pumpkinstrokemarrow

Public service probably running a bit slow here in Epsom today and there are people with flags on the roundabout connecting Horton Lane with Christchurch Road, people presumably who ought to be at work.

Despite being a lefty former public servant and without having read the small print, I do not approve of this strike. We are all in a bit of bother and we are all going to have to tighten our belts a bit - which in our own case means that our hard earned savings are not earning very much interest. And in their case means that, looking forward, final salary pensions are going to have to be cut back a bit. It would help if there was less greed at the top of the heap, but that is a matter of presentation rather than substance - except in so far as some top heap public servants have done rather well for themselves in recent years. So if I was still at work, I would have to black leg today. I might add that for most of the time I thought I was reasonably paid for what I did, although that did not stop one sometimes being a bit cross about the amount of money that government spent on contractors (some being more fancily described as consultants. So these days, Watson would be a contracting detective, while Holmes would still be a consulting detective) and the amount that some of them actually got paid. But I never tried very hard to actually be one so I can't really complain.

Back in the real world we are having a fibre fest - which means that I was down at Waitrose at the crack of dawn buying wholemeal spelt - a sort of pre-historic wheat much favoured by the beards on Time Team. Went the whole hog and bought an organic brand from a Welsh water mill which claims to have been operating since the reign of the first Elizabeth. Pictures at http://www.bacheldremill.co.uk/ suggest that the mill really is an artisan affair, which must severely limit the amount of stuff they can push out through Waitrose, assuming, that is, that they do not buy the stuff in in bulk from unnamed neighbours. Which would not be very Waitrose. But it was certainly very organic looking, coming in a stout brown paper bag, rather than the stout white paper offered by other brands, and sealed by stitching across the top with thin white string, rather than the glue offered by other brands. I shall report on how the bread (batch 88) turned out in due course.

Yesterday back to the King William in Ewell village, the first time in a while, probably since around March 19th. Amongst other things I had a Neopolitan pasty, very like a large version of its Cornish cousin in general appearance but filled with pizzery stuff - rather than mince and tatties. Very good it was too, if not quite as spectacular as the rolled up pizza we once came across in Florence. Followed up with expresso, almond biscuits and a couple of small glasses of Vino Santo. Picture from Wikipedia article on same spot on on the biscuits, but the wine we had was more yellow than brown. A strong & sweet pudding wine.

Many visits to supermarkets in the last few days, probably more than BH, so that means a lot for me.

I paid one visit to our large Sainsbury's on foot, carrying two pounds of brussels sprouts, on the bone as it were, which I had purchased at the market. The sprouts attracted various interested glances, unless that is, it was the breakfast egg on my shirt front. The mission was to buy two bottles of medium sherry, this in penance for having tasted one bottle of same which had previously been designated Christmas fare. So I get myself to the self-checkout clutching two bottles of sherry, one packet of dried yeast and two pounds of brussels sprouts, on the bone. Put the brussels sprouts in the bagging area so that I can start operations. Bagging area detects alien object. Remove sprouts and put my hand up to summon the invigilator. He jogs the thing back into life. Start to pass merchandise across scanner and the thing hiccups again. Same procedure as last time. Finish passing merchandise across scanner and the thing requires proof of age. Hand up again. This time I escape - and, despite all, the self-checkout was a lot faster than standing in line. Perhaps one day I shall graduate to one of those hand held computers with which you scan your merchandise as you go round.

Then I paid several half visits to the Sainsbury's Local which is about to knock out some more shops from Ewell village, where by half visit I mean cycle past rather than actually go in. The Sainsbury's people are very keen because they look to have got the shop up and running before they have finished putting the tiles on the roof. Presumably the lining paper they have put under the tiling battens is deemed to be sufficiently waterproof for a grocer. That apart, it is quite impressive the speed with which they can fit up such a shop from the shell and get it up and running; presumably a few heads get broken on the way, to be attended to, in the boozer, on completion. Sainbury's Basic fags around the back.

But I don't suppose the lady (ask Mr. Google for Deb's Veg) who has just opened a small veg. shop in the village is so impressed. I wonder whether she bothered to check with the council or whoever whether there was a chain store in play? And then there is the butcher at the other end of the village, who sells a lot of cooked meats and fancy groceries as well as meat; don't suppose he is too happy either.

There was also a visit to the newish Lidl near the Chessington Garden Centre, to top up with their presumably slightly dodgy premier cru wine at around £10 a pop. I say slightly dodgy as I assume that the stuff is not quite up to snuff, despite being from a bottler who is; but it is quite good enough for us. Impresses stray guests. Here I was entertained while waiting by a couple of young ladies at the next checkout who wanted to pay a third on one card, a third on another (in another name) and a third in cash. The young (English) man in charge seemed to think that a Lidl checkout machine could cope with this but it was taking him a little while to work out exactly how, despite assistance from the pretty young (East Asian) girl in charge of my checkout.

In the margins of all this I have been continuing with Vol. II of Trollope on Cicero on Kindle, last mentioned on October 20th. The general scene seems to be that in Trollope's day anyone with a proper education could read Cicero in the original. He quotes small chunks in the original without translation: wonderful, pure & poetic Latin it is too, I dare say. But, despite that, the chap seems to have had a bad press, perhaps because he was on the losing side, and Trollope is at pains to explain what a good chap he was really. Maybe a bit dodgy around the edges by the standards of his (Trollope's) day, but quite progressive for his (Cicero's), to the point of anticipating the policies and precepts of our Lord.

So amused along the way by Trollope's righteous indignation about the way that Roman proconsuls pillaged their charges big time. A practise which was illegal but was expected and anybody who was anybody could easily bribe his way through the inevitable legal challenges back in the forum. Not being challenged would be bad; everyone would assume your fishing had not been very successful. And all this at a time when similar people were doing similar things in our name in India and elsewhere. And this despite Trollope giving every appearance of being a thoroughly decent chap.

There was a longish piece in a recent issue of the TLS about all the places from which R. L. Stevenson borrowed material for 'Treasure Island', first published in a boys' magazine. He, that is RLS, freely admitted borrowing lots of material in what he claimed had originally been intended for family consumption only, but omitted to acknowledge borrowing some more from a story in a sample of the magazine which he had been sent to show him the sort of thing that they wanted. Perhaps like others, he liked to dress up the nativity of his first popular book a bit; a bit of family fun rather than a first attempt to break into the lucrative magazine market.

That being as it may, I then got to wondering, against a background of plagiarism being a big issue in parts of academia, whether one should care or worry that 'Treasure Island' was a patchwork of other peoples' material, nicely packaged up for a magazine? First thought was no: RLS was the chap that forged the material into a popular story and got it out there, into the wide world; he deserves the credit. The other chaps might have contributed a bit of the scaffolding but they did not build the building.

That line, I think, runs when we are talking about one writer recycling the published material of other writers. It might be polite to acknowledge the contribution that those other writers have made, but I see no objection to using the material. Famous composers of yesteryear did it all the time.

Unpublished material a bit different. So if an established author gets a bit lazy and pinches some material from an unpublished manuscript sent him by some starving debutant for comment, he is doing wrong. At the very least the first author ought to ask permission of the second author and offer to share the swag.

Or if an established academic gets a bit careless and uses original material worked up by his research assistant, struggling to get a grip on the greasy pole, without acknowledgement, he is clearly doing wrong.

But for that same academic to have to load the back of his paper with reams of references to published material which contributed ever so slightly to the medium and context in which his paper was written, seems a bit OTT. It could also be quite hard: how is one supposed to remember how all the bits and pieces populating the grey cells came to be there? They have been taken into one's own mind set and their origin is of secondary interest.

One needs a sense of proportion and not to get too stroppy if you think someone might have given you an honourable mention but decided not to. And one should always remember, as Caleb Colton almost pointed out ever so many years ago, that plagiarism is a most sincere form of flattery. The flattered should rest content with that! Failing that, there are always the correspondence columns of the TLS, often game for bad tempered exchanges about this sort of thing.

The first moan was my own and resulted from a train ride into London earlier this week. A pretty young lady came and sat in a seat opposite, pulled out a whole lot of what looked like photocopies of pictures and proceeded to cut them out with a small pair of scissors. Perhaps she was a student doing a project for our University of the Creation Arts. As she cut, she brushed the bits and pieces onto the floor around her. Not very good, I thought to myself. What are the yuff of today coming too. Doesn't it occur to them that some of us have to sit at look at the mess they are making and that someone else will have to come and clear it up? What to do? She was probably less than half my weight so scarcely in a position to be physically intimidating, although she might turn out to have something of a mouth on her. Playing safe, I stared at her until she noticed - perhaps 10 seconds - then glanced down to the mess on the floor: she got the idea but quickly looked away. Shall I move to the next level? But after about a further 30 seconds without further eye contact, she had a go at clearing it all up. She was reasonably successful in this, so it seemed to sensible to let the matter rest, having lost my opportunity for a proper moan.

The second moan was in TB, where there has been much huffing and puffing over the last few days about something called EURO IV, the name of the latest government initiative to bash hard working and decent van drivers. The story was that anyone driving an older diesel van - which appeared to equate for practical purposes to any older van - will have to pay £100 for each day on which the van enters London, or rather the GLC. Most of the hard working van drivers working around here need to enter London - which starts for these purposes just a couple of miles up the road - several times a week and at £100 a pop this is not going to work. So they are being forced to buy a new van, possibly years before they might otherwise have gotten around to it. What about the poor old older van driver, coming up to retirement, who might not want to invest in a new van at this stage of his career? Is it fair that the second hand value of older vans is now about zero? That these people should have their working capital wiped out by a stroke of the Bullingdon Boris pen?  Is if fair that all those posh people driving Chelsea tractors, far worse in this regard than a well cared for van, are not contributing at all? Some members of the TB were getting quite angry about it all and were in no way mollified by my praise of the Bullingdon Bike scheme.

I thought I ought to take a look at the matter, starting out at the quite helpful pages on the subject at the TfL site. From which I gleaned two factlets. One, the new rules coming in in January, part of a long running Europe wide drive for a healthier atmosphere in which to live and work, are about particulate matter from older diesel commercial vehicles, or older diesel vehicles which look a bit commercial. Only a few private cars will be hit by them. And, roughly speaking, the new rules only apply to vehicles more than 6 years old, so most fleet operators will not be affected: they turn their stuff over faster than that. But the small operators out of former council estates will be affected. So the new rules are a selective tax on them and their occupations. Two, one does not have to scrap a non compliant vehicle. In most cases it will suffice to fit a filter - which might cost between £1,000 and £2,000, but which would be rather less than a new van. I guess that the story had been simplified a little for easier consumption over the Amber Nectar. The spirit of the thing is what is important, not the tiresome details.

I then asked about EURO IV matters more generally and found myself looking at a much more complicated story in Wikipedia. Fine bit of euro babble. Probably all very well intentioned and reasonable, but sadly rather complicated. Decided that I would not press the matter any further.

But all in all a reminder of how hard it is both to be fair and to be seen to be fair when doing good.

Spent part of a recent evening watching a television adaption of this late Poirot story, unusual it seems in that the village setting was usually used for Miss. Marple. The point of present interest is that one ended up after two hours (less maybe 30 minutes breaks, making it about 2 pages of book to the minute of television) of it, I found that my grip on what had happened was very slim. I knew who had dunnit but that was about all. I should also say that while the thing was entirely watchable, plenty of costume colour in rather less shocking colours than are usually deployed in the related Midsomer operation, I did nod off a bit.

Quality time yesterday was spent on the Hammerklavier sonata at St. Lukes, performed by Barry Douglas, who was interestingly introduced by the Radio 3 presenter as having been accorded the privilege of closing their season of Beethoven sonatas with the greatest of them all. A wonderful thing, rather loud in this version, rather different from my vinyl version by Claudio Arrau. Furthermore, the piano itself sounded different for Douglas, a rather different sound to that from Leonskaja, which made me wonder whether pianists supervision the tuning of their instruments to suit their style.

One side effect was that the subject introduced at the change of key at around bar 50 of the Scherzo, and repeated a few bars later, lost the impact and delicacy it was given by Arrau. A subject which I was particularly looking out for, it having caught my ear during revision. Another side effect was that having heard the thing live both brought the vinyl to life and changed it. To the point where it took me some time to find the subject in question.

And the substantial, well known but unidentified encore at the end of the first concert turns out to have been the third movement of Op. 31 No. 2. And what is more, inspection of the calendar reveals that we get to hear it all again in March, courtesy of one François-Frédéric Guy. While inspection of Mr. Google reveals much earnest discussion about favourite performances of the same sonata, a rather more elevated discussion than I am suited to.

Before the concert, had a quick look around the bit of City Road to the north of Old Street and was pleased to find that 'The Eagle' had survived the cull of pubs in this once proud & busy commercial area. The eagle, that is, of the nursery rhyme about popping the weasel. Unfortunately it was not appropriate to sample their wares before the concert. Also disappointed to find out today that the present pub, complete with a large spread eagle on top of a pole, was not the original. This had been knocked down in favour of some Salvation Army temperance operation and only became a pub again around 1900. And next to The Eagle' was a splendid looking old style café called 'The Sheperdess'. Clearly an area which needs to be explored more thoroughly.

The day also involved two more stabs at a Barclay Bike. Experience continues to be good, although I was sufficiently geed up by the sonata to lose Old Street: that is to say I started off just north of St. Lukes and managed to get caught up in the one way system around the Barbican Centre, having completely failed to notice that I had crossed Old Street without turning right, as I had intended. Very strange. I shall have to inspect the junction next time I am in the area to see how such a thing might have happened. A bit later on I got caught up in the one way system around Wardour Street, but that was more understandable. Don't recall when I last cycled in that bit of town.

Closed with a further puzzle on the Oyster Card front. I purchased a £20 top up at the ticket window, made one journey from Leicester Square to Waterloo, to find that my account now has a balance of £14.90. Which suggests that I was charged more than £6 for three stops on the tube; worse still than the £4 of last week. Did I fail to touch out in the approved manner? But if I failed to touch out, how did I get out? I certainly did not jump the barrier. When the journey in question makes it to the online version of my account I shall pursue the matter further.

Having had a very successful bake yesterday afternoon, a surprise since both rising operations were mistimed, lingered over the breakfast bread and butter with yesterday's Guardian. From where I recycle a selection of faits divers (see http://www.faitsdivers.org/ for a rather more gruesome selection).

First, picking up on the bestitis of yesterday, I see that someone is moaning because X% of schools have been rated satisfactory by the Royal Commission for Scoring in Schools (RCSS) for two years running. Entirely unsatisfactory that all these schools are not headed for the excellent category. (Overlooking here the logical difficulty that it is quite difficult for everybody to excel). We used to have something of the same sort when completing annual reports towards the end of my time in the civil service. It was not enough to be satisfactory there either, one always had to be developing, working on one's strengths and weaknesses. Dreary stuff.

I then read the rather depressing news that the US, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan and united in their desire to carry on being allowed to use cluster bombs, weapons which are particularly nasty in that they often result in lots of small unexploded bombs lying around to blow up the innocent unwary for years to come. The Peoples' Princess was on the case years ago. I also learn a singularly silly abbreviation, CCW, which apparently stands for certain conventional weapons. Or perhaps that was a misprint.

Then there is the spectacle of ageing baby boomers getting into a stir about the awful state of care for the elderly. Having worried about their wealth and mortgages for forty years, they are now into worrying about the care for their elderly parents. They are even starting to worry about what care they might expect on their own account in a few years time. I know the feeling: having done something to my leg a couple of years ago, a something which meant that getting dressed was a bit of a problem for a few days or so, I suddenly glimpsed a future containing a care worker (from the former council estate down the road, naturally) putting my trousers on for me. Not a pretty sight at all. In fact, rather scary; so scary that the leg got better smartish.

The good news is that someone is making plans to end global poverty. Plans to which an entire page (including picture) is devoted. About the same as that devoted to various aspects of housing politics and finance.

For light relief I turn to the jobs page. For £80,000 or so a year I could be chief of childrens' health, care and crimimal justice services in West Dumbartonshire. Or for another £80,000 or so a year I could be Assistant Director (Changing Relationships) for something called the Health Foundation. Failing that I could do casual work with people with learning difficulties for £10 an hour. Or I could work more or less full time for Lambeth Mencap, for free. All of which looks reasonable to me; the differentials are proportionate. Nothing like those which attracted the justified ire of Jonathan Freedland (see http://www.jonathanfreedland.com/) in other sectors in the body of the same issue.

This one caught my eye in last week's TLS. Hasn't scanned very well - at least not in respect of the colour which is a good part of the point - but for once a bit of modern art that I thought had something. Unfortunately, all the best do Koonings (never before heard of) are in the Museum of Modern Art at New York until January so I don't suppose I will ever get to see a real one. The one's that the Tate has managed to get hold of don't look too hot at all.

We'll have to make do with bone art instead, with the bit of knuckle which came with the recent shin including an impressively sized & shaped cartilage pad which got us wondering from which bit of a cow this shin came from. Only one bone, so unless they are different from us, must be a humerus or a femur. Or at least that is what I thought. My elderly Romer not detailed enough, but inspection of the various online skeletons available - for example that from the model agricultural core curriculum at the University of California - suggests that unlike us cows do not have tibs & fibs, they just have tibs. So the slices of bone that we had look to be from the top half of a tibia - and so they are shins indeed. And I was thinking that shin was just butcher speak for some bit of cow which needed cooking for a long time.

Next up was the cold chicken, from which I had an entire leg, the top of the femur of which looked very like a small version of the top of the cow's tibia. It also appeared to be attached to something which looked rather like a shoulder blade, but I guess that must just have been a chunk of pelvic girdle which got detached. Further poking around suggests that this might indeed be the case; what I had thought looked like a shoulder blade and collar bone was actually a chunk of pubis with the ischium hanging in. Still not sure about the top of the femur though. Have to take a more careful look next time we have a chicken.

And today was a 5lb slab of pork belly, on the bone, 1 nipple, skin scored in both directions. 2 hours at 170C, 0.75 hours at 150C then 0.25 hours on slow. Very good it was too, served with brussels sprouts and mashed potato. The sprouts were a minor swiz, having been sold them at a premium price in the market (2lbs for £1.80) on the grounds that they had been prepared. Just drop them in the pan. But, some days later, this was not true at all: it just meant that instead of stripping off a few outer leaves, I was stripping off from the hard core. Fair amount of damage to be cut out too. But we think we have solved this puzzle, with this slab of belly coming from where the bony breast bone joins it's cartilaginous continuation.

Siesta'd with yesterday's DT, from which I learned that Brother Cameron want us to be the best place for business in the world. Someone else with what I call the bestitis disease. When will we learn that we can't all be best? That eventually it might be a good idea if we organised ourselves in a way which did not give us aspirations of that sort? The competitive spirit might have brought us a long way and brought us lots of consumption and longevity; but it has also, to my mind, bought us to the brink of self destruction. More consumption and more longevity is not going to be the answer: we need to fix society. Sadly, a sort of technology that we are not yet very good at.

Brother Cameron has also decided that, the US sub prime fiasco having brought the free world to its knees, it is time to start stoking a UK sub prime fiasco. I will some some persuading that this is a good idea for anyone other than those in the house building business.

And on a lighter note, I learn that Bulldog Balls has decided that we will all think he is much more cuddly if he owns up to getting damp eyed over 'Antiques Roadshow'. Where does he get his spin doctors from?

Back on patrol along Horton Lane this morning, came across a large bunch of keys on the path. How did they get there? One would have thought that one would have noticed dropping something that big and heavy. Were they chucked out of a burglar's get away car? But a more pressing issue was what to do with them. Not much use to anyone other than the owner, so perhaps one should just hang them on the adjacent railing?

After deep thought, decided that I could do better and finding that a Tesco Loyalty tag was included with the keys, popped into the nearby Tesco Express to ask them to decode the serial number. Oh no sir, can't do a thing like that, but if you phone the free phone number given they will be able to help you.

Some minutes later I phone the free phone number given and after engaging with 'if you want a poodle click 7' computer for a few minutes, spoke to a pleasantly spoken lady, from somewhere in Scotland by the sound of her, who said that she certainly could not divulge the name of the owner of the keys. Data protection, data protection! Perhaps you could pass on my name to the owner, that shouldn't be a problem. Data protection, data protection! Clearly a splendid cloak to hide behind when you are asked to do things you don't want to get into, in this case to be a lost property office. On the other hand, she said, if I handed the tag into the nearest Tesco store, they would make every effort to reunite it with its owner. Not much help in the present case. And I suspect it would actually just be filed in the nearest bin.

We decided on a two part response to this tricky situation. Erect one poster at the scene and another at the nearby retail centre - this being the home to aforementioned Tesco Express and 8 empty retail units, the hoardings shutting up one of which provided an excellent site for the second poster. Await developments. If nothing happens within 24 hours, turn the keys over to the Epsom police - the office hours only police station probably being slightly less convenient to an owner living somewhere handy to Horton Lane than our house. But a known quantity.

A second visit to the Ripieno choir (http://www.ripienochoir.org.uk/), almost a year to the day since I last noticed them, a touch pompously, on 15th November 2010. I also managed on that occasion to get sackbutts and cornetts the wrong way around: the sackbutt is the elderly trombone and the cornett the elderly oboe.

The same format as last time, with the instruments accompanying the voices most of the time, and being much less loud & brassy than their modern equivalents, achieving an attractive blend with the voices. They got the odd outing to themselves. The programme much the same as last time, mostly Victoria, a 16th century Spaniard. The relatively new church, All Saints at Weston Green, impressed as much as last time. Ideal venue and even Pevsner is polite about the place.

We sat much nearer the front this time, which had pluses and minuses. A plus being that one could hear better and a minus being a loss of the balance & blend one gets from being a bit further away. But an excellent concert and I was reminded of my thoughts after attending service at Guildford on or about October 4th, this despite the rather earthy words of some of the Victoria material. We shall be back for their Bach concerts next year.

Chickened out of returning to the same Post Office (see November 19th) with my second version of the Premium Bond application form and tried my luck instead at a smaller establishment. Where I learned that I might have been wrong about my difficulty being a simple desire to get one over the customer. It turns out that the counter clerk, or rather clerkess in this case, had to copy a large chunk of the form into the Post Office computer before issuing me with my receipt. The difficulty may simply have been irritation have having to do a tedious bit of copying in the middle of a busy Saturday, with all the huffing and puffing in the waiting queue that that was likely to have given rise to. Perhaps the Post Office would do better to install some of those scanners like those installed in HSBC to scan inbound documents for inclusion on receipts. In any event, I now have a receipt and await developments.

Continuing onto Horton Lane came across the flower illustrated, somewhere near the bridge over what used to be the narrow guage railway around the asylums. Looking rather lonely and pretty in the winter sun. Took it home for identification and after much huffing and puffing all around, and speculation about winter flowering exotics, we came down to a unanimous verdict in favour of the common clover. I had been confused by the long stalk and the apparent absence of clovery leaves.

Moving along the Lane, I come to a Tesco which I now learn to be a Tesco Express, rather than a Tesco Metro, the difference according to Google being that the Express stores are small enough to slide under the various regulations about booze and opening hours. Working conditions? Perhaps appropriate that this outpost of capitalist success should be planted on the site of one of the flattened asylums, which might have been state of the public sector art in their day, but have now been flattened in favour of private care in the community. But Tesco are not so efficient as to have put the place in the right place on their natty map: both their map and Google maps have it a kilometre down the road, on the wrong side of the road, opposite a new school. Presumably Tesco had wanted at some point to be convenient for the after school mums' trade but wound up somewhere else. Forgetting to change the map in their store finder along the way. Or perhaps they are just lazy and assume that where the Post Office (my recollection is that it is British Telecom who own the IT part of the postcode address file system. Which perhaps it did, but clearly does not now. I shall take a look at Wikipedia) say the centre of a gravity of a postcode is, is good enough for the location of the store with that postcode. Not good enough for the rather straggly postcodes we have around here.

Continuing in the same vein, the thought came to me that privatisation of everything that moves is a handy way of transferring even more wealth from the poor to the rich. In this case from the low paid dossers who used to inhabit the lower reaches of nationalised industries to the high paid dossers who might have shares in the private sector operators which have replaced them.

I close with the word prize. Which I have just learned, or perhaps just been reminded, is derived from the French prise, the female past participle of prendre, to take. The sort of word which might have been used in the olden days to describe a female found and taken as a prize on the margins of an ancient battle ground. So we retain the active, if tautologous, use of the word in English, taking a prize, but we more often use it in the passive sense of being given a prize.

I read yesterday that Dame Stella (last mentioned on November 10th) has joined Sir Simon in the ranks of those that think that it is time to legalise drugs. To stop all those crime workers and justice workers feathering their nests at the expense of all the rest of us. They must have taken us for more than the much hated bankers over the years.

Which led me to ponder on the way in which this might be done. My thought had been that one might sell drugs in the same sort of shops as they sell liquor in in Scandanavia. Rather cold, white tiled places which remind one of public conveniences; the site http://www.systembolaget.se/ may tell you something about it if your Swedish is up to date. Then I thought one might stretch the idea to include hashing out lounges where one might consume things. Not too fancy as that might constitute encouragement, so we need the same two-faced approach that we take to betting shops: naughty but nice.

But then I thought that this was entirely off message. Our coalition government likes to privatise anything that moves, so a much better wheeze would be to extend the licensing arrangements which presently govern the sale of alcoholic drink to all recreational drugs, including here such things as tobacco, khat and marijuana. Maybe even coffee.

Premises could have full licenses which would allow the purchase of recreational drugs for consumption on or off the premises, on licenses or off licenses. The purpose of having licenses would be to make it possible for the regulator (OffRegRec(Narco) - the office of the regulator of recreation (narcotics division)) to be sure that drugs of appropriate quality and variety were being supplied, that customers were being responsible and that premises were not becoming disorderly houses. The interiors of appropriately licensed premises would consist of a number of rooms, rather in the way of an antique Roman bath house. A cold room for the consumption of coffee, beer, wine and spirits. A tepid room which allowed the foregoing plus tobacco. A warm room which allowed the foregoing plus what used to be Class C dugs. And so and so forth.

An early task of OffRegRec(Narco) - perhaps Dame Stella could be prevailed upon to become the first director general - would be to establish age bars for entry into the various rooms. It would be for consideration whether there should be both upper and lower or just lower age bars. Also whether businesses would be allowed to be involved in both manufacture and retail supply. There might be consultations with the trade organisations involved.

A useful side effect would be the revitalisation of the licensed victualling trade. Until such time that is that we get so used to the new scene that we let the supermarkets muscle in on it.

While we are waiting, perhaps someone out there will draw up a list of the great and the good who are on our side? We clearly have a dame, a knight of the realm and sundry professors. I would imagine that we could muster the odd marquess who would come out of his closet. Do we run to an earl or a duke? A garter knight? A privy councillor? A bishop? A person of royal blood even? What about all those celebrities who love their white powders? A peek in the News Corp secret archive might be helpful here.

Off to a good start with an HSBC bank card which was not playing the game. Failed once, worked once, failed twice, so time to visit the card doctor, in this case the once grand branch of HSBC in Clerkenwell Road. Where the helpful ladies gave me money on the strength of my old person's bus pass and told the computer that I would like a new card. New card arrived about 48 hours later and worked first time.

Next off at the Post Office where, while standing in line, I observed what looked like a rather large and newly retired gent. attempting to negotiate with the counter clerk on the rate he would get for his 300 or 400 euros. Not good enough says the gent.. I can do better than that at Waterloo station. So having queued up at a place which was unlikely to offer him anything other than what it said on the board, he is going all the way to Waterloo to queue up again. Maybe he will save himself a fiver or so, but clearly retired to be happy to spend so much time on such a matter.

Then it was my turn, and I present the form and cheque from FIL to purchase a modest amount of great-grand-sprogular premium bonds. We were going to have done the deed by post but 'Post Office' having got onto the cheque, I thought I might as well do it that way. Oh no you don't sez the man behind the jump. You have completed some of the form in blue ink rather than black. Completely unacceptable. Go away and try again with this new form. OK so it did say on the form that black ink preferred, but then they all say that. A custom from the bad old days when machines for reading forms did indeed have trouble with blue ink. But that was a long time ago and I am quite sure that the industrial strength scanners used by the likes of NI&S today could not care less; my bottom of the range domestic job clearly does not. Can you tell the difference? But the man behind the jump clearly could and I did not attempt to butter him up. I just stomped crossly off and I shall dare him to refuse the rewritten form on Monday.

There is something about some front office jobs which brings out the pedant in people. Perhaps the opportunity to have a pop at people who are not stuck behind a counter all day is too much for them. I have noticed the tendency before at Post Offices and at British Rail ticket offices - although I have to say less often at these last now that they have been privatised. Perhaps the managers for the private operators really do care more about that aspect of customer relations than the old style managers for the nationalised industries. I am reminded that British Rail was also, in the olden days, an organisation in which the unions thought that working to rule was a rather nifty way of going on strike.

Another domain where pedants have been licensed is data protection. Not doubt a well intentioned act addressing a real problem, but it has certainly proved a pedants' license. So, for example, the estate agent handling the sale of the next door house for an absent owner refused to have any kind of a meaningful discussion with me about possible problems arising from a large and dying tree on the grounds that such a discussion would infringe the DPA rights of said absent owner. Very similar style of person to the nationalised industry pedant. I expect they breed freely in local authority climes too.

I ought to give the reference to my last offering on this subject, vaguely in favour of pedants as I recall, but neither Blogger nor Google search finds it. But impressively, Google finds this post seconds after it was posted. Maybe Blogger customers get privileged access to the Google indexer.

Two visits to St. Lukes, this week and last, to hear Elisbeth Leonskaja, a pianist from Georgia who now lives in Austria and of whom I had not previously heard. She does exist on the Internet but does not appear to boast her own web site, although she does rate an entry in Wikipedia. Six Beethoven sonatas in all: Op. 13, Op. 14 No. 1, Op.110, Op. 49 No. 2, Op. 109 and Op.111. Plus a substantial, well known but unidentified encore at the end of the first concert.

Tremendous stuff for an enthusiastic if fairly grey audience, with the first concert slightly marred by what sounded like a bit of feedback from the Radio 3 microphones and distinguished by tone from the Steinway which reminded me of its descent from the harpsicord. A tone that I did not hear at the second concert.

She passes the baton to Barry Douglas for next week's Op. 106, a Belfast boy who does have a web site at http://www.barry-douglas.com/ and whom I last heard a couple of months ago or so. All in all a very good series in a very good hall. And cheap: under half the going rate for the likes of the South Bank or the Wigmore Hall.

The day being further distinguished by my inaugural visit to a Barclay Bike. Started off well by registering myself on their computer, but then got confused by the rather odd rules which apply if you want to take more than one bike out on one account. Sent them an email via the 'contact us' tab and was agreeably surprised to be called back within a few hours, this on a Saturday afternoon, by a pleasant and helpful lady who sorted me out. So I was then in possession of a fully activated small plastic key (membership number about 5.25m), the sort of thing one might conveniently hang off one's key ring. Plus a map of London showing one where all the docking stations were.

Hop off the train at Waterloo, this at around 1100, well after the rush hour, to find the Waterloo dock bereft of bikes, apart from one broken one. Stroll across the road to Stamford Street where there were indeed bikes and I made my first withdrawal. Bicycle clips on and stately down Stamford Street. The bike was solid and sensible; entirely fit for purpose if not the sort of thing one would want to do any serious riding on. Left at Blackfriars Bridge, up Farringdon Eoad, right at Clerkenwell Road and so on to Old Street, which I reached in about 25 minutes, a journey time which I was able to confirm with the Barclay Bike Computer this morning.

After the concert, withdrew another bike and trundled west to Tottenham Court Road, docking in Soho Square. Fun to be cycling in London again after a lot of years - where I found that that there have been a lot of cycle - if not car - friendly changes in the interval, but that I had forgotten how often you have to stop for lights - a detail which plenty of younger cyclists did not much bother with. All in all, a good thing, so why didn't Livingstone do it? It is just the sort of attention grabbing wheeze that he likes. I note in passing that the fare structure seems to be closely based on that for the Parisian Vélib - not free at all, despite its name - and I look forward to happy hours revisiting bits of London that I used to know.

Celebrated with a couple of jars of a light if quite decent pint called Exeter something from the Leicester Square Wetherspoons, while admiring the building inside which (badly illustrated) I had two wisdom teeth extracted some 35 years previous. The operation was started by a student, finished by the prof. and the building is now a hotel. Leicester Square was being noisely dug up, I think to celebrate the Olympics, with paving slabs being replaced by what looked like slabs of sawn granite, about 4 inches thick. Never seen such thick slabs before. Nothing too good for the aficionados of the athletic sports.

The only bad note of the day was discovering in the tube station that my Oyster Card no longer worked and I had to stump up what seemed like the enormous sum of £4 for a ticket. The Oyster Card Computer alleges this morning that I only have £1.45 credit, a sum which I do not remember at all, but is now not checkable. It also tells me that the arrangements for online top up are not very irregular traveller friendly.

PS: shin stew now scraped and downed in two sittings with slightly stale bread. An excellent way to dispose of same.

Guardian getting itself into a state yesterday over the activities of some unsavoury looking debt collectors, debt collectors whose business plan seems to be to buy up debts of poor countries at a massive discount and then to try and recover the money from said poor countries through the courts, at a rather smaller discount. The difference netting them millions of dollars at a time. A business which might be called debt factoring if you shy away from debt collecting.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the Guardian, and it is indeed rather a dirty business. But I don't see how you are going to stop it. A poor country wants something and borrows money to get it, perhaps issuing IOU's in the form of bonds. Come payback time, all the dosh has vanished into the great leader's cadillacs and harems. Bonds near worthless and traded amongst the riff raff of the free world. Enter the debt collectors who know how to work the system to their advantage.

The trouble as I see it being, that if the poor country wants to play on the world stage in the hope of becoming less poor, it has to respect the property rights which prevail on that stage (except in China, where they seem to manage with a sort of low grade property rights which make our property rights lawyers very unhappy). If it issues bonds it must expect to be expected to pay, with debt collectors being fully part of these expectations. And if it defaults it might have trouble borrowing any more; be reduced to a barter economy.

Banks are not charities. That is the job of governments and international outfits like the UN or the IMF.

Just finished a couple of Simenon books: one a translation of a biography by Pierre Assouline and the other one of his hard novels, 'Les Anneaux de Bicêtre'. The second being prompted by the first and with the TLS reviewing a new translation of 'La neige était sale' at about the same time being entirely coincidental. I say new translation because it must have been a review of a translation which prompted me to read it a couple of years ago or so - one of the virtues of Simenon from an English point of view that he deliberately eschews complicated vocabulary or syntax: he took pride in saying things in a simple way, which, as he pointed out, is often harder than saying things in a complicated way. So his French is a lot easier going than that of his biographer, samples of which can be found at http://passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/.

Having read two books about Simenon by Simenon ('Mémoires intimes' and 'Pedigree') it was interesting to read a book about Simenon by someone else. So we learn that he had a distinctly unglamorous war, holed up for most of it in the Vendée, where he was able to establish working relations with the occupiers. He also made a great deal of money out of the popular films made from his books made by what was effectively a German company operating under a French cloak. Nothing terribly wrong about this, but one could understand that the French who had a harder war might be a little sore. He was also mildly anti Semitic, but not so much as not to be shocked by the rampant anti Semitism in New York in the 50's. In a country which went to war, in part, to rid the world of Hitler.

He got through three partners, each lasting around 20 years. For most of this period he also had a maid who was also his mistress and was an enthusiastic patron of brothels. He also had at least two lady staffers who worked on the production side of his writing operation and who were with him for a long time. Knew lots of creative types but despite his huge output seems to have hankered for more, hankered for respectability. Did not want to go down in history as the most successful author of pulp fiction of all time. He wanted posh; an endeavour in which he was perhaps not helped by his ostentatious life style. Perhaps also by his economy with the truth; according to his biographer he spent so much time spinning yarns - books that is - out of his life experience that he lost track of the truth. Simenon would say he was true to the spirit of things and that this sometimes meant one could not stick with what actually happened.

Interestingly the review of  'La neige était sale' explains that the hero of that book has a hole in the middle of his personality, a problem which afflicts both the hero of 'Les Anneaux de Bicêtre' and his wife. Given that this last contains, at least it seems so to me, plenty of autobiographical material, one wonders if Simenon worried about a hole in the middle of his own personality. He certainly worried about the relations between fathers and sons, his own having died in middle age.

Another aspect of spinning yarns out of life was that some of the people near him came to regard him as a parasite. Watching, observing & sucking the life out of them, to be regurgitated in his rather dour and often unflattering novels. Watching but not really participating. And his novels, at least the few that I have read, are rather dour. There might be passion but there is little joy.

All that apart, I thought that 'Les Anneaux de Bicêtre' was a jolly good crack at telling the story of someone who has a stroke over the couple of months or so in hospital it took to recover from it - particularly since I don't think Simenon had ever stayed in a hospital with a stroke or anything else. He shares with me a fondness for that half hour or so in the morning when one is neither asleep nor fully awake. And he shares with his contemporary Ian Fleming the need to tell us about the fancy goods available to the rich; something which the rest of us bought into vicariously as we emerged from the drabness of the war.

And then onto lunch. Following the failure with ox tail last week, had a go with shin of beef on the bone today, something over two kilos of the stuff, sawn into three centimetre slices crosswise. A bone which was a cylinder of more than two inches in diameter, which appeared solid but which was certainly hollow by the time it was cooked. The drill being to brown it a bit with some lard, add four coarsely chopped onions, add four coarsely chopped sticks of organic celery, add three pints of water, not quite covering the meat, bring to the boil and simmer for four hours. Add two ounces of orange lentils about half way through. Serve with boiled potatoes and brussels sprouts. Gravy of the watery variety but a very good flavour. Perhaps what used to be called beef tea.

PS: nicely set the following morning. Saucepan now put into the fridge to harden off the layer of fat to facilitate removal. Limit to how much cholesterol I can comfortably whack down in one sitting these days. Unlike the mountain men of old who used to drink down liquid kidney fat from buffaloes while telling stories around the camp fire. Meanwhile FIL reminisces over his toast about the lectures in which the larger bones would have made him excellent teaching aids.

I noticed some dodgy figures from the economist book of same on 18th October. During the rather long advert. break on ITV3 last night I noticed some more, this time about balances of payments, or rather the lack thereof.

So I knew that China was running a whopping surplus but I had not realised that that for Germany at $250bn (in 2008) was more than half as big as that for China. Most of the other big surpluses were energy flavoured, but we also had the rest of the German world (including here the Dutch) and the Nordic world up there at the top table.

And I knew that the US was running a whopping deficit. But after that, Spain swings in with a hefty $150bn, then Italy,  France, Greece and the UK running down from $80bn to $40bn. Perhaps it really is just as well for us Brits. than the pound can run down too. (This from someone who was mildy in favour of us joining the euro at the time that we might have joined. Also a veteran of at least one small review of a small departmental euro readiness project).

Oddly, resource rich Australia runs a larger current account deficit than we do on an economy a bit more than a third the size. Perhaps they balance their books by flogging the rights to anything that can be dug up to the Chinese.

But what is so different about the Germans?

Moved to a second post today by some nonsense in the DT about how the Minister of Health & Wellbeing is going to sack any Health & Wellbeing civil servant who participates in any way with managing the number of operations we have to pay for out of public funds by being a bit economical with operations for the elderly. The sort of Tory double speak which makes me cross: it is (to me anyway) a self evident truth that if you put a ceiling on health spending, never mind cut health spending, you are going to have to manage the consumption of pills, potions, crutches, wheel chairs and operations. And one way to manage the consumption of operations is to think about the costs and benefits involved. So the Minister is trying to con us into thinking that our NHS is in safe hands by talking rubbish. It is, I suppose, possible that he has been misreported by the DT.

The Minister should read Duncan Pryde, who tells a story about a certain Mr. Eskimo, who explained to Mr. Pryde that it was a complete waste of money giving Mrs. Eskimo a new set of false teeth because she was well past it at 35 and likely to snuff it before too long. I do grant that this was a few years ago, in the 50's of the last century I think.

Been making a fair bit of lentil soup lately so thought it proper to record the experience.

Base mix is tap water, orange lentils, usually between half a pound and a pound, butter, onions and some form of diced pork. Simmer lentils and water; gently fry onions and pork in butter; blend with a spoon (not a blender) 5-10 minutes before consumption. Overall cooking time about an hour. Lentils should be soft but not completely dissolved; texture should be slightly grainy rather than smooth like custard. You should get a little surface water as the stuff cools and, depending of the sort of pork you use, it may set to a soft jelly when cold. One might, I suppose, serve it upside down with a garnish on a cold buffet.

Best fresh but does stand. Never tried freezing although we did take a thermos of the stuff up Schiehallion once.

Variation 1, is adding a bit of chopped garlic to the hot butter before the onion. Doing this more often than not at the moment.

Variation 2 is the supplementary vegetable. In the past I have mostly used carrots, not peeled (peeling takes away from the bite), sliced crosswise and added to the water and lentils about half an hour before consumption. But I am getting a bit tired of them. Have tried parsnips and mushrooms in the past: the parsnips did not work at all, the mushrooms did not work very well. Not helped by being a bit elderly; only in the soup at all to use them up. Yesterday I tried finely sliced (not chopped) white cabbage and that worked rather well.

Variation 3 is the pork, which really needs to be the bacon or spicy sausage sort. Otherwise the soup a bit bland. A couple of weeks ago I used unsmoked gammon without soaking it first. But what you lost in nicotine you certainly gained in salt, the resultant soup being a bit salty for our taste. Smoked gammon good. Kabanos (see http://www.kabanos.net/) and saucisson sec (see http://saucissonsec.net/) good. Sainsbury's bacon OK, getting better the more your pay for it. Yesterday we tried some smoked bacon from the Portuguese delicatessen attached to the Madeira Café just down river from Vauxhall Station (see http://www.madeiralondon.co.uk/. They also do very reasonable bacon sandwiches). Smoked bacon which comes in brick shaped lumps weighing maybe a quarter of a pound and which worked very well in the soup. Must remember to keep some in stock.

Variation 4 is the presence or absence of dead flies floating on the finished soup. This is not under user control and we have failed to find out what these unsavoury looking but tasteless & harmless black specks are, despite returning a packet of lentils to Tesco for investigation. We suspect that they are to do with the lentils having been stored for too long and the built-in bugs having started to hatch. Grains, for example pearl barley, certainly do this sort of thing. As it happens, the dead flies have been missing for a bit, but have surfaced once again in the most recent soup. Lentils from Sainsbury's.

On Tuesday to the John Martin exhibition at the Tate Real. Most edifying & interesting, if the bottom line is pretty much the TLS headline over its review of the show on 4th November, the title of this post.

A nicely curated show which was not very popular on the day that we visited, so one could move around in comfort. So unpopular in fact that we got a two-for-one deal with our rail tickets from Southwest Trains, thus knocking a tenner or so off the bill, partly offsetting the twenty I put out on the souvenir catalogue. A souvenir catalogue which demonstrated the difficulty of reproducing paintings. When the real thing is fresh on the brain, reproductions tend to look very dull and flat; even modern reproductions, presumably coming with all the art that printing science can manage.

It seems that Mr. Martin, a self made man of artisan origins, made a very large amount of money from his pictures. First take was exhibiting the picture in a big town, charging perhaps 5p a go - a reasonable sum at the time. Second take was selling the picture to some rich coal merchant for perhaps £1,000 a go. Third take was selling prints of the picture at perhaps 25p a go. The picture seems to be that each of the three takes generated roughly the same amount of dosh. There were clearly plenty of people about who wanted edification combined with amusement; presumably much the same people as the people who put the bread on the tables of the likes of Beethoven and Thackeray, very roughly contemporaries. The most popular painter of his day. Outshone Turner for a while, although I dare say, rather like the similarly successful Simenon, he really craved for 'nuff respect from the establishment, in his case of arty painters. Sadly for him, even the present exhibition takes several opportunities to explain that his technique reflected his beginnings as a painter of pots. One such was the painting called 'Pan and Syrinx', an early landscape which I rather liked, having tired of the more apocalyptic offerings.

Like the pre-raphaelites, he had a lot of his pictures put into special frames, frames designed especially for the picture in question. This included a particularly lurid snaky one for the picture of pandemonium. As a parvenu, he also went to the bother of having a special cabinet built to show off his connections with the great and the good. I guess the chap had very good manners, manners good enough to get him over the hurdle of his regional (if not estuarine) accents, this being before the day of the promotion of such accents in the media.

He was also something of a wow at a printing technique called mezzotint, so I now know what mezzotints and aquatints are. Something that someone called Michael J. Campbell has clearly known about for years. Mr. Campbell's name appeared on the tickets for a large proportion of the exhibits and eventually I worked out that this probably meant that he supplied the exhibit in question. But both the explanatory material on the walls and the catalogue were a bit coy about who this chap was who figures so large on the tickets. Is he a bit shy and retiring? Google was not terribly helpful; plenty of chaps about with this name but not the right chaps. But I do find http://campbell-fine-art.com/ which probably is the right chap although the site tells me nothing about the chap himself. But his site would sell me duplicates of a couple of things that I have already so he can't be all bad.

Along the way I also learn of the biblical origin of the phrase 'the writing on the wall', since confirmed by that edifying site http://www.christianityoasis.com/christianityoasis/, a site which provides very chatty and accessible translations of bible stories. Their version of this one is rather fun; much talk of the pots of boiling oil destination for those who booze for pleasure (as opposed to the odd spot of wine as part of communion) out of God's own pots. Someone must be pouring a lot of money into this stuff.

And on the way home we learn that the newish bus station at Vauxhall includes a pissoir. Which seems a very sensible feature given the large numbers of people who pass through who might have need of such a thing - which can process people much much faster than the alternatives. A simple fact of life which has eluded the organisers of the Epsom Derby in the past.

PS: alarmed to read over the oeufs matinal that Epsom council have adopted a robust management style at the allotments where I used to allot. You now get visited by some ranger type who harangues you about the tidiness or otherwise of your allotment. I fear that I would have been classed untidy and so worthy of regular visits by said ranger - which would have really got up my nose. Or up my back. Some chap practically on benefit with the nerve to lecture me about how to run my allotment? It is perhaps just as well that I have moved on.

I noticed over breakfast a bit in the DT which said that some judge had ruled that the Minister of Health & Wellbeing must release the risk register associated with the privatisation of the health service, or some important part of that operation. Now while I do not much care for this privatisation, I do not much care either for judges meddling in this way.

I first came across risk registers when conducting the Gateway reviews invented for the government by Sir Peter Gershon KBE. These reviews came with a large pack of materials to guide both reviewers and reviewees and a risk register was one of the many things that all good projects were supposed to have. It was not enough just to have one of these things. It had to be of a volume commensurate with the size and nature of the project and it had to be active. Knocking up something suitable the day before the reviewers turned up was probably more work than having a real one.

Now it may well be that such registers are apt to rapidly degenerate into a mechanical box ticking exercise, but the underlying idea is sound enough. People running projects should think about the things which might blow them off course. Or down to the bottom of the sea. There are always threats to the success of a project and they do not get any smaller by brushing them under the carpet or by pretending that they don't exist. You must face up to them and take appropriate avoiding or mitigating action. Blah, blah. What I am not sure about is whether the combination of the great British public and the great British media are likely to be able to conduct a sensible debate about a risk register. The whole idea is to include every conceivable risk. If the probability is low but the impact is high you include it. You might include all kinds of juicy tittle-tattle about how this particular risk came to grow to its presently elephantine proportions. But would you include all this stuff if you thought you were going to have to have some kind of a debate with the Sun? Debates which are apt to absorb huge amounts of management time. What about if the threat in question was a state secret?

Not an issue for the sort of projects that I was involved in because the Sun couldn't care less. But it might smell stories in a more serious project. And I think it ought to be up to the Minister. If he is content to release the actual risk register - perhaps in its native Excel - all well and good. But if he deems it appropriate to release a management summary that is OK too and he has to take whatever flak he might attract for being economical with the truth. I am not at all sure that it helps to have judges swinging into the fray. Let our MPs earn their keep if something is going wrong; this kind of meddling is fully part of their job description.

On  a related note, the DT also tells me that the mobile phone hacking scandal continues to grow like topsy and looks to be consuming far more public resources - in particular police resources - than the whole paltry matter is worth. Celebrities have been served notice that bad people might get to hear their telephone conversations, so let them take mitigating action if this is a cause for concern to them and leave the rest of us to get on with our lives. Or to get on with providing the public services we really do need.

The government no doubt believes that market forces will encourage mobile phone operators to make their operations more secure and I believe that they may well be right on this occasion.

Moving onto today's DT, we have an interesting juxtaposition of stories, pointing up our sometimes odd attitudes to animals. On one page we have a large picture of a shark eating a seal alive. We are told that the photographer got an incredible adrenalin rush when he snapped it. Worth every one of the large numbers of pennies it took to be at the right place at the right time. On the next page we have a rather smaller picture of a young man swinging a cat around by its tail, a cat which does not appear to be any the worse for what is described as appalling cruelty. The RSPCA is busy on the second case. Perhaps Rowan Williams should take on the first?

You might think that Autumn Bliss is the name of a variety of raspberries, favoured by FIL for their size and their late ripening but which I find a bit watery and insipid.

But actually it is what you get in the leafy suburbs when your neighbours' gardeners have their leaf blowers on all morning. Noisy things they surely are. I am also less than convinced that they are worth the noise, the smell and their contribution to global warming more generally: they seem to be very slow at moving leaves about, rather slower one might think than using lawn rake and shovel. The only plus that I can see is that a blower does less mechanical damage to the turf than a rake. But is all that warm air any good for the turf either? Should I pen a memo. to the chaps in the council responsible for the chaps on the road who blow municipal leaves about?

All this comes about as I was giving a small oak tree in our garden a prune - a modest prune which I might say did not involve louder noises than those made by an oiled pruning saw. The (three in one) oil because I found that the saw bound a bit less than it might otherwise. The other trick was to cut a branch off about a metre from where it joined the trunk. That was easy enough because the weight of the branch kept the cut open and split the whole thing away- in slow time, giving one plenty of time to get off the ladder and out of the way - before you were much more than half way through. Then the stump of the branch was heavy enough to keep the cut a bit open when trimming it cleanly to the stump. Binding, cursing and sweating much reduced.

The were also ample opportunities for playing with ropes and trying out the knots that I learned about in the Boy Scouts. Happy days.

A by-product of all this is that I have renewed my acquaintance with cleaving fresh oak, a technique much favoured by Elizabethan house builders as the resultant timber lasts a lot longer than sawn. I did not really have the right tools for the job but I got on well enough with one club hammer, one wedge, one bolster and two cold chisels. Most of the work being done by alternating thrusts of the cold chisels up the branch. Or perhaps down the branch. Grain not clean enough and ends not cut square enough for a proper longitudinal cleave. One blow of the cleaver and all that.

I have also, at long last, found a use for the small galvanised iron pulleys we inherited from our naval uncle, finding them to be a great help when returning the pruning ladders to the garage roof single handed. Another activity which traditionally involves much cursing and sweating.

Oxtail soup has now been finished, not bad but with too much fat, the cooking method not having provided an opportunity to skim. Probably vastly more unhealthy than a full English. All in all, perhaps the worst oxtail in recent years. Perhaps since records began.

But succour was to hand, in the form of the Guardian from Tuesday. It gives a fifth of a page to an article about the sad death of a cyclist under a lorry and another fifth to a portrait of the cyclist. It seems that the cyclist's family are in a paddy because the coroner did not see fit to indulge in wide ranging inquiries into cycle safety and make recommendations. I think the coroner was quite right: it is not the business of medically flavoured lawyers or legally flavoured doctors to sit in judgement on bicycles because we have a well staffed Ministry of Transport for precisely that sort of thing. I dare say the Ministry includes whole divisions devoted to bicycles: these are the people to whom the dead cyclist's family should be addressing themselves. The only odd feature of the case was that the driver of the lorry involved got off with a fine of £200, and that only on account of not wearing proper spectacles at the time. Presumably the coroner did not think that much of the blame, if any, rested with him.

Writing as a semi-retired cyclist, I would say that I make plenty of mistakes while cycling. Recently I have not done worse than attract a bit of honking but it could easily have been more worse.

And then we have the library correspondent telling us about the exploits of Stella Rimington as chief judge for the Booker prize, a lady who comes across to me as what a luvvy might call a media tart. Which I find a little distasteful: a lady with a distinguished career in what used to be a discrete part of government and in receipt of a fat pension, who chooses to splash herself around and write what I imagine to be not very good novels. I prefer my retired public servants to be more retiring. It also occurs to me that the number of good politicians who wrote good books added to the number of good writers who made good politicians is less than 7. So one should not attempt the challenge of a double lightly.

Sadly she is not alone. I have noticed in the past eminent scientists who, more or less in retirement, try to make a splash in someone else's pond. Most recently, we have S. Pinker, an eminent experimental psychologist with a talent for popular science, trying his hand at quantitative sociology.

The front page has what passes for the party of left in this country, berating the party of the right for being soft on immigration. Which is ironic since the leader of said party of the left is the child of gifted immigrants of the previous generation. And the successor of leaders who thought it a good plan to renew the stocks of genes and young people by letting in lots of people from eastern and central europe.

But perhaps the challenge of the day is to find out whether paddypower (http://www.paddypower.com/bet) is taking bets on whether the good people of Mississippi are going to vote to give fertilized eggs all the same rights and perquisites of human beans. Is the European High Court of Human Rights on the case yet? Ambulance chasers? Enforcement certainly opens up a rather unsavoury vista: endoscopy units ahoy!

According to a recent DT, having two or more senior moments a day is not just getting older in a calm and decent way. It might well be a harbinger of dementia. Act now to take remedial action (whatever that might be). All very worrying as in the last 24 hours I have had two and a half of them.

The first, the one which I am counting as the half, was in the 'Red Lion' in Crown Passage, off Pall Mall, an establishment which I remember as being where we used to be taken from time to time by a company called Origin before it got swallowed up in Atos-Origin, taken in fact to an upstairs room where they provided a very decent lunch, of the sausage and mash variety as I recall, this before everywhere did them. I also recall the very decent beer being supplied by Courage. But paying a quick visit yesterday, the pleasant lady behind the bar was not having any of this. She had been running the place for 18 years, they had never done Courage and she had never used the upstairs dining room. She thought that maybe her predecessor might have done. Perhaps time has passed quicker than sir realizes and sir was actually here more than the 10 years ago that sir is owning up to? I can't think of any way of checking; maybe she was right. All a bit disconcerting though.

The second was rather more serious. Later the same day, at TB, a chap buys himself a drink, calling for it by its full name, 'Stella Artois', a full name which is only rarely used and so which one might have thought would have penetrated the grey matter. But no, when it came to my turn to buy him another one and he had turned away to talk to someone else, I could not remember what his drink was. The chief barman on the fringes of all this piped up fast enough with the requisite full name, pointing out that one would remember this unusual call. Well this one didn't. Much more alarming the the incident in the 'Red Lion'. But there was some amusing compensation: the pretty young barmaid thought that she would help herself to a coke. So she reaches for the bottle and opens it. She then reaches for a glass from the shelf and gives it a jolly good wipe with some kitchen paper before she pours her coke into it, this in full view of the assembled company, whose glasses certainly do not get the same treatment. Much hooting all round.

The third was this morning when I completely forgot that I had dough rising in the airing cupboard. With the result that it rose for 4 hours, double what I had intended. The long rise dough seemed OK but we will see if there is enough puff left in it for the second rise.

This omission may have been result of irritation occasioned by coming across a bunch of people from the Lower Mole Heritage Jubilee Trust hacking down a perfectly innocent patch of scrub, perhaps 400 square metres worth of triangle on the eastern side of Horton Lane. Looked like older people, probably mostly retired like myself or otherwise underemployed. Perhaps I should have challenged them and explained that some people would rather the scrub was left as it was. But I could not face some solemn type banging on about newts or bring the countryside back to life and desisted.

At the same time I was over cooking the day's oxtail stew, it being stewed rather than slow roasted in deference to older tastes in these matters. But it was a long time since I had stewed oxtail and I was not going to do anything like looking it up in a recipe book, so I have learned that 5.5 hours simmering is probably 1.5 hours too long. But the gravy, thickened with orange lentils & corn flour and coloured with brown dye was good. What little remains will do well as oxtail soup, if nothing much like the stuff you get in tins.

And the day had started so well. Warm sunny November morning with assorted mushrooms (or perhaps toadstools) sprouting nicely in the verges.

One of the products of the farmers' market on Sunday was a head of curly kale from a couple of ladies who might possibly have had something to do with growing the stuff. A rather orgo. looking pair selling all kinds of interesting stuff. I prepared the kale by coarsely cutting up the leaves and chopping the more serious stalks into two inch lengths then splitting lengthwise. Stalks boiled for around 12 minutes, leaves on top for 6 minutes. Very nice they were too, served with pork belly in a little stock cube stock baked underneath some onions and potatoes. This was more convenient today than the boiling bacon which I remember as being the traditional Irish accompaniment to the stuff; we shall have to try that next time we lay our hands on some.

There was some debate about whether kale was a relative of the turnip with FIL holding out for relative of the cabbage. I can now record that he was right, but that I was not that far wrong. Cabbages come under brassica oleracea while turnips come under brassica rapa. With brassica being a genus of the brassicaceae family, mustards to you or I.

Thus fortified I am now in a position to notice another product of us baby boomers entering the death zone. That is to say another book by a lady about the dubious joys of old age, in some ways like that noticed a few weeks ago on 27th September by Anna Funder. This one is called 'Wasted Morning' by Gabriela Adameșteanu from Rumania which has been translated by Patrick Camiller, a versatile chap who also does French, German, Spanish and Italian. A handsomely produced book from the Northwestern University Press, probably my first book from this particular lot.

A tale woven around the sometimes coarse reminiscences of two old ladies connected by habit, one working class and one from the former middle class. A story amongst other things of the trials and tribulations of Rumania and Rumanians through the first sixty years of the last century. Which I found fascinating, knowing next to nothing about the place beforehand. Had to resort to atlases - the Polish Army Atlas doing a very nice two page spread on what was then a sister country in the communist fold - and to Wikipedia to keep afloat. Names were a bit of a problem, as they are in Russian novels, and a cast list at the front would be a useful addition to any future edition.

A quite incidental by product was getting to know about some fairly horrific air raids during the second war on the oil fields of Ploiești, horrific in the sense of the number of air crew killed. But, nevertheless, something which had to be done.

A good read, worth every penny. Next stage is to find out whether my Rumanian neighbour has heard of the thing. The author is said to be famous in her own land.

On October 22nd I noticed a company which sold a package which would help you write the perfect CV. Today I notice a company to which you can sent the perfect CV once you have written it - http://jooble-uk.com/. So whether you want to be a canning machine attendant (excluding food and drink) (CODOT 842.50) in Tambacounda, a palaeontologist (CODOT 214.30) in Villavicencio or a nuclear weapons engineer (CODOT 229.60) underneath a mountain in Qom this is the site for you. Or maybe even a little something in the UK.

Yesterday was a day for new technology, starting with iTunes and with the challenge being to tell iTunes that it was to use an external disc drive rather than an internal disc drive. Get off to a bad start by being told by iTunes that the help page no longer existed. So off to Google to try there, where I find plenty of places which will sell me an external disc drive and some places which offer help on how to connect one to iTunes. We take a look at one of these and think that we are on the move. But we think too soon because the helpful article from Google turns out to have been written in terms of some other version of iTunes than the one we are looking at. Spend some poking around the various iTunes menus and eventually light upon a hopeful looking dialog box about moving house. Click on the move button to be presented with another dialog box which contains a small box in which I assume I am supposed to enter the address of the new house. Much faffing around. Much confusion about whether folders called 'My Music' are real folders or artefacts of Windows Explorer. But complete failure at getting iTunes to digest the new address. In desperation phone up the help line, which does indeed provide help. Oh sir, you are not supposed to type the new address into the box provided. You are supposed to navigate to the new address and let iTunes type it into the box provided. Which works. Everything now seems splendid and we hang up. Decide to test the system by renaming the old iTunes master folder so that iTunes won't be able to find it even if it tried, which it should not be doing anyway. Close iTunes, open iTunes and lo and behold, the old address has reappeared. Our iTunes universe has been emptied. Panic, panic. Furthermore, iTunes seems to be interacting with Windows Explorer in some tricky way, making all the files containing the tunes invisible. One has to deduce their presence by the size property of the folders containing the files. More confusion. Phone up the help line again. Go through what seems to be exactly the same procedure and this time the thing sticks and the iPod appears to do a proper synchronisation with the new address. Having expended much energy over two hours, at this point we decide to quit while we are ahead and head off to the boozer.

Where we are treated to a demonstration of a telephone, from the same stable as iTunes as it happens, with which you can have a voice conversation. A conversation which took the form on this occasion of you talking to it and most if its answers being displayed on the screen. One could spend happy hours poking around at the boundaries of the things's capabilities. It knew how far away the moon was. It knew the square root of a million. It knew about the size of blue whales. But it did not know where Mount Everest was or the name of the longest river in the world. It did not know what make of car was driven by the superintendent in charge at Tooting Police Station, although it probably knew where that police station was. It was not very good with Geordie accents. Sometimes, rather than displaying a succinct answer it would fire up a Google search or pop you into some hopefully relevant place in Wikipedia. It knew where you were and whether you were at home or not. You could tell it to wake you up in a couple of hours. You could tell it to wake your son up in a couple of hours. Clever stuff and it would be interesting to see some description of the underlying systems.

Today was a day for a mixture of old and new technology at Hampton Court Palace, a place the interior of which I have not seen for more than ten years and FIL for more than fifty, this despite our many visits to the exterior. Off to a flying start as FIL is both old and has a blue card, which means that the two of us got the whole deal for £13.50 or so, with parking free. FIL thought he could try the audio guide, a thing looking rather like a large mobile phone which was helpfully connected to a gadget hung around his neck which would talk to the loop feature of his hearing aids. You punched in the number for an area of the Palace and you were treated to some time watch type banging on about the area in question. In the event, FIL not that impressed with all this, but luckily help continued with privileged access to a lift and to various parts of the Palace which were shut to ordinary visitors. This last being needed to avoid the many staircases which one would otherwise have to negotiate to get from one part of the palace to another.

The Palace itself was rather odd. A massive, rambling place with all kinds of odd nooks and crannies but with not all that many star attractions, although the few that there were were impressive. Lots of large and rather shabby rooms containing not much apart from low grade pictures or rather faded tapestries. Lots of people standing around with audio guides murmuring into their ears. Lots of trusties standing about in smart red coats, ready and waiting to do their rendition of a time watch presenter. Also ready and waiting to lead us through the special stair case avoiding doors and corridors.

Down one of which we came across an interesting & ancient wooden contraption, looking a bit like the sort of thing a farmer might move bales to the top of his barn with or a tiler might move tiles to the top of his house with, but which was actually used to lift grot out of the moat. Presumably for spreading on the rose garden in the autumn.

Another bit of old technology was the barbie in the kitchen. Whacking great log fire with a whole lot of spits in front of it. Plus various lads and lasses dressed up in Tudor gear preparing to roast real meat on the real fire. I was pleased to hear that the meat was actually to be eaten later in the day, although I quite understood that it would not be practical to feed it to the punters in this age of H&S.

All in all an interesting visit. The Hampton Court Experience or how to liven up an old and rambling building with a few resting luvvies.

Wound up proceedings with lunch in the Tilt Yard Café, just about open while the place is being refurbished. Three portions of gluten free beef stew for the two of us made for a very reasonable lunch. I was also reminded what factory white bread was like. I might not too happy with the stuff that I make, but it is a lot better than that which is dished out here - despite it being sliced off the loaf in front of you.

Wound up the day with yet another bit of new to me technology, taking delivery of my very first new CD, from Amazon. Casals playing the Bach Cello Suites to replace my very tired Tortelier version on vinyl. Perhaps tired by having been played too many times of one of those gramophones in a smart vinyl covered wooden box, maybe a cubic foot's worth, which were all the thing in the late sixties. Casals very good, despite the low background hum which preseumably reflects the CD having been engineered from some older technology. As it happens, both CD and vinyl from EMI.