pumpkinstrokemarrow

It turns out that Rackham is an authority on the history of woods. Which turns out to be far more complicated than I had thought. So, for example, there does not appear to be agreement on the nature or extent of woodland cover in England in pre-historic times or when that cover was removed - although much of the removal appears to have been pre-Roman. He rather debunks the idea of there being such a thing as natural wood, wood untouched by human hand. No such thing exists in England (apart from anything else, we have been around for about as long as the trees. That is to say, since the end of the last ice age) and he is rather doubtful about how much of it there is elsewhere. With the result that restoring woodland to its natural state is rather like restoring Stonehenge to its proper state - there never having been a time when Stonehenge stood integral and entire. The thing was a process rather than a product.

Plenty of woody factlets.

So, for example, many trees live in symbiosis with specialised fungi which live in and around their roots and which serve to move matter between the roots and the surrounding soil. The fungi do a rather better job than root hairs and if, for some reason, the fungi get sick or go missing, the trees are apt to get sick and go missing.

That roots are not necessarily deep. He alleges that the roots of many big trees are surprisingly shallow, with most of them within a couple of feet or so of the surface. Perhaps that is where most of the grub is.

Some trees will evolve very slowly compared with small animals. They might live for a long time, they might reproduce vegetatively and only reproduce sexually rarely, if at all. So evolution is going to proceed at a very leisurely pace.

He is clearly very fond of Hayley Wood in Cambridgeshire, a place turned over to the naturalists when I was a child and which we used to visit occasionally on Sundays. At that time, before nature had been properly invented, we usually had the place to ourselves.

Hazel seems to have been a very important tree in the past. Which makes me wonder what a big hazel tree would look like? Do they get big? I have only seem them up to maybe 12 feet high, and then, only because of careful pruning of the many shootings from the stool. The biggest in our garden is maybe 8 feet high, having been cut to the ground some 5-10 years ago.

A red herring was the notion, introduced by the BH when she was turning the pages, that the word conifer comes from conys or rabbits, via the tendency of pine trees to grow on abandoned rabbit warrens, which had a tendency to be located on sandy ground which was too dry for broadleaved trees. OED suggests that this is twaddle, with conifer being derived in a much simpler way from cone. Failed to track down this herring through the index, which seemed to be fairly inaccurate.

Which brings me onto the quality of the book as a whole, marred to my mind by poor book design. Quite a fat book at getting on for 500 pages. Four fat clumps of photographic illustrations arranged evenly through it. But with the illustrations being detached from the relevant text so one does not get much value from them, despite their quality and interest. The thing would have done better in a larger format with pictures integrated into the text, after the fashion, say, of a Thames & Hudson picture book. The tables have all been relegated to the back of the book, so again, one does not get much value from them.

Then while Rackham is clearly immensely knowledgeable about woods and trees, his narrative ranges far and wide. Leaving me with the impression that it must be full of all kinds of errors. One person cannot be that accurate or balanced over such a broad field.

And the book is a bit disorganised and repetitive. So, all in all, an almost endeavour. There is so much here, but which would have so much benefited from a stronger grip. Perhaps a younger collaborator or a stronger editor. But maybe this past master of Corpus Christi is far too big a cheese to get a grip on. So he was allowed to go his own way.

Yesterday finished my first pass of 'The Nibelungenlied', a book obtained from the helpful 'City Books' in Western Road, Hove (http://www.city-books.co.uk/) , as I was unable to spell the thing right to Mr Amazon who denied access. This version was an old translation by one Hatto to which I had been pointed by a review of a new translation in the TLS. The reviewer appeared to prefer the old translation, but what caught my eye was the observation that it was a pity that Freud did not pay as much attention to old German stories as he did to old Greek stories. If he had, he might have reduced the emphasis he put on intra familial sex. This old German story being all about how an immigrant attained fame and fortune in his new land, only to be murdered by the disgruntled aborigines. Nothing much to do with sex at all.

On closer inspection I don't think this is fair. Siegfried is certainly murdered by disgruntled aborigines. But it is also true that he marries the beautiful sister of the three kings of Worms (on the Rhine) and that the murderer is a liegeman of one of the kings. Furthermore, Siegfried facilitates the consummation of the marriage of one of the kings by some shennanighans in the bridal chamber, which include Siegfried making off with a ring and a girdle of the bride's, which at the time of writing was tantamount to saying that he had had his way with her. All this subsequently leads to a quarrel between the bride and his (Siegfried's) wife, a quarrel which results in his dastardly murder by the liegeman. Although not before Siegfried has thoroughly thrashed his wife for stirring up trouble; a thrashing she is not ashamed to mention in conversation as something entirely normal. Husbands needed to keep their wives in line. So I think the story clearly includes some traditional Freudian subject matter.

But there is more to it than that. A lot more space is devoted to other matters, clearly important at the time. There is a lot of present giving, with both the giving and receiving (or not receiving, not accepting) being bound up with very serious issues of status. There is a lot of conspicuous consumption, some of it in the form of present giving and some of it in the forms of fancy clothes and fancy arms & armour. There is a lot of showing off by young men and women. Including the various martial arts in the case of the men. There is a lot of insecurity. It might be good and honourable to be a great warrior and it might be good and honourable to entertain other great warriors. But could you be sure that they were not going to turn on you? Which may have to do with there being a lot of interest in whether or not someone is going to stick to his word, to honour his bond or honour his allegiance. The resolution of conflicting allegiances.

All in all, thoroughly recommended. I shall now read the plenteous notes before embarking on a second reading. Maybe after that, try and find some accessible non-fiction history of the times described.

I wonder what relation this version bears to Wagner's?

Now for those who may have forgotten, Viscount Grey, as Sir Edward Grey, was his Majesty's secretary of state for foreign affairs at the time of the outbreak of the First World War. Vol. II of his memoir opens with the declaration of war and the text, despite Grey's indifferent performance at Oxford, is scattered with bits of Latin. One of which was 'corruptio optimi pessima'. Now I still have a Latin dictionary, so was able to find that corruptio was a feminine noun meaning corruption or bribery. Nominative singular. Optimi meant best. Genitive singular? Pessima meant worst. Ablative singular? From which all I could deduce was 'corruption of the best by the worst'. Something about levelling down. Not really very happy with this and doesn't really fit the context.

So off to Mr G. who leads me to Merriam-Webster who says that the proper translation is 'the corruption of the best is the worst of all'. Which sounds much better although I still don't know what case 'pessima' is taking. And while the thing has the ring of a proverb, it is not a proverb I have ever come across before. In this or any other form. Grey thinks that it applies to all fields of human endeavour; in this particular case to German patriotism, which he thought had gone too far. Hypertrophic. A good thing in small doses, a bad thing in large doses. But I still don't really get it. I shall have to savour the phrase over the amber nectar and hope for wisdom.

I now turn to more serious matters, the origins of the first war. A serious topic in my youth. The sort of thing we wrote essays about. And as a lefty I was clear that the causes of the war were capitalism and its progeny imperialism. The forces of reaction heated to bursting point in the cauldron of history. One side much as bad as the other.

But reading what Grey has to say, one gets a slightly different take. Let us leave aside the history which got us there, but simply locate ourselves in August 1914. Germany is far and away the dominant power on mainland Europe. Best army and navy growing fast. A track record of aggression and belligerence. Appears to be using the assassination in Sarajevo as an excuse to have another crack at the French. In order to get at the French they appear to be cranking up to pass their armies through Luxembourg and Belgium, a clear violation of neutrality and sovereign rights and both of whom had guarantees from the Great Powers. A biggish deal at the time was the difference in nature between the guarantee that had been given to Luxembourg and that which had been given to Belgium. The Germans might also have used their fleet to bombard the northern French coast, just across from the White Cliffs of Dover.

If we were to stand aside while they did this, our good name would be besmirched. We would have broken our bond. Our Trafalgar-winning navy would have been shamed. But more important, Germany would be master of mainland Europe with a much weakened France and with full access to the war supporting industries of northern France. Belgium and Luxembourg would be little better than satellites. So, given the aforementioned aggression and belligerence, this was not to be tolerated. Better to fight while France was still in one piece and able to help. As it turned out.

Now one might argue, and Grey certainly disputes, that Grey might have made the British position clearer sooner, with the result that Germany might not have mobilised in the west. But, this notwithstanding, I think I now think, that having got to where we had got to in August 1914, backing down was not a very good option.

Many birds about yesterday morning. Including, for once in a while, a large thrush sitting on top of a small fir tree. Magpies very busy, sounded as if they were squabbling about something, but maybe they were just being jolly after their own fashion. Franklin broke into a lazy canter to chase one across the lawn but the magpie concerned achieved take-off in the nick of time. You forget how much of a run they need to take off until you see a cat on their tail. Does the stress give the magpies heart attacks? Franklin's last attempt at hunting wasn't too hot either. He had become fascinated by a large beetle buzzing about about 6 feet up, maybe three centimetres long, maybe a stag beetle. And every now and again he would make a jump for it, not getting anywhere near. Not clear whether the beetle knew what was going on, but as far as we are aware, it survived.

The day before that was the day of the bicycle chain. Decided that a year was probably about enough and the bicycle shop man said that although it had worn, the thing had not worn enough to damage the crank or the block, so for once I had timed the change about right. The bad news was that he was busy, so rather than wait a week, I thought I would fit the thing myself. Done it often enough in the past, although not for a few years.

So, back to base. Get narrow guage Shimano chain (narrow guage because I was obliged to have a 9 gear block) out of bag. It has both instructions and two special rivets. Instructions in several dozen languages and several mentions of danger of death if you got it wrong. Don't recall getting either instructions or rivets before.

First instruction not to bad, nothing more complicated than saying which way round the chain should be on the crank and block. That is to say, if the join lies between and below the crank and the block and the crank is to the right of the block, do you want the loose male end facing left or right? After a bit of pondering I worked out what this was all about.

Second instruction much worse. It appeared to be claiming that there were three sorts of rivet and that I must no account attempt to break the chain - should I need to shorten it - at two of them. So I peer at the chain. With the exception of the rivet at the link that came broken, all the rivets looked the same. But there did seem to be three sorts of little plates holding the links together. That is to say, the little plates, maybe a centimetre long and a third of a centimetre wide, lying in pairs in the plane of the chain and which hold the male and female ends of a link together. At least there were three different inscriptions on the little plates. But the links themselves all looked exactly the same. Very puzzling.

Putting that puzzle aside, I thought I better try and break the old chain. The breaker I used to use had lost its prong. The other two breakers seemed to have rather fat prongs, too fat for the rivet I was trying to push out of its hole. Give it a go anyway. Don't make any progress. Back down to the cycle shop, tail between legs, to buy a new breaker. Where it turns out that there was nothing wrong with the breaker that I had, I just had to try a bit harder. Back home again and try a bit harder. Eventually the rivet pops out. And as the cycle shop man had pointed out, once the rivet has popped all the way out, quite a business to get it back in again. At which point I realise what the point of the two special rivets supplied with the chain was. They had special lead in bits which you broke off after insertion.

But then we get to the good bit. I hold the new and the old chain together and find that they are exactly the same length. Appear to be exactly the same model. So all I have to do is push the broken link on the new chain back together again. No need to break the new chain, to use the special rivets supplied or anything else remotely tricky.

Thread chain onto crank and block. Using the breaker in reverse as it were, push rivet of the male end of the broken link back into the female end. The rejoined link is not stiff. I don't have to push the rivet back the other way half a turn, something I remember from the past. And so far the thing seems to work; not flown apart on either of the two hauls up Howell Hill.

The only catch was that my hands were covered with thick black oil from the old chain, the block and the crank. Quite a bit on shirt and trousers. Still got some lodged under the fingernails a couple of days later, despite vigorous application of Swarfega. Shirt promoted gardening shirt on the spot, a designation which reduces the grade of laundering applied.

Next stop to get to work on the irritating clicks from the transmission. Some sort of minor adjustment needed. Maybe that can be next week's project.

The mouth wash people have certainly caught on. Their products certainly mention how good they are a dealing with excess oral acid.

There is a more interesting food item. That is, that the invention of cooking is what powered the human race to the giddy height it has presently achieved. The theory is that you just can't generate enough surplus energy to drive a big brain on raw food. Part of the problem being the time required to eat and chew raw food. You have to cook the stuff to get the conversion costs down.

So I got to thinking about this. What is there in the way of raw food? Raw meat is certainly digestible, certainly if you cut it up small. But this last might have been a problem in those far off pre-fire days. Raw grass seed - wheat not having been invented at that time - would indeed have taken a fair bit of chewing. But once one had threshing and querns, one could have converted the stuff into a sort of cold porridge. No idea whether our digestive apparatus can do much with raw wholegrain porridge - although I did as a child, and occasionally still do eat raw pastry. I rather like it, although my mother used to say that it was bad for the digestion. From which observation we deduce that there is digestion? After all, horses digest grass after a fashion even though they have digestions more like ours than those of cows, who are, it has to be said, much better at it than horses. Then there is cabbage. Quite eatable raw but not much in it beyond water, vitamins and fibre. So much for meat and two veg.. Not going to get us very far on the quest for big brains.

Eggs and cheese would be OK without cooking, although once again, the chaps without fire probably had not got onto cheese. And I personally would have trouble getting raw egg down. Maybe just about OK if it has been whisked, but certainly not out of the shell.

Then we move onto chimpanzees whom I believe to eat mostly fruit, occasionally varying the diet with raw monkey. Bananas, dates, nuts, oranges, apples, pineapples. Plenty of sugar and vitamins. Fruit and nut bars without the chocolate. This would certainly be a way to get the calories in.

So we have the answer. Make up a cold porridge with crushed grass seed and add suitable fruit and nuts. The former gives the food a bit of bulk and fibre, the latter some calories. Top up with a few eggs in season. This would keep one going during the week but maybe add a bit of raw meat at weekends to provide essential amino acids. The perfect diet for a warm climate. Might not be too hot in a cold climate where much of the food is going to be seasonal.

Although it should be said that eskimos manage OK and some of their cooking used to be pretty basic, to the point where one is more or less eating lumps of raw seal floating around in warm blood.

My bottom line on this one is not proven. I can see that getting enough food for big brains is going to be a lot easier if one has cooking. But I am not convinced that it is a necessary condition.

Second, having moaned about the poster parade on the esplanade at Brighton on June 16, I forgot to moan about something of the same sort on the promenade outside the Tate Modern on the way to Macbeth. From which we deduce that more or less permanent posters advertising something worthy, occupying much space and absorbing much money are the latest must have for the people responsible for decorating our streets, presumably some organ of local government. Let's hope that they get the chop in the hard months ahead.

I notice in passing that was also noticeable the Brighton has gone off white. A lot of their buildings are in a dun yellow, rather than the traditional seaside white. A white which can be a bit hard on the eyes on a bright day. That apart, Brighton seems to have managed its sea front buildings quite well. A sensible mixture of new and old with no blanket preservation order on all the old.

Spent the morning puzzling about cousins, having been confused for a long time about the difference between second cousins and once removed cousins. Wikipedia helpfully sorts the whole business out and I learn on the way of a wrinkle in the specification which has the important result of making the relationship commutative. That is to say that if A is a B cousin of C then C is a B cousin of A. Where B might be 'first cousin once removed'. The relationship is not, however, transitive. Something I am reminded about regularly in connection with liking people, liking being a relationship which is neither commutative nor transitive. Put in plain language, the fact that A likes B does not mean that B likes A. And the facts that A likes B and B likes C do not mean that A likes C. Liking is clearly a tricky business.

Coming back to cousins, A is first cousin to B if A is descended from a grandparent of B or B is descended from a grandparent of A, excluding the cases where A is B, A and B are siblings, A and B are in an uncle/aunt relationship and A and B are in a parent relationship. This clearly includes the case when A and B have a grandparent in common. And it is the 'or' bit which is the wrinkle which I had not appreciated before, a wrinkle that means that being first cousins does not necessarily mean a close relationship. To illustrate, a grandson of my great-great-great-great grandfather who was not my great-great grandfather would be my first cousin, albeit somewhat removed. A is second cousin to B if A is not a first cousin to B and if A is descended from a great-grandparent of B or B is descended from a great-grandparent of A.

That deals with first, second, third and so forth cousins. Removal is relatively straightforward, with cousinhood being once removed in the case that A is one generation apart from B. Twice removed in the case that A is two generations apart from B. Which is all fine and dandy provided that people do not inter-marry across generations, when things start to get complicated again.

But I think I have got the general idea. Sufficiently refreshed to go and attend to the flat wheelbarrow tyre. Somehow, not having had a wheelbarrow tyre puncture for years, I have had two in as many weeks. On this occasion it was a very small but very sharp fragment of stone wot done the business. Done the business again where a bicycle puncture repair kit is not going to do the business. New inner tube job. Previous occasion June 10.

PS: Mr G. sufficiently impressed by all this to think that I need a bit of transcendental meditation.

On the way, somewhere east of Waterloo station, passed part of London's answer to the Velib. That is to say a bank of contraptions to which we supposed municipal hire bikes were to be attached in due course. Unless, that is, the scheme had been axed earlier in the day by the Mayor's colleagues in the Commons. I seem to recall reading that the Parisian experience was a bit disappointing in that a large proportion of the hire bikes were being stolen or damaged - to the point where it seemed unlikely that the scheme was generating income rather than costing the taxpayer. The velib site (http://www.velib.paris.fr/), in so far as my French gets me, does not seem to tell one about that sort of thing at all. Far too fluffy. Whereas the TFL site produces a minute of the board from nearly two years ago which says that "The ‘velib’ cycle hire scheme was being progressed. The Mayor confirmed that all funding options were being explored, including private sponsorship" - which suggests that public funds are indeed required. The annual report for 2009-10 suggests both that the scheme is supposed to have been up and running in May of this year and that millions of pounds are involved - which I suspect is far too small a sum to appear in the accounts at the back of the report, even supposing I could find my way around them on the screen. Nothing more recent or more detailed thrown up by a (Mr G. powered) search of the TFL site. Presumably it would take a freedom of information request to get something on chickenfeed of this sort. But I would be happy to be corrected if there is someone out there who has managed to unearth something.

Having pondered matters velib, arrived at the Globe to be greeted by a perforated black sheet filling most of the groundling space at about head height. The idea being that the groundlings stood with their heads in holes, looking a bit as if they had been decapitated. Our hearts sank. We discovered later that for added diversion, sundry members of the cast ran about under the sheet causing a bit of confusion and merriment.

Then we looked up to discover that the stage managers had got fed up with the limitations of the Globe's idea of an Elizabethan stage (I understand that there are lots of views about this) and had hung a pair of concentric rings from the roof, underneath which all manner of chains, ropes and lamps had been hung. We discovered later that the rings included motorised curtain track which allowed suitable drapes to be rotated.

The production majored on gore and the three sisters. So for example, in the interest of maximising gore, the rebellious thane of Cawdor was done to death on the stage in a way which made nonsense of the subsequent lines about nothing so much became his life as his manner of leaving it. Macbeth emerges from murdering Duncan with blood up to his elbows, for all the world as if he had been disembowelling the chap rather than cutting his throat in some vaguely soldierly way.

As we have found in other Globe productions, the soldiers were largely unconvincing. Macbeth could neither say his lines nor convince as a thane who could take his stand in the shield wall. Seemed far more like someone from the nicer part of Islington than someone who would have a clue what to do on a battlefield involving poleaxes (the preferred weapon, it seems, of the gallowglass cavalry helping out on the rebel side). He had no presence and with my older ears found it hard to hear what he was saying most of the time, although I could guess some of the time, having turned the pages over the previous couple of days. Speech projection could not have been a direction priority.

Lady Macbeth also failed to convince. Her direction seemed to have been to flash her naked legs and writhe about as much as possible, activities which struck us as having very little to do with the plot.

The porter was just gross. Part of his direction having been to simulate masturbation, at the front of the stage, into a bucket. OK, so the porter provides a bit of useful light relief. But the script does quite enough without this sort of thing.

The production also majored on taking a long time. So, despite having chucked a significant number of hard earned shekels at going, we decided to call it a day at half time. Unwound with a couple of quite decent pints of 'London Pride' in a pleasantly quiet pub, the Mad Hatter (http://www.fullershotels.com/). Where the major diversion was two girls desperate for a fag and who wanted to know where the nearest place they could stock up was. The barman thought that there was an all night place near Southwark Bridge. I was not so sure that they would not have done better to go to Waterloo station.

That apart, we decided that the Globe appeared to have for its mission statement: 'Given that no-one much can understand the bard these days, turn his works into fun pantomime which tourists and youth will pay money to come and watch. This way we keep the flame burning'. Maybe they are right and that this is the best that can be done - but the DT quote of yesterday still seems apposite: " ... now does he feel his title/Hang loose upon him like a giant's robe/Upon a dwarfish thief".

On Saturday, our second outing to the St John's ambulance fest.; that is to say the AGM at the Mansion House followed by the annual service of commemoration and re-dedication at St Pauls. Re-reading the posting of this day last year, not all that much seems to have changed. They have still to hire a diversity officer. The sermon given by the Bishop of London was as bad as that of last year given by the Bishop of Wakefield: a badly judged attempt to be matey and accessible; he would have done better to stick to solemn. The St John's big cheeses still love all the flummery - although not so much that they like to wear it in the street. The flummery is carried between venues in a small furniture van. A sort of blend of scouts, guides, armed services and masons. Odd how it is still impressive. Even when one remembers that this sort of well drilled flummery has only been around for 100 years or so. Not the sort of thing that they managed at all well when people had swords for real.

A new touch was the laying to rest of the standards of three senior officers who had passed over in the course of the preceding year. A sort of additional funeral which would be even more impressive if one actually knew or was related to one of those who had passed over.

Coincidentally, I happened to pass a different sort of service funeral today on the way to the baker, at St Pauls Ewell (http://www.saintpauls.co.uk/). Roundabout closed, dozens of uniformed police in white gloves lining the roundabout and the entrance to the church. Traffic backed up a long way in each direction - which, unfortunately, trapped the cars of some of those attending rather further from the church than they had intended. Outriders. Despite having cycled to the head of the queue to wait, I did not see the hearse, which must have come in down Northey Avenue, but I did hear much stamping and coming to attention. I don't suppose the police do presenting arms.

I did not like to quiz the policemen on the spot, but I assume that this was the funeral of a police officer who had been killed on duty, although I do not recall hearing about any such thing recently and Mr G. did not seem to know any better. The church timetable was blank for today. I will ask around.

On a less solemn note, while turning over Saturday's DT, I came across a piece about the forthcoming demise of the Euro by one Charles Moore which contained a quote from the bard: " ... now does he feel his title/Hang loose upon him like a giant's robe/Upon a dwarfish thief". Clearly Charles has got it in for Sarkosy. Now, coincidentally again, we will be going to see Macbeth at the Globe this evening and I have been doing a bit of revision. When I happened to come across this very quote - Act V, Scene II, lines 20-23. So either Charles knows his bard a good deal better than I do or he happened to go to the Globe at about the same time as he was working up his piece and thought that this little gobbet of culture would brighten things up a bit.

I will report in due course. But we do wonder how the Globe are going to spin this short play out over 3 hours or so. I know they are keen on country dances and country fairs (a sort of arty version of the stuff they use to pad out episodes of Midsomer Murders with. Job creation for recent graduates from luvvy school), but that does not seem very appropriate to Macbeth.

I then have a tilt at Mr G. and find that the helicopters used for search and rescue come in a variety of shapes and sizes, have a variety of roles - including hunting for submarines - and there are maybe 200 of the relevant helicopters in service around the world. Is the project about all of these? He also tells me that the service is about to be privatised. So what is the £7b all about?The expected cost of paying a contractor to do search and rescue over the period of the contract?

One could have some fun devising some macabre performance indicators but I guess that would be in rather poor taste so I desist. Leave that to the Monty Python/Sacha Cohen (our one that is. Not the figure skater from over the pond) crew.

Next stop the web site of the search and rescue service itself - the UKSAR - to see what I can find out from there. To find that the service seems to be run under the auspices of the Department of Transport rather than the Ministry of Defence. To find a framework document for the service which runs to many pages but which does not appear to contain the pound sign, the humble '£'. So not much about cost-benefit analysis there. Much more about radio frequencies and dividing the UK and the adjacent seas up into search and rescue areas.

So I am left rather confused. It seems probable that we were to have spent rather more on search and rescue than it was really worth, that we were still running the sort of service that one would expect of a first rate power, but that was about all. One hopes that there is some analysis somewhere for the axemen from HM Treasury to bite on, but it is not very visible to your bog standard taxpayer.

PS now intrigued by the word tilt, usually in the phrase full tilt. Because I have just started reading the Nibelungenlied where they do a lot of tilting, as in jousting and knights in armour. Or tilt yards at Hampton Court. A quick check of OED reveals a variety of meanings of the word, some quite unexpected. But it also confirms that 'at full tilt' comes from charging at full speed at someone with a lance, with a view to impaling the someone.

PPS and while we are on helicopters we had two patrolling the air space over our house for a short while the afternoon. Perhaps someone had shopped the BH for mowing the front lawn without having donned protective clothing.

Sonata a good thing, although I have yet to run down a live performance and without the calm and serenity of the Mozart violin sonatas. Not a thing to be winding down with. No doubt we will get to a performance one day and get a second take on it.

But it did make me think that Tolstoy might have a point; that two people spending time together playing this thing, a rather intimate duet, could lead to trouble. I have heard tell that there are plenty of goings on in amateur music groups and amateur dramatic groups. All these emotions, faked or otherwise, flying around in a confined space often result in one thing leading to another. So entirely reasonable that a husband should get jealous of a musician or an actor with whom his wife is playing.

Not so sure about the short story, despite its being the most talked about short story of its day, with its core being a chap who gets jealous about the violinist with whom his wife plays the Kreutzer sonata and so murders her. The story being framed by being recounted by said chap to a fellow passenger on a railway journey some time after the event. Presumably no death penalty for crimes of passion in Russia at that time, at least not for the rich, despite the rampant brutality on other fronts. Much banging on about various Tolstoyan hobby horses to the detriment of the story, a feature which mars (from the old Norse. Not from the Syriac where it means lord or the Latin where it means sea. Not the planet and not the god. The god, despite being a Roman god, presumably comes from the Syriac) 'War and Peace'. Tolstoy comes across as a strange bird: full of passion but also full of anger about where that passion and the underlying desires can lead. I suspect that much of the anger arises from the more or less untreatable nature of sexually transmitted diseases, the absence of decent birth control and the high rate of disease and death among the resultant children. (Which, incidentally, is where I think where much of the more unpleasant wing of Protestantism originated). Full of anger about doctors who do more harm than good - which might well have been true in his time and place. I also suspect that he had a huge temper when aroused. He describes the central character getting into a rage - something he also does a propos of both old and young Counts Bezuhov in War and Peace - in a way which suggests that he knows all about rages. Red mist coming down and all that. So, all in all, the story is interesting but rather tiresome. Perhaps I will do better on a second read.

And then there is the film, described on the box as a thriller and delivered by Amazon more or less the day after it came out on DVD, and which it has taken me some months to more or less see through to the end. A rather unpleasant thing, altogether rather off putting. The star, Danny Huston, manages to exude evil. So far, so good. The chap in the story is evil. The story has been transposed from a late 19th century Russian landowner to a late 20th century Beverley hills moneyowner. Again, so far so good. But there is much bad language and much bad sex, more or less full frontal. None of which is very necessary to the story. And the film focuses more or less entirely on the jealousy which arises from performing the sonata, more or less to the exclusion of the working up to that point in the story, in which the sonata is more the trigger than the whole business. Although to be fair, the point that the relationship is entirely founded on the physical attractions and appetites of the wife is made. So not very encouraged but perhaps I will manage a second view.

It also seems to focus entirely on just one part of the sonata. But I don't complain on that account.

And, going further, does it really amount to despicable behaviour if the GP is a bit quick about it. That he (or she) administered the fatal injection on day 14 rather than day 17. The subject of the injection is probably fairly much out of it either way. And is probably not going to complain too much about losing 3 days out of 25,000.

Have we got to the point where I have to lay in some private morphine supplies in case the NHS is too squeamish when it comes to my point?

PS my impression is that the DT takes much the same view as I do. So the world is moving in the right direction. Maybe that is what the GMC and the doctor are up to. They want to put the real world on a legal footing and have passed the buck to our shiny new House of Commons. If you want to help things along see http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Meanwhile, my eye was caught over the breakfast bread and cheese (the Lancashire Poacher from Brighton; a decent cheddary sort of cheese. Good texture, fairly strong) by a letter in the Guardian about the Bloody Sunday enquiry, to the effect that it was a bit like having bought a ridiculously expensive car. You have paid for the thing so there is no point in whining and leaving the thing in the garage. You might as well go for rides in it.

Next stop was Surrey Library where several attempts to find the thing in the catalogue fail. One might of thought that a public interest item like this would be there, but maybe being many volumes it is reference only, in the bigger branches only, and so not visible in the online lending catalogue. I shall make enquiries. Then off to the enquiry website, all very spiffy with the full report available online. But I don't want to read a thing this fat online, rather, where do I get a copy of the report from? Website no help at all on that front. So I shall have to continue to comment on the matter without the benefit of any more fact than has been gleaned from the DT and the Guardian - the Independent having gone missing from our corner shop.

It suddenly dawned on me that Mr Blair, at that time at the beginning of his term, maybe knew what he was doing. Throw lots of money at the thing. Tell the committee to take their time and leave no stone unturned.

The money is mainly a good thing. There are frictional losses involved in pumping it through the trousers of luxury lawyers but a good proportion of it will wind up in Northern Ireland, meeting bills at hotels, restaurants, bars and the like. Helping things along.

It was a reasonable bet that the conclusions would be what they, in the event, turned out to be. Yes, the army lost control on the day, but there was no conspiracy to do evil and there was an armed IRA presence. Armed with arms that were used.

So now, most people think why on earth have we spent so much time and money on all this ancient history? Can't we just put all this away now and get on with our lives? And the few die-hard IRA will maybe be content, if not happy, to bury the hatchet. So maybe it is mission accomplished.

I hope there will be no prosecutions. I think it would be quite wrong to prosecute men who were (possibly badly led) young soldiers facing a hostile crowd a long time ago - particularly given that those who did far worse things were amnestied some time ago.

And a demerit to the makers of Aquafresh toothbrushes. Mine having been made with a double fold in the plastic handle. Partly to make the head a bit springy and partly as an appearance thing. Makes it look a bit more whizzy. But the catch is that the double fold is a wonderful trap for second hand toothpaste and all sorts of other gunge. Wonderful biosphere for MRSA and goodness knows whatever other bugs and plagues. I hope the things are banned from all NHS hospitals.

Yesterday to Brighton, the most recent of several visits this year. Managed to park up properly on this occasion, just below the sea life place. Lots of space mid-week, early summer. Strolled along the esplanade to Hove, taking in the sights and sounds.

So at the head of the pier we had a whole lot of things looking a bit like small bus shelters, made of quite heavy duty galvanised steel and housing large pictures of whales, marmosets and other things of that sort. A sort of seaside version of the poster display outside the natural history museum in London. But this version must have cost a good deal of money and as far as I was concerned did little else than block up the walkway, rather in the same way as all the junk buildings littering the concourse areas of large railway stations these days. I suppose they would serve as a windbreak, somewhere to get a fag going, if there was a bit of a breeze. They may have been connected with a wildlife flavoured gift shop - which I hope was the source of the funds, rather than the taxpayer.

Then there was the fishing museum, complete with some elderly boats. One of them was rather striking. Heavy looking, clinker build, maybe 15-20 feet long. Counter stern, pointed bow, but otherwise shaped just like a rather deep bath tub. Presumably the idea is that the thing sits fairly low in the water and is steady. Not tossed about too much by the waves and the weather - while still having a flat bottom which enables it to be drawn up onto the beach.

Next we had a huge Victorian church, St Patrick's of Hove (http://stpats-hove.co.uk/). One end has been turned into a night shelter and the other end was still a church, C of E despite the name and subordinate to the bishop of Chichester. Perhaps one of those anglo-catholic jobs. Sadly locked as it looked from the outside as if it must have been very grand on the inside.

Down Western Road to find lunch and lighted upon a place where we got a lightly gastro'd version of the sort of fish stew that is a staple at the rather less gastro Estrella of South Lambeth Road. But very good it was to, and nicely served. A place called the real eating company and one which recently got an hon. mench. in the food bit of the Sunday Telegraph. So it must be OK.

They also sold cheese, mainly of a cheddary variety, so stocked up on that. Which was followed by a visit to a nearby breadshop (the real patisserie and bakery) which was very into hand moulded bread in stone decked ovens. Bread not bad, but a bit heavy, in the way of gastro bread generally. Not like the stuff from Cheam at all.

On a more serious note I have been pondering about how we might best deal with our debt problem, which I suppose for these purposes to be £100b. Say £3,000 for each of the 33.3m taxpaying households in the country. Not a huge sum really.

One scheme, very easy to implement, would be to cut all public sector pay and pensions by, say, 10%. Or maybe aim for 10% overall but with some graduation so that those at the bottom of the heap pay proportionately less than those at the top of the heap. But then I think, why should us hard working public sectors types take the hit for the improvidence of the country at large. I don't mind paying, but I would resent all the others not paying.

Then I think of VAT. But it probably would not be practical to raise this by enough to do the business as both compliance costs and evasion would go up so much that one was not making very much headway.

Then, thinking back to my recent read on the Normans (May 10), another answer would be for the government to exact a tenth or a thirteenth. I think the idea in the olden days that the king, when hard pressed, perhaps by the Vikings, could impose a tax on moveables of this sort of order. A modern version would be to impose a tax on real estate. So we go down to the Land Registry in Plymouth and tax everyone owning real estate some amount proportional to the value of that real estate. With some equitable split between mortgage lenders and borrowers.

The tricky bit would be valuation. But it should not be beyond the wit of the Land Registry IT department to come up with some valuation algorithm. The answers could then be sent out. People who felt swizzed could appeal. But with the deterrent that if the valuation was upheld there was some kind of penalty. This would stop the system being swamped with whiners.

In the meantime, a special account could be opened at the Bank of England to which decent tax payers could direct cash and assets. Doing their bit for the country. They could choose whether to do it anonymously or publicly. Either way, the gifts would not affect tax liability, except in so far as they reduced the wealth and income of the donor. All those old ladies presently leaving their money to the RSPB and save the whales could do something more useful with it.

So I think that anger, like the other violent passions, just wells up in one. Sometimes one is not quite sure why one is angry. Sometimes one is not allowed to be angry with the cause of the anger; perhaps because the cause is god, a loved one or a loved object. But, in any event one is angry and the anger needs to be vented in some way. So quite often, one vents the anger on whatever happens to be at hand, cooking up whatever excuse comes to hand. Toast overdone, toast underdone, toast not done at all. Whatever.

But the Greeks, anticipating Freud in this as in so much, thought of the wheeze of the scapegoat. So you pick out a handsome and valuable goat and the population of the village all join in in beating it up and beating it out of the village, carrying all the pent up anger with it. They talked in terms of carrying all the pent up sin with it but we don't have to believe that. Many years later, witches were used for similar purposes. And even now, we still go in for what amount to witch hunts. We are angry about something going wrong and we want someone to vent our anger on. OK, so witch hunts are a bit more complicated than this, but I think I have part of the truth.

There is a catch though. I think scapegoats and witch hunts only work well for more or less public problems. A public problem with a public and shared solution. Private problems, private angers, need a more private solution. Which is apt to mean that someone or something nearer home is going to get bashed.

All this brought on by a very sedate morning. Started with Couperin, lately organist to the king & etc. Presumably the king in question being the Sun King. Works for the harpsicord; Book 1; Order 3; La Tenebreuse & etc. La Tenebreuse especially striking. Such command, control and depth of tone - all from an anglophone too, one Kenneth Gilbert, despite it coming on a French imprint, harmonia mundi. Not sure what a tenebreuse is in this context though. The word seems to be an adjective meaning dark and mysterious - which the music certainly was - but my sources don't say what it might mean used as a noun.

Followed up by a good read over breakfast of the May 26 edition of the 'Cornish Gazette'. Proper provincial newspaper with lots of fascinating small ads. So, for example, I could become a pasty crimper, experience preferred but not necessary. Several posts vacant in Indian Queens. On the other hand, according to Her Majesty's 1978 classification of occupations (CODOT aforementioned), this occupation does not exist. The nearest among the half dozen or so baking occupations is a 'Table hand (bakery)', a sort of semi-skilled bakery assistant. Not sure that being in a non-existent occupation would be a very good career move. Maybe I ought to write to the Her Majesty's secretary about this lacuna in her classification.

Or I could buy a Copper Maran in good condition for £12. One of these, it seems, being a sort of hen. BH thought it was something to do with tin mining. This among several pages of fish, fowl, horses and other country life. There were also several ads. advertising boxes of household stuff which should be of interest to a car-booter. I had not realised this secondary wholesale market in goods for car boot sales existed. Rather in the way of fancy goods wholesalers who supply the souvenir shop trade.

Overall, one got the impression that Cornwall must be reasonably poor, despite the price of property, with a lot of ads. for things costing less than £5. Don't think that would be worth the bother in Surrey. Maybe e-bay does not reach all the way to Lands End.

Some snippets from the geek front. First, I think that the Google unified login does not work quite as one might like it to. The good bit is that the same login sequence and the same login credentials get you into both email and blogging. The bad bit is that if you are logged into both email and blogging and then log out of one of them, the other can go a bit wobbly. A legacy of the incorporation of pre-existing but exotic blogging into a pre-existing Google world?

Second, as part of the FIL heritage activity, I have been investigating turning ancient family snaps into digital images. So I take a sample of four snaps (from my own family archive) down to Boots to see what they can do. Pleasant young lady drives what is intended to be the self-service scanner for me and the next day I wind up with 4 images on a disc for £2. The pleasant young lady had observed in passing that I might need to do a bit of fiddling around with the result. I didn't pay much attention at the time. What she had not said was that the images would be whole page images with the snap nestling in the corner, with each image occupying around 20Kb on disc. So more or less useless. Even if I knew how to fiddle with the things the resolution was not going to be there.

Take the same four snaps to Jessops, just around the corner. Much the same story from a pleasant young man who confiscates the snaps for processing later. The next day I get the second disc for the rather heftier £3.50. But this disc contains 4 images, each one of just the snap itself and occupying around 1Mb on disc. So it looks as if I am getting a lot more pixels to the pound. Pictures look OK on the screen.

Then move onto embedding images - these particular ones from a digital camera - into a Word document. All fine and dandy and I learn that Word actually incorporates a few bits and pieces for playing with images. Cropping, shrinking, contrast. More than enough for me I should think. The only problem being that when I go to print the resultant 12Mb Word document, the printer gives up in disgust and went into a 12 hour sulk. Maybe my £90 HP printer can't cope with such things. Hopefully the helpful print shop down the road can.

After all this exertion, retire to the sofa with the Saturday Guardian. Where I learn that I could apply for the post of Scientific Expert Member of the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food Consumer Products and the Environment (COT). I am advised in very loud letters that this post does not constitute employment. And in quieter letters that it is not paid although reasonable expenses are repaid; that there is a full blown application and selection procedure (PhDs and other such things would be helpful); that my performance, if I get the post, will be subject to annual review; and, that COT is fully signed up to all the PC stuff on diversity and speciality. So who on earth is going to apply for such a thing? All that pack drill for no reward? I am not sure that we did not get a better result when such posts were filled by nods and winks on the establishment network.

In course of this tutorial on matters evolution, I find that one of Fodor's big points is that just because polar bears are white and polar bears live in a white country, you cannot be sure that the polar bears are white because they live in a white country. Well no. But then, if you are going to be picky, you cannot be sure about anything. And I dare say there is a certain amount of statistical and logical sloppiness about the conclusions of this sort which are drawn by the up the evolutionistas. Bad statistics used to be the bane of shrink write. But, as the shrinks say, you can be a good enough parent. Not great, but good enough.

Still not moved to read the offending book. Getting short of quality time, so the evidence of now two reviews is enough to keep me off the book if not out of print. Evidence based blogging they call it.

But if you cheat a bit and go to http://www.slhg.org, you learn that St Luke's is part of the MILD group of companies which seems to be invisible to the usually all-knowing Mr. G. who can only come up with another subsidiary, the Mild Mining Group. See http://mildmining.com/. All very confusing. Maybe they are not related.

Having done the bonsai at St. Mawgan last week, earlier this week we finally made it to Herons Bonsai, a nursery specialising in bonsai which we had come across at least three times in the last year or so. Interesting place, very much a working nursery rather than a showcase, although they did have some flashy stuff. Some of which involved fancy rocks and some of which involved a bit of landscaping and which reminded me of the stuff we saw at the railway modellers exhibition (see April 24), this despite the fact that the bonsai landscaping was mostly live and the railway modelling was entirely dead.

Talking of dead, I was also struck by a morbid streak in the things. Some of them were mostly dead trunk with a few growing twigs. Dead trunk needing to be painted with some special gear so that it did not rot away. Testifying to a fascination with the chancy and transitory nature of life. A more or less dead tree which might or might not spring into life. A more or less live branch which might or might not spring into life in the spring. Or it might join the ranks of the died back. All very Japanese in fact.

I think I have been cured of the bonsai bug. No chance of my spending valuble time on what looks, at close quarters, to be a reasonably demanding and time consuming hobby. Lots of reels of the wire I had noticed at St Mawgan lying around. Lots of watering and pruning. Maybe I would take a different line if I had a swanky modern house, all on one floor with lots of open courtyards (with lots of round gray pebbles and fat koi carp, of course) and colonnades. The sort of place where such things can be shown off properly.

Nevertheless, I shall continue to look out for their stands at flower shows. The exhibition jobs usually impress.

Second, the brit-bashing fest. in the US has taken a new twist, with BP not only being asked to foot the bill for the oil that they are spilling but also that arising from the consequent suspension of various kinds of oily activity by other companies. This seems to me to be unfair. It may well be that there are various oily industry wide practises which will now be deemed to be unacceptable and which will be stopped. But it does not seem fair at all that BP should have to pay, just because it was its accident which brought these unacceptable practises to light. That is more properly a charge on the industry, or perhaps the country, as a whole. This is the reward we get we get for sticking our neck out in Iraq and other far flung places in their support? Long live the special relationship!

On the domestic front, another successful DIY venture. The tyre of our wheelbarrow became flat. Got around to pumping it up again, an operation which required needle tipped pliers to extract the valve from the interior of the wheel, after which it became flat again. Clearly something wrong so removed wheel from barrow. Removed tyre from wheel with my cycle tyre levers. Inflate inner tube and immerse in bucket of water to locate the leak. Which turned out to be right next to a whole lot of ridges of the sort which would make patching with a cycle tyre patch tiresome. Feel around the inside of the tyre to locate the offending spike, if still present. Which it was. What looked like a bit of thorn. Removed thorn from tyre.

Cycle down to the number 2 tyre shop in East Street, what I had thought to be an independent operation but is actually a branch of http://www.setyres.com/. They seem to be cheaper and quicker than their neighbour http://www.kwik-fit.com/. Premises a lot less flashy so perhaps the overheads are lower. Can you help with this sezzaye, proffering inner tube to the man behind the counter. Yessir sezzee, neatly chucking the thing in the bin. I am hoist and look suitably shocked. Having had his fun, he goes on to explain that he charges £5 for a repair of such a thing - for which he presumably has a sander to tackle the ridges. I have used a razor blade in the past but it is slow work - and £6 for a new one. Settle for £6 for a new one.

Start to sweat and swear a bit putting it all back together again. The tyre levers don't seem to be any help at all. Tyre whanging about all over the shop. Eventually I discover that you just push the whole thing down on the rim and on it pops. No need to use the levers at all. Just need to take care that the valve is in the valve hole. Wheelbarrow now up and running again.

Success on this front clearly called for celebration on the culinary front.

Started off modestly that evening with some chicken, pork and barley soup. The consumption of which caused me to wonder for the umpteenth time about the co-existence of zillions of foodie books, foodies, and rubbish loaves of bread. What is it about our arrangements which makes the vast majority of the population of this green and pleasant land content with the sort of stuff slung out by the supermarkets? When they could be savouring the pleasures of fresh white bread, English style. French and Italian bread can be fine. Complicated brown bread with or without lumps can be fine. But for regular consumption you can't beat good quality English white.

Moved into a higher gear the following lunch time with around 6lb of Scottish fore rib. Took a pint of Spitfire by way of aperitif. Served the beef, as usual, with white rice and summer cabbage. Washed it down with a cheeky little 2007 cotes du ventoux. Meal rounded off with a Spanish cherry clafoutis. BH judged it well, omitting all the cream and using semi-skimmed milk rather than full-fat, serving the thing warm but not fresh out of the oven. Just right, not being weighed down by all the fat suggested by the recipe. Just the sugar.

Slightly more surprised and a little annoyed to find that while this world heritage site had plenty of time to put on some commercial fest., it did not appear to have time to manage its usually splendid herbaceous borders. That down the east front was mostly rather unkempt - to the point where if they do not get a move on they will lose it. Once the convolvulus gets a grip you have had it. Perhaps we ought to shop them to the heritage people. Have them stripped of at least one of their heritage stars.

Meanwhile, FIL is composing his memoirs against his upcoming 90th birthday, from which I offer one anecdote: "Once upon a time, when I was working at the Maudsley, I was asked by the 'Nursing Times' to review a book written by a well regarded member of the psychiatric staff. This I did, reporting that the book was excellent. However, at the end of the review, as is customary, I did a bit of nit-picking. This included picking up on a 1,000 fold error in a reported (therapeutic) dose of LSD. Shortly afterwards the aforementioned well regarded member of the psychiatric staff committed suicide. Naturally I felt a bit bad about it, but since then I have often had occasion to wonder whether it is the psychiatric staff in mental hospitals who are the ones who are really in need of care".

While we are in this vein, I take the occasion to remind readers that hysteria, that scourge of ladies of a certain age from around 1850 to 1950, has been abolished and the term is not to be used in any therapeutic context whatsoever. The word itself has been almost totally expunged from the current revision of the WHO classification of mental and behavioural disorders. It only appears as something which Eskimos get and which certain Kenyan tribesmen used to get. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Oddly, the relevant document is filed under substance abuse: http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/terminology/icd_10/en/index.html.

But three more amusing snippets yesterday. First, it seems that the people who made my posh pocket knife, the one that nearly got confiscated by the Eurostar police on account of its blade being half a centimetre longer than the regulations allowed, have had their name pinched by some enterprising gent importing cheap lookalikes from China. So if you want a real Laguiole knife, go to the hunting and fishing outfitter in Pall Mall that I got mine from. You will be amazed at how long the thing keeps its edge if you look after it. Plus I had not realised that the Laguiole is a place in the south of France, north east of Toulouse. The knives have not actually been made there for years but China is taking the mick.

Second, I see that foxes are becoming something of a menace in Homerton and that an animal marksman was seen entering domestic premises in the company of a policeman. Slightly puzzled by what a marksman might do. I thought that part of the point of firearms regulations was that you did not want people banging off in crowded suburbia as you could never be sure what a stray (rifle) bullet might bump into. But perhaps a police supervised marksman would be OK; never known to miss. The good news is that maybe fewer people will feed the wretched things. I'm told in TB that ball bearings and a catapult are quite good for seeing them off, but not quite got around to it yet. http://catapultsuk.com/ looks to be the right sort of place. Much more sophisticated than the things I used to use when little.

Third, I read that back in the days when we were inventing foundation hospitals, hospital management teams were so busy doing meta-management - that is to say outward facing management of people in the Department of Health and HM Treasury - that they had no time left to do any management of their hospitals. With various dubious practises creeping onto the shop floor as a result. Let's hope that the new team don't initiate another giant round of reorganisation - with, of course, the best possible intentions and supported by the best possible (incidentally most expensive) advice from management consultants - and so initiate yet another round of meta-management.

I wonder if hospitals use the same sort of fat procedural manuals to direct their work as IT departments? Zillions of boxes to tick and headings to create action under. It seems more than probable. But maybe the DT exaggerates. In my time with what is now the Ministry of Justice it was true that a lot more time was spent managing the construction of IT systems than was spent on constructing IT systems. But that is the name of their game these days. I was not aware of that much time being spent fighting off the witch-doctors - or perhaps the witch-finder-generals from HQ.

But I should put in a word of defence for fat procedural manuals. If everybody uses the same ones, one not only gets a reasonable job done, but it is also very easy to move staff about or to take new staff on. They just plug into the same old manual wherever they happen to be put and from wherever they happen to have come. Also makes it very easy to hire consultants from the same gang that wrote the manuals in the first place. The catch is that they make what might have been interesting work terribly tedious.

For once in a while HSBC internet banking on the blink yesterday. Got to the page OK then got stuck. Tried again later and got one of those temporary fault pages the systems guys put up when all else fails. Something, as I dimly recall, you stick up on the internet accelerators which sit between the outward facing fire walls and the back office application servers doing the real banking or whatever, it being these last which have gone wrong. Back up again this morning.

No doubt their IT department deep in witch-hunt mode this morning. Who is going to walk the plank for loss of service?

Reminded on the way of the very serious way they treat the messages they send to one's internet bank account. Just the usual sort of junk mail that you drop in the bin when it drops through the letter box, but when you go to delete it you get a special dialog box giving you the opportunity to print your deletion or, alternatively, to confirm the deletion. Same sort of thing as you get when you make a payment or change a direct debit. Presumably the product design people were a bit lazy that day and settled for one size fits all confirmation.

Then, at roughly the same time, lost the internet service itself. Oh dear. Rather a muggy day to be talking to Bangalore. Luckily the service reappeared on the second reboot and is still with us.

And then two glitches of my own to report. The other day, having retired for the day, closed my eyes, as per usual. But instead of void on black I got a sprinkling of stars on black. Rather faint pin-pricks of white light scattered about the field of vision. Maybe a couple of dozen of them. I didn't think to count. Rather like the sort of night sky you get in the glowing suburbs on a moonless night. Has not happened before or since but I suppose if it becomes a habit I had better trot down to specsavers and see what one of their nice opticians makes of it. I dare say they will be able to squeeze three new pairs of specs. out whatever it is.

And yesterday, while turning over the large pile of books beside the bed, came across a small book by one Margaret MacMillan, noticed on March 28. Looked at the thing and could not remember what it was or why it was there. No recollection of the thing at all. It was only when I opened it up that I remembered that it was rather a good book, a sort of chat about modern uses and abuses of history. Which I remembered well enough when prompted. But not impressed by the void before prompting.

Today's book, sourced as usual from the TLS, presents a different problem. Interesting book about ancient mystery cults by one Hugh Bowden, but one of those glossy productions by Thames & Hudson. Very thick paper, wide margins, lots of black and white (half tone? See rather good explanation of same at http://www.ted.photographer.org.uk/) pictures and some plates. Which is all very well but it all makes the book, which does not contain very many words, very heavy. Too heavy to comfortably hold in one hand. Too stiff to comfortably read at a table: it does not lie open at the page, it has to be held open. Rather like my new Filofax. One suspects that whoever was responsible for the book design did not actually handle a test copy. All too focussed on the page images on his high resolution artmaster's screen to worry about the physical feel of the thing.

Incidentally, I hear that electronic books not too good with this sort of book either. Can't really cope with pictures, diagrams and maps, despite the fact that the whole thing could be shipped as a .pdf file. So what's the problem? Installing the Adobe software can't be the problem, so is it that the screen is not up to it? Or that the software that does the display just does not have enough buttons to allow the reader to control the reading of such a thing?

Some weeks ago I had occasion to moan about what I thought was an architectural solecism at Sherbourne (see May 3) - with mullions running from the top to the bottom of the windows. We now learn the truth of the matter from the guidebook to the church of St Mawgan-in-Pydar in the vale of Lanherne. Not a solecism at all. These straight up and down mullions are a feature of large perpendicular style windows which need the additional support provided by such mullions. The earlier decorated style windows manage without. Something I ought to have known given that I was supposed a wow at such matters when I was doing O levels all those years ago.

The guide suggests that decorated vs. perpendicular was a subject of as much anguished debate when this church was restored in 1860 or so as the rood screen was in our own Christ Church much more recently. In 1860 they went so far as to have one window retrofitted decorated from perpendicular. Or the debates without number about the number, size, shape and position of chairs in the nave given dwindling audiences.

It also tells us that the church had originally been founded, in the year of Our Lord 550, by one St Mawgan who came from a place called Dementia in Wales. According to Google Earth the place certainly exists but appears to be a field in Pembrokeshire. Perhaps St Mawgan is the patron saint of the demented, although the guide says nothing about it.

All in all a very worthwhile visit. A visit which was supplemented by two further attractions. First, a funny little craft shop in what was not much more than a shed. Rather expensive craft for all that. The merchant - to use the word that those credit card contraptions use in shops - was an interesting lady of uncertain age. Second, a nursery specialising in bonsai which also featured a Japanese garden, created out of a bit of overgrown valley. Lots of bonsai at all sorts of prices, running up to £1,000 or more. Some of them up to the standard of the flashy trees on show last year at Hampton Court Flower Show. Or at least they would be given a bit of a wash and brush up. One interesting feature was the use of sturdy wire to wrap round twigs to train them to grow in the desired direction. The chap told me that the usual drill was to put it on at the start of the growing season and to take it off again at the end - must be a right flap-doodle to do this without damaging anything.

Japanese garden an interesting blend of local with exotic. A lot of bamboo, a lot of water and a lot of little, but multi story, stone pagodas with pennies in them. The question was, who put the pennies there?

And last but not least, if you were staying in the area, yoga was also on offer.

I was reminded of the anecdote - if that is a proper word in the context - about the siege of Leningrad during which the city was stocked up by night by lorries running along an ice road over the lake. Any lorry getting stuck was simply pushed into the lake, just about giving the driver time to hop off. Things were pretty grim and nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of stocking up.

So in this case we have someone with a heart attack sitting in his or her car on the level crossing. I bet that in the days of Dixon of Dock Green, PC Dixon would have boldly entered the nearest pub and requisitioned 10 able bodied men. Then the 10 would have pushed the car off the level crossing to the beat of his trusty truncheon. The subject of the heart attack would probably never had known. But this would not do now. We have to wait for the emergency services and the paramedics. Collectively we are terrified of interfering in such cases. And I do not think it is just the fear of being sued by an irate heart attack. Someone less savoury is going on.

In the same way, PC Dixon would have gathered up 2 able bodied men and carried the patient off the train at Worcester Park onto the platform. Lied the patient down. Put rolled up police mackintosh under head. Talked calmingly to the patient while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. But again, nothing doing these days.

I may, of course, have got the detail of the story wrong. But I think the spirit of the thing is about right.

Something vaguely related is going on in the recent tragedy in Cumbria. Someone has gone mad, more or less out of the blue, and murdered a lot of people before killing himself. So tragedy indeed. But now I read that 100 or more detectives are crawling over the dead killer's life to try and reconstruct the whole grisly story of his madness. But what purpose does it serve? His victims are dead and he is dead. Why not just bury them with appropriate ceremony and move on? Do we really need such an elaborate ritual of detection?

I dare say that if the killer had been the subject of psychiatric screening, maybe at two or three hours a pop, the screener might have spotted that something was amiss and had his (the killer's) gun license withdrawn. A trick, incidentally, which does not work with knives or arson. One cannot stop people buying the stuff for that short of incarcerating them. But I do hope we are not going to move into such a world. The intrusion would not be justified by the modest amount of murder which would thereby be stopped.

Connecting the cable set me to pondering about all that signal floating around peoples' back yard, which can be captured by a few bits of aluminium and piped down into crystal clear pictures on the box. Lips a bit out of sync. with the sound but I don't think that that is anything to do with my connection or positioning of the aerial. Now the thing is, do all these signals float around for ever? Do they go whanging their way into outer space? Is the first intimation of earth on life to the little green men on Mars a dose of red hot porn from Rotterdam? Or do the signals attenuate through space and time, so winding up lost in the grey clutter of background radiation? Perhaps I could capture the signal in a special box lined with mirrors. The signal goes in through a hole then spends eternity going backwards and forwards between the mirrors. Presumably there is a catch with such a device but I do not know what it is.

Then we have another, possibly simpler puzzle. I have been wondering about why cut grass warms up when it is in a heap. Warming up which kicks in within minutes of heaping. Where is all the energy coming from? At the time of writing I have two options. Option 1 is that while grass, when alive and in the sunlight, is a net producer of carbohydrates, it also consumes carbohydrates to drive the processes essential to grassy life. Pushing food and water up and down the roots, stems and leaves for example. An end product of all these processes, just as with a computer, is heat. Processes which continue for some time post-mortem, plants being rather dumber than people. Once the grass is in a confined space, rather than waving around in the wind, it heats up quite quickly. Option 2, which does not exclude option 1, is that micro-organisms move in fast to start devouring the dead grass, no longer able to defend itself from attack. And all these micro-organisms burrowing into the grass generate heat of their own.

Meanwhile, I see our friends in the US are having their midsummer bash-a-brit festival. Making quite a thing of it on this occasion, even managing to make a lot of money out of it. That is to say, the Brit. in question is having to provide a lot of employment for bog standard citizens of the US who might otherwise be on benefit, to the detriment of the pensions of honest and formerly hard-working citizens of this country. BP being such a big deal that its shares amount to some significant proportion of the holdings of Brit. pension funds.

Not to be outdone the Surrey police are celebrating the feast of St. Securitas by having a fesitval on Epsom Downs tomorrow. To which end they have errected a large enclosure up near Tattenham Corner, displacing the gyppoes who might otherwise be indulging in their traditional sports. That is to say, telling fortunes, bare knuckle fights, horse dealing and fleecing the goujars (gadjos according to http://www.alphadictionary.com/index.shtml) at the fair. God willing, as the god fearing like to say, I shall be up there tomorrow to inspect it.

I close with positively the last word on psoriasis. It seems that our medical word is a Greek verb meaning to have the itch. So while the Turks are content to label the disease in the vernacular, we prefer to euphemise it in medical Greek. A difference which one might explore at length, but for today, I pause.