pumpkinstrokemarrow

This from my shaggy dog story from Henri Troyat, the author of the fat biography of Tolstoy which I read recently (30th September). Troyat, despite being born in Moscow, has written lots of stuff in French: biographies of all kinds of literary and historical giants - a feat in itself if they are all as fat as the biography of Tolstoy. Then a whole raft of novels, novellos, plays and what have you. No wonder they made the chap a member of the Académie française. I should say that the shaggy dog story is not actually about shaggy dogs; rather, pretty short haired dogs of a breed called 'petit lévrier italien'. A sort of small greyhound. But, entertaining nevertheless, and I shall report further in due course.

Came across a different sort of literature the other day in our 1863 golden treasury of songs and lyrics. To wit, a poem by one T. Gray, presumably the chap who wrote Gray's elegy. This elegy, however, is not for a grave yard but for a cat who drowned in his attempt to fish some goldfish out of a Chinese vase. Which all goes to show that the Victorians were not as stuffy as they are made out to be: stuffy people do not write comic verses about the sad death of a pet pussy. Also that Victorians kept their goldfish in ceramic vases rather than glass bowls. Maybe they had not learned at that point how to make these last at a reasonable price.

And now to bang the law and order drum, as befits my age. Not impressed by student demonstrators who complain about being kettled. They do, I grant, have a right to peaceful protest within the confines of the law. But the police have a right, on the behalf of the rest of us, to intervene if they have reasonable grounds for belief that the protest will not be peaceful. Is likely to result in damage to the property of third parties. Or to persons. Furthermore, children below the age of criminal consent should not be there at all.

This despite my being a veteran demonstrator from the student disturbances of the late sixties. And in my defence I would say that while our demonstrations were not altogether or always peaceful, we did not go in much for smashing things up. Left that sort of demonstration to the French.

Yesterday we did not know this. Nevertheless, it did look like a grapefruit, between 2 and 3 times the size of a regular one. Took the management decision, which turned out to be the right one, to cut the thing in half across the equator. This revealed a large grapefruit like interior. Large enough that one could see the inner workings. Thick skin, yellow on the outside, white pith on the inside - the exo-pith. Void in the centre, but a void containing a central pillar of pith which produced the seeds, the largest of which were perhaps a centimetre in length. Central pillar of pith connected by plates of pith to the exo-pith, thus dividing the body of the thing into segments.

Which is where we get to the odd bit. The seeds clearly grew out of the pillar of pith, the various pith being the vascular system. The conduit of the grub for both the seeds proper and the growing pseudo-fruit (remembering from school biology that the seed is the fruit and the fleshy wrapping which we eat is properly known as a pseudo-fruit). But the flesh clearly grew out of the segmenting plates of pith, with the plates themselves growing out of the exo-pith. Each individual piece of flesh was a rounded cylinder, perhaps a quarter of an inch long and perhaps a bit less than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. Cylinders were packed, side by side, into sheets, the sheet of cylinders lying between two sheets of pith and growing, rather like bunches of grapes, out of one of them. The orientation was that the bunches of grapes were growing from the outside in. This was very clear when one peered closely into the central void - and this was the bit that Olympus could not manage - although just about visible (if you click to enlarge) along the top of the lower portion of fruit in the picture below.

The whole arrangement reminded one of the interior of a pomegranate - with the important differences that the individual bit of pomegranate is spherical rather than cylindrical and also contains the seed. Unlike the pomelo where the arrangements for the seeds and the pseudo-fruitlets have been segregated.

Potatoes also have a vascular system. They are not just an undifferentiated mass of white stuff. Careful boiling will reveal an irregular but intricate pith network threading through the interior. But not chewy pith like that of the grapefruit, which is just as well or the mashed potato which we all know and love would not exist.

Eventually we get around to eating the thing. And it was indeed recognisably a grapefruit. A bit drier - which may simply have been a matter of ripeness - and with a more interesting texture. Bit more work required to separate the fruit from the pith than with a regular grapefruit, but any small kitchen knife suffices. Rather fitter for this purpose than the more traditional grapefruit spoon.

Accompanied by a pert young Burgundy - a grand vin blanc from somewhere called Saint Vincent's Rock. Just the ticket. The only catch being that St. Vincent appears to be a Spanish rather than a French saint.

PS: suffering from an excess of clarity this morning. Far too many clear's and clearly's creeping into the text. And as my second boss - one Norman Davis - once pointed out, if a thing is so clear there is no need to say it. So I have tried to thin them out a bit.

That being as it may be, that night I dreamed about being mixed up in a performance of Hamlet. The form seemed to be that there were several groups putting on Hamlet, one after the other, in the same theatre on the same evening. One of the groups was a proper outfit involving people whom one had heard of. My group was an amateur affair with myself having landed the role of Hamlet. Scene 1 involved the various groups mixing it in a sherry party sort of format - something which I am very bad at when awake but managed OK in this dream. The well known luvvies thought that the group I was involved in was a bit of a joke, but they managed to be quite kind about my involvement in it. They were sure that I would be OK. Scene 2 was just me, just before the off. I had not succeeded in learning the lines or the cues and was unsure what to do. My ignorance was apt to overwhelm the prompt. Eventually after much pondering I decided that the thing to do was to read my part rather than try and do it from memory. Something which might work out OK as my sight reading is not too bad. Grinds to a halt from time to time, but the chunks between, when the force is with one, are generally OK. Woke up at this point, without the theory having been tested. But the whole thing quite clearly a product of the audience participation, or lack of it, at the Oval.

Moving forward a couple of days, have now had a chance to peruse the paper about St Thomas Aquinas. Difficult stuff - I usually find philosophy difficult - but one point of interest is the notion that a deed cannot be truly good unless the heart of the doer of the good deed is pure. So some people let the goodness of a deed rest on the outcome or consequences of the deed, particularly but not exclusively with respect to others, and these people seem to be called utilitarians. But other people, particularly those of a Jesus persuasion, think that this is not enough. And I do think they have a point; one wants people to do the right things for the right reasons - both rights referring, of course, to what I happen to think is right. I might put up with people doing the right thing for the wrong reason but would not be particularly comfortable about it. This sort of thing happens all the time in offices, council chambers and parliaments: the desire to move forward, to get things done can make for strange bedfellows.

Furthermore, one would like people to do things with good intentions. One wants people to mean well while doing well. And one likes people doing things simply because they are good. Not because of any reward for goodness either in this world or the world to come. The private charity of a poor person is worth more than the trumpetted public charity of a rich man. Not that this last is without merit; after all, the charitable gift has been made and there is, in consequence, less malaria, or whatever.

The trouble with all this is that the utilitarian test is a lot simpler and does not involve poking around in other peoples' tender consciences quite so much.

I also read of a different sort of tenderness. It seems that the French majority in Quebec are still terribly touchy about both English people and the English language. This despite the facts that they have been in the chair for a long time now and that there are tens of thousands of anglophones domiciled in Quebec. Not to mention the tens of thousands of indigenous who, I imagine, would rather speak English than French. To the extent that, so the clipping alleged, a public employee in Quebec is not allowed to communicate in his or her official capacity with a resident of Quebec in anything other than French (or what passes for French so far from the metropolis). Especially if both parties to this communication are English speakers. Jolly well time they learnt that French is what one talks in Quebec. One can understand that, like the Irish, the French Canadians had a rather bad deal over the years. But that is all quite a long time ago now and it is sad that they have not yet been able to move on. Not to mention the waste of resources involved in making people do their business in a minority version of a minority language.

Or was it a consequence of the odd pint of 'Taste the Difference' Chablis from Vauxhall Sainsburys (item code 6377601 according to their site on www2, whatever that might be. Which also tells me that as well as being able to taste the difference, I should find this item complex and elegant. It was the second cheapest of their Chablis, which did not appear to include anything from their 'Basics' range, so I am now unclear as to what the baseline for tasting the difference is)? The Chablis certainly was the cause of the discussion and subsequent ponderings on whether or not certain classes of questions were sensible.

The first such question posited my being a railway signal man in charge of a set of points so configured that I either had to kill General Eisenhower on the eve of the D-day landings or to kill a random selection of 1,000 people, excluding the general. After reflection overnight, I hold to the view that this is a sensible, if rather unpleasant, question to think about. Situations of this general kind do arise in real life and it is as well to have some kind of framework within which to make a decision. There is, for example, the incident in the 'Cruel Sea' where a corvette depth charges what it thought was a German submarine in the knowledge that these depth charges would kill a number of seamen from a previously torpedoed merchantman, in the water at the time. The submarine turned out to be missing or non-existent and so the seamen were killed for nothing. A fictional incident which I imagine to be taken from a real incident. Field hospitals, overwhelmed with casualties during a battle, have to make choices about who to save and who to let die. A process known as triage. One might decide that one was not going to make a choice. That it was better to throw a dice or something of that sort. But such a decision does not mean that one does not need to have thought about the problem. In this particular case, I find 1,000 a rather difficult number. Too large a proportion of the fatal casualties on the day to make for an easy choice.

The second question raised different issues. What would have happened had Nelson lost the battle of Trafalgar as badly as the French and Spanish actually lost it? One line of argument is that what is important is what actually happened. Looking at what did not happen is a waste of time or at best an activity for saloon bars in the intervals between conversations about football.

One might add there is an inevitability about history. It just rolls forward under its own steam, picking out its route for itself. Pointless pondering about routes that it did not take. An argument not without force, but which can be taken too far. Lots of things happen in history which are not inevitable, or, at least, are caused by externalities. Externalities which have no particular connection with the unfolding events. So, for example, Alexander the Great might have caught whooping cough as a child and died even younger than he did. History would of been completely different. So different and so long ago that I am not sure one gains much by thinking about it. But smaller differences can be interesting. Maybe Napoleon being killed at Austerlitz would be a better bet. Something which could easily have happened; he certainly lost the odd maréchal and Wellington lost the odd general.

A history of something might be thought of as a story. A story in which one episode follows another in a plausible way. That there is a chain of causation. I think it is interesting to look at such a story and to try to pick out the points in the story where someone or something might have made a difference. At what points in, say, the events leading up to the Magna Carta, did King John have the freedom of action to take action which he did not actually take but which might of made a difference if he had? If Louis XVI has not bankrupted France by bankrolling the American revolution to spite us Brits., would he have been able to avoid the French revolution? One might argue that weaknesses in Louis' character made mistakes inevitable and that given the state of France at the time he was, inevitably, going to make enough mistakes to tip the thing over the edge. But I do not think that takes away from the interest in identifying those mistakes.

Suppose one of the links in the story is the statement that A was a result of B1, that is to say if B1 then A. Is such a statement really that different in kind from the statement that if B2 then not A? This B2 being a what-if.

Chablis starting to wear off. Can probably cope with what St Thomas Aquinas had to say about the first question now. See for example http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/kwkemp/Papers/MPSTA.pdf. I wonder if other faiths have people of comparable sophistication and stature?

On 21st November I noticed some rather fine oxtail. Over the past couple of days achieved replication, albeit with some heart-searching and fuss-and-bother. Buy two oxtails, cost some £17. Not a cheap dish at all. Boil up the half dozen or so thin bits with onion and celery for two or three hours to make a fatty brown gravy. Place the larger bits in a pyrex dish, the sort that comes with a lid. No liquid, powders or anything else. Crumple a bit of foil into the lid to act as a sort of condenser and put lid on dish. In the middle of the night, place dish in oven and put oven on slow, that is to say 90C. By the morning the oxtail had turned a pale brown and was resting in about an inch of fatty water. Rubbery to the poke with a knife. Clearly not edible at this point. Not sure what to do. Should I have boiled first then roasted? After some hesitation, poured the gravy from step 1 on the oxtail in the dish, removed the foil from the lid, replaced the lid on the dish, replaced the dish in the oven and turned the heat up to 120C. Cook for a further 4 hours. At the end of this time the oxtail was a deep, shiny brown. Just like in the Brazilian cafe. Pour off gravy and set aside. Serve the oxtail with, in our case, mashed potatoes and slivered then boiled white cabbage. Very good it was too. A bit more chewy than our usual stewed version but with a lot more flavour. FIL even had seconds for once.

The gravy now settles in the fridge. In due course I will remove the centimetre of so of fat and use the slimming remainder to warm up the two left over pieces of oxtail for a supper dish.

All in all, a successful, if rather expensive replication. In fact, not much cheaper than the cafe.

Fortified in this way, off to the Ovalhouse (http://www.ovalhouse.com/) to see a two person production of Hamlet. A part of town which contains a lot of old housing, some of it looking to be 200 or more years old. The theatre turned out a multi-function (polyvalent to the French?) arts centre; the sort of place which is probably worrying about next year's grant. Part of the centre was the large Victorian house which saw the nativity of the baby who subsequently became Viscount Alamein. Did he bequeath his natal house to the service of diversity theatre in inner London?

The play was called 'The Madness of Hamlet' and used, unusually, the bad folio as a text. Either for this reason or otherwise it introduced the twist of Ophelia being pregnant then abandoned, a twist I have not come across before. Or even thought of, despite its being entirely plausible. The two persons were two young actors, originally from Zimbabwe. Very talented chaps. Very mobile and expressive faces; maybe reflecting a background in mime. Voices with a big range. Great sense of fun and comedy. Tremendous sense of rhythm and timing which must have made the wannabee white dancers in the (thin) audience green with envy. I wonder if this is a talent which wears thinner with distance from African roots? However, unlike the Filter version of 'Twelfth Night' (20th November), the production would not serve as an accessible introduction to the play proper. Indeed, one would not have made much sense of it at all without prior knowledge of the story. A fair amount, particularly the singing, was in Shona. At least that is what the programme notes suggested. A language which seemed to have none of the clicks that the Zimbabwean whom I know from Tooting employs when she speaks her native tongue. A production which was very focussed on death, burials and graves. The programme notes talk of the Shona attitude to the spirit world, an interest which fitted well with the attitude of the personnel in Hamlet to Hamlet's father's ghost.

Performed on a bare stage with two props, a mat and a yellow bowl, maybe 10 inches in diameter. Perhaps a calabash? No music, other than that provided by what we had thought was just a bowl. Which made a pleasant change and which made for, counter-intuitively, a much more effective contrast between soft and loud. The bowl, on closer inspection, turned out to contain a thumb drum and the rim of the bowl was ringed with metal washers, perhaps the diameter of milk bottle tops (for those that can remember what they looked like) and which, rattling as if in a tambourine, served as the drone to the thumb drum. At least, that is what I thought was happening. As it happens, we happen to own a thumb drum, purchased some years ago from a shop in the vicinity of Warren Street. It is a bit out of tune and we never learned to play the thing. But one of these actors certainly could.

Followed up with a visit to the Gauguin exhibition. Fairly crowded, with a lot of people appearing to pay more attention to their audio-visual aids than to the artefacts, but an excellent show just the same. Rather more to the chap than I had realised; rather more than just a painter of not very beautiful Tahitian damsels. I was quite taken with his still lives and landscapes. Nor had I realised that he was of the post-impressionist era; into symbolism, surrealism and the death of realism. Not to mention the death of perspective. Good fit with the Florensky chap I have just been reading about. Amused, given Gauguin's valiant attempts to shock the bourgeois at the same time as taking their money big time, by the very grand and golden frames that some of his pictures were encased in. Other memories include the large number of French visitors, Gauguin's fondness for a rather shocking pink, the strong smell of machine oil from the various escalators and the splendid (if rather disconcerting. An oddly detached expression about her) nude borrowed from our very own Courtauld. We must make it back for another go before it closes. Make the most of the significant concessionary saving. Far too much to take in at once and I did not suppose I shall have the opportunity to see too much again.

Took refreshment at the new cake shop in one of the corners of the former County Hall, where the cakes are in much better nick than their web site at http://www.bakerycountyhall.com/. Cleverly furnished with what look like furnishings from a better class of hotel. I hope they do well. They might also turn their heating down a bit.

Back home resumed the hunt for the missing Young's pub. Their web site failed to help me although I did learn that Young's was still an independant company, even though they have sold their brewery in Wandsworth. What has happened is that their brewing is now a separate joint venture with Charles Wells in Bedford. Not quite as bad as having been gobbled up by Wells altogether. Next stop Google Earth, which suggests that the sort of small street I am looking for is not to be found near Bankside. Pan west a bit to find a small pink champagne glass displayed next to Coin Street Gardens. Lo and behold, it is the 'Mulberry Bush', the very place I am looking for. No idea why the Young's web site denied knowledge but I do have to concede the BH's memory in this matter was better than mine. Odd considering that the place is a pub. Maybe because I do not go past it very often any more now that one cannot use the Thames path in the vicinity of the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge.

I have just finished another story called 'The Belton Estate' by Trollope. Not a bad read at all, fair bit of womens' lib. worked in (given the date of 1866), perhaps reflecting the intended readership. But one bit caught my eye at the beginning, which I thought told me the answer: the story will roll forward for 400 pages to this appointed end, the hero will marry the heroine and live happily ever after. And so, after various vicissitudes it turned out, my sometimes being right about such things. Coincidentally, at about the same time, I was also reading about smooth functions in Penrose. He told me that by carefully inspecting a smooth function at one point, you can know all about it at every other point. The catch being that such a function, while perhaps pretty, is also rather boring. Want you really want is a function with a few surprises. And so, I thought, it should be with stories. You want to have a sense of a drama unfolding along regular and familiar lines, but you also need a bit of variety thrown in.

Trollope himself was rather modest about this particular effort, more so than he need have been to my mind, although he did say that he was paid £1,757 for it. I then start to wonder how much this would be in present money. Two or three minutes with Mr G. then the ONS yields a helpful article by O'Donoghue, Goulding & Allen (take one third of a research point each), telling me about retail prices since 1750. So, prices were very steady for the 150 years 1750-1900, perhaps doubling in that time, but with a ferocious spike in the middle of the Napoleonic wars. They then started to drift up, reaching 10 times 1750 prices by 1960, and then shot up thereafter, reaching 140 times 1750 prices by 2000. Spikes for the two world wars and the inflation of the mid 70's. Very roughly speaking I make what Trollope got then worth about £150,000 now. Not in the Rowling league perhaps but not a bad sum at all if one was able, as he was at his peak, to knock out a couple of such books each year.

Having polished of Belton, finished the day by a further dipping into Conrad reminiscences - 'The Mirror of the Sea'. Lots of good stuff, but I was very surprised to learn last night that he served some time gun running to the third Carlist war in Spain in something called a balancelle - a lateen rigged two master of modest size and which ended its days on a hidden rock, rather than fall into the clutches of the coast guard. To the accompaniment of a rather nasty murder, Corsican uncle on treacherous nephew. Perhaps I should not have been surprised as his father was a minor Polish aristo., no doubt implicated in revolutionary goings on there. But I had thought he had just gone to sea and served his time in the ordinary way in proper sailing ships sailing to and around our eastern empire. Not messing around with swarthy types with mustachios.

I close with a nautical factlet. Conrad tells us that are three very important capes in the world, Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Leeuwin. Which were known to sailing sailors as the Horn, the Cape and Cape Leeuwin respectively. I had to look the last of these up and it turns out to be a place in Western Australia, but neither the western nor southern tip. Presumably some trick of wind, tide or current makes the place a big deal for someone in a sailing boat.

The government of Western Australia makes the point that while it is neither the western nor the southern tip, it is the south western tip. Perhaps that makes all the difference. It is also the site of a very tall lighthouse and was the venue for the very first International Day of the Lighthouse. See http://www.westernaustralia.com.

Having got over that confusion, found my way to the right page in Wikipedia where I learned that there was indeed a famous citadel in NN, built in an Italianate style under the supervision of one Peter the Italian. Not quite built by the Venetians but tendencies in the right direction. Search for Peter the Italian and find that there are rather a lot of them, with the most famous being an associate of, partner of or model for Andy Warhol. Clearly, not the right chap at all. But after that I drew a blank, at least in the English speaking part of the internet. No further information on NN citadel or its builders.

It is if course possible that it is not known who built the citadel, beyond the fact that someone called Peter the Italian was mixed up in it. A fact which exists because the citadel clearly was built, but a fact which we are never going to be able to exhibit. A philosopher would, no doubt, be able to expound at length on the nature of the existence of this particular fact. But it seems unlikely that this particular fact is, in fact, a fact of that sort. The inhabitants of NN were big time merchants and presumably literate. Presumably they liked to celebrate their industry on parchment, parchment which may well have come down to us. Enshrined under glass in the National Library of Russia, an institution which has presumably had to be rebadged since the demise of the Soviet Union for which it was established.

I then peer at my trusty atlas, a product of the Polish Army Topographical Service (why not cartographical?) and which, as a product of the Soviet era comes very well equipped with maps of both Poland and the Soviet Union. They even have the cheek to put Poland at the front of the atlas, rather than the UK. Don't they know that atlases are presented in longitude order, starting with the Greenwich Meridian? Anyway, now being something of an expert on NN, I am not confused by the fact that when this atlas was being prepared the place was called Gorky. So I rapidly determine that it is indeed on the confluence of the Oka and the Volga, as pointed out in the book about Florensky. And that the Volga is clearly a very big river, entirely suitable for carrying lots of trade in the days before roads were very roadworthy. The only catch is that the Volga appears to come out in the Caspian, despite attempting to come out behind the Crimea in the Black Sea, which means that the Venetian galleys knocking around at the time of the construction of the citadel would not have been able to row there. Which had it been otherwise would have made the presence of Venetians there entirely plausible. One big trading outfit working with another. And the Venetians were good at galleys, a mode of transport well suited to large rivers. Did they establish a galley building factory on the shores of the Caspian? Did they carry their galleys over land, rather as the Vikings carried their long ships? After all, Fitzcarraldo managed a rather more serious feat of this nature in the Amazon.

The question is, where do I go from here? Foyles perhaps? They may well have some fat tome about NN and I should be able to browse enough on the spot for present purposes, without needing to buy the thing. I would not feel bad about doing that as I do, as it were, pay my taxes there. Then if I fail, is there some Russian version of the Institut français (see http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/) with a helpfully staffed library, well equipped with well-educated (that is to say English speaking) young female staff to deal with queries of this sort? I cannot imagine that the embassy or consulate would be much help. In fact, I might be escorted off the premises, quick time.

I was pleased to find that the story is as silly sober as it was when I was on the test on 12th November, with the black magic part having no very sensible connection with the poisoning part. And with the black magic part rather weighed down with weighty information about black magic. And while the adaptation may have stirred in Miss Marple, it was otherwise reasonably fair to the spirit of the original. The one other big concession to telly being the pushing back of the story in time from the late fifties to the late forties or earlier. Get more heritage for your buck that way. More competitive with Downton Abbeys.

Followed up with a walk to investigate the new Tesco at the Horton Retail Park, following my note of 4th October. Also to investigate the seagulls, who, last time we were out, were flying westward in huge arrow heads, the same sort of thing that ducks and geese fly around in, but very much larger, if rather more untidy. Never seen such a thing before. Yesterday the seagulls were missing, but we did come across a clump of trees containing mixed flocks of starlings and parakeets. The starlings not in large enough numbers to make one of those spectacular, slowly throbbing black shapes in the dusky sky, but quite large enough to make a lot of noise. Quite equal to that of the parakeets.

Get to the new Tesco to find that it is going to be quite a large place, maybe occupying half the dozen units on the site. We wondered whether they are going to have to provide a disabled toilet for their staff, something it is alleged is a sticking point in the unit intended to rehouse our neighbourhood butcher a mile or so down the road. What on earth do councils think they are playing at? Small shops struggle to stay afloat at all these days without having to shell out on disabled toilets for the use of their non-existent disabled staff. Or is the next step to insist that our neighbourhood butcher, one of two left in Epsom, has to employ someone in a wheelchair? Having wondered about that, we were lucky to come across a brand new and clean builder's hat which meant that we could retrace our steps to the sloe bushes in Horton Lane which appeared to have been overlooked by both the local birds and the local sloe pickers. Perhaps birds do not do sloes while they still have fire thorn and haw thorn berries. Perhaps they prefer red to blue.

In fairly short order we had picked 1lb 13 1/2 oz of the things. BH now deep in recipe books. Does declining Delia, the delectable Nigella or thin-on-top Blumenthal carry off the sloe gin palm?

To bed, where I subsequently woke up to an unusual-for-me dream. I had been invited to do an hour's interview of David Cameron on the radio. He was his usual well mannered self and I was in serious show-off mode. Far more interested to get my quips in and my points (such as they were) across than in letting him have anything to say. Pointing out, for example, that it was very hard to convince the inhabitants of my local boozer that it was right for a care worker to earn a score of thousands of pounds a year and for a banker to earn a hundred score of thousands of pounds a year. What did he suggest? Slightly puzzled, in the dream that is, at how tired he seemed at the end of the interview.

The fifth management team have made the place into a Brazilian tapioca and food bar (without warm beer). As a result of which I learn that tapioca is not just the stuff known in my primary school days as frogs spawn. It is also a kind of flour used to make all kinds of floury things, including the thin pancakes used to wrap up savoury messes in Brazil. Their version of a taco. However, I did not try them, opting instead for oxtail served with salad, rice and beans. Not too many of these last - which was just as well as the dish as a whole was substantial - served in a red gravy. Oxtail excellent, on the bone and better than the version we have at home. I think it must have been boiled for a bit, glazed with something or other and then finished in an oven. Savoury and not fatty, although one's fingers were in a bit of a state when one had finished. Could have done with a finger bowl and a cloth rather than a paper napkin. This last disintegrating on one's sticky fingers.

Unusually, this special of the day really was a special of the day. Unlike the specials of the day in most places which are just selections from their boil in the bag menus.

I shall have to see if I can replicate the cooking of the oxtail.

Nearer home I can record the demise of Ember Inns, a pub chain which is visible in the Epsom area with half a dozen or more houses. The one nearest us is a place called the 'Cricketers', with what you might think is an excellent village pond side site but which has had an uneven history in the 20 years or so since the long time owner occupiers sold up. Several major refurbishments along the way and several quiet periods. The Ember Inn web site says there are 200 or so of them but tells one nothing about who or what owns the company. Is it a franchise? Is it really a branch of the Whitbread organisation? But we do know, because the well-informed young bar maid told us, that Ember Inns have been bought up by some venture capitalists, maybe the same people as who own Pizza Express and Zizzi. Maybe a pair of people called TDR and Capricorn Ventures. Or maybe Capricorn Holdings. Both versions of Capricorn appear to be into owning other companies but neither appear to be in the cuddly warm beer business. Now Ember Inns do sell perfectly decent warm beer, but their places are not particularly cuddly. Perhaps plastic cuddly, in the same sort of way as plastic paddy (theme) pubs are typically Irish. Are they going to get any more cuddly now that they are ultimately owned by some private equity types lurking in darkest Aldgate? Will the days of owner occupier pubs ever come back? Of owner occupiers not saddled with a monstrous rent and so content with a modest income. Who don't have to sweat the premises.

While we were there, popped into the next door Rose Theatre to take in the Filter version of 'Twelfth Night'. A presently fashionable outfit who turned the play into a pantomime from 'Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare', pruning perhaps two thirds of the lines on the way. An athletic affair with a lot of bounding around and a lot of music - of the pop variety which made a refreshing change from the authentic music on sackbutts and foghorns which you get at the Globe. Set in a sort of low grade pop recording studio with lots of clever sound effects and gimmicks. Rather too much audience participation, which I found rather distracting. Rather too much doubling up, which I found rather confusing. Malvolio, as is usual, but I think wrongly, made out to be a complete prat. Olivia rather flat and not at all convincing as a beautiful noble woman, although clever to cast her past her first flush of youth. A new to me angle. Overall, good fun and a handy introduction to the story line, in preparation for seeing the play done properly, which was perhaps part of the intention. Not that this is what say in the rather pretentious programme notes which talk of, for example, ' ... stripped away design serving to highlight the timelessness of the writing ... '. I'm not sure how one highlights writing which has largely been omitted or gabbled nor why writing written in Elizabethan English, festooned with Elizabethan interests and allusions should be described as timelessness - but they clearly are.

I rather suspect that once one has seen one Filter production one has seen them all. So their version of, say, Chekhov, would seem much the same. Rather as we found with the Young Vic pantomimes.

Jelly lichen in really good shape this morning. Eerie pale green glow when viewed from the kitchen window. Pale green seems to be winning out over the dark green, although the latter has not given up.

PS: just had the second crash on take-off, post defrag..

First observation, I remain fairly careless at reading things of this sort, despite many years of practise. Maybe I am going into decline, even more apt to miss the obvious than I used to be. Used to be prone to blunders in chess too. Second observation, it is just the same as the mobile phone and insurance people. They obscure the basic facts of the case with a welter of unwanted information. Same trick as used to be used in the civil service to keep the lower order unions in line. The lower order union representatives possibly could not read but they would be flattered to be the recipients of so much information. So flattered that they would forget to make a fuss about anything. At least that was the theory of the higher orders. And, it should be said, in those days the lower orders may not have been among the higher paid but it was a fairly cushy number. I even had an allotment which came with my job to which I could repair at lunch time when the weather was good.

Followed up by a rather less satisfactory experience. Tiring of regular tea with milk, spent an afternoon on Sea Dyke Fujian Oolong. First half pint made using a few fresh leaves, subsequent half pints made by adding simply hot water to the leaves from the previous half pint. Good drink, but despite the economy with leaves wound up a bit hyper.. Did not feel quite right and did not sleep quite right. Spent half the night half awake pondering about moving a closed string around the surface of a torus - and towards morning more complicated shapes. Maybe a bit feverish; maybe the weakness brought on by the tea had let in a bug.

The the following night, last night that is, slept OK but had some rather odd dreams. Images which were plausible but wrong in some way. For example, a waitress's (white) apron which appeared to be inappropriately dirty but which, on closer inspection, turned out to have been carefully embroidered in black with a variety of insects of a variety of shapes and sizes. Which looked like dirt from a distance.

This may have been a form of déjà vu as I woke up to read that the mother-in-law in waiting to the heir apparent in waiting used to work as a waitress on an aeroplane. Would not have been allowed in his grandfather's day. A throw back, I suppose, to the days when upwardly mobile knights competed for the honour of being the monarch's bread knife.

I also learned that one of the indices of happiness in Cameronland is to be the speed with which one can down load a film over one's broadband connection. Being to do this fast enough to be able to watch the thing in real time is, it seems, now deemed an essential of civilised life. Something to be included when computing the proper level of single parent benefit. All of which brings the statistician in me back to life. How do we make proper allowance for several people in the same village wanting to down load at roughly the same time? What will be the proper way to weight and average scores over the country? Is it fair to give the same weight to someone living in Benbecula as someone living in Sutton? On the one hand, someone living in Benbecula might have a much greater need for films, there being little else to do. But provision in Benbecula is clearly much more expensive, now that they are thinking of closing down the missile test range there. Who but a statistician is going to be able to say what the right answer is?

PS: the good news is that the SNP is fighting hard for the retention of all Westminster funded military bases in the Scottish homeland. And they are thinking of insisting that only true born Scots serve in such places.

Truly an impressive achievement. One wonders whether Gilbert, sometime fellow of Merton College, did it all himself or whether he had a team of research assistants behind the scenes. One wonders what his wife thought about it all. I learn from my rather shorter biography of Churchill by Sebastian Haffner that the Gilbert biography rates an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest ever biography. Haffner is a good read if you want a quick introduction.

Next step is to approach Heinemann to see if they can throw any light on the variations in paper weight and thickness - supplied by Reed & Smith Ltd. Clearly, they did not buy enough paper for the whole job at the outset. Perhaps their policy is that, for a certain class of book, they use just one sort of paper and it all lives in one tub. No special papers for special books. But that one sort does change from time to time, reflecting the exigencies of the paper harvest in Finland. So for a large and long project of this sort, the paper will vary a bit.

For full details see http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/Churchill_1.xls.

Otherwise, standard of book production very good. Sturdy red cloth covers. Good type face and page layout. Reasonable provision of maps and pictures. Index, potted biogs. of all the dukes and duchesses who flit through the pages. Was it subsidised? I think most of the many books by Churchill sold very well, made most of his living anyway; did this one?

Lunch at the continuing excellent http://www.frerejacques.co.uk/. Moules, cheese and calvados. Cheese very good. Not too much of it and served, if desired, with bread.

I had a dream about downloading a very important file to an electric drill. I then waste a lot of my precious time trying to find the USB socket on the drill so that I can get it back again. Without success. Dream moves onto me downloading the same file onto the refrigerator, with the same problem and the same lack of success. Wake up in a sweat.

Whereas FIL had a dream, perhaps a nightmare, about being on a coach outing with his pensioner group. Coach stops at a service station for a comfort break. FIL, in a heroic effort to keep things simple, offers to order and pay for all the coffees in one purchase. The first time he has done such a thing. Proffers his shiny new £20 note, fresh out of the hole in the wall. Next time, needless to say, someone else should pick up the tab. He and all the other pensioners go and sit down to wait. And wait. And wait. After a while he returns to the checkout to enquire about his coffees to find that the next coach party have appropriated both them and his change. He wakes up in a very big sweat.

Moving on from pain, I read a piece by someone who clearly has a lot of time on his hands, the Mayor of London, about torture. His very firm line being that torture is abhorrent and should not be done in any circumstances. Noting in passing that maybe Bush the younger would get arrested in some European countries for his robust defence of his use of torture. I can more or less go along with the mayoral line, although not to the limit. But I thought his argument was marred by an assertion that torture does not work and is therefore pointless. This I do not believe. I believe that a professional torturer who has somehow managed not to become a sadist can extract useful information in this way. I don't know if there are chemical routes to the same end, but on the assumption that there are not, the Mayor failed to deal with the point that there might be circumstances when torture was useful if unpleasant.

And moving onto chemicals, I read recently that Freud has been knocked on his perch by the arrival of chemical treatments for psychiatric problems. That medical doctors no longer bother with talking cures now that they have the much more convenient chemical cures. Psychoanalytic Institutes are reduced to taking on doctors of anthropology and classicists as trainees rather than proper doctors. But I think Freud will have his day again. The brain people will find that the brain is a sufficiently plastic place for a talking cure to effect real change. Change in the form of changed wiring. Chemicals might be a cheap way to do things but they are not the only way.

Closer to home, have now discovered the first really useful new feature in MS Office 2010. The new sections feature in large Powerpoint presentations makes them much more manageable in write mode and provides a useful 'goto section' feature in right click in read mode. The left hand summary part of the display in write mode is a touch wobbly, although, so far, it has come right in the end. No doubt something they will get completely right in the next edition. In the meantime, I am comforted by the knowledge that large Powerpoints are OK. I had been wondering with one of mine running to near 500 slides and 2Mb. Not too many pictures so bytes not as bad as they would have been otherwise.

The discovery made quite by chance. I was trying to find out, using the not too clever offline help, what a new print feature called OneNote 2010 was all about. Failed on that front, but happened to notice along the way something about this new feature called sections. And as luck would have it I stopped to investigate.

Started off by practising not hitting the kerbs to the ramps in the multi-storey car park. Something which the BH is much better at than I am - more practise going shopping possibly - and something which I cannot manage in the car park near the Rose Theatre in Kingston at all. The kerbs to the ramps there seem to be designed to be hit by my back wheels. I blame the shape of the front of our C-max which means that one cannot see the front corners of the car, so making it harder to judge one's turns. The ramps in Sutton were much easier than those in Kingston, there being more room to swing into them. But I still managed to hit one of the two I had to negotiate on the way in. I forget my score on the way out.

From there proceeded to an inspection of the middle sized ASDA, which, we thought, used to be a middle sized Tesco. 24 proper check outs and maybe half a dozen DIY. Distinguished for me by two things. First, access to the first floor car park (not the one that we were in) was obtained via moving walkways, whacking great long things, rather than escalators. What quirk of the geometry of the site meant that walkways were a better option than escalators? They take up a lot more space. Second, this large retail shed was very honest about it. The place was just a large shed with air conditioning. No pretence, in the way of the last Tesco house style but one, of being a barn, a large cottage or anything else. I rather liked it - although we did not actually buy anything so we did not like it that much.

Attempted to get into the large church at the railway station end of the High Street. The church with a large and impressive tower and which, on closer inspection, turns out to occupy a whole block. A regular ecclesiastical complex, operated by the Methodists. But firmly shut. Next door was another large church, this one operated by the Baptists. And just up the road the St Nicholas church for which the shopping centre was named, operated by the CofE. One supposes that Sutton existed before shopping was invented and that there has been a St Nicholas church on the site for some centuries, possibly even 10 of them, but the current church appears to be a evangelical revival job from the last century. Not to be confused with the various churches found by Mr G. devoted to Sutton St Nicholas, whoever he or she was.

But we did manage to get into the library, presumably the headquarters library of the Sutton Library Service. Impressive place, arranged on various floors. Introductory on the ground floor, together with a cafe. Children on the first floor, media (including lots of sheet music and scores) on the second and the library proper on the third. Much grander and better stocked place than Epsom Library - but then I suppose Surrey does not have a headquarters library in quite the way that Sutton would. A more dispersed, suburban even rural operation. Better stock including books by a dead historian called Tony Judt of whom I had only just heard and a copy of 'Pale Horse' of which I just seen a television adaptation. Furthermore, it transpired that I was allowed to be a member even though I neither lived nor worked in the borough. I suppose, as befits a shopping centre, shopping in the borough was sufficient qualification. So I now have the form. I learned later that it may well be that membership of Sutton Library would give me honorary membership of most, if not all, other London libraries, some of which specialise and are very good. Maybe I shall fill the form up and see. Had I happened to be carrying both a utility bill and a biro I could have joined up on the spot and removed at most two of books mentioned above without further ado. Ticket sent on in the post, later.

I should add before closing on this topic that the Polish grocery was, indeed still there. But we did not buy anything there either.

A day or so later to All Saints' at Esher to hear the Ripieno choir, mainly doing a long-dead Spaniard called Victoria. Church itself was completed in 1939. Exterior in a light Italianate style, interior with plain arched aisles, a plain arched chancel, all painted white, but with a plainish pitched roof to the nave. Plainish because it was painted yellow and had some beams and whathaveyou tricked out in some other colour. Overall effect, very good despite some cracking in the chancel arches. It seems that this bit of Esher - Weston Green - although decently provided with old houses - had had to make do without local praying until 1939 when a local lady - Mary Rees I think - but not the FRS mathematician at Liverpool University - badgered the bishop into setting up a new parish. Presumably she paid for the buildings.

Choir good, material mainly Victoria and ecclesiastical. Properly ecclesiastical and calm in tone, an opportunity for people to celebrate their common humanity before God. Not the show-off (and put-off) stuff practised in places like King's College at Cambridge. Bit of Byrd & Banchieri thrown in. We shall go to their next concert.

But one wonders how long middle sized, semi-professional choirs like this will last, the members being mostly but not exclusively middle aged and older. (Slightly more women than men, maybe 25 in all. Plus conductor). The days of choir being an important social opportunity for young people long being gone. On wonders also about the wisdom of calling a choir 'ripieno' which I believe to be a musical term meaning filler. What you put in to fill up the gaps between the solos.

Choir supported by sackbutt and cornetts. The first of these turning out to be a sort of primitive oboe and the second small trombones. Presumably cornets and trumpets were trombones before they invented valves. Although one might have thought that sliding tubes were as hard to make in a smithy as valves. Sackbutts and cornetts augmented their living by performing at the Globe, so it may well be that I have heard them before.

All in all, a stroke of good luck. Never heard of them before and just happened to chance across an advertisement for the concert in the cafe at Nonsuch Park (of conker fame. See November 3rd.).

Interesting piece in yesterday's DT about how the Deepwater disaster was the same sort of thing as Chernobyl. That is to say that in both installations the controlling and experienced engineers drove through many layers of red lights. Red lights coming from the well designed testing protocols. Despite all their diplomas, they chose to ignore all the red lights and crash on forward, in both cases with catastrophic results. The writer described it as a form of hubris.

Which moved me to ponder about the testing regimes we had on the computer systems we were working on when I eased out of the world of work at the Home Office. Testing was a rather tedious business which lots of people did not want to get mixed up in. Heads of IT saw it as a good game for pedants who would insist on crossing every last 'i' and documenting every last 't'. For a sort of geeked up version of traffic wardens, who will not be pushed around by project managers or anybody else anxious to get the show on the road. Project managers tend to flavour a more flexible approach. Microsoft, who were, as it happens, doing some development work for us at the time, struck me as being good at it. Perhaps because they were applying testing regimes developed for big products like Word to the much more modest products being put together for the Home Office.

The bit we got right was that there should be a testing function, quite separate from the constructing function. But as it happened, for one reason or another, this testing function was let out to contractors, rather than having an in-house team. Perfectly proper and professional people, but with a natural interest in maximising the amount of testing that is done at any one time. They would say in their defence, that if you want me to sign off on this mission critical system you are going to have to give me the time (that is the money) to do it properly.

The difficulty is to get the management regime right. Does one need a permanent, in-house function, all tooled up and ready to take on whatever the rest of the IT department can throw at it? Do you have enough going on to justify the large expense involved? To whom should the testing function report? Because if the testing function reports to the project manager, this last will need to be very disciplined not to take a flier from time to time. To go for getting the product on the road rather than getting the product right. But if testing reports too high up the chain, management is apt to give the testers too much of a free hand. They and their work can grow like a cancer. From on high in the management chain, supposing they bother at all, it can be hard to make the right judgement about this. Are the testers feathering their nest or are real problems with the product?

Clearly, the engineering chaps I started with got it wrong. Indeed, the impression given is that the engineers who did the day to day running were the same engineers as those who did the tests and made the decisions. Maybe a better division of powers was called for. I remember from my days of concrete cubes, a world when one bunch of engineers supervised the building of the bridge, another bunch of engineers watched them and a third bunch worried about the quality of the concrete on their behalf. A lot of engineers, but the number of collapsing bridges was modest, if not quite zero.

And a propos of the collapse of certain Irish banks, I have been wondering where all the money went. Who are the winners and losers in this collapse? Which leads to the following train of thought. Suppose farmer O'Reilly owns the fishing rights to a bit of a stream running through a bit of his rough pasture. Suppose further than speculator FitzJames (of dodgy Norman, rather than decent Celtic, descent) decides that these fishing rights are worth £1m and persuades the Bank of all Ireland (BOAI) of same. BOAI agrees to finance his purchase of the fishing rights for said £1m with the O'Reilly winnings being loaned back to the bank. So BOAI is now in debt to O'Reilly to the tune of £1m and in credit with FitzJames to the tune of the same £1m. No money has changed hands although the title deed of the fishing rights has changed hands.

After a while O'Reilly decides that he would like a shiny new Ferrari to bang around his land in and wants to call in some of his debt with BOAI. But that is not a problem as the Ferrari people are quite happy to take their money in the form of debt with BOAI. So far so good; no real money needed. But then O'Reilly wants a loft conversion done on his pig shed and he finds that the people who do loft conversions on pig sheds want to get paid in washers, not debts. So O'Reilly calls in some of his debt with BOAI who now have a bit of a hole in their balance sheet.

Meanwhile, FitzJames has parlayed his fishing rights up from £1m to £2m. Rising market. Actual income this year from paying fishers not that hot, but the capital value is doing nicely thank you. So he decides to sell half his share to the Bank at Dubai (BAD). Luckily BAD has lots of real money available as a result of selling lots of oil and are able to pay FitzJames in real money, thus bringing a bit of liquidity into the system. FitzJames pays off a slice of his debt to BOAI and the BOAI balance sheet is now hunky-dory. FitzJames PLC pays FitzJames the person a hefty management fee for all his fine organisational work.

I have not bothered to work into the story the way in which BOAI charges fees and interests on all this and does not appear to be doing too badly. Let's keep the numbers simple. Nor the bit about how FitzJames was big mates with the Taoiseach, in whose gift rest three of the six directorships of BOAI. I leave this last bit of scuttlebutt to the 'News of the World'.

Then, all of a sudden, the fish in the fishing rights all catch malaria and snuff it. Value of fishing rights drops from £2m to £2 overnight. FitzJames PLC goes into administration where the administrators find that all the company owns is half the fishing rights, that is to say £1. All the rest of the wonga has vanished. This triggers a run on BOAI and BOAI goes bust.

Farmer O'Reilly loses what is left of his money with BOAI but he has got a Ferrari and a loft conversion. He has unloaded at a good price some fishing rights which are now more or less worthless and which no-one will now tramp over his land to use. Speculator FitzJames lived happily ever after in the Cocoa Islands where he was the mainstay of the local lap dancing industry, womens' liberation not yet having reached these particular islands. BOAI is no more and its employees are unemployed and off the dole as Ireland can no longer afford to pay the dole. But they have got what they deserved. The Ferrari people have taken a bit of a hit unless they managed to pass it on in time. BAD has lost £1m. These last are the big losers, but, luckily, they can afford it. However, they are a bit cheesed and are not going to buy any more bonds which say Fitz something on them.

After all this, I think I am safe with the line that there are winners and losers in these stories. Maybe there is a lot of paper money in the system but there is also some real money. Quite enough to keep the FitzJames's in clover.

Clearly an economist manqué. Which, as it happens, is something I once wanted to be.

Some of you will be familiar with the punnets of green stuff, called cress (and which my father firmly believed was actually rape shoots, rape seeds being the stuff with which you make margarine), which one buys to tart up egg sandwiches. And which pubs buy to tart up the dish they call a ploughman's lunch. And some of you may have wondered what happens to the cress after you harvest it. Well, experiment reveals that the cress stubble does not regenerate very well at all. Some of the seeds which never shot in the first place do shoot when given some air. And some of the cut stalks have a go at starting over, with wannabee leaves appearing around the rim of the decapitation. But essentially no go. Cress shoots do not coppice in the way of a nut tree. Presumably the more intelligent part of the shoot has gone into the sandwiches with the base of the stalk not being able to do much more than pump water up towards the now absent growing tip. The tip being the bit which knew how to grow and how to make leaves. Not like the stalks of trees at all.

And do not confuse punnets with punnetts on the way. Being unsure of the spelling I asked Mr G. who informs me that Punnett is the name of a statistical device called a punnett square used in plant breeding experiments and which was invented by one Reginald Punnett. You would not want one of these being delivered by Tesco Direct.

The second experiment is a little more complicated. The idea is to determine how many units of alcohol one can consume while still being able to make sense of an Agatha Christie drama on telly. The units of alcohol being calculated by summing the product of the volume and the alcoholic content by volume over the drinks taken and then applying a correction for the time over which the drinks were taken. I use 1/(1+logT) where log is the natural logarithm and T is the time in seconds but there are other views on this point.

The occasion was a screening of an adaption of a story called the 'Pale Horse' and starring the latest incarnation of Miss. Marple. And I failed miserably. Despite interrogating the BH the following morning I still can't make any sense of it. The thing seemed to have been made in two halves but which had not been properly joined in the middle. This despite a high powered supporting cast, including the likes of the admirable Bill Patterson in a cameo role. Would such people have been seen dead in such stuff in the olden days? Whereas now it seems that more or less any popular TV series can pull serious folk in in supporting roles. Are they truly proud to appear on such shows - admiring the professionalism with which they are put together - or do they need the dosh? Enquiring of the Daily Mirror web site, I was mollified to find that this story did not start life with Miss Marple on-board at all - she had been popped in by the TV people who believed in the power of the Marple brand. The Mirror thought that the result was more or less incomprehensible, alcoholised or not. So I have deleted this experiment from the record. Have to start again and while waiting for a suitable opportunity, I have ordered up a second hand copy of the tome in question to see if I can make any sense of it in print. Plus, it will, as ever, be interesting to peer at the detail of how the TV drama is derived from the printed drama.

PS: amused by EDF energy invitation which arrived over the aether today to 'Watch our video on how to read your meter reading'. Perhaps, along with the people who hire the doctors who look after us after four o'clock in the afternoon (and all day weekends and bank holidays), EDF should make its IT contractors take an English test.

No recognition of the fact that we cannot afford for everyone with cancer to have the latest, very expensive drugs. Most people do not have the sort of money involved themselves and it is far from clear that it is appropriate to be spending central funds on such things. Bigger bang for central bucks from other things. And given that I am not in a position to give you this drug and you are not in a position to buy it, what purpose is served by telling you about it? Is it kind to tell someone of a (possibly) magic bullet to which they cannot aspire? How would you feel, wasting slowly and possibly painfully away, if the chap in the next bed was able to flash his plastic and get the magic bullet?

The second piece was about the sad fate of a badly damaged neonate who had been expelled from the intensive care part of the maternity ward, perhaps to die. I forget the details, but I suspect that whoever wrote the piece had never had to do with the children, eventually adults, who survive such a start in life. Many of them never grow up to live normal lives. Some of them are damaged, disturbed and needy for the rest of their lives. Consume hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of care, paid for from central funds. As in the previous case, the impression was of an uncaring NHS, driven by their accountants, with no recognition of either the costs of intensive care or the morality of keeping in life people who were unlikely to have much of one, whatever the expense. I wonder if the Sun did any better in any report it may of made of this incident?

Back at the LRB (bought to while away the journey from Waterloo to Epsom), I read a lament of the impending end of the university as we know it. This doom is, I read, the result of changing from a system whereby universities are largely paid for by a per-capita block grant to a system whereby universities are largely paid for by their customers, these customers getting their money from the government in the form of soft loans. The author also takes a few swipes in passing at the way in which universities are rewarded for bad research rather than for good teaching.

This change in funding is being made in such a way that the amount of money being poured into universities is much reduced, a reduction which will cause much anguish and unpleasantness, particularly in those departments - such as those devoted to the study of Horace and Shakespeare - which are not thought to have much impact on the earning power of UK PLC. Now while I think it quite probable that the relaxed and comfortable ways of universities of my time are no more and that all kinds of good things about universities are no longer thought to be affordable, but what I can't get my head around is why a centrally administered per-capita grant is so different from having students pay the per-capita grant direct, retail as it were. Either way, students can vote with their feet and may well not elect Horace and Shakespeare. Indeed, quite a number of children of people we know have elected media studies or travel & tourism studies - both of which have a bearing on important chunks of our economy. Children who quite possibly would not have gone to university at all in the olden days but done commercial studies at the local tech.. So are we that much worse off? All in all an interesting read this lament, but I do think the author has hung his blame on odd pegs.

Maybe someone out there can explain what he was on?

On arrival at Waterloo we were impressed to discover that one lady was holding a guide to the Wallace Collection and we left them pondering on how to get to Manchester Square. It all goes to show that it is hard to guess cultural preferences from appearances.

We ourselves went off to the British Museum for a canter around their version of Sutton Hoo (see 22nd September for the other version), taking in some Assyrian bas-relief wall decorating scuplture on the way. Sculpture fascinating, not only for the size and quality. One of them was the story of the construction of a giant statue of a bull, presumably destined for worship in some temple; my point of interest being that these people had moved on from just worshipping images of bulls and telling stories about important bulls. They told stories about building images of bulls. Stories which included pastoral vignettes of deer and families of pigs, exactly in the way that Italian devotional art came to add landscape to Madonna: Madonna being framed in a landscape rather than simply enthroned.

The Sutton Hoo exhibit was good - but rather put in its place by exhibits of other hoards and treasures found in other parts of the country. I thought the standard of exhibition was generally very high. The curators were content to leave the focus on the objects and not turn the thing into a three dimensional Dorling Kindersley (http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/) or Usborne (http://www.makelearningfun.co.uk/. Do not confuse with Osborne. They do accountancy) guide to the ancient world. Also impressed by the fact that they had not seen fit to fill the front yard with people selling things or conceptual art. One just had a space to be in. Have a smoke or a picnic or whatever. Unlike the people who run railway stations who seem to have forgotten that the point of a concourse area is to provide space for lots of people to move in lots of different directions in comfort. Not to provide shopping opportunities.

Back at Epsom Station, intrigued by the ground work for the redevelopment of the station - no modern station being complete without a six story development sitting on top of it. For some time I have been puzzling about the cylinders of concrete appearing in the spoil heaps. And today, on the way out, we passed a small digger carefully digging out the ground about a cluster of four piles - the piles having been drilled and filled a few weeks earlier. By the time we got back the cluster had turned into a pile cap - shuttering and steel ready and waiting for the concrete - with the concrete making up the top three feet of the four piles having been cut away, leaving their steel to be embedded in the pile cap. The intrigue here being why did they fill the piles right up in the first place? Or better still, why not dig the hole for the pile cap before drilling the holes for the piles? Was is just an expensive mistake? Clearly a matter on which to consult the resident engineers at TB.

Then yesterday, left the house to find the helicopter, presumably the police helicopter, circling low overhead. Maybe circling over Drummond Gardens, a block of flats just up the road. Is there an escaped mental on the run? Have there been reports of burglary? Then we set off up the road to find that the thing was following us. At least that was what we thought (being a touch paranoid for no especial reason), but then it veered off to the south west, presumably heading for home which I believe to be somewhere in that direction. Checking with the various helicopter hire outfits visible online, I find one which offers a guide price. To wit, £2,000 to be be taken from one of the London airports to the Battersea heliport. On the basis that the cost to hire for an hour is not a bad proxy for the cost of an hour's mission by the Surrey Police Helicopter Brigade (SPHB), did they get their monies' worth? Would the £2,000 have been better spent on a brigade of fully manned patrol cars descending on said Drummond Gardens? Then how much can actually one see from a helicopter? Are they just hype from the boys who love their toys? One just has to hope that they have some management accountants on board who can and are empowered to do these sorts of sums.

More interesting, I had, until yesterday afternoon thought that the Holy Trinity, the three in one, stood high and alone. With perhaps the Angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, Satan et al. standing on much lower pedestals. Maybe some other former humans such as the Holy Fathers were allowed into the lower pedestal club. Maybe even the saints in general. People such as Cardinal Newman and Saint Philip Howard (see 1st November) . I guess Catholics are more into all these trimmings than Protestants. But now I learn that in the early twentieth century Russia they were into something called the Holy Wisdom, the same holy wisdom which was the name of the big mosque in Istanbul when it was a big church in Constantinople. The Holy Wisdom was feminine and held by some to be an aspect of the Holy Spirit. Held by others to be an aspect of Jesus and held by still others to be a fourth leg of the Holy Trinity, thus converting it into the Holy Table from the Holy Tripod. Another view was that she was a symbol rather than an allegory but I got a bit lost in the OED at this point. Maybe I need to fast for a few weeks to grasp the full glory of her holy wisdom.

Then a few days before that, someone from the suicide clinic in Switzerland was speculating on whether it was time to extend their franchise, beyond those with terminal physical illness, attested by two regular physicians. The dignity in dying people here were very quick off the mark to explain that the very idea of such extension was abhorrent. I wondered whether this public position reflected the need to compromise in order to move forward, rather than their own private opinion.

So all kinds of different people might agree that the new bus shelter should be placed at grid reference SU 786567 (somewhere in Hampshire, I believe) facing 15 degrees east of north. But they might want this for all kinds of different reasons, reasons founded on deeply held faiths and beliefs, and it would cause all kinds of trouble if one was too open and honest about all this. One has to come up with some reasonably anodyne line which they all can subscribe to and all punt for on a public platform. Or does one? How sophisticated does an electorate have to be before it can cope with there being different, possibly conflicting, reasons for doing something? That it is OK to be be someone on some particular thing while believing that someone to be thoroughly obnoxious from almost every other point of view? That it is OK to be with someone on some particular thing even if that someone believes that that particular thing will advance something else that you believe to be obnoxious? You would not believe that belief, but would you care to be associated with someone who did?

It's a hard life being both political and decent.

PS: I learn of fallibility in blog search in the course of all this. Searching for 'Saint' finds 'Saint' but searching for 'saint' does not. I am sure that regular Google is not so picky in this matter of case.

Yesterday was exhibition day for the dancing water bowl. It performed after a fashion, but not too well. Perhaps I should have had a warm-up. Later in the day, had another go and despite the absence of audience it took a long time to get going. Eventually realised that the water level might be wrong and gradually added water until I got some action. The colder weather seems to mean that one needs a fuller bowl. But after a slow start it did really well, getting drops dancing to perhaps six inches above water level. Coverage maybe 75%. That is to say, the vibrations seem to be rooted in the four markings around the sides of the bowl at the north east, north west, south west and south east positions. Presumably the markings have some obscure effect on the dynamics of the water, in the same sort of way as the widgets they have in the bottom of lager glasses these days, I am told, to encourage frothing rather than dancing. Nevertheless, I think there must be a connection. So the vibrations start at these four positions and spread over the surface. In my case, the south west vibration is consistently the strongest. And I cannot clear the calm patch to the north east of the centre position. Perseverance!

In between times, a stroll down to Southfield Park (part of the grounds of one of our late and sometimes lamented asylums) to see if the parakeets were performing. Some evenings you get flocks of them swooping about on their way to roost, it is said, on their natal patch on Ham Common by the Thames. However, this day, we had a South African health management person flying his aeroplane, notable because it was almost silent, unlike the aeroplanes flown up on the downs. On closer inspection it turned out to be called a Yak and made, essentially, of three polystyrene (or something similar) boards, maybe three eighths of an inch thick. One for the fuselage and two for the wings with a couple of carbon fibre strips to stiffen the butt glued joins of the wings with the fuselage. Maybe two feet six wide and two feet six long. Battery powering a large slow propeller with a life, depending on action, of around 10 minutes, which the pilot said was about the length of his attention span. Need to concentrate to fly the thing. Batteries chargeable maybe 333 times. Plane illuminated with strips of something like LEDs - each one looking like a small printed circuit maybe 3mm square - several colours - so it looked rather good swooping about in the gathering gloom of an early winter evening.

For once, failed by Mr G.. He can find a Yak model aeroplane OK, but not this one.

PS: for followers of trusty news, I have just learned that one of the Mexican equivalents is called the 'Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia' (see http://www.inah.gob.mx/). Lots of (ruined) stately homes to look after in Mexico and the drill seems to be that the federals own the ruins themselves, the states own the land that the ruins sit on and the institute looks after them. I wonder if they have middle aged and middle classed volunteers in the same way that we do?