pumpkinstrokemarrow

And then there is the rather unsavoury spectacle of the Dowler family being set to take the Murdochs for millions over the business of their daughter's mobile phone being hacked. Bad that such things should happen in the first place but not very edifying when the victims parlay this bad into lots of dosh. Do we have ambulance chasers for this sort of thing? Perhaps I would feel better about it if any monies extracted from the Murdochs were donated to some charity without prior links to the Dowler family.

All in all we seem to be getting into a bit of a muddle about access to information about others. The presumption that public affairs are public and that private affairs are private is fine, but we do have to be sensible about the huge grey area in the middle. The private affairs of those who have made a great deal of money out of publicising their exotic private affairs being a good example. Improper access to sensitive economic statistics prior to their official release on the official date being another. And we should try not to get too hysterical when some particular case falls on what we regard as the wrong side of the line. Keep the damage actually done to the cuddly victims in mind when getting excited about the evil perpetrators. Keep a sense of proportion. I am reminded that I read somewhere that our brains are hard wired for binary distinctions - fight or flight being an elementary example - and anything else can be a bit taxing, particularly if there is any anxiety or stress floating about. When we tend to leave grey areas out of it.

The same issue of the Guardian then went on to a rather po-faced account of the lives of that small number of women in France who persist in wearing full face masks, in defiance of the law to the contrary. Granted that it is all rather petty and unpleasant, but the French thought long and hard about the law in question. There is a serious issue here. But the Guardian had no space for anything but sympathy for these poor downtrodden females. I am reminded here that both France and the US have ticklish relations between the state and the church. An area where we with our established & largely unused church seem, oddly, to be more relaxed. Perhaps unused is the key.

There is also the analogy with our own Dale Farm. For how long can one put up with flagrant disregard of the law? Either one backs the law up or one changes it.

Turning to matters in the kitchen, a new variant yesterday on lentil soup. Did the old style version without spice or spicy sausage, but used four chopped tomatoes in the simmering lentils rather than three sliced carrots. It seemed an improvement. Pleased to note that there were, for once, no unidentified fly like black specks floating on the finished soup.

After which we were off to our first Wigmore Hall concert of the new season, to hear one Andreas Staier play late Schubert on a fortepiano, instead of the usual pianoforte from Steinway. Very good it was too. Good program, starting out with Impromptu in C minor (D899 No.1), the sonata in G (D894) for entrée, the sonata in Bb (D960) for roast and the Schubert variation on a theme by Diabelli for sorbet. Pinot Gris was taken along the way, having muddled it up with Pinot Noir.

In the margins we learnt that while Wigmore Street might have been a place where rugby coaches got their medical supplies, it is now a place where footballers and their wives buy their kitchens. The street seems to be awash with very fancy looking kitchen shops - for people with kitchens about the size of the entire ground floor of our house. One of them sold kitchen taps which looked as is they might cost £1,000 or more. To be fair, you did get hot and cold in the same contraption. And some of the kitchens were graced with rather nifty looking candelabra on the worktops - assuming one still talks about lowly worktops in such grand establishments.