pumpkinstrokemarrow

But once our government moves into cuts mode to pay for the RBS bankruptcy, it is going to get worse. All this talk of preserving front line services is piffle. Government may not be the most efficient place on the world, but on the whole it does things because there is a need. To that extent all its services are front line services. To the extent that there are second line services which exist to keep the front line services in the field - remember the rule of thumb which says that you need 100 RAF personnel to keep 1 RAF fighter pilot in the air - one can cut those without causing immediate, visible damage. But again, the second line services are there for a reason and if you cut them you are apt to damage the front line services. If you pack up training the front line servicemen, the standard of front line service is going to get worse over time.

All of which means that there are going to be some hard choices to be made. Epsom Council has made a good start by abolishing the concession whereby holders of blue cards do not need to pay to park on council car parks. But we keep the concession of having more convenient and bigger spots on which to park. So for us, with FIL not very disabled and well able to pay, a reasonable outcome. But it might not happen yet. A car park attendant told us that most of the car parking paying machines are out of the reach of someone in a wheel chair and that it is going to take lots of months and lots of money to fix this. Maybe the council will decide that it is not worth the bother after all.

But what about the workers in Greece? Probably unbeknown to them, they had been living on credit lines provided, at least indirectly, by the thrifty Chinese, but facilitated by the bankers who now need bailing out. Bankers who were very well paid for taking risks with other peoples' money and most of whom still seem to be very well paid. But the credit lines now moribund if not dead and the Greek government is busily slashing government expenditure to make up the difference. I guess the Greek workers want to see a few more bankers hung out to dry on crosses before they start taking the pain themselves. And while they are doing that, maybe we should be starting to think more seriously about the value-add of the financial services sector. Are they really worth the candle? Never mind the bother. How do we put the squeeze on them? See the tail end of the post of August 16, 2007. Maybe I really should get on with that MPhil.

Odd dream again last night. I was at some summer tea party. Outside, in the sun, various attractions, work flavoured. I leave, going through some rigmarole to get from the tea party, through the ancient office building, back to the real world, accompanied by one of the attractions, something but not exactly like a younger version of the BH. I think that I am onto a good thing, but she rushes across the big road we have wound up on, into the large Boots-like shop there. She busies herself buying toiletries or toothpaste or something and shows no sign of coming back over. I can see all this through the large, blue tinted plate glass shop front. Not too good. But then I spot a harassed looking business person standing on the kerb-side with a rather harassed looking pile of luggage. By way of distraction, I go across to see if I can help. He turns out to be some kind of an engineer from the US on his way to a conference but who has got lost. He gets out some papers which are no help. Then he fishes out a battered business card which tells us he should be going to Clapham Common. We are somewhere in the vicinity of Whitehall. First thought taxi. But then I think that this is going to take far too long so the tube is the answer. I know that Clapham Common is on the Northern Line but completely fail on how to get to the Northern Line from Whitehall. Various passers by stop to help, one of them producing a wildley inaccurate and completely unhelpful map of Clapham Common. But I can't deal with the situation at all. Start to wake up, thinking that maybe a taxi in the middle of the day would have only taken 40 minutes or so and might have been the right option. And as I get to be fully awake I solve the conundrum of how to get from Whitehall to the Northern Line. Far too late to be of any help to anyone.

Which prompted ponderings about graffiti which I had picked up from a strange, but rather pleasing, book called 'Among the Trees', privately printed in a limited edition of 1,000 copies by the 'Men of Trees' back in 1935. I think these people are much closer to my line on trees than the chain saw bandits of Epsom Common (see above, search still working!). Anyway, the story was that beech trees with their smooth bark have always been the favoured tree of youths who want to inscribe their love in some permanent and visible way, this before the age of the spray can. The point of interest being the allegation that the trees grow over the resultant graffiti over time, leaving a permanent record inside the tree. So the record of your love is locked up inside the tree, more or less for ever. Now if one was simply to carve the graffiti in the bark, I do not think this would work, as I think that the growing layer of a tree is the damp sap wood which lies immediately underneath the bark. But if one takes one's carving into the sap wood, which I guess one probably would as this would increase visibility, there might well be a scar in the course of time. Bit expensive in time and trees to be absolutely sure about this, so I guess I had better let the matter drop.

But I was moved to find out whether this gang still exist and find that they have been rebranded as the International Tree Foundation with a rather glossy web site at http://internationaltreefoundation.org/ sporting the vision of a world where trees and forests flourish and where their vital role in supporting life on earth is fully realised and valued. From which I also learn that they have left their rather prestigious address at 10 Victoria Street, SW1, for the leafy suburb of Sandy Lane in Crawley Down.

Printing off a map to facilitate such inspection came across a neat feature of embedded Google maps, that is to say maps made by Google but incorporated into someone else's web site. When you go to print the thing you get the option to type a bit of text into a box, which gets printed with the map and which, being legible, will remind you why you printed the thing off. Very neat.

PS what is not so neat is that having disturbed the font or spacing or something of the last sentence of what was the penultimate paragraph, I find I cannot back to the original. It might be legible but also very irritating for a wannabee geek.

PPS someone up there must be listening. Seem to be OK now.

So the next point is, if the great French public are tucking into this stuff, can it really be so bad? After all, airlines have poured lots of money into making fancy looking and acceptably tasting meals in the same sort of way. Maybe technology really is moving on. Maybe you really can pop the frozen meal into the microwave, count to a hundred, dispose a few dinky vegetables around the resultant hot goo (this way you can say prepared in our very own kitchen under the guidance of our very own grandmama) and serve. Encourage punter to whack down a bit of vino before he or she tucks in and everybody happy.

Then we suppose, that for practical purposes, that is to say for most people for most of the time, we get an acceptable result this way. What ground does the purist have to stand on? That this is the thin end of the wedge. That people will get used to eating the kind of highly charged, diabetes inducing food that does well in this sort of regime. That food will become subject to the means of cooking it cheap, rather than the other way around. It all sounds a bit thin.

Although it does remain true that it is quite hard to get in a restaurant the sort of vegetables which are quite straightforward to prepare in the home for a small number of people to a relaxed timetable. Also true that the amount of space devoted to real vegetables - swedes, curly cabbages and the like - in Mr. S. is a lot less than that devoted to mushy vegetables. Tasteful organic mix of lettuce leaves from more than one country sort of thing. All washed up and ready to go and entirely suited to vegetarians, coeliacs and vegans.

I am reminded of the regular scandals in the art world when someone passes something off for an ancient masterpiece and which subsequently turns out to have been knocked out by some apprentice in said master's mother-in-law's kitchen. Now what is clearly silly is that the value of the picture nose dives when this last fact hits the ether. The picture - or whatever - has not changed, but our perception of it has changed with our perception of its provenance. Which is, to my mind anyway, largely nonsense. If you cannot decide whether you like a picture by looking at it, should you be looking at pictures at all? Now if you are an highly paid expert in painter A, struggling to form a proper view of painter A in a world historical art perspective, you might reasonably care whether picture B is by painter A or painter C. If the latter, you are not going to devote too much of your valuable time to it. It would not add too much to your, or indeed our, knowledge of painter A and his or her place in the world of art. But the rest of us need not be troubled by such considerations. If you like it stick it, on the wall. That ought to be enough.

And now I find I have burbled myself into a corner where I should not be. There is a role for education. Things that one might not think too much of at first sight, with a bit of trouble and prompting might become an important part of one's life. Firing from the hip does not always - if indeed often - give the best result. Experts are useful. Harking back to the religious theme, we do need priests to show us the way to the Lord. Most of us are not going to find it all by ourselves. I guess the trick is for all of us to remember the limitations of experts of all sorts.

Next stop the Salvation Army charity shop between Clapham South and Balham, so pushed up the splendidly names Wix's Lane onto the common and headed across to Clapham South tube station. Still raining reasonably seriously and happy to shelter for a while in the charity shop. Where, as well as a jigsaw for FIL, we came across an interesting pile of records - presumably the result of on-decease clearings out of some of the once posh mansion flats in the area. So I am now the proud owner of Missa Luba sung by the troubadours du Roi Baudouin, somewhere back in the late fifties of the last century. Claimed to be authentic Congolese music. Rather impressive it was too. Plus some more Schubert by Clifford Curzon.

Rain easing off, push onto the second hand bookshop at Balham Station where I acquire a decent two volume, Dover edition of Burton going on pilgrimage to Mecca for £20. Neat fit with the current bout of Arab and Islamic readings. Plus, next door there was one of those dinky groceries used by the up market flat dwellers in the posher parts of Balham where I got a very decent white bloomer (sourced from a French baker) and some very decent, but very expensive Montgomery cheddar. All of which made up for the cheapness of our lunch.

Back home, Franklin has learned a new trick. I return from a modest spin to find him waiting in the drive. He hopped up onto the pannier rack from where he allowed himself to be wheeled up the drive into the garage.

And I have a new butcher to play with, to wit the one at the top end of Ewell village. I had been prompted to go there by stories about his excellent meat pies, but actually bought a neck of lamb - something that the butcher in Manor Green Road does not carry on account of its being too expensive - and it certainly is rather dear considering the amount of bone it comes with - which did for today's lunch as a Lancashire Hot Pot. The first time we have had such a thing since last year, not having had access to Cheam for most of that time. Very nice it was too, despite the potato element being somewhat overcooked, having been put in about 45 minutes before the off. Have also bought a brick of stewing steak for slow cooking purposes. We shall see how that does. There is also yet another dinky grocery next door. I shall have to investigate whether it sells bread.

Current betting is that I shall be back in Cheam during the first week or so of March. Maybe 10 weeks after the iced incident.

So what about churches in other parts of the world? Which way does the chapel face in the polar station at the South Pole? I assume that they do have facilities. I don't think Google Earth would help on this last point but it does help with Notre Dame in Paris, a sufficiently important place that they might pay attention to direction, and where I find that the altar faces something south of east, which would be right for a place a significant proportion to the east of us, on the way to Jerusalem. So maybe I do not need to worry at all.

Amused to read yesterday about people at No. 10 complaining about bullying. What on earth do they expect? We think it perfectly natural that celebrity chefs should f-word their way through the working day, exterminating legions of apprentices on the way. Why not prime ministers? They have just as demanding a job and don't even get decent pay. At least, not compared with celebrity chefs or, even, bankers before bonus.

And intrigued by an appercu on the arrangements for printing catalogues at Argos, which we happened to pass through in the afternoon. It seems that catalogues are a very important part of life at Argos as they had several open pallets containing catalogues for us to take away and the main counter was lined with a wall of the things. But the appercu was noticing that the closed pallets appeared to be colour coded by their plastic wrapping. On closer inspection the colour coding corresponded to someone called the binder. The main binder appeared to be binder D, the next most important binder A and the least important, numerically at Epsom anyway, was the binder at Nuremburg, Germany. What does a catalogue binder do? Does he just bind the pages which have been printed elsewhere? Does he print, cut and bind the pages which have been composed elsewhere and sent to him over the wire? How many binders do Argos need to have to guarantee supplies? It seems that a very important day in the life of Argos is 12 January when the spring/summer catalogue goes live. How many did they plan on having on store floors on that day? Several million? Epsom must have carried some thousands yesterday. Several million would be a fairly monster print run by book standards, and fairly hefty by newspaper standards - although one does not have to do the thing overnight, each night. Presumably, in the couple of weeks running up to that day, OIC catalogue is the most important person in Argos off the board. Direct line to god sort of person.

Then move onto the tubes. It turns out that I have just cracked into 'Colgate Advanced White with Micro-Cleansing Crystals' having been using 'Colgate Total Plus Whitening' hitherto. The flecks presumably being the Micro-Cleansing Crystals. Maybe somebody should tell the Colgate marketing people that most of us are quite picky about what we put into our mouths, something hanging over from our infantile training with mother, and sudden changes are not a good plan, particularly to a colour and texture more like oven cleaner than tooth cleaner.

Moving onto more serious matters, I was moved, when visiting the library the other day, to learn something about Islam, as distinct from the Arabs which I have been learning about over the last couple of weeks. Find that there is not very much at all in the way of general introductions, which rather surprised me, but did find a general introduction as part of the religious life of man series published by Wadsworth, this being the brand name of a publishing company from California rather than the brand name of a beer brewed in Devizes. Or perhaps formerly brewed in Devizes. They may have sold out. This introduction was called 'The House of Islam', and they do companion volumes on other religions, including, interestingly, one on religion in Africa. Anyway, as a general introduction, I thought it was rather good.

I have learnt, what seems obvious after the event, that many of the toils and turmoils inside Islam have quite close parallels with those inside Christianity. How seriously do we take the word itself? What role and standing do we accord to our priests? What is the proper relation between church and state? Who pays for the church? What about spirits, angels and saints?

Then about some of the attractive features of Islam. Its simplicity, with its five straightforward pillars of faith. And I saw much more point in Ramadan having read a little about it. Its not being that keen on poking around it matters which it regards as the province of the divinity. The absence of flummery and hierarchy in their worship, which remains, importantly, an impressive peice of communal activity. The equality of all before Allah, although they do admit to a certain amount of more equal than others, leaving here aside the standing of Mohammed himself.

Then some factlets. That, for example, the Muslims were in Spain for a longer time than they have been out of it. That Islam spread most of the way around the coasts of Africa and southern Asia. That a lot of stuff from the Greeks has come to us through the Arabs, who were civilised at a time when we were still doing the Middle Ages.

Then on Sunni and Shia. With, it seems, the Sunnis allowing rulings, progress and change to come through consensus, while the Shias give far more authority to their (unelected) religious leaders, dead and alive.

I think I shall look out for something at the next level.

On the way we thought to take in Ditchling Beacon which sported an all around panoramic sign on our elderly land ranger map. Climb up (in the car that is) the steepish hill to get there to find a very small National Trust car park more or less completely full, including, as is proper at such a place, an ice cream van. One which appeared to sell only ice cream; no teas or coffees or other aberrations of that sort. This being a late winter Saturday morning. What on earth would the place be like on a mid summer Sunday afternoon?

Not having looked at the map properly, found that we could not see Brighton from the beacon at all, despite the all around panoramic sign. We were on the top of the north facing scarp of the south downs, with spiffing views over the weald to the north. Just about make out a large gap in the downs to the east which we took to be the gap in which Newhaven had been planted. Odd bit of sea poking through. Presumably the same scarp as Butser Hill, some miles - 50? - to the west in Hampshire, which we used to know well during our sojourn in those parts. Google maps, not really the right vehicle for the purpose, but nevertheless suggest that this might indeed be the case, despite a wobbly bit north of Worthing.

Some hard core cyclists complete with hard core cycles and a specialised van explained that the beacon was indeed on the London-Brighton cycle run. They described the hill as a stiff one mile climb. Too old sezzaye. You would be surprised sezzthey. Plenty walk up but plenty of oldsters ride up with the best of us. Not convinced myself that I was ever fit enough to get up such a thing - and I certainly am not going to give it a go now. I shall stick to getting up Epson Downs - which are just about stiff enough for me.

Down in Brighton, had a spot of bother parking, despite the blue badge, and wound up in the small multi storey opposite Hove town hall, which came with a couple of nice wide, vacant disabled slots and a toilet. Everybody happy. Trundled along the Hove shopping streets which had plenty of interest, including plenty of eateries and a shop which sold old vinyl. Not very strong on Schubert, which I have decided is my weak suit, but I did manage a posthumous piano sonata in B flat, with an impromptu thrown in, recorded by one Clifford Curzon back in 1973. Back home I found that I knew the sonata really well - despite, as far as I could make out, not already having the record. Most odd.

Eventually made it to the prom. to find someone rather old to be skateboarding putting on a performance on a long line of small cones. Seeing him weaving down them was quite an impressive sight. Must have required a lot of strength in hip and thigh to make it down the whole line. Presumably the trick is to keep flipping the body in a sort of reverse sync. with the board so as to maintain forward momentum despite the zigs and zags. Something else I am not going to try.

Wonderful cloud display to the south.

Got slightly lost on the way back to the car-park which I had got located on the wrong side of the street. But FIL made it without complaint.

PS this post prompts Mr G. into putting up an advert for me about slimming. Does he think I am whacking down too many currant buns?

Cold in the breakfast sandwiches very dry. Felt the need to add a slice of tomato.

Made it half way to Cheam today, returning via the hump at West Ewell mentioned yesterday. With detours, the whole trip getting on for the same distance to Cheam and back. But the hump told me that I am not yet ready for Howell Hill: a few more days warming up needed yet.

Been pigging on Beethoven's Op. 95 string quartet the last few days. A wonderful thing on closer acquaintance. But I became mindful of B. Britten's worry about gramophones, relatively new and rare in his day. The worry being that ease of reproduction would mean that people would start listening to musical sublimities while chomping on their juice and cocoa-pops, which being rather disrespectful, insulting even, to the composer of said sublimities. All too easy: put the disc on the turntable, start to listen, then drift off to the bookcase and start on something else. Or off to the laptop. At least at a concert one does pay attention for a good proportion of the time; there are certainly less distractions.

All of which links to a worry of mine about pictures. If you are a popular model or singer or something of that sort, your picture is apt to be all over the red tops. Not to mention the entirely respectable fashion and media pages of the DT. From where it winds up sculling about in gutters, wrapping up fish and chips and being used to wipe mud off the kitchen floor before the BH gets home and pops off about it. No respect at all. Don't like the idea of my mug shot being used in this way. But I don't need to worry as it is very unlikely to arise. Which links in turn to an anecdote in McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' concerning an Indian chief who did not like the idea of a picture of himself existing at all; but since it did exist it could not be destroyed as that would be bad magic. So it had to be buried in the floor of some remote and unknown cave where it was most unlikely to be disturbed. Dry part of the world so decay would not be a problem either.

Oddly, Muslims have the reverse problem. They don't like images of people in case the images are shown too much respect, not too little.

Small parcel has just flopped through the door and not too pleased to find that part of my sparkling new direct debit in favour of the TLS has been used to send me a fairly naff cloth shopping bag and a small box of very tasteful TLS flavoured notelets. Notelets not being a medium of communication I have much use for. But as they do have the virtue of being blank inside, perhaps I will use them as greeting cards to such of my acquaintance who are apt to be impressed by such things. Or even visiting cards.

So later in the day, disembark at Earlsfield, the best station for Garrett Lane. Gave the quite decent secondhand bookshop a miss - the place from where many moons ago I was able to wow sprog 2 on the cheap with a not too elderly copy of 'Jane's Fighting Ships' - a book which, as it happens, fascinated me at about the same age - on the grounds that the pile of recently acquired unread books must be standing getting on for two feet high now. Then past the parade of shops by the station. One of those all purpose grocers used by young flat dwellers had a bit of salad orientated green grocery - but no savoy cabbage. And that was it for green grocery until I got to the all purpose supermarket by Fountain Road. Very good for booze, large bags of chick peas and sacks of rice. But otherwise much the same story. A bit of Asian orientated green grocery - but no savoy cabbage. Pushed on to Tooting Market to find that it was shut. And in all this time I had not passed a butcher or a baker. Not very keen on sour dough bread so did not push on down to the West Indian baker in Mitcham Lane. Probably shut anyway. But I did push on into the Mr. S. by Tooting Broadway tube station. Interested to see that, like at Vauxhall, the fags and lottery tills have pneumatic tubes to whisk away the money, a smaller version of the wonderful contraptions they used to have in the better department stores. They did have savoy cabbage here but the queues were tremendous. Even for the self service tills - which people in Epsom are still wary of, making them a good option there. So out of Mr. S. and tried the grocery across the road. More Asian orientated green grocery - but no savoy cabbage. So, off to Wetherspoons empty handed.

From all of which we can only deduce that on leaving Savoy, savoy cabbages marched west rather than east.

But the evening was redeemed by finding a copy of 'Edward II' in the library at Wetherspoons, in the same form and from the same publisher (Methuen) as the Arden Shakespeare. My chosen vehicle for swatting up before going to the Globe. I had not realised that back in the thirties, Marlowe was thought worthy of the full treatment, along with his colleague, the immortal bard. Given that I pay my dues at this establishment and that I have deposited more books than I have borrowed, I felt fully entitled to borrow this one to enlighten my journey home. Which it did, as I came across the line 'shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay', almost certainly the source of the title of Aldous Huxley's second novel, 'Antic Hay'. Methuen explained to me that a hay was a sort of country dance, already a touch old fashioned in Marlowe's day.

This morning to Mr. S. at Epsom to buy my savoy using the self service check out there. That, plus a detour on the way home, made a run about equivalent to one-way to Cheam. Getting there. Next step should perhaps be to try the hump over the railway line at West Ewell.

With that, off to worry about what Mr. G. is doing with my address book. Something frightful according to the Independent of yesterday. This snippet amongst a fair bit of padding, the sort of stuff that I could knock out myself without any regard to what might be going on in the outside world. I suppose they cannot afford many proper journalists.

Almost a nightmare. I seemed to be around 40 years old having managed without having to go to any proper sort of paid work in all that time. No gainful employment. But for some unexplained reason all this was coming to an end. Then I remembered that I had a few quid in the building society. Could I eke it out for the next twenty five years until my state pension kicked in? Could I maintain the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed on £10,000 a year? Could I send the BH back out to work? Bad plan as she might think that that left me being the house husband. Have to learn how to turn the vacuum cleaner on. Maybe even the washing machine. Getting very worried indeed. Wake up to remember that I am already in receipt of a pension and there is no need to go to work at all. Ever again. What a relief.

So by the time I had whacked back a couple of Waitrose cabanos (without cheese) with some thinly sliced stale white bread and washed it all down with a few mugs of oolong I was fully restored.

Oolong certainly working better now that I have remembered the instructions from the Chinese doctor lady from whom I bought the stuff - Sea Dyke Fujian in sturdy foil in a red box. Use the same pinch of tea leaves over and over. Maybe change the pinch every two or three days. This way you don't get such a caffeine hit - something which does not really agree with me.

And, for once in a while, Chrome crashed earlier this morning. But it got itself back up again within around 10 seconds, with no ill-effects apparent.

Now into the second pass of 'That they may face the rising sun' by John McGahern. An interesting tale of rural Ireland, set perhaps in the sixties or seventies. A rural Ireland which seems rather violent compared with the rural England that I know. A fair bit of coarseness, casual brutality and fighting. A fair bit of poverty. A world where music, song and amateur dramatics are, or at least were, important. A slightly tense relationship between those who have stayed, those who have gone and those who have returned. Much time spent on the natural beauties of the place, time which smells a little of the inkhorn. Not of someone who has lived in the country all his life. I await a copy of 'Amongst Women' from the library, Amazon, for once, having failed me.

Prompted to turn up my three volumes of the CODOT occupational classification from the Manpower Services Commission, fourth impression, 1978. These are the brave people who thought to produce a hierarchical classification of occupation with 18 major groups broken down into 73 minor groups, in turn broken down into 378 unit groups. The unit groups list some 3,500 occupations. The organisation is slightly classist, in that most of the higher grade occupations appear towards the beginning of the classification. Our members of Parliament have been placed, for example, unit group 001, ahead of big cheeses out in the real world at 002. Archaeologists do rather badly attracting just one occupational heading, lumped in with social workers and religious occupations. Mathematicians, an occupation I once aspired to, rate four occupational headings, albeit a lot further down the list. Whereas, as a middle of the road IT person I am comfortably ahead of the archaeologists, in major group II, in a gang attracting five occupational headings.

Pleased to see that even back in the benighted seventies, the Commission knew which side its bread was buttered on and listed no less than 18 different sorts of broker. But the brokers should not get too excited because the Commission also listed 20 different sorts of boiler. Down among the working classes I see I could have been a curtain glazing machine attendant, while the very last occupation is just a not elsewhere classified. But the three before that are heavy labourer, light labourer and stage hand in that order. So that puts wannabee luvvies helping out in their proper place. Real luvvies get to rub shoulders with conjurers and clowns in a more respectable part of the classification.

All in all, the business of trying to organise occupations in this way is much more interesting endeavour than I realised when I was involved with such things. Although perhaps doomed. Well, I might think doomed, but it looks as if the National Statistics Office are still at it, with the current classification being the offspring of CODOT and the thing done by the Census Office. Major groups still rule, although, to be fair, there are now rather fewer of them.

During the return from the same expedition, came across a horde of young people from Therfield School in Leatherhead, that well known London overspill town near us. Or, to be more precise, got into the railway carriage in which they were going home. They seemed to be at the jolly stage of inebriation, although one pale young lady was having a meaningful discussion with the waste bin by the door. Others appeared to be rather under-dressed considering the temperature outside. It seems that 250 or so of them had been at a birthday party on a boat. I wondered how many of the 250 would be found at various times, dropped off at various places along the route between the boat and Leatherhead. I managed to avoid being joined into a dance by waving my crock stick, fortunately thought to be sufficient excuse.

Woke this morning to a reverie about the seven time lords. These are the chaps who are in charge of the seven observatory like buildings - there is one on Mount Teide in Tenerife (http://www.iac.es/) - who are responsible for maintaining time on earth. The first drill is that the difference between the first time and the last time among the seven times from the seven time lords must not be more than seven millionths of a second; any more than that and red lights start flashing and alert levels start climbing. Ministers of Time all over get got out of bed. The second drill is that anyone on earth must, in normal operation, be able to receive timing signals from at least three of them, thus allowing a bit of room for maintenance and accident. Any self respecting computer centre will invest in at least two sets of the equipment needed to receive such signals and will thus, almost all the time, be able to put proper time stamps on the transactions it is processing, usually in concert with other computer centres with the same facility. This way the free world keeps afloat, with the free world being so connected these days that any break in time service will very rapidly turn into disaster if not strife.

So although the business of being a time lord is really fairly mundane, would only just about attract tenure in the senior civil service in the ordinary way of things, in practise it gets a boost of several grades, reflecting the big place of time in critical global infrastructure. They get fancy dining rooms and lots of very important meetings in very nice places. The facilities themselves are discrete - like that in Tenerife - and do not advertise their core business. There is also plenty of discrete protection, both the physical and the Khyber sort.

With a bit more energy, one could bang out a whole thriller about the business. Either a solemn one or a spoof one, as the mood takes one. Or even a scientific one, going into the cracks in the time transmission part of the special theory of relativity. Do a Dan Brown on it. So he had better watch his back.

What's the bet that I shall get really cheesed off and go to the bother of going back to O2?

Mr G. clearly thinks it is odds on as he is popping adverts for O2.

Having found that the clip which holds the saddle in place on No. 1 bicycle was knacked - to be more precise the thread on the aluminium bolt which tightened the thing up had got stripped somehow - the first spin was on the No. 2 bicycle. Up the road and back again a couple of times.

On day 2 walked bicycle No. 1 to the Pound Lane shop to find it closed. Carried on to the Upper High Street Shop. Yes he had and fitted a similar clip, this time with a steel bolt, the only catch being that for a very modest bit of metal one was charged £7.99. Cost to manufacture a few pence. Whereas, when I went to our Ford dealer to replace a small bit of plastic trim which had been knocked out of what passes for a front bumper these days, I was pleasantly surprised to be charged a modest £2.21, having thought that any car part starts at around £22.1. Plus the thing slotted into place. The knock hadn't taken out any of the bumper side lugs which might have taken us into the seriously expensive land of new bumper. Despite it also being a lump of plastic. Anyway, bicycle No.1 now up and running again and cycled the thing most of the way home without incident.

And today, day 3 of my renewed relationship with my bicycle, cycle to and from Epsom, although I did elect to take the route which did not involve any slopes. Where I was reduced to buying the cabbage supply from Waitrose, there being no vegetable stall on a Friday. On the other hand I have renewed acquaintance with the butcher in Manor Green Road, so meat supplies at least are assured until I make it back to Cheam. Not such a fancy operation, but at least it is not the supermarket. So today we have roast rolled pork belly with roast parsnips, boiled curly cabbage & etc..

Yesterday was the day of the Battersea beer festival run by CAMRA, in the once grand grand hall at the back of the old Battersea town hall, from the glory days of civic pride. Complete with coffered ceiling and organ. Strange event, with the afternoon crowd being mainly men with a median age of perhaps 50. Lots of wild hair, large beards and modest paunches. Overall impression very shabby, rather like being at the dogs in the bad old days. I felt positively smart in my posh duffel coat. Lots of obscure beer and much beer waffle going on around me. Regular beer tarts. Clearly not the sort of event when the bigger brewers showcase their stuff, the only bigger brewer that I spotted among the barrels being Fullers. I had a pint of 'Shere Drop' from the Surrey Hills brewery, a beer that I had known and liked from the reopened 'The Coopers' in Stamford Green Road. And to be daring, a pint of 'Weymouth Best' from the Dorset brewery, which I do not think I have had before. Quite potable.

For me, a beer drinker rather than a beer tart, not really the right sort of event. I like to stick with the same gear for the session, so having a choice of hundreds does not do much for me. Plus most of the draught beer from the bigger brewers suits me fine. But, to give CAMRA their due, the return of draught beer to pubs in a big way after the drought of the seventies did coincide with their campaigns.

The BH explained that gate was a Viking word for road and so Notting Hill Gate was perhaps the road to Notting Hill. Hmm sezzaye. Back home, perusal of the OED revealed two sorts of gate. One, Old English, meaning, amongst other things, the ordinary sort of gate. Two, Old Norse, meaning, amongst other things (one of which was gait), way or road. One point to BH. But then I take a poke at Wikipedia which tells me that Notting Hill Gate was named for the turnpike gate at Notting Hill, on the Uxbridge Road. One point each.

Fight our way into the large roundabout at the bottom of the West Cross Route and come across a Thames Water tower which I believe to be one of the safety valves for London's ring main. A steel and glass (or plastic) tower about the size and shape of a laundry chimney. It rather looked as if water would vent, or perhaps spout, out of the thing when the pressure was up. Sadly no such thing while we were there.

Once across, head into Holland Park where we find two or three more quite decent looking cake shops. Annoying, as on our last visit we had searched Queensway without success for one although I am sure that there used to be cake shops on Queensway. Into Notting Hill where we find a well stocked classical record shop. Very pleased to find Barenboim looking very young and doing two sorts of Schubert impromptus reduced from £5 to £3, something I had been keeping an eye out for some weeks. Should have bought the boxed set of Schubert piano sonatas but didn't. Then on into Kensington Palace Gardens to admire all the posh houses there. Most of which appeared to be of a diplomatic flavour and most of which declined to identify themselves. That and the fancy fencing gave the place a rather sterile feel. Somewhat mitigated by an oriental gentleman popping out of one of the big houses dragging his green wheelie bin. We hoped that he had read his leaflet properly and got the right bin out on the right day - although he could probably claim diplomatic immunity if harassed by the recycling police.

At the bottom we came across a heavily guarded house. Three policemen with machine guns and a number of the black steel cassions, like the ones used to protect Big Ben. A regular fortress which turned out to be the Israeli embassy. It was sad to see this evidence for such persisting hate for a state which had been founded in such unhappy circumstances.

A sadness compounded by my reading of Eugene Rogan on the Arabs. A sorry tale. It is not easy to see how we might have made it all come right, given the messy demise of the Ottoman empire, but we and the French certainly seem to have been major contributors to it all coming wrong. This including a great deal of nugatory bloodshed and worse. All sorts of things that I did not know about the region. So what is now the United Arab Emirates started life as the pirate states which made a truce with the Brits. to stop being pirates and to become the Trucial States - this back in the days when Britannia really did rule most of the waves. And at the time the French started on Algeria, back in 1830 or so, they had not paid the Algerians for lots of grain which they had bought off them. Massive loss of life in Algeria over the next 130 years. Although, to give the French their due, it is alleged in an article in a recent LRB, that the post-colonial loss of life in Francophone Africa has been massively less than in other parts of Africa. This despite the rather dodgy regimes. The Germans get off rather lightly in all this, as, as losers, they did not get any of the spoils from the Ottomans after the first world war.

But there was the odd consolation for us Brits.. We were not all bad. So, for example, the idea of mandates was not off the wall. The places being mandated were probably not in good enough shape for immediate self government and did need a big brotherly helping hand. If only we could have restrained ourselves to just that.

Excellent book, but one which might have been improved by the inclusion of a few more maps. Including, preferably, one of those ones which folds out of the back of the book and can be consulted as one reads, rather than have to keep jumping backwards and forwards. Something that modern publishers, despite all the elaborate machinery available these days, seem loathe to do.

A more banal sadness on rereading 'Boule de Suif'. Sadness that there should be so much casual cruelty knocking about the world. OK, so it is only a story, but one which one feels is rooted in real behaviour.

They really do seem very light and comfortable. Rather more comfortable with the dodgy leg than I expected. Assured that more foot support translates into dodgy leg support. Of course sir is going to feel more comfortable sir. The young lady knew her stuff. So sold for £75, slightly more than I would pay for regular shoes in Clarks - bearing in mind that a lot of regular shoes are more or less sobered up trainers in construction anyway. I wore them out of the shop with my ancient and unsupportive shores from Clarks in a brown bag.

Rounded off the day with a visit to the splendid Italian grocer at number 18 Brewer Street: long may it live! Although hard to see how it will live on when its lease comes up for renewal. Acquired one of their excellent loaves and some excellent salami. The flat sort with large lumps rather than the coarsely minced stuff you get in French saucisson sec. Had a first go at it for breakfast.

Then, in the course of all this, a rather small and nondescript car pulls up alongside me. Window winds down and driver beckons me over. Smartish looking chap but not posh. He turns out to be an exciteable Italian with a modest command of English, although this was almost certainly better than our mutual command of French. He tries to tell me some story about how he has been very stupido and lost lots of dosh - thousands of pounds - in some casino the night before and cleaned himself out. Started to show me his credit cards to prove some point. Much talk of Milan and important meeting. Run out of petrol for his hire car. Needs a sub.. Then he get out a pair of trousers, still in its plastic bag and which appears to be Versace. He applies the flame from his lighter to the material, a gesture which I could only suppose was some kind of test of authenticity. The flame did not mark the material. Worth hundreds if not thousands of pounds in Bond Street he tells me. Then he gets out a leather jacket from Armani. Same packaging and presentation. Yours, a present he tells me. You do understand? I start to take the bag and then he says 'and you make a present to me of £100'.

Various thoughts at this point. Not all of them after the event. Is he some middle range employee in some corner of the fashion world with access to samples? Has he stolen them? Is shoplifting an option in the sort of shops which are going to sell this stuff? In any event, they are unlikely to fit. How much would I get for them on e-bay? What would the chaps at Bond Street say if I were to pay them a visit? The story is a fancy version of those which have relieved me of folding stuff outside tube stations in the past, my attitude on a good day being that one would not like to deny someone in undeserved need of a helping hand in the form of a £20 note and that that is more important than being conned, even most of the time. So I give him a £20 note and say that should buy him enough petrol to be going on with. Then out comes a second Armani jacket. All three items now going for the same £100. 'Not got it on me' sezzaye. £80. £60. £50. I peer in the wallet and find I only have twenties. I am not going to go to £60 but I do proffer another £20. This is taken but then returned, perhaps because he has decided that that is as far as I am going to go. Content to take the £20 for nothing but not content to take £40 for nothing, honest to that extent at least, so better to go and find another punter who will part with £20 than give up any of his presumably valuable merchandise to me.

End of transaction. I continue on my circumnavigation of Grosvenor Square and he heads off down South Audley Street. A Metropolitan mystery which I need the gray cells of a Poirot to unravel.

Meantime a quick peek at Versace resellers on the net suggests that trousers can be had for maybe $300 - so maybe a £1,000 for these particular trousers a bit ott. A peek at Armani resellers suggests that leather jackets might go for anything between $500 and $1,500. I think I really shall have to wander down Bond Street and get a story from the horse's mouth.

Balzac, I learned recently, took a much better line in his historical fiction. That is, that is was OK to introduce real people into one's costume drama, but they should only have bit parts. To provide a bit of factual backing but not to provide the sort of humanly soap interest which requires invention and speculation.

Yesterday to Sevenoaks to visit the ancient deer park there. A place which it turned out clearly has been very scenic in its day, but a lot of the trees are now rather past their best and with all the deer knocking about there is no natural regeneration. Plus, Thames Water chose the one time we visit the place to do a drains up. It seems that some sewer in need of renewal runs right through the middle of the park. So all in all, the place had a rather battered look. I guess they are going to have to bite the bullet, as the people at Hampton Court do, and go in for a replanting program. Maybe a quarter of the park at a time. But it would be expensive as all the young trees would have to be enclosed in deer proof fences, which I imagine takes the price up to quite a lot of hundreds of pounds a tree. One would need a budget in the small number of millions of pounds ball park. A lot for a place which does not charge entry. Perhaps the National Trust has not got the dosh that Hampton Court has. And while they are at it, they might have a proper heritage deer fence around the boundary, rather than the rather common chain link mesh hung off concrete posts they have now. How about a six mile perimeter ha-ha?

We also discovered that Sevenoaks is home to a giant school, unsurprisingly called Sevenoaks school (http://www.sevenoaksschool.org/), busily metastasizing through the larger houses in its vicinity. I find out after the event that the place was founded in the 15th century and is one of the oldest such foundations in the land. And we had thought that Sevenoaks was a dormitory town built for London when the railway was invented.

PS Google ads on target today. On first closing this post I am told about some outfit which punts out Sharpe fodder on the cheap.

A day or so ago, the ITV3 airwaves being bereft of Poirate fodder, we thought we would watch something called 'Stardust', the video of which we had acquired from somewhere or other. Not paid for it you understand. Thought it might be worth a watch given that I thought I had seen that the DT was distributing this classic film free one Sunday (a day on which we never buy the paper. We get the Saturday one for the TV guide and don't really need a second helping of motoring sections, travel sections, money sections, healthy living sections & etc the following day. One only needs so much newspaper on which to clean one's shoes, especially now that I am retired and do not clean them anything like every day. If I ever did. A custom which I believe my father held to through most of his working life. Must be his stint in the army which did it). Anyway, it turned out that we had become slightly famous by association.

As, a few years ago, we were visiting Skye and took a couple of walks on the road from Uig to Digg. Plenty of golden eagles knocking about and the views as one crosses the ridge, possibly a paleogene lava sill, from west to east are particularly stunning. Had never seen anything quite like it. We had heard in Uig that there was a large film crew in town, complete with lots of animals, doing some sort of fantasy adventure, with the most important luvvie being helicoptered in each day from the nearest civilised hotel on the mainland. The butcher in Portree (who did a very good line in black and white puddings) was unhappy with the way that the film crew was pretty much self contained and was not doing much of a job of spreading some of their folding stuff around. The result for us that our first walk was disturbed by the continual passage of various vans, most of which invited us rather bossily to get off the road as actors were coming through. They were clearly doing something up on the other side of the ridge, although we did not get that far on the first day.

And it turned out that our classic film was, partly at least, filmed in Skye and was more or less certainly the film we had come across when we were there. We recognised some of the landscape, although the film, at least as seen on telly, completely failed to capture the magic of the place. Still, a bit of fame by association.

Expertise on matters walking stick continues to grow. So I learned the other day that walking north up the western footpath of Hook road with a stick is a bit of a pain as it is very bumpy. Put stick down to find that the pavement is not where one expects it. And then in Guildford, happily hobbling along and very nearly stuck the stick down the hole left by a missing light in one of those luxcrete panels (http://www.luxcrete.co.uk/) you have outside older shops to illuminate their cellars. Might have given me a very nasty jolt. Eminently suable assuming one could lay one's hands on one of those ambulance chasers when one needs one. Similar experience in Long Grove Road where the cover in one of those access hatches in the middle of the road was missing. Cast iron affair, maybe six inches square, with the lid part which should have been covering the nice deep hole containing a stop cock for something or other being missing. Again could have been a nasty jolt.

More entertaining was the sight of someone about my own age, with a walking stick very like my own tucked under his arm, jogging across Rosebery Park the other day. One might have thought that he had the stick because he was lame. I can only think that he had been lame and was just starting to jog again, carrying the stick against the possibility of the jogging tearing the leg apart again. A prop rather than a necessity.

A busy, in my present mood anyway, is a person who busies him or herself with the affairs of others, gratuitously, uninvited and often unwanted. Plural bisease, to rhyme with disease. So one has the political kind, generally elected and generally modestly paid, if paid at all. And one does need such people, whether or not one likes the ones that go in for it. Then there are the paid sort, public servants of various sorts, as I was myself until recently. 'Busy' is also often used in police dramas from Scotland to denote the uniformed ones with warrant cards. And then, at the bottom of the heap, you have the volunteer bisease. The people who have retired early, have pots of energy but are unable to devise occupations for themselves which do not involve doing good to others. Some of these people are truly doing good. Helping the old, the hungry, the halt and the lame. But some of them join committees.

One such committee has just commissioned the destruction of another slice of Epsom Common - which I happened to pass this morning - in the interests of the restoration of grazing or something. They are not even doing it themselves. They are using public money to hire contractors to burn up diesel to destroy carbon banks. How can they claim to be serving the eco-god by contributing so much to global warming?

And then there was the policeman who caught a driver blowing his nose while sitting in a stationary queue of traffic. The driver appealed the ticket but his appeal was denied. I wonder if there were aspects of the case that have not been reported to me? Like the driver needing to blow his nose because he was spluttering after a shot of vodka went down the wrong hatch.

I was told the other day of special policemen and women who patrol dog walking areas to make sure that dogs, bitches and their owners are complying with the doggy by-laws concerning waste products. The point of the inclusion of bitches is that it is quite hard to know what exactly a bitch is up to without going to inspect the spot afterwards. Dogs a quite different kettle of fish. Which makes unobtrusive enforcement a bit tricky. So here we have an opportunity for the surveillance industry. To develop a gadget which enables an enforcement officer to be sure what a bitch is doing at a hundred yards in poor light. Perhaps an odour version of infra-red detection. Then, the officer only needs to accost a dog owner who he can be confident is in breach. To the great improvement of public relations generally.

Reverting for a moment to the unpaid committees, I am reminded of an anecdote about young communists in those heady days when people thought that the Soviet Union was going to work. Lots of people went to build Siberia for all the extra rations. But young communists went for free, for god and for country. Or perhaps for motherland, party and comrade Stalin. But the people running Siberia found that the young communists were a bit of a pain. A tendency to have opinions, to disagree with the party line and generally to be a bit sanctimonious. So they thought it would be much better to just go for the paid people who shut up and got on with the job rather than talking about it.

Many years ago when I had some contact with these matters, what would have happened when you moved was that your medical card would go from your new surgery to something called a Family Practitioner Committee (FPC: a roughly county level operation, presumably lost many waves of reorganisation ago) - which almost certainly at that time had no computer, rather a giant card index. Since the FPCs would have been different in this particular case, the receiving FPC would have sent a ticket off to the national health service central register (NHSCR) which would know which FPC you were last registered at. Your ticket would then be sent off to that FPC. That FPC, in turn, would know what doctor you were last registered with and send your ticket to him. The transfer of your medical records to their new home could then be initiated. As well as ensuring that medical records kept up with people as they moved around the country, this machinery also kept track of how many patients each doctor had and so how much they should be paid. It made sure, inter alia, that you were only registered with at most one doctor at any one time.

Now one might think that now all these outfits - or their successors - have sparkly new computers and a £20bn software system to run on them, courtesy of the New Labour love affair with the IT services industry, that the whole business of moving your ticket around would be accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse and that your records would be winging their way to your new doctor in no time at all. But it seems not.

So bearing in mind that you are now entitled to see your own medical records and doctors are no longer entitled to include offensive (while possibly true) remarks about you in them, my suggestion is that when you move, you have the option of simply carrying your medical records off with you, to present to your new doctor in due course. So he or she might actually have them when you first go to see him or her. And if, rather than it being an option, it was the drill, all that expensive machinery which has been installed so that the government can move your records around for you could be binned. And an IT services contractor would be left looking for another milch cow.

On the first principle, easy enough for those responsible for children to keep them out of smoke's way. Perhaps the government ought to issue personal smoke detectors, accurate to 10 particles of smoke to the cubic centimetre of air, so that parents can make informed judgements about whether they need to move their children further away from the source of contamination. Councils might have rules about the proportion of their air space which is allowed to exceed some smoke particle per cubic inch threshold. Government could issue targets for attainment and improvement. The same detectors would also be useful for detecting noxious levels of allergy or asthma inducing particles and for non-smokers concerned about the level of smoke in the garden of a public house. That both introduces a whole new field of endeavour for the bisease, to be stockpiled in case the proposed offensive on fat people fails to lift off, and deals with the second principle. The third and fourth principles are just waffle, fit subjects for television campaigns, which might or might not succeed in putting us off the evil weed. Perhaps they will relax the rules on advertising to make space for them, perhaps taking advertisements up to 33% of the time, from the 25% or so they seem to occupy at the moment.

Which reminds me, that in the land of the free, advertisements on television are so frequent as to make the programme going on between times more or less unwatchable. At least that was my experience in hotels. It is a wonder that anyone watches their boxes at all. Perhaps the answer is that they don't.

Interesting new cabbage recipe the other day, courtesy of the DT. Shred white cabbage. Place in baking dish along with some butter and cumin seed. Cover with foil and cook for three quarters of an hour or so. Not the most slimming item but a pleasant way to whack down the white cabbage.

And an interesting foodie event of a different sort today. Yesterday, boiled up the remnants of the weekend chicken for soup, along with some onion, carrot and celery. Boiled, or rather simmered for maybe four hours, mashing with a potato masher occasionally. Strain. Then today get around to adding the pearl barley on return from Guildford with the newspaper. Decide on six ounces. Maybe an ounce at the bottom of the jar, top up from the new packet, the one with all the icons (see above). Shoot the six ounces into the stock. Only then do I notice that the bottom of the jar has a thickish layer of sticky grey dust with pearl barley adhering to it. On closer inspection I see small black movement. Ticks or mites or something. Much panic. Can't bring myself to sling the soup but I do remember dark tales of nasty diseases being caught by grains with fungal infections. Ergotism or something. Can one catch nasty diseases from mitular infections? So bring stock to the boil, which should kill off any livestock. Much careful skimming off of black specks large and small. Take off maybe half a pint from the two or three pints I started with. My chicken soup has never been so skimmed. Simmer for forty minutes then add three ounces of cooked chicken. Follow up with a third of a slivered white cabbage. Simmer for a further three and a half minutes and serve. No black specks in sight and we are still standing. Further report tomorrow.

The question is, where did the bugs come from? Perhaps the eggs are always there in the pearl barley, but they do not usually hatch, the product being dry and being turned over fairly regularly. Maybe we failed on one or other count. Bugs rushing in when the lid happens to be off sounds a bit unlikely.

While we were in Guildford, we thought we would continue my tour of Victorian stained glass in churches. First we tried St Nicholas down by the river, an Anglo-Catholic establishment within the Anglican communion, with lots of stained glass and other decorations. Sadly, they shut their doors at 1230 so we missed out. So we fell back on the ancient and interesting Holy Trinity, where there was also a lot of stained glass. Sad to report, the west window contravened one the principles of the Pugin who set me off on this particular tour. The stained glass patterning was allowed to leap across the mullions of the window, thus breaching the structural integrity of the window. At least in appearance. Pugin would not have approved at all. But I rather liked the southwest window.

Lunch at Olivetto (http://www.olivo.co.uk/). Very pleasant and good value it was too - although surprised how set lunch for £10 for one moves up to £50 for two, the time one has had the odd beverage and extra.

So moving onto my icon project, I find that a jar of Marmite sports four of the things, not counting registered trade mark signs, repeats, logos, medals or coats of arms (the things denoting royal favours of the purchasing variety). A jar of marmalade from Mr S. a measly two. But there is a very small diagram which almost counts. So say two and a half. A tin of baked beans from Mr H. runs to five. A box of mustard flour from Mr C. two. A tin shaped container made of cardboard and plastic containing drinking chocolate from another Mr C. is up to seven. A bottle of anchovy essence from Mr B. (Burgess for those who are going to fail to guess) is so old fashioned that it does not seem to have any. Whereas a tin of black treacle from Mr L. has kept up with the times, despite being a rather ancient product, and sports four. But the laurels have to go to a packet of pearl barley from Mr S. which has not only seven icons but also two small diagrams. Clearly a job creation scheme for all those artists piling out of art schools who are reduced to earning a crust as commercial artists (as opposed to the arty sort of artist).

The disease is in a particularly advanced state among the people who design the controls on cars and on computers. In the case of the former there is a related disease which consists in seeing how many functions you can hang off a stick hanging off the steering column. We have been driving a new Ford for getting on for a year now and I still have trouble with the sticks on the steering column, although on a good day I can now turn the windscreen wipers on and off.

Perhaps this is all evidence for the updated version of Parkinson's Law which states that the complexity of consumer facing systems varies as the square of the ability of computer systems to support them.

So when I get some ridiculously complicated document from EDF about my electricity charges, it is not at all that they are trying to bamboozle me with facts so that I do not have a clue about what I am actually paying, it is merely an unfortunate side effect of said updated version of Parkinson's Law.

And while we are on pet hates, I ought to mention the great double yellow line project being run by the council. Not sure if it is the borough or the county which is responsible. They have clearly been put up to it by the the Grand Federation of Road Marking Contractors and as a result we seem to have an army of people crawling around the housing estates of Epsom looking for places to plant double yellow lines. They then produce great wadges of consultation document so that we all have that little bit more to put in our recycling bins and, should argument arise, we are unable to argue that we do not have anything to recycle and so have not put the recycling bin out. Then one has lots of consultation and then the road markers are off. On completion, should business be slack, I imagine that some of them morph into double yellow line enforcement officers.

Now it is true that parking in some of said suburbs is a bit of a problem, with the number of vehicles per house reaching uncomfortable proportions. The recycling trucks cannot always get through at their accustomed speed. The Chelsea tractors are having trouble making it to school. But all the council has to do is wait for the relevant residents to come to them and ask for some double yellow lines. No need at all for them to be pro-active.