pumpkinstrokemarrow

The only catch is that not too many branches of HSBC have such things. So Epsom no, West Croydon yes. So, visiting Victoria tomorrow, I wondered whether the branch near the station has such a machine. So, off to their Internet site to make enquiries.

First failure is that I cannot find the branch in question using their branch finder, the best that I can do being the one in Vauxhall Bridge Road.

Second failure is that various attempts with their site search facility fail to find out anything at all about this sort of machine, let alone where I might find one. Not even something explaining that this service had been withdrawn. Not even something about the drill if I was a market stall holder and wanted to cash up.

Third failure is the telephone number supplied on the contact page. In order for their computer to talk to me about anything at all I have to key in all sorts of numbers including some security number, not something I carry about with me. Can't be bothered to climb the stairs to find one, so my piggy bank will have to remain at critical for a few days longer. Good job that coin, unless a good deal dirtier than mine, does not tend to heat itself up.

One such food is bread, a commodity on which I am fast becoming a barrack room lawyer. I have learned that one of the ways to get a good rise is to make a very wet dough, with the side effect that the finished bread has more water in it than it might otherwise. Also that one of the ingredients of the white English bread which I like is plenty of water and fast power kneading. With the same side effect. And then there are the evil food processors who simply want to make bread with as high a water content as can be managed as the combination of high water content and sell by weight translates into high profit margins. It seems quite likely that some of these processors use a blend of natural & organic additives carefully selected for the property of having both a declared innocuous & permitted function and an undeclared water take up & retention function.

It is also true that very dry bread is neither very palatable nor easy on the dentures. Bread needs to be a bit moist.

Another such food is sausage and I remember hearing on the radio, many years ago, about a butchers' trade show featuring a stand for a mincing machine which was guaranteed to increase the amount of water which could be packed into a sausage. The trick being to get the water in in such a way that it does not ooze out again while still in the shop. That might put the punters off.

Another trick, confined in Europe I think to the British Isles, is to include rusk in the recipe. Which sounds as if it might also help with water retention. Now it might well be that the proper English sausage that we know and love needs to have rusk in it. But it is also the case that a sausage made with lots of rusk and water is going to cost less to make than otherwise. To the point where baked beans sold with added sausage were, when I last looked, dearer than just baked beans.

Moving onto meat proper, I was impressed by a fact sheet, turned up by Google, from the US Department of Agriculture, to be found at http://www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/Water_in_Meats/index.asp - which struck me as a sensible overview of the whole subject. The Department does not appear to be wholly in the hands of the food processors. One fact therein relevant here being that meat is about three quarters water - and that if you drive too much of it out the result is not edible. But we do have the same conflict of interest that we had with bread: water is good and necessary but more water also means more profit.

And lastly there was the great formaldehyde scandal. It seems that if you treat your hay with formaldehyde your beef will hold a great deal more water, water which is only released during cooking. The result of which is that your roast beef is more boiled than roast and in any case ends up a good deal smaller than when you bought it.

A little more work with Google reveals that there is a huge literature out there on the subject of treating hay and silage with things like formaldehyde. Growing good cow is a very big business. As far as I can make out - a lot of the stuff turned up by Google being very technical - the idea of the formaldehyde is that it slows down the microbiological decay of silage leaving more grub in the silage for the cows. So you get more bang for your buck from the silage, which more seems entirely reasonable. But maybe the formaldehyde flavoured silage results in cows with more water, in which case we are back with conflict of interest.

Quite a lot of the technical stuff appeared to be for sale. You got an abstract for free but to get more you had to pay, which is not unreasonable. Someone has to pay to get the work done. But one of the more accessible things came from the New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research, via Google Books, where the drill seems to be that you can read the thing on screen but you cannot print it off. At least, you can print but you have to print all 300 pages or so of the whole number of the journal, not just the 10 pages or so that you want. Maybe I need some extra tuition in the use of the print button.

As ever, the whole business more complicated than might be deduced from reading 'Orgo Food Weekly' (from the Poundbury Press, in the land of the Royal Grocer, by appointment to himself).

See: http://books.google.com/books?id=snHnP1twEPgC&pg=PA233&lpg=PA233&dq=formaldehyde+make+silage&source=bl&ots=FrCB-89ePB&sig=lb4qSx56fJ6SRh_sD2ZP8WmApIA&hl=en&ei=QDCUTfisApmAhAe26bXfCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=formaldehyde%20make%20silage&f=false

Today's puzzle was to do with mercury and gasometers. According to an informant in TB, there was mercury to be found at the top of gasometers in Brighton and boys used to try to recover the stuff, most of it getting spilt along the way. So the question is, what was the mercury doing there? Informant did not know, so I thought to demonstrate my Internet prowess by finding out - and failed. Along the way, also failing to find out how the upper seals of a telescopic gasometer work. Clear enough that the thing as a whole was often sealed by floating it in a large round tank full of water, but what about the upper seals?

There was some stuff about mercury in natural gas and a diagram of natural gas manufacture (so it is not so natural as all that) which included a mercury removal phase. And mercury removed might accumulate and be purloined by boys. But Brighton in the 1940s would have been town gas not natural gas, so that does not help. Then there was a learned paper about the cleaning up of town gas works sites which talked about heavy metal pollution, including mercury. But it said nothing about the accumulation or recovery of mercury at the top of gasometers. There were a few links which required one to flash the plastic but I was not that interested - and not really an option for the average GSCE or BSc projecteer. After about half an hour of this gave up. Not much wiser about mercury and gasometers but slightly wiser about the limitations of wire based learning.

Onto to roast loin of pork for lunch. About 6.5 pounds of the stuff, in a lump but with the butcher having sawn through each joint to facilitate carving. Then tied up to guard against disintegration. It looked most impressive on the plate and was not bad at all hot, although a little dry. For once I saw the point of apple sauce - which I had not thought to make. On the other hand there was cabbage and boiled potatoes. We will see how it does cold, often, in our experience, better than hot. A view shared by at least one of my paternal aunts.

Thus fortified, sat down to renew my wrinkly, known to some as a senior citizen's rail card, having been sent a helpful email reminder by the rail card people. Click here and off we go. I type in the very long number on my passport once, the rather shorter number on my credit card three times and the very short number on my current rail card once and I am now hopeful that a new three year rail card will shortly arrive in the post. The whole process reasonably tiresome and took rather longer than it would of done at the station, the only catch with this last being that the station cannot do a three year one.

One wonders by what sort of arrangement the rail card people, a private, possibly foreign owned company, have access to what one might have thought was the very sensitive and very private government passport database?

Then in yesterday's DT I was interested to read that the hooligans had a cause, that they were not just mindless louts; they were protesting against those very rich people who had managed to avoid paying very large amounts of tax. It seems that they thought that whoever owned Fortnum & Mason was one of them. The line being that if the rich people paid their dues then not so many low paid would be out on the streets because local government could afford to employ armies of litter pickers from among the unqualified disaffected youth of our bog-standard, housing association, social housing estates. I am not so sure. OK so it is annoying that lots of rich people make cunning and usually legal arrangements not to pay lots of tax. But point 1, lots of not so rich people just don't pay. And point 2, squeezing the rich will not be enough to save the bacon.

Amused that I had to read the DT to find out about the cause - but am nevertheless quite sure that, in the round and to the extent that the hooligans were trying to achieve something other than mayhem, they have shot themselves in both feet. They have also provided the securocrats with one more reason to monitor traffic on mobile phones.

I wonder in passing about the origin of hooligan. The word in missing from my elderly OED (umpteenth impression of the first edition) but is present in my large biography of Churchill. It seems that in his youth he belonged to a rather exuberant dining club called the 'Hughligans', or some such, after one of the leading lights, Lord Hugh Cecil, or some such. They were referred to in the press of the day as the hooligans, with the word being used in much the same sense as it is today, but that did not stop them having the pull to have most of the leading politicians of the day to dinner, one after the other.

Sadly, further delving reveals that Churchill was not the origin of the word after all. The rarely consulted supplement to my OED does contain the word, said to be of vaguely Irish origin and certainly used in an English music hall song of the 1890s about a rowdy Irish family.

Polished off the orgo chicken yesterday in the form of soup. Strip remains of chicken and boil carcass for five hours with a few carrots and onions. Strain, add 8 ounces of red lentils & 4 ounces of left over boiled potatoes (entire, not mashed) and leave to stand for six hours. Bring to the boil and stand for a further two hours. Bring to the boil again and allow to simmer. Half an hour before the off add one diced chuchu and the diced chicken. We managed the whole lot - maybe five pints between the three of us - in one sitting.

The chuchu was a surprise extra for the BH on her birthday, sourced from Tooting market and wrapped in special paper from W. H. Smith. A sort of knobbly green pear in appearance which two independent sources asserted was properly used to make chicken soup - and I already knew that roast chicken was on the cards for the Sunday following. Investigating further with Google, I discover that the thing is actually a form of cucumber, originally from Chihuahua in Mexico, but now widely grown in hot countries generally. We tried some raw to find it something like a mild radish. The stuff would do well sprinkled in a salad. In the soup it had the texture and taste of cooked marrow, not really surprising in a relative of the cucumber, but not what I had expected: one of the independent sources had said that one uses the thing like a carrot, so I had expected, quite wrongly as it turned out, a carroty taste or texture.

This particular pseud was recently moved to discuss in a public place the quality of silences in chamber music. About how the quality of the silence was of a different order during a live performance than it was on my gramophone. I spared my audience the bit about Norman Lamont, but that can be found at December 9th 2009. We then went onto ponder about the fact that jazz and popular music do not seem to do silences. At least not in the sense of timed silences; just breaks between pieces or riffs. And my impression is that popular music is not into modulating the volume much. It is all loud. So that makes two dimensions of the musical spectrum which it does not bother with.

Moving on, yesterday to QEH to hear Mitsuko Uchida do a Beethoven quintet (Op. 16) with people from the Bavarian Radio Orchestra, followed by more of the same people doing the Schubert Octet (D. 803). Neither the quintet nor the Bavarians having been heard before, but with Uchida having last been heard around 6th October last year and the Octet around 11th April. Quintet went down well, despite my never having been exposed to a wind quartet with piano before and it taking a while to engage with their sound, helped along by Uchida's engaging energy. But the Octet, despite good passages, seemed strangely flat. Not sure what was wrong: the glass of wine before the quintet, sitting half a dozen rows further back, or the show itself. The players seemed a bit cold; they just sat there playing, which I thought reflected the fact that they were primarily orchestral rather than ensemble players. Used to just sitting there, whacking the stuff out from the score. The only one who seemed to have a bit of life was the double bass player. Cello not nearly as conspicuous as last year. That said, the rest of the more or less full house seemed happy enough. And by way of coincidence, for the second concert running, I had a comfortably off, abroad resident but native English speaking, visiting lady, by herself on my right. One lady on the first occasion and another on the second that is. Just one lady altogether would have been altogether too much of a coincidence.

Puzzled on the way home by a party consisting of a couple of middle age, a small daughter, a daughter in white fluffy party dress with shoes to match, three or four older girls and a violin. Much rather fast food litter poked into the rather small on-board litter bins. The dad, who spoke perfectly good English, seemed to be some sort of foreign and was clutching what appeared to be a programme for something or other. We thought that they were going to Dorking and we thought that Vaughan Williams, a famous son of Dorking, was in their conversation. Rather closed in on themselves, so we did not like to ask what particular sort of event had resulted in this particular configuration, but investigation this morning reveals that March 27th is a big day in the Vaughan Williams calendar, being the anniversary of the world première of his London Symphony in the Queen's Hall, conducted by the equally famous Sir Henry Wood. Google reports than the manuscript of the score was subsequently lost in Germany, in the travails of the first world war. There was no reprise yesterday and while there were various Vaughan Williams flavoured events sprinkled across the home counties, none of them seemed to fit the bill. So what this particular group had been up to is going to remain a mystery.

And then, arriving at Epsom, still no signs of life from our branch of Odd Bins which had been obstinately closed all day. There have been rumours about troubles at t'mill in the DT. One result of which was a visit to Waitrose to buy the luncheon wine, which turned out to be a very fine bottle of Meursault, ploughed by the king, according to the label. Labouré-Roi 2008. According to Google 'a refreshingly subtle and elegant style of chardonnay you could drink throughout the meal'. As it happens, we entirely agree.

Accompanied by roast orgo chicken accompanied by stuffing made from our very own bread, rather strongly flavoured by some elderly chopped walnuts, BH having had trouble sourcing any hazel nuts. Accompanied by rather than stuffed to take account of FIL's dietary sensitivities.

Friday saw a meeting of the Breadmakers' Consultative Committee at Wetherspoons. I reported that I had given up on trying to make the sort of white bread which is suitable for making bacon and egg sandwiches. Commercial bakers - such as the chap at Cheam - must have secrets or equipment that I cannot aspire to. Instead, I have opted for a more artisanal sort of bread. Fat free (except for the lard on the tins), slow matured, quite chewy. Oddly, it has now got to the point where I actually quite like the stuff - which would probably not have been true had an identical product been made or procured by the BH. To the point where a few days ago I bought some bread which I might have quite liked a few weeks ago - and found it very insipid. Various points were made in discussion; sadly all lost in the mists of something called 'Wandle'. One of the funny beers that Wetherspoons seem to specialise in these days. This one actually quite potable. But I do remember a discussion about the excess consumption of McFlurrys by the female sector of the bar staff. A sugar fix sold as ice cream by the nearby McDonalds.

Second, we have completed the census form and sealed it in the envelope provided. Too be posted as close to midnight as we can manage, as per instructions. We wonder what arrangements have been made to deal with the glut of such envelopes in small suburban post boxes. Are the curious marking on the outside of the envelope indicative of mechanical opening and scanning? We wonder what arrangements have been made to cope with peak loading at about the same time on whatever server farm supports the online version. How do they make any kind of an estimate as to what the peak loading might be? How easy it is to buy significant computer capacity which you are only going to need for a few days?

The form itself was easier to complete than I had expected; not as nosey as I had expected. A few infelicities in the questions. For example, having one question asking for your job title immediately followed by another which asked what you did. Everybody knows - except it seems the census people - that a job title says what you do. I put the same phrase into the answer box for both questions. Pleased to see that the first option for religion was 'none'; hopefully reflecting the expectation that that will be the most common answer.

Not so pleased that I have no recollection at all of the last census, a mere 10 years ago. Beyond the negative recollection that it was not done by post. Quite convinced, for some reason, that this is the first time the thing has been done by post. But how do they know where we all are? In the olden days - when, I should say, I used to work for the people who, at that time, did the census - there was a small army of people responsible for making sure that every household, caravan, bivouac and residential cardboard box got a census form. A making sure which involved a fair amount of tramping and snooping about. How can we trust the Royal Mail to accomplish the same trick?

PS: another irritating pop-up yesterday from some product which I knew nothing about which claimed to have discovered 117 things wrong with my registry. Click here to register and have them sorted out. I smelt a get out the plastic occasion and closed the dialog box without going further. Another unwanted gift from HP.

There is another ivy lover at http://howtokeephouse.blogspot.com (search for 'ivy covered') but I don't know if she would be up there with this chap. My own ivy growing ambitions got the chop.

Another puzzle was a chap on Ewell by-pass the other morning, say around 1030. A mid-range jag was parked in a lay-by. Fully dressed, casually dressed chap appeared to be asleep in the driving seat, this last wound well down. Inside out pair of jockey shorts hung out from a back window, apparently to dry. What sort of an evening had the chap spent to be like this in the morning?

And then this morning we had the litter pickers. Too rather sullen looking young men, presumably on minimum wage, strolling down the road with their black bags and litter pickers. They were doing a job of sorts. But they were leaving a lot of the small litter, for example fag ends, some of the larger litter and they were certainly not going to clear up a smashed up beer bottle on the edge of the road. So the puzzle is, how does one manage litter picking? In the good old days the ganger man would have inspected each stretch of litter picked road and simply sacked the litter picker responsible for a bad one. I dare say a few innocents would have gone to the slaughter too and I dare say the ganger man would have had his favourites. Nephews, sons, dependant uncles and so on and so forth. But the litter would have been picked - although I also dare say that if the ganger man played too hard he might have found himself being jostled a bit when he left the pub one dark night.

Whereas now, the work is probably being done by contractors who don't inspect the work done too carefully. Work done by chaps who are very hot on their human rights. Not reasonable to pick up litter weighing less than 10 grams or more than 500 grams. Not reasonable to pick up glass, that's a job for a street cleaner not a litter picker. You can't fault me unless you can demonstrate that I have missed more than 1 kilogram of eligible litter in each of more than 2 100 metre stretches in some one kilometre stretch. I pick litter to parameters which have been agreed with my union - not to mention the International Court of Human Rights - and it is only fair that you stick to them. Otherwise I shall get Cherie Blair onto the case. She's feeling the need for a bit of limelight with dosh so I'm sure she'll take it.

I close with an anecdote for our time. It seems that collectively we have this tremendous guilt about the care we afford our old folk. Lots of guilt but not so much action. So to assuage the guilt, we encourage lots of bizzies to write lots of rules for the poor schmucks on the front line. To make sure that they don't get up to anything that we would not approve of (from a safe distance). With the interesting result that care workers are not allowed to help old people take their complicated medicines without written authorisation from a doctor or chemist. On the other hand they are allowed, indeed encouraged, to walk the plank if one of their old people snuffs it for lack of medicine. Let alone takes the wrong medicine. Funny sort of world where a care worker is trusted into someone's house to do all kinds of intrusive personal care - but not to read the instructions on the medicine bottle.

Good that it lists the places where your search text can be found, rather as some of the MS Office find functions do, but bad that you cannot jump from the entry in the list to the place in the document. Presumably a bug. Adobe don't bother with the list but just take you through the places, one after the other. Which would be a pain if there were lots of hits, but in this case there were not.

BT have now overseen loading the latest reader from Adobe, which does a better job of the particular search I was trying to do, and have made it the default reader for PDF documents.

None of this was difficult, but having a person to talk to (within perhaps 30 seconds of picking up the phone) resulted in resolution, whereas gazing at the screen did not. I remember something like this from the Help Desk we used to have at the Treasury. By the time you had explained what the problem was, you realised what the answer was. Making the effort to explain to someone else seemed to get the brain into gear.

All of which leaves me with thought that HP, like MS, are trying too hard. I would prefer my PC to have come into my life with Windows and whatever is needed to drive my all-in-one printer and then to leave it at that. No HP advisor, no snapfish, no anything else and no dock. A dock which I have to close every time I start the PC up. Perhaps my next support call to BT will be to get them to turn the thing off.

However, I did come across a reference to a film called 'F for Fake' by Orson Welles, which I promptly procured through Amazon - and for once in my life I had to pay considerably more than a fiver for a DVD, very nearly a tenner in fact. Which turns out to be in the same league of pretentiousness as the Boon book - and more or less incomprehensible the first time around. But a bit of work on Google overnight and I have got the plot sorted out and the film was then much better the second time around. All about one forger called Elmyr de Hory and another called Clifford Irving, with far too big a role for Welles himiself. Very self indulgent altogether. Elmyr de Hory comes across as an entirely likeable and very successful forger of modern art. Clifford Irving comes across as rather unpleasant.

But the film ends with a splendid story. I have no idea whether it has any truth in it, but rather fun. So we have a rich, famous and libidinous Picasso, more or less in his dotage, in his flat in some sunny part of the world. A beautiful model parades up and down in front of his window until Picasso decides that there is enough left for one last fling. Model enters flat and strikes a deal. I model, you paint and I get to keep the pictures. Some time later, she pays a visit to some swanky art gallery clutching 22 late masterpieces by the master. They are duly authenticated by various experts and start selling for splendid prices. Gold digging good. At this point Picasso emerges from hiding and denies the masterpieces. The model is still clutching her copy of the agreement. The experts say they are real. But then Elmyr de Hory is lurking in the background and everybody agrees that he was quite capable of knocking out the masterpieces.

Intrigued, I thought to buy the Clifford Irving book all about it, but at £20 plus for a second hand one in fair condition I thought I would leave it until the pile of unread books has shrunk a bit. If I still remember after that, maybe. Rather irritated to think that this splendid scandal must have passed me by in the seventies, leaving not a trace now. And I thought I took an interest in such matters.

Fine spring morning so something of a route march this morning. Horton Lane. Horton Country Park, Horton Golf club, West Ewell, Ewell Village, East Street, Hook Road and home after about 2 hours 43 minutes. Hedgerows greening up in the Country Park and some signs of chain saw activity, but not too bad. Adopted by a brown staffy dog (as opposed to a bitch) while walking through the golf course. Arriving at the golf course car park, it went to sniff at a lady with a buggy who gave me a dirty look. At which point, thankfully, the dog decided that the car park was more interesting than I was. Fine display of dandelions underneath the advertising hoarding at the corner of East Street and Hook Road.

Home to slow roast flank of beef. About four pounds of the stuff cooked at 90C for around 16 hours with some chopped mushrooms, sliced onions and a drop of port. Served with boiled potatoes and spring greens -which needed a good wash having been visited by a slimy slug or some such. Not bad at all. Preceded by a little smokey with bread - the first time FIL had had such a thing despite his many visits to the Scots. Perhaps he never made it to Arbroath. Smokey excellent. Good texture and not too salty.

Bought a Guardian yesterday. Which left me a bit uneasy with all the media coverage of the attack on Ghadafi and his works. Leaving aside the wisdom of our intervention, uneasy about doing it like a reality television show. With real time discussion of whether or not to assassinate the chap - the same chap whom Blair went to cuddle not so long ago. Democracy in the media age I suppose - but a bit tacky nonetheless. Plus, I do not think assassination is a very good idea. These people should always be given a comfortable bolt hole; not put in a position where they have nothing to lose. How about one of those nice villas on a sand bank in the Persian Gulf, next to some footballer or oligarch or other? He could have cosy chats with those nice Shiites over the water.

Rather happier with the line taken by Monbiot about nuclear power. He writes some interesting stuff but I had him down on the looney left, so pleasantly surprised to find him in favour of nuclear power. One of his points being that a power station which can take an earthquake under and a tidal wave over without doing anything too disastrous must be built on fairly robust technology.

The first visit was on a cold grey afternoon and the daffodils were only just coming into flower. Oddly, all very impressive (see also December 28th). Onto to the privy garden which really did look good. A symphony in green. Even the sunken gardens managed to look special. Some trick of the cold grey light. Maybe related to the habit of arty people having their studios facing north.

The second visit was today, which started off very warm and balmy. Daffodils full on, in various shapes and sizes. With variety, mainly in blue. For example, some very pretty blue wood anenomes. Pushed on past a herd of Russians, into the east garden and on down the long walk. An austere version of the long pond at Versailles - presumably a crib. Fountains at the end came on every ten minutes to keep us on the move, and we rounded the end to find a herd of male deer, complete with antlers. BH explained that at this time of year the lady deer will be dropping the young started in the autumn while the men keep out of the way. Male bonding rather than male display time of year. Certainly not into being present at the birth. Quite a different timetable from the ducks on the water who were into male display. Back up the south side of the long water paying a visit to the ancient oak, which might have been planted by King John to impress the natives when on the way to Runnymede, just up the road. Just about alive the last time we saw it, but now rather dead. Hopefully the sapling is from one of its own acorns. A trick which does not work with some trees, where one cannot plant one in the wreck of another; one has to go to clean ground.

To complete the rustic scene we had a skylark skylarking above. Couldn't see it but no doubt about what it was. First time we have heard such a thing there. This was followed by a couple of Egyptian geese on a visit from Hyde Park (March 16th). On through the ancient hummocks, alleged to be ancient ant hills and back into Hampton Court proper.

Over the road to Blubeckers for lunch, perhaps for the second time in 20 years. Near empty, but entirely satisfactory lunch. Nice little bottle of Macon-Villages Dom de la Grange Magnien (some less expensive white Burgundy can get a bit ponderous, but not this little number with its figure-hugging cloak of oak) to go with it. A stroll down Bridge Street, just above the River Ember, to wind down. Butcher still there and still presenting beef rib on a plate. Fishmonger still there and we now possess two Arbroath smokies. Various junk shops still there and we now possess a bugle. £12 when Mr. G. tells me that I can get a new one from anything between £20 and £200. I guess this one is near the bottom end of that range but there still looks to be a fair amount of work in the making. Plenty of brazing. I shall now learn how to make reliable noises on it so that I can impress sprog 1.1 when he next visits. I can already do loud; more than one note and reliable are going to take a bit longer. FIL can do soft.

Needed a break after that lot, so went out to inspect the signs of spring. So in the back garden, in pond No. 1 the sedge grass is starting to sprout after its autumn haircut. In pond No. 2 the marsh marigolds are in flower. And in pond No. 3 the first water lilly leaf has surfaced after the lowering ceremony of January 22nd last. Further down we now have some celandine flowers. Not a mass, but some and it looks likely that there will be more. And in the wide world the dandelions are beginning to flower. Again, not a mass, but some. And I am sure there will be more: the mowing contractors don't get to all the places that dandelions do. Some daisies to be seen. Groundsel in bud. The spring sunshine had brought all the thirty somethings out to West Ewell's two caffs for their Sunday morning frappés over the 'Mail on Sunday'. Some outside, fagging. Very Belsize Park. So all in all, things are looking up.

Later in the day off to the Wigmore to hear a one man band going under the name of Emanuel Ax, a popular event as we were reduced to returns. But keyboard side seats in row eye did very nicely and my view was improved by the seat in front of me being vacant. But diminished by one male in the front of me to the left spending the first half of the concert audibly and visibly reading the programme and one female to the right spending the second half fidgeting. Almost to the point where one tapped them on the shoulder. Both north Americans and one wondered why on earth they were there. But to be fair, most of the more or less full house was very enthusiastic. As loud in their appreciation as I think I have heard there. And someone gave him a bottle of champagne which gave rise to the mercenary thought that his purse would probably buy getting on for 1,000 such bottles. Then that Pollini plays to a full RFH which is maybe five times the size and where tickets were half as much again. Which probably explains why the Ax purse was made up by an anonymous contribution. But nice to hear first class piano in a chamber concert hall for once, rather than in a symphony concert hall.

A Schubert concert, which he started off with the D935 impromptus, this being the main reason why we were there, having taken a fancy to impromptus ever since we hear Imogen Cooper do the other ones, D899, in what turns out to be well over a year now. So time continues to fly. See December 9th 2009. He then moved through the calming D664 sonata onto the grand D960 one. Somewhat overwhelmed by the whole business, reduced to getting a taxi back to Victoria Station. This morning's consolation will be to hear both sets interpreted by Barenboim for Deutsche Grammaphon, courtesy of a second hand vinyl shop in Notting Hill shortly before 11th February last year. Search button working well today. Another advantage of blog over pen.

Back home to take another look at what Mrs. David has to say about yeast in her bread book, to find that it was clearly a tricky subject before the invention of the dried yeast pellets that I use. A whole literature about how different ways of making yeast result in different kinds of bread. About how real bread bores would not dream of buying yeast but would make the stuff from scratch. A process which seems to involve potatoes. Along the way I was amused to see that her book was endorsed on the back cover by no less than Sir J. H. Plumb and Sybille Bedford OBE. No puffs from the Sunday Telegraph or some fellow foodie for her.

Moved on to perusal of a review of Bush junior's apologia in the NYRB. Which made me ponder about intention. Bush comes across as a good chap. The sort of chap you might have a pint with - indeed I remember that reading he was an absolute wow at chatting and troughing with the voters. He could get more grits down with a smile than any other politician of his generation. He makes some mistakes, some rather serious, but he meant well. Most of the time he admits to the mistakes after the event.

Now people who take their politics seriously are apt to take a dim view of people with whom they disagree. People of the far right and of the far left are apt to regard people with whom they disagree, certainly those at the other end of the spectrum, as evil. Last night this seemed to be taking things too far. Some dreadful things happened on Bush's watch, but he meant well. The road to hell it not, as far as theologians are concerned, paved with good intentions. You are only evil if you plan to do wrong, you know it to be wrong and you in fact do do wrong. Bush, on my reading of this review, fails the second test. Justice takes a slightly harsher view in that one can be criminally negligent, in England & Wales anyway. Neither plan nor knowledge needed here, just the deed.

In TB, I do know people who do do wrong in the sense of the second test. They know that something is wrong - say slashing the chap you catch with the wife, bashing the chap that jogs the arm that drinks or stealing a laptop - but they do it nevertheless, perhaps claiming the defence of no planning in the first two cases. There is also the small number of people there who do not seem to think that bashing is bad at all; rather a demonstration of virility and status. An activity only qualified about rules about young people not bashing old people and ladies. That sort of thing. Whereas I know very few people of education who do things they know to be wrong. This perhaps because education can mean more control and less crime, more thought and less deed; but education can also mean dressing the deed up in fancy clothes, the dressing being both for private and public consumption, to the point where the deed is not wrong at all. Do we prefer the thug of simple morals or the smoothie? The thug of the streets or the thug of the banking hall?

So I am not sure what one does about Bush. Do we shout and scream at him because he was wrong? My understanding is that politicians do shout and scream at their staffs in private so perhaps that is the sort of language they understand. Or is enough just to change him for a new model while maintaining parliamentary decorum?

Is shouting and screaming just before he makes what you think would be a mistake OK? If he is about to make a very bad mistake, should one still maintain parliamentary decorum? I guess the answer is that it all depends. One breaks decorum at the peril of the civil state - but a very bad mistake might do that too.

PS: bread now running very late. Reduced to the expedient of cheese scones for tea. A well known way of getting a lot of calories down in about 20 minutes: 12 oz flour, 3oz butter, 4oz cheese and milk to mix. Enough for two or three.

I have also finished the book called 'Germania' by Simon Winder, the chap responsible for the picture of 10th March. A very entertaining read; a sort of history of Germany, Germans and things Germanic from the very beginning. Crammed with all sorts of fascinating trivia which has left me keen to spend some quality time cruising around the place, my experience so far being limited to an afternoon's stroll across the bridge at Echternach and a very important jolly to Berlin.

Despite being a good read, I did have two problems. The first was that the author is not a professional writer and his jokey prose and repetitions grate after a while (maybe a kettle and pot problem lurking here). The second was that one did not get a proper sense of how the author came by the material - beyond a rather disquieting suggestion in the bibliography that he made extensive use of various editions of the 'Rough Guide to Germany'. It is not at all clear how much German he has. I would have preferred the book to have been properly framed: it is a personal book not a product of academe and he should have been properly placed in it. As it is I am left feeling that the thing might be a bit of a swiz.

If the book is a success, perhaps the author, being in the book trade, will be able to wangle a picture book version. The sort of thing which Thames & Hudson are quite good at. There are a few pictures in the present book, unlabelled in half tone, but the material cries out for the Thames & Hudson treatment. Or perhaps the history of Germany in a hundred objects.

My problem now is to source a proper history book in English covering the same sort of ground. Is there such a thing? I don't know of any modern, one volume history of any of England, Great Britain, the three kingdoms or the British Isles (inc. the Îles Normandes). And their version of the Oxford History of England presumably does not come in English translation. Probably a bit long for my purposes anyway.

PS: a little late in the day I was pointed to http://www.hoeckmann.de. A site containing splendid maps of the baroque complications of the old German geographical scene. I was also pointed to a splendid film called the 'Scarlet Empress', a German flavoured film from the early 30's in which Marlene Dietrich has the interesting assignment of presenting 18th century Russians as being both barbarians and Germans - the Russian upper reaches of the time being heavily infiltrated with Germans. Great fun.

To be on the safe side we checked in our elderly Romer - probably still good for facts of this sort, not that susceptible to the wafts and whims of fashion. Which is not quite the whole story as it turns out that there is room for debate about which vertebrae are cervical and which are thoracic and so on and so forth. Not always as clear as one might have hoped. Nevertheless, Romer does confirm that while birds, fishes, amphibians and reptiles are a bit relaxed, proper animals, that is to say mammals, pretty much all have seven cervical vertebrae, with the small number of exceptions including tree sloths and manatees. But certainly not giraffes or pigs.

Now it is a well known feature of intelligent, that is to say human, life that seven is a magic number. There are seven ages of man, seven hills of Rome and seven layers in the ISO reference model for digital communications. In the beginning, before the rot set in, there were seven electors for the Holy Roman Empire. Not to mention the seven dials near Leicester Square. All kinds of important things come in sevens.

Which clearly demonstrates the presence of the deity at the time of the design of mammals. The deity being intelligent is into sevens, just as we are. Whereas if it had been left to natural selection we could have wound up with any old number. So OK, the deity was out to lunch when the trees sloths and manatees were on the slab, but that does not detract from the argument as a whole. He is present and correct!

Having sorted that one out we then moved onto a piece by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian about how it is not a good thing that the difference between top pay and bottom pay has got so large and is continuing to grow. Most unhealthy. A line I agree with, but then I thought you are a presumably decently paid journalist and you are chairman of the National Trust. So you are copping a fair packet yourself and see fit to bang on. So I go to check my handy copy of the National Trust Annual Report for 2009-2010 where I was pleased to discover that the large numbers of national trustees are not paid. They collect a very modest amount of expenses and that is it. The only fly in the ointment is their director general - one Fiona Reynolds - who appears to be on something like £150,000 plus final salary pension scheme. The pay of a senior civil servant. I suppose the trustees would argue that they are a serious organisation which needs a serious person at the helm, for which one has to pay a reasonable salary. I am inclined to agree.

But it would be interesting to do some work on the way in which the public servants in devolved bodies of various sorts have managed to whack their salaries up big time over the last twenty year or so; how bosses in local government, bosses of educational enterprises and bosses of hospitals have managed to transform their pay scene. From being the Cinderellas of public service they have become the Snow Queens. Much better paid than the heads of departments, the god calls me god lot (aka GCMG, but not the Greater Covina Medical Group), who used to be top of this particular heap.

PS: and if you are bored, you can ponder on the two rather different anatomical uses of the word 'cervix'.

This week's Irish stew, more properly St. Patrick's Eve stew, will be made from the last neck of lamb to be had yesterday from Manor Green Road. It seems that the other 19 had gone to a local prep. school to make their St. Patrick's Day stew. Very proper of them too. Sign of the times that one has to go to a prep. school to get such a thing; it seems most unlikely that the local primary schools will have time or funds. Although one of our local primary schools had the time and funds to erect a colourful mosaic advertising itself on an outer wall the other day. Must have cost a lot more than a lot of Irish stew.

Yesterday to town to try the carrot juice bar at Selfridges. Which turned out to be missing: the food hall had plenty of fast food franchises but we could not find one which did carrot juice. Thwarted here, moved onto Hyde Park to take a gander at the municipal art there.

The first item was a very large bronze of a decapitated horse's head - maybe 20 feet high - erected on its nose somewhere near Marble Arch. Both ugly and morbid. The head was balanced by a piece which appeared to consist of half a dozen giant jelly babies made out of some kind of translucent, brightly coloured plastic and erected on a tasteful plinth. We then proceeded west, across sundry roads, to get into the park proper.

Into the Italian Gardens where we noticed that the statue of Jenner, some kind of BH great uncle, had not had the bird lime cleaned off very recently. But we did see a couple of very large and handsome brown ducks - probably Egyptian geese - and a very tame heron which hopped about the edges of the ponds trying to avoid the people trying to take its picture. On down the western edge of the Serpentine - which was looking very well on this hazy spring afternoon - to find a couple of brown rats. Across the water from the brown rats was a large metal saucer, erected where I think there used to be a Moore sculpture. The ticket on our bank told us that it was by the same chap who designed the world's biggest April Fools' joke in the Olympic Park - which I am sure I have noticed before but cannot now find. The saucer was not rubbish, but it was not finished either: the man had not properly worked out how to connect the shiny saucer to the ground. A trick which lots of sculptures fail to pull off. A problem, the pictorial arts version of which vexed the Pre-Raphaelites enough that they used to make their own picture frames.

We next come across a sign which explains that the Royal Horse Artillery will be firing a 21-gun salute in the park on the 21st April next to mark the birthday of sprog 1. I shall have to tell him as I do not suppose the Artillery will have bothered with that bit. Might be OK on field guns but admin. not too clever.

Pushed on to the memorial to the late Princess of Wales to find that it is now graced by a large bronze duck. Not as bad as the horse's head but not very good. The memorial was guarded by a rather surly worker from a company called Enterprise, who, it seems, have taken over the maintenance of the Royal Park known as Hyde Park: the parky's have been privatised. No more Queen's Gardener, no more Queen's Parky. The park might still be splendid but it seems a pity that its maintenance has to be a matter of profit and loss. Memorial itself suffers from the same problem as the saucer: idea good but not finished. The important bit is not properly connected with the rest of the world.

The next memorial was to the cavalry of the empire, which looked to have been put up for the first world war and touched up for the second. The important bit of this memorial was a knight on horseback, in full armour, poking a large scaly thing underneath his horse with a lance: St. George and the dragon; a little anachronistic perhaps, but no more so that the whopping great near naked Achilles a bit further up the park. BH thought that we wound up with St. George the Dragon because the Plantagenet family did not think that St. Edward the Confessor, his predecessor, was really manly enough for a people engaged in a reverse conquest of France.

On down to Hyde Park Corner where we find that the Commonwealth memorial actually looks quite impressive if viewed from underneath the Wellington Arch. With, for the first time, flames coming out of the black bowls on top of the white pillars; clearly visible in the mid afternoon light when looking east. Pity about the silly little pavilion to one side. Pity about the smell of burning cooking oil hanging around the place.

I close with a planning puzzle. What on earth were the controllers of planning thinking of when they allowed some hotel in Buck. House Road, nearly opposite Buck. House Proper, to drape its elegant, fake Georgian frontage with some kind of green eco-carpet? Quite ugly; nothing at all like the far superior, rather arty and (I think) French effort in Piccadilly.

Then we move onto insurance for the house, which we have insured with Halifax, one of many outfits which used to be mutual & friendly and now has share holders. Some years ago I queried the rising cost at their shop and the helpful lady said 'Oh dear. You seem to have a very old policy. Let me have a quick look'. In short order, as I recall, the cost of renewal was halved or something and I was not impressed. A fit of nostalgia for the days when you could trust your insurance company to play fair and you did not have to think about it. So this year, once again, they send us a reminder. Terribly sorry, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are going to have to hike the charges.

Not best pleased to have to disturb my reveries about my next concrete art work, I decide that I had better take a peek at one of those comparison sites. Fairly quickly find myself inside a well put together site, put together by Tesco. All a bit tedious telling them all the stuff they need to know, but, nevertheless, well put together. I notice in passing that fashions in these matters have clearly changed. 20 years ago all the serious action was in subsidence. Now the action seems to be in watercourses. Is there a watercourse between 200 and 400 metres away from your house? The inference appearing to be that if there was one less than 200 metres away you might have trouble getting insurance - which would knock out most of Manor Green Road. Not a problem for us up the hill though. After a bit Mr Tesco went away for a think and came back with six quotes, five at under half what Halifax were offering and one a lot more. The catch was that the five were not exactly blue chip outfits, the names of which just tripped off the tongue. Never even heard of some of them.

Nevertheless, the signs are that Halifax are overcooking things. Off to the shop to see what they have to say. 'Oh no sir. We can't handle that sort of thing here. You have to phone the insurance people using that phone over there'. Which I do and have the pleasure of going through the security question rigmarole twice because the first person I talk to is not able to pass the baton to the second person I talk to. But who is able to knock off about two thirds of the proposed increase. Much muttering about how the Halifax policy is much cleaner and simpler than these other offerings are likely to be.

Which may well be true, so I suppose I am going to have to sit down with the small print. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just trust them?

Then a few days ago we had had a good experience with filling in our income tax form online. Good in the sense that the site had been well put together and one could do the thing in bits as the mood took one. The system remembered what you had done. And, to cap it all, the result seemed to be acceptable to the tax people and they sent us a nice letter a few days later.

So today we took a chance and opened a further communication from the tax people. Which turns out to be a four page letter, numbered page 1 to page 4, but which also appears to be two versions of the same two page letter, each purporting to give the BH a tax code. The two versions of the same two page letter are nearly identical, with their very own dear sir and yours sincerely bits, but the two tax codes are different. After much scratching of heads (and possibly other parts) we think we have worked out what is going on. But the thing is not a masterpiece of clarity. We are supposed to be educated, numerate people, well able to navigate the odd form, but what on earth would a bog-standard have made of it?

After careful consideration, we have decided that no further tax action is needed at the present time.

Compost dark brown, fairly damp, quite a few worms and a faint smell of animal glue. Or rendering plant.

Removed from bin and then sieved to produce something not too far away from what we might otherwise buy from the garden centre, at least in appearance. Filled up the various buckets and garden containers to hand which now await distribution by BH. In the garage for safekeeping in the meantime.

The sieve caught one dessert spoon which had probably been there for a couple of years, but being stainless steel none the worse for wear. BH now into sterilisation cycle just to be on the safe side. A lot of bones. Quite a few beef ribs, miscellaneous bits of sheep and pig and one turkey breast bone. Oddly, given that we consume a fair amount of the stuff, no oxtail bones. The sieve catchings were scattered on the landfill site a few yards away from the compost bin.

I thought to mark the occasion by placing one of my concrete art works (illustrated) at the right angle of the 3-4-5 triangle formed with the hypotenuse running from the compost bin to the landfill site. Compost bin at the 3-5 angle, landfill site at the 4-5 angle. Hopefully, in years to come, some bearded television archaeologists will puzzle noisily over this cult site. Perhaps an underground cult of meat eaters formed around the time that the EU banned meat consumption in the wake of the considerable societal dislocation caused by global warming? Why else would there be these carefully placed artefacts in an area otherwise devoid of animal remains? On the perimeter of what had clearly been a circle of small beech trees, well known for their cultic associations in this part of western Europe. Was the concrete art work really a sacrificial stone, or perhaps something on which to joint the furtively barbecued meat? Was it all a throw back to a Pythagorean cult?

With apologies to Hašek who had the idea first.

Ironically, the same issue of the NYRB carries a piece about how the Soviets, for all their faults, were very good at the mass production of very good weapons, with assault rifles and tanks getting particular mention. The argument being that the Soviet way of organising things worked much better, at least in this speciality, than that of the free world.

An argument recently given a post-Soviet turn by a video clip of a spanking new Russian fighter which appears to be capable of flying backwards, turning somersaults and other unlikely stunts. Said to be superior to anything the Yanks can put up, never mind ourselves. See http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/CA_SU-301.wmv.

First part of the wheeze was to have ten year settlements. This would take some of the pressure of continually having to explain how one's work profited UK PLC off of hard working academics. It would also slow down the ebbs and flows of funding fashions.

Second part of the wheeze was that the annual grant for a university for the coming ten years would be A plus N1 times B plus N2 times C, where A, B and C are positive numbers, N1 is the number of students completing their courses in the previous ten years and N2 is the number of students admitted in the previous ten years weighted for their A level achievement. Answer in millions of euros.

The idea is that a university gets more as the quality of the applicants they accept rises. If a university can take on great swathes of people with fancy qualifications it must be good and so deserve the wedge. Payment by results sort of thing. Promotes merit but does not promote class. No extra points for taking on specials.

I can now spend the morning thinking of the catch with this splendid wheeze before submitting it to Cameron's Citizen Suggestion Box. Fame and reward for good suggestions.

PS: good bread bake yesterday. I think I really am getting the hang of things. See http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls.

Pushed on into Clerkenwell Road which did not have much commercial character any more. No small businesses doing obscure light industrial things, although there was a supplier of janitorial equipment. But once in Old Street things got more interesting. Lot more housing and a lot more small shops, including some with a Vietnamese flavour. Lot more people smoking in the street. A former Salvation Army Hostel. A former orphanage. And at the corner of City Road and Old Street the very grand and red Leysian Mission. From what I can glean from Mr G., the place was very grand inside too, including a full scale theatre, and had been built for the Wesleyites in 1903. Somewhere along the way the place fell out of ecclesiastical hands into commercial hands and is now the Imperial Hall. Not altogether clear whether it is hotel, flats or both. Can't include a picture here as they all seem to be copy protected. No doubt I could drive through the copy protect if I gave it a bit of time.

Back to St Luke's church which looked as if it had been burnt out at some point, then unfrocked and expensively rebuilt as an out-house for the LSO. Very nice chamber music venue it was too, slightly marred for me by the use of Y-columns to hold up the new roof - a stretched version of those used to hold up the wobbling bridge connecting Bankside with St Paul's. I find them rather ugly.

Music by Mozart - the K428 string quartet and the K581 clarinet quintet - provided by the Elias Quartet with Michael Collins in support with his Yamaha clarinet. We didn't get to find out whether he was any relation of his Irish namesake. His clarinet did really well in this particular space - rather better than when we heard him in the Wigmore Hall the other week (see January 28th). And we wondered about the group dynamics of a quartet containing two sisters and two unrelated gents.. Altogether an excellent concert - and at £9 a pop very reasonable. They look to have a good chamber programme, so I must keep an eye on them.

Needed to calm down a bit, so retired to the neighbouring Wetherspoons where they had an Adnams Festival on and offered a choice of half a dozen or so brews from Adnams. Being of mature I concentrated on just the one. And for a treat we had a barmaid who seemed to be talking the language of 'East Enders' as her mother tongue. We were very restrained and did not seek the autographs of the quartet who turned up after a while with various hangers-on, presumably on the same errand.

Afternoon rounded off by meeting a young French family - the daughter with the properly French name of Celeste - getting off the tube at Clapham North where they were visiting friends for a holiday. I did no better than suggest they visit Clapham Common, not thinking until afterwards that I should have recommended the Indian and other restaurants of Balham and Tooting, which are probably much better than anything they have in that way at home.

Green alkanet (see February 28th) at Raynes Park alive and growing, although it looked as if it had been a bit set back by the recent frosts.

PS: what are the proctors of St. Andrews playing at? I had thought of it as an ancient and respectable place supplying courses in Land Management and Fine Arts for real and wannabee royals. But the front page of today's DT tells me that they have awarded an honorary degree to the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo, aka Shredder Fred. I thought Cameron's crowd did not believe in rewarding failure.

An interesting performance and reasonable value for money when the voucher from the RHS mag. was applied to the bill. Tea, sandwiches, mini 'Devon Cream Tea' and cake. Tea fairtrade or some such. Sandwiches with complex fillings, cut into oblongs about three inches by one (no crusts) and fresh from the chiller cabinet. The cream part of the cream tea was in little tubs from Cornwall and rather good. Jam and scone adequate, with the scone very crumbly and with BH giving an interesting demonstration of consumption. Cakes were all brown, cool, moist, heavily iced and very sweet. Not very English at all: where was Victoria sponge never mind the authentic sponge?

Followed tea by a visit to the Wisley branch of the RHS library. All very neat and tidy with the books impeccably numbered and labelled. Less grand books than the Vincent Square branch but probably more useful. Although we did wonder about the place of expensive picture books about plants in the age of broadband. And they were weak on flashy German gardens - of which I had just learned that there are lots.

Preceded tea by a visit to the gardens themselves. Lots of good looking crocuses. A wander around the pinetum. A visit to the new glass house where we liked the display of cactuses and succulents. Intrigued by the various plants, some very large, which seemed to consist of a continuously growing, single bud. Opening leaves often had strange patterns on them and were often arranged very mathematically. A lot of them were aloes. Quite a lot of displays of things which like dry, both inside and outside. Lots of pebbles and gravel. I rather like them - although I do not think they often translate well to suburban front gardens which do not have enough space and you get too much design to the square metre.

The only mistake in the new glass house was the cement floor. The design was driven in part by the need to be chair friendly and have no steps. So there was a swathe of cement floor and path, some of it gently sloping, tricked out to look a bit like the sort of flaky stone which is sometimes used for London pavements, Lambeth Bridge being a bad example. Effect rather spoilt by the joints in the real cement running straight across the grain of the fake stone. In any event, not a very successful bit of design to my mind. The problem being the gently sloping paths of gently irregular shape; they did not please this eye. No great problem with fake in general.

For the official version see http://www.stadtgeschichtliches-museum-leipzig.de/. The panoramic photograph of the interior there is rather good. Alternatively just type völkerschlachtdenkmal into Google.

Started off with the Mozart, probably new to me and certainly a flavour of Mozart I don't recall hearing before. Rather good. Followed by the younger brother of the quartet called the 'Kreutzer Sonata' mentioned on 28th February. So I was close to achieving full house on that front on this occasion; hopefully there will be another before too long. The 'Intimate Letters' we did get was a strange but impressive piece, themed on the same adulterous lines as the 'Kreutzer Sonata' and which followed on nicely from the Mozart. 'Excellente continuation!' as unctuous waiters in pretentious restaurants in France might murmur respectfully in one's ear as one orders. At least they might according to Houellebecq.

In the warm up talk back at the conert, the cellist told us that they had played it as part of some dramatisation of the life of Janáček involving an important luvvy called T. West. They had been very impressed by the difference between his very relaxed rehearsal mode at home, glass of the vino rosso in paw, and his highly energised performance mode; I suppose as performers themselves they would be sensitive to such things. Must try and find out what the show in question was.

Wound up with rather superior & serious business in the form of Rasumovsky 3. Tremendous stuff, improved in my case by a couple of run throughs the day before.

The second eureka moment came from a chance encounter with a book about dementia by a psychologist from the Netherlands called Bère L. Miesen, a chap who appears to be something of a world expert on the topic. Terrific value at 30p reject from Bourne Hall library with the best offer from Amazon being £9.91 for a used one or £17.48 (not including the sometimes expensive P&P) for a new one. I share a few thoughts.

First, my understanding is that a lot of care work is done by decent older ladies for low wages, largely without training. While caring decently for those with dementia is a very demanding and sometimes draining, rather than rewarding, business. I am reminded of the building and agricultural labourers of my youth who scored in the labour exchange as unskilled as they were not ticketed for a recognised trade, but who were, nevertheless, apt to be very skilled. Or of the once lowly status of a GP compared with that of the consultant.

Second, he has a simple but compelling model of why sufferers appear to revert to their childhood, which goes something like this. When something happens we lay down lots of traces in the memory banks. The number of such traces laid down for any one happening will tend to increase with the importance of the happening and will tend to decrease with age - and with dementia. To the point where one is not making new traces at all. Traces are persistent, but they do not last forever and they die on a random basis, although as long as there is at least one trace of a happening, there is the possibility of recall. But then, if one gets the parameters in this model right, after a certain point there are no recent memories at all and the memories that are left, paradoxically, get older and older as time goes by.

Third, he (implicitly) offers a very simple explanation of why dementia sufferers often cling to their carers - behaviour which is hard to accommodate continuously. The dementia sufferer has no short term memory and is condemned to live in the present. Each encounter with the carer is an encounter with a new and strange carer, something which frightens or upsets the demented. But who has got enough marbles left to work out that this fright or upset can be avoided by keeping the carer in range at all times. Preferably, just to be on the safe side, in touching range.

All in all not a pretty way to go. But there is a person inside, a person whose quality of going is very dependent on the quality of care. It is worth the bother.

Along the way I found out that the 'Third Ear Band' did the sound track - a band whom I liked when a student and whom I last heard as the warm up act for the 'Rolling Stones' in Hyde Park in 1969 or so.

The dominant memory arising from the film is that of the gruesome murder of his starlet wife, which on checking I find to have been a few years before this film was made. A bit odd that he chose to make such a violent film in the circumstances.

That dealt with and given the cold outside, decided it was time for another round of red lentil soup. Made with basic bacon and turned out fine, only slightly marred by a scattering of the strange black specks. It is now some months since I reported such black specks to the customer service people at the Leatherhead Tesco, people who seemed very efficient at the time, but I have not heard back so I am still none the wiser as to what the specks might be. Would they offend a vegetarian or a vegan or both? Next time I am in the area I will pay them another visit and see if there is any record of my original report.

Next stop was the farmers' market, something which I tend to regard as a posh version of a craft fair. So instead of lower middle class ladies making bizarre ornaments of various sorts we have upper middle class ladies playing at farmer's wife and making bizarre eatables of various sorts. I also wonder whether they import the chutney base from China in large barrels, add a bit of local apple and then decant it into dinky little jars for sale - which they could quite properly describe as having been made on our own farm from our own produce. I tend to discourage attendance but happening to be near the market, broke my own rule and had a look, to find that I had been a little unfair.

I wound up buying two lobsters for £18, one rather larger than the other. Once home, realised that the smaller one was very light indeed and when opened found that there was not all that much inside at all. The tail bit was both shriveled and mushy and the claw bits were both shrunk and wet. We ate it all without ill effect, but it was not particularly appetising. The larger one much better. Taken with a light salad and a 2002 Castillon, this last being rather good. I now vaguely remember reading that crabs and lobsters should feel heavy; hopefully I will carry on remembering until I next buy such a thing.

Two small pork pies to go. The be-aproned and fake-hearty vendress of which offered a chilli flavoured variant, which I declined. For me, pork pies are quite strongly flavoured enough without adding more. Reminded of the disgusting pork pie I once bought on a motorway in the Midlands which came with built in cheese and pickle. Perhaps Middle England likes that sort of thing.

I understand that his work with Sainsbury's is regarded as a great success and has made both him and Sainsbury's a great deal of money - although I do not take my hate to the point of avoiding the place altogether. That would really be letting him get to me.

A different sort of hate is the television which goes under the name of reality television - which, to my mind has very little to do with reality and would be more honestly named low budget television. Cheap television is another candidate name; 'cheap' capturing nicely both the low cost and the tackiness, but neither will really do as both include far more than reality. So I guess we are stuck with this last; at least we know what sort of programme is so labelled even if we object to the implied link with the real world.

And now we can have both hates in one package as I see that the great man now has the arrogance to think that he can turn around a bunch of educational no-hopers by having a bunch of celebrities play teacher on them, on camera. Even supposing that it turns out that he has done some good - which we would not know for sure for some years and which in any case strikes me as rather unlikely - what relevance can such a circus have to the not too clever state of the bog-standard end of education? What do the team of celebrities which our Jamie has put together think that they are playing at?

Let's hope that he has not done too much damage to the no-hopers. And in fairness, they are volunteers. They don't have to do it, any more than those legions of adults who are so eager to makes prats of themselves on the box.

I find the popularity of this sort of thing most depressing. What is the world coming to?

In some cases it is fairly straightforward. So judge X decides that felon Y is guilty as charged and shall be hung by the neck until dead on Z. At least in this country, when we used to do such things, we used to get on with it, and Y was hung on Z.

At the next level, a junior mandarin managing some project or other convinces a senior mandarin that it would be a good idea to spend some money. Senior mandarin is persuaded and the minute of the meeting duly records that project X is authorised to spend Y on Z. The trick, if one is the junior mandarin, is to get Y to be as big as possible and to get Z to be as vague as possible. Don't want anything specific like '25 new servers make IBM, model ABC' or 'against shopping list A appended'. A blank cheque is much better. Then you can get on and deal with the inevitable contingencies as they arise without having to explain one self all over again. Particularly when the expensive pickle is of one's own baking.

And then there is the question of enforcement. I am reminded of an anecdote about the chief engineer at Heathrow Airport. A fairly important sort of cove it seems, at least a knight in conqueror speak. The less important cove that I knew was a wow on neural networks, at the time a fashionable species of computer software. He persuaded the chief engineer at some meeting that if all the considerable amount of equipment at Heathrow was tooled up with sensors and connected to his neural network, huge amounts of money and down-time would be saved by improved targeting of preventative maintenance, neural networks being good at detecting changes of behaviour and changes of behaviour usually being a bad thing in this context. So the chief engineer said "make it so". But was there any enforcement? Did he have a team of aides that followed such things up, or was this decision just lost in the mists of time when my cove lost interest and moved on?

But Ministers of the Crown do have teams of aides. So when they have a bee in their bonnet, or one of their aides has a bee in his or her bonnet, a whole bureaucratic machine is put into place. Each period, anybody with any interest in this particular bee has to report progress against myriad targets. The asking often being done in rather grand letters purporting to be exchanged between Ministers, or sometimes in even grander letters headed '10 Downing Street'. These reports are usually inspected by several layers of bureaucracy, with each layer needing to demonstrate how much value they have added. One sometimes got the impression that reporting was burning up far more time and energy than getting the bee out of the bonnet.

I recall that one such bee resulted in all department acquiring large buying departments (remember Bristow of the old Evening Standard?), departments which had mutated into highly paid commercial departments by the time I packed up. It was not altogether clear that buying decisions were that much better than they were in the bad old days - but at least there was a process to be inspected. And where there is a process, there is usually a buck to be passed.

On the same page there is a reference to an advertisement for the job of director of the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research. Which I had never heard off but which appears to be a sub-department of GCHQ. What on earth does such an institute do? How is it staffed? Did I miss my vocation?

PS: I should have known: Mr G. knows all about the Heilbronn Institute.