pumpkinstrokemarrow

We get there to find that this bank holiday Monday was a partnership day with Chessington World of Adventures and that, under their expert supervision, the palace had hired a mixed herd of luvvies to dress up in Tudor gear and prance about shouting. Some of them on horses. Even the lady doing a hawk display was dressed up. We understand that she can offer shows for as many as 7 periods of hawking - but only one at any one show. Iranian, Caucasian, Arabian (north or south), Angevin and so on. Wan't clear whether the harris hawks she was using instead of the more authentic (but more temperamental or more endangered species) goshawks she should have been using came from A. M. Hawks, headquartered near our very own road (http://www.aandmhawkuk.co.uk/) or not. His vans advertise themselves as rodent control but it is always possible he does shows as a side line. And some of the luvvies made use of radio mikes connected to rather large loudspeakers which meant that you got the benefit of their shouting whether you were interested or not. Which I was not, so not best pleased.

And to make matters worse, BH draws my attention to a front page piece in today's Guardian which explains that the National Trust is going in for talking seats for their palaces (not the same as the palace group of which Hampton Court is part). You sit down for a quiet snooze in the sun to be woken up by some luvvy or other droning on about how much he (or she) loves roses, dogs, heritage hot-dogs or whatever. I had not thought that they would sink so low.

But the rose garden was very good, just as good as on our last visit (see May 15th). Starting to see the point of some of the roses which I was not too keen on first time around. To the point where there were very few roses which did not have something to offer. And some of the bushes has an added piquancy in that they carried roses at all stages of the life cycle, from closed bud to sun-bleached and weathered hulk. A reminder of the transience of most good things. I think that this might well have been something that Elizabethan and Jacobean poets would have been into - as well as people of a certain age more generally. Much scent. Some rather like pinks or carnations; some rather like dahlias. And some which made one wonder how many generations of careful breeding it took to get from the five pink petals of the aboriginal dog rose to the whopping great things we can have now.

Having done the roses, a quick scoot around the herbaceous borders and other flower beds which are coming on nicely. Some very handsome fox gloves dotted about, a flower we used to grow when we lived at Cambridge but have not managed since.

For lunch, over the road for our second visit of the year to Brubeckers, filed under Blubeckers on the last occasion, the 22nd March. Completely failed to work out what we had last time, a detail which I forgot to record. But this time went for pea & potato soup followed by chicken ceasar salad. FIL went for the ribs with red goo. Waitress very concerned & helpful about whether the goo contained gluten or not, which was good and it didn't. All washed down with Strathallan water. Which on further investigation back home turns out to have only a very faint web presence so perhaps it was Strathmore water, which BH thinks fits in because this last comes from the same place as the late Queen Mother was born, a place visited by FIL last week and about which we were talking over lunch. Strathmore water turns out to have a rather more substantial web presence, being one of the products of A. G. Barr PLC (http://www.agbarr.co.uk) with the product site at http://www.strathmore-water.co.uk/ being very like the sort of thing you would expect from someone selling recreational drugs - rather than a bottler of still water. Clearly more money in still water than I had thought.

All of which being as it may, an entirely satisfactory visit. Did what we wanted on the day. Only marred by the odd flavour which had been added to the chicken in the chicken ceasar by overdose of some herb, possibly thyme. BH thought it OK, I did not.

Moved onto perusal of the voting for our borough elections. I find that Epsom boasts two political dynasties. The Dallen dynasty which fielded three candidates, all of whom got in, and the Carlson dynasty which fielded three but scored just one. Don't really approve of this sort of thing in local government any more than I do in central government, although I suppose the locals have the excuse that it is not always easy to come up with the candidates. Indeed, one of those elected for Labour is a 20 year old, first year student of politics at the University of Surrey. Let's hope that he is a lot more mature than I was at that age.

We thought to celebrate our return from the seaside with a bit of steak. Two half pound slices of mature Scottish rump steak from Mr Sainsbury. Very nice they looked too with good body and colour. Grilled for a total of about 10 minutes and turned out very well; something of a surprise as I do not associate Sainsbury's with fresh food. Not escaped from their grocery origins as far as I am concerned. Served with chard, carrots and newish potatoes, all boiled; it being nice after a week away to have a bit of simple veg. with neither butter nor garlic in sight. Washed down with a 2006 Barossa from some antipodean outfit called Henry's Seven. Or perhaps Barossa is the name of the place and Henry's Seven is the name of the wine. Not at all clear but I dare say one could work it all out at http://www.henschke.com.au/. Originally dear but marked down. Very nice it was too; perhaps we should get some more while it remains marked down, a practise I was recently wised up to. French cherries for pudd..

We have not had chard for a while, it being something I used to grow on the allotment but do not see in shops very often. This shop was one of those large farm shops with large car parks which sell a good range of frozen ready meals, a good range of expensive groceries and a sprinkling of local produce. In this case chard and potatoes from darkest Kent. The chard really had been picked the morning we bought it so we ate it when just 36 hours old. Not sure that even the Waitrose supply chain could beat that.

Second call was the Kit Cat Cafe just inside the dunes from Zone C of Camber beach itself (see May 26th). Teas plus a steak pie advertised as a Pukka Pie but I was not so sure. It was one of those pies with very flaky pastry which flies all over the place. Not like the Pukka Pies I remember at all.

Third call was the Coastguard Tearooms at Fairlight (see http://www.coastguardtearooms.co.uk/), an establishment which was doing a steady, local looking trade the Tuesday we were there and which looked to be doing very well out of visitors to the Hastings Country Park, which is what we were, being on the Hunt hunt mentioned on May 27th. Now we had previously noticed some extensive crayfish lagoons on the map, just south of Tenterden, and here we found crayfish salad on the menu. So we go for the local crayfish and get a nicely presented salad which amounted to a crayfish version of a prawn cocktail served on a plate rather than in a sundae glass. Rather a lot of mayo but not bad at all. Followed up by a respectable bit of victoria jam sponge.

Sadly, when I get around to asking Mr. Google, it seems that the crayfish lagoons are long abandoned and the outfit which used to run them is now a potato shop (see http://www.thepotatoshop.com/estate.html). Which would explain why the waitress looked a bit puzzled when I suggested that her crayfish might have come from the crayfish lagoons.

Fourth call was the Coach House Coffee House in New Romney (by popular demand, now open on Sundays) where we had baked potatoes. Friendly staff and the potatoes had been baked in one of those retro contraptions rather than steamed in a microwave. Designed to look like solid and ancient cast iron in black, trimmed with gold, but never been close enough one to find out what they are really made of. But they were let down by having a lot of cheese twiglets sprinkled over them. Far too chunky to melt down a bit in the way that they should.

That apart, most of our eating took place in the Gallivant Hotel, a place which we are now happy to recommend (see http://thegallivanthotel.com/index.php). Good location, nice rooms and public spaces, food and drink trying hard.

Hot on potted prawns, Rye bay scallops, Dexter beef and Romney Marsh lamb. Wine fine but beer cold. Nice white wine from Pays du Gard, a place with which I confused the waiter by confusing it with the flash new bridge over the Tarn. The pitfalls of airing one's knowledge when a few beers down. But they could only manage one room temperature bottle of Shepherd Neame before I was reduced to cold Grolsch. It seems that warm beer was only kept for the kitchen, not really for the customers at all. Some of the portions of food were a bit odd. So BH got monster portions of hot smoked salmon (not like its cold smoked cousin at all) and Marsh lamb while I got miniscule portions of Dexter beef (hors d'œuvre format) and turbot. Cheese following turbot was very good - a cheddar and a blue cheese - but served with some very thin brown biscuity things and some sort of chutney. Would have done better with some thinly sliced white bread - but this place would not be the first place to get this all wrong.

Dexter beef served as cow chop very good - something like that served in Florence, but served off the bone and without the tail they leave on the chop in Florence; cutlet fashion rather than chop.

Breakfasts good. Scrambled eggs on toast excellent with or without bacon, tea a bit feeble and no kippers. A good mushrooms on toast. An attempt to supply proper bread, an attempt which did not really succeed as not enough people wanted the stuff for it to be fresh.

We were agreeably surprised, given the tone of the place, that there were no shiny white plates of various shapes and sizes and that there was very little in the way of drizzles. But they made up a bit by serving some of the food on wooden boards. Plank life.

Winchelsea. Regularly raped and pillaged by the French, not clear if it was ever finished. What is left now is the large chancel, bricked across where the crossing used to be. Various funerary monuments to knights in armour, including one immortalised by the immortal Millais in his picture called 'L'Enfant du Régiment'. This particular knight in armour was Edward I's admiral of the fleet. He had a rather French name.

The museum next to the church included a case full of wooden truncheons which had once been issued to a squad of vigilantes formed during the late 19th century Fenian scare. Didn't say whether there were any Irish in the area at the time.

Icklesham. Norman with proper Norman pillars; village version of those in Durham Cathedral.

Pett. Mid 19th century rebuild. A small church which still felt rather short of customers. Gargoyles.

Fairlight. Another mid 19th century rebuild, mainly notable for the views of Fairlight Cove from the tower, sadly shut on the day of our visit. Jumping off point for our hunt for the source of Holman Hunt's picture of strayed sheep, a reproduction of which hangs over the PC at which I type. We succeeded in finding the headland which is the background to the picture. Not so sure about the rocks in the foreground. Must take a copy of the picture next time we try. But in the course of the hunt we did come across another memorial erected by the Ontario Heritage Foundation, this one to a chap called Grey Owl. See picture above and 25th April.

Fairfield. Another mid 19th century rebuild of a very old church, this one in the middle of a sheep filled field in Romney Marsh. Access gained by means of a large key hanging up by the back door of a nearby farm. Interesting king post roof, something which most of the marsh churches seem to sport. Numerological font: the basin was heptagonal and rare, the base of the circular pillar was pentagonal and the base proper was decagonal, not to say tenagonal. Neat, white painted box pews, with seats around all four (in)sides for greater conviviality during the sermons, with these last coming from a matching three tiered pulpit. Top tier for feast days, second tier for regular days and bottom tier for the prompter.

Brookland. A very grand church with a detached & shingled bell tower, stable doors to the porch and shutters to some of the windows. Nave arcades sloping outwards. I seem to remember something of the same sort at the rather larger St. David's cathedral. July 2007, but no record as we appear not to have been connected at Tenby. Fragment of a wall painting depicting the execution of Saint Thomas. Ancient lead font, a posher version of that at Walton on the Hill. See 13th April.

Ivychurch. Another very grand church with the north aisle doubling as an agricultural museum containing a range of implements, mostly to do with sugar beet.

Old Romney. Quite grand enough for a village which scarcely exists. Roof included what looked like cross-halved scissor tie beams, a new to me feature. Another interesting font. An even more interesting ladder into the bell chamber, 300 years older than H&S regulations about such things. Take one 20 foot tree and slice in half lengthwise. Chop suitable number of 2 foot billets into triangular sections. Tie the two slices together by nailing the triangular sections across them at intervals as treads. Erect at steep angle.

New Romney. The biggest and best church in the area. Lots of round arches and other Norman features. The first village in the area which had any shops. The people very like those one might come across in a fen town in Cambridgeshire or Lincolnshire. Maybe something to do with Romney Marsh being a fen land of sorts.

At which point we decided that enough was enough and moved onto Dungeness.

PS: Mr. Google suggests that any one wanting any more ecclesiastical information should consult http://www.worldtocome.org/home.html.

Views which coincided with some stuff in the Guardian about how such pylons are destroying our green and pretty land and that someone ought to do something about it.

Not stuff which I go along with. I do not dispute the need for such things and I do not find them a blot on the landscape. Indeed they exemplify a theory once advanced by my father that beauty lies in the match of structure with function. A theory which I find needs a fair amount of tweaking to hold up, but which does, to my mind, work with engineering structures of this sort. They are doing something important, one can see what they are about - their function does align with their structure in a very visible way - and I no not have a problem with them.

Their was also a lot of stuff about the use of gagging orders by celebs and others, one aspect of which caught my eye, despite my lack of sympathy for people who make very good livings by being in the public eye and who then whine when the public gets to see the crud under the carpet. The aspect being that if A & B are up to something at night which neither of them wish to share with the public, that is one thing. But if A wants to share and B does not want to share, that is another. Why should B be able to stop A exercising his or her human right to exhibitionism? Or revenge?

Rather less stuff about how some scheme to rescue people who cannot pay their mortgages is resulting in the conversion of a lot of real estate into what used to be called council houses. Ironic that it has taken the spectacular failure of market forces to propel a right-wing government into rebuilding the stock of social housing.

The hotel then moved us onto the Times, a paper that I do not read very often. I was struck by the high density of advertisements - which seemed much higher than in either the Guardian or the DT. Murdoch is clearly setting his stamp on the thing.

Visit closed by a dream which contained rather an odd illusion. I was with some people in a bookshop in Russia, one of whom wanted a biography of Nikita Krushchev. I poked around until I found a book which contained what appeared to be the word Krushchev in the title and which I assumed to be a biography. The idea of the book then seemed to fuse with that of a particular sort of glue pot which was much used in schools when I was young. A triangular shaped, clear glass container of yellow gum with a red rubber lid, the sloping top of which you dragged along whatever it was you wanted to glue; the Stephen's Golden Gum you can get now is perhaps the successor product. However, by the time that I got to the checkout, the book had become more ordinary, with just an elaborate coat of arms made of coloured plastic being clipped onto the front of an otherwise ordinary book. The sort of coat of arms which has a shield in the middle, a helmet on the top, supporters (usually animals) at the side, a motto underneath and with the whole thing being tied up with various ornamental flourishes. By the time I had the book in my hand it was entirely ordinary and I tossed it in a rather rude and dismissive way to the chap who wanted it. An unremarkable dream except for the fusing bit. I really had the sense of the book being the glue pot. Senior moments working their way into the underworld?

And 'Iphigenia in Forest Hills' being the name of a book by Janet Malcolm, which rates full length, top billed reviews in both the NYRB and the TLS. As luck would have it, I came across them both. The subject of the book is the trial of one doctor who was alleged to have hired a hit man, who happened to be her uncle, to kill another doctor, who happened to be her husband; a trial which attracted much media attention in New York in 2009. I knew nothing of it.

TLS came first and their reviewer is a lady author. The impression she gives is that the book is a post-modern, deconstructed view of the badly flawed trial of a tragic lady doctor. That Janet Malcolm, apart from taking the lady doctor's part and showing no regard for the victim, is determined to take the legal process apart. To show how the trial is an ugly show, or perhaps a contest, with the truth, whatever that may be, hardly getting a look in. The lady doctor was never given a chance. She, the author, seems to put no value on evidence or process. At the end of this review, my thought was why has the TLS given so much space to this tripe?

Then there was the NYRB and their reviewer is a gentleman publisher and author. He is clearly fascinated by all the post-modern twists and turns. The way that we all try to superimpose a coherent and satisfying story on the rather casual mish-mash of truths and half truths that is what we have to go on, in this case in a trial. He describes the book as brief but immense. "All her art is deployed to reveal the seams and interstices of the art-making process". He gives quite a lot of space to the role of the rather odd sounding lawyer appointed to look after the interests of the couple's child; a looking after which result in the death of the father. At the end of this review, my thought was maybe I had better the get the thing and take a look for myself. Unfortunately, Surrey Libraries have not heard of Janet Malcolm, and I hesitate before buying a book which I suspect will turn out to be superficially clever, full of interesting colour, but shallow.

I close with a wonder about the efficacy of process. The Catholic Church believes that a sacrament is valid, provided it is conducted according to the rules, whatever the flaws and failings of the celebrants. They believe in the efficacy of process. Management consultants believe in the efficacy of process, in part because most large firms of such consultants have processes to sell. People called in to review the doings of others quite explicitly check the process not the product. Can't second guess professional judgements about the ambulance service in New Malden (for example) but I can check the process you went through in coming to those judgements. I believe in process - provided sufficient room is left for content. One has to beware of writing a report that consists of little more than the copious headings supplied by the process manual. But Janet Malcolm appears to have no regard for process at all.

That all being as it may, it seems that in the bad old days shipowners were keen to turn a crust and to that end were apt to skimp on maintenance and to overdo the loading. This way they could keep rates down and profits up. And just to be on the safe side they usually insured the ship, sometimes for rather more than it was worth. On the other hand, you didn't insure the seamen and you didn't pay pensions to their widows. But you could have them chucked in jail if they declined to sail after they had signed up, skimping and overdoing notwithstanding. The result of this mix was that there were a lot of unscrupulous shipowners and a lot more avoidable deaths.

Then along comes Samuel Plimsoll, a man who needed a cause. He stamped up and down the country and stamped up and down the House of Commons. He raised a great stink and held huge meetings, this at a time when there was little other entertainment. Songs about him and his cause were performed in music halls. He was intemperate, often careless with his facts & figures and generally he was a bit of a pain. But despite all this, and the goodness of his cause, it took some twenty years to get the Plimsoll mark that we, and more or less everybody else, now have. There is a monument in his honour on the embankment, paid for by grateful seamen.

It seems quite possible that a smoother operator, someone who operated in the corridors of power rather than on the streets, could have achieved the same result rather faster. But no such smooth operator appeared until the end. And would a smooth operator have had the passion to get the thing on the road?

Useful to be reminded that there was a time when health and safety had not been invented and some capitalists really were evil. And that one of consequences of our sort of indirect democracy is that the powers that be don't always do what the people want; which is perhaps just as well in the case of capital punishment but not so well in some other cases one can think of.

So, a few days ago, we thought to go and pay our respects to this monument, said to be in the Victoria Embankment Gardens - but without taking care to find out exactly where in the Gardens. I had not thought that they were very big. So exit at Waterloo Station and across Waterloo Bridge to open proceedings in the courtyard of Somerset House. Cleared of cars and with a new fountain, it was very handsome. We admired the window I used to sit behind near forty years previously. We admired the animal heads of the Chinese Zodiac. Not bad, but the artist had not thought through how to mount the things and it rather looked as if someone had chopped the heads off twelve large animals and stuck them up on poles.

We then searched the gardens between Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Bridge for the monument, to no avail. Settled for lunch in the outdoor café near the bandstand. Pleasant sort of place with pleasant staff who sold us a couple of Spanish omelettes: we should have known better. When they turned up they were perfectly ordinary omelettes with a filling of cold chips and some salad. Quite eatable but not quite what we had in mind.

We then resumed the search, extending it east as far as No. 2 Temple Place, a place without any signage to tell you what it was or did - but it does sport a web site (http://www.twotempleplace.co.uk/index.html. Seemingly the home of a trust set up by a very discrete private banker. So discrete that I had never heard of him and certainly can't afford his services). We also found an interesting water gate to a long gone palace and sundry monuments but nothing plimsoulian. We wondered whether he was hiding in the eastern fragment of the Gardens which had been shut for maintenance.

Back to Somerset House where we decided to call time on Plimsoll and settled instead for the Courtauld Institute, a place we first visited when it lived quietly in Bloomsbury. All a bit of a mess - the building which was far too grand for civil servants not being cut out to be an art gallery - but we had forgotten what a splendid collection of pictures they have. To the point where there was stuff after Cézanne which I rather liked. Even some expressionists. There was also a Cézanne, a view of the lake at Annecy with large tree to the left, which we managed to confuse with a reproduction which has been hanging in our hall for years and years. Humbling to find out how carelessly one uses the things on one's walls.

Closed with tea with the model ships in the south lobby and return home to find that the monument was in the southern portion of the gardens which I had rather forgotten about, despite, many years ago, having slept in them one night. We will catch Plimsoll another time.

From the same sort of place, but rather different in tone are my two atlases of Great Britain. One is a book club reprint of an OS atlas and the other an AZ road atlas. Very different from each other they are too. The OS is A4, hard back and big. The AZ is slightly less than A4, soft cover, rather thinner and generally much smaller seeming than the small actual difference in size would seem to warrant. It looks convenient.

AZ around 3.5 miles to the inch, a certain amount of physical geography, some tourist features but essentially a road map. Helpful set of town maps at the end. Just the ticket for long range driving. For some reason it reminded me of the folding Michelin maps of France of just about the same scale - but when I get one out not so sure. They are meeting the same need; but the colouring schemes are quite different.

OS much more old-fashioned. Not so brash looking. A geographer's atlas of Great Britain. The main maps are done on a scale a bit smaller than that of Michelin at 250,000 rather than 200,000. Much better job than either Michelin or AZ at indicating relief. And then there is the issue of reference. Michelin does not have an index so does not need it, but OS and AZ both do. OS relies on the National Grid, the thing which we learned all about in geography at school. No doubt of great interest and importance to a geographer, but which means in this context that a reference consists of a page number, two letters (to give you the general area) and four digits (to give you the position in that general area). All rather complicated and one has to try to remember whether the first two digits mean up and down or left to right. A complication which is much reduced in AZ where the reference consists of a page number, one digit and one letter. And it is made clear on each map that digit does up and down and letter does left to right. Less precise but much easier to use. Otherwise, the content of all three sets of maps much the same, despite their rather different colouring schemes.

But OS has much more wrapping. Much more stuff that might come in useful in pub quizzes or in arcane disputes at TB. Little essays about the geography of Great Britain. Maps of rainfall and temperature. A historical geography section with a series of one page maps with accompanying essays, starting with one covering the period up to but not including the Roman exit. Moving onto economic geography in the same sort of format. You can see where the coal is and where the pumpkins/marrows are grown. And including helpful maps of administrative Great Britain, before and after the great reorganisation of 1974, a reorganisation which caused much statistical grief at a time when I was supposed to know about such things. Not sure where else one might find such a thing. All in all, much better as an arm-chair read than AZ. But not so convenient for a car-seat navigation. I wonder which made the more money? This being something which the formerly public service OS did not used to have to bother about too much.

This one was big. Started off with Beethoven Op. 18 No. 3, on through Mendelssohn Op. 80 to Beethoven Op. 131. A relatively gentle start, warming up before the interval and the hots after the interval. BH thought that the Quartet was more or less wrung out by the end.

For once, I think because I bought the tickets when Chrome was crashing Flashdance and which were, as a result, allocated by computer rather than by me, we were sitting on the right hand side of Wigmore Hall, about half way down, in the left hand side of the right hand aisle. The result of this seemed to be that the cello came across with a rougher, more strident tone than I was used to from the left hand side of the hall.

One oddity during Op. 131. The cello and viola were having an intense duet while the two violins rested up a bit. First violin stares, wide eyed at the cellist and appears to be mouthing something. What he was doing, or whether the cellist noticed, I have no idea. In any event, he soon had to stop mouthing to pick up his own entry.

Other people write stories about them. We have several of these on our bookshelves. Engravers do engravings of them. We have one of those on one of our walls.

But foxes are also vermin and there are far too many of them in the gardens of Epsom. They sometimes make a lot of noise. They often dig holes in the lawn, holes which are hard to repair on our hard and infertile clay soil. They often defecate on the lawn. Few of them are pretty; most of them look pretty manky, mangy or both. On the upside, it may be that they help keep down the rats and mice, but my information is that they are rather keener on slugs and earthworms. Much less bother than a nimble rodent. In any event, as far as we are concerned they are a bad thing.

Most people agree with us and for this and other reasons - including the bipedal vermin which sometimes stray into our leafy streets - most houses are fox proofed between front and back, that is to say a fox wandering in the street cannot make it to the back garden without getting over a six feet fence. Which a fox is well capable of if pressed, but we think the average fox is reasonably lazy and is not going to be jumping over six feet fences without some obvious cause - like a hamburger visible on the other side.

Which brings me on to those people who like the foxes and who do put hamburgers and such like out for them.

Probably not a matter for government, local or otherwise. What we need is a committee of residents to review the matter and make recommendations. We should start with a committee representing the island of gardens which includes our back garden. A proper committee with a chairman, treasurer, social secretary, web secretary and general secretary. Lots of flannel and meetings, annual general, extraordinary or otherwise; a proper gathering of like minded suburban folk. One might, perhaps, meet downstairs at TB.

An early task would be to survey the hundred or so houses which make up the boundary of this island and determine how many of them have not been fox proofed. A cursory check of our part of the boundary reveals just one or two houses which may not have been fox proofed. If the number turns out to be small, a delegation from the committee could visit them, firmly suggesting that some action be taken. It would probably be helpful to go armed with literature explaining why urban foxes are vermin and with diagrams & designs for simple & cheap devices to block up gaps. If absolutely necessary, one might have public meetings at which the guilty could be named and shamed.

If we succeed in blocking up the gaps, the hope would be that new foxes would not enter the island and all we had to do was eliminate those caught inside. This part of the operation would need specialist advice. Or a specialist licensed to come in and shoot the things. Entirely humanely; only instantly fatal head shots would be permitted.

So I am on the look out for a volunteer to take this on and organise such a committee. That failing I suppose one might try one of the local political parties; they are quite keen on and sometimes quite good at this sort of thing.

By way of apéritif, I took some 'Taste the Difference' IPA from Sainsbury's. Brewed and bottled by Marston's it tasted fine, though perhaps not quite as fine as the offering from Greene King. Probably rather cheaper, but I had forgotten to note the price before screwing up the receipt. With the meat we had a 2009 Crozes-Hermitage from the same place. No idea where in France it came from; presumably one of the many recently invented appelation contrôlées. Far too many of them for someone who is really a beer drinker to attempt to keep track of. But I think we have had the stuff before without complaint and this one was fine. Bottle slipped down without any problem at all.

By way of digestif, I took some 10 year old Talisker at a princely 45.8% by volume. I understand that, as Scotch goes, this one is at the peaty end of the spectrum. The taste, this time around, rather reminded me of Tequila because of the after taste. An after taste which I associate for some reason with petrol; no idea why as I have never either sniffed or tasted the stuff.

The following day we had another more substantial go at it (the Talisker that is) while watching the last episode of Middlemarch (see May 12th). After taste gone, generally much more satisfactory. Perhaps the after taste was a product of what we had been eating and drinking beforehand the day before; in the way that oranges taste pretty grim just after brushing one's teeth with Colgate. Net result was that we were both rather maudlin by the time we got to the emotional closing scenes with voice over by one of the national treasures (Dame Judi).

It may also be the explanation of this morning's failed tweet. A dark brown bird in the back garden, rather like a female blackbird, but with a clearly yellow bill, like that of a male blackbird. Off to the RSPB tweeters' site to be told that the thing was a female blackbird, despite their illustration of same not being yellow billed. Perhaps a juvenile male? Do I need a personal trainer to get me up to speed?

Probably not relevant that there is rather a handsome Catholic church nearby, with a handsome brick tower and graced with frontal pillars of a vaguely ancient Egyptian design - rather along the lines of those at the entrance to the Abney Park Cemetery (see May 5, 2010).

Back home, did rather well with the 20p purchase from Surrey Libraries of 'Cutting It Fine', the ghost written memoir of a second division chef called Andrew Parkinson by a journalist. Second division in the sense that we could afford, at a pinch, to eat out of the sort of kitchens that he ran at the time that this book was published, maybe 10 years ago. Which we could not in the case of his more celebrated colleagues. And unlike television chefs whom I find obnoxious, this chap comes across as decent and dedicated in what is portrayed as a rough trade. Book rather scrappily written, with more expletives & such forth than is necessary, but interesting nonetheless.

He gives the impression that things are slowly getting better, but the story he tells is pretty rough. Very long hours, lots of heat, cramped working conditions, lots of pressure, lots of shouting and screaming. Lots of ragging, bullying and worse. Lots of odd bods and boddesses. Various occupational health hazards; varicose veins and cocaine to name but two. A rather military style of discipline and organisation, with the lower ranks being rather badly paid, certainly for the hours that they put in. A lucky few at the top of the heap hit the pay dirt. An unlucky few at the bottom wind up getting knifed with a cold knife or branded with a hot one; a problem which is hard to eliminate given the ingredients. Probably gets worse rather than better as you climb the slippery pole. According to the TLS, Bully the Bean, that well known culinary stunt man from Catalonia, used to treat his devoted and starry eyed junior staff like dirt. Ex army chap, got his name from the corned beef with beans and tomatoes he used to whack out to the squaddies.

The other side of the story is the dedication needed to turn out large quantities of decent food at a price which attracts the punters and turns a profit. Much easier to do decent food at home for a small number of people for a known time. And that a large part of what is needed in a restaurant is organisation and management skills. A head chef has to be able to wow & dominate his staff with his cooking skills, to be able to show flair in menu and meal construction, but all this would be nothing without the organisation and management skills needed to keep this complicated show on the road.

One can see why the business might consolidate into chains large and small. Doing this sort of thing on your own is hard, in much the same way, but with knobs on, as it is for a shop.

One other aperçu. While the more you pay, the more likely it is that the food you eat has been prepared on the premises, more and more of the work is being outsourced to factories where it can be done cheaper and better. Life in these factories not too good: you spend your working days on the same never ending repetitive task on what amounts to an assembly line. Overseers with whips and stop watches. Job satisfaction not too good at all.

Stop press: the chain saw gang are at it on Longmead Road today. Not quite as bad as their Common colleagues (see February 10th 2010); their instructions, in the main, appear to be to maim rather than kill. Indeed, someone less sensitised than the present writer might say prune rather than maim.

So (2), we started the week with a visit to the woodland gardens at Bushy Park (http://www.royalparks.gov.uk/Bushy-Park.aspx). We came in over Hampton Court Bridge, round past the newly gilded Diana fountain and down the rather splendid chestnut avenue. Many noises off, apparently to do with something called Chestnut Sunday, which might have been a genuinely heritage affair, but which might, on the other hand, easily have been invented more recently by some enterprising showman. Splendid place; a truly pleasure-yielding bit of park design. Lots of families sitting around under the trees with picnics. Cute babies. Families of baby coots. Families of baby ducks. Various fat fishes swimming around. Were they fat enough to snaffle the emerging ducklings? Even the odd rhododendron.

Next stop, a day or two later, was the Isabella Plantation at Richmond Park. I had forgotten how this park is a quite different sort of place from Epsom Common - but also that the trusties who look after the common should not try to compete. They should be playing a different game. The plantation itself good. The rhododendrons a little past their best but there were still some wonderful specimens, particularly a couple of beds of white ones. And the yellow pond irises were spot on. There were also some quite talkative ladies' parties.

Last stop, yesterday, was Hampton Court, now heritage rather than royal. There was the odd rhododendron, but the real reason for being there was the rose garden - which was truly wonderful. I do not think I have ever seen it looking so good. Interestingly, the colour scheme was badly damaged by my sun glasses; whatever the gardeners there had done was badly damped down by brown glass. One had to chance the bright light to get the intended effect.

For once, decided to forego the Tiltyard Café - we had had to park in the station over the river anyway - and to try our luck in Bridge Road. We wound up in the Dish Café where they had some excellent apricot tart, of a sort which I had never come across before. They could even manage a natty little box to take an extra portion home with. Nice staff as well.

And a day for tweeting. First thing, I had seen, for the first time ever, never mind this year, a swallow in Horton Lane. Then then was a small green-grey finch in one of the pond gardens in the Palace and lastly there were swifts swooping over the bridge. Investigation this morning revealed, eventually, that the small finch was probably a female chaffinch - no-one ever having bothered to tell me that the male and the females were rather different in looks. Plus, someone ought to tell the RSPB that for a charity in receipt of billions of widow legacy money, they ought to run to better quality bird pictures on their web site. Do they blow it all on very important charity networking in the Ivy. Or perhaps the newly refurbished Savoy Grill? The colouring of the male chaffinch was terrible. No help at all to a beginner. Tweeting rounded off by a return visit of the suspect redstart to our own garden this morning. See 2nd May.

The lead was all about how the Lib Dems had sunk the Conservative plan to have elected police commissioners. What with the lead and interior coverage the whole affair got maybe a page. But nowhere could I find any discussion of the merits of the change. Lots of discussion about political angles of the sinking, but nothing about the thing itself. An irritating if common failing of the posher papers. In their defence, they might argue that they had discussed the substantive issue ad nauseam a few weeks ago and that they did not want to bore their readers with repetition. But there was no reference to any such discussion. Online, where one might reasonably expect a click here to see the discussion, they would have no such excuse.

Then there was some coverage of the 8 year old murder of Milly Dowler, with which a rather unpleasant sounding man has been charged, a man who, it turns out, is slightly linked with certain inhabitants of TB. My problem here is the lack of what I would call decent evidence. No blood stained knife or anything like that. What little that has appeared in the paper so far is mainly about how nice the girl was and how horrid the man is plus a certain amount of circumstantial. Nor have I found any explanation of why the case surfaces now, so long after the event. I am mindful here of how we managed to bang up the wrong unpleasant man for a murder on Wimbledon Common. Also of the legal dictum that the worse the crime, the less the evidence needed for a conviction.

On a lighter note I was amused to read that a former big cheese in a company called 'Dorset Cereals' (http://www.dorsetcereals.co.uk/) whose watchword is 'honest, tasty and real', was mixed up in some elaborate tax avoidance scheme, now struck down by HMCR. A company which trades on the orgo-country-cuddly associations of the word Dorset when selling well known west country products but which are actually a ' ... tasty blend of Chilean flame raisins, apricots, sultanas, banana, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, blanched flaked almonds, whole hazelnuts and multi-grain flakes'. What a lot of old tosh.

Moving onto truly serious matters, following the lentil report of 17 April, I can now report that I have tried the recipe again, substituting real tomatoes for tinned tomatoes. Much better. Maybe all an illusion down to my prejudice against tinned tomatoes, but better nonetheless. As we used to say in meetings in the world of work, 'if you think we have a problem, we do have a problem'.

We have also tried some gluten free beef burgers from the Manor Green Road butcher. First time around I grilled the things and on serving them was rather alarmed to find little yellow lumps scattered through them. Clearly some kind of carbohydrate, looking a bit grain like. Had the butcher confused gluten free with wheat free? After peering at the lumps, FIL chomped bravely on with, as it happens, no ill effects. The yellow lumps were not the barley I had suspected them of being. But I did find the burgers a bit heavy going. A bit too firm and chewy. Second time around I tried frying in oil and while I did not get to sample on this occasion, the burgers looked much better. Plump and moist rather than thin and dried up.

We had the crabs' legs reported in the last post with a 2009 Mosel, from one Dr. Loosen, via Waitrose. The crabs' legs were quite eatable but did not strike me as very fresh. Also a bit firmer than I think proper. I did wonder, despite the market man having claimed that the things had been swimming somewhere off Grimbsy dock early that very morning, whether they had not passed through a freezer on their way south. The Mosel was good. Very slightly fizzy and quite sweet. BH very taken with it. The only trouble was that I mistook the nature of the cap and instead of just twisting it to get it off, I peeled the stiff foil wrapping off from around the neck of the bottle prior to extracting what turned out to be the non-existent cork, in the course of which a shard of the foil attacked a finger.

And then yesterday was tempted by a quite different type of wine. Get off the train at Epsom to find the place swarming with very lightly dressed and very slightly inebriated young ladies, one of whom had left a three quarters full bottle of pink wine invitingly in the top of a litter bin. All neat and tidy, with the screw cap on. I paused and wondered about whether to take advantage and eventually decided not to. Perhaps if it had been a bit later and the regular pubs had shut I might have made a different call.

Along the way we learned a bit more about how to work the DVD remote. We have been reminded that they work better with newer batteries and we can now, reasonably reliably, turn the subtitles off without turning the whole thing off. A feature of these particular DVDs being a tendency to turn the subtitles on when moving from one episode to another.

The show itself not bad. A reasonable take. But like Austen adaptations, a tendency to move the gentry into bigger houses and everybody else into smaller houses and a tendency generally to heighten the tones and colours. More important, moved to read the book again, something I have not done for a while. About 800 pages in my edition so the adaptor is getting about 3 pages to the minute; a rather different proposition to the 3 minutes to the page achieved by adaptors of Agatha Christie stories. It is hardly surprising that so much gets left out, that the texture of the thing is rather flattened. I had forgotten what a dense read the book is, which sometimes leaves me floundering for what it is she is trying to say - and also that the lady had quite a sense of humour; humour which is mostly lost in translation. I had also forgotten that she rather thoughtfully manages a walk on part for one Dr. Toller. Did she know some not so distant relative? Nuneaton is not that far from Gamlingay. Moved to wonder about what her partner, George Lewes, made of all the scenes involving amateur scientists, with his tendency to dabble in natural history and such like. The scenes are not unkind, but they are not particularly flattering either.

Moved to wonder also, probably not for the first time, about her relationship with Tolstoy. She does not get a mention in my standard biog. of Tolstoy, but Tolstoy gets a mention in my standard biog. of her. It seems that Tolstoy read 'Adam Bede' and was much impressed. I learned also that 'Middlemarch' was,very roughly speaking, written between 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina'. It seems entirely appropriate that one of the greatest English novels should rub up against two of the greatest Russian ones in this way.

And a little while ago I suggested that doing good quality jigsaws of good quality pictures would be a good way of getting art students to look at said pictures. It now occurs to me that getting students of literature to write TV adaptations of good quality novels would be good way of getting them to actually read the things. A up to date variant on the usual essay.

By way of a break, visited the Epsom Library book sale today, a book sale focussed on their cull of the art and collectibles sections - resulting in pots of books about pots and porcelain going cheap. My eye was caught by a four volume 'Lives of the Painters' by one John Canaday at £10 - a bit strong compared with the non arty stuff which was mostly going for 20p a pop. Wound up buying the thing.

In the course of the same break, bought 13 crabs' legs for exactly the same sum, £10. Get home to find that I have bought 2lbs 1oz of crab and 8lbs 3oz of book. An aperçu on the relative values at the beginning of the third millennium. How hard would it be to plot the relationship over time? Google's contribution is the fact that I could buy the same book through him at prices varying from £5 to $250. But there are clearly a lot of them about so I guess the thing is a respectable read.

PS: I note from today's Guardian that the sons of Bin Liner are following the well established, if irritating, tradition of terrorists whining about the forces of law and order (or of Satan, depending on your point of view) being a little relaxed about the letter of the law.

This morning's thoughts are prompted by being reminded last night that the old Etonians who now run our country are out to turn our national health service over to their mates in the insurance industry, one effect of which would be something like the spike in the image.

First thought was that it was self evident that health has to be rationed. There was far more of it about than we can possibly afford to give, ad libitum, to everybody who might want it - something which is, I suspect, a lot more true now than it was when the national health service was invented; in the teeth I might say, of many of the health professionals of the day, many of whom seemed to think that national health amounted to getting into bed with Uncle Joe, an uncle who was by then shedding his image as the saviour of the free world. Plenty of folk in that other saviour of the free world, the US of A, still think along the same lines more than fifty years after his demise.

Second thought was that this was maybe not so self evident after all. We could spend more than we do - say 10% of GDP. If we pushed that up to an unrealistic 20% with no loss of efficiency (rather unlikely. Think what a fist New labour made of a much more modest spending hike), would everyone be able to have as much health as they wanted? Possibly. So I settle down on the thought that it is unlikely that we will be able to take health off rationing any time soon.

After which the question is, how does one accomplish the rationing? One way it to have everybody pay for health at the time and place of delivery. Fine for the very rich and the very careful, not so fine for the rest of us. Some of the rest of us would take out insurance. But that would still leave a large chunk of people at the bottom of the heap who made no provision. The improvident. Not decent to have them pegging out in the street or in squalor at home so we would have to do something. In the way that many decent doctors gave their services to the poor gratis before the health service was invented.

Then we observe that the insurance model seems to be very expensive. The US does not get all that much bang for its very large number of bucks. National health services, for all their many faults, much more efficient. So where in the service do we do the rationing?

Do we get GPs to do it?

Do we do it by long queues? With those with no stomach for queueing not getting too much health.

Do we get NICE to lay down guidelines for GPs to follow? Would this be so different from the guidelines that insurance companies lay down? Would the fact that NICE is not a profit making corporation make a difference? Although it is, presumably, an important target for various sorts of corporate lobbying by entertainment and favour.

Sadly, I suspect that some sort of tiered system is going to be the outcome. The dream of everyone getting the same health care has not turned out to be workable. If some people want to spend more than others - either absolutely or as a proportion of their income - a preference for health over beer and skittles - and get more health care than others as a result, I guess we have to let them. A bit unsavoury if a rich man with an unpleasant disease can afford to be cured while a poor man has to put up with it; but that is where I believe progress has taken us.

And then there are the lawyers. Are we getting so legalised that whatever we do with health systems, we will be covered in lawyers making a tidy living out of the inevitable nooks and crannies? I wonder if Muslims go in for suing as much as Christians? I rather think not, that they are more content to go along with the will of Allah, without making so much fuss. But it would be interesting to hear the story from someone who knows. Maybe when they are as sophisticated as us, they will be just as bad, Allah notwithstanding.

To be continued.

Nearer home, I have a health and safety beef about an office building somewhere south of Stamford Street. We were strolling around, a bit off piste, taking in the various odd buildings old and new in this part of the Lambeth-Southwark borders. Turning a corner we suddenly found ourselves dazzled, blinded even. Just as well that there were no lycra loonies headed our way because we would not have seen a thing. That's odd I thought to myself. I thought we were pointing vaguely east and it is late afternoon. Look around and we find that people are walking around with two shadows. Look around a bit more and find that the shadows pointing vaguely west are the result of the late afternoon sun being reflected off the mirror glass of one of the new office blocks. And being reflected, we get to see it at half the real altitude. All the benefits of low flying sun without having to wait until winter. Plus you get two suns for the price of one. Clearly a danger to life and limb, but who do I complain to? Or do I just sue the owner of the office building for the trauma of the accident that nearly was?

Shortly after trauma, we arrived at the Globe where we found a seat in the now more or less occluded sun where we could take in our picnic and the various passers by, before going in for the Globe's touring performance of Hamlet, which had on that day reached the globe point of the tour. We had been attracted as we thought that a touring version might go a bit easy on the pantomime acts the Globe is fond of.

As it turned out, not a bad show at all, albeit with (I think) a fairly heavily adapted text, something that the helpful programme claimed was entirely OK and kosher. Provincial audiences in Jacobean times couldn't cope with the full monty any more than most of us.

Good use of elementary props to signify things like presence on watch towers.

Touring taken down to the point where there were 8 actors (including actresses) who had to cover the 20 odd parts, to do the music and the scene shifting. The only part which was not doubled up was that of Hamlet himself. Not as bad as the 2 man Hamlet we saw near the Oval (see 26th November last) but I found all the switching a bit tiresome. They managed OK, but I did not.

Another result of actor economy was that Gertrude, who doubled as a violin player, came across as rather dowdy and very school marmy. Good maternal displays towards Hamlet in the second half, but hard to see why Claudius would have put his immortal soul in peril on her account.

Horatio was, for me, badly done as scarcely more than a plump school boy. Rather silly and immature. Not clear whether this was a product of casting or direction but I did not like it. A Prince of Denmark might be expected to have more dignified friends, the goings on of our Windsors notwithstanding. R&G played more or less entirely for laughs. I suppose you have to expect that these days. But I still think that Hamlet is a bit casual about knocking them off: he claims that they were party to the plot to knock him off but we are given no evidence of that.

Direction was also very keen on theatrical gestures with both hands, so we got lots of them. The only one who could manage them with any style was Ophelia. Hamlet couldn't do it at all. A shame, as otherwise I thought he did rather well, despite being and looking very young.

Went a bit flat at the end with what seemed like a rush to the finishing line.

The one in what was Horton Hospital is now left marooned in the middle of a housing estate, the developers having failed to have sorted out what to do with it before they built the houses. The Liberal Democrats, to whom I am grateful for this illustration, are hot on the chase. They share my own view which is that, while it might once have been both possible and appropriate to incorporate a restored tower into some tasteful townscape, that moment has past and the best that can be done now is to knock the thing down. However, there are plenty of people out there banging the heritage drum - most of whom do not live anywhere the thing, or the building works which would be needed to do anything more positive with it than knocking it down. So, being civic minded, we keep an eye on the thing.

Last week, we happened to notice that it was covered in scaffolding and the site sported a planning notice which talked of 'change of use of water tower (sui generis) to landscape amenity space (sui generis)'. A fine example of 3rd millennium Planglish.

A few days later, having cast my vote for AV (not any more, to mind, a great solution to our political woes, but a strong vote would have been a signal that change was needed. Cameron, presumably, having cunningly conceded to the LibDems a vote on a bad option), continued to exercise my democratic rights by visiting the town hall and asking to see the papers relating to this planning permission. What is the application reference number please? No idea. This caused a bit of a delay, but the helpful lady behind the jump persevered and after quite a small number of minutes appeared with a large buff envelope full of fascinating papers about the redevelopment of a water tower, the wrong one as it happens, St. Ebba's rather than Horton. This rather shorter water tower has been caught before they finish work on the site and is a better candidate for conversion as the thing has a clutch of almost heritage buildings around its base which can be incorporated in the proposed flats. Sensible report from heritage folk which recognised that finding a remunerative use for the tower was a necessary condition for preservation. It also crossed my mind that the advent of cheap word processing and cheap colour printing made making this sort of material publicly available a lot more of a proposition than it would have been in the olden days.

Anyway, did not like to upset the helpful lady by explaining that it was the wrong tower, and went off. A day or so later we went back to the Horton Tower to get its application number, meeting on the way someone who explained that it had finally been agreed to demolish the thing, amid some pushing and shoving about who was going to pay.

Back to the town hall, brandishing the application number to be told by the same helpful lady (who clearly remembered my previous visit but equally clearly knew little or nothing about hospitals or their water towers) that this application did not exist. This time I persisted and after a confab. with a colleague it turned out that the approval had been withdrawn because of something or other and that all the papers were in consequence invisible to the general public until such time as the matter was resolved. The scaffold might indeed be up, but execution had been stayed.

We shall continue to watch this bit of liberal democracy unfolding.

PS: more serious, there was an interesting piece in a recent issue of the LRB about Libya, a country which until fairly recently was two provinces of a decaying Ottoman empire, rather like the much bigger Iraq. The current stand-off between legitimates and rebels is very much along the lines of those same two provinces. What have we got into (again)? A couple of other factlets. First, there were some 40,000 Italian settlers in the western province at one point. What has happened to them? Second, Ghadafi, like Castro, was once a young, handsome and popular rebel himself. But also like Castro, he lived and/or stayed on well beyond his sell-by date.

Trundling around more or less the same route yesterday, I happened to notice the decaying white fluff on the stretch between the Wells and Wheelers Lane. Looking up, found that the offending trees were in leaf and that I could reach one. So I took the liberty of abstracting a leaf from this site of special scientific interest (on which more below).

Back home to consult FIL, who whips out his trusty book of trees, in which the leaves of common trees are illustrated in such a way that you can flip through them very quickly, resulting in a hit on the aspen. Not liking to trust to FIL's trusty book, get out my miniature Polunin for confirmation. Which it does in a surprising way. I had heard of the phrase 'trembling like an aspen' (see, for example, Henry IV Part II, Act 2, Scene 4, Lines 106-7), but had not realised that this was the result of the leaf stalk being flattened, more like linguine than spaghetti. This flattening allows the leaf to tremble in an attractive way when you hold the end of the stalk and blow on the leaf. The leaf abstracted did this, so I think I can register a confirmed vegetable tweet.

Polunin went on to mention the white fluff and to say that the aspen is usually found on marginal land in cold climates. The ones in Epsom must be strays.

Quite impressed by the illustration despite the fact that the leaf had more or less dried out by the time I thought of scanning it, having been preserved overnight inside a folded sheet of paper. Incidentally, the flattening of the stalk is visible just before it joins the leaf, on the enlarged version you get by clicking on the thing.

Not so impressed earlier on my trundle, to hear the sounds of the chain saw gang wafting across the common as another chunk of common woodland bit the dust. Or rather, was converted to saw dust. The irritating notices pinned up along the path explained that the grail of the day was the Common Heath Slug (CHS), an animal close to extinction in this part of England as a result of loss of habitat. Common as muck up north, but who would want to have to go up there? The CHS is not particularly interesting or attractive in real life but is much more impressive close up at night on their CHS web cam site (http://www.epsomcommon.commonheathslug.org.uk). The fighting among males for females is much more fun than 'Midsomer Murders' and much more likely to be on when you fancy a spot of TV. Must get around to creating and erecting some rival notices. Must get the save the trees vote out in time for the gang's AGM.

PS: for once a glitch in the usually smooth running Google advertising machine. On posting this blog he thought to tell me about a gang called Trees-R-Us, but supplied an improper URL. Lots of people of this name around the world. Judging from the URL he did supply, I believe he meant this lot: http://trees-r-us.biz/. Let's hope they are better at trees than they are at site construction.

Pleased at Waterloo station to find that someone somewhere has been listening. Some of the retail buildings in the concourse are being dismantled, returning a bit of space to tired commuters to concourse in.

Onto the various beach furnishings which have been installed around the RFH and QEH. Maybe Boris was been so entranced by his success at copying the Parisian bicycles that he was moved to copy their beach - albeit on a rather smaller scale. But I can report that at least one young mother was sufficiently impressed that she had her toddler building sand castles on it. I wondered how they will keep the thing clean - something we used to find a bit of a problem when we had a sand pit.

Then up to the roof garden, a rather smaller affair than I was expecting. All seemed a bit contrived to me, although it was nice and sunny up there and a pleasant place to snooze in. A lot of the smaller plants had been imported from Wisbeach and a lot of the larger ones, in rather small pots, must have taken a lot of watering to keep in the land of the living. A sort of low grade imitation of the show gardens that are de rigueur at flower shows these days - not that I like them very much either. A pretentious version of flower arranging.

After which it was time for lunch, for which purpose we decided to try the gourmet pizza place in the Gabriel's Wharf collection. Plenty of action in Google, but they do not appear to have their own site, while Pizza Express have hijacked http://www.gourmetpizzacompany.co.uk/ and arranged for this url to be a proxy for their own site. So even respectable folk go in for cyber-squatting. Internet non-existence notwithstanding, excellent location and ambience - in our case supported by a Croatian waitress who was old enough to have been taught that much of Croatia used to belong to the land of pizza. At least, the Venetian part thereof. Starter and pizza entirely adequate and supported by a very good value Valpolicella. Tiramisu good and clearly from a factory. It was properly firm, not soggy like a trifle. The sponge bits were still spongy.

Back home to read about another bit of culture, in this case a whole lot of cellophane sheeting hung off the ceiling and a leading contender for the Turner Prize. I grant that the thing was not offensive - it was neither made of unsavoury detritus nor obscene - but it was more or less vacant - at least it appeared so from its picture in the DT. For how much longer are these arty types going to con us out of our mostly hard earned money by persuading us to give them space and grant for this sort of rubbish? When will the emperor's new clothes be seen as such? This particular story is clearly required reading at all respectable universities of creative arts.

Ask Google about the Star, and he seems to think that it is primarily, although not exclusively, a Jewish symbol. A motif worked into books, pavements and architectural decoration generally. So the anxious lady might have a point; not the thing you would expect to see in a Victorian chair in a Christian church.

Ask Google about the synagogue, and that certainly exists too, just around the corner from the church, in Synagogue Place. We will have to pay a visit next time we are in the regional capital. Perhaps the chair was the subject of an inter-faith solidarity exchange between the two institutions? Again, something to ask about next time.

The puzzle nearer home is the East Road railway (over road) bridge which was replaced over the Easter weekend, having first been noticed on April 8th. According to our free newspaper, the deck for the new bridge is a piece of steelwork weighing around 150 tons. Each end of the deck sits on three bearers, the three bearers sit on a new concrete plinth and the plinth sits on top of what is left of the brick abutment. The bearers are concrete cubes, with a side length of perhaps one foot and there is a layer of something else, much darker than the concrete and maybe two inches thick, between the bearer and the steelwork. There is probably another layer of something between the bearer and the plinth, but one can't see that from the road.

My puzzle is that 150 tons is a lot of tons. You can't just dump that sort of weight on fresh concrete and the operation of taking one deck out and putting the new deck in must have been completed in under a week. Sadly we were away and were unable to keep a close eye on the operation.

So how was it done? Was the new concrete plinth cast in-situ on top of the truncated brickwork - old brickwork which had been stabilized by the work of the preceding fortnight or so? You would not have to wait very long before it could take the weight of the bearers, but how long before it would take the weight of the deck on top of the bearers? The bearers themselves could have been made well in advance and so would be well up to spreading the point loading of the steel deck out into a spread loading that the new concrete plinth could cope with. Perhaps the key is the stuff between the deck and the bearer and the bearer and the plinth. Being thin it does not have to be terribly strong - a bit of compressive strength would be enough - but it does have to dry quick. Have the deck on jacks, bed it down on the quick drying goo, wait a couple of days and then take the jacks out?

I do recall works in the road under the bridge, consistent with large jacks being installed there.

And then we have The Sugar explaining to anyone who cares to listen that government could do its business with half the half million people or so it needs now if it was run on business like lines. He then goes on to suggest that second best would be if government got better at doing business with people like himself, who are masters of screwing a profitable deal out of pratty civil servants. It does not seem to occur to him that he and his kind might possibly stop screwing quite so hard.

But it occurs to me that one of the reasons that we have a large chunk of our young adults preferring to exist on rather measly benefits rather than getting jobs, is that the sort of jobs on offer from him and his kind are just too awful. Mind numbingly boring and with never ending pressure from unpleasant lance corporal types to flip more burgers an hour or whatever. At least the civil service used to believe in providing proper jobs with decent conditions.

Nearer home, my success in picking up cheap books has been dented by two failures. Tempted by 'The Fox in the Attic' by Richard Hughes, the chap who brought us 'A High Wind in Jamaica', a book of which I had heard of but never read. Couldn't get on with it at all and gave up after about 30 pages. Sort of thing which might be turned into an episodic costume drama on telly. Might cope rather better with it in that context.

And then there was 'Memoirs of Hecate County' by Edmund Wilson, someone else of whom I had heard but never read. Got about half way through the three hundred pages before giving up, finding his detailed description of the sex life of the narrator of one of the (six) stories rather unpleasant. In other respects the book rather reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby', set at about the same time and in about the same milieux. I note in passing that this particular copy was not to be introduced into the British Empire of the U.S.A, so not sure how it fell into my hands.

Rather better was 'My Life as a Fake' by Peter Carey, tying in well with the various other forays into fake and copy land this year (see, for example, March 24th). Not an author with whom I get on very well, but this book was essentially a thriller, mainly set in Malaysia & Indonesia and with poetic trimmings. Pots of local colour. It thrills well enough and one turns the pages - but I would not endorse the puff : '... a manic, endearing and penetrating ode to fakery ...'. The fakery in question is merely something to hang the book on; scarcely centre stage. But I did rather like the portrait of a minor poet called Slater; a chap who showed promise when young but who traded the craft of being a poet for that of being a performer. A performer who dissipated his creative energies by sweeping up admiring females by the bucket load. A man who was mostly terribly selfish but who was also sensitive to what others were at or up to and was sometimes very kind.

All three to be recycled to the Tooting branch of Wetherspoon's library.

No wind in the rain on this occasion but a breezy & sunny day. Given that not all parties were fully up for a full performance, decided to go for doing both sides of a row at once, rather than going down one side then coming back up the other. This made for a certain amount of bumping, but did mean that I got around the whole thing. Perhaps a first.

Total haul was one scarf, possibly a gents scarf, four secret seven books by E. Blyton and one jigsaw by Waddingtons, total expenditure £2.40. The point of the secret seven was to investigate my mother's allegation that Blyton books were impoverished both in vocabulary and otherwise. My own first impression today is that the secret seven stories are a good deal more complicated than stories like 'Little Deer' (from the Janet and John stable, once hugely popular and now almost invisible in bookshops) which I have been looking at lately. But I may be neglecting Freudian and autobiographical angles, of which, for example, 'The Ugly Duckling' is full. Don't know about 'Little Deer'. Angles which would probably not come out in analysis of vocabulary, clause and sentence.

I mention analysis of clause because that was bread and butter for my mother's teaching of English in the 60's. This despite the fact that I do not recall doing much of that sort of thing outside of Latin classes in the school that I went to, at about the same time. And I do not suppose that it figures at all in the teaching of English in schools these days.

The jigsaw was a world map, political variety, about three feet by two feet in 300 pieces. A well made thing from Waddingtons. Helpfully supported by a full size poster of the finished product, so that if one is feeling a touch lazy, or perhaps just a touch old, one can lay the pieces on the poster, rather than doing the thing freehand. Sold to me by a lady who probably lives in the same sort of house as we do and who gazed at me long and hard before suggesting that £1 would be a fair price. I suspect that she and her family paid rather more than that for it and have had a fair bit of fun with it - and so found it hard to let it go for so little. But I guess they decided that that was the best that they were going to do. I suppose I might have gone to £2 but certainly not to £5.

This afternoon I thought to ask Google about it, but find that Waddingtons, while well known to him, do not appear to exist as a company. Not like Sony who are only too pleased to tell you about all their products and where you can buy them. In fact, I was unable to find this particular jigsaw at all, despite poking around the sites of various jigsaw retailers. So why is there a Ravensburger site which tells you all about everything they make but no Waddingtons site?

Perhaps I will try again when fresher.

Maybe all those billions of pounds that get bequeathed to them are doing some good.

The moved onto yesterday's DT where a 'yours disgusted' was panting on about the iniquity of the census people who had to be told twice that an address no longer existed and had the temerity to call on Easter Sunday afternoon in order to be told for the second time. He was in an awful lather about it. Didn't seem to have occurred to him that doing the census is mostly a badly paid temporary second job for people with badly paid first jobs. Which means that the second job has to be done on days like Easter Sunday.

Much more important to this household was the fact the the news ran into overtime panting on about our success in assassinating an important terrorist, with the result that the locally much more important 'Countrylife' had to cut its lead item about Molly the Moo Cow of Longleat. Perhaps the 'yours disgusted' should get stuck into that one.

More important still was my finding a little book in our bookcase called 'London Restaurants' by someone who wrote under the name of 'Diner-Out'. A first edition of 1924 published by someone I had not previously heard of called Geoffery Bles of Pall Mall. Adverts for other offerings from his list are illustrated above, but it seems that he must have made a lot of money as the chap who first published C. S. Lewis, including here both the wardrobe and the rosary stuff. I can get a copy with a dust cover from Abebooks for £4 - which is a plus as my copy says £1.50 inside. But then, it has not got a dust cover.

This little book is a mine of useful information; thoroughly recommended. That, for example, some people who were keen on their food went to a lot of trouble and expense to get a cook who could boil a potato to their satisfaction - without needing to cover up the result with fancy sauces. Helpful sections on wine, wine corks, cigars and the right cigarette. Diner-Out rather disapproves of chain smoking, but he is quite all right with regular smokers, with discerning smokers who know what they like. He goes on to remind one that hors d'oeuvre were sometimes called appetisers - something which, as a food writer who spent a lot of time in restaurants, he sometimes needed. One really did not feel like a proper blow-out at the Savoy but the 'Daily Mail' needed its article, so the appetite needed to be tickled. He has various suggestions covering this eventuality.

I then move into the body of the book where I come across a page or so about a place called the 'Trocadero' which at that time occupied that flashy but presently unoccupied building of the same name at Piccadilly Circus. It seems that this Trocadero was at the flashy end of the Joe Lyons range of eateries, where you could get a superb lunch, ex wine, for 15s a head (at a time when a wage might have been £5. Or one of the pot boilers above cost 7/6. Relative prices seem to have moved around a bit. Or perhaps I have actually got some much more recent reprint, not a first edition at all. No dates, so hard to tell). Including things like 'Homard Grillé Paillard'. It was also quite OK for gents. to entertain ladies picked up from neighbouring streets there, provided all concerned were properly dressed. At that time the floor manager was one M. Monbiot, whom I find from Google was the grandfather of the lefty writer for the Guardian of the same name. The great grandfather worked the place too. I wonder if the journalist of the family ever alludes to the catering branches in his pieces in the Guardian?

I suppose the last survivor of this class of restaurant was the Café Royal in Regent Street - which sadly I only ever managed to visit in a corporate entertainment capacity up on the sixth floor. Not very grand up there at all.