pumpkinstrokemarrow

Greeted at the station by three young girls just inside the entrance, all of whom were wearing very short skirts and one of whom appeared to be removing her tights or perhaps stockings. Perhaps they were adjusting their dress before entering one of the various clubs in the environs.

Up onto the platform where after a while the platform indicator indicates that the 2313 is cancelled. The last train to Chessington North, from where Epsom is maybe an hour's walk has just left. The platform announcements continues to remind us not to leave our bags unattended. No information about trains to Epsom available.

Think about getting a train to Surbiton from where Epsom is maybe two hour's walk. Actually get a train to Earlsfield. It now being a little after 2300 decide not to bother with nipping down to the 'Halfway House' for a quick one. Decide instead to get a bottle of water from the machine, at the not so modest sum of £1.40 for what looks like a third of a litre. Still, needs must. Get the first 20p piece into the slot then the £1 piece gets stuck, too far in to get the thing out again. Pressing the one button available does nothing; does not even return the 20p which did not get stuck. A helpful notice on the machine tells me that it is nothing to do with Network Rail and that if I have a problem I had better phone such and such a number quoting some six digit machine reference number. Given that it is probably after hours and I am carrying neither mobile phone nor pencil and paper this is none too helpful.

So get the next train to Wimbledon where three chaps who had thought to get to Dorking thought that maybe there was an unscheduled train to Epsom at 2355 - rather better than the 0031 which was scheduled. The platform announcements continue to remind us not to leave our baggage unattended. Decide to investigate the 'Prince of Wales'. Lo and behold the place is open and looks set to be open at least until 2400, despite it being Wednesday, a day not known for particularly late hours. So I do get to have a quick one after all. But by 2335 I am getting a bit nervous about the alleged 2355 so go back to the platform.

On the way, picking up a piece of unattended baggage outside the pub. To wit, one Logitech Mobile Traveller Special Edition, looking intact inside a more or less intact plastic wrapping. On closer examination it turns out to be a common or garden laptop carrying case with a free mouse. The latter might turn out to be quite handy as I am presently using a rather irritating spring loaded affair on my laptop, with the spring loaded lead continually curling up in the wrong direction. The only catch is that the instructions tell me that to get the best out of the thing I need to download some software from Logitech; the catch with this being that the laptop in question is not connected to the Internet. I shall find out in due course whether it works without. All of which reminds me of a minor worry, that those of us homeworkers who use PCs not connected to the Internet are fast getting left out in the cold. Won't be long before they stop issuing CDs for software altogether. All right for businesses who can afford to carry PC engineers, not so hot for the homeworker.

While I am working all this out, move onto Raynes Park on the grounds that if the worse comes to the worse I am that much nearer Epsom. But as it turns out, the 2355 from Wimbledon does turn up and I am whisked off to Epsom to walk through my door at 0110 or thereabouts, maybe an hour or so late. Luckily it had more or less stopped raining. I did not notice but fellow passengers alleged that the thing had not stopped at Ewell West, so anyone hoping to get off there had an extra half hour's walk.

And so we all get to live happily ever after. And to be fair to Southwest Trains adventures of this sort are quite few and far between.

PS just learned that New Labour press on in denial about the Stockwell shooting by giving the lady in charge on the day a gong. The lady whom I thought should have fallen on her sword.

The price also includes a range of internationally acclaimed dining options, swimming pools and entertainments. Said to be almost as good as London's West End. Perhaps even better on the swimming pool front where the West End does not do all that well, at least in so far as municipal swimming pools are concerned. So we can pay all this money to have facilities which are said to be almost as good as those we enjoy at home . We get a stateroom which might be a bit larger than our bedroom and which might have a window with a watery view. Every morning we get to queue up for hours so that we can get off this floating palace and every afternoon we get to queue up for hours so that we can get back onto it again. Unfortunately the advertisement says nothing about the facilities offered smokers. Do they sport internationally acclaimed smoking options? The finest Havanas stored in the finest humidors? Can I be sure that no-one is going to be smoking anywhere near me?

Should you be rushing to book, remember that the price quoted is based on double occupancy. Hefty single supplement applies. Remember also that this never to be repeated DT reader offer may be withdrawn without notice at any time. For ourselves, I think we shall stick with the Isle of Wight. We can think about, if not watch, the huge cruise ships pulling out of Southampton from the comfort of the Puckpool Tea Garden - which sells beers, pies and ice-creams, to mention just a few of the merely locally acclaimed items on their menu a couple of years ago.

Thinking of home comforts, part of yesterday's reading was another go at 'Suite Francaise', from which I share a tit-bit. It seems that if you were a prominent French writer between the wars that it would be normal to team up with a similarly prominent French politician. You, being rich, provide him with material benefits. He, with his hands on the levers of power, can pull strings for you. The tit-bit was that the material benefits might include the loan of your mistress for a couple of days to entertain the politician at the races. Very open minded chaps these Frenchmen. Or perhaps I have misunderstood the French.

Another part was Howard's End, with a preface by one Alfred Kazin, of whom I had never previously heard, the book having been taken out of the library in the wake of a viewing of a Merchant Ivory adaption which I had enjoyed. Well cast with Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Wilcox, Antony Hopkins as Mr. Wilcox, Helena Bonham-Carter as Miss. Helen Schlegel and Emma Thompson as Miss. Margeret Schlegel. Not luvvies I particularly care for in themselves, but well cast on this occasion. On reading the book again, the first time for more years than I can remember, struck by the sensitivity with which Forster was able to describe personal situations which do not quite work out for one reason or another. Maybe a reflection of his problems. But still find the cultural aspirant, Leonard Bast, embarrassing and awkward, even as a character in a story. Maybe a reflection of my problems. But last night got around to reading the introduction by Kazin, with which I was much struck, not that I am quite as enthusiastic about the book as he seems to be. But he draws attention to the start of chapter 6, where Forster announces that 'we are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk'. Kazin reminds us that no-one thought that the lower orders were worthy of serious literary attention, in English anyway, until Hardy got around to it towards the end of the 19th century.

He does not appear to be very keen on Joyce, while recognising his place in the canon. 'Ulysses will always be the grand, cold monument (of the modernist novel, of which Howard's End is certainly not one. More kin to Jane Austen)' and a quote from Virginia Woolf's diary: 'a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples... An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working-man, & we all now how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?'. Perhaps, while we no longer have the high cultured of those days, the chaps like Gladstone who used to knock out a bit of Latin poetry by way of relaxation after a full day's work (a snippet from the DT), at least we do have good quality education and opportunity available for all those with the wit to take advantage of them. No need to be snobby about people from the working classes any more.

To recover from this mishap, akin perhaps to getting out of the wrong side of the bed, we took ourselves off to http://www.enzoatkingwilliamiv.co.uk/ for lunch, an establishment which had had a long history as a boozer in Ewell village, before the trade fell off in the late nineties. Now converted, by a couple rather than a chain, into an Italian eatery where we did very well. They clearly saw me coming as, inter alia, they managed to cook their own bread in their pizza oven. At least I suppose that is where they cook it. Some bread bores can get quite excited about the difference between stone baked and steel baked bread - although most of the good bakers I have used in a regular way were definitely in the steel baked camp. In any event, a far superior item to the soggy warm brown stuff which restaurants usually manage when the DIY bread mood grips them.

As part of my festive reading I have finished off the biog. of Stalin by Deutscher (see 1 December above). A good book which, I think, has stood the test of time well. It would be interesting, if one had more quality time, to read a well thought of modern version and see how much the picture has changed, apart from giving a lot more space to Siberian, Ukrainian and other atrocities.

So I find that, in addition to backing the wrong side in 1918, England and France were still at it in 1939, by which time it would have been better had they moved on. That is to say, England and France thought it would be a good wheeze if Hitler and Stalin beat each other up, leaving them free to pick up the spoils, while Stalin thought it would be a good wheeze if England, France and Germany beat each other up, leaving him free to pick up the spoils. As it was, Stalin did a last minute deal with Hitler which he thought bought him useful time before the inevitable punch up. In the round, we all lost out as a result, not least the Germans. And Deutscher argues that Stalin did not even make very good use of the time that he had bought. He might have done better to fight a couple of years earlier. Interestingly, he also says that Russia's industrial production had more or less caught up that of Germany by the late thirties. OK so Russia was a much bigger country but it was still quite an achievement given their starting point. Unfortunately, 40% of this production was located in parts of Russia scheduled to be overrun by the Germans.

He goes on to argue that, unlike Hitler, Stalin was a committee man. OK, so if his generals did not agree, he would make the decision. But, on the whole, when they did agree, he would agree with them. Also that, instead of interfering with front line minutiae, he gave quality time to production and logistics, making sure that those thousands of tanks were in the right place, fuelled up and ready to go, at the right time.

Another feature of Stalin was that, while not a Russian, he was a man of the people, the son of a man born as a serf, unlike the old Bolsheviks, most of whom came from middle class or better backgrounds. Maybe this stood him in good stead too.

Which, together with the airplane news of yesterday, reminds me of a pitch which I have made here at least once. To the effect that so long as the world is full of inequality it will also be full of trouble. A pitch which is clearly wrong to the extent that people from good backgrounds are drawn to the extremism - or terrorism - of their day. To which I retort, not wrong but complicated by. The extremism of their day will only thrive to the extent that it is rooted in real and sustained poverty, injustice, cruelty or whatever. Although, thinking aloud, once the tree has taken good root, it might acquire a life of its own and survive for years or decades without what one might have thought was the necessary nourishment.

For the rest of us, Mr S. was shut on Boxing Day, although the co-located Wickes and Halfords managed to get going. As did one of the newsagents in Ewell Village. By the day after Boxing Day, that is to say yesterday, I was pleased to see that both Chessington Garden Centre and the Christmas shopping bus to Kingston were up and running. Maybe today we will get some trains although I have yet to hear any. The good news is that we have already had our first two dustbins collected.

One notable event of Christmas Day morning was the sight of myself running around the lawn in the dark and in dressing gown trying to locate the sage for the sage and onion (inter alia) stuffing with a torch. Very cold underfoot at that time of day. And while I did not notice any curtains twitching as a result of the flashes of torchlight making the neighbours think of intruders - or perhaps a very late running Father Christmas - the crows in the trees at the bottom of the garden were not amused at all. Much squawking and flapping. I think they mostly got up and left, disgusted. But it was all worth while. Not all that much sage left on the bush after the local live stock's browsing, but enough that when combined with the same amount of dried made an excellent stuffing.

On Boxing Day, we thought to inspect Epsom Common where, to our surprise and despite the heavy rain, there was still some ice on the paths, in particular on a sloping stretch which presumably acted as a stream during the day and froze during the night, building up a good thickness which the rain had not yet dealt with. But few signs of chain saw activity. Which made me think that maybe what the eco-vols needed was some tractor mounted chain saws, front mounted, on hydraulic arms, one on each side. Then they could really get going, driving them ten abreast across the common, rather in the way of those pictures of massed combine harvesters on huge fields in Alberta. Plus, it would be a really good test of 50-something hand-eye coordination. Could you handle four wheels at say 4 mph each, two chain saws at 545 rpm each and two hydraulic arms at 24.3 ppi each without getting the health and safety people in a lather?

If Santa hasn't obliged they could put in an application for part or full funding by the National Lottery. To get them started I did a bit of research with Mr G., only to discover to my horror that no-one seems to make tractor mounted chain saws. The nearest thing I could find is illustrated in the previous post. Rear mounted and only suited to clearing brush. So the poor old eco-vols are going to have to stick with their old style chain saws.

Another notable event of the season was a minor skirmish at the Tooting branch of Wetherspoons, in which connection I commend the prompt and efficient action of the shift leader. Not a big chap but he smothered the skirmish in very short order, despite the sound of breaking glass. Almost as efficient at this sort of thing as the Cathy who used to have a pit-head pub up north before she had TB, some years ago that is.

The skirmish involved two men, one black and one white. The latter probably drunk. I think they knew each other quite well. The white one bigger than the black one. The white one appeared to be needling the black one. The black one appeared to be needling the white one back in some way that I couldn't catch and was not disposed to simply go away. He was going to stay put. Eventually they came to blows. White chap sustains some claret. Smothered as noted above. Black chap leaves. White chap continues to hang around despite it being suggested that he should leave by the other entrance. Two visits by two policemen. The is to say, the same two policemen paid two separate visits. No further action, which I think was the right outcome.

Should the matter have wound up in court and my good self have been called as a witness, not sure what I could have told the court, beyond correcting any fantastic claims which might have been made by the two combatants. Only sitting a few feet away and facing in the right direction, but not near enough to know what it was they were squabbling about or how the squabble developed. The only ones who might have known that were the two involved, who would have been partial witnesses. Maybe a learned counsel could have winkled the truth out of them but I doubt it. And given that I do not think that blame rested entirely with either one of them and no great damage was done, not worth the expense. Best left alone; let the learned counsel loose on something more worthy of his expensive and tax-payer paid time.

PS why does Mr G. think that I might be interested in hypnotherapists? What key word in recent posts is he biting on?

First, the US is about midway in the festive binge league, while the UK is close to the top, whether measured by spend per head or by spend as a proportion of GDP. Places like China, Korea and Israel come bottom. Some of the places which are presently low are climbing as they get richer and start to spend more on their own versions of Christmas.

Second, giving to US educational establishments is well organised, with more or less published tariffs. So for $10m I can get Harvard to include a name of my choice in the title of an existing job in perpetuity. For $5m for 10 years. While for $15m I get to supply the whole job title. So I could have the 'Pumpkinstrokemarrow Regius Chair of Comparative Joycean Studies'. There is another tariff card for buildings, but they tend to come rather dear. One could of course settle for a less prestigious uni., perhaps the one one went to oneself, in one's home state.

Third, giving gift tokens is one way to increase the value to the recipient of gifts. But it seems that only about 90% of the value of such gifts is redeemed and there are interesting shennanighans dealing with the balance. In Delaware, the balance reverts to the state after a decent interval. Then it seems that accountants get quite excited about when to score the purchase of gift tokens in the sales figures, with the vote going to scoring when the token is redeemed, rather than when it was bought, thus depressing estimates of festive spending.

Fourth, people having been moaning about the commercialisation of Christmas for almost as long as there has been commerce.

Fifth, a way ahead might be charity gift tokens. The idea is that I buy a token for you and you get to choose which charity gets the dosh. Things are so arranged that if you don't bother, there are defaults set up, so it does get to some charity or other. I rather like this one. Everybody gets to feel good and hopefully the charity makes sensible use of the proceeds.

My early Christmas present to myself was a book by one Derek Bickerton on the evolution of language. Interesting and easy read but rather marred to my mind by the jokey style favoured by writers of popular science these days. Plus a fair amount of space is given over to having a pop at all the other people ploughing their furrows in this particular field, although to be fair he does admit to having been wrong himself a few times in the past. To my mind jokey style is apt to come with sloppy thinking: but maybe sloppiness not really a problem given the state of this particular art. We can slop around for a few more years while the thicker theories mature.

But a book I will probably not be getting is a scholarly edition of the letters of Van Gogh. In six volumes and 2,249 pages at £325 if I place my order on or before New Year's Eve. I have puzzled before who might actually read all this kind of stuff, however splendidly it is got up, which these books apparently are. However the review (by Frank Whitford) was interesting. I wonder about the place of all these letters in the chap's oeuvre - which to my mind should stand without the need of this kind of prop. Oeuvres should be free-standing, sufficient unto themselves, portable and reasonably permanent - formulation designed to exclude a lot of what passes for Brit Art. While a helping hand with consumption does sometimes help, I am not sure about this sort of helping hand. I learn that while most of us remember Van Gogh as a drunken nutter who knocked out a few paintings of sunflowers, and maybe think that being a drunken nutter is a necessary condition for artiness, he was actually a sophisticated and literate painter who knocked out of lot of paintings - 800 or more it seems - and who was able to write in an interesting way about the process in two or three languages. I learn that in translating these letters, the translation team leader required the translations to use target language which was contemporary with the subject language. So in translating, say, French slang to English slang, the translators attempt to find contemporary English equivalents for the French. An interesting device.

Lastly, I feel the need to mention Sebastian D. G. Knowles whom is alleged by the TLS to be a professor of English at Ohio State where he specialised in Joyce studies. But this did mean that he felt the need to read that half of this oeuvre known as Finnegan's Wake. He confessed to this lacuna in his education at some Joycean conference, maybe after a drop too many of the dark stuff, which confession did not stop him being pushed further up the Joycean ladder. All very strange; not a book I have got very far into myself, but then I do not set myself up of as a professor. To be fair to the chap, he has now, it seems, managed to get through the thing.

We then moved onto the business of damage. I have read and been told on various occasions that if you get turned over by the nice people from HMCR (or is it the border protective police these days?) and your car or your suitcases get trashed in the process, you are just invited to bundle your stuff up and get out. No question of help or compensation, although on a good day a sympathetic officer of the peace might offer you a good quality dustbin bag. Now I can see that from their point of view having the time and facilities to put you back together again is something they could do without. On the other hand, if I turn out to be innocent, is it fair that I should have to bear the cost of this bit of enforcement. Would it not be fairer for it to be a charge on the public purse? Maybe they could carry a varied stock of 'Back to Basics' suitcases from Mr Sainsbury from which to dish out replacements to people? This would not cost them that much. Much more sensible, why not just get rid of the drug laws and harmonise excise duties on the legal drugs, then the need for all this control would be much diminished? All those chaps in blue could have a mid-career change and become care workers. Under TUPE, of course. (Interestingly, one comes across a fair number of ex-forces people in the mental health industry).

Talking of dustbin bags, I also learn from TB of an anomaly in the waste recycling and recovery regulations (as amended 2008 and to be amended 2010, 2011 and 2012.5). If our household sorts our rubbish into the four different containers now provided, those containers are emptied free of charge at regular intervals. The only hitch is that sometimes we wind up with someone else's wheelie bin which causes much huffing and puffing over the Kellogs. However, if TB, which generates much larger quantities of glass waste and food waste than we do, sort that rubbish into the same four containers large size, they have to pay to have them emptied. If they don't bother to sort and just chuck it into one container, even larger size, they don't have to pay to have it emptied. The management consultants hired to sort all this out by the ecos who have infiltrated New Labour seemed to have missed a beat here. Incentives all the wrong way around. Can they be trusted on more important matters? Should I write to my local councillor or my local MP, that redoubtable former television journalist, Chris Grayling? Does he mind having the name of a fish? Was he called fishy at school? (A factlet picked up from Chief Inspector Morse).

Meanwhile, yesterday evening, following our recent visit to a mosque (not during service hours) and to Westminster Cathedral (during service hours), and it being far too frosty to chance driving to Guildford Cathedral, we visited our local church for a spot of Christmas carols. On entry reminded that stained glass only works from the outside when it is dark and the lights are on in the church. Which, oddly for such a major occasion in the calendar, was nowhere near full, although there was a token infant who made a lot of noise with his toy car through most of the proceedings. Very splendid high Victorian rood screen shutting off the chancel to profane access. Much larger than expected choir arranged in front of the screen: a mixed choir of men and mainly younger women with a lady director of music (as choirmasters seem to style themselves these days). Including a visiting Canadian medical student with a very strong voice and who did a good job on a couple of solos.

So what we got was arranged rather like the nine lessons and carols you get from King's College on Christmas Eve. A service with prayers and readings interspersed with carols from the choir and carols from all; an arrangement which retains something of the sacred (including much emphasis on virgin births and wombs - a feature which always used to amuse my mother) and which I much prefer to the Christmas medleys which are also on offer at this time of year. Some of the carols were a bit ambitious for the choir but, in the round, they did very well. The public carols were the sort of thing I used to thump out as a child so that was all right too. Although my voice took a while to warm up and apart from trouble hitting the right note, there was trouble hitting the first word of the verse. Most of the time I wasn't under way until half way through the first line. Clearly very out of practise.

To close on a properly culinary note, we find last week that to feed on sirloin steak costs about at much as feeding on oxtail stew, which one might have thought was the poor man's option. So an excellent sirloin steak for one cost me about £5. Grilled spot on, eaten with brussels sprouts and soft white rolls as before. Two small ox tails, enough for three of us, clocked in at near £15. So cost per head about the same, not counting the additional vegetables and cooking energy. Varied the cooking in that I boiled the tails up with carrots, onions and swede for a couple of hours. Then removed the meat and left the balance to stand in the cold for a bit. Spooned off some of the fat and liquidised what was left. Pour the now thickish pale brown broth back over meat and simmer for a further hour. Add some very coarsely chopped but unpeeled carrots maybe 15 before the end. Much superior arrangement to having well boiled vegetables floating around in fatty water: scores on all three fronts: appearance, texture and taste.

And then there is the dripped drivel through the loudspeakers in trains, which the operators assure us is for our own safety and is in any case forced on them by regulations from the European Commission for Diverse Equality. The one that seems particularly inane - although it does prove that their IT system is car sensitive - is the one which tells you that you are sitting in car 3 (or whatever) of this 8 car train. By way of getting back at them I try to devise more interesting messages for them. Perhaps I will send the better ones in to their customer suggestion scheme. So how about 'You are sitting in car 3 of this 8 car train. Car 2 is the one behind you, looking towards the direction of travel and car 4 is the one in front of you, against the direction of travel'. Or 'You might like to know that this car is carrying 74.2 customers of the maximum of 85 full size equivalents permitted by the European Commission for Customer Carriage'. Or 'Will you please make sure that you have fastened your shoe laces before attempting to leave the train. Southwest trains can take no responsibility for any accident that might result from any failure so to do'.

But despite all this technology, yesterday evening I find myself waiting for half an hour after the due time on the platform at Earlsfield, temperature well below freezing, with no more information than 'train delayed' on the whizzy electronic display. One shivers and wonders whether nipping down to the 'Halfway House' for a pick-me-up is a good idea. Then the Epsom train comes along without any warning. So it wouldn't have been. Maybe they should transfer some of the team from the in-car announcement project to the on-platform announcement project.

But there was diversion to hand on the train. Sitting next to me was a young man who appeared to be a bit lost, clutching a leaflet about suburban railways with markings somewhere in southwest London and a door key (the credit card variety), together with a small cardboard slip with the room number, from a Holiday Inn Express, in the name of Mr and Mrs Ahmed Al-eiza or some such. The problem was that he had not got a clue which Holiday Inn Express it was. He spoke decent English and did not appear to be drunk. He denied having a wife whom he could phone up and ask where she was. Helpful passengers, most of whom were happy to be diverted, pondered about where there might be Holiday Inns in the area. Certainly no where near where the train was going. Sandown Park near Esher came to mind. Then Colliers Wood, then Sutton, then Chessington World of Adventure. I try to phone the telephone number of the small cardboard slip and get through to central booking control. At least they don't tell me that they can't possibly talk to me because of the Data Protection Act. But they don't seem to be able to trace the registration. They pass me onto another operator and I start again. Still no luck. Maybe I should not have omitted the hyphen when spelling his name out. Young man goes as if to get off so I give up. But he is restrained on the grounds that Stoneleigh in the middle of the night is probably a worse option than Epsom. Then someone has the bright idea that maybe we should take a peek at his train ticket, which turns out to be for Wandsworth. Ah ha says the someone. I think there is a Holiday Inn Express at Wandsworth. He has money so lets send him back to Clapham Junction to get a cab. Which we do, learning on the way that he is fresh off a plane from Los Angeles and is visiting the International School - which I learn this morning is at Cobham and nowhere near Wandsworth. But the sympathy level goes up many notches. Lots of wise nodding about how jet lag can fry the brain. Less talk about what on earth is the twat up to.

This morning I thought that maybe going to the Chessington World of Adventure Holiday Inn might have been a better bet. We knew there was one there, and once there no doubt he would have been processed. If necessary, into a bed there.

Presumably the almost complete lack of helpful information on the card board slip was a security measure. No-one happening to find the thing in the street would be able to abuse it. Was that what was happening here? An abuse attempt?

And I was also diverted by the very English compromise whereby the BA cabin crew strike is called off by a judge on the grounds of some minor irregularity in the striking voting procedure. That way the strike is off and so management are happy and the union don't have to do a humiliating climb down. Was the judge acting under instructions from No. 10? Whatever, I imagine that a fair bit of damage has been done to the BA operation. Will it prove to have been another nail in the coffin or will they escape for a few more years?

First thought is off to the hat shop, or at least the hat departments of assorted shops. The idea was to get one of those baseball caps with a long peak but with the top missing, all the better to ventilate with. Not much about and what there was appeared to be more about keeping the fashion in that the sun out, although to be fair I did not go to the bother of going to a golf shop which might have done rather better. Annoyingly, I had unknowingly cycled past a big one at the northeast corner of the junction of the A243 and the A3 before the need for such a place had been articulated. And I only found out about it when on a non-stop shopping bus to Kingston. Then I tried out an already owned sun hat, one of those floppy jobs. BH complained that it was a summer sun hat not a winter sun hat and she was not at all sure that she wanted me to be seen in the thing. But it did almost do the trick. There was a chin strap so it did not blow off. There was a broad, 360 degree rim which kept a lot of sun out. The only catch was the the hat was indeed floppy and the all important rim was apt to blow up, with massive reduction of sun stopping power.

Next thought was one of those things that Clint Eastwood wears when filming spaghetti westerns in Spain. Stiff leather job. And we did find such a thing but it cost rather a lot - more than £20 anyway - and had no chin strap. So declined. And there the matter rested for a few days until the sun glasses option was successfully pushed in.

So off to Boots. Do you keep records? Rather frosty yes. Can you make me some sun glasses using my last long range prescription? Well yes but we think that is a very bad idea. It is more than two years since you last had an eye test and who knows what your eyes have been doing in the interval. Plus there are all kinds of interesting diseases that a timely eye test might mitigate. Why don't you have a free eye test first? Subtext: then we can sell you three pairs of glasses rather than one. Eventually, the lady behind the counter, the dispensing optician that is, gets the idea that I am not going to buy three pairs of glasses so we settle down to the business of buying one.

Interesting point here in that I am taking advice about how many pairs of glasses I need to buy from the person who sells them on a fairly massive margin. Big conflict of interest. But not clear how this is to be avoided in a cost effective way. Mandatory separation of eye advice and eye sales would ease (not eliminate) the conflict but I suspect us poor consumers would wind up paying more rather than less overall. And I fear that the poor old NHS is heading slowly in the same direction with hospitals being paid by the primary care trusts by volume, while at the same time advising on need. With anxious consumers somewhere in the middle of all this. Maybe New Labour should get some of its highly paid management consultants to explain in powerpoint and pictures why health in the US is so expensive.

Moving back to my domestic problem, we then discuss how much sun I want to eliminate. Polaroid much better, although more expensive. Don't understand the explanation of why better but then it turns out that my eyes are too naff for Polaroid. Got to have tinted anyway. Do I want to cut out 70%, 80% or 90% of the light? They have samples but in the absence of any testing sun light, I don't have a clue. Cutting out 90% seems a bit drastic so we settle for cutting out 80%. Oddly, one seems to be able to see through the sample quite well on this basis. Maybe the great designer designed us eyes which were intended for reading in the dark.

And so onto frames. No you can't have frames the same as the ones you have got on. Sir, please. They are at least two and a half years old and were discontinued ages ago. Can I have something similar? No, not really. The current fashion is for shallow lenses - a lot wider than they are high - and big side pieces. At around £150 a pop. I am not sure that shallow lenses is really a very good idea when it comes to sun glasses. Big is good for sun glasses. What about those ones? They have big lenses and they seem to fit. But so old fashioned sir. They don't really you suit you at all. Yes they do. They cost £25 which is a lot more suiting than £150. And so we conclude a deal on that basis, with the lenses taking it back up to £150. Could I have had a winter sun hat made to order for this sort of money?

That aside, the pricing structure people at this optician had not really got it right at all. If the cheapos had been say £75, but otherwise identical, I might have been persuaded that paying double was providing enough added value. But persuading me that paying six times was a good idea was always going to be a lot harder.

The same people at Microsoft can't win all the time either. I can buy Microsoft Office, licensed for up to 3 home PC's for £100. Now it may be that Microsoft have got their money back on this product many times over and ought, in common decency, be whacking the thing out for not much more than the cost of the CDs. But as it happens, I would probably pay £1,000 for the thing if I had to. It is worth that much to me. Luckily, I don't have to buy at the car boot sale where the barrow boy can see the whites of my eyes and make an all too accurate assessment of what my bit of the market will bear.

Which reminds me that I got heisted at the north end of Surrey Street market in Croydon earlier today, it being a long time since I have bought oranges in such a place. See a barrow, barrow boy (actually of middle years) with fag on, no names no pack drill, selling rather good looking Spanish navels for 5 for a pound. Yes please says I. Barrow boy ignores me. Eventually I attract his attention. You have to come around this side if you want to be served says he. So round I go and he serves me in such a cack handed way that I completely fail to notice until it is too late that he is serving me from a rather inferior tray of navels. They might taste OK but they are not nearly so pretty. And I only get four of them plus a rather elderly banana as a bonus. All in all, not a very successful purchase. Good job it was only £1. Will do better next time.

Preceded the tour by a return visit to Cardinal Place to inspect the Christmas lights - which I thought they had made a pretty good job of. Made good use of all the space and glass. But the white steel pipes holding up the roof gave me pause for thought. The round pipes were maybe nine inches diameter and made out of one inch steel. Whereas the square pipes being used at Clapham Junction to hold up a new flight of stairs were maybe 7 inches across and made out of one inch steel. So either the roof at Cardinal Place is seriously under-engineered or that at Clapham Junction is seriously over-engineered - a criticism which I recall being levelled at carriages in the days of British Rail. Those days when the union ruled the roost, the trains never ran on time and you could buy a one-way ticket to Frankfurt an der Oder at Epsom Station.

Will British Airways survive the attempt of their unions to rule a roost whose foundations are under attack by armies of woodworms? Not to mention feral ryans. Tough cheese that their world is changing and they have got to learn to sweat a bit, but they seem to be hell bent on ensuring that they have no world at all.

Talking of cheese, on the 'Constitution' hunt, it being a pub I almost never find at the first attempt, requiring one to pause and take stock somewhere else, we had occasion to pass Rippon Cheese, a splendid cheese shop which I used to patronise from time to time. The staff - perhaps the owners - wore black and white aprons and black bowler hats, sold excellent Emmentaler, Swaledale and lots of other stuff. The Swaledale I used to buy was a softish white cheese with a seam of small bubbles running horizontally through the centre of the quite small cheeses - maybe 8 inches across and two deep. Very good it was too and since then I have had a soft spot for cheeses with small bubbles. (But to be pedantic, Mr G. tells me that Swaledale is the name of a dairy not a cheese, so asking for the stuff might have various results). Been quite a reliable indicator so far. But maybe times are hard. The format of the shop appears to have changed and the contents to no longer be exclusively cheesy. Not a good sign. Use it or lose it!

Now time for a moan of closure. Our government seems to make a point of knocking the bog standard family whenever it gets the opportunity. It seems to be unaware that this sort of family is the most reliable known way - not that it is that reliable - to bring up large numbers of children. Unmarried mothers generate, other things being equal, more problem children than married ones and soak up an awful lot more benefit. So why are Ma. Harman & etc. always having a pop at the married ones?

Then got to thinking about whether I would want a registration mark that was or approximated to my name. With the result that I canned the idea as being rather vulgar. It might be convenient in a working environment to wear a legible name badge. But I would not go so far as to want my name in foot high letters stencilled onto the back of my formerly tasteful tweed jacket. Still less would I want the name of somebody else, be he or she an ever so successful seller of fashion items.

Even better, heading south over the Isles of Scilly (roundabout), caught a most magnificent sunset. Sun a flaring yellow, just dropping beneath white cloud. Lots of cloud of strange appearance and lots of bright lights. Followed the sunset by continuing to head south and lost it over Horn's Hill (1km north west of junction 9 on the M25), by which time the thing had turned pink, but still magnificent.

I close with two factlets, both about recreational substances. First, if you rinse an empty Rum bottle with maybe 50cc of cool water, the product fizzes. A slight but distinct fizz. Is the water setting off some secondary fermentation process which had been stopped by the strength of the Rum? If it is, it has to have kicked in very fast. Second, in the course of a learned review article in the TLS (which had appealed to me for having a pop at the arrogant Mr Dawkins), I find that certain recreational substances are antinomian. A word which is both old and odd and which the OED tells me is both noun and adjective and applies to people who do not think that moral laws bind them, perhaps because they are already in a state of grace. They already have purchased their tickets for heaven and no subsequent sinning can invalidate them. There was a sect, which got bloodily squashed, which went in for this sort of thing in Germany in the sixteenth century. Maybe called Anabaptists. Presumably the idea is that people who get stoned can get up to some pretty bad things, thinking all along that it is OK, for them anyway. Which, given the recent case in Perugia, seems all too likely. One might think that using such an obscure word was just the reviewer showing off, but I got my money's worth!

So off to the offie for a drop of the amber nectar. For a change thought we would use the posh offie in (I think. A to Z not very clear on the point) Bridge Road at Hampton Court. The road which also contains a real butcher and one of those cooperative antique emporiums. Acquire a bottle of pudding wine by the name of Saint Croix du Mont, Chateau Grand Peyrot 2000. Very nice it was too too, with a strange, light, but rather splendid nose. Mr G. suggests that it is a very dinky little appellation, only known to serious cognoscenti. Must go back to Bridge Road and get some more while he still has some left.

The following day chanced across a fine new variant on the kedgeree theme. Take three ounces of cold boiled white rice. Stir in seven ounces of warm boiled smoked haddock. Cook gently in a little butter with maybe a couple of tablespoons of water. The variation arose by adding two finely shredded brussels sprouts rather than butter fried chopped onion. Gave the kedgeree a little bit of colour and lightened the taste a bit. A cleaner, less greasy taste than the onion version. Will try again next time I have a bit of smoked to hand.

Another letter from the bank yesterday (HSBC) telling me all about my shiny new overdraft facility, due to kick in in the new year. This took about three pages of letter and one page of small print. Didn't bother with the small print but it took me several goes to understand what the letter was about, and I am supposed to have slightly higher than average reading skills. What someone with lower than average reading skills would have made of it I know not. Which reminds me that I was told that the banking custom of charging for their services by punitive fines on minor infractions, rather than by the bank charges you used to have when I was little, is a very regressive arrangement. The effect being that the less well off who are not too hot at managing their bank accounts are the ones who wind up paying most of the charges, rather than the more well off whom one might think could better afford it. Another not too impressive outcome of our best of all capitalist worlds with its cherished belief in the magic of the market.

Which reminds me of something I once read in a Russian novel. Something about how some country folk hated markets, which they regarded as hot beds of cheating, thieving and chicanery. How much better if one could simply live off one's own land with one's own people and not have to have recourse to such places.

Having done that one to death I now move onto the second course unit, on how to build a television drama out of fiction. We take as our text the Poirot story, repeated on ITV3 recently, called 'The Cornish Mystery'. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0676170/. For those who may have missed it, the story concerns the wife of a country dentist who was apparently arsenicked by her dentist husband who wants to get off with his nurse, but whom Poirot works out was actually arsenicked by a local shopkeeper who wants to get off with the money. Mr Amazon supplies the original text, published in the US and priced in dollars despite also appearing to have something to do with Penguin.

The first thing I learn is that the original story ran to just 17 pages. So the adaptation has turned 17 pages into an hour, whereas the adaptation of 300 rather bigger pages of Jane Austen might turn into six hours. So no surprise that the Poirot adaptation works by adding things to the original story while the Austen adaptation works by subtracting things. Assuming the function from number of pages to running time to be continuous, there must be a break even point where the adaptation contains no more and no less than what was in the original.

The second thing is that the original story is told in the first person by Captain Hastings. There is a landlady but there is no Miss Lemon, making the original set-up much more like that of Sherlock Holmes than that which appears on telly.

The third thing is that the villain is called Jacob in both versions. Which struck me when reading the story as a bit of mild anti-semitism, fairly rife at the time of writing, even in this country. But Mr G. offers no support for my theory that the name is more common among Jews than Gentiles. But it does tell me that my given name, James, is derived from the same Hebrew root as Jacob.

The fourth thing, is the scenes which have been added to the telly version. We have the business of Hastings and his regime, his diet and his exercises. Inspector Japp does not appear at all in the original story. The telly version makes much of train journeys and antique cars which appear but are not a big deal in the original story, being more or less contemporary with it. The telly version adds a midnight meeting of the dentist and his nurse, a visit by Poirot to the villain's shop, an attempted visit by Hastings to the dentist who turns out not to be the villain, a funeral, a reading of the will, and an exhumation. The doctor is made to be more of a prat on telly than he is on the page. And Poirot does not talk in a foreign accent on the page, does not include much Belgish and does not talk about the vox populi.

The fifth thing is a small number of few minor changes. Poirot does not meet the victim in the rain on the page but he does write out a full confession for the villain to sign. Last but not least, on the page Poirot honours his word to give the villain a 24 hours start. On telly this is presumably thought to be giving the villain too much leeway and is not to be tolerated on prime time telly which might possibly be watched by children in addition to the elderly. So Poirot is made to break his word. Maybe a serious point here in that 100 years ago a gentleman's word was his bond. Not to be broken. An episode (when he lies to save the situation, but the lie turns out to be true so he remains a gent. after all) in a Hornblower story depends on this. A famous play starring Al Pacino depends on the written version, that is to say where a gentleman's signature, rather than his word, was his bond. But are we better or worse off that this is no longer anything like as true as it was? Or have things not really changed at all? Have I just overdosed on the Daily Mail?

All in all, a decent if slight story adapted in an entirely fair way to the box. Quite clever how they can spin an hour out of so little material. An hour which I have watched at least twice without strain. Maybe some of the extra material has been purloined from other stories.

So now we have catalogued the differences between the adaptation and the original. The next task is to do the analysis. Why was the original expanded in the particular way that it was? To be continued after the parts that ordinary beers do not reach have been refreshed.

Presently squeaking up the left-overs for tea, following a hard afternoon's shopping in Kingston, now being fully converted to the merits of the shopping bus from Chessington World of Adventure. £2 return each, no reduction for freedom card holders, bus every ten minutes. A lot cheaper and faster than messing around with the car all the way there.

Interested to see that the computer services and instrumentation industries might be getting a good multi-billion pound project off the government blocks before the public expenditure chopper falls. It seems that there is a plan to put a gadget in every home which will collect readings from meters for gas, water and electricity and send them off to some central meter reading exchange, which will then pass them on to the relevant supply company. All of which will require adapting every existing meter, adding a new gadget to every home, building the data collection network (to be piggy backed off the mobile phone system it seems) and the central exchange. Lots of work for all kinds of people. Can't remember anything like it since the conversion to North Sea gas in the early seventies. Furthermore, households can opt to have the smart version of the gadget at £25 a person or £100 a family with free biennial chipgrade and a free annual newsletter. This smart version will do things like detect smoke, heat, light, alcohol, nicotine and the volatile derivatives of recreational substances. This will enable the emergency services to attend in good time and the gadget to provide you with personalised lifestyle advice 24 by 7. It will also know what television programmes you are watching. All you have to do is to tell the thing from whom you buy your various services so that the readings can be routed to the right place.

Perhaps by the time New Labour is back in power, the time will have come for us all have chips implanted in the lobes of our left ears, chips which will be able to talk to the gadget which we were originally told was all to do with reading the gas meter. This will mean the the lifestyle advice could get really personal. The same chip would probably also be used as identification in banks, immigration desks and the like. Savings all round. Harriet Harman rules! Give the lady a fag.

On the subject of the public expenditure chopper, it would be fun to be a fly on the wall and watch all those fancy projects justified ever so recently and with much expenditure of paper, pomp and committee time, on the grounds of all sorts of benefits and savings in the future, being canned. Savings in the hand worth more than savings in the future when the credit ratings people are sniffing at the door. All this invest to save has got to stop.

To close, I retail some bank stuff from the DT. It seems that despite all its cataclysmic headlines about HMG mismanagement of the sorry saga of RBS, that said HMG is set to come out ahead, mainly as it is charging RBS handsomely for its bail out. And RBS is still making enough dosh going forward to pay the charges.

While all this was going on did a bit of tweeting, to the point of extracting FIL's bins from the coat cupboard where they live. Lots of blue tits and great tits feeding on the cypress tree with its clusters of small round cones. But of more interest was a bird about the size of a starling with a distinctive yellow flash on each side of the head. Investigation suggested that it was something called a redwing, something I have never knowingly seen before.

Later on in the day it came to my attention that a certain commercial premises in Epsom contains an ashtray which contains cigarette butts which can be seen from the side walk if one looks carefully. Butts which move around, which suggests that the ashtray is active. Now while it is not a crime to have an active ashtray in a place of work, such a thing does suggest that someone may be smoking in a place of work, which is. Should I phone up the smoke sneak line? Should I complain to the appropriate authority that the smoke police are not up to their jobs? Perhaps I shall just wait to see if it survives.

Meantime I ponder about synopses. I start off by learning that the three synoptic gospels are so called because they all have the same synopsis, that is to say they all tell roughly the same story. Rather an odd use of the word but there we are. However, my interest is more in when it is appropriate to provide a synopsis, preface, introduction or management summary to a piece of written work, which we suppose for the sake of argument to be around 33 pages of A4 single spaced typescript without headings or much in the way or breaks . Now, in the civil service world, if one was not a higher authority and one wanted to get one's work read by someone who was, one stood no chance if one did not provide a three or four lines saying why he or she should. These three or four lines might say something about the catastrophic consequences of not doing something. They might attempt to summarise an argument and its conclusion, where the conclusion should be something you wanted the higher authority to do. Higher authorities were not generally into being educated for its own sake.

In the case that the that there were more than two pages, the three or four lines should be followed by a management summary which should be approximately 8.5% of the length of the whole.

Then many works of non-fiction include either preface or introduction, sometimes both, in which case the preface precedes the introduction and is more about how the work came to be done while the introduction introduces the work itself. I think that more often than not I do not read either preface or introduction, so wasted on me. Most have more or less elaborate contents pages. Some have summaries at the head of each chapter. Most books include promotional material on the dust jacket; stuff to encourage one to read something by someone you may of never heard of before. You may come to a book by virtue of reading notice of it in a newspaper.

But if one is just clutching a manuscript and you want someone who has never heard of you to take it seriously, what does one do? What sort of shape should it appear in? Does one attempt to synopsise what one has done so that the someone can get the idea without actually having to bother to read the thing? Do you build an elaborate table of contents and have lots of headings and sub-headings to help readers find their way about? An approach which in some parts of the civil service results in documents being all heading and no content. And one which A. Huxley has no truck with: his essays just start and have no apparent structure at all. But they are quite readable. While designers of modern science books are quite into structure. Lots of sections, headings, inserts, pictures and diagrams. Maybe an animated CD to go with the book. Summaries of the argument. Questions to test your understanding. Visual tricks to keep you on the ball; not unlike, in some ways, those used by the Sun to keep their pages looking lively.

Does one cultivate such a gripping style that the someone is sucked in from the first word and does not need the support of sections and headings? Do you do what Mrs Harry Potter had to do and tramp around dozens of publishers until you hit one who can be bothered to read what you have done? Not sure I would have the stomach for this last. I think I would give up after two or three. Have to go on ego-growing classes to build myself up before setting out on something of this sort.

Perhaps I shall trawl the net for advice on such matters. Or try one of the small-ads from published (and possibly publishing) authors in the TLS offering services to budding authors.

Yesterday to Epsom station for a bit of train spotting, hoping to see again the strange train I saw the other night. Locomotive at both ends, something very inferior to the Class 45 locos the better trains from Cambridge to London used to be pulled by. It had the same general shape as a 45 but it was smaller all round and had a shorter snout; I think now maybe Class 38 but this is denied at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_Rail_modern_traction_locomotive_classes which claims that such things were never made. Anyway, between the two locos were maybe half a dozen recycled passenger cars, painted a dingy yellow. Some of them still had windows through which one could see sink, kettle, coffee pot, a range of flat screen PCs and a vacuum cleaner. And there were some large contraptions. The only person involved appeared to be the driver marching sturdily from one loco to the other. But what it was all about I could not tell; nor could the Portuguese (I think) lady who had charge of the platform at that time. So imperative to see the thing again and have another crack at identification. But failed. The thing was nowhere to be seen.

Foiled here, we carried on to the South Bank to pay our third visit in three weeks to 'Eat'; indeed our second visit to this very branch in two weeks. A far more sensible place than the poncy eatery entirely inappropriately called 'Canteen'.

Then off to hear Imogen Cooper play Schubert. A triumph, played to a nearly full and very enthusiastic house. Off to a stunning start with impromptu number 1 in C minor (D899, part), through to the climax of a sonata in B flat (D960) and wound down by what the chap behind me thought was one of the moments musicaux (D780). Sadly, my stock of Schubert piano music very thin so it may be a while before I track it down. Amazed, once again, by the way that one piano can fill a big hall, even when being played very quietly. Reminded of a cheap crack that Norman Lamont made at the expense of one of his hard working mandarins, who, thinking to congratulate him on his handling of a meeting, told him (Lamont that is) that he thought he (Lamont again) handled the silences very well. Lamont relates, we all laugh. But we were all wrong. Managing silences in meetings is a very useful art. And managing - or perhaps timing - silences is something that Imogen Cooper did very well last night. Not to mention the telling chords dropped into those silences. And then there was the thought that how odd it was that a composer who died of the clap in his mid thirties getting on for 200 years ago, speaking through a lady in middle years and a posh piano, could hold 1,000 of us in thrall for a couple of hours. You are not going to get much more immortal than that. Odd also that we in Epsom should rate the creative arts so highly. All those hoodies doing substance enhanced conceptual art at http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/. When there is so much to be had from reproductive arts. A point that D H Lawrence made many years ago in 'Women in Love' when castigated by a tiresome lover that he ought to be creative rather than copy the creation of someone else.

A pity that so few pubs still do rolls of this ordinary sort, which used to be common when I was little. A roll or a pie is just the thing to accompany the odd jar. Much more suitable than shredded duck in crispy pecan sauce or vegetarian taglitelly served with a hint of tarragona. Presumably caught in the squeeze between people losing their taste for rolls and pubs getting a taste for higher value snacks.

Must try and find out whether 'Delaware' is still used for Tesco's own brand stuff, in the way that M&S used to use 'St Michael'. And did Tesco give the name Delaware to the road that housed their HQ or did Tesco give their name to the road? And then, does Sir T. live above the shop in a modest - or perhaps magnificent - penthouse?

More recently we have been reflecting on the Foxy Loxy business in Perugia. I share a few thoughts to add to the billions - or perhaps trillions - which must be out here already. First thought, is that it is a pity that there is not better evidence on which to send two young people down for 25 years. Not to say that they are not guilty as found, but one would be more comfortable had they been caught with weapons which matched the wounds in hand. Or some such. Reminded of the saying from a legal friend to the effect that the quality of evidence required to convict varies inversely with the severity of the crime. Second thought, is it possible for stuff to be blanked out on whatever they were consuming that night? Fred Vargas builds one of her murder yarns on a policeman who gets drunk, has a bit of night blanked out, and cannot be sure whether he did the deed or not. (As it turns out the blanking out was caused by the real bad person bashing him over the head then injecting noxious substance). Maybe these two just do not know what happened on the night. Third thought, the DT on Saturday and the Observer on Sunday were both hot on the weakness of the evidence. Maybe the pendulum, having done the hate thing on this (at the very least) badly behaved young woman is now swinging the other way. Fourth thought, why did it take so long for the thing to come to trial, given that they laid their hands on the people they eventually charged more or less immediately? On what I have come across so far, glad I am not a Perugian judge of appeal.

A much better example of creativity exploration was to be found yesterday at Cambridge's Mill Road festive fair. A long, narrow and diverse retail area bristling with houses, shops and restaurants. A good proportion of whom had joined in the fun. Plus a variety of festive stalls selling a mixture of decorative and culinary crafts. Plenty of interesting snacks. IPA rather better quality than that which used to be found in TB. Various song and dance acts to liven things up. You could even have a guided tour of the local mosque. Lots of people out in the afternoon sun. Couldn't think of anywhere else which would lend itself to this sort of thing. Can't think of any other street quite of this sort. You used to have bustling high streets in parts of London but too big and wide to work well at community engagement. Keep an eye on http://www.mill-road.com/Home.aspx for next year.

One of the things we came across was a Chinese bronze contraption, a bowl with a broad flat brim with two rounded handle mounted on it. Fill the thing with water and rub the handles in the right way and the whole thing, including the water starts vibrating in a most odd way. The water dances. And if you put your finger in the dancing water you can feel the throbbing. Very therapeutic I should think. And if this does not make much sense, think of the trick of running a wet finger around the rim of an empty wine glass or beer glass to make the glass sing.

Stayed in the Gonville Hotel, very conveniently placed for Mill Road, the Catholic Church and town centre. Good sized car park, nice rooms. Plus points for the internet access mentioned above, a good quality, freshly cooked breakfast (no hot lights) and for carrying gluten free bread. Minus points for kippers (declined) which sounded as if they were soggy shrink wrapped fillets, a wash basin which was far too high for the average female and a water supply in the bath which could not decide whether it was coming out of the taps or the secondary shower head.

On the way back home we attempted a pilgrimage to the Tesco HQ in Cheshunt. We remembered that it was Delaware House in Delaware Road and the point of interest being that it is said to be a very modest affair for a very large company. No flashy nonsense in Holborn for Sir T. Leahy. Sadly, not having bothered to check beforehand, we found Cheshunt and we found a giant Tesco Store, but no Delaware Road. The giant store was most impressive though. Must have been at least a 50 checkout operation. They also had a cafe without music and with doughnuts. Fresh and sugary looking affairs which we declined.

Back home, had some trouble finding Delaware Road. Google maps seemed to know about the place but would not take me there. Not sure what was going on here. Eventually get to the Tesco site where they do indeed have a handy location map for Delaware Road, which was, after all, near Cheshunt Station and nowhere near the flashy Tesco store that we did visit. A bit like Microsoft on a small scale. Building number 1, Building number 2, Old Tesco House, and so on and so forth. Next time we will make it and pay our respects to what was, when I was little, a company of rather small, scruffy and downmarket self service outlets. How fast can the mighty grow?

More adventurous, had a go with veal yesterday, something I do not recall cooking for forty years or so. Sliced off a miniature rump steak shaped piece of meat. Bashed between cellophane to double its original area. Fry some chopped garlic and bashed black pepper in regular rape seed oil. Do the veals for two or three minutes each side, which resulted in an accumulation of an interesting pinkish froth. A prettier version of the froth you get when boiling up pork bones. Serve with mashed potato and cabbage. Not bad, but not sure that I would not rather have calves' liver and bacon for the money. Maybe next time I will try the egg and breadcrumbs version, avoided on this occasion because of FIL's breadcrumbs aversion.

Thinking of the lentils lurking in the top cupboard, we had occasion to check up on moths the other day. The point at dispute was whether it was the moths or their worms which did the damage. Mr G. found an article on the subject which was quite unequivocal. It's the worms that do the business, with the moths, generally speaking, having no mouths. They only exist to mate and lay eggs. Slightly off-putting to think of fat white worms creeping about one's cupboards and carpets. Coming back to lentils, the article went on to say that as well as fibre fond moths there were also dried food fond moths - to the point where any dried food - flour, rice, beans, lentils - was vulnerable to attack. What do the org-food crowd do about this I wonder? No fumigation with dodgy organo-phosphates for them. How did the Neal's Yard people get on in those far off days when they had a very basic warehouse full of sacks of stuff in Neal's Yard itself? When their staff had long hair and quite possibly smoked during their lunch breaks?

The adventurous vein must have been quite strong as a varied the route home from Cheam today. So instead of heading straight back to Epsom headed up Malden Road towards Worcester Park, in the hope of finding a golf shop to buy one of those see-thru plastic peaked caps without a top to keep out the low flying winter sun, which had seemed particularly trying on the way to Cheam. Trying to the point of being dangerous as one swung around a corner into full sun - and blinded. All too easy to hit or be hit. However, no golf shops in Cheam and the road ran a long way downhill, with me starting to fret about the haul back up again. So chickened out of Worcester Park and turned left at the A24, pushed over a modest hill to the west of Nonsuch Park, over the lights to Ewell and so home to try the (plaited. The unplaited version has been off for a few weeks) chollah, it being Friday.

Got to pondering about the digital books at the University of Adelaide mentioned yesterday. Chapter 3 of Volume 3 of 'A la recherche' on a single web page? In my English copy this chapter runs to 151 decent sized pages with smallish type. So went back to check, and while the text seemed a little thinner than the Scott Moncrieff translation, didn't actually find any missing chunks and didn't have the patience to check properly. Maybe they have just used a more recent translation which has settled on a less luxurious style. Unfortunately, the meta-data for the text was a little thin. I couldn't find anything about what edition they had scanned and OCR'd. Although the FAQ section did explain that scanning and OCR'ing was reasonably error prone.

The good news is that I could down load a copy of 'Finnegan's Wake' more or less in one piece. The last time I tried to do this I had to bring down text in some unpleasant online format a page or so at a time. All very tedious. The catch with this latest discovery being that one loses some of what Joyce wrote in the clean text format. Some of the material depends on the layout on the printed page and this has been lost in transcription to html. Perhaps, if one was fussy, one would have both the image and the transcription. The catch being that one would need a big screen to do justice to the thing. Maybe simpler just to stick to the book since I have a perfectly good reading copy. And, to be fair, this is only an issue with a very select band of famous writers. So it is an issue with some Sinclair Lewis but not with any Marcel Proust.

Get to Cheam to discover that I need to make a retraction in that I may have suggested that his Bakewell tarts were sufficiently neat to have come from a factory. This turns out to be entirely unfair as I caught him in the act of unloading a batch off a baking tray onto a plastic delivery tray. These, as it happens, were not quite as neat as the ones he sells over the counter. Maybe the Christmas rush is getting to him.

Yesterday to learn about the origins of Vauxhall at Tate Local from Ross Davies. First factlet, the interior of the Tate Local reminded me of the interior of the library on Lavender Hill where I have had occasion, from time to time, to use the Internet. Both impressive, although rather different, buildings from the glory days when reformers thought to educate the working classes. Second factlet, it seems that Vauxhall was invented by one Fawkes de Breaute, a robber baron from Normandy who did well in the reign of King John and the disturbances which followed. Career came to a messy end during the minority of Henry III. My Kingston Oxfam purhase of 'King Henry III and the Lord Edward', two volumes by Powicke, devotes about a column inch of index to him. It seems that the messy end included one of the most serious castle seiges of the day, ending with the chief occupants being hung (after absolution). Fawkes himself was luckily absent. But unluckily exiled so he never got his paws back on the 11,000 unaccounted-for marks which he had deposited with the Templars in London, who, it seems, providing private banking services at the time, UBS not having been invented. But to come back to Vauxhall, it seems that Fawkes had his town house there, so the area came to be known as Fawkes' Hall, over time corrupted to Vauxhall. Nothing to do with the various places of that name in France or the brewery up north. Third factlet, the animal decorating the bonnet of Vauxhall cars - only actually made in Vauxhall for a very short time - is taken from Fawkes' device.

And then there is, I think, an aristocratic Breaute who figures in Proust. He certainly appears as Mr G. comes up with lots of the stuff. And, for once, and when I don't particularly want one, I come across a handy digital text without any trouble at all at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au. Without even looking for one. Just like buses, chippers and offies. Always there when you don't want them. Now Proust was into fancy cars; perhaps he was into early Vauxhalls and came across the name that way.

On the train on the way home learned about a new trick in the world of fashion. When I was small, when one bought a coat or a jacket, it was the custom to include a spare button or two in a little bag in an inside pocket. Now it seems, the little bag is sometimes attached high up on the outside of the back of the garment as a feature or a bit of trim. The example on the train looked as if the appearance of the garment might be damaged if one actually tried to use the spare buttons. Alternatively, the lady in question had the thing on inside out.

The train also included a lot of young Germans which may have accounted for my dream the following morning, that is to say, this morning. I was in a rather small room full of drinkers, some German. I was standing with my elbow on the top of my fathers desk. I thought the Germans were being a bit tiresome so I thought I would wind them up by doing something a bit loutish. So I toss my not quite empty bottle of Newky Brown along the top of the desk, with it landing on its side, perched on the edge, with a very modest dribble of Newky onto the floor. Germans look absolutely aghast at such loutism. But, just as they are about to biff me, they realise that it is a leg pull and pull back, pretending, not very successfully, that they think the performance amusing.

Pondering further on the caffeine content of tea I light upon http://www.teatalk.com/science/chemistry.htm which tells me that a 200ml cup of green tea contains 76mg of caffeine. Also that oolong tea is characterised by, amongst other things, the presence of the scary sounding dimeric proanthocyanidin. Try the same trick for coffee and find that roasted coffee beans are about 1.5% caffeine by weight. But making the comparison between tea and coffee looks like being more tricky. I learn along the way that Necafe has a very fancy web site, far stronger on image than content, befitting its status as market leader in the convenient coffee world.

But I keep trying and find http://www.diffen.com, which appears to be a poor relation of Wikipedia. It tells me that ordinary tea has maybe a third of the caffeine of coffee, with green tea a third of that again and oolong tea somewhere in between. I think whoever wrote it is of a tea=healthy and coffee=unhealthy bent. Amongst other things he talks of getting coffee jitters when whacking back too much of the stuff. Which I recognise: jitters does not seem quite the right word but drinking too much tea or coffee can make me feel a bit odd. Maybe the answer is to stop drinking tea by the pint. But not an answer to which Mr Benn would sign up to. I believe he drinks tea (conventional variety) by the pint, is teetotal, smokes a pipe and has made it to 85 or so in pretty good shape. Which means we might be stuck with his son for a good while yet. See previous post on the subject of my aversion to political families.

Another aversion is headlines in newspapers which ought to know better which scream about some awful decision taken in the health world - like closing down the only A&E facility for 100 miles or so - because of filthy lucre. Filthy bureaucrats who put money before lives. Odd, given the money driven world that we live in, that more people do not understand that money should be an important driver in the health world. Health is very expensive and if we do not allocate scarce resources in a cost sensitive way we are not going to be very healthy.

I now have to confess to some weakness on the Epsom Common front in that I did not attend the annual general meeting of the Epsom Common Association and attempt to make any impact on their chain-saw wielding cow-friendly policies. Which I abhor. Partly because I did not find the energy to tromp down to some village hall in the depths of a November evening. Partly because I suspected that I would just have got shrill and cross and not made the right sort of impact on this gathering of early retired ecos in woollies. Although I suppose it would have had the virtue of reminding those that run the association that we do not all like what they do. I wonder how long it will take them to catch up on the fact that gratuitous cow growing is not presently considered ecological - a far more serious concern than playing at farm. Maybe they should read their Guardians more closely.

Getting on well with Deutscher on Stalin, now maybe a quarter of the way through. Decidedly not shrill and comes across as very fair. And readable - quite a feat in itself for someone whose first language was not English. I share one snippet. England and France by backing the wrong side in 1918 or so made an already dreadful civil war drag on for longer than it would otherwise. Thus contributing to the subsequent transition to totalitarianism. If the revolution had been consolidated without so much blood being shed things might have turned out better. A lesson for today.