Thursday, June 30, 2011
Cherries
Off to the National Theatre yesterday to see 'The Cherry Orchard', the first time we have been to this theatre for a while. Picnicked on arrival on a piece of astro turf which was complete with an astro turfed model three piece suite, complete with standard lamp. Interesting tourists to go with it. My share of the picnic was a few slices of the new to me wholemeal bread, half of which had passed through a water mill prior to passing through me.
Good set and generally good cast (of 22 according to my count at the end), but the show as a whole seemed a bit heavy, particularly the first half. And far too long at 3 hours including the interval. Chekhov might be melancholy, but it should be done with a lighter touch than the NT managed. Observation should be more ambivalent and less judgemental. The production of Uncle Vanya which we saw at both Kingston and Guildford was much better in this regard (see March 30, 2008).
Audience rather more dowdy than that at the RFH the day before. Why would this be?
The adaptation, while sticking to the story, seemed a little heavy at times. A tendency to work background information into the dialogue, presumably intended for the benefit of audiences who may know little of Russia at around 1900. The program, which we almost bought, also appeared to include plenty of educational material which would have done credit to something from the Open University. And I noticed some apparently minor tweaks which rather went against the grain of what I think Chekhov was driving at. I wonder whether the adaptor was able to work from the Russian original, or whether he was working off a Penguin Classic? Perhaps he was more used to doing adaptations for television. Our own water damaged copy came from Chatto & Windus back in 1928, a time when my father was a sprightly 18 years old and well before I was thought of.
Zoë Wanamaker was rather too competent and forceful to be very convincing as Madame Ranevsky. Yasha - granted not intended to be a very attractive person - irritated. Semyonov-Pichtchik and Charlotta good fun. Some regional accents in evidence: presumably they have these in Russia, just as we do. It is a fairly large country.
The thought I came away with was how it easy it was for generally well intentioned and kindly people to cause accidental damage to those around them. Part of this was the ease & frequency with which groups of people converse on non-intersecting parallel lines, a theme Aldous Huxley was keen on in one of his books of maybe 30 years later.
PS: I was told later that I saw Dame Judi leading in the play some years ago, somewhere in the West End. A performance of which I have no memory, but that is not at all impossible these days, irritating though it might be. However, on checking with the indefatigable Mr. Google, I learned that there is no such performance. All he can offer is Dane Judi playing a subordinate role many years ago and the lead for telly in 1980. So it must have been somebody else. Which is a pity as I think she would have been rather better at it than Zoë Wanamaker.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Arithmetic
Intrigued by the following statements in a Guardian column the other day. 1: UK GDP has doubled in the last 20 years (say). 2:over the same period, the income of workers has increased by 25%. 3: that of pen-pushers has increased by 50%. 4: that of the rich has doubled. While I recognise the point that the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer, I am at a bit of a loss as to where all the missing GDP has gone. Unless there are some very rich who are now gobbling up a great deal of the cake. It all goes to show that making statements of this sort, unless they are festooned with footnotes and qualifications, is a hazardous business.
Then off to hear Pollini at the RFH. Drawn there by his offering the Chopin Preludes. A sort of feast of 24 appetisers, or perhaps 24 warm-up acts. But I rather like them.
Auditorium not quite full, some having fallen by the wayside during the postponement from April. But there were a lot of flashily dressed ladies; a much higher proportion than one would see at, say, the Wigmore Hall. And lots of people from the far east. By way of contrast, the male attendants looked a touch scruffy in black SBC tee-shirts; perhaps a gesture towards the K. Livingstone/New Labour invented and now pressing need for the SBC to be more accessible. Two quite young ones had to sit in prominent positions on the stage through the performance and I did not envy them at all: what if one felt like a scratch or fell asleep? Some bad behaviour from the audience in the form of taking flash pictures despite being asked twice not too; hopefully the young ones saw the culprits afterwards. One phone went off during the performance. Which prompted the thought that given the number of people who feel the need to check them at every interval in the proceedings, it is a wonder that it does not happen more often. Luckily I had left mine at home, out of harm's way.
Chopin very good, followed by 6 Debussy Preludes. Also good, recognisably of the same genre, although getting a bit modern. The concert was wrapped up by a very energetic rendering of the very modern (1948) Piano Sonata No. 2 by Boulez. Flashy and shimmering are words which come to mind, but despite all that, rather too much for me. And enough for Pollini that he needed the services of both music and page-turner, a page turner whom I think to have seen on the same errand at the Wigmore Hall. Do prima donna pianists have favoured page-turners, in the way that prima donna golfers have favoured caddies? In any event, reminded why I usually avoid this sort of thing - of which there is usually rather a lot in these 'International Piano Series' concerts. Is this a relic of the taste of Al Fayed, the man from Harrods who used to sponsor them? But I was clearly in a minority, with the enthusiastic audience awarding the chap a standing ovation. We left before there was any chance of an encore.
On the way out, we had noted that Tower Crane 2 at the Epsom Station building site has now acquired a partner, Tower Crane 1. The same sort of crane as Crane 2 but a rather lighter, slenderer model. But why do the builders install Crane 2 months before Crane 1? And while we are on the subject, does the large on-site generator (which seems to be on 24 by 7) power the cranes or do they trust their luck to the National Grid?
So on the way home, we thought to inspect the green alkanet at Raynes Park (see 11th March). Hard to tell quite what was going on in the dark, but it rather looked as if someone had tried to kill it by spreading some sort of smelly compost on top. With new green alkanet pushing through nevertheless. Although given that compost on a Network Rail flower bed seems a bit improbable, perhaps someone had just strimmed it with the same sort of effect. All the chopped down alkanet composting down in the recent rain. Must try and take a look while it is still light.
DIY (2)
Now completed 5 of the eight elements. Keeping more or less on schedule. Should have the first of the four trestles assembled tomorrow, ready for the start of height testing by the assembled family. I suspect a bit of shortening is going to be called for, which will disturb the proportions slightly. But better than lengthening, which would have seriously disturbed the proportions.
And before anyone suggests that maybe I should have worked a bit harder on getting the length right in advance, maybe with the aid of a few cosines, I am fairly sure that even had I done the extra work, the family would still have insisted on a fitting & adjustments. Nothing like sitting at the finished object to find out what is wrong with it.
Along the way, I have been reminded how much of the time goes on marking out - and how easy it is to make mistakes. Just as well I am not doing indoor furniture where all the pencil and knife marks have to be planed or sanded out before varnishing (not into French polish these days. Varnish is a lot better than it was and French polishing was always a bit of a performance).
Getting quite tired, no longer being used to working, never mind working with my hands. But I get along OK if I take it slowly and do not take too many breaks.
Monday, June 27, 2011
DIY
Having not done the garage doors in early April but having patched the shed doors in mid April, and following the recent purchase of ironmongery (16th June), now well into the construction of two trestle tables.
The table tops no big deal; little more than a bit of fiddling about with a couple of sheets of ply.
But the trestles are bit more of an operation. Four trestles makes four trestle pairs, that is to say eight identical elements. Each of the eight elements involves four pieces (three pine and one mahogany. Got to have a bit of class), four halving joints, two hinge cuts, various tidying up operations and then gluing & screwing up - this last always being a bit fraught with me. However much preparation one does, the actual application of glue always gets me in a sweat. Various little somethings - typically invisible to the casual glance after the event - typically go wrong. So far I have done three elements - up to gluing that is - might be an idea to paint or varnish them to harden up the surface - in about a day and a half. Even at minimum wage these two tables are going to be a considerable multiple of the cost of what might have been obtained from IKEA.
On the other hand, I have got to renew my acquaintance with carpentry. Of the outdoor furniture variety; not sure if I am really up for indoor furniture any more. Much too fiddly and time consuming. But, even so, I am still at a slightly higher grade than what my Dad used to call shut-knife work, this being all he aspired to.
One engineer's square deployed. Just the ticket for checking the the elements are square before setting them aside to dry. Not that I am very sure what I would do if an element was not square. Probably have to chuck it out and start over.
Two planes deployed - a jack plane and a jointer plane. The former is fine for odds and ends but I had forgotten what a splendid tool the latter is. Seems to cut true all by itself.
Three chisels deployed. Box handled jobs from Marples. The 1.25 inch bevel with which I cut my left hand open forty years ago, while snagging on the infamous Chingford Hall estate, now demolished. The 0.75 inch bevel which a very experienced old carpenter, who cut his teeth in a (largely women staffed) London factory making wooden assemblies for aeroplanes during the war and who should have known better, took a hammer to thirty nine years ago. Butt has never fitted the palm of the hand properly since. The 0.5 inch firmer which has had a quieter life.
Four G-cramps deployed. Two of them described as light but actually rather heavy so probably intended for an engineering rather than a woodworking shop.
Don't think there is five of anything, but there is quite a bit of it altogether. Fine collection of hand tools which cost quite a bit in their day but probably more or less valueless now. Few real carpenters use this sort of stuff any more and the tools are not old enough to count as heritage or collectable. Although I am using a heritage camping table to keep tools handy on, a relic of my sister-in-law's camping childhood.
And given that my ancient bench (which was made our of scrap shuttering timber from the incarnation before last of Croydon Art College and which used to double as a low table in our marital bed-sit) is a bit low for comfort, I am sitting to most of the cutting out of joints. Bit wimpish, but it does save the back.
Target for completion 0700 on 7th July.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Three moral thoughts for Sunday
Is it right to carry on using the western Libyans as target practise?
What might have been thought right a few months ago is starting to look a bit dodgy to me. We are backing the eastern half in a civil war between the western and eastern halves of the country and doing a good deal of damage to the western half - which despite the best efforts of our gallant air crews does not appear to be about to cave in. Are we sure that it would be a good thing if it did? How would we feel about the eastern half running amok over the western half? Dressed as Malays? Rape, pillage & the full works?
Is it right to collect money for charity for pay?
This thought prompted by a polite young man who knocked on the door yesterday wanting me to sign some sort of a mandate in favour of an entirely worthy looking outfit called World Vision (http://www.worldvision.org.uk/). He would not accept a donation and he would not give me a leaflet. All he would do was have me fill out one of his mandates on the spot, which I was not prepared to do. I supposed that he was on commission, but whether he was or not does not materially affect the point. There are people out there who do collect money for charity for commission, for pay.
First thought is that if you are knocking on doors collecting my money for charity, you should be setting a good example by giving your time to charity. Now while charities might be more effective when run as a business with commission for the foot soldiers and fancy salaries for those at the top of the heap, charities of that sort seem a long way away from the original idea of charity, back say in the Middle Ages. Be the idea Muslim or Christian - they are both religions which promote charity.
So second thought is that that you are going to have to pay engineering companies (say) to dig wells because they are not charities. It is just about OK to run your charity shops as businesses; maybe even to pay some of the staff in them. But the people out there soliciting cash on the streets should be doing it for love. Charities should keep some connection with their roots; the business of freely giving help and support to those in need of it, where the giving is a person to person thing, like Christ washing the feet of his disciples or the Lord Mandelson washing the feet of the beggars at his door. Good for the soul. Maybe they should take a peek at the origin of the word every Monday morning and ruminate on the fact that the root includes the meanings love and expensive. Perhaps there is a connection with the French 'cher' which also means both dear beloved and dear expensive. As, indeed, does our dear.
Third thought is just a bit of old-Etonian bashing. It is not OK to have some fancy ball at the Dorchester, costing perhaps £333,333, of which £3,333 is given to charity, and then to call the thing a charity ball. Get lots of plaudits for your great generosity.
Lastly, is it right to speak for my neighbour rather than for myself?
This one is more obscure, but I give it a go anyway. It is the sort of thing that might crop up when deciding whether to put the letter box at the western end of the street or the eastern end. This is something that various corporate entities might have a view on: the Post Office, the Council, the Chamber of Commerce or the Police. It is also something that the people living in the street might have a view on. Maybe we would admit the views of people living in nearby streets. Let us suppose that the drill is that there is a public meeting, chaired by some public inspector from OffBox. More or less everybody gets a chance to make their pitch. There might be some voting. One could spend happy hours dreaming up the appropriate rules and regulations. Then the public inspector goes away and comes to a decision.
The thing that I am uncomfortable about in this context, is one person speaking for another. While I might fully understand that Mr. Sykes is a bit ancient, has lots of letters to post and would in consequence like the letter box near his house, it is for Mr. Sykes to make his pitch and cast his vote. It is not up to me to make his pitch for him, or to make the pitch I think he should be making; I should pitch for what I want. If we all express our own views and desires, rather than making guesses about other peoples', the lucky old public inspector has some chance of coming up with a good compromise. We should not try and do his work for him.
Furthermore, it is not my place to explain to the public at large that poor old Mr. Sykes has an unmentionable disease and so does not like to be seen in the street much and so would like the letter box outside his front door. I should mind my own business. If he wants to declare his unmentionable disease, that is his business.
Against that, it does seem reasonable for me to say that Sykes's need is greater than my need and cast my vote with him. A judgement that I am perhaps better placed to make than the public inspector. It it also seems reasonable for Sykes to appoint a proxy if he does not feel able to make his own pitch, perhaps to hire an expensive lawyer, although I guess the appropriate rules and regulations would have to have their say on that one. And in an extreme case, it would be reasonable for the Court of Protection (if it is still called that) to appoint one. But at least that is a civil servant minding someone else's business, not a private citizen. Until they get privatised...
At which point I have rather lost myself. Have to have another go another day.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Grub up!
Over the past few days we have eaten in five establishments other than our own; rather a lot for us. In ascending order of culinary grandeur (which, as it happens, is the same as the order of price), rather than order of architectural, they were George's Meeting House (a Wetherspoon's; curiously named for King George III), the Amesbury Archer (a Harvester near Stonehenge), the White Hart (part of Dartington Hall), The Drewe Arms in Devon and the Lord Poulett Arms in Somerset.Wetherspoon's the usual good value, with the only novelty being the quite decent pint of something called Googly - having taken pot-luck among the strange-to-me brews on offer. See http://www.teignworthybrewery.com/. Nice that Wetherspoon's are sufficiently decentralised to accommodate local beer. Unusual for a big chain.
Harvester offered nothing fancy but was also good value. And one could fill up on salad, a reasonable proportion of which came without oily or other flavourings. We spent a bit more than at Wetherspoons's, being quite taken with their Red Rioja at £10 a pop (bottle that is, not glass), which went some way to compensating us for the total absence of warm beer. We were surprised to find this near-road service area establishment more or less full early on a Saturday evening: the cheerful & energetic waitress told us that the split between locals and aliens was about 50-50. Oddly enough a fellow TB'er was there at roughly the same time as us. Perhaps just as well that we did not run into him or we might have been even more taken with the rioja.
We ate in the dining room part of the White Hart. A room which was roughly cubicle in shape, with the length of side perhaps 20 yards; I guess a sort of 1920's fake-up of a medieval hall, but decorated very plainly. Mainly white masonry with heavy brown timber trim. Service very good, Otter beer very good (rather spoiled by my being on the steering wheel), food adequate, bread (of which there was quite a lot) not too good. I think they might have done better to keep the food a bit simpler. But one of our number was very taken with a pudding called Honey Bavarois. I was very taken by the grounds outside. Some very fine trees, terraces and at least one good bit of sculpture (above). Henry Moore certainly knew how to do sculpture which sits on its plinth OK. A trick that many sculptors & sculptresses do not manage at all. Worse, I suspect they do not see what I am on about.
Drewe Arms very village pub, not far from the delightful Fingle Bridge and nothing at all like the White Hart. Thatched roof. Steps down into the pub from the road. Jumble of small, low ceilinged rooms. A moderately gastro menu, ambience very good. Half a dozen or so real ales, served off the settle. Various village boozers, young and old. I stuck to the reliable Otter. Leaving aside what other people had, I went for Giant Prawns, of which I got five, which were very good, but the first of which doubled as a water pistol and squirted red goo over the new to me lightly linenned and lightly coloured jacket from M&S via Exeter Oxfam. Very nice it was too before this little accident. I took a chance and followed up with something called Torbay Sole - which turned out to be excellent. Along the same lines as a Dover Sole but rounder, half way in shape to a Lemon Sole. Sadly, rather than being served with proper green vegetables, perhaps spinach or mange tout, it came with oily mixed leaves, which at least had the decency to come on a side dish. I could probably fix that on another occasion. I wanted to finish up with bread & cheese without the trimmings but this was too much for the prevailing system. The best they could do was bread & cheddar, boarded with all the trimmings - which was two better than the mixed cheese platter with biscuits which was on the menu. Bread OK but not good. Cheese quite good but far too much of it. Maybe a quarter of a pound. So for once I bagged up two thirds of it for sandwiches the following day (made, as it happens, from a Tesco Coburg loaf from Sowton. What one would expect from a big store bakery). Beverages other than beer - wine & water - good. All in all a good place; we will go again should occasion arise.
And then we had the Poulett Arms, which got off to a good start with a very louche looking Adam & Eve draped around the arms. Smaller selection of settle beer. I continued stuck to the Otter. Nice dining room and with a bit of bar left. Smoking den umbrella and seat free. Perhaps people don't smoke much in Somerset. Sticking again to what I had, kicked off with a starter confected from broad beans - which meant that I had to have it. Good to try, but a little disappointed with the flavour of beans a little lost in a yoghurty/minty sauce. Followed by a very decent fillet steak, served with, amongst other things, chips in a white mug. Very good chips they were too. They could manage green vegetables of a sort; that is to say not cabbage and well oiled with butter. Followed by bread & cheddar. Bread far and away the best of the lot; cheese a bit odd. Room temperature but oddly creamy/crumbly for a cheddar. Quite eatable but not really the real thing. White wine good (described as summery, name starting with A and not very long but that is about all I am sure about. Possibly Alois), port & whisky good. All in all another good place; we will go again should occasion arise.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Mercure Southgate, Exeter
Various exit thoughts on this very central hotel. Very handy for the cathedral. And on this second visit it dawns on me that the name is 'Southgate' because the hotel is pretty much on the site of the old south gate to Exeter, now vanished. It is also just outside one of the chunks of the city wall which is still standing. So a suburban hotel, properly speaking.
I commented last time on the massive new pine staircase. Sadly, we now find that despite the massivity, the balustrade at the top is now loose and not confidence inspiring. Would no longer do to crash against the thing while drunk.
Moving onto to our handsome premium room, we find that one of the drawer fronts is also loose. Maybe a drunk already tried crashing into that. But pleased to find that the television did not find it necessary to screen one of those yucky, pseudo personal greetings that you get in some hotels.
Also pleased to find that one could open the windows - something not permitted in the Holiday Inn at Solstice Services - which helped with temperature control. Duvet still miles too hot for the presently warm & damp June weather, but by the third night the housekeepers had worked out that the fact that we had removed the duvet from its cover meant that we would quite like a proper top sheet. Very substantial affair it was too.
Bed time reading was mainly 'A View of Delft' by one Anthony Bailey, 20p from Surrey Libraries. I share two factlets. First, Vermeer did not produce a great deal, maybe 3 paintings a year during his 20 active years. These three paintings fetched something like a year's wages of an able seaman. Whereas now, the same three paintings would fetch millions, nothing like the year's wages of a seaman at all. Second, his woman in interior compositions filled the gap left by the banning of Virgin Mary compositions by the local church. Idealised pictures of women were clearly a necessary of life.
The bathroom contained a substantial, square & flat bottomed sink, a smaller version of the Belfast sinks which are back in fashion in kitchens after a break of maybe 50 years. Very good for washing carrots in; perhaps a first for this particular sink.
We only used the restaurant for breakfast, which was marred by the irregular supply of tomato juice and the regularly poor quality of the bread. On the third day, BH got around to complaining about the far too loud background music - which, to give them their due - was immediately turned down to the point of inaudibility.
Visit ended with a visit to the reception desk, a desk which was given a homely touch by a rather tatty home-made card index, used for storing details of inbound guests, the printing out of which was one of the duties of the early morning shift. Presumably a device introduced by some imaginative shift leader to augment the efficiency of the computer systems.
While at reception we were further entertained by a rather tired and grumpy gent. who was complaining that when he had arrived very late the night before, he had been given the key to a room which was already occupied, by an occupant who was not pleased to be disturbed, at, let us hope, nothing more compromising than sleeping. From which we deduce that at Mercure the reservation, room allocation and key subsystems are only imperfectly, if at all, integrated. Key subsystem perhaps sold by some enthusiastic firm of lock people, without regard to the wider, hotel keeping issues involved.
Smokers should be warned that smoking outside the front door is discouraged after early evening. This for the Health & Safety of guests who might happen to have rooms in the vicinity and who might feel the need to supplement their air conditioning by opening their windows.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
A smaller plug for Tavistock
Back for our what appears to be the first visit since the 21st January 2010 or thereabouts.First part of the visit entirely satisfactory. The church of St. Eustacius is still there and still very grand, I dare say far and away the grandest of the four churches in the land which honour this particular saint, FIL's patron saint. Or almost, it being his family rather than his given name which is that of the saint. So not his name day in the European sense. The small white mouse was still decorating one of the pew ends and the three hares were still decorating one of the ceiling bosses. We were also treated to a bit of organ rehearsal with the organ, apparently of modest size, producing a very immodest amount of noise.
On the way there we had tried to get into the even larger Catholic church up the hill, a massive grey contruction of the 19th century; huge bell tower and huge porch (above). Vaguely Byzantine. Very firmly locked. I assumed that this was a Catholic attempt to assert their primacy in the town at the time of their emancipation, while wondering where they found the money for the thing. But I was quite wrong. We learned at St. Eustacius that the massive grey construction was the product of a niveau riche breakaway movement which turned out to be a white elephant and which was then sold on to the Catholics. Perhaps it being firmly locked means that it has remained elephantine blanche.
Then onto the usually excellent chip shop where the chips and cod remained excellent but where my haddock was disappointing. Wet and fishy tasting rather than firm and dry.
Pushed onto the Oxfam shops to find that their previously wonderful seam of classical vinyl has been exhausted. Emerged empty handed.
Two buzzards on the way home. One high flying just before Moretonhampstead and one low flying just after. Plus a demi-tweet in Tavistock itself in the form of a buff chested finch size singing bird which flapped off before I could get near enough to work out what it was. This being reasonably close these days. Probably a male chaffinch.
I close with a plug for Exeter library. They might charge aliens £4.40 an hour for access, but it is access in a large, cool & comfortable room and access without one's screen being festooned by very loud advertisments. Plus MS Office, USB ports & etc. Just like the screen which I get at home - unlike the festooned & chargeable screen in a hot cubby hole offered by the hotel. Which last is odd, the hotel being a Mercure, in the same group as Novotel, with the Novotel at Ipswich having offeried us a very splendid large screen Apple, entirely unfestooned and entirely free of charge.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
A plug for Sidmouth
Entirely by accident we paid a visit to Sidmouth today. Which turned out to be spot on for a lunch time visit on a bright, breezy day. Apart from being a very decent resort, very understanding about older people, I was able to buy the first proper white bread I have had for some time.
And next door to the baker there was a grand old grocer, still complete with fancy mahogany shop furnishings, where I was able to buy some emmenthal cheese which they were quite happy to slice up for me (I had left my knife in the car), thus making up my lunch box. I was also able to buy some bread flour, stone, wheel & water ground in some local mill. The lady of the house warned me that it makes rather heavy bread and was best cut with some regular steel & roller ground flour. Given that my bread is already on the heavy side, certainly compared with the luncheon bread, the next bake promises to be interesting.
After luncheon we proceeded in a westerly direction and ascended the cliffs to the Connaught Gardens. Just the place for a snooze on a sunny afternoon with plenty of flowers to take in in between times. This included both a thin hot house with a variety of cacti & pitcher plants and a rather squarer tea house with a variety of tea & cakes. Not to mention the bandstand.
Maybe one day we will take a week out in one of the grand looking hotels.
More seriously, maybe one day I will sign up for an NVQ Part I in bakery and learn how they do it. My home efforts, while entirely eatable, good even, are not like the stuff that good English bakers make and are not getting any more like it. Various theories have been advanced - for example, the injection of steam into the dough, the injection of steam into the oven and the use of high powered dough mixers - but these are not theories which I can easily test. Will I be able to find a course which focusses on white bread and which does not spend most of its time on the construction of the fancy bread which to my mind is an excuse for not being able to make simple bread properly? Will the course be full of bored young offenders being re-educated? Or bored housewives?
A casual peek at NESCOT - my most local further education joint, which did a good job on getting me my only and rather lowly IT qualifications and which boasts something called a senior management team headed by a highly paid lady (with portraits on display in the entrance hall) - offers nothing under bakery and just two courses under catering. Both to do with food hygeine. Clearly far more important than food, let alone bakery.
And next door to the baker there was a grand old grocer, still complete with fancy mahogany shop furnishings, where I was able to buy some emmenthal cheese which they were quite happy to slice up for me (I had left my knife in the car), thus making up my lunch box. I was also able to buy some bread flour, stone, wheel & water ground in some local mill. The lady of the house warned me that it makes rather heavy bread and was best cut with some regular steel & roller ground flour. Given that my bread is already on the heavy side, certainly compared with the luncheon bread, the next bake promises to be interesting.
After luncheon we proceeded in a westerly direction and ascended the cliffs to the Connaught Gardens. Just the place for a snooze on a sunny afternoon with plenty of flowers to take in in between times. This included both a thin hot house with a variety of cacti & pitcher plants and a rather squarer tea house with a variety of tea & cakes. Not to mention the bandstand.
Maybe one day we will take a week out in one of the grand looking hotels.
More seriously, maybe one day I will sign up for an NVQ Part I in bakery and learn how they do it. My home efforts, while entirely eatable, good even, are not like the stuff that good English bakers make and are not getting any more like it. Various theories have been advanced - for example, the injection of steam into the dough, the injection of steam into the oven and the use of high powered dough mixers - but these are not theories which I can easily test. Will I be able to find a course which focusses on white bread and which does not spend most of its time on the construction of the fancy bread which to my mind is an excuse for not being able to make simple bread properly? Will the course be full of bored young offenders being re-educated? Or bored housewives?
A casual peek at NESCOT - my most local further education joint, which did a good job on getting me my only and rather lowly IT qualifications and which boasts something called a senior management team headed by a highly paid lady (with portraits on display in the entrance hall) - offers nothing under bakery and just two courses under catering. Both to do with food hygeine. Clearly far more important than food, let alone bakery.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Fine soup
Fine soup today rather than fine wine, and very good is was too.
Take half a tenderloin of pork, 2 ounces of pearl barley and simmer in 3 pints of water for an hour. Add two pounds of finely sliced white cabbage, including here the sliced stalk to provide a little textural variety. Simmer for a further five minutes and serve in green Beryl ware soup plates. At this point the water should not cover the other ingredients. There should be plenty poking out above the water line.
Flavour of soup enhanced by its excellent appearance. Pale grey stock, off white barley, darker grey pork and pale green cabbage, all nicely offset by the darker green of the soup plates.
Sadly, not something that can be had in restaurants. Neither flavourings nor E-numbers to give the cook some creative satisfaction and the stuff does not stand well. Needs to be eaten fresh. We did the lot in one go, with a little white bread.
Oddments
One use to say of British Airways 'speak their name with pride'. Then there was the tail fin saga. Readers may remember all the fuss and bother when BA thought to paint their tail fins with arty-ethno designs. Rather clever but widely disliked, notably by Mrs. Thatcher. Probably The Queen. Now we have the tail fin saga reprised. It now seems that the marketing chaps at BA are game for another go and were so impressed by the work illustrated here on May 12th last year (about the fifth hit if you search for 'detritus'. Click to enlarge) that they have commissioned the Dame Trace to run a competition to choose a collaborator to work with herself on an installation which wraps up a tail fin. One of the conditions is that the work must involve dirty sheets and the contents of a litter bin selected at random, but at midnight and from under a full moon, from among those in WC1A. They, the marketing chaps that is, took a full page advertisement in the Guardian to tell us all about this important event. Shall I sell my modest number of shares in disgust? Shall I pen a 'yours disgusted' to the Guardian? Or perhaps to the DT?
But there is hope for the arty world yet. I recently read about something called the rolling bridge, installed in Paddington Basin. Been around since 2005 but I had never heard of it before. A footbridge of modest size over a canal, made of eight triangular sections which roll up onto the right hand bank when a boat wants to go through. I have hopes that this might be an attractive and interesting looking artefact. Although I suspect the attraction might be reduced by the rolling up turning out to be a bit of a gimmick, there being no actual requirement for boats to go through this particular bit of canal.
Further afield, FIL recently inspected a rotating bridge in Falkirk, a contraption which replaces a flight of locks (now under a housing estate) and which moves canal boats from one canal to another. It looks rather splendid in its pictures but I did wonder about value for money given that the thing must have cost quite a lot of millions. Did the ratepayers of Falkirk think it a good idea? Did they want the council to whack out their hard earned dosh on this bit of regional pride?
I defer judgement until I have seen the thing for myself.
PS: I feel the need to report that today, for the first time in 37 weeks, I have polished a pair of shoes. Brown shoes. The polish was a bit dry but it still worked. Polishing shoes has become something of an event since I moved into the world of trainers at the suggestion of one Hugo Williams.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Rising vaguaries
Time to rise remains a bit uncertain. Using the new to me Waitrose Canadian Very Strong White, got a very rapid second rise. Especially considering that the rise was in the slow airing cupboard rather than in the accelerating direct sunlight (when available, which it was not today). Less than two hours for the best rise yet. A rise which survived the transfer to the oven and cooking. Yet to be sampled.Thursday, June 16, 2011
Day late
This to mark Bloom's day, a day after the event. This illustration of the last page of the original day taken from a copy of Ulysses bought some years ago, for £3 from York Books in Honiton (http://www.gyork.co.uk/). Nice reading copy rather than a collector's item, a Bodley Head reprint of 1960, hardly if at all read when I bought it and not much more read now.The other event of the day was reading about how the Italians have put one over Berlusconi by stopping him from building any more nuclear power stations. Or something like that. Talk about bashing the nose to please the face. And the Germans, normally a stolid and sensible lot, did something similar a few weeks ago. Knee jerk reaction from the bad business in Japan.
Given our dependence on power - even very green veggies are generally quite keen on hot baths - and the state of supply, you might think that voters would go for whatever offered a bit of energy security, or at least a bit of diversity of production. Spread the risk a bit. But no, in the wisdom of our collective minds orgo has become good and nuclear has gone off-orgo. So we can't have it. And saying we can't have it is also a good way of having a pop at the capitalist-industrialist-old-etonian nexus which runs the country. So let's have a pop.
And while we are at it, let's have a pop at windmills too.
Where on earth do these people think the power is going to come from when the Chinese use as much of the stuff as we do and the Middle East has gone up in smoke? Or the Somali pirates have sunk all the oil tankers.
The French, by way of contrast, still seem quite keen on nuclear, doing a lot more of it than pretty much anyone else. They have done something useful with all the expertise built up in their force de frappe, stupid though that might be for other reasons and assuming that there is indeed some useful spin off from bombs to power stations. Would you employ a used nuclear bomb engineer in a nearly new nuclear power station?
PS: there is some popular phrase about bashing the nose to spite the face, but, for once, Mr. Google unhelpful. Lots of hits about people bashing each other to intemperate language but nothing about the phrase. So I can't even get the phrase right, never mind know where it came from.
Ironmongery
Rather shocked by the price of hinges at our local Travis Perkins yesterday - not that I am complaining about the reliably helpful people from the teepee. I do not suppose their prices are any higher than anyone else's. But the shock was that eight 3 inch butt hinges came to £25 or so. And then there were the screws, the glue (common sense reigned here. No need for proof of age) and the timber to attach the hinges to. Further proof that is often a lot cheaper just to buy whatever it is from IKEA than to make it yourself. OK, so making it yourself you get all the satisfaction of hand crafting and you get to decide on the dimensions yourself, but it is not cheaper. And that is without counting one's time.
Which reminds me of the large number of wooden gates dotted around the Polseden Lacey estate. Foot passenger gates for when footpaths enter fields which might contain sheep or cows. New and substantial affairs, fashioned out of 4 by 4 (inches) if not larger timber, quite possibly oak. Probably weigh a hundred weight or more. Which brings me onto the gate furniture: all new and substantial, fashioned out of galvanised steel, with the flat bits maybe 5mm thick. Not the sort of stuff I would care to have to work with on the sort of vice that I have got. Gate furniture which is cunning enough to allow senior visitors to work it, to allow the gates to more or less shut themselves and strong enough to hold a cow trying to make a break for it. All of which suggests to me that one of these gates must cost hundreds of pounds by the time you have hung the thing. All presumably reflected in the leases on which the estate is farmed.
Although we did hear sheep (and probably lambs) there, our close encounter with sheep had to wait until I purchased an English leg from Manor Green Road, 6.25 lbs of it. Decided on three part cooking: half an hour at 190C, then two hours at 170C, then turn the oven off to let the leg rest for quarter of an hour. Leg rubbed down with lard before the off; oven opened once for basting. Turned out OK. Moist with just a hint of pink in the middle. But I erred in slicing a bit thick, which meant the slices were a bit chewy, in a way that I associate with frozen New Zealand rather than fresh English. Served with boiled cabbage and boiled new potatoes. The latter taste the difference from Sainsbury's (reduced to clear) and not too hot at all. BH explained that this was all down to the hot weather stuffing the tail end of the early potato season on Jersey.
I liked it rather better cold today, sliced thin.
PS: I read this morning in my new Mexican cooking book, that serious cooks of Mexican food make their own lard. That way your get a much nicer flavour than that of the rank stuff you (and me) get from the likes of Sainsbury's. But then I only use it to grease my bread tins these days, barring the occasional egg sar-knee.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
More Poles
Or to be more precise, perhaps our third visit to Polesdon Lacey of the year. Which means that our household has now accounted for 8 of the 240,000 or so visits the place gets in a year. If we suppose that we will make another two, mental arithmetic suggests that there are another 19,999 households like us.
Rose gardens past their best, but still plenty to see and smell. Long herbaceous border in good form but not in the same league as that at Hampton Court.
Good value lunch in the canteen, just over £20 for two including two mains, one pudding and one pot of tea for one. The mains included some quite decent boiled green vegetables - of which the portions were a little sparing, but perhaps reflecting the average age of midweek visitors. A plus of midweek was that the place had a tremendous stillness about it. Plenty of bird noises and agricultural noises, but no bustle of people and cars. This is not to say that the place was empty; just that there was plenty of room for everybody.
Came across a coat of arms in the garden, carved into a stone plaque. A bent and naked upper arm holding something. An arm which I cannot resolve in Google. Searches give plenty of hits about tattoos & deltoids and some about coats of arms involving arms. But nothing which answers the description. I shall have to ponder how to refine the search and report back in due course.
Came across some volunteers in the garden pruning some young trees - that is to say 10 or 20 years old rather than 100. They were making a bit of a mess of it and were generally giving a good impression of Dad's Army. I suppose you can't entrust volunteers with proper ladders and chainsaws to do a neat job. Thinking about it, we decided that while you might be allowed to have volunteers without chain saws in the garden, you were probably not allowed to have volunteers of any sort in the kitchen. This because, remembering what Parkinson (see May 16th) had to say about the need for discipline in the kitchen, it seems unlikely that volunteers would put up with it. A nice old lady (or gent.) doing her bit for charity while having a natter was not to have some young chef bawling her out for forgetting to wash her hands. Or using scissors when she should have been using a knife.
Later on, while holding forth on the burgeoning market for redundant utility (for example, water) sheds in the woods, managed to have a close encounter with a cow pat. Sun glasses fell off and had a very close encounter. Luckily there was a trough nearby and we were not minded to fuss too much about how clean the water in it was. As a result of this missed a possible tweet: a large grey brown bird flapping across the field. Big crow sized but not crow coloured. Maybe we had disturbed a snoozing owl?
Later still, while kneading the dough this morning, got to wondering about the top ten problems in the world. Rather irritated by their being so untidy: one could come up with lots of problems but they all tended to be related to each other. Not independent and orthogonal in the way of the dimensions of a vector space at all. For what it is worth, I append the list (5 too manys, 1 too much and 4 runnings out), in no particular order.
Too many people.
Too many poor people consuming too little.
Too many rich people consuming too much.
Too many people who are economically inactive or under-active.
Too many big arms falling into the hands of bad people. Not to mention small arms falling into the hands of very bad people.
Too much inequality driving too much migration.
Running out of energy (it being unwise to rely on fusion coming up with the goods any time soon).
Running out of food.
Running out of fresh water.
Running out of decent weather.
Pix
This is, I am told, an aerial view of the Great Barrier Reef. One of a whole lot of rather splendid pictures taken by a spaceman by the name of Douglas Wheelock. For those who know how to tweet, which excludes me, there are lots more there.Now getting into Craig on Germany (see 12th June). Rather a different take to that in Steinberg, with the strangeness of Bismark much less visible. In which I have learned that Germans in 1870, having put up with many years of large French armies banging around southern Germany during the French aggression of the 18th century, thought that the time was right to try and create both a natural frontier and a defensive glacis in one stroke by grabbing Alsace & Lorraine. Much the same as the line that Stalin took after the second world war. Which doesn't make the grabbing any less of a mistake, but one can better understand why the mistake was made. Bit like boom and bust. It just keeps on going round and round.
Yesterday paid a visit to the new railway bridge over Borough High Street at London Bridge. A steel affair with very extravagant curved steel tubes decorating the southern face. Quite an achievement to make and install the things without shutting down the high street. But, to my eye, whoever designed the bridge broke the structure and function rule mentioned on May 26th. While the steel tubes might have something to do with holding the bridge up, they are essentially a large sculpture, a large sculpture which is far too large relative to the thing that it is supposed to be adorning. It is just pretending to be an integral part of the bridge. Overall effect rather unsatisfactory, although rather less so than that of the wobbling bridge between Tate Junk and St Paul's, which fails the same test.
The problem is not that buildings should not include fake structural elements. Fake structural elements can be used to create a sort of visual narrative and lots of buildings have them with success. Think of the fake beam ends running under the eaves of neo-classical buildings. Or the fan vaulting of King's College Chapel. But they should not dominate the narrative. And with this move into the land of bubbles and froth, I had better depart for my morning ablutions.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Nature notes
Took a turn around Epsom Common yesterday, where we came across some cows in a recently cleared bit of woodland, belching green house gases into sky. Will I ever be moved to start making a proper fuss about the way the ecos mismanage our Common? Will our Council ever be moved to withdraw the eco grant in favour of older persons' carer grant?
A bit further on, we came across a mother and baby deer. First deer I have seen on the Common for a while. BH says she often turns them up when on the Common with dogs in the late afternoon. The dogs liking to chase deer and the deer liking to come out for tea in the late afternoon.
A bit further on still, we came to the aspens, noticed on 7th May. And, for the first time, actually saw aspens trembling like aspens. When a light wind catches a branch in the right way, all its leaves do indeed tremble, giving the whole a very distinctive shimmering effect. Never seen anything like it before; but now really do understand where the phrase comes from. Do other trees do it?
Following my following of Boon, last mentioned on April 6th, I was pleased to read in this week's TLS that I can buy a book with title 'Mimesis and Science' and sub-title 'Empircal Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion' from the Michigan State University Press. 'This exciting compendium brings together some of the foremost scholars of ... mimetic theory ... foundational role of imitation in human life ... '. A snip at £21.95. Did Mr. Boon contribute? Will the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University be as snooty about this offering as he was about Boon's?
And I am pleased also to be able to record that using 'Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University' as a search string, this very blog makes it to page 7 on the Google search results. I really do exist, on roughly the same page as the good professor.
Then for some reason I was moved to look up what a snob was, something that I get called from time to time, with surprising results. It first meant a cobbler or a cobbler's apprentice. It then became Cambridge slang for anyone who was not a member of the university. So, as it turns out, I do qualify. It then moved on to mean anyone who admires, copies or tries to pass themselves off as a person of higher standing than they actually are. To qualify one has to do it vulgarly; trying to better oneself in a dignified way is OK. But I deny the charge of vulgarity. Perhaps the point is that the true snob is not conscious of his or her crime. It is the lack of self-consciousness which makes the crime. I shall have to ponder further.
And lastly, carried on looking for my own trumpet by asking Mr. Google about 'Steinberg being a Pennsylvanian professor'. And I score hit 2 on page 1. Mr. Google clearly up to the mark on that one, my post being less than 24 hours old. The only disappointment was that hit 1 was all about an important Pennsylvanian dentist who happened to go to a Pennsylvanian university and who also happened to be called Steinberg. The nerve of the chap. Maybe I could get rid of him by enclosing the search string in quotes.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Bismark
Now completed the first pass of 'Bismark' by Jonathan Steinberg, a book reserved from the library some months ago, at the time I noticed a review. I have saved the £25 I might have spent on it, but the catch now is that I have to return it, renewal not being permitted as it seems that someone else wants to read it. Maybe I will get to spend the £25 after all.
An interesting read, although I thought the editing a bit sloppy. There were plenty of sentences which I could not fathom and there were some US colloquialisms - like kid sister - which jarred. I suppose I should not complain about this last, Steinberg being a Pennsylvanian professor. Maps and index a bit thin. Long German names a bit difficult, rather like those in a long Russian novel - in which last there is often a helpful cast list at the beginning. Which would be even more helpful if it could be folded out and kept in view as one tried to read the text. No such luxury in the present work.
Like some other great men, many unattractive personal qualities, qualities which eventually finished him off. When he lost his master, the first Kaiser, he had no other friends. Those that he had had had been used and discarded, usually brutally. But I am pleased to be able to include a triple had. I wonder if I will be able to stretch to the quadruple one day?
One of the unattractive qualities was his anti-Semitism, something he shared with many Germans of his day. Which, oddly, did not stop him having very close relations with some Jews or stop him from attending the very grand inauguration of the very grand synagogue in Oranienburger Strasse in 1866. In which he did one better than me in that I only managed to sit in a bar across the street. But Steinberg has an interesting take on this anti-Semitism, in an odd way, almost a sympathy for it. German conservatives, especially the mostly not very rich squires on the poor land in the east, hated the passing of the old order. The passing of the world where everyone had their station in life and many things could not be bought or sold. They hated the new world where everything could be bought and sold. A new world of barrow-boys, hucksters and swindlers. A new world in which barrow-boys could buy up the ancestral estates of good, honest junkers. Hates which are cousins of the present hates, for some of the same reasons, of bankers and hedge funders. And the Jews, prominent in this hated new world, came to be the symbol of it. The focus and lightening conductor for some of the tensions of the time. Some of this dislike, if not hatred, of the marketplace can be found in Tolstoy.
Queen Victoria (our one that is, not one of the German ones) thought that the unattractiveness extended to wickedness. She may have had a point. And while he did not get as many people unnecessarily, if not casually, killed as Napoleon I, he did , quite deliberately and for domestic reasons, provoke three quite unnecessary wars, which must have got through 500,000 souls or so. What price his soul at the Pearly Gates? 500,000 years in the boiling oil? On the other hand, how many other politicians of his generation were in competition for the bad stakes?
Against that, one needs to bear in mind that he had many attractive personal qualities, in addition to his political skills. Not many of us manage to climb the slippery pole without any of the former.
Another topic on which Steinberg has interesting things to say is the forces of history. The crudely Marxist view in which history is propelled by rules & regulations and will march on without much regard for the deeds of individuals. There might be individuals but they have just grown up, swollen into the holes left them by said rules & regulations. If not one (individual), then there will be another. A view with which Steinberg disagrees. His view is that the history of Germany from 1850 was shaped by a number of accidents. That the first Kaiser was a weak man who lived for a very long time. That somebody like Bismark happened to be around at the right time. That the Germans won the battle of Königgrätz - which they might easily have lost.
Then there is the growth of the Prussian army. It was not that great in 1860 and it needed the ten years to become the army which defeated the French in 1870 - a defeat which was by no means a walkover. The Prussians took plenty of casualties. And one result of beating the French was that the Germans were sure that one day the French would seek their revenge - against a country without natural defences. So they launched a pre-emptive strike in 1914. When, as it turned out, they would have done much better to sit behind barbed wire entanglements along their frontiers and simply machine gunned any French or Russian armies that tried it on. For all their Prussian efficiency, they had not worked out that defence worked better than attack, given the weapons available in 1914.
And then the lack of growth of proper political institutions. Bismark's Germany might have had houses of parliament but it did not have democratic government of the sort enjoyed in places like France, UK and the US. Governance was a mess. Despite its wealth and success in other spheres. A weakness which led more or less directly to the disasters and horrors of the Third Reich.
Lots of other good stuff. Next step to reread my first edition of 1978 of Gordon Craig's study covering the period 1866-1945, and about which I presently remember nothing. Perhaps it will come back to me. A book also, as it happens, from OUP. Then back to Steinberg for a second take.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Early bird
This morning achieved, for the first time ever, getting the dough into the airing cupboard for its first rise by 0700. The 42nd batch: for more details see dropbox. To celebrate this event I thought to have the first fried egg sandwich for a good while - excluding one or two taken outdoors. And the first time I have used my own bread for such a thing: I thought it was now near enough the real thing now for a sandwich to work. Which it did.
Followed up by finding a use for paprika, following yesterday's post. Something I do not make a lot of use of. Finely chop and fry a couple of cloves of garlic in butter. Add a bit of pounded black pepper. Add finely chopped onion (3 medium) and simmer for a bit. Add a few pinches of paprika and simmer for a bit more. Slice up 544g of 'taste the basics' Scottish rump steak from Sainsbury's (for rather less than £5), add that and simmer for 10 minutes. Add finely chopped tomato (2 small and 3 large (8 large on the vine for £1 from the market this morning)) and simmer for 20 minutes. Add finely chopped mushroom stalk and coarsely sliced mushroom caps and simmer for 5 minutes. Serve with boiled crinkly cabbage and boiled white rice. Very nice too. FIL even went for seconds. Maybe a bit more paprika next time.
And while all this was going on, I have been wondering about the infallibility of the pope, prompted by reading about the doings of Bismark in 1870 (of which more on another occasion). It seems that Pope Pius IX put the first Vatican Council up to asserting that a properly consecrated pope could not err when making a formal pronouncement at a formal occasion on a matter of doctrine. An assertion which ran right up against the anti-clerical, liberal tide which at that time was in flood, not least in the pope's native Italy. All kinds of people seriously grumpy about the assertion. Tactless if not provocative.
Given that senior civil servants at the Vatican are clever and well educated chaps, one supposes that they thought about what they were doing. They thought about the vagaries of language and the difficulty of saying almost anything with complete precision. Difficulties which were, by this time, being thought about. Not least by all those German scholars puzzling over the literal truth of the old Testament.
For example, suppose that the pope was to decree that all the cats in the wood were white. One could argue the toss about most of the words in this apparently innocuous statement. Does cats include wild cats? Does it include big cats? Are we talking about entire adults only? Where does the wood begin and end? Are we clear about the boundary? What about a cat stuck, straddled across the barbed wire marking the boundary? What about visiting cats? Dead cats? And who is to say whether any particular cat is white? How many shades of off-white are we going to include? What about bits of some other colour on the paws or the tip of the tail? A good Jesuit could have lots of fun with it all. Never mind a more tricky doctrine like that of the immaculate conception. (I note in passing that the product of an immaculate conception would have to be a woman, as the male ingredient had been omitted. Perhaps appropriate now that so many of our C of E priests are in fact priestesses. Except that I am not sure whether they are signed up for immaculate conceptions).
All of which means that the statement of doctrine, beautifully drafted though it might be, needs to be backed up by a team of clerical lawyers who can adjudicate on the issues which will inevitably arise at the margins. All of which rather muddies the once clear waters.
I learned at Tooting that such statements are made quite rarely, popes not liking to give too many hostages to fortune. Which reminds me that New York Jews are apt to make a bit of a game of it all, going in for arcane & enthusiastic disputes about whether this or that article or process is truly kosher.
For technical details see http://www.catholic.com/library/Papal_Infallibility.asp.
PS: shady goings on down Wheelers Lane this morning. Municipal dustcart pulled up under the trees. Private builders pick-up backed up to to the back of it. Various clunking noises coming from the innards of the dustcart. Empty pick-up pulls away as I approach. Clearly a deal concocted by two bunches of fly boys in the nearby Coopers' Arms. Was it a one-off or is it a regular arrangement?
Friday, June 10, 2011
The land of the free
Commentators from the US like to take a pop at the colonial history of us old worlders, laying on 'all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights' stuff with a shovel. Conveniently forgetting their own gobbling up of Northern Mexico, Hawaii and sundry other places. Most of which they have retained, unlike us old worlders who have returned.
So against a background of their great and the good employing lots of illegal immigrants from Southern Mexico on less than minimum wages, I was amused to discover this week, following two quite separate threads, of their love affair with the cuisine of Mexico. Rather more intense than our own, more prosaic and in any case declining, love affair with the cuisine of the sub-continent.
The first thread concerned another go at lentils (see, for example, May 13th). Not having any kabanos to hand, not even any non-standard chicken ones (something I buy by mistake from time to time), I thought to try the chorizo sold by the butcher in Manor Green Road. At which point the question of gluten arises: do chorizos contain gluten? An important point on which I had forgotten to quiz the butcher. Ask Mr. Google and he comes up with a wealth of chorizo flavoured web sites. Most of them driven by meat cookery nuts from the US. Some of which waxed lyrical about the difference between Mexican and Spanish chorizo. One of which waxed lyrical about the importance of getting the right quality smoked paprika with which to spice up the sausage. Smoked paprika indeed.
As far as I could see, chorizio did not involve anything which looked glutinous. The only possibility was some stuff called fermento, used with the paprika for spicing up; ostensibly a milk product but just the sort of thing that might include wheat flour for some food processing reason or other. After a conference with BH, decided to take a chance and the stuff went down FIL without a problem.
The second thread was chancing across a whole sub-culture of cookery people in the US who enthuse about the variety and sophistication of the 1,000 year old cuisine of Mexico. A continuous tradition, barely disturbed by the arrival of a few gold diggers from old Spain at the half way mark. In the lead is one Diana Kennedy, who actually originated in these islands, but has, it seems, become am important sub-cultural person. I was sufficiently moved to buy a copy of her book 'My Mexico'. It remains to be seen whether I shall do any of her recipes. My one experience of Mexican grub was in Leicester Square and was not too impressive. Hot, red and greasy. Probably not very authentic either.
Heritage
Another morsel from http://englishrussia.com/. Not quite sure what or where it is, but clearly a job for the National Trust if they run out of things to turn into theme parks here.Maybe they could ship out some young offenders to help them with the clean up.
And I had thought that the Soviets were deeply into painstaking, not to say pedantic, preservation of their Tsarist built heritage. Along with the Tsarist police heritage. How wrong I was.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
More news
Further investigation reveals that stag beetles can indeed fly and that they do vary a great deal in size. FIL may well be right after all about the monsters he used to see back west. More luridly, it seems that magpies are really keen on them, eating the abdomens, but leaving the rest more or less intact. And alive for a day or so, if a bit sluggish. Which fits the description of our chap, including the presence of plenty of magpies in the garden. Not sure if I have the stomach to turn the thing over and see whether it still has one.
Then over the tea-time kippers, we pondered about some stuff in today's Guardian about how the surveillance state has reached our schools.
The first bit of Guardian outrage we spotted was about the use of finger print machines to support library and canteen services. Which did not strike me as such a bad idea. Finger print machines are not intrusive, they are hard to cheat and remove the need for children to carry tickets or plastic - which they are apt to lose or forget. They also get to learn about a bit of technology. One could build the stuff into lessons. Assuming that the technology is indeed value for money, that it does what it says on the tin, why not?
Perhaps because it is presumably a lot dearer than the bar code technology used by Surrey Libraries - which works fine, but which does require you to carry your bar code around with you. Which I do, all the time. Tucked behind the plastic. So I do wonder about value for money.
The second bit of outrage was about the use of CCTV everywhere, in some cases justified by a rather unlikely yarn about how useful they were in the support of teacher training. This we found rather unsettling, BH (who used to be a teacher) more than me (or should I say I at this point?). What have we come to that we need to film our children at their lessons, never mind in their toilets and changing rooms?
I had the same sort of unease about the DT desire to open up civil servant claims for travel and subsistence to public scrutiny. OK, so there is some abuse, but the amount of money involved is probably fairly small in the scheme of things. Do we really want to be worrying about how every bit of T&S is going to look when printed up by an unfriendly newspaper? Would this be a good use of management time? And I would be surprised to find that civil service T&S is much out of line with what goes on in the private sector. And where would such intrusion stop? Would the DT want to move into the HR arena? Give newspapers the right to second guess all sorts of management decisions in that area?
Presumably private schools with their more robust attitude to expulsion and their more committed parents do not feel the same need for the surveillance state. Not that that helps the rest of us. Or the sales boys and girls who peddle it all.
The Guardian, being a newspaper, confined itself to how awfuls about all the surveillance. I did not spot anything about how better to address the issues which prompt schools to go in for it.
Monsters behind the bin
BH spotted a monster stag beetle lurking behind the compost bin on the patio. The body of the thing was about two inches long, the largest either of us have ever seen. Indeed, not seen one at all for a while. There was also a reddish tint to the black, especially around the claws. Also something not seen before.FIL, however, claimed that he had seen much bigger and better specimens in Devon. Perhaps they like the wet there.
But it remains a mystery what the thing is doing there or how it got there. Yards and yards from the nearest open ground. Now been there for at least 24 hours. Can they fly?
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Tale of two arties
We started off at the Château Dell Denbies, down in Dorking, recently awarded some accolade for the finest rosé in the land. A substantial place, in a fine setting and with a very large car park. There used to be a large courtyard, but this has now acquired a glass roof under which you can take tea surrounded by merchandise which is a cross between that which might be obtained from a National Trust shop and that which might be obtained from Chessington Garden Centre. I imagine that they also share with Chessington Garden Centre the important commercial fact that there is a lot more money in selling tea and cake in a place with a car park than there is in the core business, be that bedding plants or rosé. The art gallery is upstairs, occupied for the week by a consortium of arty people, including a neighbour of ours. One of them was kind enough to introduce me to the Hillsong Church, an outfit of which I had not previously heard, which sports a very fancy web site (http://www.hillsong.com/) and the Leatherhead branch of which gathers three times a Sunday in the Leatherhead theatre. The very place where we once had Peter Hall on stage apologising for the unready state of the Hamlet we had just seen. A place more notable now for its uncomfortable seats than for its theatre. It seems to have fallen off the repertory circuit, such as it is.
We then moved onto the cult of beauty at the V&A. An interesting exhibition, fitting in well with my dying fad for the Pre-Raphaelites. Many of the pictures on show were in fact from the Tate Real, displaced by the renovations there (see 3rd April). However, I did not find many of the cult objects very beautiful. Some of them looked very expensive; neatly expressing the irony that these back to basics people made a crust by pandering to the dubious tastes of the grocery billionaires of their day.
The exhibition was also very badly curated. It was too crowded (with things, not people that is. Number of people OK) and badly laid out, the lighting was atrocious and one was entertained by luvvies reading poetry through gratings in the ceiling. The fact the 'AV hardware' and 'AV software' both got a mention in the credits on the wall at the exit, along with the important people who stumped up the necessary, says it all. The one or two exhibitions I have been to in the upper regions of the Tate Other - a place of which I do not usually approve - were much better done. Plenty of space with the objects in question left to speak for themselves without much curatorial or AV support. The good news is that the V&A courtyard is probably too big for a glass roof so they have settled for a nice fountain instead. Courtyard looks very well; long may it reign without glass.
Fine slice of warm apple strudel from somewhere between Gloucester Road and Earls Court. Probably the Caffe Forum. Lots of interesting places and buildings in the area, around which we had not been for a while.
On the way home, we intrigued to learn, from the top of a C3 bus, that the borough of Fulham used to have an electricity department which ran large sub-stations, suggesting that once upon a time electricity supply, in London at least, was a matter for local authorities. Must have been before they invented privatisation. It is true that Lots Road power station was just around the corner but I thought that was to do with tube trains rather than cookers. I note in passing that the roof of the power station is being taken off. Is the power station setting itself up as a rival to Battersea or will the powers that be have the nerve to knock this irreplaceable & invaluble piece of national industrial heritage down for flats?
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Fallible
On Sunday to Box Hill where we were able to dispute the right of way up with a fair number of lycras - most of whom seemed to be rather solemn types when we came across them again at the top. Took themselves and their vehicles very seriously.
More seriously for me, another demonstration of fallibility. We thought we would walk out of the back of Donkey Green towards a viewpoint looking north - with the main viewpoint looking south being at the front of Donkey Green. We walk through the woods, admiring the various large trees - some notable beech and yew among them - to come out on an old bridleway. A few yards later and we are at a viewpoint. Fine view down over the flat lands below, with a town in the middle distance. Clearly Leatherhead since we are pointing that way, despite not being able to see the River Mole and the railway not being in quite the right place. BH not so sure at all but prudently keeps quiet. She then suggests that if we carry on down the bridleway, we would get back to where we started. Very long way round sezzaye. We need to head back south, not east. So we retrace our steps back to the car park - to my credit we do not get lost - to inspect the map. To find that the second viewpoint was just to the east of the first viewpoint and does indeed face south towards Dorking, not north towards Leatherhead. Absence of Mole and position of railway now explained. And the bridleway would indeed have brought us back, on a slightly shorter route than that we had actually taken. Quite apart from BH being right, very shocked to have had such a failure of sense of direction. Not completely hopeless as I did get us back OK; but fairly hopeless nonetheless. Next time I shall take a compass to avoid further embarrassment.
And then there is the question of dreams, with the ones that I remember getting less and less coherent. I remarked on one on May 26th and now this morning I have had another. Not odd in the sense of something being one thing and another at the same time, rather in being a jumble of impressions; a jumble not a narrative. Not even a rather odd narrative. I enumerate some of the jumble.
Being vaguely at our house in Cambridge discussing the edibility of various large but dodgy looking fungi with people that I only knew long after we left.
Marching sturdily through deep yellow mud of the back garden, on the way to the compost heap with a tray full of condemned fungi, wearing veldtschoen - shoes which I had when young and which did not turn out to be as sturdy as they were cracked up to be. Old fashioned construction not all that great after all.
Most of my back garden having been parcelled out into very small allotments for various dodgy looking people. Very carefully tended allotments, around 8 feet by 4, plus small but ancient looking sheds. One per allotment. Most of the things which had been in the garden now missing. The odd tree left to remind one of bygones.
The bit I had been left at the bottom having been further colonised by more dodgy looking people on account of my not having been there for a year or so. But they had left my shed, notable for being mounted on a post, a bit like a postmill. The contents included some things which I recognised, like my father's pruning knife, and some things which I did not, notably a small garage chain hoist. The sort of hoist which I used to know a special name for and which now, neither I nor Mr. Google can recover. Decided to abandon ship and leave the dodgies to it.
BH and a neighbour whom I recognised in the front room, the only catch being that the front room in question was that in Epsom, that presently occupied by FIL, who did not, as it happens, come into the dream.
Being at a desk at work and being puzzled by lots of paperwork about people who did not concern me. Started shredding the paperwork only to realize that I was at the wrong desk and was grubbing about in the wrong files.
Being unsure about whether I was supposed to be at work or not. Getting rather het up about it. Started grubbing around in more files to try and find out whether I had resigned or not and if so, from what date effective. Clearly have an odd relation with packing up work as this sort of thing crops up in dreams quite often.
Moving onto maps and I could not be sure which one I was supposed to be on. Getting very het up about the various titles and subtitles of these maps. If only I could work it out, I would know which map I was supposed to be on. This bit presumably maps back to the Dorking experience.
Waking up I start to ponder about Surrealists, whose work I had always associated with dreams, without ever having dreams of that sort myself. But now I am. Clearly a case of very late development.
Monday, June 06, 2011
NOT(DIY)
One of this year's activities has been retiling the roof. Perhaps not absolutely necessary but we thought it a good idea to get it out of the way before it was absolutely necessary. Never need to think about it again.So far very pleased with the work, which was finished a month or more ago and which is getting its first serious rain test this morning. I ought to get up into the roof later to smell for damp.
Three words of warning. First, the whole thing, from first contact with roofer to paying him off must of taken around six months, including the roofer's antipodean Christmas break. Doesn't do to be in too much of a hurry, even in a double dip. Second, putting the scaffold up makes a great deal of noise. Only goes on for half a day or so but, being retired and at home when it happened, we knew all about it. Especially the boards banging down. Third, despite having a boarded roof and the boards were left in place, large amounts of dirt and dust found their way down through the boards and down into the roof space. Good job that the roofer had warned us about this and that we had put dust sheets down. Clearing up still a dirty old job. Plenty of coughing and spluttering.
The illustration is of a sort of builder's mark; left to mark their territory while they were away for the weekend. We were assured that the thing was perfectly safe, which it might well have been. But because the board was slightly warped, it rocked in the wind making an interesting bonging noise through the night. Sprog 2 enlisted to climb up and take the thing down. Seems a very long time since I was able to climb up multi-storey scaffolds without the benefit of a ladder.
I will also put in a mention for health and safety. The roofer said that when he started out, he might well have done the job without a scaffold; a practise now outlawed by the H&S crew. But I thought the scaffold was worth the expense. Much less likely to get the job done properly if the chaps doing it are putting most of their brain cycles into not falling off, rather than into our roof. Plus I know someone on disability for falling off a much shorter ladder than would be involved here. It does happen. And I know someone else who smashed up a forearm, quite badly, in the same way. At least in his case, now OK; not on disability, at least not on account of falling off a ladder.
Sunday, June 05, 2011
21st birthday
Yesterday saw our 21st successive visit to the Derby (the Epsom one that is) and to mark this very special occasion we did both the Oaks and the Derby. Various impressions follow.
The DSS enclosure on the hill continues to shrink, although the fair in the dip, relocated there to make space for a bigger and better police enclosure, was a bit bigger and better than it was last year, its first year in its new home. Beer tent well organised and pitched at the right level; well able to cope with the demand from those few who could not be bothered to hump the vastly cheaper offerings from supermarkets up the hill. One did not have to wait long for one's tin of Carlsberg or one's tin of Adnams. That being the grand choice of beer available. A far cry from the couple of years when Theakstons brought in a tented pub, complete with quality warm beer at pub prices; a sort of travelling circus which trundled around the various events of southern England: poultry shows, traction shows, horse shows and horse races. Great summer job for the young.
Despite the shrinking, the view from the bit of the hill that we were on seemed to be better than ever. One could see pretty much the whole course from Tattenham Corner to the finishing post; almost as good a view as one gets from the grandstand. I'm sure it didn't used to be like that.
We are no longer entertained by prophesies of doom from the bible bashers who used to set up shop in the space between the big beer tent (there were two in those days) and the line of bookies stands below. But a bunch of cheerful transvestites from the south coast went some way towards plugging the gap.
Not much smoke. In the olden days when the Derby was on a Wednesday, the people on the hill were real men, all beer and fags. The odd punch up behind a truck. But this year the proportion of people smoking appeared to be quite small. Maybe less than 1 in 10. Maybe the new rules really are bearing down on the habit.
The best bet over the two days was the lady who managed each way bets on both Dancing Rain at 20 to 1 and Izzi Top at 25 to 1, with Dettori's mistake to thank for the third place for Izzi Top. The £80 winnings went a long way to compensating her for backing a horse, Izzi Top, which sported the black and white colours of the hated football team from Newcastle (not to be confused with http://www.newcastlefootball.com.au/). This particular bunch being supporters of the neighbouring Sunderland.
The best incident was the admittance of a horse to TB. A small cart horse, as it happens in the same colours as Izzi Top, came in to do a few circuits of the pool table, early Friday evening. Nicely turned out. For one of the circuits a young lady, having mounted very neatly, rode bare backed (although not bare assed). Left quite peacefully when it was suggested that the horse might upset the customers, to be tethered to the post holding up the pub sign, from where it could munch happily on the hay poking out of the nearby pick up.
The best pet was the border collie in the bar of the Kings Head, opposite the church of St. Martin of Tours (appropriately, the patron saint of, amongst other things, horses). The dog was best for its colour which was brown and white rather than black and white. Never seen such a thing before, but the owner told me that they were reasonably common on the aboriginal borders.
The best food was the rolls put on by the Amato. A fresh well filled roll - beef, ham and some others - for £3. A proper roll which was served without crisps, chips or any other nonsense. Just a roll, just like pubs used to sell in the good old days before pub grub was invented. I did one beef and two ham.
Pleased to find that the neighbouring Ladas had opened for the meeting, having been boarded up for most of the year. A once decent pub fallen victim to changing times, like a number of similar establishments on the outskirts of Epsom. Let's hope the new people manage to make a go of it.
Found myself impressed on Saturday morning to be able to read in the Guardian an account of the Oaks which I had seen late in the afternoon of the previous day. Presumably the chap dashes off his copy more or less as the race is finishing, zaps it up to HQ from the press room at the course, in minutes, in time for it to be censored, made up onto a page and then printed on hundreds of thousands of copies of the next day's paper, in time for one of the copies to get back to one of the Epsom Costcutters, first thing, for me. I guess it helps if you know something about the horsey lingo. You can whack it out while barely thinking about it. And I, knowing nothing about horses, am reasonably easy to impress.
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Not a box of cigars
Not a box of cigars at all; rather the box of truncheons with which to bash the Fenians mentioned on May 27th. Not made any progress towards finding out why the ancient borough of Winchelsea felt the need to disturb its bucolic peace with parades of vigilantes.I think the things top left are cannon balls, in which case I am fairly sure they had nothing to do with the Fenians, dating from a rather earlier era. Most of them stone rather than metal.
Friday, June 03, 2011
Error
A long time ago I used to make goat curry from time to time, travelling to Balham to get the goat from one of the Halal butchers there and using a recipe for ragan josh from a book by one Michael Pandya, the gift of a Norwich colleague back in the days of Mrs. Thatcher. This used to work very well, so one day, not being able to get to Balham for some reason, I tried the recipe with beef. Which turned out to be edible but quite wrong. There was something about beef which did not work properly in this recipe.
So yesterday, made another error of the same sort when I was trying to tart up cold chicken with boiled vegetables a bit. The thought was to make some white sauce to go with them, the usual form for which being to start the white sauce by gently frying some onion in butter and then, towards the end of the process, adding some yellow cheese. But yesterday I thought that since sage and onion makes excellent stuffing, why not try sage and onion sauce? Got some fresh sage from the garden, chopped it up and added it to the sauce instead of the cheese. Looked OK. Texture of body of sauce OK. But the chopped sage felt coarse on the tongue, which made the texture of the sauce as a whole all wrong. Edible, but not to be repeated. I now know that sage leaves have a coarseness which is fine in the context of a chewy and savoury stuffing but which is not fine in the context of what is supposed to be a smooth and savoury sauce.
Yesterday's second error was of a different sort. In February I mentioned a book by M. le Comte d'Herisson which included some stuff on a chap called Nauendorff who was actually the missing second son of Louis XVI. I was quite taken in. But yesterday, turning the pages again, I was moved to make netular enquiries and rapidly find that ten years or so ago someone had matched the DNA in an antique pickled heart with that in a hair plucked from Marie Antoinette, thus proving conclusively that the second son did die in the Temple and did not escape to become M. Nauendorff or anyone else. I then get hold of an anonymous article about famous pretenders from something called gutenburg. This article, written in a popular style, makes clear that the French go in for pretenders for Louis XVII in much the same as we go in for pretenders for the princes in the tower. There were lots of them. This particular one made quite a good thing of it for a bit, extracting lots of dosh from credulous royalist ladies, before he retired hurt to Camberwell where he made a respectable living while annoying his neighbours with fireworks.
My error being taken in by the respectable sounding M. le Comte d'Herisson. All very well for credulous royalist ladies before the invention of DNA, but I think I should have known better.
I can wind up with a related error from Google. The post for 1 February of this year seems to have gone missing. Not in the February list, nor has it strayed into the January list - which can happen due to the difference between GMT and PST. But it does appear if you search for 'Herisson'. What is going on? What can one deduce about the blogger database from this particular error?
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Readings from the DT
The first concerns the thundering in the media commented on yesterday. My point being not to whack in a whole lot of new supervisors in a bout of policy making by Sun headline. When I get around to looking at the words which follow the thundering, I find that there has, as it happens, been a complete failure of supervision; by managers and senior managers in the caring company concerned, by ComCare (not called OffCare for some reason) and by the commissioning local authorities. All these layers of supervisors, but we still don't get it right. But I stick with my point that the answer is not to add another layer. Reform or replace a layer or two perhaps, but don't add another one. And that the real answer is to do something about the quality of the work, not about the quality of the supervision.
The second concerns the people for whom every little counts. It seems that a certain Tesco was chucking a great deal of food into the bin because a freezer had broken down. Food which was perfectly OK but which could no longer be sold. Sundry low lifes got to hear about this and decided that they might as well retrieve and eat the stuff. Possibly sell it on in the boozer. Tesco has seen fit to take one of these low lifes to court. Now it may well be that the low lifes have indeed broken the law by rifling the bins at the back of Tescos, but it does seem very mean (and a poor use of our badly overstretched criminal justice system) to take them to court. The loss of business occasioned by free food getting into the system and the loss of good name which might be occasioned by damaged food with their name on it getting into the system, not sufficient justification.
We were then amused to read that the shortly to be retired bribery laws, but presently the law of the land and used to contain the activities of the likes of BAE, were invented over 100 years ago to deter eager tradespeople from bribing one's maid or housekeeper for orders for kippers or soap. Or even claret. I wonder.
Lastly, we were absolutely horrified to learn that an important soap celebrity, who cannot of course be named, had been struck with a slipper by a drunken boyfriend.
At this point I move onto the rather superior NYRB - rather superior to its London analogue the LRB. Bigger circulation and bigger budget? - where I read about the solution the the financial crisis. As far as I can make out this solution is a variation on the Keynes theme, but a solution which recognises that public debt has now got so high that governments need to have a care before incurring any more. So how to stimulate demand? Answer: have a government backed bank which provides funds for large, useful projects. Wind farms, dams, nuclear power stations. Hospitals and schools. With the trick being not to fund the things in entirety, merely to back the bonds which do fund them. The things would be run by the private sector for a good profit, which is why people, not to mention those forces for evil, the hedge funds, will buy the bonds. The contribution of government is to provide some seed corn and some backing for some nice long term projects. This way you get to generate a lot of demand for a fairly modest amount of new government debt.
Which all rather smells of PFI. The wheeze whereby we get public spending off the national accounts, at the price of paying rather a lot for public, not to say national, services going forward. Dreadful thinks I. But then I think again. The public at large wants a lot more service than it is prepared to pay for in the form of tax. The public at large wants a lot more than it can actually afford. Has been consuming a lot more than it has been earning for many years. Part of this is now expressed as a whopping hole in public finances. So the way forward is to make people pay for public services at the point of consumption. When they are actually dying they won't mind dipping deep into their pockets. And what better way to pay at the point of consumption than to privatise the services? The private sector knows all about paying at the point of consumption.
A solution which is apt to be rather inefficient, not very egalitarian and apt to make a small number of people a great deal of money. But is that where we have got to?
I close with a puzzle for readers. What is there in this post to make Mr. Google think that I need the services of an asbestos removal company? See http://www.westfieldgroupukltd.co.uk/.
