pumpkinstrokemarrow

On 24th February I talked about a plant thought to be borage. Not being entirely satisfied with our identification, we decided to ask our neighbour, whose father had served in HMS Borage during the war (see article A7486978 in the BBC WWII memory archive) and whose mother believed that a sprig of borage was an essential ingredient of a Pimms, and so ought to know what the stuff looked like. She was unconvinced; she granted that the thing was probably a member of the borage family, the boraginaceae, but that was as far as she would go.

On 11 November I noticed an article in the LRB in which someone was lamenting the impending doom of university life in this country as we know it. This particular lament was geared to a change whereby income was attached to students rather than delivered as a block grant, a change the significance of which the article failed to convey to me. There were also words about how income was also attached to research.

The Epsom chapter has been on a fraternal visit to Vauxhall, where it seems their colleagues are about to waste a couple of mature mulberry trees near what used to be the Vauxhall pleasure gardens and is now a council estate. It seems that the juice from the squashed berries clashes with the latest municipal garden design directives sent down from Lambeth Town Hall, directives which mandate the use of granite sets for paving, sets which are badly stained by aforesaid mulberry juice. The idea that garden design directives might possibly fit in with or around mature trees in pre-existing gardens has not yet reached the Town Hall. The DT devoted a third of a page to the whole sorry business. It seems that some residents of Vauxhall really are disgusted; perhaps to the point of hugging the trees in question in order to keep the chain saw gang off.

Rather a lean issue of the TLS this week. But pleased to see that Mr Boon has risen so quickly to the bait thrown by his caustic reviewer the other week (see 10th February). Quite good natured about it all, all things considered. My own copy (ex West Hill Print Shop) of the book in question still sits on the study table (ex Vauxhall Station) awaiting my better attention.

Yesterday to the RFH to hear the Berlin Philharmoniker do Mahler 3 under the baton of Sir S. Rattle. First time I have heard the piece since I heard, while on a family holiday in Amsterdam, the Concertgebouw orchestra do it under Bernard Haitink some 45 years ago. Not sure if he is a sir but he is, inter alia, a KBE. Being from an older generation, probably not as full of himself as the rattle, who chooses to have a large photograph of three quarters of his face occupying most of the front cover of the A4 format programme. Price £3.50.

Continued setting up the new PC by installing the Nokia PC Suite from their web site. Easy and trouble free: the Nokia people must have gone to a lot of trouble to make it so. I was even able to select my model number from a large number of pictures - although that little exercise turned out to be unnecessary for installation purposes. Installation followed by a demonstration that elderly mobile phones are not very good at botanical close ups.

Yesterday to Borough to try a new place for biryani, but as I was running a little late, caught the slow train from Waterloo East to London Bridge. I had forgotten that Platform A at Waterloo East is primarily intended for estuary people and so found myself in a crowded train with the space near the door taken up with two very young families complete with rather ornate baby buggies. Despite the fact that they were travelling well laden in the middle of the rush hour and more or less blocking the exit, most people were very indulgent. To the point where, at London Bridge, a large florid gentleman took control of the situation and directed the two streams of passengers around them, off the train, in good order. A rather flustered young mum looked most relieved.

It seems that some of the demonstrators in the recent demonstrations in Egypt were concerned about flying brickbats and made themselves impromptu helmets. This chap thought he might as well double his hat with his lunch.

Mr Boon of copying fame (15th February) makes the interesting observation that if you ask Mr. Google about London you get 733 million hits in 0.18 seconds. If you ask him about sex you get the rather grander total of 1,030 million in 0.09 seconds. So sex is somewhat more important than London. But if you ask him about copyright you get the stunning 10,960 million hits in 0.13 seconds. From which we deduce that even in our post-capitalist world property rights are still more important than the basic functions of humanity.

Unable to paste (CONTROL + V) from Notepad via IE8 when I could from Google Chrome.

Just finished an excellent and accessible account of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 by one Margaret MacMillan, last noticed on June 7th last year. I think I must have been moved by turning over the pages of the other book - 'Dangerous Games' - once again to get this one. Something called a trade edition from Random House which has been printed on unusually cheap paper and which would have benefited from maps which fold out for viewing while reading and a diagram of the timetable.

On the first point, perhaps de-luxe editions, of which this was not one, should come with a little packet of maps to be consumed in parallel with the book, rather than building inferior maps into the book. Alternatively, the publisher could put a selection of suitable maps up on a web-site. Or a CD. Not as convenient as paper but better than an atlas. An atlas is a necessarily blunt & often heavy instrument and the maps need to be tailored to the book. I should say that the maps in this book were satisfactory although they could have been bigger and better; the problem was getting at them.

On the second, MacMillan chose to present the large amount of material by losing part. So we have chapters on Bulgaria, Turkey, China and so on. But what we gain in comprehension about the problem of China we lose in grasp of the process as a whole: the problems were all being dealt with in parallel, many of what were thought of as small problems in the margins of what were thought of as large problems, but there was too much going on for this reader to be able to grasp the whole.

The book and the peace is enlivened by all kinds of tittle-tattle about the players. Their lives and loves. One hopes that most of it is true. It would be annoying to find later that the book was merely reproducing the ill-informed gossip of the day.

I share various other bits and pieces. With, of course, the advantage of nearly a century of hindsight.

Anglo Saxons sometimes make the French out to be the villains of the peace. Greedy and vindictive. But this book reminded me that the US had little to fear from troubles in Europe and the UK was protected by its navy. And we had already impounded the German navy, merchant marine and colonies, so we had got what we wanted. The French, following the devastation of northern France, were simply anxious to avoid a repetition of what had happened to them twice in living memory. What became thrice in living memory for some of them. On this book's account, the Italians were far worse than the French.

And we were careless enough to let the German admiral scuttle his fleet in Scapa Flow as a gesture of defiance when he learned of the terms of the peace. The US was probably pleased rather than otherwise that the UK did not get to get this useful addition to its navy. They were as keen to get to be in charge of the seven seas as they are to keep charge now.

Some of the smaller players, very hot on self detirmination when it came to getting their own independance, were sadly indifferent to the rights of others and generally greedy when it came to settling boundaries. The Poles and the Czechs being examples.

Also true that self detirmination was an insufficient criterion for the invention of new countries. Much of Central Europe was terribly mixed up and one also had to have regard to viability, transport and security. Railways and junctions seemed to be of great interest. The Clapham Junctions of Central Europe had to find good homes. Altogether too much for the peace makers of the day to cope with. We solved some of these problems after the second world war by going in for large scale ethnic cleansing. After the first world war that only happened between Turkey and Greece - after the Greeks overreached themselves.

There might have been some hope for Palestine, what is now Israel, if we had managed to make the whole of Syria independant, that is including what is now Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. A large and strong Syria might have been able to make room for minorities - to the benefit of all. A hope which was very much alive when Weizmann first met Feisal but which was snuffed out when we snuffed Feisal. Figuratively, of course.

The US was already starting to worry about Japanese power at this time, despite their being on our side and having provided useful naval support during the height of the German submarine campaign. Part of their reward was a whole bunch of islands in the Pacific, in some of which they built large naval facilities before the second war. Which then had to be reduced at great cost.

All in all a rather shabby peace. But better than those that had gone before, and probably much better than that which the Germans would have imposed had they won. They were fairly fierce after the 1870 war and looked set to be more so had they won the 1914 one. Furthermore, natural justice had a voice for the first time at such an event, even if it did not prevail. And although it gave the Germans debating points, it did not cause the second war. Apart from the Germans themselves, that was more to do with the various weaknesses & errors of those who won the first one.

Now half way through our second ever Pomolo, the first having been noticed on November 29th last. A little drier than the first, perhaps been in the shop for a little too long, but quite eatable just the same. More fun that its small cousin the grapefruit as one can spend many happy minutes fiddling around with skin and pith. Bit like a pomegranate in that regard.

The shop was in North Cheam and carried an interesting range of groceries and vegetables. I also bought a mouli, the stump of which I finished for breakfast this morning. A sort of giant white radish, much milder than our small ones. Rather good. While in the shop, I also made the acquaintance of a carpet seller, originally from Lahore, who was also an enthusiastic cook. It seems that he had married an English girl who stuck to English cooking and his children followed suit. So although it is not the custom for men in Lahore to cook, at least not in a private capacity, he has now become, on his own account, an excellent cook. He advised me on the proper use of the jars of ready made sauce of which the shop carried a wide range. Sadly, the carpet selling business had gone bust in a rather messy way. He was very sour about the ways of banks. Much the same story as used to be common among the builders in TB: the banks encourage you to borrow to build your business, but when they lose money in some far flung land you have never heard of, they pull in all their loans in this one.

My problems are rather more homely. So over the past few days I have been pondering over the role of string, twine and rope in my life; a role which it seems to me is larger than average - although I do know one or two other people who are keen on string. Must of been something which happened when I was very little.

The result is that I keep significant supplies of both twine and rope hanging in the garage roof. Twine is sizal and comes in large balls from agricultural shops - for example Mole Avon at http://www.moleavon.co.uk/ - while the rope is blue nylon and comes in similar balls from similar shops. And not only do I keep supplies of new, I carefully hoard the old, tying all the scraps together and hanging the resultant hanks from the roof. Hanks made up in the special way I learned in the Boy Scouts - or perhaps when Outward Bound. Interest in string not quite as strong, but still present: this one more the preserve of the BH.

A related interest is knots. So I can still tie a reef knot behind my back and a bowline with one hand. I could probably still do a back splice although I have not tried that one for a while. No opportunity missed to demonstrate my skill with the Spanish windlass. And nothing but a full blown square lashing good enough to tie a couple of sticks together.

Which then associates to knives. One clearly needs a decent knife to mess around with rope. On which front I am sorry to have to report that I have lost track of my army style knife with a two and a half inch knife blade and an old-stype can opener on the front and a three inch spike on the back. A spike which we used to be told was for getting stones out of horses' hooves but is actually for getting knots undone which have been strained tight and hard. Laguioles might have excellent blades - the best I have ever come across - but they come with neither can opener nor spike.

Celebrating on two counts.

First, attendance at the second Succoni concert; every bit as good as the first. With the new-to-us Suk meditations making a successful amuse-gueule.

Second, the discovery that what we had thought to be the bottom of the range HP printer which came with the new PC can scan. So scanning capability is restored and given that printing on the new printer seems to be quicker, if of lower quality, than that on the old printer, it is getting to seem unlikely that I will attempt to install said old printer on the new PC.

I read in yesterday's 'Guardian' that the 'fine dining' end of gastro pubs are into a whole new form of flannel. The idea is that after you have discussed your requirement for wine and water with the chit from Rumania, you summon the salt pan with whom you can discuss your requirement for salt on and off the table, the salt pan being named for the legendary Mr Pan, the founder of modern salt cuisine, who lived in Harbin during the second half of the 19th century. (For some reason my shiny new PC is inhibiting a paste from Notepad so I am able to include Harbin neither in the native script nor in the authorised transliteration. Maybe a setting in IE 8: I have had problems of a similar nature in hte past when blogging from an Internet cafe. Maybe something to be sorted out with my missold support from BT). I dare say that I shall find on my next visit with Mr Sainsbury that he has devoted maybe half on one side of an aisle to various salts. Not, of course, including Epsom Salts which lives with the medicines rather than with the condiments.

Not to be outdone, there is a piece in today's DT about how the Chief Medical Officers of Health are foaming at the mouth about all this and are in urgent consultations with the chaps from Fountain Court to see if the 2006 tobacco regulations can easily be extended to salt or whether it is going to be necessarty for the PM to find some time in his busy calendar for a small bit of primary legislation.

Turning to home cuisine, a couple of very satisfactory and simple dishes over the last couple of days. First, a chick pea (from Turkey) stew flavoured with tomato, onion and tenderloin. Simmer chick peas for a couple of hours. Dice onions, tomatoes and pork. Add and simmer for a further couple of hours. Good gear. Second, a sort of Lancashire Hot Pot. This because our freezer contained a pack of stewing lamb from the Sainsbury's basics range, described as slow cook cuts ideal for casseroles. 1.081kg (are the scales used in their butchery department really that accurate?) for £5.39 (even their cash registers do not attempt the third decimal place). Describing the motley collection of lumps as cuts was rather gilding the lilly: off-cuts would be a better term. Off-cuts from one of the other strange offerings in the basics range. So we had fore arm cut off of a shoulder of lamb so that the shoulder is a nice tidy shape, a couple of slices of neck of lamb and quite a lot of crudely chopped lumps of breast of lamb. All rather off putting. However, pressed ahead and browned it all in some dripping. Added some coarsely chopped onion and a little water and simmered for a couple of hours. Added a couple of ounces of red lentils and some more water. Tastefully arrange some sliced peeled potato on top. Simmer for a further 45 minutes and serve with savoy cabbage. Very good it was too, despite the crude butchery and the quantity of linings.

And then to Orwell to finish off 'Coming Up for Air', an excellent book, sourced I think from a stall outside the museum inside Bourne Hall. Mystery how a chap who was born in India and went to Eton knows so much about the lives of children and shopkeepers living in small country towns before the first war and about suburbanites generally between the wars. Vert funny he is about them too. Shades of Sinclair's Babbitt of 2nd February 2009. Also reminds me of reading, many years ago, about how someone from the communist block in the late fifties was amazed how well Orwell captured the tone and (cabbagey) smell of large blocks of municipal flats in his country in the now more famous 1984. Of which, oddly enough, the present book is, in many little ways, a precursor.

But if I was Orwell I might be a little irritated by the biographical blurbs at the beginning of this 1989 Penguion edition. Orwell gets say 4.5 inches while one Dr. Peter Davison gets 1.5 inches. Orwell writes the book while Davison writes 2.5 pages of introduction. An introduction which is mainly focussed on the near 100% absence of semi-colons. Something Orwell apparently took a deep interest in; he was certainly interested in language if all the newspeak in 1984 is anything to go by.

Today was the day we chose to deliver 150 or so letters for a residents' association that the BH used to be involved in prior to FIL's arrival on the scene. These 150 addresses are scattered more or less at random across the 3,000 or so addresses in the area in question. So not just a question of shoving one through every door.

Step 1: policy. We decide that, all things considered, the best thing to do is get the print shop to copy & fold the letters and then for the two of us to push them through letter boxes according to the list (see step 2). Decide against sticking the things in envelopes and addressing them. Decide against posting them. Having done the job, I think BH was right to overrule my advice. Hand delivery quicker than enveloping, addressing, stamping and posting would have been.

Step 2: create list of names and addresses from a spreadsheet originally derived from the Electoral Register. Remembering that each postcode is supposed to be something that a postman can conveniently walk around, decide to sort by postcode, rather than trying to do something clever with the first address line which contains both street number and street and which would not sort terribly well. Minor catch in that maybe 20 of the addresses did not have postcodes and appeared in a group at the end of the list.

Step 2: first quarter I do by myself in the car. This is quite slow and involves a lot of walking backwards and forwards to the car.

Step 3: second quarter we do together in the car. I walk about while BH drives about and supervises. Much faster.

Step 4: third quarter BH does by foot. This is the dense quarter clustered around our house.

Step 5: fourth and last quarter I do on the bicycle with a DIY clip board made of a scrap of hard board hanging around my neck and holding the address list, the supply of letters and a biro. All held together with two of the same sort of bulldog clips as I use as bicycle clips - that is to say the pale triangular ones with the folding arms, rather than the dark cylindrical ones with fixed arms.

Step 5: home to a well earned cuppa.

By the end of this little job one has quite a good idea how to go about it - although the plan is that there will not be a repeat.

I now know, for example, of all kinds of nooks and crannies in the ward which I did not know of before. Strange dog-legs on streets. Funny little tracks and alleys round the back of things.

I learned of the wide variety of housing in the ward. From the fairly grand to the fairly scruffy. Where either or both of house and front garden might be grand or scruffy. No high rise and not many flats. No dogs.

I learned of the wide variety of letter boxes - including here both the letter boxes which are actually holes in the door and those which really are boxes stuck up somewhere near the front door. These last are much easier to get post into as many of the holes require trickery to get light weight letters through. I got better at this with practise. Perhaps I will have a pow-pow with our postman about what sort of letter boxes he goes for and amend our letter box accordingly.

I learned of the wide variety of schemes for numbering the houses in streets. Some of which did not seem to have much rhyme or reason at all. One could, perhaps, engage the branch of mathematics which tries to impose order in the form of streets and numbering on connected but otherwise arbitrary networks in the Euclidean plane. For those with a taste for science fiction, one could move onto other kinds of plane. Maybe the surface of a Calibi-Yau manifold (8th December)?

I learned of the wide variety of numbers on houses. Or not. And some people like their house to be addressed by name rather than by number. Right pain. How on earth is one supposed to know where 'Mon Repos' is in a road of a hundred houses? Especially when the house sign is in small letters which you have to peer over the fence to decipher. Shouldn't be allowed; except perhaps in those odd places which do not number in a sensible way.

PS: lots of people seem to be chipping in with pop-up advice about how I should be setting up my new PC. Including various HP pop-ups. Maybe they will calm down after a few days or I will learn how to turn them off. Maybe I will get PayPal to work again. But that is probably not a new PC issue.

Bit the bullet yesterday and off to John Lewis at Kingston (upon Thames) to buy a new computer to talk to the Internet, to find that John Lewis are not really into desk top machines any more. Luckily, BH knew how to skip through the Bentall's centre to PC World where they were. Rapidly buttonholed by a pleasant young man who rapidly sold us an HP Pavilion Slimline - off the display shelf as it was the last one - 20 inch wide format screen and a cheap printer. Plus a three month service agreement to get me over any teething problems. Got it all home without getting wet and without dropping anything.

Managed to copy the folders I wanted off the old computer onto an external drive OK. Installed MS Office, up to the point of authentication, OK.

Then, when I started on the Internet, the fun started. Put the Total Broadband CD (from BT) into the Pavilion to be told that the user I was logged in as did not have administrator rights, what control panel was telling me notwithstanding. OK, perhaps the PC World people had locked that user down in some cunning way as it was on display. Create a new user. Same problem. Exercised my shiny new service agreement with PC World. Phone quickly answered by a young lady who did not take more than a few seconds to explain that this was not unusual with these discs and told me the workaround. Disc now whizzes into life and asks me whether I am installing from new or whether I am adding a computer to my installation. Which question does not seem to quite cover what I want to do, viz, replace one computer with another. Try add to be told that there is some compatability problem with this version of Windows and the install stops at 53%. Just stops and hangs. No helpful messages or anything. Try from scratch and it just stops at 53% without saying anything at all.

Clearly time to talk to the helpful people from Bangalore, who for once are not helpful at all. Oh no sir, that sort of thing is not our problem. You have to talk to the supplier of your computer. But your disc is five years old; are you sure it is not out of date? Well, you can buy a new disc from a BT shop or from their website. I can't do anything from here. Thanks a bundle. Hang up to go and visit their website where I cannot find any buy new disc options. Phone another support number where the chap really is helpful. Might even live in England. No, you do not need discs any more but if you sign up for a three months support agreement I will get you up and running in no time. Getting a bit frazzled by this point, so I go for it. To find that all I had to do is plug the new computer into the existing router and I am on the Internet. No need to install anything at all. OK, so I might have been a bit dim, but I think I was missold. The really helpful chap had been told enough that all he had to do was say plug the thing in and it will work, not sell me some support.

And in case you are wondering, the reason that I did not just plug it in anyway was that my BT instructions are very firm about not plugging your computer into the router until the installation software tells you to.

Move onto setting up Norton. Now my existing Norton account is a 3 user household thing with 2 users to go. So I thought I could just spend one of the two users remaining on the Pavilion. But what I wind up with is a free 9 day trial of some fancier product. My account page tells me that the older product is not available for download. Which is a pain as Norton are plugged into my bank somehow - although a quick peek at my accounts there does not tell me how - and I do not want to wind up paying twice. But I can't find the Norton support option which produced some really helpful help a few years ago. Just a whole lot of help pages which do not help in this instance. Still, I do have interim protection. Put Norton aside for another day.

For a bit of relaxation, move onto installing the cheap printer. Manage that without serious incident. Manage to activate MS Office online without having to do hardly anything. Much easier than the phone option I have used in the past.

For a bit more relaxation, install Dropbox, having carefully put an up to date copy of my Dropbox folder where I think Dopbox will look for it. Fail completely and it creates a new one which it then proceeds to synchronise. An operation which is successfull but takes most of Tuesday night.

Despite dire warnings from some blogger or other, allow Rapport to reinstall. It never caused me any bother and HSBC clearly think that it provides useful additional protection.

Chrome, Google Earth, Nokia, Olympus and etc & etc to come. Done quite enough for now.

Instead, a bit of destruction therapy. As I have mentioned before, I don't like leaving my hard discs lying around, so I extracted the disc from the old computer. That was easy enough, a lot easier than it was on the Viao, but I still couldn't actually get inside the thing. Instead, more or less sawed it in half with a hack saw then bent it double with a club hammer. Interestingly, the actual business part of the disc appeared to be two shiny metal discs, each perhaps 1.5mm thick and mounted perhaps 5mm apart on the same spindle. Not the single platter ceramic affair the Viao had at all. However, the important thing is that I don't suppose anyone at the waste transfer station is going to be so keen on investigating my affairs that they will try and read what is left - which might well be possible if you throw enough time, toys and trouble at it. Who knows.

I close with a nice new word that I found yesterday while recovering from all this: squailer. It seems that a squailer is a stick which has been weighted at one end with wire or some such and which is used as a missile against small animals and large birds. One goes squailing with it. Just the sort of way that gangs of teenage boys would spend their time on Epsom Common a hundred years ago. This courtesy of one G. Orwell - although I don't know how he knew because he went to Eton where I imagine such an activity would have been regarded as very common.

On 10th February, under the Mubarak banner, I noticed a book about the joys of copying by a chap called Marcus Boon, rather snottily reviewed by a colleague from Cambridge.

I recently learned about an outfit called Freecycle - a sort of Ebay without the money bit - to be found at http://www.freecycle.org/. The idea is that rather than bothering with Ebay or taking the thing in question to the waste transfer station to be landfilled, you just post the thing on this site, then someone comes and takes it away and provides it with a good home. So in my case, with thoughts moving to a staider form of bicycle than the Trek I have now, I decided that my No. 2 bicycle, a good ride, but intended for someone younger or fitter than me, was surplus to requirements. Post the thing on Freecycle and within say half a day I had maybe ten expressions of interest. Gave the first email in my telephone number and he had taken it away for his son within the hour. Just the result I wanted. I shall use these people next time I have something somebody might want to dispose of. The only bit of pack drill was that I thought it proper to email all the people who emailed me to say how things stood. But this was knocked on the head by taking the advertisement down.

Had occasion yesterday to mention good and bad English. So right on cue, booting up today, I get a pop-up from BT about a critical update to the help part of their broadband system. Well, their broadband system is fine and their help desk people are helpful, but it seems unlikely that this update to my desktop help is critical. And if it were, they ought to know that their just saying so is not enough in this critical - not to say cynical - age. So I invited the pop-up to try again later.

Conferred with two serious amateur cooks about the trials and tribulations of bread making last night, both of whom had gone through the bread making fad some time in the past and who were surprised that it has taken me so long to get around to it. I explained that the bread I was getting was quite eatable but did not taste of anything much and not much like baker bread. We agreed that making plain white bread was difficult and this was probably the reason that in-house recipe books and in-store bakeries are full of flavoured bread. The flavour obscuring the underlying truth that the basic bread is not very good. Both thought it unlikely that the flour was the problem. One thought that the oven might be the problem, possibly an inaccurate temperature gauge, with bread being sensitive to cooking temperature. Also that the finish of white bloomers was achieved by brushing some milk onto the loaves before putting them into the oven. And finally that the solution was to be found with one http://www.danlepard.com/ - this being the site of the bread correspondent for the 'Guardian'. The other thought that adding some vitamin C might help. And that swapping cooking oil for lard was unlikely to help.

It is often alleged that people who are superior in the creative department are apt to be inferior in the mental health department. An allegation I go along with on the basis of gossip. Think of all those people who thought you needed to be a drunk in order to be a modern American writer.

A further thought on this front. Maybe he, like others before, really believes that he needs to stay at his post lest his country fall apart or worse. His fellow country men and women are not fit to look after their own affairs; take him away and all kinds of dross will come out of the shadows to fill the vacuum. Much better that I hang on a little longer, despite my failing health and the state of my garden. The fact that my family and I have salted away a good bit of my country's dosh is beside the point. Or at least, is not the main point. And the cunning thing is, the chap might have a point. He has so managed things that he really is indispensable.

The Evesham PC used here for Internet purposes took three goes to get going Monday and during the third there was much unpleasant looking CHKDSK activity. Arrived in Windows XP to find that the Dropbox folder had vanished. Maybe other stuff had vanished but the Dropbox client wanted to know what was going on so I knew about that. Maybe the fact that Dropbox must be plugged into some Explorer interface makes things a bit more fragile than they might otherwise be.

Been pondering about why it is that 80 year old presidents find it so hard to move on. The chap in Egypt is said to have salted away lots of dosh somewhere, so why doesn't he do a runner to Dubai and live out his days in one of those palaces built on small sand banks? One might have thought that at his age and 30 years in the hot seat he might like a break, to turn his mind to higher things and prepare for the great leap forward to come. In the middle ages, the more sensible kings used to retire to monasteries, leaving the children, wives and barons to fight it out among themselves.

The people at Dorking have gone for a younger quartet this year so we got to hear the Sacconi Quartet (http://www.sacconi.com/home) on Saturday, the first of their series of three. And very good they were too, bringing a bit of youth and zap to the proceedings. But not so youthful that the viola player didn't wait to start a second movement until a presumably older gent. in the back row had stopped mumbling. Programme went small, medium, big rather than the more usual medium, small, big. So we started with Wolf's Italian Serendade (never heard before), then Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 (never heard before) and finished with the reasonably familiar (but not too old to hear something new each time) Beethoven's Op. 59 No. 1. A musical feast of climbing. Wolf started a bit jerky - at least it seemed so to me - but settled down to something rather good. Smetana good and Beethoven the business. Although the joined up, last two movements seemed to sag a little: perhaps I was getting tired. Or perhaps the glass of cheap wine (sold in small bottles with uninteresting labels; not as posh as what you used to get in BA club class) was a mistake.

On Friday, rather than doing one of my regular circuits in the immediate area, I decided it was time for a change and decided to walk from Waterloo to Tooting Broadway, which turned out to take something over two hours.

Now had two further attempts to get the scanner to work. First attempt, simply rerun the large file downloaded from HP. Runs to the point where it wants to do a restart, but then silence after the restart. Printer uninstalled so neither printing nor scanning. Second attempt, go for the second of the two installation files offered, this second one ten times as big as the first at around 350Mb. Maybe this includes the bits of the product which does scanning. Runs to the point where it invites you to turn the printer on and plug it in. Runs to the point where it wants to do a restart. Then the install pops up and resumes. There is hope! After a while it announces that all is well. The only bit that I skip is product registration which got into a muddle with the Yahoo browser which I do not ordinarily use.

This, it seems, is a bacon and cheese sandwich with the bread bit having been replaced by two battered chicken fillets. A bit rich for me I think now that I am off the bike, but you can get them from KFC.

Walking around Horton Country Park yesterday, I discovered that one of the chain saw gangs has made it across Christchurch Road and has started in the park. Not in force yet as all that has been done is that some of the underbrush around some trees they want to grow big has been cleared away. Trying to put the park back into the Park I suppose, but I would rather that they left well alone. I bet the birds like the underbrush too. In fact, in some parts of the Isle of Wight, the environment types make a point of growing the stuff special. Perhaps I should put the Epsom environment types in touch with them.