pumpkinstrokemarrow

Today cold, with mashed potatoes, a very small number of brussels sprouts, a rather larger amount of savoy cabbage and a rather less faded entire swede. Plus patent gravy as follows: melt some beef dripping in saucepan. Gently fry a finely chopped onion until brown. Stir in some corn flour and cook for a bit. Add well bashed black pepper (keep bashing until you can smell the stuff from 3 feet). Add blood from beef from day before, at least that portion not drunk up by the BH. Add water from the boiling swede. Add well bashed coriander seeds. Add finely ground beef to taste.

Don't think that I will bother with King Edwards from Waitrose again. The ones I got were fairly well damaged and there was a fair bit of waste. Serviceable but I would hate to think that I paid extra for them.

Yesterday evening I passed for perhaps the sixth time a pair of boots which had been abandoned on the approach to Epsom Station. They looked as if they had been there since before Christmas. On this occasion, I decided that it was time to pick the things up and take them home. They looked a bit small but there was a chance that they would fit. They are now cleaned up a bit and drying out nicely. In a day or so I will give them a coat of polish.

The good news is that they are nearly new pair of quite serious boots from a gang called Uvex - a contraction of the German for ultra-violet exclusion. I had never heard of them before but they look to be good gear. See http://www.uvex.com/ and/or http://www.uvex.co.uk/. A serious undertaking with ambitions to be the Mercedes of the boot world. They even have a philosophy, and just to be on the safe side, there is also a statement of their attitude towards the environment. The boots in question are a pair of Uvex Ultras. All kinds of interesting features are mentioned on the web site, things such as Cambrelle lining, whatever that may be, but, oddly, it does not actually say that there are steel toe caps, although inspection of the boots themselves would suggest that they do have them. Perhaps you cannot be called a safety boot without them so that is assumed. In any event, you can get a pair for yourself for something under £70.

The bad news is that they are size 43. Which I find out means 43 Paris points in length; a Paris point being two thirds of a centimetre. Uvex ought to know that we measure our shoes in Barleycorns; a Barleycorn being one third of an inch. Another complication is that continental shoe sizes are simply the length whereas in our case the size is the length minus a start point, with different start points for different sorts of people. After some fiddling with the calculator and an assumption that an inch is 2.54 centimetres, I work out that my fine new nearly new boots are size 9 while I am size 11. I can get them on but I do not think it would be a good idea to wear them for real. Might do awful things to the toes.

So the present scheme is to clean them up and take them down to TB to see if I can find them a decent home there. Free to a good home!

The thought then came to me that now one had touch screen gadgets from Apple, the way was clear to portable digital jigsaws. The screen could be in three parts - naturally of user variable size. Part one contains an image of all, or at least some, of the jigsaw pieces. Part two contains an image of all, or at least some, of the so far assembled jigsaw. Part three contains all, or at least some, of the target image. Perhaps a function to synchronise part two with part three, if desired. One can move the contents of all three around by stroking the relevant part of the screen. Pan, scroll, zoom and so on & so forth. One can arrange pieces of jigsaw in their area, according to taste in such matters. I generally start with grouping by colour mix, moving onto grouping by shape towards the end of the exercise. One can rotate a piece of jigsaw by suitable rotary movement of the finger. One can attempt to place a piece of jigsaw by dragging it from part one to part two. Noises from contraption according to whether placement is successful or not. I think this could be made to work. There would be some minuses, but I am sure with a bit of thought one could come up with some pluses. For example, you could have a library of pictures and a library of jigsaw masks, perhaps graded by difficulty or style. One then chooses a picture and a mask and away you go. I might go for old masters, having this theory that doing a jigsaw of an old master is excellent preparation for going to look at the thing itself. The thing is, has anybody done it? Should I patent the idea? Should I build an app. (or whatever they call them) for the iPhone?

All this, however, is in the future. Yesterday evening no such contraption was available. On the other hand there was a half square metre patch of ice, halfway between the end of the platform 8 canopy and the disused signal box. Of irregular but convex shape and maybe two inches thick in the middle. And I had my walking stick, a bent wood affair about one inch in diameter at the tip, with a flat rubber ferule. So the game is to gradually smash up the patch of ice by poking around at the edges with the tip of the walking stick. What kind of shapes can one make on the way? Most of the time my patch was the head of an animal, first goat then cow. Towards the end of the time it became the map of Africa. How long will it take to divide the patch into two? Will that bit of white ice be easier to smash through than that bit of black ice? It was surprising how hard it was to guess which were the soft parts. How long will it take to destroy the patch altogether?

I was slightly surprised that no busy can to inspect what I was up to. To explain that by tampering with ice belonging to Network Rail, I was invalidating their insurance and opening myself up to suit.

And I started to wonder today whether there is a tendency for patches of ice to melt down to one or more circular discs. Any departure from circularity will attract melting action. How difficult would it be to put together a credible model of ice patch melting? Probably beyond my level of nerdosity.

PS: and the other day, I was wondering what had happened to Danish Bacon. A brand leader in the days of my youth. A warehouse for which used to mark my taking off point on the A30 when hitching from Exeter to London. Hadn't noticed the stuff for ages. Then it turned out that our after Christmas gammon was Danish Bacon and that the butcher in Manor Green Road was full of the stuff. The gammon was good so perhaps I will try the bacon. Can hardly be worse than Sainsbury's Basics, although it could easily be dearer.

The cheeses were a fontina, a pecorino and a blue cheese the name of which I forgot to ask. Did very well, served with water biscuits and a saucy young St Emilion (from Aldi, or perhaps Lidl. I always get the two places mixed up), although some doubt was expressed as to the artisanicity of having the mould inserted into the blue cheese by means of dirty wire. There was a theory that real artisanicity did not need wire. The dirt - or blue mould - gets there by more natural means. Wire or not, a good cheese. Creamy white flesh. Not ridiculously strong like some blue cheeses one comes across.

The cake was a panettone from Bonifanti (see http://www.bonifanti.com/. They look to make a huge range of the things), complete with lady pleasing, festive red cloth wrapping. Wrapping good enough to keep and use next year, perhaps as a repository for mince pies. Or perhaps as a repository for a cheap skate panettone which did not come with festive wrapping. As it turned out, not only was the wrapping up to snuff, also the best panettone I recall having. Very light and fluffy; a sort of upper class current bun from Cheam without all the sugar lumps and sugar syrup sprinkled on the top. This last being one of the big mistakes of the generally sound Cheam baker. And like the stollen of the same weight reported on 15th December (and most of which vanished when I was TB'ing), the second ingredient was sultanas.

And we learned something else. While perusing the list of ingredients, we discovered that in Italia and other parts of Europe what we call a nut is called a fruit in a case. So the Bonifanti translator, one assumes that they could not run to a mother tongue translator, thought to translate fruit in a case as tree nut. Better than nut case I suppose.

There was also a festive visit to the Oxfam shop in Drury Lane where I picked two LPs at 1.99 a pop. Having selected them on the basis that they were 1.00 a pop, it seemed rude to put them back when the truth was out. One was advertised as a Deutsche Grammaphon (http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/) recording of some songs by Debussy. Bit outside my comfort zone but I thought I ought to give it a go. Ditto an Erato (now gobbled up by http://www.warnerclassicsandjazz.com/) recording of a Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Which as well as featuring a French violinist, also featured Brent Town Hall, said to be the recording studio. Their web site suggests that the venue might more properly now be called the Paul Daisley Hall - after a deceased Labour politician from the area. Maybe big mates with good ol' Ken L. Must pay the place a visit.

Sadly, what had been sold as Debussy from Deutsche Grammaphon turned out to be a Mozart comic opera from some entirely different label. I had checked the playing surface - which was fine - but had not bothered to check the label. Didn't notice that the label was the wrong colour, brown rather than yellow. Had I taken on something for lunch? And it was not even in stereo, so seriously ancient. Far too far outside my comfort zone to even make it to the turntable. But the Tchaikovsky turned to be what it said on the tin and to be OK. Even to the point where I thought that perhaps there was some point in orchestral music after all. I shall keep an eye out for it.

Today to Hampton Court, which we found to have very recently recovered from the ice; might have been a bit dodgy yesterday when there would have been lots of ice in and on the gravel paths. Today, cold and wintry as befits the flat, riverine location. But the pudding trees - that is to say the conical yews - looked great in the dull wintry light. Really gave the illusion of being in some grim Teutonic forest. With the dull, flat & long water behind. Few people outside although the car park was more or less full when we left at 114700.

Returned to a misbehaving Excel. It had thought, presumably as a result of some editing which went wrong, to expand a worksheet to the maximum number of columns, nearly all of which were blank. It may have gone to the maximum number of rows too. In any event, this meant that doing anything involving new rows was taking forever and on several occasions crashed Excel. All that which version do you want to recover kerfuffle. After some head scratching, the answer seemed to be to copy the very small amount of real content to a new worksheet. Delete the old, rename the new and off we go. So far, so good.

Spent part of yesterday refreshing my knowledge of beach huts; the sort of thing which at fashionable Southwold fetches more than a proper house in darkest Hartlepool. It seems that beach huts are direct descendants of the bathing machines which were all the thing in the 19th century. And furthermore, that that used by Queen Victoria at Osborne came complete with a water closet; of which, despite having inspected the thing from the outside on several occasions, I was completely unaware. My tutorial booklet did not explain the details of the royal plumbing but one hopes that the discharge, if any, was not too near the royal person.

Then to musing about the way that successful software products get used in all kinds of ways never dreamed of by their inventors. So, in my case, a big use of Google is checking my spelling. If you put the word in in a rough and ready way, most of the time Google will point up the proper spelling. Not sure if it recognises my Englishness and offers English rather than transpond spelling but it would be easy enough to check. Perhaps a job for after TB when ITV3 has failed me for once.

And a big use of Wikipedia is getting the accents on the foreign phrases I like to impress my readers with. Now I do know what the hexadecimal codes for accented letters are; but I do not know how to tell Blogger about hexadecimal codes. Not really up to searching through the help blogs to see if they can tell me. So what one does instead is type the foreign phrase into Google, en clair, that is to say without any trappings. Then, 99% of the time, Google points to a Wikipedia entry which is all about the phrase in question. Often, the phrase is the title of the article and comes complete with trappings, that is to say accents. An easy task then to copy the phrase from the Wikipedia screen where it is very properly accessible, as more or less public property, to the copy command (something which does not work on the many web sites where the owners fuss about intellectual property rights and theft), and then to paste it into MS Notepad. Notepad strips off the font supplied by Wikipedia. One can then copy the phrase from Notepad and paste into Blogger where it will take on the native font. Which is what I want. Hopefully it makes the desired impression.

Try it with 'Joyeux Noël'.

Was able to do much better eight hours later, when stomach was much fuller but the alcohol level was running down. Instantly got the trick of stacking them the obvious way which we had missed earlier. Tried again on waking this morning and hand not very steady at all. Part of the trouble was was once the stack wobbled it was doomed. No amount of two handed tweaking would stabilize it; not that such tweaking was permitted anyway in many of the rules and regulations. Another part of the trouble was that the Paul Lamond spec. to the Chinese engineers was not particularly demanding. While the chairs were all the same nominal size there were variations of the order of a millimetre; quite enough to make a big difference when trying to stack the obvious way.

A few hours later, hands much steadier with the result illustrated. Have now got just the five most awkwardly configured chairs to do, where by configuration I mean the sectional shape of the legs and the shape of the head of the back of the chair, there being various variations. I think I shall fail.

The camera in the telephone does not seem to be able to cope to well either. I think I am getting the effect which results from the pixel size getting large relative to the detail one is trying to capture, giving the image a rather jagged appearance. You can get the same effect on the screen - in Powerpoint, say, when the display font size interacts in a funny way with the screen pixel size. See also how the lower yellow chairs have been distorted.

In intervals of stacking chairs, becoming alarmed by a proposition acquired from a review of a recent book by Hawking & Mlodinow. It seems that Hawking has followed in the illustrious footsteps of Fodor by taking a collaborator and venturing, when in years of maturity, into new territory, in the hope that his eminence in old territory will carry him through. The reviewer thought that perhaps it had not. See also June 12 and July 8. Notwithstanding, a presently popular theory seems to be that the universe is built on the surface of a complicated manifold - an object of a dozen or so dimensions and which can be of considerable complexity with lots of strange folds, holes, singularaties and tunnels, but which, locally, looks just like Euclidean space. You can move around in the ordinary way. At least that it what I think the idea is. So, so far, so good. But it then seems that the properties of the universe you get depend crucially on exactly which complicated manifold you choose. With the result that some people think that there are billions of universes out there. We just happen to be in the one which works for us.

An arrangement which seems very different from that of evolution. With monkeys, natural selection has had millions of years and perhaps millions of generations to tune the design. It may well be that the gorilla on the typewriter usually types nonsense, but if you give him long enough he might whack out something sensible. And unlike the gorilla, natural selection can build on success. Once you have got a decent eye or toe-nail, you can run with it. No need to start from scratch each time. So not unreasonable that you get some decent designs coming out of natural selection. Whereas with universes you are starting from scratch. I don't see an option where this manifold nearly works so let's tweak it a bit. At least not without admitting the deity. Which is not the plan.

PS: Mr G. scores again. He seems to think that I need advice about alcohol dependency.

We still have water, so, assuming it really was cold last night, the new water main house has done its job. No need to fork out for emergency plumbers from somewhere in eastern Europe. Or perhaps north Africa.

The lentil soup turned out pretty well with only a very modest number of dead flies floating to the surface (see 19th December). No where near enough to put one off the soup, to the point that there is now only a bit more than a pint left of the original gallon. But for the accompanying bread, a bit let down by what passes for a split tin white loaf from the in-store bakery at our local Waitrose. Might just as well have been one of the much derided loaves of Mother's Pride which used to be delivered by the milkman: crumbly, stale tasting after just a day and nothing much like the product from Cheam, which remains icily inaccessible. At least for me.

The crumbly texture might also affect the stuffing for the festive chicken: the bread for the stuffing having gone down to bread crumbs rather than the more fluffy product you get from real bread. And having forgotten to get the nuts, reduced to using some left over mixed nuts, also from Waitrose. Some not very good hazel nuts - maybe three duds out of twenty nuts - supplemented by some almonds. One dud out of twenty there. It will be interesting to see what difference using almonds makes - something I have never done before. Nor have I ever done mixed nuts before, not believing in the melange of a melange of flavours which results. Palette can't cope.

Maybe next year we will get the vermin people in to get rid of the grey squirrels from our garden so that we can have proper hazel nuts from our own tree, rather than the elderly, kiln dried continental nuts one buys. Different animal altogether. But I suspect a fair amount of slaughter would be needed to get this result; even to the point where our squirrel hating neighbours cry foul, never mind the squirrel loving ones.

I mentioned the other day that I had actually bought a book that Amazon proposed to me - the winner of this years Goncourt, 'La Carte et le territoire', by one Michel Houellebecq - of whom I had not previously heard. And I am not much the wiser now as it does not seem to be the custom of Flammarion to include a potted biog. of the author, in the manner of an English book. But I think he might be a bit odd: the book seems to be about rather odd people - anti-heroes even - including the author himself. Can't remember when I last read a book which included the author as one of the characters, in the third person, in this explicit way.

It is also clearly designed for the Christmas market as not very joyous Christmas Days figure quite prominently. So part 2 (page 127) opened this real Christmas morning on a fictional Christmas morning. The French is not too hard and I am learning some interesting new words. For example, the word 'people' seems to be used somewhere in the personality, celebrity, fashion leader area. A people is the sort of person who might exhibit him or herself in a fashionable and expensive restaurant. The word functioning equally as either singular or plural. Rather harder to decipher was 'bourrelets'. First I find that bourre is the sort of fluff that is scraped off of furry animals like sheep and goats onto prickly bushes like gorse. Be extension the low grade fibre used to stuff mattresses and cushions. By extension, a particular sort of cushion in the form of a tyre or do-nut. By extension, the tyre like folds growing around the neck of a middle aged chef in a wannabee fashionable and expensive restaurant. I least that is where I have got to. Not completely convinced that I have got it right. But rather a splendid word if I have; better than we have in English.

One of this morning's preparations was a Christmas present for the house. Waking up, I was told that temperatures are going to drop to something improbable tonight and my thoughts turned to the little house at the side of the house which houses our mains water input. The house itself was built to a generally good standard in the 1930's but for some reason it was thought proper - or perhaps it was just easier, given the height of the floor above the drive - to have an external mains water input. It runs in under the front lawn and drive - not terribly deep - not down to current EC regulations - and then pops up beside the house prior to entry about 9 inches above ground level. Leaving a length of exposed pipe.

For many years this length of pipe has been housed in a very little house, nicely made with a felt roof. It has done well and the mains input pipe has never frozen or burst - at least not to our knowledge - although the base of the very little house is now showing signs of rot. However, with the news that we may now be in for some colder nights than there have ever been in the recent past, a rather bigger little house is clearly indicated. So I have spent most of the morning making a rather bigger little house to fit around and over the very little house. Temporarily fixed to the wall and filled with two condemned bedspreads. Proper fixings: two 5/16ths holes in the wall plugged with pine plugs into 3/16ths holes in which the fixings screws are screwed. Hopefully that will do the trick. Temporary both on account of its size and the rather low grade construction. Elderly hardboard facings which are a bit flaky - although interior gloss painted on the outside - and more substantial deal plank sides salvaged from north London. Or maybe not both deal: they are both some sort of not-red pine but one must weight twice what the other weighs. Despite their being approximately the same colour. Roof decorated with seasonal if unberried holly from our own garden.

In sum, my considerable youthful investment in carpentry tools and training has meant that I can knock out a bit of what my father would have called shut-knife work without much sweat. One of my two fancy (if obsolete) veneer cramps has had one of its very rare outings. But good to have the right tools for the job, even if the return on investment not too hot: they make the thing a pleasure rather than a penance.

PS: as a true believer in the matter of global warming, was reassured by the Guardian explaining the other day that the very cold spell we are having is indeed a product of global warming. The warming has disturbed the air flow over the north Atlantic with the result that a tongue of very cold air has swept down over England, pushing very hot air over places which should be cold. Instead we are. The average temperature this year remains high, the cold in Epsom notwithstanding.

But I had taken precautions, precautions in the form of half a tenderloin from the Manor Green Road butcher. So for supper, coarsely chop tenderloin and simmer with three ounces of pearl barley, three pints of water and four chopped sticks of celery, for an hour. Add 7 ounces of finely slivvered white cabbage for the last five minutes and serve. Excellent stuff which prompted a discussion of why it is that very few restaurants or pubs can manage this sort of thing. Is it that the punters don't want it? Is it that the stuff neither stands nor boils in the bag very well? Is it a question of branding? Can't let some fresh out of cook school pub chef free lance with our carefully crafted menu. The only restaurant which I can think of which comes near to home cooking (Portuguese style) is the Estrella in Vauxhall, which I imagine is an independent, run by the resident owner. No brand managers to please.

Finished up with the third and final episode of Branagh's Hamlet. Marred by the last scene, where Branagh lost the plot when swinging off the chandelier. There was also a sense of sprawl, which together with the length of the thing is presumably why the other three DVDs opted for the short story version. Cutting out anything which did not bear on the story line or the love interest.

Woke up this morning to resume the paused Iliad from Pope, the one with the interesting pencil annotations. See 25th July. First thought was that there was a great deal of violence. Second thought was that T. E. Lawrence, who might be thought to understand such things, thought (in the introduction to his translation) that the Odyssey was the product of someone who smelt more of the ink pot than of the camp fire. A scholarly affair. So on the assumption that the Homer of the Odyssey and him of the Iliad are the same person, the violence of the Iliad is that of an arm chair rather than an actual warrior. Nevertheless, there is much talk of spears piercing livers, hearts, necks & etc. There is also much talk of bravery, cowardice and fear. So even in a warrior culture, where the aristos at least are bred to war, you can't rely on them keeping their pecker up through thick and thin. Sometimes they bottle it and get themselves speared from behind for their pains. Very shameful way to go. Sometimes they blame the gods. When the gods are backing them, for whatever reason of divine caprice, their spirit is high and they can take on anyone. When the gods desert them, they can do nothing.

A fair bit of the action revolves around the winner of some combat à deux stripping the arms and armour from the loser, to be hung up in winner's tent as trophies. Also because such things were very valuable. But the chaps on the loser's side made it a point of honour to stop the winner doing this. And so it went on. I imagine that valuable point remained true after the Battle of Hastings. You didn't chuck all the arms and armour in the pit along with the bodies of the enemy. Ridiculously wasteful. Strip them first. You might show a bit more respect to your own lot.

Prior to that, the first interesting item of the day had been the discovery that at least one inhabitant of Belgrave Place had invested in the same sort of fake Christmas tree from Homebase as our good selves. This I know as its remnants were littering the street.

Unable to gain entry to what looked to be rather a splendid 19th century church, St Pauls of Knightsbridge, as it was actually being used. The posh looking lady guarding the door seemed quite ready to believe that I was late for whatever was going on, but that did not seem quite the thing.

I was then amused by the spectacle of a lady police officer on a rather large and frisky horse near Green Park, with a saddle cloth advertising some outfit called Child Exploitation and Online Protection, possibly part of the Child Abuse Investigation Command, this last presumably under the command of a commander. Not at all clear what horses had to do with all this.

Then close by, I happened to get up close to one of the many war memorials which have sprouted in London's public places over recent years. This one a composition of inclined black girders, of various heights, up to about eight feet. Rather to my surprise it was rather effective close too, having looked a bit odd from a distance. A memorial to the New Zealand war dead of the two world wars. So my take, is that the memorial is sound but that its planting is not. They should have given more thought and more space to that part of the operation - something made more difficult by the number of memorials which were prior facts on the ground around. For me, a familiar problem with outdoor sculpture: how to plant the thing? A trick that not many manage to my satisfaction.

By Waterloo station was treated to the sight of a loaded six yard concrete lorry - one of those with a rotating drum - proceeding very cautiously towards, if not to, the site of the shard. The driver appeared to have had a recent close encounter with some ice and was taking no chances - despite the fact that the ice was more or less no more. At least not there. I learned later in the day that it has never been the custom, certainly not in the south of England, to put chains on lorry wheels. Neither concrete lorries nor municipal dust carts - despite the fact that one ex-driver of one of these last remembers getting into a pickle in one on ice near Hove. Must ask the Finn of our acquaintance with haulage connections what goes there.

After more vicissitudes of the same sort, found my way to the Tooting branch of Wetherspoon's library where as good luck would have it I chanced on a book called 'The Bird of Dawning' by John Masefield whom I had thought to be a poet but who was also, it turns out, a sort of English Conrad, with sea time in sailing ships, presumably more or less at the end of the era of big sailing ships. Good read, gripping even as it closes. Clippers are portrayed as the race horses of the sea. Their proper purpose might have been to move tea or wool about, but half the point was to race the things. To drive a beautiful and beautifully turned out ship as fast as it would go. Well past the point of prudence. Crack on all sail and go for the winning post. Take a chance on great chunks of spar and rigging getting carried away. On the ship simply diving down into a big wave. With the suggestion that a fair proportion - say half - of the masters of crack clippers were themselves cracked. To the peril of their ship, their crew and themselves. In defence of the masters, it seems that the crews - usually rather mixed bags - were fully up for racing.

Reminded along the way of an important professional skill in those days: you have to be able to work out where you are with the aid of a clock, a sextant, navigational tables, pencil and paper. A skill that Scott took to the pole and back. Could not have been much fun when you were cold, hungry and sick and your legs were slowly turning to blocks of ice.

The book was a rip roaring success, according to Mr. G., at the time of its publication around 1930. Entirely fitting, given my current fascination with the chap, that its title should be taken from towards the end of the first scene of Hamlet, from a speech by Marcellus.

As one might expect from its location between two new housing estates, the new Express was catering strongly to the ready meal trade. There were also as many self service check outs as they service checkouts. Not only do they expect you to trudge around finding your own food, they also expect you to wrestle with sophisticated machines while giving them money. I expect that the BH will decline to play.

Back via TB where I was able to collect a fine harvest of factlets. The first concerned an interesting knot, the dolly knot, essential for tying down loads on lorries for which the commoner ratchetted webbing straps are not suitable. I happened to be carrying a piece of twine on which the dolly knot was demonstrated, but I was not able to manage one myself. Perhaps the audience problem; I have often seen competent typing collapse when watched. I shall try again in the privacy of my own home, hopefully with diagrammatic support from Mr. G.. Then there were various insights into the many rules and regulations which govern the driving of road vehicles owned by London Transport. Learning along the way that a rather tribal culture has built up from the different underground lines. The different lines have, for example, their own Masonic Lodges and Social Clubs. The different lines have nicknames only known to the cognescenti. The last factlet may actually be a porky. This was the allegation that oranges were grown in County Armagh, small bitter fruit suitable for the making of marmalade, until our accession to the EU meant that the aboriginal marmalade trade was swamped with cheap oranges from Spain. The suggestion that this may have had something to do with the name of the Orange Order, rather than the place of birth of King Billy. As far as I can make out, they do grow oranges in County Armagh in Australia but in County Armagh in Ireland they only grow apples. It is indeed a notable apply growing area and some of the peculiarly Irish varieties are noted for their orange skins; but no oranges proper. At least as far as I can see.

Back home to the Branagh version of Hamlet. Notable for being the only full text version extant on DVD. We have got about half way through and as far as I could tell there were only very minor variations from the Cambridge text. Which variations might actually result from Branagh using some other text, rather than his taking liberties. Perhaps he used that from Oxford. Full text made for a long film - but what it did do was restore the sense that this really was a great play. Restored all the texture that had been lost from the stripped down versions mentioned previously. Branagh himself I find a rather irritating actor, but after a while his portrayal of Hamlet as a rather unpleasant member of the upper classes came together. Perhaps like some other actors from the lower classes, he gets a bang out of playing members of the upper classes. He had also managed to bring together a fine collection of stars to play bit roles. Gérard Depardieu did a splendid cameo as Reynaldo. Timothy Spall did a splendid job as either R. or G.. Derek Jacobi did not seem right as Claudius although his queen was rather better. And Branagh did recognise the difficulty of the play not explaining why, if Hamlet senior was such a paragon, his wife abandoned ship for his brother. Recognised by inserting a near successful clip of Claudius wooing Gertrude at bowls. Or perhaps it was curling. The inserted clip to support the action or a soliloquy being a device used several times. Interesting wheeze. An older Charlton Heston made a splendid player king.

Perhaps, rather to my surprise, it will on completion be voted the best of the bunch - that is to say, of Branagh, Olivier, Gibson and Williamson.

I wonder if this wasp is what accounts for the large numbers of very ill acorns one sees about the place during the summer? See August 24, 2008.

The other result is that I have now been in Epsom Waitrose twice in two days, the first of the two being that mentioned yesterday. Several men in Waitrose, apart from myself, were looking a touch uncomfortable. Only there to carry the shopping home as the wife didn't like to take the big beamer to Sainsbury's. Some of them tried to pass the time by taking an interest in what the wife was up to but that generally seemed to end in tears. I settled for a discussion about milk consumption with an Irish lady who was buying 8 litres of the stuff together with 3 pints cartons of yoghourt. She did not know that you could freeze the stuff but she did explain that she and her hubby we very keen on custard and milky drinks - so they would get through the 8 litres before the sell by date. Hubby, so she told me, would be able to carry the milk home as he was on his first ever visit to Waitrose. Not visible, so perhaps he was away eyeing up the fancy booze in a hopeful way.

Continuing the bardic binge, took in a television version of Macbeth the other night. Or at least the second half thereof, being so carried away by discussion at TB that I did not notice the time. This version had Patrick Stewart in the lead and was I think a lightly adapted version of a production which was well received when it was on the stage a few years ago. Now some people will love the show because it has a starship commander in the lead role. Some other people will hate the show for the same reason. I thought it was OK. Stewart, despite being a bit old for an early medieval warrior king, turned in a decent performance. You could, for a start, hear his lines. I liked the setting, which I thought caught well the edgy atmosphere which must have reigned in the castle of a king starting to wobble on his perch a bit. His wife was OK too. The only catch was that an awful lot of lines include swords and daggers, which don't work too well when you are togged up like an SAS person and clutching the latest in machine pistols. But failed for once when I went for a replay by Amazon. Their DVD librarian knew nothing of this Macbeth although he (or she) could offer a dozen others.

That was the first slip. Then we get a leaflet through our door about the Tesco Express opening on the edge of town on the edge of one of the redeveloped mental hospital sites; see 4th October for previous thoughts on the subject. The only catch was that the leaflet, a lightly customised version of a national form, put the new shop in the wrong place. Maybe half a mile or more from where it actually was.

Then for the last slip. This same Tesco Express was due to have a grand opening on Wednesday 15 December. I march up there on the Thursday to see if their lentils are any better than those at Leatherhead, hoping they would be new stock, only to find that due to circumstances beyond their control they were unable to open as planned on Wednesday but were now hoping for Friday. Would they be able to reschedule the mayor in time? Would they be able to pay off the crèche he was supposed to grace with his presence on that day? Sadly we were unable to attend to find out on Friday. Or to collect whatever freebies might have been going. And today, I thought that marching up there to buy potatoes was too high risk. We need to hoard potatoes against the Christmas festivities and one could not be sure that the Tesco would either be open or that it would sell potatoes. And I would not want to walk back to Waitrose, so settled for walking to Waitrose in the first place, from where I have now procured 10kg of the finest King Edward potatoes. And one of those sticks of brussels sprouts which are all the thing this year.

This trip being the third outing in 24 hours for the new snow shoes. That is to say the black rubber nets festooned with spirals of wire which one stretches onto the underside of one's shoes. Rubber quite like the stuff you might find in a catapult. Spirals of wire intended to give one grip on packed snow and ice. £17.50 or so from the south street hearty shop - and sold by a fit looking chap who might actually do hearty things on mountains and made, guess where, in China. Prompted to buy them by our first bout of snow a few weeks ago and they have now given very satisfactory service in the second. Fine grip on the packed snow which is now covering the roads near us. The only catch is that they do bad things to wooden floors and quarry tile floors do bad things to them. That is to say that one is very apt to fall. No grip at all. Minor issue in TB where the gents has such a floor, often wet which makes things even worse.

Luckily there is a reasonable supply of benches in Epsom, so having got there through the snow, one can sit down to remove the snow shoes to tackle the slush and shops with naked trainers. Back not good for changing trainers off-bench these days. Even if they do come from Nike.

Maybe a couple of hours less cooking next time around.

Next point of interest was a book about a biblical heroine called Judith - a tale of sex and violence - reviewed by one Ruth Morse in a recent TLS. She is something at one of the various Parisian universities. The book is published by a gang called OpenBook (http://www.openbookpublishers.com/) and their entirely worthy idea is to publish learned work quick and cheap. Getting the stuff out to readers while it is still reasonably fresh. Additionally they put a copy on the web where anyone can look at it for free. After a while I find that you do not do this from their web site, rather from Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk/books). Get to the book in question fast enough, where I am able to test the delights of on-screen reading. Which I am not all that struck by. I am used to reading in a reclining position, not sat up in front of a television screen. Maybe it would be better with one of the tablets that you can get now - although I think I would have to pay OpenBook if I wanted something which worked on one.

The reviewer made much of the glory of reading books off the web. One's book could be festooned with hyperlinks to all kinds of fascinating collateral. Fascimiles of this and that. Illustrations. References. One's learning experience would have been leveraged up into the wonderful world of the web. Unfortunately, this book did not do that. It was a printed book which had made been available over the web. OK, there were some URLs in footnotes but the only way I could find to follow them was to transcribe them onto paper then back onto the screen - short term memory not being good for a long URL these days. Copy and paste did not seem to work in a Google Books window. What Ruth M. is perhaps missing is that it takes a lot of work to prep. a book for the sort of web experience she is thinking of. A lot of work which is unlikely to be forthcoming in the context of a low-volume on-the-cheap publisher.

I observe in passing that I was not very impressed with the online Britannica. If they can't afford to do a fancy job who can?

Perhaps spurred on by the rye and as someone who sometimes takes a high moral tone, I have been pondering about morals at the margin. So the other day, I committed the minor offence of buying a rail ticket, discounted for a wrinkly (the name given by some to a senior citizens rail card), when I was not actually carrying said wrinkly. I think that this non-carriage invalidated the discount, the rule being that you have to be able to present the wrinkly upon demand by a duly authorised representative of south west trains. As it happened, I was not challenged and the designers of the electronic gates at neither Vauxhall nor Epsom had thought to make provision for presentation of wrinkly - although I imagine they were fully up for detecting the the ticket presented was a discount ticket. The second minor offence arose at Waitrose where I presented one item at the quick service counter (the one that does fags) and bought another. The very young assistant only charged me for the item bought, not the item presented. Being a bit dozy at the time I only got as far as thinking that I did not seem to have paid very much, without working out why. Which I did after I had left the shop but I did not go back to rectify the error. I wonder what a Catholic priest would have to say if I confessed to him? Take fifteen hail marys? Is the test doing the thing deliberately and knowingly? A test which the first case passes but the second fails. Do I know anyone who would take discussion of such a matter seriously?

Will I enjoy the free item - kippers from Craster - more or less in consequence?

Tiring of that, moved onto pondering about the billions of pounds that the Irish lost on 13th November. The theory that some proportion of the billions of pounds that the banks have lost has wound up in peoples' pockets and that the balance has been spent, perhaps on things which are or have become worthless. But even the money spent is in someone's pocket. It has all gone somewhere. The question is, is it right or possible to try and get any of it back?

Case 1, I am the quarryman who sold the sand to build the houses to break the bank of Ireland. I sold lots of sand in good faith to a builder I have been working with for years. I don't think I had any duty to check that the builder intended to break the bank. My duty was to check that he could pay for the sand, which he could. There was also the duty to pay tax on my gains, which I have and so to that extent I am contributing towards sorting the mess out. But nothing else. Don't see that I should give my profits back to the government or anyone else.

Case 2, I am the speculator who sold the land to the builder. I sold lots of land to builders and made a very nice thing out of it. Maybe I wined and dined a few councillors to smooth the way for planning permissions and so on and so forth. As a speculator I knew that it could not go on for ever; the bubble was going to burst. So I had better sell as much land as I could while the going was good. Much more complicit in the resultant crash than the quarryman.

Case 3, I am chap who bought a house that I could barely afford at the time, which I cannot afford now that I have lost my job with retrenching government and which is now worth half what I paid for it. The bank reclaimed the house but went bust anyway. My wife has left me to become a lap dancer (division three) and I am now living in a cardboard box in a shrubbery in Phoenix Park. So I have perhaps been foolish, but not criminal.

Case 4, I am an investment banker in the bank that went bust and I still get my socking great bonus as the bit of the bank that I work in made money, not lost it. I try to get a group of us together to make a very public gesture of giving most if not all of our bonuses to the government, ex gratia. Try and recover the good name of bankers. But this very quickly falls apart. Very few of my colleagues are up for it and I don't see why I should do it all by myself.

So all in all, I think it is going to be very hard for government to claw back any of the lost billions from the various places in which it has wound up. It is just going to have to take them out of general taxation and balance the books that way.

A lot of subsequently prominent politicians get walk on parts. Mitterand, for example, appears to have been a bit of an operator with some very dodgy friends and relations. Also a womaniser.

To shake the bad taste off, to Hyde Park to get a stupendously loss leading stollen from the Lidl promotional stand on the ice rink they are just presently sponsoring in Hyde Park. A kilo of stollen for £2, including 290g of sultanas and 120g of marzipan, this last being half chopped almonds. BH says that this is excellent value. The same sort of thing from, say, Sainsbury's, might cost a tenner or more. I shall have occasion to check a bit later.

But later that evening a rather scary senior moment. Having bought a piece of brisket, the plan was to do another overnight job in the oven on 90C. The only question being when to kick it off. Thought maybe 1945. Arrived in the kitchen at B-hour minus 5 to find the thing already in the oven and on the go. I could remember prepping the both the brisket and the oven but I could not remember putting the brisket in the oven, despite it being absolutely clear that it was in. BH denied brisket action. This, for some reason, was more bothering than my average senior moment. Situation somewhat retrieved the following morning when I remembered that stollen was also the name for a sort of underground bunker used by the Germans as jumping off points for their assault troops at Verdun in 1916. Presumably the connection lies in the shape of the things. Impressed on checking with my copy of Horne's book on the subject to find that the memory was not playing tricks. And it must be getting on for twenty years since I have read it. Or is the memory simply slowly panning back to infancy, now having got to about half way?

Back at Hyde Park worked out from the ice rink to inspect the various Christmas Fair offerings. A good selection of Christmas novelties from the various sheds. Some very elaborate sheds containing beer. A model of a dead tree which waved it arms and talked. Some very flashy rides, including a reasonable sized but portable big dipper and a rather splendid miniature version of the London Eye. We offset the saving on the stollen by spending 10 times as much with a lady, who might well have come from the German alpine countryside at some point, on sausage, cheese and bread. Spread our bets on lunch with some excellent cabbage noodles from some Hungarian ladies, some not so excellent Hungarian goulash from a student who sounded as if he came from the US, and some German style fried potatoes with onion and bacon from a young man from Newcastle. We agreed that he had the very best sort of German accent. Maybe I am just not very keen on Goulash? Too much paprika?

Rounded off the occasion with a chance visit to Christ's Church at Down Street. A rather impressive 100 year old church done in gothic revival, making clever use of a rather awkward site. Lots of stained glass in various traditions. Came with a fairly hefty vicarage next door. At least it had one at one point. Things might have moved on. Church of England but with an evangelical flavour. See http://www.christchurchmayfair.org/. It would have been interesting to stay for their candle lit carols that evening; sadly not convenient.

PS: just learned that the real Christmas fest might be in France; neither in London nor Germany. See http://www.fetedeslumieres.lyon.fr/.

The subject was a very nicely produced picture book called 'Asylum' from the MIT press. I suppose I must have spotted an advertisement for it in the NYRB. The book being a collection of arty photographs of and around the closed and somewhat derelict state hospitals scattered across the US. State hospitals being US speak for mental hospitals.

It seems that in the US they went in for a building binge of very grand mental hospitals set in large grounds in the country in the 19th century in very much the same way as we did. Perhaps on a rather larger and grander scale. And that then, in the latter part of the 20th century they were pretty much all closed down, again in very much the same way as we did. The notes make the point that one of the big drivers for closure was cost. In the olden days, the mental hospitals were enclosed and to a large extent self supporting communities, a bit like the monasteries of old. The patients - or the customers as they would perhaps be known these days - worked the land. The book includes pictures of what were substantial farming operations. Huge tubs, for example at Danville State Hospital in Pennsylvania, for the manufacture of sauerkraut. But then it was decided that having the customers growing their own grub was abuse. It was also taking the bread out of the mouths of decent farm workers. So the hospitals were no longer allowed to allow their patients to be useful and to contribute and, partly in consequence, went bust. The taxpayer was not good for the bigger bill. I think it was pretty much the same here. The same waves of professional fashion washed over the asylum worlds on both sides of the Atlantic.

And their case was not helped by the sort of scandal noticed on 11th October.

But I was touched to see the treasure and care that had once been lavished on those needing asylum. The Victorians really did care, even if they could be rather harsh about it and be rather given to municipal display & competition at the same time. Also by the echoes of a lost world. The grand quarters for the superintendents. The dreary day rooms with their dreary furniture for the patients: it does not seem to be possible to get away from this particular dreariness. The attempts to be normal with their own radio stations and ball rooms. The room full of uncollected rusting tins full of the ashes of the lost departed. Other rooms full of the suitcases with which they had once arrived. One place, the St Lawrence State Hospital in Ogdensburg, was very forward looking with wicker work coffins. Well ahead of their time.

All in all a rather odd memorial. But I wonder if anything comparable has been done for our own mental hospitals? Too late now if it hasn't. Most of them are housing estates. In the case of Epsom and Exminster, in a messy compromise with the heritage people, whereby many of the old buildings and trees have been preserved. For my money, trees yes but buildings no. Knock the lot down and start again.

The freedom of information people have established a sort of presumption that public business should be conducted in public. Ironically, at about the same time as another bunch have established that private business should be conducted in private. Now it is true that government got a bit lazy (if not worse) and conducted a lot of business in private that should have been more public. So, a lot of the time, it seems entirely sensible that the arguments for and against some policy decision - perhaps to scrap the Red Deer Commission - should be made public. And a lot of the time this might be before the event rather than after the event. If one is sure that one is right, what has one to fear from a bit of barracking from the plebs; and it one is not sure, maybe it is only prudent to seek a bit of help?

In this particular case I have no idea what was done, although the outcome was a hostile takeover by Scottish Natural Heritage. I expect some support staff left to pursue other interests.

However, I am quite sure that a lot of the time it is not appropriate for public business to be conducted in public - sometimes for the same sort of reasons that it is thought proper for private business to be conducted in private. Sometimes for reasons of security: it is clearly not sensible to put the details of, for example, munition dump physical security, in the public domain. All the public need to know is that there is munition dump physical security.

So, if one is sent a whole lot of stuff which has been marked 'SECRET' by the government, presumably for some reason, it is entirely irresponsible to stick the whole lot up on the internet. And it is rather presumptuous to read the stuff and stick up a selection, on the grounds that the public has the right to know. Who is some deranged retired hacker to make such a judgement? Having got the stuff, would not a better course be to consult some trustworthy chap or chappess on the fringe of the establishment? Say a professor at a reputable university? Or a retired judge? And if one really thought that something dodgy was going on that ought to see the light of day one but was paranoid about the men in unmarked rain coats loitering in one's street, one could always lodge a copy for safekeeping with someone or other.

But sadly, I think that there are plenty of bad and irresponsible people and that stopping them is going to be difficult.

One dodge which was explained to me yesterday was that you zip your lurid material up into a file which you then encrypt using the first half of a key pair. Plenty of software about which will do this sort of two-key encryption business for you. You then post lots of copies of the encrypted file all over the internet, very clearly labelled 'lurid material', but which, at this point, cannot be read. It is then going to be very hard for the security people to disappear the file. Hard to see how they are going to be able to deal with all the people that download the file, even supposing they can trace them at all. I then lodge the other half of the key with a bunch of people that I trust, with instructions to publish the key if I fail to check in. So if the men in the unmarked rain coats bundle me into their unmarked van and by a process of secure rendition have me dispatched to the south pole without proper clothing, I can freeze, comforted by the thought that the lurid material is now out there for all to read. I suppose a weakness in all this is that they might get the names of the people that I trust out of me by a process of enhanced interrogation. But that is a detail. I am sure that with a little thought I could beef up the process to deal with it.

Another dodge might be that you are not allowed to post files onto or through the internet which the security chaps can't read. I recall that the US government was quite keen on doing something of this sort. One then reads everything that is posted, before it is posted as it were, and blocks obnoxious material. One might make things a bit easier by having trusted sources whose material one did not have to check. Maybe decent people like myself could apply for a license to post which would mean that I did not have to pass my material through the censor. One catch would be getting everyone to agree to the regime. The US might be happy about there being no material that they could not read, but I can't see the Chinese buying into that. Perhaps a regime whereby recognised state and corporate players were allowed to post files which other people cannot read. But odds and sods could not; they had to go through the licensing regime.

A regime which would need to be instantly revokable. So if I was a villain without track record who was therefore able to get a license, that license could be turned off the moment I got a track record. With turning off perhaps resulting in any material labelled with that license being deleted if it attempted to pass through internet hubs.

All in all, it seems likely that there is going to be a lot of money to made here. Gimme my degree in internet security now.

And then there is the question of how nasty are you allowed to be to perpetrators. If you have a perpetrator, but one who has not committed a crime that you can pin on him, is it OK to give him ten year's solitary for the income tax irregularity you have managed to pin on him?

A good start would be to make sure that perpetration was a crime. That handling stolen information was the same has handling stolen goods. Maybe with exceptions for honourable journalists. Or perhaps just rely on honourable prosecutors not to prosecute where there was a public interest defence.

Another good step would be not to publish sensitive information all over corporate networks where all kinds of people can get at it - and leak it if they have a grudge. Perhaps dressing up the theft in the clothes of whistle-blowing. Not practical to vet everybody. So you have to ration access.

Having got that lot off my chest, time for the cup that cheers. And I admit to using tea bags. The fight to retain loose tea has been lost.

Talking of which, while Amazon France, Amazon UK and Amazon USA might have a common login, so my one login and details does for all three, but they do not have common advertising. So the French are much more energetic about telling me about offers than the English and the Americans don't bother at all. Today's email from France reads: 'JAMES R TOLLER : risque d'avalanche de bonnes affaires !'. Perhaps the difference is that I use the UK a lot, so probably am not going to use it any more; hardly use the USA at all, so not worth their bother to bother me; whereas, I am an occasional user of France and so it might be worth their while to see if they can push me to a few more purchases. And I have to say, I did actually buy the winner of this year's Goncourt on the basis of one of their fliers. Not arrived yet, but there is clearly some method in what they do. I also notice that for some purposes, Amazon appears to operate out of Luxembourg - presumably another corporation tax haven along with the likes of Ireland. Does Amazon get away with paying as little tax in the UK as Microsoft does?

Back with Fenby, he makes no assumptions at all about one's knowledge of French and in many places prints some French word or phrase in italics, followed by an English translation in plain type in brackets. I find this slightly irritating and would have preferred translations, if present at all, relegated to footnotes. And while the book is generally decently printed, they have been careless with the rather too narrow and rather too variable outer margins. Irritated by the appearance of the page. Simon & Schuster effort.

Book itself interesting, not having known more about de Gaulle than one picks up from newspapers. I have now got to the liberation, that is to say about two fifths of the way through the 600 odd pages of text. On the plus side, a brave, decent family man who did not put his nose in the trough. A wow with French crowds. A real figure head. And despite his army background and dictatorial style, he knew that once the war was ended there was going to have to be some real change. Which there was. And he knew that the many resistance para-military groups had to be closed down, more or less forthwith. Which they were.

On the minus side, stubborn and touchy. Churchy. Very difficult man to work with - with the difficulty extending to many of his French colleagues. For a minor general from a country which had been thoroughly whopped by the Germans, he took a very high line about the honour and glory of France, seemingly forgetting that he was our pensioner. On numerous occasions during the war both Churchill and Roosevelt dreamed of ways of getting rid of him. But never quite realising their dreams.

Various factlets along the way. 1) France was a complete mess politically before the war. With plenty of right wing anti-semitism. Fair amount of free-mason knocking as well. On the road to a Spanish style disintegration? 2) Despite hexagonal France being knocked out, de Gaulle was able to draw significant resources from the overseas France - with most of which the Germans did not have the time or resources to bother. 3) The Germans were gobbling up around 30% of French GDP by the end of the war - a contribution which represented nearly 10% of their GDP. A lot of co-operation of one form or another. 4) Partly for this reason, French infrastructure was far more bashed about in the second war than it was in the first war. And by the sound of it, a lot more than ours was. 5) Despite being obsessed with the French liberating Paris, de Gaulle was reduced to asking the Americans for troops to help to restore order in liberated Paris. French troops not up to the job - or perhaps they were too busy partying and settling scores. There being a fair amount of this last. Nasty business. He didn't get the troops.

Which rather give the impression that the governors have completely lost interest in this particular wheeze. Perhaps they have moved on to twittering.

Small prize for whoever can work out where the cleggy office is, on the basis of the statue behind. Has he got a prestige second floor office or has he been consigned to the upper regions? Or even the servants quarters?

But it has not solved the baler problem. The other day someone at the TB was telling me about his work on a farm during the harvest, during his youth, which involved using something like a screwdriver to complete the knotting of bales. The story seemed to be - and this was well before anyone started to wobble in stance or diction - that the bales popped out of the baler with strings wrapped around them ready to be knotted, but not actually knotted. The human knotter then used something like a screwdriver to ram the two loose ends down into the bale, a procedure which amounted to a knot. One does not like to probe such yarns too hard on the spot, but one does wonder why the bale did not fall apart after it left the baler. Part of the point of a bale is compression, so that you get more bales into any given barn. A bale which is compressed but not knotted will fly apart, well before any knotter can get to it. And then, does one believe that ramming the loose ends of the twine down into the bale will really hold it? For a start, the loose end running left would have to be rammed in well to the left of the loose end running right, otherwise all one is doing is making a hinge in the bale. But my informant said nothing about two strikes with the screwdriver to the bale. By implication there was just one. He did say, thus giving the whole business some verisimilitude, that by the end of the day one had a very tender palm.

The real life baling expert I consultant, someone slightly older than my informant, had never heard of such a thing. The Wikipedia and other virtual baling experts, suggested that mobile balers took a while to reach farms: they had to wait the availability of tractor power to power the things and for the invention of a suitable mechanical knotter. There were also transient problems with the supply of twine with a bit of a dearth during the Korean war. Commies cornered the market or something. Which strikes me as a rather unlikely tale. But nothing about balers which did not do knotting. The fact that they did do knotting seemed to be the whole point. And they were around in numbers from the end of the second world war. Well before my informant would have been anywhere near a field full of bales.

Yet another fascinating topic which I do not suppose I shall get to the bottom of. Perhaps someone can offer a plausible variation of the story which makes sense?

In the meantime, I wonder whether the London tube train drivers are on a suicide mission like the print workers and dockers before them. Also, I have been led to believe, water works workers. All these groups thought they could hold their employers to ransom. Not to mention the well paid & padded cabin staff from BA. Or the coal miners. Maybe they extracted some short term gain, but the long term result was that they were written out of the industry. Printers found that it paid to replace print workers by computers. Dock owners found that it paid to replace docker workers by containers in highly mechanised container handling facilities. The water boards found that it paid to replace water works workers with machines. Total employment in all three industries much less than it was. Much less than it might have been had the unions involved had a better understanding of their bargaining position.

I understand that it has been possible to run tube trains without drivers since around the time of the introduction of the Victoria line, maybe forty years ago. And control systems must have come on up leaps and bounds since then. And come on down in leaps and bounds in price. Has the relatively new Jubilee line been tooled up with this in mind?

The objection raised in TB was that a tube train driver, assuming that he had not propped the dead man's handle open with a milk bottle full of whisky (there have been stories about this sort of behaviour in the past), would be able to stop the train in the event of there being an obstruction on or near the line. A person on or near the line, dead or alive. I thought that a person on the line would result in some detectable blip in the electrics, detectable at the control centre, resulting in the braking of the train more or less as fast as a person could do it. Not so sure about a person near the line. Another line of attack would be cameras in the front of the train. Get a computer to read the pictures and to do something when it saw something odd. But one would have to think about the something: stopping the train every time the computer saw something odd might do bad things to the timetable. But just raising an alert with the control centre and hope that someone processed the alert might be a bit slow. Maybe the best thing there is to deny access - something which some at least of the stations on the Jubilee line do. No doubt the London Transport R&D guys are grafting away on the whole thing as I type. Or perhaps the R&D guys from the companies which will sell the necessary systems?

PS: just renewed the acquaintance of Sainsbury's basics. Three interesting looking pieces of pork - described as chops (in big letters) of various shapes and sizes (in small letters). Very cheap at £2.75 for 0.75kg, but they do not look much like the sort of pork chops which I might buy at Cheam. Maybe they come from the head end of the pig; a porkine version of best end of neck. But they will do very well for the intended use - a sort of pork version of Lancashire hot pot, made in an open dish in the oven. Very fitting really, when I think that I make Lancashire hot pot with the neck of a sheep.

Oddly, when the fat, water and gravy had settled we got far less fat than last time. Maybe a third. Presumably this meant that a lot more of the fat found its way into us.

Started on Brian Vickers' 1993 swipe at some of his literary and bardological colleagues last night, ex. Kingston Oxfam. He castigates them for their love of theoretical frameworks and sects and for their intolerance of other peoples' frameworks and sects. Their passion for forcing everything into their particular theoretical mould without any very sensitive regard for the subject - and not resulting in much illumination of it either. He devotes a chapter to bashing each of deconstructionists, feminists, new historicists, psychoanalysts, Marxists and Christians. (I wasn't aware that these last were in the field so I shall be interested to be informed). Preceded by a couple of more theoretical chapters. I don't get the impression he has much regard for any of these gangs but he seems to reserve his especial ire for the thinking coming out of France in the 50's and 60's of the last century. From the likes of Lévi-Strauss (the author of my only prize from university), Lacan and Derrida.

I was struck, in the course of a section on intentionality in 'Othello' (something, the existence of which, it seems, that the aforesaid Frenchies deny), by a paragraph on what Vickers calls divided knowledge. Where the audience is told something by one player which is not known to another. Perhaps that one player's musings on his own inner state, or perhaps one player explaining, in an aside, his attitude to another. So, in Othello, we are told at the outset that Iago hates Othello - this hatred being what underlies what Iago intends, his intentionality - and is out to bring him down. Vickers then claims that this device is peculiar to drama and opera. Which gave me pause. Why should this be? If one made a story out of Othello would one not make sure the reader knew at the outset that Iago hated Othello; well before Othello found out for himself?

But then I tried to think of some examples. The only one I could come up with for a good while was the beautiful Russian agent who is supposed to trap Agent Bond in 'From Russia with Love'. As with Othello, we know right from the outset that the beautiful Russian agent is out to get Agent Bond. Although not a particularly good example as Agent Bond is fairly sure about that as well. Then I thought about crime novels; crime being a business where one person routinely misleads another, which might be the occasion for some of the Vickers divided knowledge. Couldn't think of an example though.

Thoughts then turned to Tolstoy where Pierre, Prince Andrei and Levin are all rather given to soliloquys. But these don't seem quite the same as soliloquys in a play. So perhaps Vickers has a point. But it's not that one can't do it; rather that one doesn't. Clearly something else needing some quality time to get to the bottom of. And yet another demonstration that I am with the theory guys in spirit: a good bit of theory is a lot more fun than the play!

A fault very similar to that which Lawrence of Arabia attributed to urban Syrians.

During consumption, BH was using something called 'Olive' from Sainsbury's on her bread. A margarine which announced loudly on the lid that it was made with Mediterranean olive oil. Sub-text: life giving, life enhancing and all the rest of it. Probably good for your sex-life. And much more quietly on the side of the container that the biggest two ingredients were water and rapeseed oil, with olive oil coming in third at 20%. Which all goes to show that as well as selling food from their basic range, they also do food labelling.

Then moved onto a chunk of Yau (2nd November). Where I glean two fascinating (to me anyway) factlets. First, that the surface described by the complex equation 'z1^5 + z2^5 + z3^5 +z4^4 + z5^5 = z1*z2*z3*z4*z5' is something of a complexity which few would suspect from the simplicity of the equation. Isn't it just a twisted sphere or something? But actually of a complexity which helps nerds unravel the inner secrets of the universe. Second, a chap called Schubert (not the musician) counted the number of straight lines that you could draw on this surface, arriving at 2,875. Odd both that there should be this sort of number of lines and that it is possible to enumerate them.

Yesterday was intended to be the day of the knife, I having decided that I needed a new sort of knife with which to unpack oranges. However, as it turned out, it became the day of four churches. Started off with a very decent and reasonable lunch in a place called 'L'Ulivo' in Villiers Street. They don't seem to have a web site but they do have a registered office in Shepherd's Bush should you happen to be that way.

First stop after that was St Mary le Strand, a splendid, if slightly faded, baroque church from the early 18th century. Would not have been out of place in Paris, serving the Catholics. But the upper Lord was put in his place by a very large lion and unicorn job celebrating the lower Lord, aka George I, affixed to the highest point of the arch to the apse. Helped along by a very helpful and knowledgeable attendant. Shame that we have so little use for buildings of this sort.

Next stop was St Clement Danes, which it not the oranges and lemons one, rather the RAF church. Site dating back to the Danish London ghetto of the 9th century but the present building of similar date to St Mary le Strand. With the differences of being bigger, lighter and in much better repair. Very good job of rebuilding after the war, the roof having been knocked in by a bomb. Very RAF flavoured. I could imagine veterans taking the place very seriously in the fifties and sixties when people of that age still believed in corporate worship. Organ donated by the USAF. The windows were made up of small pieces - say nine inches square - of glass which had been textured in such a way as to be only just about transparent. So the windows let the light in but you were not distracted by being able to see the trees (or whatever) outside. Images much too distorted. A clever wheeze, achieving some of what stained glass achieves.

Next stop was King's College Chapel, to which we had been directed by the attendant at St Mary le Strand. Extraordinary place, put up in the middle of the 19th century. Very colourful and presently restored to more or less its original condition. Except the roof, which had had to be truncated to accommodate an anatomy theatre above. Not like its relative in Cambridge at all. We also came across a couple of cases celebrating the college's pre-eminence in the field of dentistry. Inter alia, all kinds of unpleasant looking instruments and dodgy looking dentures.

Last stop was a quick visit to St John's at Waterloo, drawn in by an advertisement for a sculpture by a lady of Brazilian origin called Ana Maria Pacheco. Who along the way has collected an honorary degree from the APU where my brother used to teach. The sculpture turned out to be interesting, appearing to be the product of a rather tormented soul and reminding us very much of the Spanish sculpture in wood which we saw last year (25th November 2009). And while the church itself is a very handsome space, I did not think that the sculpture had been well placed in the space. Tucked in at the side rather than occupying a more dominant position.

Amused over the matinal tea to read about the Tate's Christmas effort. It seems that they hired a presently fashionable artist from the Institute of Conceptual Art (fees on application to http://www.conceptart.org/) to do their Christmas tree. He has come up with the amusing little idea, very retro, of erecting a regular Christmas tree in the Tate, rather like the one you or I might have had at home before we moved onto reproduction trees. Rubbish bins are out! Dame Trace consigned to the dustbin of history! The DT did not mention whether he has gone so far as to include real candles - as we did in the early sixties. I remember it being quite difficult to attach the candle holders to the tree in such a way that they would hold the candles upright. If he has, I imagine the H&S people will be a bit firm about not lighting them. Far too much like smoking in a public place. And the PR people will need to check that the candles have been sourced from carbon and animal friendly materials. You never know what sort of cranks might be creeping around the Tate at this time of year.

Nearer home I have been working on a different kind of retro, the Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. I have two versions, one the heritage variety, intended for people like me, the other the sort intended for use, the reading variety. The heritage one describes itself as original, which it clearly is not, but it is, I imagine, as close as they can get to the originals. Sewn binding. Superior reproductions of the original watercolours done at Norwich while the book as a whole was printed and bound in China. All under the auspices of Penguin Books, despite masquerading as the product of F. Warne & Co.. It seems that Beatrix got the story from North America, but it is still clear that she knew all about nature. Did more than just import the thing.

The reading one, from Ladybird, has been considerably tweaked. Most of the story seems to be there and most of the words, but there has been a lot of chopping and changing of sentences and their order. Not quite sure to what end, but presumably to move the style on from 1903 to 2003. I dare some some difficult words and constructions have been omitted or dumbed down. If I was serious about getting my M.Phol., I dare say I should pump them both into Excel and do some analysis. Word use, clause structure, all the sort of thing so loved by modern university English departments. An analysis which might demonstrate that the heritage author and the reading author were really two different people.

Perhaps next week.

Binding, paper etc not in the same league as Penguin. Much more bog standard affair. And whereas in the Penguin version, Beatrix is about the only authorial credit, in the Ladybird version you also have an adaptor, a designer, a photographer, an art director, a team of modellers and a painter of backgrounds. I think the idea has been to make the illustrations as much like what you might get on a childrens' program on television as possible. So instead of tasteful watercolours - which a second millennium child would possibly or even probably not relate to - we have soft toys for the squirrels, a plaster model for the owl, various accessories and painted backdrops. These are then assembled and photographed to produce the sort of illustrations that a thoroughly modern child is going to understand.