabre rattling. Gunboats large and small. (Ironic, given that the Brits were busy nationalising everything at home at the time. The chief Brit villains seem to have been Herbert Morrison (who replaced the more sensible Bevin as Foreign Secretary at the vital moment) and Churchill. Nothing learned about giving in gracefully in good time from either Ireland or India). The Brits get chucked out of Iran. Meanwhile, the Yanks, in the form of president Truman, are rather sympathetic towards the Iranians and try hard to broker a deal, without success. Most of the world thinks that UK is in the wrong. But then Truman is replaced by Eisenhower. Cold war running hot. Are the Soviets about to make a grab for all or part of Iran? The Yanks go into reverse and pick up the threads of a civil sabotage operation put together by the Brits before they were chucked out. After various hiccups, Mr Mossadeq is deposed during an orgy of civil disturbance, something the Iranians seemed to be rather good at, and the Shah returns, rather ingloriously, to rule for a long time, rather badly. Compromise on the oil front, one which leaves Britoil (BP) alive to fight another day. (Another irony here being that the US effort in Iran was spearheaded by a scion of the Roosevelt clan, at least one of whom is remembered for good things).

So while Iran might have been in a bit of a mess anyway, both the UK and the US appear to have behaved badly, the latter after a more promising start. In our case, one more dreadul cock-up on our road out of empire. And we were so p****d off about it, that we compounded the cock-up a year or two later at Suez... Perhaps the only redeeming feature of the whole mess is that at least Mr Mossadeq was allowed to die in his own bed, in more or less his own time.

Perhaps the lesson for me is, once again, if you read something which is surprising, piquant or striking, check it before you use it. Fair chance that it is wrong.

Then, quite by chance, on to St George's Cathedral. Impressive place, if a little cold, rather in the way of Guildford Cathedral or Liverpool Cathedral (Anglican variety), this third incarnation having been built in the fifties after the second incarnation, built by Pugin in the middle of the nineteenth centry, was badly knocked about in the second war. I particularly liked the stained glass and the lady chapel. Impressed by the pews made of solid tropical rain forest and amused by the conveniently hingeing (doesn't look right. But hinging looks worse) kneelers attached to them. High altar rather low key. Perhaps the furniture is kept under lock and key when it is not being used. Unusually, all the worshipers, few enough in number, were men. No pious ladies with rosaries. But the cathedral was very up to date in the sense that there were video monitors attached to most of the columns in the nave. Presumably so that those who did not have a good view of the high altar did get one.

Further evidence that we live in a meta rather than a real world, by which I mean that we are much keener on talking about things than doing things. I wanted to get a quick overview of the animal kingdom. Animals, arthropods, chordates, insectivores and so on. So I ask Mr G. about animal taxomony and I get a wealth of sites with very learned articles about how to do taxonomy. Lots of fine print about when to invent a new genus and when not too. On the naming rules for new species. But I could not find something simply listing out the top part of the tree of the animal kingdom. Until I came across Cody and Garry at the Nebraska Wesleyan University who had produced a sort of tree, presumably supporting materials for a biology course (http://www.nebrwesleyan.edu/), which was quite good enough for my purposes when supplemented by my ancient copy of Romer on the vertebrate body. So I have now been reminded about kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders and all the rest of it. Fascinating business. But odd that I had to go at it by this roundabout route. Perhaps taxonomy is far too real to have a place in a modern biology course, where one talks about systems, pathways, econnitches and themes. Merely looking at animals is very old hat.

TLS scores a hit with Iran. There has been a very modest amount of coverage of the recent election in Iran. I think it was rather overshadowed, in the DT anyway, by the expenses scandal. But the TLS managed a timely review of two or three books about the place. And for once, one did not mind that the reviewer took the space to do a quick tour of modern Iran and its problems, in the margins of telling you about the books under review. It seems that the election was pretty hopeless; well up to the standard of some basket case country in Africa. To think that Iran is a three thousand year old civilisation: any civilised people left there must be getting ready to turn in their graves. I also learn that to say that Mossadeq was a heroic democratically elected leader kicked out by the machinations of the evil CIA&MI6, is a little economical with the truth. To the point where when Mr M. chucked in the towel because the Iranians had had enough of him (perhaps with a little prompting), he took refuge, in his pyjamas, in the headquarters of the US aid operation in Teheran, luckily next door to his own house. Maybe the Guardian did rather better than the DT on all this. Maybe there was some coverage.

Now tucking into a book on the Mossadeq business by a US journalist. So far, on his telling, Mossadeq was heroic. But only on page 7. We shall see how things develop.

A new culinary experience from Cheam where I have taken to buying cholla bread on Fridays (said, at Cheam anyway, hola, more or less as in the Spanish for hello). Hitherto I have always had the unseeded version and generally it had vanished in a couple of hours, eaten without butter. Yesterday, had a bit of a brain storm, and bought the poppy seed version instead. Not so keen at all: the grittiness of the seeds constrasts improperly, for me anyway, with the sweet flavour and the smooth, layered texture, sort of on the way to croissant. I also learn that some do indeed eat the stuff with butter.

On the way back came, across a cone men exercise. It seems that there had been a drill to erect a circle of cones around the roundabout at St Paul's church on Howell Hill, taking a six feet annulus out of the annulus you are supposed to be driving in. Very neatly errected, with no sign of anything as messy as road works. And, lo and behold, today the ring has gone again. I suppose it is important that we train new cone men in the art of placing and removing cones neatly and with dispatch. Can't call nimby just because they happen to use a roundabout that I use.

Then, not to be outdone, I moved into a geek drill. From time to time I buy music from http://www.eclassical.com/ and from time to time they send me emails in case I want to buy some more. My eye was caught by a flier for 24 preludes and fugues by Shostakovitch; and, having recently been much taken with something of the same sort by Chopin, thought I would give it a go. Seemed very cheap at $7.99. Flashed the plastic and after a very reasonable half an hour or so of download, was the proud possessor of 300Mb worth of preludes. Can't play them on the PC onto which they were downloaded as no loudspeakers. So load them onto shiny new hard drive, an operation which seemed to take less than a minute, something which I find more amazing than the chip speed, having been brought up in an era when one stored things on punched cards and rolls of paper tape. Then move it onto a newish desktop computer. Double click on a prelude, whereupon MS Media Player fires up and informs me that it can't find anything to play the thing on. No loudspeakers here either. Then move onto a more newish laptop. Laptops generally do have loudspeakers. Double click on a prelude and off we go, if a little tinny. Then we move into geek drill mode. How do we get the preludes into the Media Player library? Help seems to be a bit erratic, as often as not being straight windows help which was not very relevant. Manage to build a play list by hand, by adding each of the 24, one by one as I fired them up. Tedious but one gets there. Next morning, think to actually listen to the things rather than play with them and Media Player announces that the preludes are not where it thinks they are. Eventually work out that maybe the problem is that the things are on the E: drive rather than the C: drive. Eventually work out how to add this drive to the list of places where the Media Player looks. But Media Player still can't see them. Finally, it dawns on me that it can't see into a compressed folder, although it will play something in such a folder if you double click on it. So uncompress it to a folder of what appears to be the same size and bingo, we have arrived. So I now have a playlist containing all the preludes which appears to survice closing and re-opening the Media Player. Eventually I will learn how to work the thing... Clearly intended for much younger folk who like playing songs.

Not so pleased to see that yet another rich MP (conservative as it happens) thought it appropriate to get even richer by stretching the rules for allowances, using them for nannies for his children (not allowed) rather than bath plugs (allowed). BH wondered what I expected. How did I think that he got rich in the first place? In this case, largely by rich daddy. But it remains true that the most generous people I have known have been poor people, not rich people.

Meanwhile, nearer home, pleased to announce that there is some kind of a gourmet fish fest with jazz to be held at Hastings 19-20 September. Maybe even worth a weekend away. And even nearer home, there is clearly some sort of a fest on at Epsom. Numbers of young women dressed very high wandering about the town at 1030. Maybe the local school of dance, drama and other performance arts is having a graduation. Maybe they will be in a bit of a state by the time we hit town around 1830, by which time they will have had getting on for 8 hours on the razzle.

Yesterday, to the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Turned up at 1445, 15 minutes before our half price, half day tickets kicked in. Blue badge did its usual helpful business of getting both us and our car to near the head of the two queues involved in getting in. Whereupon we found ourselves in what seemed like a cross between the Chessington Garden Centre and the Chessington World of Adventures. Lots of things to buy, most expensive and some consumable. Some alcohol, although not much use as most of us got there by driving. Lots of people wandering about, more than half female and more than half retired. Not quite the fashion statement of the Chelsea Flower Show, although they did try to make up with some catwalk stuff in a tent somewhere along the way. The noise of the day came from the natty little pull along boxes which people bought to put their purchases in, and which made a very distinctive rumbling, heard all over the show, as they trundled along the corrugated steel walkways. Not an unpleasant noise, but certainly distinctive. In contrast to FIL's rollator, which had rather bigger wheels and which made no noise at all. Maybe the crucial differance was that the boxes on wheels were made in China whereas the rollator was made in that home of precision and quality engineering, Germany.

The star of the day for me was the floral tent. Whacking great three bayed affair stuffed with really spiff floral displays. Quite sobering to think of the care and skill required to bring several hundred crysanthemums to show pitch on the same day, quite possibly out of season. And then still be in a condition to arrange them in a tasteful display. Although to be fair, a lot of the old style flashy flowers were simply massed in old style hemispherical groups. But even that would be well beyond my arranging skills. And then there were a lot of interesting displays involving lots of varities of a single species. But what surprised me was the high proportion, over half I should think, of exotic displays. So we had a lot of pitcher plants, orchids and bonsai. Other exotics from jungles, deserts, pre-history, South America and South Africa. All kinds of things which one might imagine would be well beyond the skill of your average amateur gardener. But presumably one would be wrong. These people would not spend the large sum involved in exhibiting if it did not generally pay. Overall rather stunned by the huge variety. Evolution, leveraged by nursery selection, has certainly done its stuff in generating variety.

One lady not so stunned though. I heard her explaining to her companion that all this orchid stuff was all very well, but once one had seen them at home, in their natural habitat, all this forcing in tents seemed a bit naff. But one stall holder got his own back, explaing to a colleague about the lady customer who came to him at his nursery with a very strange flowering pine story. It seems that a clematis had got mixed up in the pine tree and that she had convinced herself that the clematis flowers were springing from the pine. Was not going to be told. Amazing how one - and this is something that I do all the time - can cling on to the interesting or status-enhancing improbable in the face of the obvious.

Within the floral tent, I think the star for me was the bonsai, with a very flash arrangement of orchids coming second. I had forgotten how much I like bonsai, about which I acquired two factlets. First, when you have a cluster, each stalk of the cluster is an individual, not springing from a common root, like a sucker. Second, when you do interesting carving on the redundant parts of trunks of older trees bonsai'd later in life, you may paint the exposed wood with some sort of lime wash. This serves to provide decorative contrast and to inhibit decay. Now I don't want the bother of minding a bonsai myself, but must look into whether there is a fancy permanent display somewhere. Or do I have to go back to Washington DC, to drop a name, where they have a huge display of the most spiff bonsai that I have ever seen, by accident as it happens, in their national arboretum. Where, as it happens, the lady trustees were worrying about how to get to our very own Wisley on public transport. If I had been a bit quicker on the uptake (I plead consumption the day before) I would have invited them to visit us at Epsom, and then I could have taken them, but I did not think of that until afterwards.

For the BH, the star was the show gardens. The couple of dozen or so of small outdoor gardens knocked up by garden designers and others. A sort of large scale, outdoor flower arranging. All very clever, involving a lot of skill, flair and work in their own way, and certainly very popular, but not really my bag. I prefer the naturally artificial medium of bonsai to the fake natural of a show garden. Some of which, incidentally, were just plain silly, or even stupid. One had even been taking lessons from Dame Enim. She gets everywhere these days.

Back at Cheam, the business model of the baker is clearing working on me. While I started off by just buying bread at maybe £1 a day, the cakes are gradually creeping up on me, with the result that I am now spending more on cake - a much higher profit item I imagine - than I am on bread.

But not so sure about the business model of the newly opened delicatessen next door. Doesn't open until 1000 in the morning. When I finally get around to taking a look inside, very lightly stocked. Some sausage, some cheese, some olives. A few made dishes. Some grocery in boxes, bottles and jars on the shelves. But not really a place to browse and buy a whole lot of bits and peices which one had not previously thought of. So I spent £2.85 on a 100g or so of quite decent looking salami, tendered a £20 note and 85p in change (at which the proprietor did not look too happy) and that was it. I don't suppose I will be back again for a while as we have a much better stocked delicatessen nearer home. Name of Alio's. More or less on the way home from the baker at Cheam. He does not have a web site but Mr G. does come up with some honourable mentions, for example at http://www.pbase.com/lindarocks/image/25341369.

Read about another sort of business in the margins of shaving this morning. It seems that it is an offense under common law to sell something which one does not own. But it is also a principle under commercial law that if I buy something in good faith it is mine. This second rule was said to be essential to the smooth development of capitalism. And not at nutty as it at first sounded. Suppose that A owns a car. B steals the car from A. C buys the car from B. So A is a loser, B is a winner and C is neutral. He has given the cars worth to B, so his net worth is unchanged. So the idea is that he gets to keep the car and A has to seek redress from B, this including damages for loss of use of the car's worth in the interval. The chances are that if C has bought the car in good faith, he does not live anywhere near A, so A does not have the irritation of waking up every morning to see what was his car in the road outside and not being able to do anything about it. And good news for lawyers as they can clock up a lot of chargeable time detirmining whether C did indeed buy the car in good faith or whether he can be charged with receiving stolen goods, in which case differant regulations are applicable. Maybe I should have been a lawyer after all.

Two more snippets from the NYRB. First, there is a chap called Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who has been a thorn in the flesh of the Israeli establishment for many years by coming clean about the fact that Israel was largely established by theft. But, just as in this country, those who are hardened lefties in their youth, wind up reading the Daily Mail & Telegraph just like everybody else, it seems that Benny Morris is swinging into the centre ground. His latest utterances have much less sympathy with the Palestinians than his former utterances. He even talks about the Jews having been in charge of Palestine for some 13 centuries (1000BC to 300AD), so they are just coming home really. Must try telling the Druids who retreated to Anglesey that it is time that they surged back over the Menai Straits and claimed their inheritance. Second, there is a rather sad story about Diego Garcia. It seems that around 1970, the US thought that this would be a jolly good place to build a jolly good base, from where to dominate that part of the globe. So they asked us (the UK, as beneficial owners) to kick out the modest number of inhabitants and give them the freedom of the place. So we did. Now the fact that we did this is not that dreadful. Such things happen in the world. But what is dreadful is the crude way in which we did it. More or less shoved them into cattle boats at gun-point and shipped then off in Mauritius where most of them have lived in slums ever since. One might have though in the enlightened era of my youth, we might at least have paid them off decently and got them properly fixed up in new homes. Maybe pensioned off for life. Although to be reasonable, this would have to exclude those born after the Exodus. Otherwise there would be no end to it.

On the other hand, the Internet bizzies are alive and well. It seems that the provider of every bit of software on this PC has decided to go in for online update this week. There seems to be no end to the unsolicited pop-ups inviting me to take the latest whizzy release of whatever it is. All very tiresome; although one hesitates before rejecting them as the updates may actually be useful. So, for example, the PC spent some time yesterday taking an update from the BT Broadband Online Support System (B-Boss to cognoscenti, aka B-Brother). But I took it because it may save time when the time comes for the next huddle with their Bangalore help desk.

A very kind review of 'Brooklyn' in a recent edition of the NYRB (see 14/6/2009). It was a review by a lady which may partly account for it being kinder than my short notice. Review extended to 7 columns (less a couple of smallish pictures), so a substantial affair. First column given over to a slightly relevant anecdote drawn from the reviewer's own life. Remainder more or less given over to a resume of the book, which is good, considering how few reviews bother to do more than wave at it occasionally, in the margins of punting some hobby horse of the reviewer's. In this case the chosen comparator was James rather than Joyce. Maybe there is a connection of exiled single women, but James is very dense compared with Toibin. Perhaps I should take a peek at both Brooklyn and James again.

There was also an interesting peice about the economy, in the course of which it was explained that the financial services sector, while doing stalwart duty in keeping the rest of us going, also manages to absorb a large chunk of national product in their own pay and rations. The actual size of the chunk being a rather dodgy quantity. The article talks of the sector generating 30% of all corporate profits, where this excludes pay and rations. Corporate profits being what funds the income drawn by shareholders but not that drawn by employees, so presumably only a small proportion of national product. Must take another peek at those tricky national accounts in my remaindered annual abstract of statistics. But either way, this seems to be quite a big bill to pay for efficient allocation of capital (this being what we are told the financial services sector is for, apart from the dull businesses of insurance and retail banking). Particularly when they have been spectacularly bad at it of late.

Then, on the way to Cheam, got to pondering about who were the winners in the banking mess. So we start with a farmer, in the fringes of some big mid western town in the US, who sells his land to a developer. Better than not growing alfafa. So the farmer has got his dosh and so he is OK. The developer pays a builder to build the houses. The builder gets his dosh so he is OK. The developer then sells the house to a punter so he is OK. The farmer, the builder and the developer have now trousered the (as it turns out) inflated value of a lot of houses. The punter borrows the money off a bank, this last being gorged with cheap dosh from the hard working Chinese who have nowhere else to put it. Punter, being sub-prime, doesn't meet his payments. So the banks, or perhaps in the long run, the Chinese, take a bit of a pasting. But there are clearly lots of winners in this game. So why are they not spending us out of the recession?

When they accompanied a smoked haddock version of the fish dish reported on 4/7/2009. Around a pound of smoked haddock, padded out with two onions, maybe a pound and a half of cooked new potatoes and some left over frozen peas (thawed) worked well. BH was even persuaded to resume consumption of smoked haddock, having been on strike in that department for a few weeks.

Today to that well known luvvy joint, the Latchmere, via Battersea Park. Battersea Park a little damp, but otherwise up to scratch. Two splendid compositions in green, one the trunk of a large London plane and the other the divided trunk of some kind of eucalyptus. Given a bit of practise and/or skill I should have been able to extract a photograph or better still a still life in oils. Water colour would have been too weak to capture the rich variety of greens and greys involved. Various fishermen trying to extract fish from the pond. One said (in a proper, old-style London accent) that he had been fishing the pond for fifty years. Sometimes catching thirty pounders and sometimes going a small number of months without a bite. But he keeps at it. Blew eight quid on tea and cake at the waterfront cafe. Not bad stuff but an expensive way to eat. Then pegged it along the northern side of the park to exit at Albert Bridge. Across the bridge, past some very swanky flats, past what looked like the very swanky international headquarters of the Lord Foster of Thames Bank organisation and then up onto Battersea Bridge road. Bridge looking very well, repainted with some of the detail having been picked out in gold. Rather than stopping on the way, even managing to get past the Youngs establishment unscathed, we kept ourselves fresh for the Latchmere where I had a decent couple of pints of Doombar. Proper London pub iron pillars with fancy capitals. Thought about giving the upstairs theatre a go (http://www.theatre503.com/), but the programme looks a touch fringy. Probably involves a lot of coarse humour. Cheap but starts a bit late. Probably be back in Epsom after midnight. Need to give it some deep thought. Then on to the Falcon where just a quick whistle whetting Brakespeare bitter of some sort or another. Then onto, just for old times sake, a crowded train. Luckily a fast one, so we got home in time to whack up some lentil soup for supper.

Not bad but the (basics?) unsmoked bacon from Mr S. did not add quite as many e numbers as I would have liked. So the result was a little bland. But entirely serviceable. Done the first couple of pints with the balance earmarked for the next day.

Window project (14/6/2009) now drawing to a close. Two panes of glass from Leatherhead fitted OK. Frame fixed into hole using 4 long thin coach bolts, the only snag being that coach bolts leave the head proud and one has to cut the glazing battens around them. But long thin coach bolts seemed the most suitable fixing available from Travis Perkins. Drill through the frame into the masonry. Make soft wood plugs and hammer them in. (I dare say if one used hardwood plugs one could burst the breeze blocks out of which the wall is largely constructed. Plus a lot more bother to make hardwood plugs). Drill a hole in the centre of the plugs, replace frame in hole and drive down the coach bolts. In only one out of the four holes did the bolt not hit the hole first time. Had to fiddle with the hole in the frame a bit. Fit the glass; not too neatly not ever having had much practise with putty. But OK. Pack the space between the frame and the hole with mortar. Try and keep the mortar damp over the following few days to aid a good strong set. Have now painted the mortar. Will move onto glossing the frame once the putty has dried a bit more. Overall, not too bad, considering it is the first time I have made a window for many years. And the first time I have fitted one. Maybe if I am feeling very bored one day, I will take the glass out and have another go with the putty.

Prompted by the hot weather, the new garage window has now been complemented with a new green awning, sourced from Epsom Downs the day after the Derby, to hang between the garage and the extension, permitting al-fresco luncheons in the shade. Much pondering about how to hang the thing up. Decided on eye bolts, so off to ScrewFix to see what they could do. Which turned out to be nothing in the way of modestly sized eye bolts, but they could do rather heavy duty ones, designed to tie scaffolding to walls. Sufficiently hard core that they had bothered to weld the base of the eye so that it would not pull apart under strain. Must have had a big strain in mind, given that the bolts had been made out of steel rod a centimetre in diameter. What was bad about them was the price and the fact that they came in fives (I wanted four or six but didn't feel rash enough to run to two packets); what was good was that they had a chrome finish which should weather OK and that they had a screw thread. So rather than having to mess about with putting them in the masonry of the walls, I could just screw them into the ends of the 6 by 2 rafters which hold the two flat roofs up. The things had big enough and long enough threads to give a good fix going with the grain, although perhaps I should have smeared them with some wood glue just to be absolutely sure. Test erection of the awning entirely satisfactory, but we will look out for something slightly bigger. Maybe we will be lucky after next year's Derby.

I close with what looks like a rather impressive looking facility, chanced across in the surf: http://www.alzheimurcentre.blogspot.com/. Don't think we have anything quite like it in this country. Maybe we will get there as the number of us catching this unpleasant disease grows. Or the number of us who know what looking after someone with it is like.

Since then, the latter program has been trying to invoke a BT dial-up connection from time to time. Irritating pop-ups. No idea how to get it to stop doing that, short of getting rid of the thing altogether. Not keen to mess about with the BT end of the problem in case I damage the broadband connection and have to get into a long huddle with the subcontinental help desk.

And something prompted Microsoft to do something to the now not very often used Internet Explorer and went through quite a lengthy update.

And something else has prompted something called BigFix to fire up at regular intervals, telling me that this freeware is no longer supported.

Then this morning, Chrome and HSBC did not seem to work too well together. Chrome was trying to connect to an address which appeared to contain a repeating group of two elements. A sort of recurring decimal which Chrome could not cope with. Went to HSBC through Internet Explorer (now at version 8), chucked out reasonably gracefully the first time, probably because of a typo, then got in OK the second time. On the other hand, something called MSN messenger was keen to get my attention. Closed it down eventually.

So decided to uninstall BigFix. This seems to have worked and not so far seen him again. Also thought I would uninstall the Realtek audio controller, the corresponding hardware having gone to the tip a year or more ago. This went OK, firing up a reboot all by itself, at which point the PC announced that it had found some new audio hardware and would attempt to install it. Oh goody I thought, maybe I will get some sound back and be able to play with my recently acquired copy of iTunes (and the 20Gb of musical stuff which came with it). But no, after a while the PC announced no game. Need to find a CD for the controller in question. No chance, given that I had never heard of it before today.

On closer inspection, the screen I am using here doesn't have any of those arrays of little holes which suggest loudspeaker. Clearly too old for that sort of thing. So maybe there will be no sound until I install a whole new sound set up. Which is unlikely to happen and so the 20Gb will rest in peace.

On the other hand, the (ViewSonic, cathode ray tube) screen is a bit wobbly. I expect it will give up altogether one day and I will trot down to John Lewis and start again - because last time I tried to connect an exotic screen to this 5 year old Evesham PC (the late lamented Evesham. Good name at the time), the PC got into a right mess. Took about three reboots on the old screen before it would play again. So I don't think just replacing the screen is going to work if I do it. And is not going to be worth it if someone else does it. So John Lewis it is.