pumpkinstrokemarrow

And while we are on bloggery, there was a rash recently of blogs on the next blog button which were no more than advertisements. Some are straightforward market stalls. You get pictures of things which you can buy. Some are a pain in that they take the next blog button off the page so that moving on is slightly more tiresome than it might otherwise be. But one was very odd, appearing to be a great wadge of text, more or less gobbledegook, of obscurely dungeons and dragons flavour, but interspersed with words which, I think, when clicked, took you to an advertisement. Which was all very well but the host blog was adding no value, so why would you bother to go there in the first place? Anyway the rash seems to have melted away, so perhaps the advertised refinements to the next blog button, to take you to blogs which share your interests, prejudices and predilections, are indeed in place.

And two moans about the TLS. Firstly, they devoted over a page to a French translation of a long Browning (I think) narrative poem, published in parallel text. Being in the grip of the green fairy at the time, I thought it would be interesting to read the thing, a free and expansive prose translation of a very dense poem. One could make an interesting study into how to translate poetry. I then get onto Amazon France to find that while they know about the book it is unavailable. Abebooks know nothing of it. So what is the TLS up to, puffing books which are unobtainable to ordinary mortals? But perhaps I should not moan. While the book was quite cheap, a very good page rate in fact, not sure that I would of got my money's worth. Interesting studies would gobble up more quality time than is available.

Secondly, they have devoted about a third of this week's issue to books of the year offered by literary and literate celebrities. Now while I might be interested in the work of this or that celebrity, I am not interested in their very short views on the work of others. If I want that sort of thing I can read the Christmas book selection offered by the DT.

Then thirdly, there was the old moan about their (the TLS) sniping about Oxfam bookshops, so I thought I had better pay the branch at Kingston a visit and came away with a biography of Stalin by I. Deutscher, published by the OUP no less in 1949 and sold to me for £2.99. A snip I thought, a snip which should provide an interesting take on Stalin, being written by someone with serious lefty credentials at a time when some people might still have been thinking of the chap as the hero who won the European half of the second world war for us. Two snippets so far. On page 99 I come across the phrase 'all the cheating that oriental slyness could invent'. About on a par with the anti-Semitism of some of John Buchan's novels. While on page 89 there was an interesting discussion of terrorism, a term which to this writer included both the activities of Bolsheviks in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century, robbing banks for funds and assassinating officials for effect, and those of the resistance to German occupation in the war which had then just finished. The term does not seem to have carried then quite the same moral baggage that it has acquired since. It also seems that both Stalin and the future dictator of Poland, Pilsudski, were engaged in this sort of thing, bucking against the Tsarist rule, although the latter harked back to the heroic resistance of the Polish nobility to 19th century encroachments, rather than having any very strong connection with the branch of the social democrats to which Stalin belonged.

Which reminds of me an interesting bit of history. Prompted by an unkind review of a history of Poland by A. Zamoyski (who had previously written a successful history of Napoleon's invasion of Russia), I did some poking around on the question of Polish borders. Not making too much progress on the Internet, I turned up my trusty atlas, prepared by the topographical service of the Polish army and published by Pergamon. An atlas which conveniently includes political maps of Europe in 1914, 1937 and 1967 on the same page 79. From which I learn that while there were lots of Poles, there was no Poland in 1914. Then, at the end of the first world war, Poland is reinvented by grabbing slices of land from what had been Germany, Austria and Russia, all three places being in no position to complain. I learn subsequently that this resulted in a Poland 30% of which was not Polish. So now less of a surprise that in 1940 or so, the Germans and Russians more or less, or perhaps after a fashion, just took back what had been taken from them twenty years previously. Then, after the war, the Russians kept a chunk of what they had taken but the Poles were given back the chunk which the Germans had taken plus some more, in particular a large chunk called Silesia. Given the Holocaust and the forced population movements after the war, Poland wound up a very ethnically clean country in what had been a very messy part of Europe. The only anomaly, it seems, is a nest of ethnic Germans who speak something called Silesian and who got left behind in Poland, more or less by mistake, while those who lived in the much bigger and nearby Breslau (now Wroclaw) got chucked out.

But I do remember being rather peeved when the same sort of thing happened to me, albeit on longer runs, when my company was paying for my first class ticket. One of the few perks that was left by the time that I had left. First class private office long gone. Tea lady (who remembered the days of carting up coal for the nobs) even longer gone. And she was called Gladys; a very proper sort of tea lady.

I was then prompted to apply for a job as a car park attendant in the Haringey service, a game that anybody can play at http://www.haringey.gov.uk/index/jobs_and_training.htm. First of all you have to register. This bit is not much more complicated than telling them your name and email address. So far so good. Then you find the job you are interested in and study the long list of mandatory and desirable requirements which you need to address in the course of your application if you want to get anywhere near the shortlist. Then click to apply, whereupon you are invited to fill in a six page form. This is delivered one page at a time so you can't take stock of the thing before you start or complete it in the wrong order if that takes your fancy. Nor did the six page form appear to bear any very close relation to the long list of requirements, so it was not terribly clear how or where one explained how well one met them all. One might of thought that a form based around the long list would not have been a bad idea. But perhaps I do them an injustice. I abandoned my attempt to be a car park attendant at the second page. It may have been that the pages following did indeed link up with the long list. I was also told, although I did not get far enough to verify that Harringey, holding Diverse Employer Certification (DEC for short), asks question like "what is your sex?" and "what was it at birth (if different)?".

Now I can see that for a large employer like Haringey, having a sophisticated recruitment package of this sort is a good wheeze. The HR people can run on factory lines and get through lots of recruitment in short order. They can tick all the boxes in the DEC (see above), HASIRC (Health And Safety In Recruitment Certification) and IOPC (Investors On People Certification) forms. They can whack out lots of statistics. Their interviewers can get through their interviewing days without ending up brain dead or dying for some recreational substances. But for the applicant not so clever. In these days when one might need to apply to dozens of outfits before one is suited, it means that you have to go through all this rigmarole dozens of times. You can't just write a CV then knock that out, gently tweaked and under a short email dozens of times. When you might even have the stomach for hundreds of times with the CV option. And at the end of all this, when well knackered, you actually make it to a recruitment centre (not sure if that is the right term. One of those group things in a hotel where ten of you are, in effect, interviewed jointly and competitively by a bunch of very well paid HR contractors), you have to turn up gushing with enthusiasm and just dying to work as a car park attendant in Lordship Lane. Once again, glad that I have left the world of work!

But got to Sutton to find that the Post Office there in Grove Street was a much smarter place than Epsom Post Office, which has been terribly shabby for years. The lady behind the armour glass told me that Epsom had been downgraded in the Post Office scheme of things and could no longer expect to be smart. I suppose we should be grateful that it is there at all. I suppose also that it must be tricky for Post Office management to manage all these large and grand buildings which were built when business was a bit brisker. I remember that there are some very large and grand post office buildings on the continent. Presumably they are in the same kind of trouble.

Which reminds me of a pub theory that has been maturing over the past few months. There are a lot of very large, free-standing pubs in England. Great big three story affairs perhaps built in the nineteenth or the early part of the twentieth century when decent working people were keen to escape from the nappies in their hovels for a few hours and when business was in consequence brisk. Brisk enough to carry these large and often fancily decorated buildings. But times have changes. Business is no longer so brisk. But local councils do not always seem to understand.

Hello Mr Councilman, I own this pub which has been losing money for years despite my best efforts. Can I knock it down and turn it into flats which would provide much needed housing and maybe make me a bit of money for a change? No. Hmm. Well can I turn it into a restaurant instead? No. You would be changing the character of the area and we cannot allow that sort of thing. No. Hmm. Well what can I do? Not our problem.

My understanding is that on the continent their bars are better pitched to the scale of business. You have a bar on the ground floor of a block in a town. The upper floors are all offices or flats or whatever. Getting a reasonable return on the space and everybody happy. Maybe a bit of noise at closing time. Now, we are moving in this direction with town pubs in new-build. But what on earth are we to do with our suburban and country bar heritage which is rotting away? We can only support so many foodie bars.

Which brings me onto the swedes. We have had swede three times in the last five days, mashed with a little butter and pounded black pepper. The first one, which had been sitting in the garage for a week or two, was very hard to mash. Had to resort to fairly severe measures. The second one, fresh from Waitrose, and cooked for maybe 45 minutes rather than the usual 25, was fine. The third, fresh from the Cheam greengrocer was another toughie. This may have been to do with its shape, cylindrical rather than spherical. Not a good sign in radishes which are supposed to be spherical. But that is not the whole story. Swedes are supposed to keep for ages and should be OK after a week in the garage. I shall keep an eye on swedes for the next few weeks and see if I can spot the pattern. There must be one.

Then onto the exhibition of Spanish devotional sculpture at the National Gallery. Polychrome multi media. That is to say the heads, hands and feet were always painted wood, while the clothes might be wood, painted cloth or a mixture. There might or might not be an interior wooden frame to hold the whole thing together. With a naked man, the idea seemed to be to make the sculpture of the naked man, then add a sculpted loin cloth, either wood or painted cloth, afterwards. We learn that Spanish ecclesiastics went in for a sort of tonsure that I have never seen before, perhaps copied from the New World. Head completely shaven, just leaving a bar of hair above each ear and a tuft on the forehead. The people who made these things were famous in their own land, in the same way that painters and sculptors were elsewhere. Fascinating stuff, some very lifelike. Especially so when one remembered that it was all over 300 years old. There must have been a touch of restoration along the way: seems a bit unlikely that these things would survive so long without a bit of help.

Some of the figures were rather lurid. Life size, life like versions of dead and dying Christs. Complete with all the gory bits. Plus the head off of John the Baptist, served up on a fancy silver platter, complete with lovingly modelled sectioned neck. Complete with various pipes. The heads were often positioned so that if the faithful happened to glance up while they were praying, they had the illusion of Christ looking down on them personally. Rather odd to think of pious widows in vigorous middle age praying beneath beefcake with blood and tears. I learn from the rather handsome catalogue that the central organs of the church went to some trouble to convince themselves that praying in the vicinity of such figures did not amount to worshipping idols - graven images even - a practise quite clearly banned by Old Testament authority. Must try to get to Spain to see some of these things in their proper surroundings. The National Gallery had a good shot with its darkened rooms, but not the same as a proper church. Or maybe even Mexico. I am told they go one better there.

Out of there, slightly shell shocked, and onto a circumnavigation of Green Park, in full autumnal splendour. A big plus for London town. Here we learned that the Queen was not at home, with just the union jack flying over Buckingham Palace. On the other hand, someone had made the steps near Clarence house into a memorial to the late Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales has taken to flying what looked like the royal standard over what I think was Clarence House itself. I assume that he was at home. I had thought that only the reigning monarch was allowed to fly the standard, perhaps except in the case of certified incapacity, clearly not the case just presently, but I have clearly got this wrong.

While we are on royals, according to our local freebie, the Queen has developed a new mode of visiting. She does not actually get out of her limousine, just rotates in her seat so that she faces the open door with her feet on the ground, and smiles graciously as she is presented with a small bouquet. It seems that she paid a visit of this sort to St Barnabas in Temple Road on the way home from the last Derby.

On the way home, we come across yet another species of Openreach van, taking the total to three now. Around Epsom, the Openreach engineers drive around in standard Transit vans. As you get into Sutton they have moved up to something bigger, a sort of cross between a Transit and a Luton. By the time you get to London Bridge, as we did the other week, they are into small panel wagons. London Bridge clearly the home of the heavy gang.

To add to the festivities, given that the oven was being heated anyway and for the very first time, I thought I would have a bash at baked apples. Take three large windfalls from a neighbour's Bramley tree. Maybe three inches in diameter. Remove cores and any livestock that may be present. Score the skin around the waist of the apple. Fill core with raisins and drizzle in as much golden syrup as they will take. The book said bake for an hour which is the same time required by the potato pie so that is what I did. Apples dissolved into a rather pretty pancake of baked apple goo topped with the brown shell of the top half of the skin. The only catch was that I could not get them out of the baking tray without disturbing the pancake. So not too many points for presentation but they went down OK. Luckily, apple goo did not overflow the baking tray so did not have oven cleaning , or the domestic strife which it might have occasioned.

All of which led an interesting dream the following morning. Interesting in that the dream appeared to continue until I was awake enough to think coherently. It seems that I was project manager of a project to produce a large and important powerpoint presentation to be used as a training resource far and wide. Chapter and verse on how to buy drain covers for prisons, including all the latest buzz from the Council of Trent or some such. In order to help with this there was a project team, a rather heterogeneous gang including various people I used to work with or for. Now it had been decided that while I might be knocking out most of the text we needed maybe 100 images to adorn the 400 slides envisaged. So we had a meeting of the project team to work on the images. The project team had to do something and I had no text for it to bite on, so images for hypothetical text it had to be. A meeting which I completely failed to chair properly. My end of the table came up with one solution and the other end of the table had a more or less separate meeting and came up with another. I had to do a rather clumsy job of splicing the two together at the end. There was lots of discussion about who was to chose the pictures and where we were going to get them from. As author of the text I was fairly uneasy about subcontracting the choice of illustrations. Could I give indications of what sort of images I was looking for? On the other hand, it was clear that if there was not going to be any subcontracting, the job was not going to get done. And then, how would we buy the images? Did we need a license for unlimited use, so that the people to whom we gave the powerpoint to (for free) could make whatever use they chose of the images - which could, given that we wanted to distribute the powerpoint in an open form - be readily extracted? Was such a license going to be terribly expensive?

By the time I was reasonably awake I had decided that the answer was to hire a photographer to take the pictures specially. Then we could own them outright and the whole question of copyright and license would evaporate. A decent photographer ought to be able to whack out 10 images a day. So 10 days at £500 a day should see the job done. A snip at an important project of this sort running into hundreds of thousands of pounds. But then one had another worry. Would one land some arty type who wouldn't knock out more than a couple of images a day. And who more or less froze up if you tried to push a bit harder. Who really got the hump if you made constructive and helpful suggestions about his works of art. Maybe a catalogue would be a better option. At which point I decided that it was clearly time to break my fast.

Continuing the variation, had a peek on return at the news part of the Sunday Times. Something that was read avidly, along with the Observer, in my youth in those far off days when Sunday newspapers counted for something other than motoring sections. Now very rarely read a Sunday newspaper, getting quite enough motoring sections (and the television guide) on Saturday. One only has so many shoes to clean on the things. Be that as it may, was amused to read on the front page that the Prince of Darkness (aka Principle First Secretary of State aka Lord Mandelson) is really keen to be Foreign Secretary in the dying days of our Labour administration. How is it that he is so keen to grab this fag end of a job? But the amusement mainly stems from the fact that his grandfather was, for a short while, one of the worst foreign secretaries we ever had. I recall that Atlee was quoted as saying it was the worst appointment he ever made. I had previously come across him as being particularly bad at the time when the Persians (as the Iranians we then known) decided that maybe they ought to own their own oil, despite what is now BP having spent a lot of money getting it onto the boil. See 15th July, 2009.

Slightly depressing how our politics - certainly the new labour variety - seem to have come to be dominated by family concerns. Bad enough political power passing from father to son, or from mother to daughter but I particularly dislike having husband and wife teams in the cabinet. Are we really so short of talent?

All this possibly brought on by our plucking up courage to try the absinthe which we acquired a month or so ago, at about the same time as the arrival of the freedom pass. Advisers with internet enabled mobile phones at TB had been able to explain what to do with the stuff. Acquire special absinthe spoon, a sort of complicated looking tea strainer, some sugar cubes and some ice. If you get really keen you can buy elaborate silver ewers with little taps at the bottom for dispensing the iced water. Take 10cc of absinthe. Drip through some sugar cubes into a glass holding at least 100cc. Add ice and water to at least 70cc, the stuff being 70% by volume and not to be knocked back too quick. The product is a delicate green watery looking drink, well up to its sobriquet of green fairy. I had expected it to be cloudy, as when you add water to Pernod or Ouzo, but no. Quite clear. Taste rather bitter - I guess this is to be expected. People do talk about gall and wormwood in much the same breath - but you get quite a hit considering the fairly modest amount of alcohol involved (on this occasion). Tempting to carry on but given the rather dubious reputation of the stuff thought than one was enough to be going on with. Was it the dubious reputation generating the hit rather than the alcohol? Later on there were aches in odd parts of the head, happily not of long duration.

It was certainly the case with this morning's scrambled egg. I don't usually add milk at all and get a rich yellow product. Today I added maybe two tablespoons of green top (slightly better than coloured water) to two eggs and got a rather thin, palid product, despite the knob of butter it was cooked with. Eatable but you don't get that mainlining cholesterol feeling.

Over breakfast reviewed the review, that is to say this week's edition of the TLS where I came across various matters worth a mention.

First, there was a very solid article about preserving our heritage in a digital age, which included a lot of stuff which would do very well in Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner, assuming that said corner has not yet been redeveloped. Lots of turgid sentences with lots of impressive sounding words which I could not make head nor tail of at all. But he observes in passing that Mr G. in his digitising book project may cut the odd corner in the interests of economy. I had not realised - it is obvious enough after the event - that digitisation mainly takes the form of scanning followed by optical character recognition, a proceeding which is error prone, with not all the errors detectable, let alone correctable, by computer. You might actually need a person to do that. I guess what Mr G. is not going to do is proof read the product, in the way that a book used to be in the (g)olden days of type. Maybe proof reading hardly goes on at all these days with most manuscripts being submitted in digital form in the first place? Except in so far as the author has the discipline to do it himself. And I dare say quite a lot of authors do not; you need to be able to focus on a tedious task for hours at a time. I drift off into musing about the content and lose focus on minor infelicities altogether. But the author of the article goes on to make the more interesting point that once a book has been properly produced it is reliable. You cannot easily tamper with the printed word. You can chuck it around the world without much regard at all without damaging that reliability. If you hold a book saying published by Penguin you can trust it. OK so someone could forge such a thing, but who is going to bother? But this is not true of the digital word, especially the digital word which is online. That can be fiddled with the whole time and you would not be any the wiser. Will we ever tolerate the management regime online which would be needed to lock down an online text in the same way as a printed book is locked down?

The Mormons have faced up to this problem by inscribing their all important family records in plain text on small wafers of silica. These are even more durable than books, it even being suggested that they had been tested in biblical vats of boiling oil, can be read with a domestic microscope or by a computer.

This article is followed by a lighter and short review of a book about deletion. Which makes the interesting point, quite the converse of the drift of the heavier and long article, that being able to forget is a good thing. We now have the ability to store huge amounts of information - the life time sensory input of a human bean is well within reach - and we do not need to forget anything. But not forgetting anything is a dreadful burden. One is unable to move on. I wonder how often film stars come to loathe the productions of their youth?

Then we have the review of a couple of books about the doings in Afghanistan. From which I learn that 57% of the teaching material at Sandhurst is derives from war films. An oddly precise figure, but assuming it is even vaguely right, puts a different take on the claim that war films are nothing like the real thing. Our warriors learn how to be warriors from the antics of the Governor of California in his youth. Not so differant, I suppose, from the Saxons mentioned recently who learned what to do in battle from the stories sung over their cups in the pub.

A propos of Afghanistan, I learned during the week that lots of countries are participating in the task force to sort the place out. Out of the 60,000 troops or so so engaged, about half are from the US. A sixth are from the UK. And so on down the list until at the bottom you get the odd hundred contributed by places like Outer Mongolia. Maybe as many as forty contributors altogether. Must be as much of a swine to command and control as the Roman army was when it started taking in allies and confederates big time. At least now, as then, there is a top language to command and control in.

Lastly I mention a piece from this same TLS about the 'Wild Things', a confection for children from the sixties of the last century. The piece is headed by an engaging picture (about to be posted) of a child riding on a cuddly monster. My point being that it is odd how monsters who are clearly equipped with hard-core teeth and claws for ripping other animals apart should be successfully portrayed in such a cuddly way. Do we not have any instincts about not meddling with such animals? Or does the image revive happy (or happily) infantile fantasies of being such an animal?

The next item is one of those electrified contraptions like a roller towel for helping you in and out of the bath. We have a nearly new one from a company called Aquasoothe, costing in excess of £1,000 when it was new a year or so ago. Well made thing. Lots of stainless steel inside and well finished. Battery about 2 inches by 2 inches by 10 inches packs a remarkable amount of power and holds its charge. But the second-hand value of the thing seems to be close to zero. There were three or four of them on E-bay when I looked, bids mainly in the £5 area - although I grant they might shoot up as the deadline nears. Then on another site called http://www.asksid.org.uk/ there were rather more of them, mostly offered for free. Now I can see that for a personal item of this sort about which one is a bit uncomfortable anyway, one might prefer new. And if you buy from new you get installation and after sales soothing. But for considerations of that sort to a make an as-new one virtually valueless seems terribly wasteful. Not very ecological at all.

The usually sensible National Gallery seems to have stepped into a pile of conceptual art tripe (or perhaps manure would be the better metaphor), having installed a life size replica of the street of sleeze in Amsterdam, complete with life size models of the ladies, in the basement. This is intended to provide a stimulating and shocking counterpoint to the tarts, rapes and what-have-you portrayed in the posh pictures upstairs. Complete twaddle. How is it that otherwise grown-up and mature art experts keep falling for keeping up and in with this tripe? Why is it thought a virtue to shock us? I might like a lot of the pictures in the National Gallery, but not because they shock. And anyway, how can a much loved picture which one has spent hours with, shock. Neither likely nor necessary. Why is it thought a virtue to shake me out of my comfort zone? The whole point of comfort zones is that they are comfortable and everybody can see the boundaries.

On a different tack, rather surprised by the amount of advertising just presently for very violent computer games. So yesterday, for example, came across a large advertisement at Waterloo for the rogue god of war (or something). Intriguing that on the one hand there should be much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the press about knives and guns while on the other we are fully up for the synthetic version. But then, who is to say whether the synthetic version satisfies the urge to violence or stimulates it? Not aware of any serious evidence either way. I suspect that it all depends. With some people in some circumstances it satisfies, with other people in other circumstances it stimulates. I offer two examples, one in each direction. First, the Japanese have been very keen on very violent comic books for decades but have been relatively non-violent in real life for those same decades. They were, I believe, rather violent for real before that. Second, our Saxon forebears used to pass the time in the pub telling each other stories about gory valiant deeds, their own and those of their forebears. Part of this was boasting but another part was exhortory. In the morning I would be moved to go out and try to go one better. To be fair, they did not have much in the way of synthetic alternatives in those days.

Prompted by a review of a play about the Kreutzer sonata in the Guardian, I thought I ought to listen to the same, having acquired a mint condition set of the sonatas from the Oxfam shop in Tavistock (see above) played by Perlman and Ashkenazy. Very good it was too, although slightly irritated by the record notes which made the outrageous suggestion that this late sonata was the first quality sonata of its kind. Whoever wrote the notes appears to have quite overlooked Mozart's cracks at the form and I dare say there are others. Most odd. I then started trawling through related items. I don't have a copy of the Tolstoy short story which was the source for the play so I couldn't have a go at that. Luckily I know someone who does so I won't have to borrow it from the library. Then I thought that there is another piece of music called Kreutzer. A bit of poking around and this turned out to be a string quartet by Janacek, written in 1920 or something and apparently inspired by the short story rather than the Beethoven sonata. Next I thought of the 'Good Soldier Svejk', feeling sure that there is a mention in there somewhere. But the book is 400 or so pages long and I no longer know it well enough to be very confident of tracking the mention down. Had a quick look in what seemed like the right section but no luck. Then thought to see if there was a digital copy out there in English somewhere but failed on that front. There was a Czech one but that was organised by chapter and would have been a bit of a pain to search, even supposing that Kreutzer is spelt the same in Czech as in English. But ended on a slightly higher note, finding out from Wikipedia that the original Kreutzer was the musician son of a royal court musician at Versailles. Didn't get the chop along with all the other royal lacqueys during the revolution and went on to be a famous violinist.

Then, a bit further down the road we come to the King's Arms, last noticed on 16th October (search continuing to behave itself). Maybe twenty vans in the car park which have been there maybe 20 working days. If we allow £250 a day for each van plus an allowance of £100 for materials we get to £140,000, say £150,000 in round numbers including some of the VAT. Can't really expect builders to pay the full whack. Which is rather less than I had originally guessed. Must ask the TB'ers what a proper allowance for an average van would be. But even so, supposing the King's Arms is to sell things at £10 a pop at 50% operating margin, they have to sell 30,000 of them to get their capital back, never mind the interest. Let's say that for this to be a proposition they need to get their capital back in two years of 300 working days each, then they need to do 50 items a day. Which does not sound too difficult. Perhaps I shall pop in to see how they get on. Be interesting to see their business model and then to see their outturn. Perhaps I should have been a banker not a concrete engineer.

But the Royal Navy does things on a much grander scale. The DT tells me that they are about to take delivery of a spiffing new submarine, called an attack submarine, so presumably not the sort which carries hundreds of nuclear warheads, coming in at something between £1 and £2b. And we are to buy half a dozen or more of the things. What on earth are these things for? To hunt down the odd Afghani battleship which manages to break our blockade?

The Somali pirates must be well chuffed (see 10th February). Every billion pounds poured down the submarine hole is a billion pounds less to spend on the sort of kit which might sort them out. My latest idea on this front is an exclusion zone. No traffic whatsoever in a band between 20 and 100 miles off the coast. Fishermen will have to stick to crab potting or whatever they can manage inshore. Anything unexpected in the exclusion zone is sunk without warning. Might think about picking up survivors during office hours. The coastline in question looks to be about 1,000 miles long, so one of those fast patrol boats we used to have in the sixties every 20 miles or so, plus some fancy radar ought to do the trick. Maybe chuck in a few aeroplanes or helicopters to vary the diet. I would have thought that £250,000 a pop ought to be enough for a suitable patrol boat, given that one only needs a largeish, fast cabin cruiser with a big machine gun on the front. So for the price of a spiffing new submarine you could have 4,000 of them. Ought to be more than enough to cover 1,000 miles of coastline. Even be able to have some in dock some of the time. The Russians used to be sensible about this sort of thing: lots of cheap and cheerful can sometimes pack more punch than a few fancies. Perhaps I should write to the DT on the subject.

PS I have a soft spot for the King's Arms in its guise as a boozer, as the place I learnt to play spoof. Some of the public bar crowd there used to play for serious stakes. A good deal more serious - say £100 or more - than I cared to play for. Which all goes to show that the propensity to gamble is poorly related to the ability to pay for it.

Then, after aperitifs in a Fuller's establishment which had been a bank in Vauxhall Bridge Road, decided that local nosh from Wilton Way/Warwick Road was the thing. After wandering up and down for a bit lighted on what turned out to be a very entertaining establishment called Preto. All looked very new, although without the smell of new paint or new carpets, neither of which is good for appetite, so new in fact that the web site (http://www.rodiziopreto.co.uk/) is still under construction. A Brazilian steak house which meant that you got access to a stationary buffet and an endless supply of barbecue meat, this last carved at your table off natty stainless steel skewers, for a fixed price. We started off in the sin-bin, despite the place being fairly empty, perhaps because we looked a bit old or perhaps because we had not booked. But after a while we got promoted to the main room, with splendid seats right under a giant telly showing a more or less pornographic film of some Brazilian fiesta. I was pleased to see that Brazilians do not appear to admire the skeleton thin in the way that our media thinks that we do; BH rather gob-smacked, although not too bothered being the odd glass of the red stuff down by this point. Place more less full by the time we left at around 2130.

Meat generally very good. Lots of beef of various shapes and sizes. Barbecue chicken hearts made a savoury novelty. The only failure was some lumps of chicken wrapped in very salty bacon. We also learned, as a bonus, of another use for boned loin of pork (see 11th November). Wrap it around a skewer and barbecue it a la Brazil. Boiled rice excellent; much better than anything I have ever managed.

Woke up the following morning very concerned about ivy. Seemed to have acquired a house of rather complicated shape, probably rather elderly, with chunks of said elderly roof covered in very fierce ivy. Now ivy is all well and good on walls; don't care too much about what it might do to them (in our case being cement rendering so reasonably impenetrable to ivy attack), but not too keen at all on the stuff getting into the tiles. Different matter altogether. Hence the waking up rather concerned.

The plus point concerned the older of our two Evesham desktops, which had started a slow beep when one attempted to start it up. Ask Mr G. about slow beeps and he has lots of stuff on the subject. It seems that there is even some august standards committee allocating beep codes - in the way of morse codes - to problems and manufacturers. However, I decided that beep meant mender. So off to Ashcom in Ashstead and find that the shop has moved onto the main street, out of the back alley it used to be in. Then it turned out that the shop on the street (http://www.ashteadcomputerservices.co.uk) was a breakaway movement from one in the back alley (http://www.ashcom.co.uk/). Anyway, helpful gent. on the street soon had the side off the PC and had it plugged in with some configuration tool up and running. Item 1, the clock battery was flat. Item 2, one of the two memory cards was faulty. Both things sorted out in about five minutes, PC now booting rather than beeping, all for £40. Which I thought very reasonable. I would have gone to perhaps £100 considering on the one hand the age of the thing and on the other hand the inconvenience of change. FIL now happy bunny and solitairing away again.

Now Dumpistan really was a bit of a dump. Apart from it being a wonderful place to grow dahlias, there was not very much going for it, despite having been a country for a very long time. The population was divided into the blues and the greens (superficially at least, after the manner of ancient Constantinople). The blues only accounted for around 10% of the population but included all the decent chaps. Who believed in allowing ladies into church on Sundays. Not emptying your dustbin into your neighbour's garden. That sort of thing. The greens were the rest and their idea of fun was to go up into the mountains and shoot at each other with very old muskets with very long barrels. Shooting at blues was OK, but not such good sport. Far too easy. One effect of this fascination with muskets was that the car boot sales (held on Tuesdays rather than Sundays) in the green areas of Dumpistan were dominated by the musket dealers. Coveting muskets was what one did when one was too old to use one any more.

Now, as it happened, the blues took the side of the Big Britanners when they turned up. They thought that the BB's would help them bash the greens. So they provided servants, cleaners, drivers, scouts and such like.

Then, after a while, the BB's got fed up with this game, partly because the greens were better at it than they were. There were demonstrations in Trafalgar Square addressed by luminaries of the old left calling for withdrawal. Which brings me to a moral dilemma. Having stirred up trouble between the blues and the greens, was it decent to pull out and leave the blues to be well bashed by the greens? A stunt which the BB's had pulled at various times when pulling out of empire. One answer would be to take the greens with one on pulling out, but I am not sure that the Trafalgar Square gang have got the stomach for that. All in all, a bit of a mess. Don't see a decent way out at all.

Yesterday was the day for stained glass, having recently acquired a book all about Pugin who was big into stained glass for the second part of his rather short life. He has interesting views about how the stained glass should be worked into the detail of the window, rather than stuck onto it like wallpaper. Also interesting to read about the messy details of the construction of stained glass windows, uneasily placed between art and craft; with these windows being rather big and complicated things which it is not really practical for one person, artist even, to execute from scratch. You really have to rely on the craftsmen for most of it. So have taken to looking the stuff up when opportunity offers and last week to Ottery St Mary where there was lots, some by Pugin, including an east window which I did not like at all. Colours all washed out and wrong.

So yesterday to Osnaburgh Street where the story was that there was a fine east window to be seen at St Mary Magdalene, Munster Square and some other window in Holy Trinity of Onsaburgh Street by a cast out Puginic pupil. St Mary Magdalene turned out to be some odd species of Anglo-Catholic church, nominally C of E but with papist trimmings. But not papist enough to be open (Catholic churches in England (but not in rural France) seem to take being open more seriously than C of E ones). A lady doing something in the cafe in the crypt merely said that the church was closed and that if we cared to come to a service on Sunday we would be able to get in. No concessions to tourists at all. Then a gent living in some sort of an annex to the east end said that he had no access to east windows and perhaps we should try the crypt. Door shut. So that was a bit of a dead loss and so onto the holy trinity. This church, a classical affair built after the great fire but before the age of gothic revival, appeared to have been unfrocked and was now a venue for exhibitions. Yesterday there was some exhibition under construction with a young chap got up a bit like an undertaker's mute barring entrance. To be fair I think he wavered - maybe older people clutching bus passes wanting to see windows are not going to chuck bricks through them - but his instructions got the better on him. Strictly no entry. Sad that such people have to take their instructions so literally. So stained glass windows a complete wash out.

So on down to a street near Carnaby Street to Mother Mash (http://www.mothermash.co.uk/) where one gets fancily presented sausage and mash. Not bad at all and quite reasonably priced, although a bit let down by what was described as classic gravy. But I do sympathise. Good gravy is a tricky quantity. A bonus was that it solved the backbone mystery of the day before. The boning of the loin of pork must have been down to a restaurant wanting medallions of pork to perch on top of these little mountains of reinforced mashed potato: using an entire chop would not look quite right. Might even be a tad unstable. I shall seek confirmation of this diagnosis on my next visit.

And so home to read about an learned journal called craft studies or some such. So that awkward gap between art and craft will probably be getting the learned attention it deserves. Not to mention post-structural assaults on quilting as practised by Mothers' Union in Stoneleigh. The mag. at http://www.bergpublishers.com/BergJournals/TheJournalofModernCraft/tabid/3254/Default.aspx is not quite right but it might be the right sort of idea. Lots of other stuff trawled up by Mr G. if one persists.

One last rabbitoid. They were more or less wiped out in northern Europe by the last ice age and the Romans, once they had found out about them in Spain, kindly thought to colonise the rest of the known world with them.

Yesterday was the day for calves liver. Which arrives at Cheam in a white plastic bucket, the sort of thing you might buy paint or tile cement in. Yesterday was the day of a new bucket containing an entire liver. From which it might follow that the liver was relatively fresh, thus accounting for its splendid texture and flavour. Alternatively, it might have been the cooking; that is to say fried in back to basics rape seed oil from Mr S. (I am not very keen on the smell of hot olive oil) along with some smoked streaky bacon. Served with mashed potato and summer cabbage - this last perhaps from Spain it not being very summery around here any more.

Shortly before I arrived, the butcher had been boning a loin of pork. Not sure why one would want to do such a thing with both loins and chops being very well with the bones in, but there we were: a two foot length of half backbone and rib. Free to regular customer on this occasion, unlike when I paid all of 99p for a rather inferior bone on 7th September. Much the same drill with cooking though. Boil up with celery and onion. Take the pound or more of meat off the bone. Discard bones. Liquidise the balance. But, for a change, cut down the lentils from 300 grams to 8 ounces. Bring to the boil, turn off the heat and leave to stand overnight. Warm back up to serve and results spot on. Served with thinly sliced, day old, white bread.

Having slightly fewer lentils meant that the soup cooled in a rather different way after bringing it the boil. When the soup comes to the boil it is covered in froth and is rather inclined to boil over if not watched. Take off the heat and the soup is just the right consistency for the froth to set as the soup cools. So, in the morning, the soup was covered in rather attractive layer of soft but solid froth. A sort of porcine pumice if you like. I should have taken a picture and shared.

To close, I should give the Google people a puff. The search function has been working much better on the blog the last few times I have tried and since I had a moan about it. No oddly missing hits. Can't be bothered to do the serious testing required to find out whether the search engine has changed or whether my searching has changed. Or whether it is just some fluke.

BH thought to cook them in cider. Which had the odd result that when I was snuffling around the kitchen towards the end of the operation, I caught a very strong smell of cream of tomato soup - despite assurances that there were no tomatoes whatsoever involved. Product not bad though, improved by the rabbits turning out to have been trapped rather than shot, or at least not shot as there were no shot and no clots, both rather unsightly on the dinner plate. Three of us more or less did for two rabbits, just enough left over for me to have for supper on bread.

Usually these olefactual anomalies are a strong signal that a cold is coming on. In this case I have just had one, so I hope it is not de retour.

Following the posting on 9th June, I did indeed give Amazon a prod and obtained a book about the Koran in its historical context edited by one Gabriel Said Reynolds - which, as a non specialist I have found rather heavy going. And ultimately boring. This because, while Muslims may believe that the Koran was given to Muhammad by Allah and that there is no need to look further, the proper business of Muslims being to look forward not back, I believe that the Koran has to come from somewhere. And given that it came from the south eastern fringes of the Roman/Jewish/Greek/Christian world, it seems probable that it will draw on those traditions. Subsume, accommodate or comment on stories and beliefs from those worlds. Reynolds' contributors spend a lot of time and effort spelling out the detail of this accommodation, drawing on specialist knowledge of the languages current in the area at the time. Too which my response has become the 'so?' which stroppy adolescents are so fond of.

Of more interest to me, is the notion that Muslims believe in faith, hope and charity in much the same way as Christians. Equally progressive in the early days. But they are much tougher on there being just one god, dumping the trinity business which caused so much strife in the early Christian church and which was not, I believe, very popular in the eastern part of that church, and are much tougher on making images, with not just golden calves being banned, but any kind of representation of animals or people in churches, just to be on the safe side. And if one god is the key difference, that might explain why the Christians did relatively well in the lush north west with all the divine livestock in its woodlands - trolls, elves, dryads and the like - while the Muslims did relatively well in the arid south east, where the sun and monotheism would be so much stronger. Although, to be fair, I do not think that they are free of auxiliary divinities. The 'Arabian Nights' is full of them. Argument further collapses as one moves further south and east where it becomes a lot more lush than north western Europe. Must put thinking cap on.

Back home, thought yesterday to try the oak smoked kippers from the fish man from Hastings at Cheam, in addition to the regular cod. The kippers were the right colour, but a bit greasy looking. Cooked by simmering for around 10 minutes. Right flavour, but texture not very good. A bit mushy. Not like the firm, clean texture of the kippers from Craster knocked out by Waitrose, or, for that matter, by the man in the shed along Ferry Road, between Southwold and Walberswick.

The cod, however, was entirely successful. Cooking time up to 80 minutes now, having started at 50. So far, so much the more cooking, so much the better the product. Liquid down to a succulent yellow goo with bits of tomato and onion embedded therein. Fish brilliant white - almost up to Dulux standards - firm and flaky. But I dare say there is an upper limit to the cooking time.

Then moved on to the turning off of the utilities at the house that had been sold. I thought, in my innocence, that the utilities would like to read the meters themselves for an account closure, rather than relying on a mere customer reading. But no, they have worked out that them getting out to a meter costs them a lot more than the small risk of customer fiddling warrants. Could sir read the meter please? Well no, I live 200 miles away and it is not very convenient. Then could sir guarantee to be in when we come to read the meter please? Well no, I live 200 miles away and it is not very convenient. Perhaps the meter man could walk 100 yards down the road and get the key from the agents? No sir, certainly not sir. Our meter men are very busy men and certainly do not have time for that kind of thing. So we are left in something of an impasse. Maybe the answer is to simply turn off the direct debits and then pursue the matter in slow time.

I also learn that despite all the huffing and puffing about my speaking for a third party and the am I sure that I have said third party's authority to be talking to them at all, that they are not in the least bit interested in a letter from him, confirming what I am telling them. Processing letters probably even more fag than reading the meter. At least the meter only involves digits. No long words.

Maybe the energy lift will get the grey cells going on the beam mystery. This being the very impressive concrete beam I passed the other day, all by itself on a very serious low loader. Maybe 4 feet high, two feet across and thirty feet long. Beautifully finished thing, a nice even grey with no holes, segregation or other flaws. Not that I could see anyway. But what was it for? A beam of these dimensions must be for something serious. And how was it made? How do you get a beam smooth all round unless you cast it in a beam shaped mould? In which case, how do you get the concrete in, past all the reinforcing bars? Do you cast the thing vertical? Does a vertically cast beam behave differently from a horizontally cast one? In the way that most sedimentary rocks do. Do you have to make a special concrete which is both runny and which sets hard? A tricky circle to square.

And then onto the Marlborough mystery. Have resumed work on my four volume life and times of Marlborough by one W. Churchill in a Sphere reprint. Now the Sphere people tried quite hard on the map front, within the confines of a paper back reprint with elderly technology in 1967. So they have managed a number of black line maps across the top of pairs of facing pages. And Churchill tried hard to explain the grand strategy involved in Marlborough marching 400 miles or so, at ten miles a day or so, from Amsterdam to Munich (roughly speaking) to fight the battle of Blenheim. But, even on the second reading the grand strategy completely eludes me, black line maps notwithstanding. So off to the trusty Polish atlas and turn up their map of southern Germany which handily covers the ground in question. Geographical rather than political flavour. Shows rivers and hills and things. Bit of colour to help the grey cells along. And now, on the third reading, I think I am finally starting to get the hang of the whole business.

Three facts struck me. First, the chaps needed new shoes at the half way point so Marlborough needed to organise thirty thousand pairs of shoes from somewhere in Germany and to have the credit or wherewithal to pay for them. A tribute to emerging industry and the emerging financial muscle of the UK. (Something which I suspect our EC partners are very jealous of - and so who are only too happy to chuck logs in the way of RBS reconstruction in the rather feeble name of increased competition on the high street). Second, Marlborough had the novel idea of playing hard to win. He was prepared to lose 10,000 men on a battle, something which the Europeans had not gone in for for a while. Progress of a sort I suppose, progress towards the sanguinary affairs of the second half of Napoleon's career. Third, we Brits see Blenheim as Marlborough's battle. But two other generals with their armies were involved on his side, a Prince Eugene (a famous warrior in Austria) and a Prince Louis (not to be confused with the sun king, also a Louis). I wonder if you read about the battles in history books written in their countries how different a slant you get? Rather in the way that we put Waterloo down to Wellington while some heretical folk put it down to some chap called Blucher.

Having dumped the copy of the DT in question, thought I would check in the online version, where I could find no trace of the item. So much for news online.

Next stop Mr G., who had a bit of a blockage about coin of the realm, but he did turn up a few bits and bobs. For example, an accountant who had done some consultancy for the project. More relevant, some gang called the taxpayers alliance who build lists of monumental governmental inefficiencies. The COINS project was included, was alleged to have cost £1.5bn and to have overrun by 9%. So a monumental project but scarcely a monumental overrun, at least not in percentage terms. But it rather looks as if this was the rather slender source for the item in the DT. Perhaps they were scraping around for bits and bobs to fill up odd blank corners and the print deadline was rushing up on them.

Then moved onto the Treasury website where the existence of this seemingly important project was admitted but there were no details. Certainly couldn't turn up a project initiation document or anything like that. So pretty much a dead end. No-one out on the web wants to tell me anything serious about how much this project cost and I don't think I can be bothered to pester the DT for clarification. I'll just put it down to the DT getting it wrong again.

And while I dare say that the Treasury has more important things to do just now than publish details about it inner workings, not too impressed with the lack of such details. Not so open government at all.

The day before, being out of town, I had bought a Guardian for once in a while. Now the last time I did this, I think a month or so ago, I was rather disappointed. Two Guardians on the trot seemed very dull. Not even the usual sprinkling of outrageous job descriptions among the advertisements for social workers and the like. But on Tuesday it did much better. An entertaining read. Apart from being told about the new pedestrian crossing arrangements at Oxford Circus, there was lots to read about drugs. About how heroin kills a 1,000 or so of us a year while tobacco clocks up 100,000 or so. So while I am a bit doubtful about the second figure, it does make a bit of a nonsense of the current laws on substances. Maybe the nutter furore will promote a better class of debate. Then I learned about an odd Swedish novelist deceased and the unseemly squabble about the spoils from his estate. That bactrian camels are probably on the way out. Of a lady careless enough to drop a data stick in immigration at Liverpool airport containing thousands of very dodgy files. That most immigrants in France live in the south east of that country. That some eastern countries are buying up great swathes of African farm land. Colonialism with a 21st century face. And a Monbiot item about how all kinds of people are in denial about climate change and the deep shrinko reasons, nothing much to do with the climate, there might be for this. And with all kinds of people including some whom one might of thought should know better. All in all a splendid read, well worth the pound I paid for it.

Followed up by a visit to the Epsom dump. Just reversed the van back to the place where one chucks old mattresses - that was all I had to dispose of - when I was rather briskly informed that no vans whatsoever were allowed in this part of the dump and that I should go around the back. Freedom pass cut no ice at all so around the back. Onto the weighbridge where I had the challenging task of remembering the van registration mark between the back of the van and the little window in the weighbridge office. Took two trips. Plus I was told that driving license or rates demand was what was needed. Freedom pass, despite being issued by the borough with my picture on it, was not satisfactory evidence of my residence in the borough at all. (I learn later at TB that there is some agitation going on in the borough on this very point). However, I was let through, so onto the cavern. A rather intimidating place full of huge heaps of rubbish, visiting dust carts and a huge loader with a huge shovel scuttling backwards and forwards. One nudge and the hire van would have been well over its excess (£400 I think). However, all being carefully marshalled, dumped the mattress and escaped back onto the weighbridge unscathed. Incidentally confirming on the way the furniture dealer's story of 22th October that all commercial waste goes straight to landfill. None of this recycling nonsense for vans.

While waiting outside the cavern, the blue container mystery of 16th September was solved. It rather looks as if these interesting blue bins are what are used to bin our food waste. There were several of them lying about full of small full plastic bags. Food waste seemed quite a likely candidate, but I thought leaving a vehicle at the entry to the cavern might earn me penalty points so I desisted from checking at close quarters.

On the way to the March Barton dump the day before the day before it had seemed that the road signage and road marking crews had been slipping. Didn't seem to be as much of it about as usual. Maybe I didn't have a hangover. But I did come across two junior road signage maintenance engineers (third class, female) checking out one of those interesting posts saying things like 'M3 A 76.3'. The check appeared to be, in so far as one could tell at speed, checking that it was vertical with a large spirit level. Good to know that these important signs are being looked after so carefully.

Shortly after that amused to see one of those very efficient AA recovery vans, complete with car hauled up on its towing contraption and with its bonnet up. I suppose they have to break down from time to time but one might be a bit peeved if one was the punter. Although one could have a smoke, something which I assume is banned in the recovery vehicle itself, even supposing the driver did not mind, which he might well do these days.

On arrival in the regional capital, pleased to read about the new road crossing arrangements at Oxford Circus. It seems that they have actually dismantled the great array of cattle fences with which the circus used to be decorated and with which we used to be cattled or contained. Progress! We shall go and inspect this wonder of modern London as soon as is convenient. Maybe Boris is actually scoring a few hits.

I had been wondering, because he seems to generate a fair amount of newsprint and I would have thought that half a page of Evening Standard would take half a day from scratch. Does he write it all in the margins of his very busy mayoral schedule or does he simply hire a few clever wannabees to write it all for him? He probably gets a big postbag at all the papers he writes for containing more than enough material for them to spin his stuff off of. Boris just looks over the product and signs it off as his own? Rather in the way that small civil servants write letters for big civil servants and big civil servants write letters for ministers. I would have thought that any self-respecting journalist could fake Boris's hand well enough. And the clever wannabees can live in hope that this will lead to better things, as well it might.

Yesterday a bit of DIY for once in a while. The joints in one of our elderly Stag dining chairs - joints mainly of the push fit round tenon or dowel variety. Rather than go for the invisible mend which the ladies like, went for the up-front, in-your face wire strapping. Two mild steel wire straps, one on each diagonal under the seat, stressed by turning dowels in them. Locking the twisted dowels down with another bit of wire. Pulled the joints up OK and all looks very strong, but I am not so sure. Does mild steel hold its tension for any length of time? How can one be sure that one has not pulled it beyond its quite low plastic limit?

If I had bought the wire in the regular way, specially for the purpose, I would probably have spent more on wire than a new chair would have cost from a junk shop - although, to be fair, such a chair might well have had loose joints too. And, as it happens, the wire came from a car boot sale in Hunstanton. The dowels, which I have had for years without use, came from a car boot sale in Hook Road Arena. A case of something kept in case it came in handy, coming in handy.

And now off to address the tea crisis. I thought I had a packet of Sea Dyke Oolong tea in reserve. But as I hit the bottom of the tea caddy, I find I am mistaken. And the nearest place I know for restocking is Lisle Street off Leicester Square. When can I take a slot out of my busy schedule to get up there?

First, having a lot of gold in the pommel of your sword was more practical than having a lot of iron, not just a matter of showing off. I had overlooked what should be the obvious point that gold is more than twice as heavy, or more properly dense (see http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_metals.htm, first hit on Mr G.), as iron, and so one could make a counterweight to the blade which was not inconveniently bulky.

Second, the gun fun people are perhaps more like collectors than artisans. Collectors collect things for their greater glory, the greater glory of their collection and so as to be able to drool over them. To turn them over and over, to peer (or leer) at them. But probably not to use them. So some people collect stamps, others thimbles, others books and others Chinese pots of some particular variety. Perhaps one collects books once one's purse has outstripped one's ability to read the things. One can collect much faster than one can read - picture books excepted. So gun fun people are in a grey area between the artisan and the collector. A slightly odd collector in that the thing collected is lethal while the other collectibles mentioned are decidedly harmless.

Whoever writes the back page of the TLS is also in the same grey area, more precisely that between reader and collector. He, or her people, trundle round second hand book shops in London on the lookout for interest, either in the shops or in their contents. But he is very sniffy about Oxfam bookshops on the grounds that they very rarely have collectable titbits going cheap. Which I find a little harsh: Oxfam bookshops carry a good range of stock, almost down to Mills & Boon up through to obscure and learned tomes. It is true that one does not often come across collectibles, but I quite often come across good steady books at a reasonable price. Books that one might actually read. And if one does not, one has not paid a whole lot for it. The thing can be recycled to the next charity bag with a clear conscience.

Rounded off the active part of the day with a visit to Great Bookham Common, a place previously noticed as an exemplar of low-key non-destructive management by the National Trust. Sadly, while still a splendid place, they have caught the destructive, eco-vandal bug and appear to be chopping swathes of the wood down. There were a whole lot of laminated notices explaining themselves; no doubt extolling some bio-diversity fad or other. I just look the other way and hope that these people will come around one day to remembering what these places are for for the likes of me. Then they might really be holding it trust for me.

To bed with the book which tells me about swords and incest - by one Heinrich Fichtenau. The chap is clearly a lover of words and their shifts and turns. So to sleep, having been reminded of the association between age, family position and rank. So words indicative of age in people are often used to indicate status in society. So, butcher's boy and lady's maid in English and garcon in French. Boy as used to be used to denote a black servant in the southern states. Any or all of these people might well be adults. Any male, even someone as important as Mr. Blair, is my son to the pope, or even a common or garden priest. My children by Blucher of his cavalry in a film about Waterloo. But that was more that they were his family, rather than that they were his inferiors. And prince to me is associated with youth, despite there being plenty of adult princes. People that are born and die as princes.