Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Miscellanea
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.
The lamb biryani turned out to be rather different from what I had been expecting. A good portion of rice and meat, but none of that sloppy vegetable curry usually served with it. Instead, a little bowl of plain yoghurt. Which turned out to be quite handy as the rice was quite spicy. I preferred it to the curried version I am used to: perhaps I shall ask for it next time I am in an Indian and see if they will play ball.
It left me rather full, one effect of which was rather grand dreams. I had been put in charge of physical security of the country's gold reserve at rather short notice and was trying to get a scratch team together to build a simple asset management system from scratch. All very trying. And then the gold reserve morphed into the country's one and only nuclear bomb, a bomb which was kept disassembled and spread over an upstairs floor of a small warehouse, with some of the most innocuous and unlikely looking bits being highly radioactive. One stepped carefully over them. All very odd and no idea where much of it came from - which I usually do.
Still feeling fairly full in the morning, off on a brisk stroll around Horton Lane and West Ewell. Where I find that the council has a rather odd sense of road mending priorities. The relatively new, clean and decent cycle and person path running alongside Horton Lane had some hard-to-see defects, all carefully marked in orange with one of those spray cans the inspectors use. They have now been mended. Which all seems very odd considering the very much more serious holes in the road all over, for example, that part of Stamford Green which runs onto the common.
Lots of signs of spring. Alder and hawthorn buds starting to break. Ground alder, nettles, docks and thistles on the move in the verges. A first dandelion flower bug breaking. Lots of celandines in bud. Daisies and purple dead nettles in flower. Plus various other small flowers I can't name.
Drifted off the flowers and started wondering about detectives, or rather the process of detection. Or the process of coming to a decision.
I decided that some people are good at coming up with decision candidates. Intuitions, options or hunches if you will. These are the creative people. But the important bit, as recognised by the policemen and women who briefed Houellebecq (see, for example, February 3rd), is that one has to check one's hunches. One should always go through due process, review the evidence for and the evidence against, because hunches are quite often wrong. Ideally, the creative person should present his stuff to a committee of reactive people who can react to the stuff without being emotionally committed to it in the way of the creative person.
However hard one tries, when poking about for a solution, once one has had a hunch, one tends to close down. To close one mind to anything other than that which supports ones hunch. Very hard to maintain an open mind. So due process and the reactive types are a helpful antidote.
So the question is, does Murdoch have his own hunches or does he review those of his side-kicks? Livingstone, I think was a reviewer. He reviewed the hunches of his then side kick, The Lord Mendelson. At least I have read something to that effect, although all Mr G. can find is stuff about how they both served on Lambeth Council as loony lefties.
A complication is those cases where the process of making the decision feeds back into what the decision ought to be - which is not the case in a murder. Whatever the investigating team might get up to does not affect who done it. If might affect one's view of the degree of guilt of who done it, or what the charge should be, but that is not quite the same. But if one is, for example, flogging a new advertising campaign to the board, the state the board end up in when they come to make the decision feeds back into the assessment. The assessment and the answer are not independent.
Back home to slow cooked shin of beef. About a kilo of the stuff in four slabs of maybe 5 inches by 4 inches by one inch. Some connective tissue, little fat. Add a drop of port and a coarsely chopped onion. Covered pyrex dish. Enter the oven at slow at 2130 yesterday. Add a little water, some more onion and some mushroom at 0725 this morning. Consumed with mashed potato and crinkly cabbage. All excellent except the mashed potato had some odd black bits, not visible at the time of peeling.
PS: found time in the course of all this activity to file, for the first time, an online tax return. There were some infelicities and I do not yet know what the tax people will make of it, but, overall, the online experience was better than the paper and pencil one. And someone has put a lot of work into making it so.
# posted by Jim @ 5:50 AM 
