pumpkinstrokemarrow

Start with the small one, which was the result of walking back the mile or so from Sainsbury's carrying around 20lbs of flour and a few other oddments. I was carrying them in a proper ruck sack, just the right size for the job, but I would not have wanted to have been carrying very much more. Which sounded a bit feeble when compared to the 112lb bags of cement I used to unload when small and the 90lb packs that the French foot soldiers of the first world war used to have to hump about. Not to mention the 224lbs sacks of peas and such like that the parents of people I used to know used to have to hump across scarily bending plank walks across dykes in Lincolnshire.

I happened to enquire about the origin of the word barbecue in window 3 while editing an old post in window 2. Google was keeping an eye on the goings in in window 3 and posted these barbecue flavoured advertisements in window 2. Does one really approve of all this attention to detail?

As a lapsed republican, I am moved to comment on today's royal list, prompted by the omission of two of our dearly beloved former prime ministers. Off to the Guardian which thoughtfully provides a downloadable spreadsheet of the 281 invitees which were on the list released by the Lord Chamberlain. The Guardian seem to have left the 7 Spencers off their version - sloppy editing - but it is still possible that this is essentially the dinner list for this evening, as, according the horse's mouth (http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/), of the 1900 people invited to the Abbey, 600 get to have lunch with HRH the Queen and 300 get to have dinner with HRH the Prince. They don't say whether the two lots overlap at all.

Sufficiently overwhelmed that the following morning, that is to say yesterday, I moved onto the next level of senior moment by moving beyond nearly doing the wrong thing. Like bending down at the oven door all ready to put the milk into the oven. Yesterday I went the whole hog and put some Salad Cream into my freshly bag brewed tea. The excuse is that item 1, I was also preparing my breakfast sardines, in which I always use Heinz Salad Cream (Original) rather than Hellman's Mayonnaise which I do not much care for. Item 2, for reasons which I need not go into, the Salad Cream is kept upside down in the fridge door, next to containers for the three sorts of milk we (three) use. So not that hard for there to be some neuronic crossover resulting in a pouring crossover.

On the 18th April I suggested that the offering at Stonehenge was perhaps not all that it might be.

We have now made it to the Wolford Chapel which we were reminded of when visiting Exeter Cathedral on 23rd April. Sufficiently organised that it was open late on Easter Sunday afternoon and that the maple leaf was flying outside (from the post in the middle of the picture).

Following the report on magic squares on April 12, I am pleased to announce the publication of a first edition of an Excel workbook which computes the things. The algorithm from TB actually appears to work, although I had to put a limit of 1,000 in as Excel got into a bit of a twist when I tried 4,035. Not that I believe that anyone other than Excel is in the wrong.

Hotel Inspector is one of the BH's favourite programmes so we decided that it was about time to try a bit of inspecting for ourselves. So off to the 'Mercure Exeter Southgate', a place which is mostly about 30 years old, in what used to be a car park below the city walls and above what used to be the RD&E hospital. New bits follow the finish of the old bits with red brick, sash windows and some stone bits. The builders had clearly been got at by the heritage people.

Inside we found a large new build wooden staircase, made out of pine but including a bannister with banister rails and a heavy wooden hand rail, properly shaped around the bends and which reminded me of those in the 1910 Treasury Chambers, although these last were of some more serious material. Not sure now whether it was mahogany or oak. Might have been both: mahogany for the ministers and oak for the servants. There was also some elementary carving. The whole thing presently a bit new looking, but it will look well once it tones down a bit. As far as I can recall, Wetherspoons are about the only other people who still go in for such things.

Room entirely decent, if not very large and overlooking the huts for the workmen engaged on a refurbishment programme. But we had completely forgotten about the bane of this sort of hotel room: noisy air conditioning, uncomfortably high temperature and a great thick duvet, this on an unusually hot April afternoon. Turn the air conditioning off, open the windows (someone having thoughtfully half removed the catch from the sash, which meant that one could lodge the thing in an open position. Which would not otherwise have been possible as the installer had not got the sash weights quite right. Can't get the staff, even in these far flung provinces) and remove the guts from the duvet. Quite a reasonable night's sleep.

Hotel customer computer in a cupboard like space and not working. Perhaps the heat got to it. Not like the flashy great free apple in the Novotel at Ipswich (see September 21st last). Luckily the cuts have not yet reached the Devon Library Service, so here we are.

But before that, to breakfast. Amongst other things I had bread and ham. The ham was quite good; not shiny in appearance, with a good texture and all the stuff on the plate looked as if it had all come from the same animal. Not the reconstituted stuff sold by Sainsbury's at all. But the bread rolls were poor. Not altogether clear where they came from. Small white affairs which looked a bit hand made but might well have actually come from some factory via a deep freeze. No where as good as the stuff knocked out these days by yours truly.

And then onto the cathedral, a place which I must have visited a dozen or more times but still managed to surprise me. An architectural treat, a lot of the interior detail of which has been tastefully restored. So, for example, I thought the vaulting of one of the ceilings was much improved by the compound ribs being picked out in dull red and green. Lots of tombs and memorials, ancient and modern: several for knights in armour and one for the inventer of what is now Ontario and who is responsible for the Wolford Chapel near Honiton which, having passed mapled-leafed signs for it often enough, I had assumed was the chapel for a war grave for Canadians. Quite wrong. We shall try and put the record straight by paying the place a visit on the way home. Not so impressed by some of the modern art although there was some very good embroidery. Outside one was amused by various gargoyles, some quite new and rather good. Someone in the deanery has a sense of humour. We were also amused by the north door, a rather grand affair which one might have thought was for the private use of the bishop, but which was labelled 'STAFF' in large black and white, which rubric does include the bishop but I am not sure if he would see it that way.

There was a fair of activity inside the church with people getting ready for the Easter services tomorrow. What with that and one thing and another, quite struck with the sense of a cathedral being a very live thing. Far too big and far too old for it to be a tidy integral whole. Much more a patchwork of all kinds of bits and pieces, certainly from the outside. Quite a lot of restored stone work mixed in the old. Quite a lot of change as new bishops left their marks on the efforts of their predecessors. So, for example, someone had punched a north transcept window through the pilaster work of the Norman north tower. So the idea of trying to restore the thing to some mythic past is clearly not going to work. It's not there.

Wednesday to the spring meeting up on the downs, our first visit to the new stand. And much smarter than the old one it was too, although it was just as hard to get a drink, unless you wanted champagne. Reminded me, for some reason, of a continental railway station concourse.

Being a fine warm day was clearly a day for a trot - brisk walk perhaps - around Epsom Common. The first item of interest was two places on the circular path where white fluff had accumulated on the sides of the path to the extent that it looked a bit like a rather feeble snowfall. At the first place I could not work out what was doing it, beyond deciding that there was far too much of it for it to be brushings from dogs - which, in any case, tends to accumulate around benches rather than paths - or seeds from dandelions - which does, furthermore, not tend to drift around in small clumps of down. Rather single seeds. At the second place, found that the culprit was a stand of tall slender trees with pendant green catkins maybe two inches long and up to a third of an inch in diameter. The fluff was growing out of the body of the catkins and the leaves appeared to be growing out of the base of the catkins - but they had not got far enough for them to be any help with identification. Will I remember to check in a week or so's time? Presumably an evolutionary variant on the cotton theme.

Not the same as in the olden days when all you got was a numbered card and you had to try to remember what horse you had backed, how you had backed it and for how much, all through a haze of beer and sun. The only clue was the name of the bookie, with the name being no clue as to where on the course he (rarely she in those days) might be found, always assuming that he had not done a runner. And with your bet having been inscribed by hand into a large ledger by a gent. who could convert a bet into money while he wrote. Computers have taken all the challenge out of on-course betting!

Furthermore, tearing up and flinging away a losing ticket made of substantial card was a much more satisfying act than tearing up these flimsies. To the point where we did not even bother to tear this one up.

Nearly finished reading a fascinating little find at the bookshop next to Earlsfield Station; well worth the £1 I paid for it and fits in well with the current fad for things old German. 'The Lugwigs of Bavaria' by one Henry Channon and being volume 5,216 in the Tauchnitz Edition collection of British and American authors, published in 1934. Dedicated to Diana Cooper, presumably the famous Diana Duff-Cooper of that era. This particular example originally sold in 1943 in Frankfurt (M), presumably the one on the Main rather than the other one, and to someone who appears to think that the place is spelt 'Frankfürt', a point on which Google, for once, is agnostic.

The biggest headline in yesterday's DT was about Whitehall blunders, which on closer reading appear to amount to careless censoring of documents published on the internet under the freedom of information act. The headline has no doubt prompted massive intervention by the security industry in the censoring industry. Massive pay day for all those security consultants who can now spend happy weeks explaining to the humble censors how they might better do their work. Was it in the public interest for the DT to explain how easy it is to leave text under stones in word processing documents, stones which are not that hard to lift up and text which you had intended to be private? Was the whole thing a put up job by the United UK Federation of Security Consulting Contractors? Is the expense involved in responding to this headline justified by the improvement in state security? Have resources been diverted from the fight against terrorism? Or from our crime ridden streets?

A graph illustrating a fairly steady bread fad, now running to 27 bakes since the start of the year.

Interested to read in the Guardian last week about how our shiny new RAF Typhoons, the aeroplanes formerly known as Euro-fighters, and costing maybe £150m a pop are not much good for whacking Libyans, leaving aside the question of whether one thinks that that is a very good idea or not. The story was that the Typhoon was designed to take out the sort of thing advertised on March 13th, although it may not, in the event, even manage that. So is it that both sides of the rusting iron curtain still locked into the sort of toys needed to fight each other - rather than fighting the sort of people we are actually fighting? Although it is said that in the past the Russians were more practical; more into sturdy mass production and less into fancies. That was how they beat the Germans.

On Friday to the Antelope in Mitcham Road to see if they were still doing sausage rolls. This a pub which used to be called 'Jack Beards' and which before that used to be a den of iniquity & recreational substances. I can't remember what it was called for that portion of its life. But the Antelope was still there and was trying very hard to be the sort of pub that you now get in Clapham North. Warm sausage rolls still available, probably manufactured on the premises out of sausage meat and a very fatty variety of pastry; quite eatable in small numbers. Warm beer satisfactory. Along the way I was reminded what a huge place it is, with a large front bar, a back bar, a function room and now a smoking (gar)den. The back bar and function room being large & high and done out in rather tired, dark brown wooden panelling and such forth. Must have been quite the gin palace in its day, entirely in line with the more or less contemporary grade 1.7 listed picture palace up the road, now a non-smokers bingo hall. Oddly, as far as Mr. G. is concerned, the place is just a bingo hall. It seems to have lost caste as a monument of cinema history. Illustration from http://moblog.net/home/.

As previously mentioned, did not follow up on buying a retro Pashley, but today was moved to get back on the Trek and went down to Surbiton and back; probably a bit further than Cheam and back. No bad back effects so far.

Having reported bottling out of making garage doors on 8th April, I am pleased to report that I did actually manage some DIY on the shed door.

Following my report on cycle path repairs of February 23rd, the Surrey roads people have seen fit to pour even more resources into Horton Lane and are now having chunks of the nearly new carriageway proper resurfaced. As far as I could see there were cracks which I dare say would get worse over time, but hardly cracks to get in a stew about. The condition of nearby Longmead Road was much worse. I wonder whether the difference was that Longmead Road serves commercial people and the inhabitants of a notorious estate, unlike Horton Lane which mainly serves people who live in nice houses which are not now owned by housing associations and which have never been council houses? Or is it one of those finance nonsenses whereby the man from the ministry which looks after Longmead Road has done his budget for this year while the chap from the ministry which looks after Horton Lane had a bit of dosh to clear at year end?

Talking to a mental nurse in TB the other night, I thought it proper to demonstrate my mental arithmetic and told him something about perfect numbers (see 3rd April). Rather to my surprise he retaliated with magic squares. That is to say a square of numbers of side N populated with the numbers from 1 to N*N in such a way that the row totals and column totals are all the same. I think he said diagonal totals as well but not too sure on that point.

Someone who is clearly into interior design in a big way, from http://walter-pall-bonsai.blogspot.com. Not sure that I would feel very comfortable in such a contrived & clean interior.

Prime Minister Blair used to irritate me by staying at the houses of his rich friends in warm foreign parts. Or perhaps people who thought that doing him such a favour would be repaid in some discrete way. Whereas Prime Minister Cameron irritates me by pretending to be an ordinary joe having to sit about in the airport lounge for hours waiting for his budget airline flight. Perhaps his security detail all have to dress up as ordinary joes too.

Off to Tesco's Leatherhead yesterday to check up where my complaint about flies in the red lentils had got to, the complaint having been made on 19th October last. Oh, said the helpful lady at customer services. You should have had a reply long ago, maybe 5 weeks or so after the original complaint. Do you have any record of the complaint? No, we wipe them at the beginning of the year. But you can phone head office she says, proffering a slip of paper on which she had written a telephone number. Maybe I will let it go this time, and next time the flies appear try the Sainsbury's customer service people.

Nice bright morning so clearly a morning for the Common rather than Horton Lane. Maybe I would tweet another green finch, having had one confirmed sighting earlier in the week and several possibles last week. Something of which we had lots when we used to live in Hambledon (near Portsmouth) but which we do not see much of at all in Epsom.

It seems that the rules in South Dakota for when this sort of thing happens - a bit of trouble with an overheating axle bearing to be precise - are very precise. DO NOT MOVE THE TRAIN. And that whatever luminary wrote these particular rules made no allowance for the possibility that the train might be stuck on top of something which burns good.

Up to yesterday we knew of just two world's ends: one near Hambledon in Hampshire and one near Chelsea in London. Quite by chance we have now discovered another behind the Chalk Lane Hotel - which does not do afternoon tea so is not really a proper hotel at all - in Epsom. World's End turns out to be the name given to the lane running between what was the back of Lord Rosebery's Durdans estate and the Woodcote estate. A bit of dead land colonised by an interesting mixture of trees, ponds, houses and occupants.

Off round the circuit yesterday morning, and a nice sunny spring morning it was too. Needing to pay a visit to Epsom Coaches it was convenient to do the circuit anti-clockwise rather than my usual clockwise, which gave me a different view on the stream down Longmead Road, with the result that I discovered a new-to-me flower. A whole nest of them growing on the banks of a bit of the stream, a conical compound flower, rather the size and shape of that of a horse chestnut, quite close to the ground and certainly not attached to a tree. Perusal of our Collins' guide revealed that it was the flower of the butterbur (white sort not creamy) which, if I keep an eye on it, will have grown very large, rhubarb like leaves by mid-summer.

Now rather full of same having spent the night before last on a French one called 'Spiral' and last night on an British one called 'Lewis'. Interesting differences in tone, although it is hard to be sure how much of this is down to the lure of the novel and the half understood foreign rather than any real difference.

One of the older pictures which survived the cull at Tate Real was this 17th century view of Belsize House, I think looking south with the smoking chimneys of London in the distance to the left.

The first of these concerned what it might feel like to have a new face - something which has happened to one or two people in the last few years. We suppose, for the purpose of this thought, that the new face really is new & nice. That it is not all puffy, swollen and showing the joins around the various edges. For example, around the eyes. The thought then being that my face is an important part of my identity, certainly more important than a leg or an arm and perhaps more important than the interior of the head, and to abruptly switch from one to another would be rather unsettling to say the least. To the point where one might need counselling or trauma therapy. I then thought that it might help if one moved, away from people who had known one before and into a place where there were very few mirrors, where one could build a new life and get used to one's new face at a suitably sedate pace.