pumpkinstrokemarrow

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.