pumpkinstrokemarrow

Firstly, the otherwise excellent googlemail for some reason has not implemented a resend feature. Which means that when you do want to resend - which I do reasonably often - you have to fiddle about. Maybe tweaking a forward - which googlemail does do - to make it look like a resend. Went onto the googlemail forum to ask about it and discovered a whole lot of people out there beefing about googlemail. Some of the beefing was fairly crudely presented and some of the people appeared to be spending a fair bit of time beefing - to the extent that they appear to be given ranks or grades by google. Master contributor, artisan contributor, apprentice contributor sort of thing. So that the rest of us know who to place our faith in.

Secondly, while doing a touch of banking the other day, someone or something saw fit to put up a window about something called Trusteer. Just tick the box and we will make your computer even more protected than it is already. I vaguely remember getting something of the sort before and ticking the box without any untoward effects. And the window is professionally presented and might well be appearing on behalf of my bank. But I don't know how one can be sure; how can one be sure that some evil person is not spoofing the thing to gain access? Why is Trusteer coming back for more? Maybe the bank ought to have sent one a letter saying that they were going to distribute this thing. But life is too short to fuss too much. I just ticked the box and let the thing do its worst. Which so far seems to amount to telling me from time to time about all the cookies it has eaten.

Thirdly, on the third occasion that I have used Paypal, the first two occasions going fine, got into a minor pickle, with Paypal declining to make a payment requested by a third party. We will see how slick their help operation is.

To close with a literary factoid, was moved to look Oscar Wilde's favourite marquess up in Burke's Peerage. Where I find that the Marquess of Queensberry is the head of a very ancient and honourable family occupying very nearly 9 large pages of small type in double columns. The marquess in question being 9 out of 12. The dreadful Bosie eventually married and had one son who died relatively young, without issue, after a stint in the Scots Guards.

But what really caught my eye was that the Queensberry's appear to be, or be some part of the Clan Douglas, with the lineage starting with William Douglas, 1st of Douglas, born 1174. A subsequent Douglas was the Douglas who pops up in Henry IV part 1 as being captured by Hotspur at the battle of Homildon Hill and fighting with him at the battle of Shrewsbury. Subsequently became the Duke of Touraine and was killed at the battle of Verneuil fighting for the French. I wonder if Oscar, with his fondness for the bardic quote was aware of this connection? It seems likely.

Other medieval Douglas's did things like getting killed in Spain and fighting at the battle of Poitiers (on the wrong side, naturally) . Quite enough of them had their heads chopped off for treason for them to qualify as gentlemen - a criterion I think I first came across in Proust.

For the very curious, the ancestral seat of the Queensberry's appears to be a mountain a few miles north of Dumfries. At 2,286 feet nothing like big enough to be a Munro. Maybe there used to be a castle on the top. Nothing else listed under that name on my map.