Thursday, August 06, 2009
Visit to the southern capital of the western region
Down to Exminster for a few days. Did not make it to the regional capital of the west - a place also known as Exeter - but we did make it to the southern capital - a place also known as Tavistock. A phrasing copied from the Chinese, whom I think used to have northern and southern capitals. Found some new things in the church of BH's special Saint Eustacius. To whit, one very small white mouse carved into the end of a pew by way of signature by the carpenter who made them. One rather bigger white friar made into the bottom of the stained glass of the northeastern window for the same purpose. We learn that the posh chaps - W. Morris and E. Burne Jones - who knocked up the northwestern window between them - might have been arty but did not know much about stained glass. Their effort is in a bad way compared to the efforts of their contemporaries, which look brand new if rather less arty. I had learnt, some years previously, that the craftsmen who make the engines for posh cars make their marks on them. And I learnt, from someone passing the white mouse, that the craftsmen from up north did something of the sort with the new Wembley stadium by tying their Middlesborough scarves into the steel work (from Dorman Long and others) holding the roof up. Middlesborough will always have a peice of the action there! (Going back via Widdecome, we found a large church there, a smaller version of that at Tavistock. The same white barrel vaulted nave & aisles, with sparse black timbers with interesting bosses. (Those at Tavistock including the odd green man, although not as outlandish as those at Ely)).
Having pondered about the absence of buzzards on the way over Dartmoor, was rewarded by the sight of two of them very high over the weir on the river Tavy at Tavistock. Never seen buzzards so high above the ground. Also rewarded by a sight of the expensive looking contraption guarding the entrance to the hydro electricals there actually doing something. It turns out to be a robot for scraping the detritus off the screen which stops the fish getting into the hydro electricals and dumping it a bit further down the river. The thing looks as if it cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, which would have paid some unemployed graduate in mixed ecosciences from Princetown Uni. to do a spot of training on the job with hand tools for some years. I wonder who does the sums on these things?
Excellent fish and chip shop at Tavistock. Very well fed for the second time running, in my case on haddock, chips, mushy peas and two slices. Every bit as good as anything which could be obtained in the metropolis - and about the same price as it happens.
The bookshop in the pannier market did not do so well. They were offering me a rather old red everyman edition of Rousseau's confessions for £6. No comparison with the far smarter modern everyman edition I had bought from Epsom library for 40p the week before, complete with white dust cover and clear plastic dust protective cover (vide supra). All in all, rather expensive for a stall in an indoor market. There was another stall which did everything for a pound, including two two volume sets of War & Peace (one pound for each volume). But no buy, already having a perfectly good copy already. Don't read it that often that I need to get a spare in. Reminded of the moan in the DT from the secondhand book trade about how they are being done in by all those Oxfam bookshops. Not fair that they don't have to pay proper rent or rates. Don't think I have a view. Oxfam bookshops are quite well stocked, if a little pricey, and the profits - I assume there are some - do go to a well intentioned cause. On the other hand, secondhand bookshops are a very mixed bag and a lot of them, to my mind, have rather grand ideas about what their stuff is worth. Used to do well at car boot sales but their books seem to have drifted down-hill. Still cheap but not interested.
On the other hand, in the Oxfam shop in Tavistock with the huge collection of vinyl, I did get some duplicates, vinyl being quite hard to get these days. Two discs of Dvorak for £3.99 and one disc of Brahms for £4.99. Rather odd pricing policy, but giving me three piano quintets, two being duplicates and one new. Keen on piano quintets, so it is good to go in for belt and braces. I could have had a whole lot of Chopin by Rubenstein which I suppose would have been a good thing, him being a very big cheese of yesteryear, but I am not sure my ear is good enough to justify that amount of duplication and so I abstained. Maybe it will still be there next time we visit.
Along the way, rereading the first of my new Fred Vargas, from which I share two snippets. First, it seems that the French police are organised a bit differant from ours. So in Paris anyway, you have a number of detective brigades, each in their own house, with a commissioner in charge. Members of the brigades are called brigadiers. With ranks lieutenant, captain and commandant. There are also drugs brigades, known as 'Les Stups'. It seems that there is not much love lost between them.
On reflection, I suppose the English and Welsh equivalent is squad. (No doubt the Scots do something differant, being differant in these matters). On television anyway, we have flying squads, fraud squads and drugs squads. But we don't call the people in charge of them commissioners and we don't call the people in them squaddies. Perhaps the French usage reflects a closer link with the army. In the way that some foreign fire brigades are spun off their armies, rather than being a purely civilian operation. Although, that said, I think both policemen and firemen regard themselves as non-civilians in this country. Don't know about the ladies.
Second, it is claimed that if a properly trained archeologist digs out a hole which someone dug previosly, and then got filled in, he can tell you things like how many people worked at digging the hole, whether they were left handed, how tall they were, that sort of thing. Everyone leaves a trace like a fingerprint when they work a pickaxe in a hole. Now Fred Vargas was an archeologist in her previous life, so perhaps she knows. But it seems a little far fetched. Perhaps it only works in certain soils.
And by-the-by I learn that silex is French for flint. But missing from my mini-Littre and I kept guessing it was something to do with willows, a meaning which fitted some of the time. A dictionnary which does not often let me down. And I should of remembered that willow is salix not silex and that it was unlikely that the French would shift the vowels of the Latin, this last being nearer to them than it is to us. But I suppose I was clutching for straws, as one does when struggling with the vocabulary.
# posted by Jim @ 8:53 AM 
