Monday, October 31, 2011
The axe man playeth
Off to Wigmore last week to hear Ax and Kavakos do three Beethoven violin sonatas - 23, 24 and 96. Slightly alarmed by the volume of the piano at the outset but it and I soon settled down. All very good; a combination which I get on with, with not too much going on at once. I was also reminded of the series we went to maybe 35 years ago at the QEH where Lupu and Goldberg played through the Mozart sonatas; a reverse combination, that is to say a younger long hair on the piano and an older short hair on the violin. The CDs for which still attract glowing reviews. My vinyl version ideal for calming one down after a rough day; wonderfully soothing stuff. Which is not quite how I would describe the Beethoven sonatas, wonderful though they are.
Nice winding down encore, but I forget what it was. No-one I had heard of. The only bad note was the Wigmore peddling its prize winning CDs. Even this bastion of old school culture is infected by the need to flog souvenirs to its punters.
Started this week with a rare visit to the cinema to see 'The Help', the BH having just finished the book from which the film was made. Oddly emotional watch considering that the story line was quite straightforward and the subject matter reasonably familiar. Perhaps part of it was a well crafted film which knew how to pull on the heart strings. Perhaps part of it was what ever got to me on November 19th 2010 - the famous picture of one of the Little Rock Nine. BH tells me that a lot of the stories in the book were missed or heavily cut in order to make room for a film about the writing of the book, rather than a film about what was in the book. The very prominent nasty rich white girls were reasonably familiar from plenty of films about their bitching and shenanigans at high schools and colleges. The focus on the business of rearing other womens' babies was less familiar. And the amount of time given to matters lavatorial was a surprise - although a feature of one or two other films I have seen from the US. BH also tells me that much of what was positive in the book about Mississippi and the people who live there was missed out, the film mainly concentrating on the bad bits, although you did get some very fine suburban trees. All of which reminds me of a bit from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' where a white plantation owner explains to a bossy white northern lady that he, the plantation owner, lives with and loves his blacks. While you northern people instinctively shrink away if you accidentally touch one. See November 8th 2007.
Coming out of the film, the first thought was that I was glad that I was not a comfortable white person from Mississippi. Glad that we never had that sort of thing in this country. But then I realised that the goings on at Downton Abbey and such like places - or even the sorts of places you get in Agatha Christie adaptations - would play rather badly if you colour coded the masters and servants. And remembered that our goings on in India, and even more recently in East Africa, might well have been up to Mississippi standards. So perhaps better to lay off the patronising.
PS: this morning moved to dig my copy of 'Mules and Men' by Zora N. Hurston out of FIL's room. Stories from the same part of the world, but from 1935. It will be interesting to see what their tone is again, in the light of Sunday's movie.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Guardian over breakfast
Breakfast not so hot, featuring as it did bread made with Dove organic flour which had not risen as well as it might. Perhaps organic means that they have not added all those magic e-numbers which makes the bread rise like it did for mother. So sought diversion in the Guardian, the free one that is, not the solemn & miserable one which now costs the large and inconvenient sum of £1.20.
First item was a sorry tale of a girl who had just got the plaster off her broken arm when she fell off a ladder at school and broke it again. Report a bit short on facts but one suspects that there was failure on both sides, it generally taking more than one failure to break the sort of system that I imagine is in place to stop this sort of thing - the point here being that the girl should not have been doing physicals at all. First breaks only just healing up. But the bit of the system that does work is that we are now into sue the council for negligence mode. OK, so the school probably missed a few beats, but is suing the best way we can find to deal with the problem? Unimpressed of Epsom.
Next the eye wandered down to the trade announcements. Reliable roofer. Discrete divorcée. First thought was that trades people with attitude think it a bit low to advertise: if you were any good you wouldn't have to. Second thought was that it is quite an expense, say £50 per week per title (Epsom, Twickenham, Selhurst etc). One would need to have it in for a bit to know whether it was doing any good and that is going to be a fair chunk. And if you are not getting the work and hav'n't got many chunks, always tempting to carry on. Maybe this week I'll hit the jack pot. And so the debts pile up.
From where we moved onto the housing pages. Lots of full and half page ads for this or that development. Buy now because it is selling fast and you may be too late. But what caught the eye was a couple of small display ads from estate agents, presumably acting for mortgage companies repossessing someone or other. Another sad story behind the ad. The form of which seemed to be that we have an offer of £X for property Y. If you get in with a better offer before we exchange we will look at it. Both X's seemed very low, without actually going as far as to check prices in the localities in question. Presumably all the mortgage company cares about is getting the thing off its books: good to get its money back but it is not going to lift a finger, let alone bust a gut, to do the best it can for the poor old dispossessed.
I learn that one side effect of all this is that the market for rented accommodation is booming. All those young professionals who can't stump up a deposit. Which ought to push a bit of life back into the market. Market forces pushing in the right direction perhaps?
Nearer home I am pleased to report that I am not the only person with residential rats in the garden. A house up the road has had pallets full of some kind of fake stone slabs on its front verge - the bit on its side of the foot path that is - for weeks if not months. The other day they were removed revealing four or five splendid rat holes underneath, the pallets having provided sufficient protection of home and hearth against marauding foxes. Or maybe cats. I dare say a hungry cat would go for a rat but most of the ones that I see look far too lazy. And the plump one that had a go at a squirrel the other day was more comic than lethal.
Ditto the blue tits. I have had a bit of gammon skin hung up from the garage fascia for three days now and not a blue tit to be seen. Perhaps they have no sense of smell. Or perhaps they don't like the salt. I did not think to rinse or soak the gammon before using it and the lentil soup was, in consequence, rather more salty than I care for. Not to mention the blood pressure. On the other hand there were very few of those black, fly like specks floating on the surface. Another interesting feature, perhaps to do with the salt, was that when cold the soup set to a soft jelly consistency. With a bit of trouble I might have been able to get it erect onto a plate.
The good news is that the jelly lichen has sprung up nicely with the warm damp weather we have been having over the last couple of days. Speedy stuff the way that it can be dormant for months and then spring up in what seems like hours when the conditions are finally right.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Pink elephants
On September 28th I reported on the tequila bottle that refuses to bloom, despite its distinguished pedigree. Well, it might not be blooming, but it is doing other things.
To wit, having taken on a reasonable quota of Newky Brown, woke up early the following morning to a very disturbing vision. The two inches of what I had thought were dormant black stuff at the bottom of the tequila bottle had entirely metamorphosed into a black worm, curled around the bottom. Maybe 2cm in diameter and 30cm long, with small, shiny black scales rather like a slow worm. In fact, more or less an obese slow worm, but without any eyes, nose, mouth or other surface features. Spontaneous generation from the slime, rather as the ancient Egyptians used to believe.
Now I am not very keen on snakes, at least the sort that are out in the open. Not too bad with those in glass boxes. Not too bad with the wriggling red worms in the compost bin. But this thing had me very perturbed. How did it get there? Was it going to climb out of the bottle and start exploring the study? Would it take up residence behind the bookcase?
It took a little while to wake up properly and chase the vision away. Even now, a day or so later, still faintly alarming, so it must clearly have touched some psychic nerve. Perhaps best not to enquire further.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Memory
Another indication today that mine is becoming unreliable. Which is a pain: one cannot hold forth in the boozer confident that one's fascinating factlet is indeed a factlet. Something I have hitherto felt to be OK; so we have a crisis of confidence.
The indication arose from yesterday's cigar hunt. Clearly being a touch bored, or perhaps just showing an IT person's obsession with facts on the ground which don't quite fit in with preconceived ideas and which might be the tip of some unpleasant iceberg, thought I would do a bit of checking, when I find that I was poking around for cigar stores in Kingston VA, when I should have been poking around for cigar stores in Bristol WV. And the one in question appears to exist after all, at least there is an entry in a business directory for 122 E Main St, Bristol, West Virginia, 26426.
Muddling up VA and WV is one thing, but how did I get from Bristol to Kingston? What on earth is the connection? They are both old towns with plenty of heritage; Bristol might be bigger but Kingston is probably older. They are both on an important river, the sort of thing that Vikings might have rowed up. They are both protected by being in the corner made by the junction of a tributary river with the main river. But this is true of lots of places.
And then I remember the store being in State Street, Bristol being on the state line, not Main Street. Presumably huge penalties for carrying Cuban cigars across the state line. Squared if you are also carrying limey whisky, in brown paper bag or not, opened or not.
So I then ask Google maps to show me where the Main Street place is and it turns out to be in somewhere called Salem. Presumably the zip code for Salem overrides the misprint for Bristol. Refine the various searches to include State Street and eventually find my way to 527 State Street, Bristol, VA 24201 which does indeed look like the right place. In VA rather than WV after all. I should have stopped there, but pushing on, I find another business directory which says that the place in question is actually 523A State Street etc. What a muddle.
Which all goes to show one needs to be careful with facts from either yours truly or google. Caveat emptor and all that. Would you buy a used car off of someone so careless with their entries in business directories?
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Off the boil
Nike and Niketown are now firmly on the back burner following a visit yesterday to Cotswold, the outdoor shop I had thought was in Kingston market place turning out to be a hifi shop. Having previously taken advice that military types like them, settled for a pair of Merrells (http://www.merrell.com/UK/en), costing about the same as a pair of Nikes from Niketown. Smart without being flashy but will probably need a little breaking in, being rather more substantial. Certainly proved necessary to prune both big toe nails.
Next, following the bigos failure last week (October 23rd) tempted by a Polish restaurant in Old London Road which we had not noticed before but which had, apparently, been there for just about a year. Slightly discouraged by its being empty when we arrived around 1230, but mood improved when we found that a pint bottle of Zywiec was going for £2.75 or so, not that much more than Wetherspoons. The waitress tried to get to me to try others but I stuck to my guns. Accompanied by potato pancakes and stuffed dumplings. The pancakes were thinner and more dingy looking than the latkas I used to get in Great Windmill Street, but good all the same. Dumplings good too. A hearty lunch. BH was pleased with her soup and chicken salad, so I expect we shall go again. See http://www.republicrestaurant.co.uk/.
The only down side was that it was explained that lots of Polish people don't like bigos so it was not on the regular menu. Just done as a special from time to time.
Rounded out the outing by a hunt for the Kingston cigar shop which someone somewhere had told me of. Nip through a touch of bureaucracy for aliens at the Kingston Library and onto a terminal to find that there is a cigar importer at 30 London Road. Fuelled by the Zywiec, I was thinking that I might be able to blag my way through to some samples but desisted. Then, this morning, I try again to find it claimed that I can buy cigars in both Bentalls and Teddington, which might be more convenient than trolling into the big town. Oddly, Google does not tell me about the cigar store I once visited in down town Kingston VA.. Perhaps it has faded away; the main drag did have a rather down at heel look to it. Killed, presumably, by the big stores.
PS: I see in today's Guardian that my trinity post of 22nd October falls into the category of 'disgusting, hypocritical and self-deceiving'. This according to someone who describes himself as an art correspondent. Perhaps he should stick to art; I can imagine he is a fan of Damien Hirst or perhaps the late German chap who was into the arty display of corpses.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Evidence based policy making
The title seems appropriate as evidence based is still one of those important padding phrases which are well used in government documents of a certain sort.
I was prompted by a claim in the Guardian that we are spending the surprisingly large amount of £30b a year in this country helping people with autism to get hold of a DoE consultation document about a new approach to special educational needs and disability, previously noticed on October 18th. The general tone of the article in the Guardian was very worthy, while that in the Daily Mail was about how scandalous it was that hundreds of thousands of school children were being branded duffers by lazy teachers. Getting hold of in this case meant downloading a pdf and getting it printed at the West Hill print shop for £10 rather than paying £30 for a proper copy. 130 pages of report of ugly design with an ugly typeface, particularly ugly in headings and titles. No pictures or tables to break things up a bit. The Treasury and the Bank of England do things much better, at least for their more important numbers.
Now when I was at work, it quite often fell to me to consume large documents such as this and to generate comments. Failure to generate a reasonable number of comments was a personal failure, not to be tolerated. In this case we have a consultation document and I have a nodding acquaintance with the subject matter, so I thought it was fair game for the comments game. So here goes.
The bottom line is that by the time I got to the end of the document, I had decided that nodding acquaintance with the subject matter was not enough to enable one to make a very positive contribution to this difficult subject. I did not know anything like enough about how the process works now to have much clue as to whether the proposed process would work any better. However, that is not enough to stop a seasoned commenteer.
There is much talk which sounds like privatisation. And the move to personal budgets, while quite possibly a good thing, certainly pushes that door a bit further open. There are to be people called strategic partners. Which in the IT world that I used to inhabit meant an opportunity for fancy consultancies to make lots of money. More generally, not at all clear to me that moving everything onto three year contracts is going to be very helpful. A huge amount of energy is going to be soaked up in letting and competing for all these contracts. Not to mention the wear and tear on all the middle managers involved. Not to mention the wear and tear on all the front line troops who don't know who they are going to be working for from one year to the next. Are the sort of people who are apt to be good at special needs very apt to be very entrepreneurial?
To try to move to a more whole person process, supporting the person, their family and the carers from birth through to adulthood sounds like a good thing.
Early identification of need sounds like a good thing.
Not abandoning ship at 16 sound like a good thing. On the other hand, there is little if any recognition that providing employment for those with special needs is not easy. In the olden days we used to expect larger employers to do their bit, and many did. The civil service did. And for those with very special needs there were asylums with their farms and occupational therapy units. I suspect much of this no longer exists although Sainbury's sometimes does its bit with helpers at the checkout - although I dare say plenty of shoppers wished that they didn't. All made much more difficult by the disappearance of great swathes of more or less unskilled work and the drive for efficiency. Much harder to hide such people on the payroll these days. Are we going to pay employers to take these people on? What about the bureaucracy that might be involved here (see below)? What about the self esteem of the specials?
Being less confrontational and less adversarial sound like good things - but I don't see how you are going to get away from the bad things altogether. Resources will continue to be scarce and parents will continue to fight for a big slice of a small pie. But I dare say a better process would reduce the number of expensive fights between lawyers.
There is a real problem with labelling; the Daily Mail does have a point of sorts. If you label someone as having special needs (SEN), as having emotion or behaviour problems (BESD) or as being disabled, you are, in some sense, consigning that someone to the dustbin. On the other hand, if you do not label you cannot deploy the necessary resources. We used to have the same argument about race, although I have not heard it much recently.
Another problem is that SEN, BESD and being disabled are strongly correlated. Plenty of people fall into all three dustbins at once.
The document is very thin on budgets and numbers. There are some numbers scattered through the text but they have not been assembled into tables where you can get a good eyeful. No confirmation, for example, of the aforesaid figure of £30b. It is very fat on what we used to call motherhood and apple pie - that is to say things that are obviously good things - but without more numbers who can say how big a slice of apple pie was going to be appropriate?
The document is full of the words helpful, bureaucratic, transparent, accountable. Which seems to amount to saying that the work done in the bad old days by Labour was the second thing and not the other three, while in the brave new Conservative world it would be the other way around. More or less mud slinging without much regard to what the words might mean. Do the authors of this document suppose that the authors of all the other documents were trying to be anything other than helpful? How can you be transparent and accountable without being bureaucratic? I would have thought that a properly documented process was exactly what you do want in a tricky area such as this. Documented both in the sense that the process in general is documented and that the application of that process to each special is documented - and this is just the sort of thing that bureaucrats are good at.
Which the document does recognise in so far as that it proposes lots of new measures for special needs providers to provide.
The document is very full of giving power to the people. Away with dictation from the centre! Conveniently glossing the fact that the whole document is yet another central initiative for the people to cope with. And I was amused to see that GLC creeps back as a helpful consortium for the provision of services. I wonder if that is the sort of thing it did before abolition by one of Cameron's predecessors?
There is no glossary. And the abbreviations get thicker on the ground as you get through the document. Thick enough that I had to keep flicking back to keep up with them. It would have be easier if there had been a glossary.
I think that is enough to be going on with!
PS: later in the day I happened to overhear a special talking very enthusiastically about his personal record and plan, part of this document's whole person theme. It was clearly working for him.
Monday, October 24, 2011
A cornucopia
Following my post on October 18th, now got around to thinking a bit more about the matter of Kevin Lane. But without conclusion. The material on the web site, while odd, did not amount to enough for me to be able to overrule the jury and say he didn't do it. Plus it was unfortunate that he elected not to call his partner to corroborate his alibi. Doesn't look good to me and presumably didn't look good to the jury. My next thought was that one wanted to see a better summary of the case than had been put on the web site. Perhaps the judge's summing up would provide a management summary? Perhaps that is what they are for. But then I got stuck. The Ministry of Justice web site did not help me find out whether or not members of the public could get at summings up. Nor, supposing that they could, had it anything much to say about how. The nearest I got, deep inside some long document about criminal procedure, was something that appeared to say that anyone could apply to the clerk of the court for such stuff, provided the case was ongoing or recent, which this one clearly wasn't. It looked as if was going to take a bit of effort to find out what goes here. If I was rich, I suppose I could just ask my own lawyer to prepare me a brief, but I am certainly not that kind of rich. Perhaps Mr. Branson (the bearded one, not the pickle one) would oblige? Perhaps he gets lots of begging letters about matters like this? And then I noticed that one of the bits of paper I had been given at Trafalgar Square described Mr. Lane as an innocent young man. Which description I believe to be a touch economical with the truth; possibly not guilty as charged, but not innocent in general. At which point I decided that I had spent enough time on him.
Then moved onto a recent LRB, where I was treated to a long whine about how awful it was that the legal aid budget was being cut and all kinds of worthy causes would no longer have access to free lawyers. Whoever wrote it did not seem to understand that if one wants to make large cuts in government spending, which our government clearly does (for good or bad), a good proportion of those large cuts have to come from lots of small cuts across the board. Lots of small cuts to lots of programmes, all of which had previously been proved to be essential, value for money and all the rest of it by world class consultants. One hasn't got time to revisit all this stuff. One just has to get on and make half the distance with roughly pro-rata cuts. Not nice but necessary.
And then there was an interesting piece from R. W. Johnson on elections in the US. He claims a seismic shift over the last fifty years or so. A shift which has left us with rich people and ordinary white males tending to vote Republican. And with professional people, women and other minorities tending to vote Democrat. With the first tendency likely to out gun the second in the mid term. An unholy alliance between those who have done very well out of the last 20 years and those who have done rather badly. What I don't agree with is that things are so very different over here.
And another one on Houellebecq, a chap in whom I took an interest in earlier this year. Searching for him turns up the relevant posts. This article was clearly a very good article as it took more or less the same line on the chap as I would, albeit at considerably greater length. Early work bit prone to porno., but the 'La Carte et le territoire' with merit and without porno., although perhaps not quite up to the puffing in French literary circles. However, first read of the article did involve some alcohol, so I think I will give it another read.
A coincidence, as a few days ago there was another reason to remember Houellebecq, in particular the point noticed on July 11th with the consumer durable in question being a surge protector. Having been alerted to the possibility of weathery disasters by the book about the lack of water in the western half of the US, I thought I ought to protect my shiny new hifi with a surge protector. Off to Maplin where I find that they do not do the Belkin I know and love, just some cheap and ugly alternatives. Have Belkin vanished from the face of the earth? Luckily I persisted all the way down to Staples where I find that Belkin is alive and well. Maybe not quite the same as my existing models but near enough. With the additional and unplanned benefit that the cabling spaghetti in my study is now much thinned.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Chiesa Italiana di Dan Pietro
On Thursday back to St. Lukes to hear a new-to-us Shai Wosner play a couple of Beethoven piano sonatas; Op. 2 No. 3 and Op 7. Very good they were too.
We thought we would try the canteen in the crypt, having been tempted by an advertisement for hunters' stew, which I had thought should be a moderately spicy confection of sauerkraut and pork. Otherwise known as bigos. We get there to find that what they call hunters' stew was a very dark brown beef stew, seemingly involving spinach or similar, served with rice. I was not all that keen on it and it certainly was not what I was expecting. Wine was OK though, as was the general ambience.
Our meal was rounded off by being interviewed by someone about how we found the concert. I suppose she was from the LSO although she actually lived in Cork and spent the odd weeks in London. Presumably some kind of freelance. Notwithstanding, she had a very natty little tape recorder, about the same size as a mobile phone but with a miniature microphone sticking out of the end. We learned that the playwright call Synge (see October 11th) whom one might of thought was called singe was actually called sing. She had to do him at school: he might have been a prot. but at least he was not a brit. But I failed by not being able to remember how I came across St. Luke's concerts in the first place. Not as if we go to their other place at the Barbican very often; can't remember when we last did.
Thus fortified we proceeded west towards Holborn, coming across St. Peter's Italian Church (http://www.italianchurch.org.uk/). A place with a modest doorway onto the Clerkenwell Road but with a very grand interior, apparently the first Catholic church purpose built on basilican lines in England. A lot of polychrome statuary and a lot of expensive stone & plaster work inside. They could afford to publish a fancy guide book and trust you to put something suitable in the box - there being no marked price. But it all seemed a bit cold to me and looked better in its pictures than it did in real life. Perhaps it would be OK when the place was full of true believers. Of which I do not suppose there are as many living in the immediate area as there were. All moved out to the suburbs to staff up the better class of pizza joints. Maybe assimilated even.
But back to more prosaic duties today, having wandered down the garden to find that something, probably a rat hunting fox, had broken into the front of our compost bin. Or perhaps the rats had to make a serious effort to break out before they were cooked underneath the blanket of dried leaves I had thoughtfully provided for them. Luckily, three old deal shelves from north London made a neat repair. In fact, a rather better job now than the original. Even went to the bother of oiling the second hand No. 10 screws to help them on their way down. Hopefully nothing now will either break in or break out. Topped up the dried leaves just to be sure that things are nice and warm inside. Maybe even to the point of getting a bit of spontaneous combustion, preferably the smouldering white rather than the flaming red sort. That should keep the rodents out.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Missed chance
Maybe if I had invested in winway I might have managed some better moves. A snip at $30.Tawdry Trinity
Coming up to the 30th Sunday in ordinary time, I see fit to record three tawdrities of the world of Cameron.
First, we have the spectacle of middle aged ladies twirling around in tights and sequins for the amusement of the masses.
Second, we have newspapers celebrating the lynching of a head of state with large front page pictures of his bloodied corpse. Even the usually solemn and serious Guardian caught up in the fever.
Third, we have learned counsel quizzing a murderer about the murky depths of his sexuality & personality in front of his victim's parents. It would be far more dignified all round if this line of questioning were not pursued. I for one am content to leave it to the judge to sort out whether to bang him up in Broadmoor or a regular prison.
And then there is the sad news that the fish shop in Creek Road near Hampton Court appears to be no more. I have lost my supplier of Arbroath Smokies, although it is possible that one can get the things at Selfridges or Harrods.
But there is some good news. On Friday I did a bit of adult education, the first since I gave up work. Education during which I did not come near to falling asleep in after lunch, quite good for me. The education was a one day bread making course put on at the Molesey Adult Learning Centre, also known as the Henrietta Parker Centre for Home and Family Studies, set up some 50 years after Mrs. Parker died (in 1934), bequeathing monies for this purpose. Such are the mysterious ways of charitable trusts. She is however recognised in a memorial display of small patchwork pictures - very clever they are too - in the centre café.
As a result of the course, a reasonably priced, well organised and well led affair, I think I can now make white bread much more like that of the better bakers than I have managed hitherto. The theory is that I have been doing far too much rising. English bread is supposed to be soft, damp and bland, without the body, texture and flavour one gets with a long rise. I shall report further in due course.
Easy to find out about these courses. Go to http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/, then learning, then adult learning. The only catch being that there are not that many places with the right sort of training kitchens and there are not that many bread making courses. There are, I believe, quite a few run by celebrity bakers and bakeries, but I guess that these are longer and a lot dearer.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Smacking
Yesterday's Guardian tells me that the Welsh Assembly, peace be upon them, are contemplating the banning of the smacking of children. It also tells me that such a ban is already in place in many places in the world.
All of which, as someone with some experience of children, strikes me as silly. There are times and there are children where a modest amount of direct action is helpful. It is true that in the bad old days children were bashed and beaten in a way which would be unacceptable now - practises which extended all the way from a housemaster's study in Eton to the tenements of Glasgow - but this is a poor reason to ban the practise completely. One might of thought that in a mature and civilised country like ours that we could manage something more subtle than an outright ban.
Consider, for example, the case of the disturbed children who commit what would be serious crimes if they were old enough. A fair amount of physical and possibly chemical restraint is needed to manage such children, practises which, following the banners' line of thought, are going to be hugely more traumatic than a bit of modest smacking. But legal.
Consider the case of a child that throws a wobbly. Has a trantrum. Runs amuk, goes beserk. Something which happens from time to time. Smacking such a child may well be necessary to calm it down. And less dangerous than a good shake.
Consider the case of a parent who belts his (unlikely to be a her) child with a tawse - an implement now mainly known to Mr. Google as a fetishist's delight but once well known to the children of aforementioned Glasgow tenements. I believe that at least one customer of TB has experience of such things. We might all agree that such belting is inappropriate and I am reasonably sure that the common law of assault covers the case; there is no need to invent new laws to tickle our lawyers' fancies (and purses).
And then there is the question of enforcement. Lots of people are going to ignore such a law. Lots more will turn a blind eye. Are we going to install CCTV cameras in the homes of children at risk in order to collect evidence? Are we going to believe all the tales of disturbed children? Even go so far as to reward them for telling tales? All in all, not a good way to maintain our respect for law in general.
PS: I am also reminded of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth which accompanies the forced removal of children from this country. What on earth to the do gooders expect? Forced removal is always going to be an unpleasant business, but a business we are always going to be in as long as there are more people out there who want to come in than we can cope with. Which is likely to be a long time on present showing.
Canning town?
A representative of the enterprising Mr. Bakai presented this card to us somewhere in the region of Trafalgar Square, many miles from his Canning Town consulting rooms. An area which, according to my AZ is small, bounded on all four sides by large roads and mainly consists of two loops of Bow Creek, a short distance upstream of its discharge into the Thames. Also known as the River Lea. From my limited acquaintance with the area, I would expect his front doors and windows to be protected with substantial metal grilles, once white but in need of a coat of paint. I may be wrong, but that is what I would expect.The following day I was rather struck by the picture of Mrs. Tymoshenko in the dock, looking very demure, dressed in virginal (or sacrificial) white and pigtails, being told by a warder not to interrupt the Lord High Judge while he was reading his four hour verdict. They really like to rub it in at these show trials. But my sympathy for poor little Tymoshenko was rather tempered by her having managed to get her snout in the trough to the tune of a couple of hundred million at the time that the Soviet Union was being dismembered. Not in the same league as the Russian oligarchs, but not a bad effort for a Ukrainian lady. Perhaps some Ukrainian voters would like some of it back.
And this morning, continuing my reading of Trollope on Cicero on Kindle, probably not the last or most reliable word on the subject but good enough for me. Very struck by the carryings on of the Roman oligarchs around 50BC. At that time it was perfectly good form for the upper classes to pillage subject provincials, only getting pulled up if they harvested out of turn or if their harvest reached unsustainable levels. Not enough left for the next chap. Squabbles about the spoils could get ugly too. So we had a debate in the Senate about the doings of four or five pillaging Senators, three or four of whom were present at the debate, perhaps even speaking in their own defence, after which they were led downstairs for execution. Trollope does not say whether their property was forfeit. Perhaps the forfeiture was disguised as wardships; a wheeze much favoured by hard up kings in our own Middle Ages. Perhaps we should get the British Council to put on lectures about Cicero for the benefit of the chattering classes of Moscow.
Might also mention that another leading lad had dressed up as a lady one evening in order to attend some ladies only religious festival. Presumably he had had intentions and there was something of a scandal. But, just as with our own gilded youth, it all blew over and he was able to go onto higher things. No salt mines for him. Or perhaps copper; I read recently of a huge Roman run copper mine in what is now Jordan. Conditions very unpleasant and required huge supplies of slaves to keep it in working order.
A rather different sort of rough and tumble at Dale Farm, where once again we have the spectacle of out-of-town protesters who are really pushing their luck, whining because they got pushed about a bit in the scuffle. What on earth do they expect? The answer to which question is that they are into provocation. They want and expect scuffles and they want and expect the rest of us to be outraged about it. They enjoy all the attention and they just love being on telly or in the papers. However, outrage a bit thin on the ground in this bit of Epsom. Except about the millions of pounds which we have to stump up to deal with it all.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
More failure
I notice this morning that the right heel of my four weeks' old Airwalk trainers has already gone through, with the left heel not far behind. From which I learn that Airwalk heels are made rather like those from Clarks; that is to say that the sturdy looking heel is honeycombed with sponge filled holes, a heel which it is impossible to repair. Not impressed. See 21st September for original posting.
But things are looking up as I have now completed my new hifi setup with a CD player from the same stable as the amplifier. See 1st October for original posting.
The next step was to get some CDs so that I could make sure the thing worked, so off to the British Heart Foundation where I was able to procure an embryo collection of 3 CDs for the sum of £3. Reflecting my lack of experience in these matters, it was not until I got home that I found that one of the boxes was empty. As it happens, the CD would have been a duplicate of a disc, at least up to the piece of music being played, so not a major deal. And the Foundation is £1 better off than it should be. It then took about an hour to get the thing out of its box, wired up underneath the amplifier and playing Grieg. Maybe this is the key to the next bit of DIY: a polished wooden case for the CD collection. Anything better than painting the back door.
Which reminds me of two other senior moments over the last week or so. On the first occasion, I was passing from West Hill to Christchurch Road, more or less at junction with Stamford Green Road, when I was stopped by a young lady in a health uniform and with a large health bag who wanted to know where West Hill Avenue was. I explained that this was West Hill and that West Hill Avenue was probably off it, up the hill somewhere, waving vaguely in the Epsom direction. The young lady had almost vanished when I remembered that I had just passed the exit of West Hill Avenue in Manor Green Road. An avenue I have walked up many times and an exit I have walked past a lot more times. Very bad.
On the second occasion, I was walking along Chessington Road towards West Ewell station, more or less at the junction with Longmead Road, when I was stopped by two young ladies, neither in uniform. They wanted Richards Field. I hadn't got a clue. Then they said, well what about a car park? At which point I remembered that I had just passed one and sent them on their way, wondering why they had switched from Richards Field to car park. Did they want to park up while they searched? Some minutes later I remembered that the car park was in Richards Field, and their directions must have included something about car parks so that I was able to make the connection. But another road I have walked past many times. Not on my beat so not very bad. But bad.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Failure
On Sunday to the National Gallery where we failed to see Madonna on the Rocks because the rocks were being repaired and where we failed to see Vermeer II because it was out on loan. Going from bad to worse, we were later unable to get into the Duke of Sussex because it was to be closed until 1600 for some reason or other. Reduced to using the fire station around the corner, with the compensations of decent beer and a very decent bowl of olives, this last for £2.20.Compensation at the National Gallery took the form of some rather good Pisarros, being particularly struck by one called 'The Côte des Bœufs at L’Hermitage', not to be confused with the picture of the same scene which lives in Paris. I learn this morning from http://www.camille-pissarro.org/ that he was a very prolific chap with whom I would like a better acquaintance. Makes Vermeer's output look a bit piddling. By volume that is.
Leaving the gallery was presented with the flier illustrated. I have yet to read the material properly, but we do appear to have yet another case where the suspect's face fitted, where there was a bit of circumstantial but not much in the way of proper evidence. With what there is tainted by the presence of a policeman subsequently put in prison himself. This is not the same as saying the suspect didn't do it, but unsatisfactory none the less. Blood stained knife in hand of suspect better than his fingerprints on dustbin bags which may or may not be associated with the getaway car. I shall give the material a proper read in due course.
Entertained on the way home by the sight of two chaps, presumably having taken strong drink, crossing the tracks at Earlsfield the quick way, being rather put out by the detour required by refurbishment works. Next to me was a rather proper and solemn chap explaining to his curious five year old daughter why this was very silly. At some length.
I close with a rather different sort of failure, the failure to be able to read. I read yestrerday in that entertaining little book from the Economist, the 'Pocket World in Figures 2011', that the rate if literacy in Bulgaria is 98.3%. Various other countries of the same sort attract a similar figure, while the UK is prudently silent on the point.
Two pieces of evidence against. First, I read recently in a learned government report that about 20% of the school population in England have special educational needs (SEN), of which around one third need more help than can be provided from within their schools' own resources and of which around one seventh (2.7%, 200,000 or more children) are children who might once have been a permutation of SEN called ESN. This suggests to me that quite a lot of children are not going to be very good at reading. Second, on May 18th 2008, I reported a figure of 10% for illiteracy, a figure which I remember checking at the time, although I do not seem to have left any record of the checking. Now England is a reasonably sophisticated place. Is is likely that Bulgaria does better, even making allowance for the communist educational heritage? So I think this particular number from the Economist is either twaddle or defined on an unhelpfully inclusive definition of literacy. Makes one nervous about the quality of other numbers provided.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Wimmin
A striking image from http://englishrussia.com/. A relative of Glenda Jackson? There seems to be some confusion about what the caption means, but the general sort of idea seems to be that equal rights means victory. The ladies in these posters - there are a few of them - are a bit more muscular than the two ladies featured in a collection of US posters from the same war at http://blog.largeformatposters.com/. This last courtesy of http://www.stumbleupon.com/home/.Friday last to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Pacifica Quartet and Menahem Pressler do Shostakovich: quartets 7 & 8 followed by the piano quintet. I had known the quintet for a long time, but mugged up on the quartets beforehand, all three works handily residing on the one disc from Melodiya via EMI. As it turned out the quartets were really good but I found the transition to the quintet after the interval difficult and it took a while to settle into it.
It also turned out to be something of a testimonial occasion for Pressler who, it seems, has been doing sterling work for the Wigmore Hall for more than 50 years, although, oddly, we have not come across him before. Now 87 and still going strong - certainly a good deal stronger than I expect to be if I ever make it that far. On the strength of this we got an encore in the form of the slow movement of the Brahmns quintet. A slight gasp of anticipation from the audience when he announced this item and no transition problems for me. All in all a memorable occasion.
Having recently used our thermometer from Zeal's of Wigmore Street (see 12th of February) during the making of blackberry and apple jam, kept an eye out but we did not spot the place, either there or in Wimpole Street. Turn to Google who denies all knowledge of such an outfit - so I wonder where I got the idea from - but he does admit to a thermometer manufacturer of that name in Merton, a good deal nearer Epsom than Wigmore Street. I dare say one of the chemists - perhaps John Bell & Croyden - would sell one a thermometer from Zeal's but that is not quite the same thing.
Our thermometer has been delisted, perhaps because less people are doing this sort of cooking these days. Perhaps because dipping a brass implement into one's jam is a health and safety hazard. However, on closer inspection I decide that the thing is probably a confectioner's thermometer rather than a jam maker's thermometer. It also told me that the jam I was making boiled at the boiling point of water where I had expected it to boil at some rather higher temperature considering all the sugar in the stuff. And the thermometer alleges that you have to get up to around 350F to get caramel. But the jam did set, whatever the thermometer was telling me.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Conspicuous consumption
Perhaps the sort of thing that Madonna might have on her bookcase. But I was struck by the incongruity of having a book, of no real value, fetching such a price on account of its symbolic and rarity value. Incongruous because the whole idea, or at least effect, of the printed book was to make books affordable. So that one no longer needed to be an abbot with the temporal power to extract enough money out of starving peasants to be able to finance the production of beautiful books for private consumption and exhibition.Incongruous, but not bad. In fact rather good. Sinking large amounts of money into artefacts which cost nothing and do no harm, but which convey status, is no bad thing. A wedge of dosh moves from one moneyed person to another. Various people get some employment out of the transaction. One has not diverted productive resources down some gold plated plug hole. Much better than ruining the country to build some palace. Or tent. Or stadium
It also prompts the idea for yet another MPhil. One could do a study into the relation between the prices an early edition of a book fetches, the size of the academic industry built on the author of the book, the number of people that buy the later editions of the book and the number of people that read it for pleasure, all the way through. This book would score very highly on the first three counts but I am not so sure about the fourth.
And talking of palaces, today we have been to Nonsuch House Mark II to inspect a very handsome model of Nonsuch House Mark I. A model lovingly crafted by http://www.modelhouses.co.uk/ for the modest sum of £40,000. Now it was a very handsome model and I was very pleased to see it. But I am not sure that this was a very good use of resources, certainly not a very good use of local authority resources in these difficult times, although as it happens I think that the funding was private or charitable. However, while it will be on permanent display, it will not be on permanent display in the sort of proper museum which is open 7 days a week, which will reduce the value added. Reduce the number of school parties which can come on some project built around the thing - assuming, that is, that teachers still bother with that kind of history.
A thing which, along with other palaces of the day, does indeed seem to have been something of a folly. Built to get one over the King of France, but both the relevant King of England and the relevant King of France were dead before it was finished and it was only 100 years or so after that before the thing was broken up for the building materials. So stones which had been taken from Merton Priory in one century, found another new home in the next.
So a folly of a folly. A first.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Water
The fascination with the watery affairs of the western US continues unabated. So yesterday we watched a much younger Jack Nicholson in 'Chinatown', a film which we had not seen before and which has worn pretty well for its 40 years. For some reason Jack Nicholson managed to remind me of both Sean Connery and Frank Sinatra.
Then there was the perusal of the web site of the people who managed the delta area of the Sacramento river.
And then there was the perusal of the watery pages of my Polish Army Atlas. Where, in passing, I learn about splendid things called amphidromic points. Defined in the 1987 Manual of Navigation from the Admiralty as places on the ocean from where co-tidal lines tend to radiate out from. Co-tidal lines being rather like contour lines, but linking up places which have the same tide times. Tides at amphidromic points tend to be a bit tricky. All to do with the tendency of continuous maps from a surface onto itself to have fixed points.
To assist my reading I have compiled a list of parties who might have interest in any particular water project, a list which follows. All the parties who have to be squared away, or perhaps disposed of if 'Chinatown' was anything to go by.
Civil servants who want to grow their empires.
Engineers who love building things. The bigger the better.
Congressmen who want projects in their areas.
Senators who want a monument to their term on this earth. Needs to be named for them to really score here.
White water enthusiasts who like unspoiled rivers. President Carter was one of these, on which account he got a lot of hate mail from dam buffs.
Fishing enthusiasts who like unspoiled rivers.
Water sports enthusiasts who like the large lakes created by dams.
Long hairs who are into the environment generally. Quite apt also to be recreational drug users.
Civil engineering companies who love building things for the government. Dams good, tunnels better.
Manufacturers of earth moving and tunnelling machinery. Manufacturers of big pipes, turbines and pumps. Manufacturers of cement. Manufacturers of irrigation machinery.
Voters who live in the flood plain of a temperamental river.
Voters who live somewhere which is going to be flooded by a dam.
Voters who like cheap electricity.
Eastern voters who don’t like subsidising western ones with Federal money.
Power companies who don’t like competition from cheap Federal hydro.
Manufacturing companies who need a lot of cheap power.
Farmers who will get cheap water.
Farmers who won’t be getting cheap water but have to compete with those that do.
Voters who live in big hot towns like Los Angeles and who like both to shower and to water their lawns. And to stay cool.
Land speculators who make a lot of money out of big hot towns like Los Angeles getting bigger and hotter.
Lawyers who do well out of all the big money schemozzle.
Farmers who like big bad aqueducts which leak someone else’s water into their gravel from where they can pump it up onto their land for free.
Voters in area A who would rather waste their water on some dumb water project than let those greedy sonsofbitches in area B have it.
I close with a new-to-me prophecy of doom. It seems that once upon a time all the seas were fresh. Then over the years, all the salt and other stuff washed down into them from the hills, making them saltier and saltier. Evaporation of the water from the surface further increases the concentration. So small seas like the Dead Sea have already had it. The Caspian Sea is on the way. And the Pacific Ocean is to come. So if global warming doesn't get us, salt will.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Warts and all
Interesting result with the 72nd batch of bread. All that was different was the use of own brand olive oil from Sainsbury's, a short first rise and a long second rise. Four of the five warts visible in the illustration. All paper thin and all survived cooking - they had formed during the second rise - but the most impressive was damaged on exit from its tin. Bread tasted fine with a touch of the crumpet about it. This may have been due to cooling in a warm and steamy kitchen.This last being down to next door's apples of which we took a consignment this morning, half a barrow full to be more precise. Mostly by hand but I did have a go with the litter picker. This gave a useful extra three feet of reach but required trickery to get an apple off the tree and into the hand without dropping it. Big ones, surprise surprise, much harder than medium sized ones. Small ones generally too well attached to the tree.
Having got the apples I was able to apply successfully for the lifting of the restraining order on blackberry harvesting and went out for a last swing down Horton Lane this afternoon, managing about a pound and a half in an hour. Would have done rather better last week and I think we are really at the end now, after a season of record breaking length.
The blackberries, 6 or 7 pounds of apples (after peeling and coring), 3 kilos of sugar and a couple of pints or so of water have now been boiled down into jam (the colour and appearance of full strength textured Ribena) and poured into 7 jam jars, 2 coffee jars, 1 jug (Berylware from Woods) and 1 dessert bowl. We even had a supply of the waxed paper discs used for topping out in the better class of kitchen.
The only real innovation was to cook the peel in a little water, liquidise it and add it to the boiling jam. The theory being that cooking apples are not that flavourful and what little flavour there is resides in the peel. On the other hand one does not want lumps of peel in the finished product.
Not sure if this was the result of the added peel, but there was very little scum. No need to remove what there was.
Now we have the long wait until morning to see it the stuff sets. I did tests on a plate but I have not made enough jam recently for that to be reliable.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Bookwormed
Following the post of 7th October, got around to visiting the people at Jessops who did such a good job on some ancient family photographs a year or so back. Took a couple of versions, one on very thin paper, the sort favoured by the artist, and one on thin card which I had printed by a jobbing printer in Myddleton Road, N22, some 35 years ago. The same road, as it happens, from which we obtained our very fine bedstead for the princely sum of £2.The attendant, using the common or garden public access scanners, did one of each. He claimed that the scanners might be common or garden but that they did do lots of psi's and he did not think one was going to better anywhere else. The results did not look too hot on the screen that came with the scanner, but I took them away anyway for the entirely reasonable sum of £3.49 or so.
The one illustrated is that on the very thin paper, on which the scanner has picked up the crumples, faint though they were. While a lot better than the image I got from my entry level scanner, still not perfect. I think the trouble might be that the scanner is not forgiving enough; what comes across as sharp & clear, black & white on a printing press is blurred by the scanner. Or perhaps the interaction of the scanner and the screen is doing something. Possibly moving from one number of pixels to another, a move which can do funny things to images. One line of enquiry will be to investigate whether by pushing the image through some image enhancer, I can recapture the spirit of the original. I know people in Tooting that are good at that sort of thing.
Another line of enquiry would be a high street photographer who might be able to do better with his fancy camera than Jessops with their fancy scanner. The only catch with this being that high street photographers seem to be an extinct breed, at least in this part of Surrey. I suppose that cheap digital cameras awash with image enhancing widgets have taken the bottom out of the market.
In the way that my water book tells me that a machine invented by public money at the University of California has displaced the 20,000 lower paid workers who picked the tomatoes for big corporate tomato growers there who grow their tomatoes on water paid for by that same public money. Which also picks up the social security tab for the now unpaid lower paid workers. Complicated world.
I believe that the bit of the music on the book plate is from a piece which was important to my father. But I could not pick it out from the Beethoven and Bach candidates I could think of - and had the score for. Which cuts things down a bit. I tried putting 'ECBEEABAA' into Google, this being my translation of the notes into letters, but that does not seem to be a language that Google works with. But it must be possible if I remember correctly that iTunes can identify a piece from the odd bar, in which case it must have something to bite on. A further line of enquiry.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
While back in the Emerald Isle...
Last week to the Old Vic again to see 'Playboy of the Western World', near full and a good show. Our second exposure to drama from rural Ireland, the first being on or about March 29th 2009, 'Dancing at Lughnasa'. As it happens, Niamh Cusack was in both, and did rather well in both. On this occasion, neither she nor any of the other luvvies exercised their smoking privileges, although I grant that the script did not call for it quite so strongly this time around. Robert Sheehan and Ruth Negga also did well in the other two big roles.
They took a leaf out of the Globe's book with the cast lined up at the front of the stage doing a bit of folk song a couple of times during the proceedings. Complete with squeeze box and a small bodhran, a sort of drum which I am rather keen on but which I had confused with a lanbeg, a confusion which might have caused trouble in some quarters.
Splendid set, a rather splendid mock-up of a stone cottage making good use of a revolving stage. I am still wondering how you make replica stone walls without using stone, which all goes to show how fancy props can distract one from the business at hand. To which I reply that the fancy prop is an integral part of the business at hand. We do need to know the sort of place that the paddies were living in. Back in 1907 a Dublin audience might reasonably be expected to know but that was another time and another place. A parallel wonder of recent days has been about for how long pots and pans have been cheap and available to the working classes. I have heard that many rural poor in Ireland did all their cooking in a single cauldron over a peat fire - which I imagine to be rather like the cauldron exhibited at the Sutton Hoo museum - where it was a luxury item, chiefs only. The Irish version was said to have contained a never ending stew, fortified by the odd rabbit and cleaned out for feast days. I have also heard of tinkers trundling around mending pots and pans, something you certainly would not bother with now.
Another wonder has been the various times and placing where a bragging, far fetched and aggressive style of conversation has been the thing, provided, of course, that it is done with style and no one resorts to fists. The important thing is to be able to return the serve. Some inhabitants of TB are quite good at it. It used to be all the thing in the poorer quarters of Belfast, but I forget the special word they had for it. There is 'banter' in TB but that does not quite capture the spirit of the thing. Also all the thing in the aboriginal bars in our former colonies in Africa. Don't know about golf clubs as I am very rarely in one.
Monday, October 10, 2011
How they do things in the US
A recent TLS contained a review of a book about the mystery of why the US, more or less alone among the lands of the free, persists with capital punishment. Part of the answer at least seemed to be that the US is a federation with a relatively weak centre, at least in so far as domestic affairs are concerned. While the parts are rather keen on directly elected justice officials who tend to do what the electorate want; there certainly seem to be plenty of them if http://ww2.co.waller.tx.us/Elections/elected_officials.html is anything to go by. Unlike in our part of the world, with indirect democracy, where it is easier for liberal elites to ignore what the workers might want. So started to ponder about the merits of indirect democracy.
The author of the book was a journalist by trade which makes his style a bit breathless. But he managed to spring a good surprise on me last night. Pages and pages about how awful it was that billions of dollars were poured into something called the Grand Coulee Dam. No justification, more or less illegal and pushed through by FDR as a showcase project during the great depression. But then it turned out that huge amounts of electricity came on stream just in time to make huge amounts of aluminium with which to make huge numbers of aeroplanes with which to whack Hitler, who could not compete with electricity on this scale. The well built turbines whirred at 120% of their proper capacity for the duration. So it wasn't such a waste of space after all. I wonder if this is why Boeing wound up just across the Wenatchee Forest from the dam, in Seattle?
Lastly, as a former manufacturer of test cubes of concrete, I ought to mention that when making large concrete structures, such as dams, you have to insert lots of cooling pipes and pump lots of icy brine through them, otherwise the stuff would never cool down and set. It is not explained whether one needs to back fill the cooling pipe holes after the event. Squirt grout in or some such thing.
Back home, two culinary experiments. In the white corner, I experimented with making cabbage and noodle soup with chorizo. Usual drill, posh chicken stock cube, three pints of water, noodles and slivered, new season, crinkly cabbage. But needing a bit of meat to gee it up thought to slice up the stump of chorizo which was all that I had to hand. Not too sure about this: would the rather odd flavour of chorizo - not sure quite how it gets it - sit OK with the rather bland noodles and cabbage? The answer was yes, the amount of soup being large relative to the amount of chorizo. But with the oddity that the red stuff which leached out of the chorizo bound to the first bit of crinkly cabbage that it came across. So while most of the cabbage was a pale green-yellow, a small proportion was a pale orange. But clear segregation rather than mixture.
In the red corner, BH tried her hand at quince jelly, but without going to the length of straining it clear, so more like jam. But she did wind up with four small slabs of the stuff, about the size of small chocolate bars and which looked entirely as intended. She took a dim view of my suggesting that perhaps it would be simpler to have poured the stuff into jam jars to set. Not the Spanish way at all. To be taken with Spanish goat's cheese.
Saturday, October 08, 2011
Bureaucracy
Sparked off this morning on a small piece in yesterday's DT about bureaucracy putting the knife into a perfectly innocent conker match somewhere near Stansted Airport. Always rise to the bait of digs at bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy in question in this case was the insurance company which would not provide public liability insurance unless the conker match organisers ticked various boxes. So the bureaucrats in question were nothing to do with government, local or otherwise, rather with an organ of free enterprise. I think the story goes something like as follows.
If someone is running some kind of visitor attraction which I have paid to attend, and that someone does not take reasonable steps to prevent deaths of poodles, if my very important poodle is then killed in an accident, I am entitled to sue the someone for a large sum of money. Expensive business this post pettic traumatic syndrone (PPTS). By extension, if my very important hand is bruised by a conker, I am entitled to sue the someone. There are plenty of lawyers out there who will help you decide whether your bruise is actionable on a no win no fee basis.
So the local authority in which the attraction is to be held says to the supplier that you cannot have the attraction unless you get insurance for yourself. The local authority bureaucrats are just doing their duty to protect citizens from unscrupulous sellers of attractions. Not much point in suing some chap in a van without any insurance. Just look at Dale Farm.
So the supplier then goes to the insurance company which then goes to its lawyers. Its lawyers come up with a whole lot of stuff which the supplier has to do to make it less likely that he will be the subject of an action and to make it more likely that the insurance company does not have to pay up. Perfectly normal insurance company stuff; they are not in business to pay the price for sloppy supply. They do acts of god.
In this, the lawyers for the insurance company can make good use of the product of the bureaucrats of the Health & Safety, Equal Opportunities, Human Rights and European Communities empires. Does a one armed Angolan nun have reasonable access to the conker match? With or without the proper paperwork. Has reasonable provision been made for her to say compline afterwards? So to be fair to the DT, there are some bureaucrats on public funds who get in on the act.
Supplier ends up filling up forms which demonstrate that he is not sloppy. Or decides that it is all too much bother and goes in for some other occupation.
So on mature reflection, I think this is a societal problem, exacerbated by greed & enthusiasm in various of the parties, but not admitting to a quick fix, from the DT or anywhere else.
Friday, October 07, 2011
Bookworm
Last week I was invited to join the great book dust in the extension. That is to say, to take down, shake and dust each of the many books on the 25 shelf metres of bookcase. A proceeding which, it is alleged, reduces the amount of dust in the air and hence the amount of coughing and spluttering.
My participation had the added advantage that it provided me with an opportunity to consider each book in turn with the hard eye of the culler. A culler who would be quite glad to get the several metres of books lying around on the floors, both upstairs and downstairs, off the floors. And so it turned out: several metres of books have indeed been delivered to the British Heart Foundation skip at our local waste transfer station. Including such gems as my recently collected collection of Oxford Classic Trollope (although I did hang onto the autobiography) and various large, largely unread & certainly old tomes by Prescott on various aspects of Spanish & Spanish flavoured history. Quite a prolific chap considering that had rather dodgy eyesight. So my seven volumes of the life of Churchill have been promoted from the pit to the dress circle (see, for example, November 17th 2010).
Along the way I decided that modern books from the US were much more apt to be decently made than modern books from the UK, most of which were pretty poor. In particular, bindings with decent paper which stay open at the desired page without the need for paperweights, fingers or other devices were apt to be of US origin. Perhaps all part of the big picture where their stuff generally seems to be made to a better specification than ours. That is not to say that it is better value, but it is better.
It also prompted the conceit of using some of my father's book plates for the first time in a long time, thinking it would be fun if my four books by or about my famous namesake E. Toller were adorned with an arty book plate marking the library of one J. R. Toller. An amusement for future browsers of whatever dump they eventually wind up in. The same book plate which prompted an HP failure. That is to say, I have generally been very impressed by the quality of the scanning from my bottom of the range HP printer, bottom of the range in the sense that it was bundled up for free with my HP desktop. However, when I thought to scan the book plate it did not do very well at all. It could not cope with the mixture of heavy black areas and fine black line at all. Looked pretty bad on the screen. I suppose I should persevere and get Jessops to have a go; I believe their scanners to be a touch more serious than mine.
And then the Kindle part of the brain was jogged and more stuff from Gutenberg was loaded up, although I am getting to the point that I am chucking books without bothering to actually load them onto the Kindle from Gutenberg, secure in the knowledge that I could if I wanted to. On the other hand there have been two recent bonuses from browsing, bonuses which would not have accrued had I stuck to load on demand.
First, a couple of short stories from Gogol which I had not come across before: the mantle (which I presume is the same as the story called the overcoat, not really the right word, although it does point up the fact that overcoats used to be worn over other coats, rather than over suits) and the nose. Perhaps the fun poked at government officials tickles the fancy of a retired one of the same. The stuff certainly seems to translate well. Second, one of Trollope's few flights into non-fiction, this one in the form of a biography of Cicero, a chap who I am now learning lived in rough times. The Romans might have been a major stepping stone to our present state of civilisation but they certainly played the game a bit rough. The things that could happen to their own chaps was pretty grim, not to mention what might happen to animals, women, slaves or aliens. But I also learn that many of the issues which diverted the Roman chattering classes were not that removed from those which divert our own, so to that extent it is a pity that our leaders are no longer trained in the classics. Our present leader, I believe, is a PPE man. Don't know about his colleagues.
By way of appetiser, I offer a comment on a famous actor of Cicero's day. "It was a pity that [such] a good man should have taken himself to such a calling". The calling in question being pretty much on a par with street cleaning, grave digging or worse to a respectable Roman. Curious how the luvvies have turned the tables on us, to the point where voice overs for cartoon films are coining it to the tune of millions of dollars a year and where they are accorded respectful audiences by prime ministers. But then Nero was a bit keen on them too.
It was also the case that a respectable Roman should not indulge in retail trade, as success in this sort of trade was bound to involve dishonesty. On the other hand, usury of the worst sort was fine.
PS: I complain in passing that one does not appear to be able to search a blog by date. Presumably the searchers think it enough that entries are presented by date.
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Hurricane Ariel
The other day up to St. Giles Cripplegate to see the Jericho House production of 'The Tempest' there. Never heard of Jericho House before but their site at http://www.jerichohouse.org.uk/ bills them as being into various kinds of innovation. For example, Jericho collaborates with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. They are into outreach to exiles and there is a connection with Palestine and Israel. This play was billed as being a return of the Tempest to its intended format as a masque, a popular form of aristo. entertainment at the time of writing and as pointing up its relevance to the post-structured themes of colonialism, oppression and such like. This last was a bit discouraging, as were the mostly pallid reviews, but the talk of bringing on the lutes was encouraging.
Anyway, we turn up and the show was good - and far more conventional than the wind up had led me to believe. We got to hear a lot of the words and there was much less irritating slapstick than has become the custom at the Globe.
The magic of the theatre in the round in this old and dark space worked. Minimal scenery. A few props. Good use of music and lights. Good use of the long centre aisle up to the stage in the crossing. Show stolen by a very athletic Ruth Lass as Ariel, who managed to leap and sing at the same time. Not so young either. Plus a spectacular appearance in Act III Scene III on stilts, rather like the sort of thing that sporty people without legs might bound around on. Presumably she had not read that bit of the Arden commentary which explains that the play is supposed to revolve around Caliban. Backing cast mostly satisfactory, with only one or two weak links.
They had taken some liberties with the text with much of the long Act II Scene I expunged and Gonzalo expunged altogether. Some of his lines had been given to Antonio in whose mouth they made little sense. Furthermore, Antonio had had a sex change. The resultant Antonia did a quite reasonable job if failing to ooze quite enough malice. The same lady also did rather well as Stephano, also sex changed.
A down side was that some of the famous lines got rather loss in the noise and bustle. 'O brave new world' was very feebly delivered by the otherwise rather good Miranda.
An up side was that the whole thing was done and dusted in about 2 hours, without interval. Which worked much better for me than the Globular three hour marathons with interval.
The drain being closed by the time the show was finished, we came home via Moorgate and thought that changing at Balham, that is to say one less change, might be a good idea. Which it would have been except that we bounded up the steps at Balham to leap onto a train to Epsom to find, too late, that is was the slow train via West Croydon. I think we would have done better to wait a few minutes to catch the proper train via Carshalton. Carshalton Beeches bad. On the other hand it did furnish me with a nearly new Guardian from that same morning.
Closed the night's performance with a fragment of a dream involving my cycling past two huge and slowly moving army vehicles carrying tanks, coming the other way down somewhere like Hook Road. Road too narrow and vehicles too high for me to be able to see what they were carrying properly. Tanks was something of a guess. Possibly brought on by a recent sighting on one of those large waste disposal vehicles from Drinkwater, trundling down that same Hook Road on their way from the tip. Aka waste transfer station.
PS: and to be fair to to contemporary themes of colonialism, oppression and such like, the play surprised, once again, by its bearing on still relevant themes. Including, for example, our duty towards expropriated aboriginals. And I had not noticed that what happened to Caliban afterwards was something of a loose end. Is their scope for a modern sequel?
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Divine service
Off to Guildford on Saturday to mark the year of the bible at Holy Trinity.
Proceedings were opened by one Sarah Foot talking about medieval translations of the Bible into English, or at least what passed for English in those days. It turned out that it was the same Sarah Foot that wrote the biography of Aethelstan which attracted a very warm review in last week's TLS, so off to a good start. Sadly, a bit downhill after that. Despite being an eminent and experienced lecturer, I found it hard to hear what she was saying and fell prey to afternoon sleepiness, an ailment which used to be the bane of courses when I was in the world of work. No good at sitting still just listening; have to have something to do with the tongue. And despite being an experienced listener it did not occur to me to stick up my hand and ask her to get the microphone turned up a few notches - any more than it occurred to her to check that we could all hear. Must have been the unusual context. Net result was that I was sort of half awake during most of the talk, not awake enough to get much from it. There were some odd visual effects by way of compensation. So went away with the thought that in this 400th anniversary year of King James' Bible she ought to have been talking about that, rather than its remote ancestors.
Proceedings were closed by a sung Evensong, sung according to the old rite. That is to say, not the Good News Bible or some such. Very impressive it was too, with the singing fully up to the standard of the church. A church with a very impressive apsed and panelled chancel with a fine wrought iron screen. A light and airy thing which served to make the chancel special without cutting it off from us. One oddity was having a conductor standing in the middle; that bit did not seem terribly holy. Catholics, I believe, sometimes hide their music behind curtains.
All of which made this unbeliever see some point in it all. A ceremony to bring the community together, to bring the sacred and profane into contact for a short span. This last being nicely pointed up by the contrast between the rather extraordinary singing of the choir and the rather ordinary lesson reading of the mayor. It also struck me that to work well, it needs to be the whole community. Not the same at all if you are a minority sect.
Closed the outing with a visit to Il Ponte of Epsom (http://www.ilponte.co.uk/about_us.php) which I had confused with Pontis of Oxford Circus (http://www.pontis.co.uk/jsp/pontis.jsp). Despite the confusion, we had a good meal, helped along by a lot of their wine coming in half as well as full bottles, which allowed for more careful consumption management than might otherwise have been the case. It also turned out that the confusion was not that unreasonable. The names were similar and the format was similar. Family run Italian restaurants involving real Italians.
Monday, October 03, 2011
Beefy
It was the day of the cow (not being able to determine the status of a cow from its chop. Cows, kine, heifers, steers, steroids, bullocks and bulls all look the same to me. Calves, that is to say veals, I might notice) yesterday, so we celebrated with a two rib piece of fore rib from Manor Green Road. Who had taken proper note of the instructions about there being fat but no chining and the 9.5lb joint did indeed turn up with fat and without having been chined.
Tied it with two white strings and was pleased to find that it stood up; it seeming more proper to cook such a thing upright, but without really knowing whether it matters. Affectation rather than experience. Gave it three hours at 180C, something above the slow temperature cooking at 170C described in our trusty Radiation Cookbook, but more in line with the last recorded effort on 13th July. Rested for half an hour. Lost something between half a pint and a pint of fat during the cooking, which left the meat moist and loose, brown not pink. Very good it was too, with the key feature to my mind being loose. Carveries usually manage it but purveyors of hot salt beef usually do not. Served with rice, primo cabbage (which at 2 for £1 made growing bug infested versions on an allotment sound like hard work) and swede.
Preceded by crab salad: flaked white meat from claws, loosened with a touch of olive oil and tossed in a suitable lettuce. Spiced up with a little (out of season) spring onion.
Postceded by a cooked cheese cake. None of your digestive biscuits, jam and jello. But it remains a mystery why the biscuits, jam and jello variety dominate the market. Either the commercial caterers think that we like biscuits, jam and jello or there is some tricky food processing reason why the other sort does not fly in a caff.
Accompanied by one drop of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and another of Bergerac. This last having caused much self checkout self confusion by being on special and costing a modest £10 for two, less than half the price advertised. Clearly not properly alert to these nuances of shopping with Sainsbury. Recovered enough from the confusion to get four, a multiple of two if not a big multiple. But I was on my bicycle.
The whole being rounded off with an experimental Romeo y Julieta No. 2 from our local Waitrose. Smokable when damped up but unpleasantly dry out of the tube; it had clearly been in the shop for rather too long. I should have inspected the thing the day before and arranged for a more subtle damping. Better still, go to a proper fag shop from which the things arrive in better shape in the first place. Even if they do cost 25% more.
PS: this post suggests to Mr. G. that I need to be told about polytunnels for lambing sheep in. What?
Saturday, October 01, 2011
St Lukes
Thursday was St. Luke's day again, so off to Old Street to hear Khatia Buniatshvili do some Beethoven sonatas: Op. 31 No.2, Op. 49 No. 1 and Op. 57. Very good stuff it was too. Other points: accoustics very good, dress spectacular and introductions by the Radio 3 person somewhat on the gushing side. The sort of thing you might expect from a presenter on a popular archaeology programme on television.
Most of the lunch break was, in consequence, spent pondering about whether the fee for the concert covered the bill for the dress. One theory was that as a young female performer the fashion house might do the dress gratis, by way of an advertisement, but I was not convinced that the pianist, good though she was, was eminent enough for that. Not exactly in the same league as the late Elizabeth Taylor, whom I seem to remember rather abused her freebie privileges towards the end of her career.
Then off to Whitecross Street to inspect the charity shop there, and on into the food market which looks to have displaced a vegetable market. Another of the vanishing markets of London. Food market more into hot takeaway food from around the world than farmers' market stuff, although there was a little of this last. For example, some nice looking cakes, going cheap as the market was shutting down, this being around 1500.
Interesting find from the charity shop in the form of a book by a journalist - Marc Reisner - about the water scene in the western United States. From which I learn various things. First, there is very little water in most of these western states. Not suitable for the sort of farming practised in the eastern states - and northern Europe - at all. Second, these western states were home to all kinds of gigantic land fiddles in the second half of the 19th century - pretty much on the same scale as the rip-off of national assets by the oligarchs. Third, the feds have spent and continue to spend huge amounts of money - billions and billions - on huge water projects which then go on to sell the water to farmers in those same western states at a fraction of the true cost. Farmers who think that any other kind of federal spending - perhaps on the poor or the sick - is much the same as communism. And then there are all kinds of technical problems. Water tends to evaporate if you shoot it up into the desert air in a show-off fountain. Irrigation seems to result in salination, both of the land and of the downstream water. Apparently the Mexicans got a bit cross about this a few years back. The fossil ground water which feeds these water projects is scheduled to run out in the life time of our children. Maybe those nice people up in Canada can be persuaded to ship some of theirs south? All looks to be a very hot - or perhaps a very dry - potato.
I wonder if it is much the same story in Israel?
Quick foray into the rather grand public library in the Barbican. Tempted by the selection of beautifully bound Pathfinder maps for sale at 10p a pop but failed to find one with which we could claim even a vague connection. Plus slightly damaged by that irritating public library habit of tearing out the front page of things they are getting rid of. Neighbouring conservatory shut but central ponds and gardens looking as good as ever. Good place for a central pad. Will I ever get to see inside one?
Home to a reprise of the Op. 31 sonata on my half century old loudspeakers, on which half seemed to be missing. So, more or less on a whim, off to Sevenoaks and bought some new stuff. Pro-Ject, Marantz and Bowers & Wilson, the last two of which I had never before heard of but which came out OK on a quick peek on the Internet. Affordable, up & running and most of the missing half of Op. 31 recovered. It even made a decent job on a rather scruffy disk from the USSR which must be as old as the old speakers. Oborin & Oistrakh doing Grieg's sonata No. 2 on a label called Mezhdunardnaya Kniga. And I thought that kniga was something to do with books. But the full story can be seen at http://www.mkniga.ru/.
I liked the sales staff at Sevonoaks (http://www.ssav.com). Pleasant, efficient and came up with something I like, on budget. Only problem now is to decide whether to wear the speaker grills or not. BH is very keen on them being worn, partly to tone down the high tech. appearance and partly to keep dust off.
