pumpkinstrokemarrow

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.