pumpkinstrokemarrow

We had heard good reports about the chipper in the middle of Brighton Pier so today, to mark the year end, we thought we ought to give it a go. So we did and found ourselves on the pier, at around 1230, all ready to go.

For these purposes the pier can be considered as a pier with three bulges, with a pavilion in each bulge and with the pavilions being crosses between railway stations and conservatories. Plenty of Victorian iron work. The middle bulge contained the smallest pavilion, which was called the 'Palm Court' and which contained the chipper in question, a chipper licensed for both on and off sales.

FIL had to have the gluten free roast chicken, but BH and I had the haddock, and very good it was too. Furthermore, the chips had probably never seen the insides of either an oven or a microwave. Good service and plenty of cuddly small children to keep us amused while we were waiting. After our meal, we celebrated by putting our heads in a just married cutout and having our picture taken on my telephone by a passing tourist. Fair to say that I need a bit more practise as I did not realise in time that one was supposed one's head right in the hole.

Passed up on the hard core rides at the end of the pier, far too hard core for me and which appeared to have been made in Italy. Presumably they are keen on such things there.

But FIL and BH did have a go on the recently arrived wheel of excellence (illustrated), a wheel which looked about half as high as the London Eye, had been made in Germany and had done stints in several other places before turning up in Brighton for a five year run. Handsome looking thing, although the capsules were of the hang and swing variety, rather than the elaborately geared, fixed capsules in London. The only real down was that the designer had not given enough thought about how to put the thing on the ground, something I complain about from time to time in respect of outdoor sculpture, with the result that the bottom was a bit scrappy, especially close to. London Eye much better in that regard.

Two vehicles of interest in the course of the day. The first was a van parked at the BP petrol station at Maldon Rushett which described itself as a mobile police office dedicated to working in partnership to reduce disorderly and anti-social behaviour. I have not got the words quite right, but they were terribly on message. The mobile police officers were nowhere to be seen, presumably on a coffee break. The second was a camper van of similar size, shape and colour as the mobile police office, but parked in Brighton, the point of interest being that the campers were careful enough to carry sturdy yellow plastic wedges which looked to be made out of the same sort of stuff as the cones on roads and which, when suitably placed under those wheels on low places in the road, would yield a level camper van. Perhaps the campers were Germans.

Back home to a brussels sprouts medley for supper. That is to say, chop a couple of onions and simmer until soft in a little butter. Add some chopped triple smoked & baked gammon. While that is warming through, peel and halve about 40 sprouts. Add sprouts with a little water to the mix and simmer for a further seven minutes. Serve with home baked wholemeal without further butter.

I discover from http://crepuscularratel.blogspot.com/, a little late in the day, that Lego make a range of advent calendars. You can have regular, city, pirate or star wars to name just four. They are very visible on Google but oddly, not visible at all at http://shop.lego.com/en-GB/. Perhaps they had some geek taking them down at the stroke on midnight on Christmas Eve.

I wonder if they did a Christian one, or even a Muslim one?

Next wonder was what proportion of the world's population do Christmas? Around a third would be my guess; not bad for an illegitimate child taken on by a jobbing carpenter.

A long time ago the BBC used to make episodic childrens' dramas which we used to watch on Sunday afternoons. Each drama got 6 pops at the 1700-1800 slot as I recall, and rather good they usually were too. Nice rounding off to Sunday afternoon. One such drama was a dramatisation of the borrower books, of which I probably made some use as a child, and featuring one Ian Holm, who gave the proceedings that extra touch of class. So we tuned into the festal version featuring one Jeeves with great expectations, to be greatly disappointed. The adaptor, or possibly adaptress, had seen fit to introduce far too many novelties & gadgets and the ageing Jeeves was not able to pull off the tricky trick of portraying an unpleasant person in a pleasant way.

However, some good did come of it all. At several points we have a couple of small people - say the size of small rats - in a glass bell jar in a laboratory being inspected by a couple of large people. Large people to whom the small people are specimens to be inspected, poked around and eventually dissected, this last despite the fact that they are sentient, quite possibly with souls, albeit rather small ones. But a sight which suddenly made me rather guilty about killing animals, be it in the interests of science or of filling the belly, my belief being that mammals certainly and birds quite possibly are certainly conscious, if not quite sentient, beings.

But I did manage to keep the guilt at bay. I continued, and continue, to snuffle down the triple smoked gammon. Of the nine uncooked pounds, including bone, we are probably now down to three. (Of the 10kg of brussels sprouts, we are probably now down to 6kg. Starting to turn a bit yellow around the edges).

Another device for keeping the guilt at bay was a serious swing around London on a succession of three Bullingdons. This included a circumnavigation of Hyde Park. A visit to two of the more important metropolitan junctions, Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner, both quite challenging on two wheels. And, most important, I made it to the West Pole, that is to say the westernmost stand of the Bullingdons, aka Kensington Olympia. Two poles down, two to go, the North Pole and the East Pole. Should bag at least one of them next week.

Took in Holland Park on the way, having got no further than the tube station on Bayswater Road in recent years. Very smart area it was too with plenty of German cars and other foreigners about the place. Not surprised to read in yesterday's Guardian that it is the most expensive residential area in the land, although I am not quite sure how you would measure such a thing. So smart that there was not a shop or boozer in sight. I guess they just send the maid down to Kensington High Street with a jug.

The good news is that while last week I thought that while fun, the Bullingdons were a bit of a drain on the London taxpayer, this week I think that they might be quite a pull for tax paying tourists. One of the many attractions of London Town for foreigns borne down by excess of euroangstitis, a couple of whom I came across at Warwick Road, Olympia, a few hundred yards east of the West Pole. They were very keen, particularly on the little white key that I was flourishing.

The bad news was that on one of the legs I came close to breaking the 30 minutes barrier and on another I actually did break it. An extra 100p to pay.

One of the festal films was an old film about Aran, a curiosity in its own right, having taken around 3 months to turn up from Amazon. Amazon, to be fair to them, always said it would take about that long. The mystery being  why it would take so long to come from the admittedly niche operator, Park Circus. Does one have to wait until they have enough orders to be worth baking a new batch? Does one have to wait for the slow boat from China?

The film itself is a docu-drama from the 1930's, a docu-drama about people scratching a living from the edge of the world. On an island off the coast of County Clare, said to be without soil - although this did not seem to stop them having healthy enough looking sheep and goats. Also without trees. But there were plentiful supplies of stone, sea weed and sea food. Perhaps like the first humans, they mainly lived by scratching around on the foreshore for shell fish - supposed to be very good for the growth of brains.

But the whole thing looked a bit preposterous. First, it was not clear how one could gather enough stuff to sell to pay for the timber, cooking pots, clothes and what have you needed to supplement the shell fish. Was the whole operation subsidised by remittances from the boys in London? Second, it was not clear why one would stick such a life, a life which would be a continual grind, often wet and cold. Mortality due to accidents and tuberculosis (to mention just one likely malady) must have been huge. Why did they not just pack it in for London?

In fact, I was reminded of Eskimos, scratching a living from another edge of the world. But why did they not push inland a bit for an easier life? Why stick out all those freezing winters in damp igloos? Sharing the marital bed with the in-laws? There must have been a continual push and shove between the lands of those doing the Eskimo thing and those of of those doing the Indian thing. A bit of trading & intermarriage. Plenty of squabbles, raiding and worse. A bit like, I suppose, the tensions between the Bedouin of the desert proper and the more settled people on the fringes which just about support regular agriculture, tensions which get a bit of an airing in the stories of T. E. Lawrence. The population & psychological dynamics of such boundaries, zones of transition must be interesting.

And I learned this morning that abandoning ship for better parts has a very long tradition. It seems that as far back as the 10th century the then indigenous Irish were making sometimes forlorn dashes for England to escape the attentions of the Vikings, these last presumably & eventually assimilated to what remained of the indigenous. There was some fuss in England about the large slice of church revenues and benefices which the escaping Irish seemed to be able to lay their hands on and it was policy to encourage them to push onto mainland Europe, perhaps to do missionary work among the heathens of Lithuania.

The last concert of the year was at the Wigmore Hall, the pull being Dvořák's piano quintet in A, but we also got a piano sonata from Janáček and a string quarter from Smetana. The whole being brought to us, appropriately enough, by the Škampa Quartet, assisted by Stephen Hough. All good, but the quintet has never quite achieved the impact when I first heard it, by chance, at the QEH. By coincidence I read in Visser a few days later about having experiences (experiential moments perhaps?) which can never be repeated. One cannot repeat or recreate the wonder of the first occasion; at best one can echo it. Neatly chosen encore in the form of a couple of verses of 'Silent Night'. A seasonal and suitably slight winder down from the heights of the quintet.

The last TLS of the year was a double edition, usually notable for its banality, but this year full of good stuff. So I am reminded that Nabokov deserves to be remembered as more than the chap who wrote the story for 'Lolita' and learned that he was also a world class classifier of butterflies. I shall chase him up in the library.

There was also a sense of running out of time. So there were a number of interesting reviews of what looked like interesting books - but books to which one did not think one should be devoting the time that would be needed to justify purchase. Contrariwise and interestingly, there was a review of  'L'Art français de la guerre', a fat book of which I am near completing the first pass, the one where one does not bother the check all the words which one does not know. I agree with the conclusion - that it seems unlikely that anyone will be reading this book in 30 years time.

Festive fowl has now been reduced to soup for tonight's supper, having been accompanied by two sorts of stuffing - one with gluten and one without - but both seasoned with rather battered sage from the garden and rather small nuts from Horton Lane. I commented at the time of picking how the picking seemed to draw on skills honed during our long hunter gatherer apprenticeship and cracking seemed to do the same. Eyes surprisingly good at picking out small nuts which escaped into the pile of broken shells.

The triple smoked gammon was the business. A dry and flavourful ham. None of that damp saltiness one associates with the cheaper products from supermarkets. The only real failure was the custard sauce which accompanies the Christmas Pud., carefully confected by myself, but which failed to achieve the desired stiffness. Tasted OK, but not quite the same as the real thing. May have been the result of using a measuring tablespoon rather than a real one. We have yet to broach the Christmas Cake.

Festive chocolate for some was provided by Rococo (http://rococochocolates.com/) but which for me was provided by Lidl in the form of chocolate cigars sold under the brand 'J. D. Gross'. A very acceptable alternative to smoking indoors, something which I presently do not do.

We have got through perhaps 3 of the 10kg of brussels sprouts. We have exhausted the supplies of carrots, the supplies of onions are running low and we are down to the last crinkly cabbage, rather a small one. Visit to the depot planned for tomorrow.

Interesting dream last night, possibly brought on by having had a go at all ten years of the festive Jura (see http://www.isleofjura.com/home.aspx), or possibly by the discussion about whether the legend on the bottle was deliberately vague about exactly where and by whom the stuff was bottled. Was the label being economical with the truth? Was Jura a member of the Interbrew family as they say at Asda, rather than a cuddly independent?

Dream starts off with the family and lots of other people in a rather shabby country house, of the sort of size that might feature in a Poirot - his taste in country houses being rather grander than that of the Marple. Work rather than holiday atmosphere. Out on the moors up north somewhere, but domesticated rather than bleak or wuthering.

At this point a large furry brown catapillar arrives on the scene. Perhaps two feet long, with legs extended maybe a foot wide and six inches deep. Coloured rather as a tiger and with lots of bristles. The thing can fly and is very scary. Somehow we manage to catch and kill it and I am charged with incinerating the corpse in the very large, walk in fireplace, using the large supplies of kindling, broken furniture and other wood & timber which seems to be lying about. Lots of people standing around. Are there lots of other caterpillars flying around outside? Roosting in the eaves? Have some trouble getting the fire going but eventually I succeed, to the point where it is clear that it is going to take the rest of the house with it before too long.

Meanwhile long lines of humans, decent but a bit shabby start to appear, walking across the moors. Somehow we know that they are not right. I go to make enquiries and it turns out that these humans are actually colonists from outer space who can take on whatever form seems suitable to the intended colony. The caterpillar was their first go, quickly revealed as a mistake. The humans were their second attempt. And, yes, they could do horses should that have seemed appropriate.

Odd, in retrospect, that their English was so good while they were not able to work out without trying it that caterpillars was not the way forward.

They were not particularly threatening, except that there were an awful lot of them and they were clearly coming to stay.

Country house now very much on fire and we have to join the long lines of imitation humans heading south. I get separated from the rest of the family, managing to find BH (a relatively rare dream appearance) but not the spogs before I wake up.

A slight offering of my own to celebrate the recent election of 'The Dame Emin' to the headmistressship of the drawing arts at the Royal Academy of the Performing Arts. Long may she reign! See, especially, May 12th 2010.

I might say that biros have got much better over the years. This offering was done with a see through, government issue biro from somewhere in the Home Office which was not bad at all. Very little tendency to splodge or smudge, unlike some earlier models. Only weakness being that it is not very strong on solid.

And talking of the performing arts, we were pleased to learn yesterday that the couple of gents from Zimbabwe whom we saw knocking out 'Hamlet' at the Oval (see 26th November 2010) have now been booked to do 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' at no less a venue than the Globe. Where, as it happens, I vaguely recall seeing this very same play not very long after the place got under way. We are clearly prescient and we will see if we can get FIL to knock out 'Jingle Bells' on the thumb drum (hanging in his fireplace) to celebrate this event.

I had noticed the other day that brussels sprouts were being discounted at the Kiln Lane Sainsbury's and had been tempted. But today, down the market, I was being offered 2lbs of small brussels sprouts for £1.80 or 10kg for £5. This time I fell for it and spent a happy minute inserting the small sack into the near side pannier. Despite amounting to no more than around 10% of the combined weight of me and the bicycle, they made a difference to the handling, particularly when cornering. I shall report in due course on the percentage that get eaten by humans - I believe that the chickens down the road will eat green vegetables if we get stuck.

Notice that while the French are content to call brussels sprouts brussels sprouts - or at least something fairly close - the Germans to be difficult call them pink cabbages. Or possibly pink coal. Maybe I need a better dictionary.

I can also report that the second jar of blackberry whisky continues to ferment slowly (see September 28th). Should I take a chance and bottle the stuff for fizzy?

And then on another, different, day, being too far gone to actually read the 'Evening Standard', I made a study of the front page instead.

First finding is that, like the 'Sun', there is a generous use of font, my count making it 19 on this one page, although I grant that I count things like bold and normal as different for the purpose of the count. I believe the idea is that having lots of fonts helps make the page look lively and attractive. Cunningly balanced & steadied by use of the same font for the four bits of news, one large and three small. With further steadying given by the three small bits being both arranged in single column and identical in both font and layout.

Second finding is that, out of the roughly 1,000 square centimetres available, nearly 200 had been allocated to the headline. 100 to the advertisement across the bottom of the page. 100 - that is to say all of 10%. Not for nothing are these things called newspapers - to four bits of word news - one 70 and three 10s. 150 to the bit of picture news about the late lamented leader of North Korea. Picture news in the sense that it was news but virtually all the space was given over to two pictures, one large and one small.

The 'Metro', by way of comparison, had, for me anyway, a rather dull look. Lots of fonts, but they went in for sans serif which do not sparkle in the same way. On the other hand, there was more use of colour. In other ways, the structure of the front page was very similar to that of the 'Evening Standard'. So while they did not have the steadying effect of three identical bits of word news, they did have three identical references to stories inside which achieved the same visual end. The big bit of news was about the same size. The headline was about the same size but by being deep rather than wide drew more attention to the amount of space it was burning up. All in all, not as attractive as its rival freebie.

On Wednesday we had what I had expected to be the last Irish stew of the year. There was a slight change in the format in that as the butcher was busy with festive deliveries, I suggested that he did not bother with the rather time consuming longitudinal saw through the spine, settling rather for latitudinal chops, or perhaps transverse swipes, with the cleaver. The result included what amounted to three double best end of neck chops. Otherwise the usual drill: lard, onions, lentils and potatoes. Served with brussels sprouts.

But then I heard that the Corkishman who runs the 'White Swan' in Mill Road in Cambridge Town was offering Irish Stew for lunch at £3.95 the bowl, plus roll. So up at the crack of dawn, or what passes for the crack of dawn for someone five years retired, and off to Victoria Station where on arrival I noticed a cloud of train spotters around a very serious looking steam locomotive, grandly puffing away, or rather up. It was not moving. In the words of the immortal Rev. Awdry, main line job rather than branch line. Full coal tender. Green paint. The only disappointment was the train that it was presumably destined to haul was a rather shabby looking affair. Perhaps it would have looked grander if I had been near enough to cop all the cut glass and candles.

Off to Bressenden Place for a Bullingdon and headed off up Victoria Street where I narrowly missed an entire red cabbage which was rolling across my path. Carried on to King's Cross, commiting just one traffic offence in the form of a right turn into Shaftesbury Avenue while heading north up Charing Cross Road, and dropping the Bullingdon off at St. Chad's Street. And so on to Cambridge Town where I disembarked at the shiny new platform 7, an arrangement which lengthened the walk to Mill Road by a hundred yards or so. Paid my respects to the flats on the site of the 'Argyll', which had once been a provincial version of TB, and after various vicissitudes arrived at the 'White Swan', where they did indeed serve Irish stew. Deeply impressed because very few pubs freelance their food these days, nearly all being tied down to the corporate food plan. Indeed, a Corkishman did try to do stew at TB, to be firmly put in his place by the then operator, Magic Pubs, at that time a subsidiary of Greene King, better known as the brewers of a fine IPA.

Decent portion for the £3.95. The real thing, albeit not made to the same recipe that I use. Small lumps of meat without a bone in sight. No lentils in sight either, but there were some carrots instead. Broth good if a touch peppery for me - a cook who rarely adds salt or pepper to anything. And the Corkishman was sufficiently impressed with us to box up the remaining two portions for us to take away, for free, on the grounds that it was the end of the batch and he was probably not going to sell any more of it that day.

Next stop the Fitzwilliam to look over two small exhibitions, one of fancies from the Hapsburg Treasure Chest called 'Splendour & Power' and one about Vermeer called 'Vermeer's Women', this last providing an opportunity to check that they were taking proper care of the three important pictures they had borrowed from London, two Vermeers and a De Hooch, which they were. And the young lady minding the cloakroom seemed to think that minding a portion of Irish stew was OK although, sensibly, she did pop it into a second plastic for safe keeping.

The oldest entry from the Hapsburgs was a rather impressive ring from 1400, said to have been carved from a single sapphire.

I found 4 Vermeer's in the other exhibition, two from London which I knew well and one of which is reproduced above the fireplace in FIL's room, and two much smaller one's which I did not know so well, despite one of them having been reproduced above the piano in the house where I grew up. But seeing them with other painters from the same time reminded one of how good Vermeer is. I have read that his paintings are full of symbolism, but what I usually go for is the serenity of his compositions.

Then off to another boozer of TB stamp, this one the 'Grapes' at the top of Histon Road. Pleased to say that the tone of the place had not changed much and that while it only sold Greene King IPA out of some complicated contraption which makes the IPA taste rather keggy (I have come across such a thing at the Vauxhall Griffin at Vauxhall (http://www.thevauxhallgriffin.com/) before now), it did have an acceptable if unknown substitute.

After various other adventures eventually found my way back to Epsom, where I found that the BH had indeed roasted our triple smoked half gammon. A phrase which reminded me of the triple vintage cider of my youth. I understand that empty bottles in good condition now change hands on ebay for surprisingly large sums.

I moan from time to time - most recently on December 20th - about the antics of the Chain Saw Volunteers. No problem when they trash chunks of our natural heritage.

But when it comes to making our local school bigger - Stanford Green Primary - which could be done with much greater comfort if the school was allowed to grab a chunk of green space - no go at all. All the ecofaddists are parading the streets of Epsom. Chaining themselves to the railings of the town hall.

What I have in mind is that the school has pots of land, the only problem being that it is landlocked. Only one narrow road to the outside world; a road which reaches the outside world near enough to our own house to mean that we have lots of Chelsea Tractors parking outside at school start up time in term time. So a simple solution would be to punch through, from the pots of land, to Christchurch Road, well away from our house and possibly through the allotments. Maybe grab a bit of Stamford Green to make a roundabout so that the Chelsea Tractors are not a hazard to themselves or others on the reasonably busy Christchurch Road.

If the allotment holders get too stroppy - and they include plenty of people well up for making an effective fuss - just buy up one of the houses on Christchurch Road. Although one might argue that growing food on allotments is not very green at all. Much more efficient to grow food on a large scale. All this small scale farming dreadfully inefficient. One only has to think about the enclosures in the past: all very sad for the cottagers at the time but you can't stop the march of history.

Maybe sell one or two of the pots of land for housing to pay for it all.

PS: one should remember in all this that there is no-one who makes as much fuss about smoking as an ex-smoker. Or in this case, an ex-allotment keeper (twice).

Panic stations on Friday when it was realised that due to a prior engagement we were not going to be at home to see the grande finale of 'Strictly cum Brucie'.

But then, as panic subsided and brain clicked in I thought that maybe if I plugged some headphones into the appropriate looking hole on the front of the PC there would be enough sound capability to produce noise in the ears. The problem being that the PC did not come with loudspeakers - unlike laptops where it is all packaged in - with the result that I have been unable to hear any of the many, possibly spiffing, video clips that I get sent. Consult with FIL who tells me that he does indeed have a pair of suitable headphones. Plug them in, connect to one of said video clips and lo & behold I have noise in the ears.

Thus comforted, off to Maplins to buy my own headphones, to be confronted by a bewildering choice, ranging in price from around £10 to around £50. This last being for what was described as studio quality hifi. I settle for something reasonably clunky looking for around £15. They are certainly heavy on the head. I have also learned that my ears must be an important part of my personal heat management system as my head gets quite hot if I have the things on for any length of time. But I jump ahead.

Next step is to get plugged into BBC iplayer and for some reason I decide that the download option is best. That way one is not dependent on the vagaries of one's broadband connection. Click the appropriate buttons and in short order I have the BBC iplayer desktop installed on the PC. Must be quite a tricky beast as it, for example, expires things 7 days after download and allows you to subscribe to a series. Download an episode of 'Brucie', a process which takes about 10 mins for the 300Mb. Fire it up and all is well except that there is no sound. Check the video clip again and sound alive and well there.

Maybe there is something wrong with the download so the next step is to download the episode again - and then I start to get into deep water. Doesn't seem to care for downloading the same thing more than once. So I decide that the thing to do is to uninstall the iplayer desktop and start again. Took a little while to find the download place again but we do, and it downloads. Icon reappears on the desktop. The only catch is that nothing happens when you double click on it. Or try and open the thing from the program menu. Nor is the folder in which one's valuable downloads are stored for posterity present. Back at panic stations.

Take a calming draught and decide to wait until the morning before taking any further action. At which point I phone up the BT help people - whom I pay a monthly retainer to be helpful. And helpful they were, taking about 10 minutes to plug into my PC and announce that BBC had withdrawn the iplayer desktop and that you were now supposed to do everything online. I decided not to engage in discussion about how it was that I seem to have stumbled on the thing just as they were in the process of withdrawing it; instead I just uninstalled it again and settled for online 'Brucie'. One black mark for BBC and one gold star for BT.

I note in passing that the (portrait) shape of the iplayer display and the (poor) quality of the television picture suggest that the system was designed for people to use on their telephones while in transit. Possibly more fun than playing patience.

And I note in closing that BH has yet to view the grand finale. I rather suspect that she is not going to.

Which is perhaps just as well because the sound is still a touch idiosyncratic. You have to poke the PC about a bit to get it going; a process which BH would find tiresome, to say the least. Perhaps another call to BT is indicated. First thing Christmas morning?

The DT had a piece yesterday which, while staying well within the law on such matters, managed to get right under my skin, which I am sure was the intention. The piece concerned a lady doctor was has been awarded the equivalent of £100,000 a year for life in the wake of some imbroglio over maternity leave; not a very good result for the public purse although possibly a very good result for her.

Also mentioned was the fact that the lady was a Pole who had only worked for the outfit paying the fine for a year or so before she went on maternity leave on full pay, presumably thus getting under the skin of her colleagues. The whole was decorated with a large picture of her on an off day.

First thought was that it was a bit awkward that lady doctors are about ready to take on highly paid jobs at about the same time that they are ready to start their families, an awkwardness which our HR function does not seem to have got its head around.

Second thought was that it was not clear why a lady who wants a family should expect to get a year on full pay while she makes a start on it - a year during which her employer has to find that full pay and make alternative arrangements which take account of the fact that the lady does not have to declare whether or not she is going to return until towards the end of the year. Even less clear in the case of a highly paid lady.

For a large employer this amounts to a special employment tax with the random element smoothed by being large. For a small employer this can be a serious burden with the random element looming much larger. A serious deterrent to the employment of ladies of childbearing age. I guess the lady doctor's employer was somewhere in between these two extremes. I am reminded that in the bad old days, ladies in many professions were obliged to resign - perhaps 'were dismissed' would be less euphemistic - on marriage.

Third thought was that it is all a matter of policy rather than morals or equity. Do we want to encourage women with young children to remain economically active? Do we want to spend many thousands of pounds training young women for them to practise for just a few years  - eight years in our own case - before packing it in? In these times of high unemployment, do we want mothers who could be bringing up their children - not to be rioters, single parents or otherwise a charge on the state - occupying scarce slots in the world of employment?

And last thought was that the award was disproportionate.

Feeling the need to work something off, then headed into London town for another trip on the Bullingdons - most of the time in light drizzle and in the dark. Duffel coat stood the test well although rather damp by the time I got home. Picked up the first bike on the Albert Embankment, over Lambeth Bridge and up Horseferry Road, admiring on the way what for a short while had been my fine first floor, corner window seat in the now not so new Home Office building. On to Victoria Street, through Grosvenor Gardens and choosing the wrong turning for Belgrave Square, had to push the bike the last hundred yards to the docking station there. Picked up the second bike at Cadogan Square and headed north up Upper Sloane Street to Knightbridge. Turned right for my first navigation of Hyde Park Corner, certainly for quite some years, and then headed up Piccadilly. Left into Regent Street and right into Great Marlborough Street from where I can report that Grant & Cutler are, sadly, no more. I am told they have been reduced to a concession inside Foyles. Got lost in the one way system and had to take in a bit of Oxford Street in order to make Soho Square, which I made, according to the Bullingdon computer this morning, two minutes short of a chargeable time. On the way passed a cluster of very suspicious black silos on a Crossrail building site. Far too large and numerous to be cement silos. Is Boris using the building site as a screen for weapons of mass destruction? Whom might he want to destroy?

Prompted by my Visser book (see December 16th), paid a proper visit to St. Patrick's of Soho Square, a handsome church dedicated in 1792 by a bishop of somewhere beginning with 'C' from a place called 'VA' - the only candidate for which that I can think of being Virginia, at that time undivided. Possibly the fruit of the labours of a newspaper called the 'Catholic Reader', but probably not the one to be found at http://thecatholicreader.com/. A church with a strong pull towards the altar - which was indeed a slab of stone - marble - in memory of sacrificial altars of yesteryear. In fact a lot of handsome marble altogether. I was particularly struck by the polished, polychrome marble flooring. A quiet, peaceful and restful place in the middle of the metropolitan bustle, a quiet and restful place which it is hard to see being provided, for free, in a non religious way. The card illustrated was provided to introduce Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal.

Retrieved the exact same bicycle for the third leg. Back onto Oxford Street, back down Regent Street, around Piccadilly Circus into Shaftesbury Avenue. Right into Charing Cross Road, across Trafalgar Square (with its fine but badly decorated tree) into Whitehall. Down Whitehall, across Westminster Bridge to dock outside the Archduke. But I passed up this opportunity and pushed on, by rail, to TB, which I reached warm, damp and thirsty.

In the course of all this I had passed just one bicyclist wearing a bicycle cape, one which looked considerably younger than mine, so maybe you can still buy the things and needed to beep-beep just one brace of pedestrians about to step under my front wheel. Vive-voce as the bell on the Bullingdon was not up to much. Pedestrians both amused and grateful.

Irritated on our walk around Horton Country Park today, otherwise a bright sunny morning, by the antics of the Chain Saw Volunteers (14th West Horton). Bashing yet another innocent & innocuous chunk of our rough woodland in the name of some ecofad or other.

Came across a chap in black lycra yesterday who was neither young nor beautiful but who was holding a bicycle and who was peering through the hedge at some hard core and subsoil piled up outside the Horton Golf Club club house. Closer inspection suggested that he was peering at a bird, at first glance a small sea gull. Closer inspection revealed that it was no such thing, rather a bird perhaps a bit bigger than a missel thrush, bright white breast, grey parts to the head and dark back. Touch of green. Long legs, maybe yellow. Lycra, who was a tweeter, thought that it was a stray greenshanks, blown off course and exhausted, tucking his head under his wing which was why we could not see the distinctive beak. My eyes not good enough to work out that the head was tucked under the wing, in any event I could see no beak.

Not completely convinced, so back home to take a peek at Google which suggests a bird of rather different shape than that we saw and with a long curved beak. Rather longer legs than we saw. Off to the RSPB site - which I do not find very helpful for identification - and the best it could do on the information I was able to supply was plover. Fairly sure it was not one of those. So I think I will pin my colours to the lycra mast and settle for greenshanks, perhaps one of the couple of thousand or so which live in the UK. Continue to be amused by the buzz that a tweeter gets being proportional to the rarity of a tweet in the context. Not bothered in the least that the tweet in question might be as common as muck a few hundred miles across the way. So the tweet gets all hot, bothered, excited - and pleased - about some poor sod of a bird who has strayed big time off course.

A different sort of tweets in the form of trumpets, following the cornetts and sackbuts which came with the Ripieno choir on or about November 22nd. This on the occasion of the Epsom Choral Society (ECS) Christmas Carols, as ECS had managed to procure the services of that eminent television trumpeter, Crispian Steel-Perkins (http://www.crispiansteeleperkins.com/), possibly getting a discount as he is something of a local boy. It turns out that he is quite the showman and also something of an ancient trumpet buff and we were treated to three or four different instruments - including a cornett described on this occasion as an ancient trumpet rather than an ancient oboe, the point being, it seems, that a cornett has the mouthpiece of a trumpet while being similar in other respects to a recorder; made of wood but supposed to be evocative of the horns used by Vikings and such like. Very good he was too, particularly at playing sufficiently quietly to decently provide some highlights to the singing of the choir.

Back at the ranch, we continue the intermittent perusal of Trollope on Cicero (see November 29th), and now of Cicero himself in the form of his Philippics downloaded, in English, from  http://www.gutenberg.org/. Antony does not now seem such a good egg as he did to the bard. Apart from being a drunk, it seems that he was rather partial to killing people so that he could grab their property or because he did not like them very much. And given that Cicero had made these rather intemperate speeches about him, he had a couple of his chaps visit him, chop his head and hands off and have them spiked up on the rostra in the forum for the amusement of the plebs. After which he had his wife shove her hat pin through the offending tongue. However, the Philippics seemed pretty rubbish to me, in translation. Couldn't see a lot of point in pushing on with them. Presumably the chaps illustrated can, having spent a chunk of their valuable academic time on them. I guess they can read the things in the original and properly appreciate the quality of the Latin.

Quality which I am told derives in some part from the ability to play fast and loose with the word order; the various endings to words (the cause of much grief in my early adolescence) allowing one to reconstruct the meaning, a trick that does not work very well at all in English. Oddly, I am also told that Russians do not play this game, despite have one of the more heavily inflected languages hereabouts and despite their being big into poetry.What is wrong with them?

Having failed to make a purchase at Chessington we may chuck out 27.90 euros on one of these with http://www.fairylights.de/, a site full of goodies found through the Lemax one. But despite being more than half a metre high it does seem a touch dear. But then again, maybe it is very nicely made with all the mould marks polished away and real silver snow flakes, in which case it would be worth every cent.

Half a dozen or so beach huts have appeared in Epsom Market, offering festive fare of various sorts. Hand made stollen (rather different from the version sold by Lidl), hand made fudge, football scarves and various foreign looking eatables.

However, this was not good enough for us. We went to see the festive fare on offer at Chessington Garden Centre (http://www.chessingtongardencentre.co.uk/). Just inside the main entrance there is a large room, with twinkling black tent cloth hanging from the ceiling, full of Christmas decorations of one sort or another. From there, you penetrate into the shop proper where you are tempted with various gift suggestions, some with a garden flavour, some without.

You then get to what was for me the highlight of the show; a display case perhaps eight feet long and 4 feet wide chock full with Lemax village ware. Model houses, model shops, model hotels, various model people engaged in various model activities. A small model train. All made to a high festive standard, with a vaguely German flavour but with English signage, presumably made in China, and if you don't go to Chessington to buy them you can always go to http://www.alles-mini.de/shop/. Some of the offerings were quite amusing, rather in the way of the buildings in the Bekonscot model village noticed on 12th July. But not so amusing that we actually bought any of the stuff.

From there you get into the restaurant area which I am told is the highest turning over department in the place. I didn't look too closely but I imagine it is much the same sort of thing as you might get at Hampton Court or the better class of National Trust house. But I was impressed by the large laminated wood beams holding up the roof, the sort of thing that you can see these days in school halls and swimming pools. Very much the better class of shed, more or less completely displacing what had once been an impressive display of plants from hot countries, probably from the time when the Garden Centre had educational aspirations.

We declined Santa's grotto, although we have had good reports from those who have small children to take, as we did not. Should any readers want to make the trip, they might want to book online to avoid disappointment.

A good deal of the outside is given over to garden fittings and furnishes of various sorts. Posts, ponds, statues, stones, posh bricks, tubs, trellises and all the rest of it. If you look hard you can even find some bamboo canes to hold up your runner beans. A reasonable chunk of what is left is given over to garden food. Bales of peat and bales of the finest compost.

We ended our visit at the aquatic centre with its large and impressive range of fish. Disappointed that the small but impressive display of exotic water plants and plant like water animals seems to have been displaced by wares of greater commercial promise, including various plastic water plants. But we suspect it is a good place to buy fish as we have heard that they take the selling of fish seriously, rather in the way that a rescue dog centre gives candidate rescuers a good going over before releasing any dog. All of which prompted a discussion in the TB last night about what a pain it must be to be selling expensive and lovingly made/reared merchandise to complete plonkers who have plenty of money, but little proper appreciation of what they are buying. Not for me.

Just finished the broth from the oxtail noticed on 14th December. Thinned with water and thickened with left over boiled white rice. Hearty warming breakfast on this cold and snowy morning.

Over breakfast I read about the odd business of one of those grossly overpaid bankers being temporarily stood down with exhaustion brought on by overwork. There is talk of management changes so that his workload can be more easily managed down. Not sure that I approve of masters of the universe being struck down by something so banal as being unable to properly manage their in-trays. I thought you got your master of the universe badge precisely because you could manage all that sort of thing. That you really were a master. I wonder what the arrangements about sick pay are?

Before getting around to breakfast, a couple of snippets from a book by Margaret Visser (http://www.margaretvisser.com/) whom I first came across some years ago in a book about the rituals of dinner, which I think I had better now read again. I am grateful to Surrey Libraries for withdrawing this book from stock, the result of which being that I acquired it - although not so cheaply as I would have a couple of months ago. The ladies at the library tell me that they are now applying Oxfam rather than jumble sale policies to their cast offs.

First snippet concerns the bible story that everyone used to be taught in the days before we had faith schools, the story about the time when Jesus chucked the bankers and other undesirables out of the temple. A bible story, you might think, for modern times. The Visser take is that at the time of Jesus, the temple was arranged as a series of concentric spaces, outer spaces for the profane and inner spaces for the sacred. Money changers and animal dealers were permitted in the outermost space, along with everybody else. Jewish men and women in the next one, Jewish men in the one after that and so on and so forth. The animal dealers were there so that you could buy your sacrificial animal from someone with the seal of good housekeeping from the temple authorities and the money changers were there so that you could change your Roman coinage for the Jewish coinage needed to make a kosher purchase of your sacrificial animal. By the standards of that time this all sounds eminently reasonable. So what reason did Jesus have for upsetting the apple cart? Not something that was ever discussed in my time in RI.

Second snippet is a blast from the past for a former manufacturer of test cubes of concrete and certain related substances. One of the related substances being pulverised fly ash (PFA), of interest because of its mildly pozzolanic properties, a fancy way of saying that it was a sort of feeble cement. Many years later, I now learn from Visser that pozzolana is a sort of powdery stone derived from volcanoes which the Romans of Italy used to make their cement. A close relative of another sort of not so powdery stone derived from volcanoes into which the Romans of Rome used to cut their catacombs. From all of which we deduce that the incineration of coal in power stations - the source of the PFA - bears some relation to the sort of incineration which goes on in volcanoes.

A plug for rockets for all owners of small children. Wonderful thing: cheap, simple and safe. Fun for all the family. See http://www.stomprocket.com/ for the story from the horse's mouth and Mr. Google offers lots of places from which to buy the things.

On the same occasion we also chanced across something called Tunbridge Ware, offered that Sunday morning in the Spa Hotel (http://www.spahotel.co.uk/) but also to be found at http://www.tunbridgeware.org/. The ware being elaborate marquetry boxes, mostly of jewellery box sort of size. The marquetry included some very handsome cube work (if that is the proper name. Reminded me of similar motifs painted on the ceilings of Renaissance churches in Tuscany. Maybe that is from where the pattern derived) and was varied by the inclusion of mosaics made by setting short, square sectioned sticks of coloured wood, maybe a millimetre across, upright on the ground, the whole then being polished flat & shiny. Products interesting but a bit strong in price for Christmas presents in our family. Might also mention that the hotel, as well as being a very handy place to take coffee on a Sunday morning, has rather splendid gardens out the back.

Back at the Guardian depressed to read of all the dreadful goings on in Syria. Which gave rise to the thought that one can understand the Israelis being a touch paranoid about Arabs if one of their Arab neighbours carries on like that on their own.

And amused to read that this nation of shopkeepers needs a ministry of shopping to get us doing more shopping, or at least more of the right sort of shopping. One more of the many contradictions of capitalism that we should need a ministry to encourage more spending at a time when, collectively, we need to be balancing our books by spending less. Never mind about saving the planet. Also that that essence of the free market, the English High Street, should not work properly of itself but needs the dead hand of government to poke it into line. Whatever would Adam Smith have thought?

Intending some light relief off to Tooting, on return from where I experienced a whole new category of senior moment. Got to the northbound platform at Earlsfield (the normal entrance to the southbound platform being closed) to see a southbound Epsom train heading into the station. Make a dash for it, getting about two thirds of the way down the platform to the temporary bridge when I run out of puff. Decide that I am not going to make it. The train pulls out shortly afterwards. But a touch upset to think that not so long ago I would have carried on running, up and over the bridge and caught the train. Fortunately we were still in 15 minute interval land so little temptation to take the Chessington train and take in a quick one at the 'Earl Beatty'.

There was also compensation in the form of a handsome black girl handsomely got up in various shades of grey, something I have not seen before. Worked very well.

And there was still time to inspect the temporary bridge, which appeared, oddly, to be tied down with wire ropes rather than bolted down. I was also interested to see that one could stack up concrete blocks - the sort of thing used to fence off workers on motorways, maybe a cubic metre a pop - using just a couple of lengths of three by three as bearers between each layer. Struck by the weight that these bits of softwood could take without apparent strain.

Back at Epsom the sky was unusually clear with plenty of visible stars, among which I was able to pick out Orion, Cassiopeia, Large Bear and Small Bear. Pole star rather faint but visible. With the further unusual of a clear night in December not being followed by a frosty morning. Bright and clear but no frost.

It being some time since we had chick peas, thought to have them yesterday. One pound of chick peas soaked overnight and topped up in the morning. None of this rinsing business. Browned a clove of garlic in butter, added three chopped onions and cooked that for a bit. Added a chopped yellow pepper and cooked for a bit longer. Stirred the whole lot into the chick peas. Added 6 medium sized finely chopped tomatoes - which in this case were oddly dry. Reminded one of oranges which had been kept a bit too long. Add a finely chopped lump of smoked bacon from the Madeira Deli at Vauxhall (http://www.madeiralondon.co.uk/) - this last being the most expensive ingredient at £2 or so. Simmer the whole lot for three hours. Serve with cabbage and rice, both white and boiled. Hearty farmyard style food as they might say on the tin if the stuff was sold in tins.

And it was more than a month since we had oxtail (see 9th November), so today we made up for lost time. Also for the economy of the day before as the oxtail, which will feed three, perhaps with a little broth over, cost £15. For a change, removed some of the fat strips from the larger pieces, a process which reminded me of the fact that some animals use their tails as fat storage jars. Browned the oxtail in a little lard. Added two large chopped onions and fry for a little longer. Cover with water and simmer for 1.75 hours. Add two ladles of orange lentils and simmer for a further 1.75 hours. Serve with mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts. Broth excellent, meat flavour good if texture a little firm for FIL. Maybe push up to 4.25 hours next time.

In the margins, I learned from the Guardian that there is every possibility that Hamleys of Regent Street will be taken to court by the Diversity Commission for a flagrant contravention of the ground breaking Harman-Balls act of the last adminstration. It seems that Hamleys have separate signs pointing to boys' toys and girls' toys. There is the further point that the girls' toys are a couple of floors higher than the boys' toys, which might be construed as discrimination. The Guardian did not say for whom the toys on the intervening floors were intended. We await the ruling of this administration's Attorney General with interest.

I last reported on the new daffodil bed on 22nd September. Since then, the snowdrops and winter aconites have turned up, they were planted, over seeded with the balance of the meadow mixture and, lastly, the netting was reinstalled, using for this last a whole lot of thin bamboo in an attempt to hold the net more or less in place. Plus lots of mild steel wire and sisal twine. Grass came up fairly well, although for some reason the left hand end was much thinner than the right hand end (viewed from the same side as the illustration), despite getting more sun. And for the avoidance of doubt, the rather brown stuff in the foreground is the rather shady back of our back lawn. Just looks like that from this angle.

Regular water meant that the worms came back, making a fair amount of mess with their worm casts, but that is supposed to be good for the soil. Modest amount of digging by squirrels, rather less by larger animals, possibly cats. FIL says there is something in daffodil bulbs, the smell of which puts them off. And there is a track running across the stretch illustrated, with whatever it is, probably a fox, getting through the (split chestnut) fence just in front of the right hand post. Lately we have had the leaves to pick off, which I have been doing by hand, rather than take the damage involved in using a rake. We don't have one of those blowing things.

The last step was some kind of edging, the idea being that we don't mow the daffodil bed along with the lawn, rather we cut it once after the bulbs have died down and once in the autumn. Natural grass in the meantime. The idea is that two cuts a year will suffice to keep the grass (and the meadow plant organic grass improvers) free from woody weeds and not so strong as to smother the bulbs.

But what kind of edging? First thought was to have a border of bricks set into the ground. Rather a lot of bother. Or perhaps some kind of ornamental garden stone. Rather expensive. Or perhaps some kind of low wooden rail. This might look a bit big on this rather narrow - around a metre - bed. Then we thought of the low iron rails they have at Hampton Court and this seemed like quite a good idea. So off to the blacksmith at Walton, a place which had a forge, all sorts of interesting & mostly old equipment and a large supply of horse shoes. That sort of area. Yes sir, three bags full sir. I can knock you some of that up. But, despite the good start and several phone calls, the rails never turned up. Next stop, Sparrowhawks of Epsom Lane North, a lot nearer and more convenient than Walton. Not quite so twee but he bent up some rebar for us and it was ready a couple of days later when he said it would be. Job done and installed. I shall go to him first next time.

To the Wigmore Hall after something of a gap to hear the Nash Ensemble. The driver for the visit was an opportunity to hear the Schubert C Major quintet of which I had been reminded of a few months previously, but we also got a couple of Mendelssohn quartet movements (Op. 81 parts 1 and 2) and a Schoenberg sextet (Op. 4). Rather to my surprise we quite liked the Schoenberg. Liking the Mendelssohn was less of a surprise, in any event it made a good opening. And it was no surprise at all to be reminded why the Schubert is so popular. Also that the quality of silence and the dynamic range of a concert hall far surpasses, certainly for this sort of thing, what has been achieved by Sevenoaks in my study. Audience properly enthusiastic. We get to hear the Ensemble again next year, at St. Lukes, concerning which I note in passing that St. Lukes is one of the few areas in London known by its parish name to the Bullingdon Bike System, the only others that I could spot being St. Giles and St. James. Also that there is no saint for the church which everything seems to agree is called St. Sepulchre, mentioned previously. Presumably a confusion with the French, for whom holy and saint are synonyms.

Wigmore only marred by the two sitting in front of us, a middle aged dad with an adolescent son. After the interval, the dad did not finish his mobile phone conversation until the lights started to go down, which I thought a bit poor. He then proceeded to nod and eventually fall asleep properly, which was actually a bonus as I could then see the centre of the stage, previously blocked by his head - which, given that he was a bit shorter than me, made me realise that sitting behind me in a hall without raking seats must be a bit of a pain, even though I do try to keep my head reasonably still. Unlike the adolescent son who appeared to be well bored and fidgeted through most of the second half. The lesson to take away is that sitting in the middle of a middle row is not quite the best wheeze. Middle row good, but if one sat slightly to the right one, rather than in the middle, one would be less likely to have one's view of the stage blocked. Something to be explored.

Rather liked the Oxford Street lights on exit.

Home to resume my first pass of this year's prize book from Goncourt, 'L'Art français de la guerre'. Starts off well, being a handsomely produced paperback from Gallimard, who have an excellent house style and good standards. Vocabulary a bit tricky but I shall pick up on that on the second pass. Subject matter including a fair amount of butchery, sharing what seems to be a French taste for that sort of thing with last year's prize book, 'La carte et le territoire'. One notices the same thing in arty French films.

I shall no doubt report further in due course, but in the meantime find it rather depressing that the French, having more or less lost the second world war, more or less immediately plunged into a very unpleasant war in their colony of Vietnam, with both sides displaying considerable savagery & cruelty. Helped along on the French side by an infusion of men who had been brutalised by fighting either for the French resistance in France or for the Wehrmacht on the Russian front. I dare say the story will move onto Algeria where there will be more of the same. A rather worse record than our own, at least in the sense that while by default or otherwise a lot of people in our colonies were killed - some tortured - on or shortly after our watch, quite possibly more in total than in their colonies, I do not think we ever went in for quite the same sort of organised savagery.

All of which reminds me why we were right in 1968 or so to protest the US presence in Vietnam which followed. Even more savagery & cruelty, which turned out in the end to be completely unproductive, even for the US, quite apart from being the cause of several million excess deaths. A far worse record than in Iraq.

PS: on the second post of September 23rd, I noticed the idea that the hill people's of south east Asia do form a unit of sort, cutting across the boundaries of Burma, Thailand and so on. Pushed up there by the more successful peoples of the plains. This idea has now resurfaced here in the reported use by the French of the highland people in Vietnam to slaughter the lowland people, for whom they had but a low regard. Blogger search failed to find the earlier post though; had to resort to sledgehammer technology. Google search finds it, but only at the month level, rather than the post level, which is not quite what one wants.

The fad continued with another swing around London on a Bullingdon Bike, managing on this occasion neither to get lost nor to get honked. Starting, as usual, at Vauxhall, headed down the Albert Embankment, then turned right into Lambeth Road where I was sorry to see that the 'Lambeth Walk', an old fashioned boozer with old fashioned clientele which I had visited occasionally in the past, was being refurbed, presumably to a gastro pub. It had been the sort of pub where I drank Newcastle Brown, the old fashioned clientele preferring lager to warm beer. One good thing about gastro pubs being that they generally offer warm beer.

On round St George's Circus and down to Blackfriars Bridge, eventually leaving bike 1 just short of Holborn Viaduct. Up onto the viaduct to inspect St Sepulchre without, an old foundation handsomely restored after the fire of London. They were getting ready for a carol concert in the evening, with the organist demonstrating what a large noise a relatively small organ could make. The church was also ecclesiastical home to the Royal Fusiliers with their memorial including a colour presented - or perhaps awarded in the proper word - by the king of the day to the 1st battalion in 1790 or so. A famous regiment, perhaps now best known for being that of the father of a member of Pink Floyd. Also one David Ben-Gurion.

Procured bike 2 and continued east to Aldgate, passing the gerkin on the way, surprisingly impressive close to in the cold afternoon light. Also treated the the impressive late afternoon sight of a large pale full moon rising over Romford. Managed to find my way back west and then south over Tower Bridge. I had forgotten how narrow it was. Then started a search for a bike stand, a search which did not end, as it happens, until I got back to Stamford Street. Down to the Bricklayer's Arms (according to my map that is. Did not actually get a glimpse of the place), then hung a right to Elephant & Castle, possibly the first time I have been there on a bicycle for more than forty years. Up past St. George's Cathedral, round the back of Waterloo Station, finally finding a bike stand with vacancy at the western end of Stamford Street. I expect I broke the half hour rule on bike 2 and will have had to pay for some usage for the first time.

On the other hand I did achieve my first circumnavigation of the Shard, thus being able to inspect it from the east, rather than the more usual west.

Quick fortification in the 'Archduke' - rather dear at £9 for a glass of wine, albeit a very decent glass of wine - after which I was ready for the chocolate lollipops, brought to the Southbank chocolate festival all the way from Croydon (http://www.paulwaynegregory.com/). None of this fake Belgian nonsense for them. The important point being that their fillings were flavoured with salt, this being, it seems, the latest thing among serious chocophiles. The three lollipops went down BH fast enough, whatever.

I contented myself with finishing off the Lincolnshire Poacher, taken with a drop of wholemeal spelt. Probably not from http://www.lincolnshirepoachercheese.com/, rather from a farmer at one of Epsom's farmers' markets, a farmer who almost certainly does not farm but who does sell rather good cheese. Next stop some of his sheep's cheese.

The gem being a fraternal meeting of the Lithuanian Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. With thanks to http://abc3miscellany.blogspot.com/.

Having got well and truly tangled up in the Soho one way system and tried to check-in at three or four stands before finding a vacant slot in Soho Square, headed south to the southernmost point of the Bullingdon Bike scheme, a place called Bowling Green Street, near the Oval. An interesting part of town with, I imagine, higher than average bike stand maintenance costs. Indeed, chalk marks at Bowling Green Street suggested that fully a third of the check-in stations were temporarily suspended.

Only managed one foul on the way, earning a severe honking from a small grey Mercedes saloon when turning right into Baylis Road at Waterloo Station. Not a clue what I had done wrong and the honker did not seem minded to stop and tell me.

Then having had trouble finding a Post Office on my last outing, I was not best pleased to come across one near the Oval tube station having only just checked in my bike. I suppose in time I will get to know what facilities are available where on the the system.

Back home to dreams about coupons. That is to say that minorly irritating feature of modern life whereby supermarkets post you large numbers of coupons for more or less unintelligible discount schemes. Presumably they think that they can make market share like that, but I think that if they all do it, which seems to be the case, the only winners are the people who put together and operate the discount schemes. I wonder if all the big supermarket chains buy in the necessary from the same outfit?

All of which resulted in a dream about being in a large and not very busy Sainsbury's clutching dozens of coupons, all of which FIL had carefully annotated with the serial numbers necessary to release our gift, discount or whatever. The pretty young check-out girl, not unhappy to spend a quiet half hour sorting all this stuff out, instead of passing heavy green cabbages and cold wet fish fingers across the scanner, gets to work sorting all the coupons into the right piles to be processed. After a short while along comes the captain, a rather older lady, who rather brusquely announces that customers who want to muck about with coupons should jolly well get along to the customer service line and stop blocking the check-outs. Sweeps all the coupons back into a heap and is all set to give them back, when she remembers that this week the proper drill is to process them at the check-out. So she gives the coupons back to the check-out with rather a bad grace and stomps off. Check out girl starts over, now a bit grumpy in that the captain will no doubt find some way to get back at her over the next couple of shifts.

Dream then changes gear and all I have left now is a confused image of trying to make a stew involving something of  lamb and liver of pig. Doesn't sound too hot at all.

Up bright and early to read about the PM's stirring defence of our financial services institutions against interference, if not taxation, from those horrid people in Brussels. All rather ironic given that these institutions are probably equally to blame with Blair & Brown for the mess we are in. One only hopes that Cameron knows what he is doing and that his heart is in the right place. Not sold out, that is, to his mates in the city.

A mention in dispatches for Olivetto, a restaurant in Guildford, also to be found at http://olivo.co.uk/restaurants. Perhaps the third time we have been there. A late lunch, the main event of which was a seafood risotto. Not quite sure why we went for it as our experience of the dish is rather mixed: I have had one very sour, as if someone had spilt vinegar in it. BH has had one unpleasantly salty. Often they are watery, oozing red oily water. But the basic idea is sound enough and is very reliable in its subcontinental guise, so I guess we thought it worth a go. And it turned out to be rather good. A plain risotto rice base covered with miscellaneous shellfish on the bone: mussels, clams, prawny things of various shapes and sizes. Followed up by what was described as their chef's interpretation of tiramisu, also rather good. Watery being a complaint which often afflicts this dish too. All washed down with an entirely satisfactory 2009/10 Falanghina del Sannio, plus a drop of the Vino Santo mentioned last week (November 30th). Smaller glass, same colour wine and same biscuits.

Home to a piece by Monbiot in the Guardian on a shiny new sort of nuclear power station which gobbles up all the energy in the fuel supplied, unlike the paltry 5% managed by the reactors we have now. Very little unpleasant waste and no pressure vessels which might explode. Something called integral fast reactors or IFRs and they could drive the world for many years to come, perhaps for as long is the sun is apt to be around. So how come Mr. Monbiot knows all about these things while HMG is carrying on with old-style reactors and Germany is abandoning the nuclear ship altogether? But good enough for the Chinese, the Indians and the Russians.

A short poke around with Mr. Google did not come up with anything very helpful. Lots of stuff out there about IFRs, but all very positive. All we get is that President Clinton cancelled the relevant US project back in 1994. Some talk of their being bad for proliferation and very bad for the established energy corporations who might take a bad knock if these things really did work. Has there been some pushing and shoving in the corridors of power?

Perhaps the Monbiot piece will result in a bit of movement, at least in the English corridors, at least to the extent of checking his story out.

Out for another outing last week. Set off from Vauxhall station where I was misled by the bike stand map and found myself nipping across several lanes of traffic and several lumps of pedestrian deterring masonry to reach the bike stand. Checked a bike out OK and set off across Vauxhall Bridge, managing to do a right turn onto the embankment on the further side without stopping. Onto Parliament Square, up Whitehall, round Trafalgar Square, keeping a beady eye out for a Post Office, the trick being to find a Post Office near a bike stand since I was not carrying a bicycle lock. I thought that there was one somewhere near Goodge Street tube station so head up Charing Cross Road, negociated some trickery around the large building site which used to be Tottenham Court Road tube station and so on up Tottenham Court Road where there was nary a Post Office in sight. Left into Euston Road then left into Great Portland Street. Penetrated Fitzrovia and decided to continue the search on foot. Quite near the British Telecom Tower which I was sure used to be called the Post Office Tower. Maybe there was a Post Office in the block out of which the tower sprang? Walked all the way around it without success. Peered down sundry side streets. Decided to press on to Trafalgar Square where I knew there was a Post Office. All night if that was what it took.

Checked out another bike and after some shenanighans in the one way system in that part of town, found myself heading south down Great Portland Street again, where, lo and behold, was a Post Office. But no bike stand. So carried on into Regent Street where a passing Post Office van caught my right shoulder with its near side wing mirror. Luckily it was on a light spring and caused no damage. Round Piccadilly Circus, down Haymarket and parked up somewhere near Cockspur Street. From where it took me quite a while to find the Post Office, which, when I eventually found it, seemed to be a good bit smaller than I remembered. It was also operating a queueing ticket system, rather like the cooked meat counter at Sainsbury's sometimes does. At which point a helpful Post Man intervened and explained that if all I wanted was airmail stamps there were help yourself dispensers complete with scales which would do the business for you. Which indeed they did, and my letter is now winging its way to Canada with a rather bland stamp on it saying airmail worldwide without any indication of price, which, as it happened was something over £1. Much better than queueing.

Back to Cockspur street for a third bike, with the intention of going across Blackfriars Bridge and looping back to one of the south of the river rail terminii. So down Northumberland Avenue and onto the Embankment OK, but instead of branching left up onto the northern exit of Blackfriars Bridge, found myself heading west down Fleet Street, which was not what I had intended at all. But it was getting dark and my legs were getting tired, so I decided to carry on to Waterloo at that point and dumped the bike somewhere near what used to be the Schiller Institute (which turns out to be rather an odd gang, some sort of odd-ball think tank rather than anything literary) and which before that was, I think, some kind of hospital. Slight glitch at this point in that the checkin flashes red rather than green when I shove the bike's front wheel into its receptacle and from which I cannot then extract it. Does the computer know that I have returned the bike? Am I going to be charged some defaulter's rate?

Slightly puzzled, head off into Waterlook station and so home, where the following morning a quick peek at the Bullingdon Bike web site tells me that all is well. And that I escaped paying any usage related charges by a slender 6 minutes on my first bike of the day. Perhaps in the interests of economy I should start carrying both a bicycle lock and a watch.

Back home, pleased to read today that the coalition is bringing a new broom to the bureaucracy ridden national health service inherited from Brown & Blair. They are going to scrap all those ridiculous targets and they going to have a whole lot of shiny new goals instead. Presumably the same civil servants who worked up all the targets will now be busily rebadging them as goals. Much cheaper than starting from scratch.

Happened to wander into the HMV shop at Guildford yesterday, a shop which seemed huge compared with its late lamented cousin in Epsom. Big enough that although there did not seem to be many people in it, they were doing enough business to keep 8 checkouts busy with the queue steady at about 20 people. Oddly, one of the checkout clerks was permitted, for some reason, not to wear the regulation, bright blue sweat shirt; perhaps she was what they call a captain at Sainbury's.

There was a very small classical sub-section in the very large music section, which I flicked through, thinking that perhaps I would find something that I could add to my collection of two CDs. Then very oddly, I came across a three CD set of Shostakovitch's preludes and fugues played by the same Melnikov whom I had heard at the Wigmore, on or around April 28th, aggressively priced at £13.99. A snip, and I join the queue. Our best guess was that the thing was an unwanted gift which having been bought in London had been returned to Guildford.

Back home to find them ideally suited to the new gear from Sevenoaks. A very satisfactory purchase.

Along the way noticed two or three Qashqai rugs in Dickens and Jones. So the third and last oddity was the fact that our Qashqai rug from no less a store than Liberty's of London was both significantly better and significantly cheaper than those on offer yesterday at Guildford.

PS: the CD's came from the respectable sounding label Harmonia Mundi (http://www.harmoniamundi.com). But their web site makes the mistake of printing in white on top of a photograph. Practically illegible, which is a pity as they look to put out some good stuff.

I have just been told about a rival to the burger bar at the bottom of Box Hill. Always get in a muddle about whether it is called Rykers or Bykers. But the rival is called the 'Heart Attack Grill' and appears to offer blood pressure tests along with its burgers. Which last have names like 'Triple Bypass'. Plus cigarettes without filters. All in all, it looks well suited to its Las Vegan locale. Can't think how I could possibly have missed the place when I was there. See http://www.heartattackgrill.com/. Plus it is a big enough deal to rate its own entry in Wikipedia.

Would the LibDems combine with Ma Harman to force through emergency legislation to make the concept illegal if they tried to bring it here? Always enough Parliamentary time for this sort of worthy prohibition; just think of the foxes.

PS: as far as I can see from the picture, the buns are not up too much. Possibly microwaved from frozen. But I don't suppose the intended punters care too much about that.

Yesterday I mentioned people who object to views of high speed trains rushing past the bottom of their gardens. Or perhaps rushing along a couple of miles away, just about in eyesight and earshot. Probably the same people who take a dim view of the pylons and cooling towers which bring them their cosy glow in the winter being visible at all, despite the fact that as structures go they are usually not bad looking. Along with motorway bridges. A lot better looking than a lot of the stuff knocked out by our more arty architects, never mind artists proper.

But the odd thing is that there is another sort of people, superficially similar in appearance with thornproofs and green wellies, but who can't bear to leave nature alone at all. They have to manage it, have procedures, protocols and records. So our in our case, we can't just leave Epsom Common alone; a haven of non-management in our badly over managed lives. We have to fiddle about with it. Chop things down. Pretend to be charcoal burners or graziers. Worry about obscure bats. Worry about the rights of people who want to tear around the woods getting muddy on bicycles.

Is the difference related to the fact that the former are trying to be country people whereas the latter are common or garden suburban people, probably economically inactive?

Reminded of all this the other morning when strolling around Horton Country Park - the site of much worthy occupational therapy on the National Health before the unions of the 1970's deemed this to be exploitation. Nice bright morning, enjoying the stroll and the sunshine, when the peace is broken by the chain saws of the South Horton Conservation Volunteers (sponsored by Husqvarna, see http://www.husqvarna.com/), a group which seems to have got the idea that conservation means chopping things up, perhaps a confusion with the process for making conserves - aka jam - out of soft fruit. One wonders whether the volunteers also belong to the W.I..

It then occurred to me that there seems to be a similar confusion with another c-word of similar length, to wit, contract. So if I contract, I get smaller, but if I contract with you, I get to do something for you, for money. So where is the connection? OED devotes nearly 5 columns to the matter, from which I learn that the word in all its various meanings comes from just the one root. So I am left with the idea that a contract, in the sense of an agreement, circumscribes, contains or limits my freedom of action. My freedom of action is contracted, in the sense of made smaller, to that extent. A bit thin; maybe I will be able to do better in the morning.

PS: and while I think of it, we saw a whole new sort of lycra loony yesterday afternoon. An old lady, in old lady coat and hat, cycling very slowly down Temple Road while conducting a conversation with her hand held mobile phone, Temple Road being sufficiently encumbered by residential parking to make such behaviour a bit of a nuisance. We could not decide whether to applaud her aplomb or to honk her for holding up the traffic. In the end we did neither. We were just held up.

From time to time I moan about the vast amount of public money poured into something called the Hindhead Tunnel.

I am now prompted to moan about the £30bn or so the DT says that we are to pour into an enhanced rail link between London and Birmingham, £30bn, of which £0.5bn is going into another tunnel, a couple of miles long, to avoid disturbing the tranquil views of some bunch of city-working weekend-villagers.

As a person of the left I am a great believer in the public provision of all sorts of things. But, as a country we have been living beyond our means for years. Government, in particular, has been spending a lot more money than they have been able to collect in tax, to the point when the people with money to lend to our government - aka the bankers - might start to think that we are a bad bet and do an Ireland on us. And for my money it is even more important that our government stays solvent than that is should go in for fancy public works. So why are we spending this huge amount of money - which I compute to be £1,000 each for everyone in work - on a rail link which will cut the journey time to Brum from 90 to 60 minutes or something. Is it really worth it? Are we allowed to see the sums? Would it not be better to knock a chunk off the national debt? To show the Germans that we mean business when we say that we are going to start practising Northern Europe thrift and endeavour?

Water under the bridge, but there is also that fancy public work called the Olympics. 20bn on a whole lot of big sheds which will be scratching around for occupiers after the big day. I compute again, and allowing £250,000 per affordable flat, I get the result that for the price of the Olympics - a good part of the wage bill for which has probably been remitted to Eastern Europe - we could have built 80,000 flats - which one might have thought would have made a useful dent in the London - if not the national - housing shortage and which would certainly have had a longer useful life than the aforesaid sheds.

My wheeze would be to turn the whole operation, on a permanent basis, over to the starving Greeks. They started the whole thing, they need the work, so let them carry the torch into the third millennium. A permanent site, dressed up with all the razzmatazz that Disney could bring to the operation: dancing girls, hot air balloons, baby sperm whale fritters, the works. And the Greeks, if they wanted, could subcontract the rebuilding of the sheds from time to time. So, for example, they could charge the Dubaise £1bn for the privilege of building the velocodrome. For an extra consideration, they would be allowed to fly their flag from the top of it. They, the Greeks that is, would get their national debt under control in no time: they could stop worrying about work or the lack of it and just sip ouzo under the trees in their town squares while their ladies got up the dinner.

I suppose the reason that this will never happen is that it would mean that the whole travelling circus of Olympian civil servants would crash to the ground. All those perks, not to say, bribes, would go up in smoke.

The volume of blogging here since inception, measured as the saved volume to Word, with allowance neither for the odd post which seems to go missing nor for the number of Kb cheating pictures. A rather erratic record, but one which shows steady underlying growth. The sort of thing that Osborne would give his eye teeth for.

Rather stodgy article in a recent NYRB about the dire state of the law in the US. A review, I think, by a judge of a book by a judge, which perhaps explains the stodge. The message, however, is rather dire, on three fronts. First, they put a very large number of people in jail in the US, a relatively large number of them for a relatively long time. Numbers which, it seems, have grown hugely over the last forty years or so. Second, while black people are only slightly more likely to use illegal drugs than white people, they are twice as likely to be in jail on that account. And third, contrariwise, black people have to put up with far more crime on their streets and in their neighbourhoods than white people. All very unhealthy.

It is alleged that some of this is due to the large proportion of law enforcement which is discretionary and which tends, in consequence, to fall more heavily from white cops onto black citizens. Some more is due to rather chaotic law making in states, beyond the control of the sensible feds. One example is cited of a state which wanted to send a juvenile to jail for life with life meaning life with no parole - for a non homicidal offence - although the citation does not say what the offence was. Another is the wheeze whereby state prosecutors threaten to charge a bad person with an offence carrying the death penalty to encourage that person to plead guilty to some otherwise non-provable lesser offence, but one which still carries a whopping jail sentence.

It is noted in passing that the standard of public debate (in the US) about the present prohibition of many recreational drugs is poor compared with the standard of debate about the prohibition of alcohol after the first world war.

All of which made an interesting contrast with another stodgy article about the difficulty US prosecutors are having banging up another category of bad person. The sort of bad person who knowingly sells on bad securities, the sort of thing which made the sub-prime crisis what it was. It seems that the standard of proof is high: one has to show both that the seller knew the goods stank and that they lied about them to the buyers. While the seller has the defence that the buyer ought to have known better, given the standard warnings which come with all such trades. The sort of thing which is printed in small on the bottom of the large posters advertising financial services companies at suburban railway stations in this country. The amounts of money involved are large; beyond the wildest dreams of a drug dealer of whatever colour.

But, lightening up, the issue closed with one of those bad tempered exchanges between author and reviewer which sometimes grace the correspondence page of this sort of magazine. Was Freud a druggie as well as a liar? Should we care?

À propos of reading a book about brains by one Antonio Damasio, I decided that I needed to read a book about cells. Not knowing anything about cells or about books about cells, Amazon not much good. So off to Foyles where they carry stocks of books about everything, everything that I have ever wanted books about anyway. As expected, after a fairly small number of minutes, I light upon a large paperback all about cells, a paperback which, having progressed to the 8th edition, looks to be a successful undergraduate text. Lots of pictures. Hopefully more or less accessible to someone with old and ordinary level GCEs in chemistry and physics. Off to the desk to find out how much the thing was and was a touch shocked. Perhaps it is just a long time since I have bought a book of this sort, but I must have looked either poor or dismayed or both as the assistant rapidly announced that I could  have 10% off as it had been on the shelf for a while. Done!

Back home, I find that the book 'Becker's World of the Cell' is indeed just the sort of thing that I am looking for. Plenty there to give me the general idea - including for example, that the physical shape, the geometry of large molecules is important. That molecules with chunks of matching shape might get to talk to each other. Impressed by the amount of stuff that there was to learn. Not a problem for me, a casual visitor as it were, but presumably if one was an undergraduate one needed to be able to recite chunks of the stuff if poked. Which would take more brain power than I can muster these days.

At this point I find that there is a companion web site, access to which is granted by the scratch off code at the front of the book. A web site which includes what looks like a facsimile of the book, which might be quite a handy adjunct, when, for example, the text is talking about a diagram which is not on the same page. It also includes various visualisations. I stumbled a bit over java add-ins - which seem to struggle a bit with Chrome sometimes - but then got onto a very nifty visualisation of how photosynthesis works. Moving pictures zooming down from the leaf to the molecule. Clever stuff (even without the sound effects, which are not supported by my PC. Probably just as well as I would probably have found them irritating), which must have taken a good bit of time and effort to put together and which made me feel much better about the price that I had paid for the book.

Also quite happy for Foyles to have the £5 or so more than Amazon that they charged. They earned it.

Also amused along the way to find that the corporate logo for Pearson Education is very like that for the Home Office. Presumably the branding people who sold the Home Office theirs made the reasonable assumption that there  was no overlap between the Home Office and Pearson Education: no-one who mattered was going to be annoyed by the fact that the branding people had been able to sell the same art work more than once.