Monday, February 28, 2011

 

To borage or not to borage

On 24th February I talked about a plant thought to be borage. Not being entirely satisfied with our identification, we decided to ask our neighbour, whose father had served in HMS Borage during the war (see article A7486978 in the BBC WWII memory archive) and whose mother believed that a sprig of borage was an essential ingredient of a Pimms, and so ought to know what the stuff looked like. She was unconvinced; she granted that the thing was probably a member of the borage family, the boraginaceae, but that was as far as she would go.

A trip to the library followed, where I found that Epsom library does not carry the sort of superior floras which contain the sort of proper diagrams of plants which enable one to confirm identifications. But it did carry various picture books and a larger Collins Flower Guide than our own with the result that we arrived at something called Green Alkanet - an immigrant cousin of our own borage and comfrey. Further poking around with Mr. G. revealed http://www.dgsgardening.btinternet.co.uk/alkanet.htm which talks about a basal rosette of leaves, which talk I thought conclusive. Yesterday I was able to inspect the plants at Raynes Park (see below) again and they seem to be coming on very like those in the books. And today our specimen has flowered, with the pretty blue flower looking very like those in the pictures - without going as far as counting stamens and that sort of thing. There is also an essay at http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2005/09/green-alkanet.html. Where I think the matter may rest.

Yesterday to London to make the better acquaintance of the original Kreutzer Sonata. Not to be confused with the violinist, the Janáček string quartet, the short story (last mentioned on 30th September) or any of the various films of the same name. Well played by Vadim Gluzman (from Israel) on the violin and Angela Yoffe (from Latvia) on the piano, nicely echoing my recording with Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Askenazy. Inter alia, I get to hear the point of the story: I would not care to have my wife play such a thing with another man. Something I suppose musical families have to get used to. Or the husbands of pretty barmaids. We also got a splendid French sonata, rather earlier, and a couple of pieces by Ravel, much later.

On the way to the concert, scored a first of another sort. Being a little early, thought to take a look inside All Souls Church in Langham Place. I couldn't get beyond the porch as a service was just ending, a service with a full congregation of all ages. Young, old and families. Something I do not recall seeing for real for many years. There was also a small band involving things like guitars, violins and drums. The tone was evangelical, with a chap in a suit standing four square behind a microphone on the altar; no discrete standing to one side as in a C of E church, allowing the cross pride of place. And for those in the aisles unlucky enough not to be able to actually see the great man, there were large repeater screens.

And at the concert I made the acquaintance of the Bela Bartok Centre for Musicianship (http://www.bbcm.co.uk/), the director of which had brought along a party of quite young children to hear their first concert. The first time that I have seen a significant number of children at the Wigmore Hall. Almost the first time that I have seen black people at a classical concert. It was good to see.

Needing to wind down afterwards, I thought to check out Toucan 1, Toucan 2 in Wimpole Street having changed hands. Toucan 1, just off Soho Square, was alive and well but shut on Sundays. Next stop the 'Coach and Horses' which seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Virtually empty and no regular warm beer. The best they could manage was Hobgoblin, so I passed on that and took in a quick pint of Bombardier at the 'Salisbury' in St Martin's Lane. Then onto the 'Hole in the Wall' at Waterloo, unusually full for a Sunday with cheerful Arsenal supporters. I gather they had cause to be less cheerful later in the day. And so home, via Raynes Park as mentioned above. As luck would have it, a through train was in just as I arrived, so I did not get a chance to inspect the plants properly. Just a glimpse through the window as we passed.

Just finished off last week's Lancashire Hot Pot for breakfast. That is to say the one made from the neck of one animal from not more than one country. Unlike the one noticed on 18th February about which one could not be so sure. Very it was too, although one had to be a bit careful about the shards of bone collected at the bottom of the saucepan.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

 

Unidoom

On 11 November I noticed an article in the LRB in which someone was lamenting the impending doom of university life in this country as we know it. This particular lament was geared to a change whereby income was attached to students rather than delivered as a block grant, a change the significance of which the article failed to convey to me. There were also words about how income was also attached to research.

So not to be left out, the NYRB has now published another lament by an academic with UK affiliations if not residence, very much focussed on the connection between income and research. The author reports on what sounds like a very unpleasant and seriously bureaucratic process of scoring the research turned out by academic institutions. A process which results in a lot of pressure on academics to turn in the sort of research which reliably attracts a good score. Which results in a lot of academics spending a lot of quality time managing the process rather than doing the teaching or research they signed up for. And all the bureaucrats have lots of fun keeping the academics on their toes with continual tinkering with the detail. All of which sounds rather depressing. No more wandering the sunny groves of academe, wondering about the dialect of cuneiform used in Tikrit by the monumental masons of the third millennium.

But what is almost as depressing is that, just as in the previous lament, the present lament, despite the no doubt exalted qualifications of the author, offers no recognition that I noticed that there does need to be a process for deciding how much money to give to universities and for deciding how to share it out. Beyond perhaps a nostalgia for the days when Oxford and Cambridge got quite enough dosh to live on from private endowments and did not have to answer to the government for anything much.

Along the way the author takes a swipe at the fact the the Treasury, in complete and blissful ignorance of university life and values, does much of the deciding about how much money is to be given to universities and has a lot to say about the process of allocation to universities. In which he follows in illustrious footsteps: Winston Churchill as a very young but very well connected MP in 1902 was already complaining about how ' ... control of expenditure ... lay in the hands of Treasury clerks ...' (page 40, volume 2, big biog.). Things have moved on a bit and such control now lies in the hands of assistant directors, directors, director generals & such like (most of whom, as it happens, went to Oxford or Cambridge) - but there is still, or at least there was until quite recently, a middle ranking person with the job title of 'Estimates Clerk'. An echo of the Bank of England where quite an important person goes under the job title of 'Chief Cashier'.

Friday, February 25, 2011

 

Chain saw gangs

The Epsom chapter has been on a fraternal visit to Vauxhall, where it seems their colleagues are about to waste a couple of mature mulberry trees near what used to be the Vauxhall pleasure gardens and is now a council estate. It seems that the juice from the squashed berries clashes with the latest municipal garden design directives sent down from Lambeth Town Hall, directives which mandate the use of granite sets for paving, sets which are badly stained by aforesaid mulberry juice. The idea that garden design directives might possibly fit in with or around mature trees in pre-existing gardens has not yet reached the Town Hall. The DT devoted a third of a page to the whole sorry business. It seems that some residents of Vauxhall really are disgusted; perhaps to the point of hugging the trees in question in order to keep the chain saw gang off.

Nearer home was interested yesterday morning by an example of memory loss. In one of my forgotten but self-important dreams, I must have been assigned to one of the Gateway teams which inspect government computer projects. A process known as peer review. So I woke up pondering about exactly these inspections were conducted. As I pondered I became a bit alarmed that I had so much trouble recalling the detail of a process which I must have led around 20 times over the last ten years. It is just now starting to come back to me, 24 hours later. Presumably in a couple of years or so, all I will remember is the name and the fact that I used to know about them.

Which reminds me of two snippets from people rather older than I. One, when we were turning over the pages of a a photograph album, remarked that such and such a couple used to be really good friends. But she couldn't even remember their names. The other, à propos of something or other, remarked that her husband, at that time dead for perhaps 20 twenty years, was no more than someone she used to know. Little more left than that, apart from her two children. These are memories which one might want to keep. When getting rid of books, it is rather different and my trick is to get rid of the memories first, by putting the books in a box in a roof. Once the memories have gone, one can dump the box without pain.

Feeling poetic, the image is of being a luxuriant island in a river. Covered with all sorts of exotic nature. Over time, the stream carries bits off. Some of which get snagged up nearby, for a bit. One can still see them. But then they get swept away and are lost. Perhaps just leaving an empty tinny speared on a twig overhead as a memento. Over time, the island gets smaller and smaller - until one day, the waters gently swirl in over the by-now barren lot. As it says in the good book, in a slightly different context, "as the waters cover the sea".

Perhaps an early visit to TB is indicated.

 

Copies reprised

Rather a lean issue of the TLS this week. But pleased to see that Mr Boon has risen so quickly to the bait thrown by his caustic reviewer the other week (see 10th February). Quite good natured about it all, all things considered. My own copy (ex West Hill Print Shop) of the book in question still sits on the study table (ex Vauxhall Station) awaiting my better attention.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

 

A rattling good rattle

Yesterday to the RFH to hear the Berlin Philharmoniker do Mahler 3 under the baton of Sir S. Rattle. First time I have heard the piece since I heard, while on a family holiday in Amsterdam, the Concertgebouw orchestra do it under Bernard Haitink some 45 years ago. Not sure if he is a sir but he is, inter alia, a KBE. Being from an older generation, probably not as full of himself as the rattle, who chooses to have a large photograph of three quarters of his face occupying most of the front cover of the A4 format programme. Price £3.50.

Splendid piece with a huge cast. 1 soprano, 1 contralto and 2 choirs. 2 harps, 1 gong, 2 large bells, 8 timpanis with 2 timpanists, half a dozen or so each of trombones and French horns. 1 tuba. Three pairs of cymbals on the go at one point. A dozen or so double basses. Enough other winds and strings to make up a balanced sound. The running time of nearly 2 unbroken hours was proportionate to the size of cast. Most sections got a decent outing at one point or another, a very democratic piece in that sense, but one did feel a bit sorry for the choirs. They got to do a lot of sitting for their relatively small outings.

We were sitting quite near the back which I had thought would be OK with such a large cast. But as it turned out, with my ears anyway, some of the very quiet passages were a bit lost. When, for example, you had twenty violins playing very softly in unison after some bravura bit of brass. With hindsight, I would have preferred to have been maybe twenty rows further forward - which would, presumably, have at least doubled the very reasonable - £15 each - price of our tickets. Plus, when one is down to returns, one can't be too fussy. Not on a gala occasion of this sort anyway. Sufficiently gala that there was a serious standing ovation at the end.

There were some truly wonderful passages - the sort of thing you might get in a 'highlights from' CD - and the thing does hold together. But it is very large: it did cross my mind to wonder whether the whole thing was not an elaborate leg-pull by Mahler. Or perhaps comparable to one of those paint charts you get from Dulux advertising their full range of colours and textures. The man was clearly a master of orchestration.

In the course of getting home, I wound up patrolling the secluded night smoker platform at Raynes Park for 10 minutes or so. First sighting was a decapitated telegraph pole. Chopped off at about 12 feet with a nice little metal hat to keep the rain off, but with no function that I could see. What was the thing doing there? At its base was a rat trap. And running south along the margins of the platform were hundreds of vigorous plants coming through. The first showing was a flat rosette of leaves; sessile is the botanical term I think, which made one think of foxgloves, which they were not. But they looked as if they would be shooting up some time fairly soon, so not really sessile at all. Gathered one, the one illustrated in the previous post, for identification later. No one on the train found it necessary to comment on my carrying a plant in the middle of the night.

Consultation with Collins' Pocket Guide and FIL this morning suggested first that the thing might be a member of either the mullein or the woundwort families. But after further delving thought that perhaps it was the more mundane sounding borage. Of which, as FIL pointed out, there is quite a lot growing in the inner verge of the house at the end of the road. Observant of him to notice, before the event, as it were. And on my morning constitutional I came across quite a few clumps. Not rare at all. But I shall have to keep an eye on Raynes Park so that I can get formal identification from the flowers.

 

Close ups

Continued setting up the new PC by installing the Nokia PC Suite from their web site. Easy and trouble free: the Nokia people must have gone to a lot of trouble to make it so. I was even able to select my model number from a large number of pictures - although that little exercise turned out to be unnecessary for installation purposes. Installation followed by a demonstration that elderly mobile phones are not very good at botanical close ups.

The significance of this particular one will be explained shortly.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

 

Miscellanea

Yesterday to Borough to try a new place for biryani, but as I was running a little late, caught the slow train from Waterloo East to London Bridge. I had forgotten that Platform A at Waterloo East is primarily intended for estuary people and so found myself in a crowded train with the space near the door taken up with two very young families complete with rather ornate baby buggies. Despite the fact that they were travelling well laden in the middle of the rush hour and more or less blocking the exit, most people were very indulgent. To the point where, at London Bridge, a large florid gentleman took control of the situation and directed the two streams of passengers around them, off the train, in good order. A rather flustered young mum looked most relieved.

The lamb biryani turned out to be rather different from what I had been expecting. A good portion of rice and meat, but none of that sloppy vegetable curry usually served with it. Instead, a little bowl of plain yoghurt. Which turned out to be quite handy as the rice was quite spicy. I preferred it to the curried version I am used to: perhaps I shall ask for it next time I am in an Indian and see if they will play ball.

It left me rather full, one effect of which was rather grand dreams. I had been put in charge of physical security of the country's gold reserve at rather short notice and was trying to get a scratch team together to build a simple asset management system from scratch. All very trying. And then the gold reserve morphed into the country's one and only nuclear bomb, a bomb which was kept disassembled and spread over an upstairs floor of a small warehouse, with some of the most innocuous and unlikely looking bits being highly radioactive. One stepped carefully over them. All very odd and no idea where much of it came from - which I usually do.

Still feeling fairly full in the morning, off on a brisk stroll around Horton Lane and West Ewell. Where I find that the council has a rather odd sense of road mending priorities. The relatively new, clean and decent cycle and person path running alongside Horton Lane had some hard-to-see defects, all carefully marked in orange with one of those spray cans the inspectors use. They have now been mended. Which all seems very odd considering the very much more serious holes in the road all over, for example, that part of Stamford Green which runs onto the common.

Lots of signs of spring. Alder and hawthorn buds starting to break. Ground alder, nettles, docks and thistles on the move in the verges. A first dandelion flower bug breaking. Lots of celandines in bud. Daisies and purple dead nettles in flower. Plus various other small flowers I can't name.

Drifted off the flowers and started wondering about detectives, or rather the process of detection. Or the process of coming to a decision.

I decided that some people are good at coming up with decision candidates. Intuitions, options or hunches if you will. These are the creative people. But the important bit, as recognised by the policemen and women who briefed Houellebecq (see, for example, February 3rd), is that one has to check one's hunches. One should always go through due process, review the evidence for and the evidence against, because hunches are quite often wrong. Ideally, the creative person should present his stuff to a committee of reactive people who can react to the stuff without being emotionally committed to it in the way of the creative person.

However hard one tries, when poking about for a solution, once one has had a hunch, one tends to close down. To close one mind to anything other than that which supports ones hunch. Very hard to maintain an open mind. So due process and the reactive types are a helpful antidote.

So the question is, does Murdoch have his own hunches or does he review those of his side-kicks? Livingstone, I think was a reviewer. He reviewed the hunches of his then side kick, The Lord Mendelson. At least I have read something to that effect, although all Mr G. can find is stuff about how they both served on Lambeth Council as loony lefties.

A complication is those cases where the process of making the decision feeds back into what the decision ought to be - which is not the case in a murder. Whatever the investigating team might get up to does not affect who done it. If might affect one's view of the degree of guilt of who done it, or what the charge should be, but that is not quite the same. But if one is, for example, flogging a new advertising campaign to the board, the state the board end up in when they come to make the decision feeds back into the assessment. The assessment and the answer are not independent.

Back home to slow cooked shin of beef. About a kilo of the stuff in four slabs of maybe 5 inches by 4 inches by one inch. Some connective tissue, little fat. Add a drop of port and a coarsely chopped onion. Covered pyrex dish. Enter the oven at slow at 2130 yesterday. Add a little water, some more onion and some mushroom at 0725 this morning. Consumed with mashed potato and crinkly cabbage. All excellent except the mashed potato had some odd black bits, not visible at the time of peeling.

PS: found time in the course of all this activity to file, for the first time, an online tax return. There were some infelicities and I do not yet know what the tax people will make of it, but, overall, the online experience was better than the paper and pencil one. And someone has put a lot of work into making it so.

 

Helmets

It seems that some of the demonstrators in the recent demonstrations in Egypt were concerned about flying brickbats and made themselves impromptu helmets. This chap thought he might as well double his hat with his lunch.

No idea where the picture came from. Or, indeed, whether it is what it appears to be.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

 

The mysteries of googling

Mr Boon of copying fame (15th February) makes the interesting observation that if you ask Mr. Google about London you get 733 million hits in 0.18 seconds. If you ask him about sex you get the rather grander total of 1,030 million in 0.09 seconds. So sex is somewhat more important than London. But if you ask him about copyright you get the stunning 10,960 million hits in 0.13 seconds. From which we deduce that even in our post-capitalist world property rights are still more important than the basic functions of humanity.

And then yesterday I was prompted to air my knowledge of matters searching - to little avail at the time, but the brain was clearly chugging away overnight and a thousand flowers bloomed in the morning. Couldn't get the subject out of my head for the half hour or so it took me to wake up. Blog dump clearly called for; which follows.

We suppose that the population being searched is web pages, with any one web site being made up of one or more web pages. We assume that a web page belongs to exactly one web site and that many web sites consist of exactly one web page. All those chaps trying to sell their skills at double glazing, bonsai care or whatever.

We suppose that the search term is an ordered list of words, in the simple case, just one.

The context of a search will sometimes be available to the search engine. That is to say information about the person, computer and place making the search. Information of this sort makes it possible for the search engine to produce a good result from a bad search term. But also constitutes an invasion of privacy. We ignore this possibility in what follows.

We suppose that it is not practical for the search engine to search all web pages each time it is asked to do a search. Web pages have to be indexed in some more or less complicated way as a background task (a task once known as crawling, undertaken by crawlers) and individual searches do most of their business by looking at those indexes. One of the things taken into account in constructing indexes is whether one web page is pointed at by some other, respectable web page. The more the merrier. None and you don't get indexed. Furthermore, an index will only be able to answer the kinds of questions which have been taken into account during its construction, this being another way of saying that the index contains a lot less information than the original web pages. One will always be able to devise questions that the indexes cannot, on their own, answer.

We start off with the simple and unhelpful search term 'London'. The search engine looks at its indexes and gets a list of all the web sites containing web pages containing the word 'London'. It might think about 'london', 'Londons', 'Londoners', 'Cockneys', 'Londinium' and 'Londres'. What about all those Londons in far flung places when the search obviously comes from Epsom? Next task is to present this list in descending order, when all kinds of considerations might come into play. Does a web page which says London lots score more? Does it score more if it says London in special places, places in the html which you may not see when you display the page on the screen - but which you can see in Chrome anyway by right click then view source. Places you can only populate by paying Mr. Google to give you the key. But does view source really give you the full sp.? And what about web pages that you have to pay to see?

Things get much more interesting when you move up to two element search terms, perhaps 'London baker'. Do you score the web page according to whether and how often the two words appear not more than so many words apart? According to how often the two words appear in the right order not more than so many words apart? According to how often the exact phrase appears? Does one take document structure into account? No good if the two words appear in two separate boxes?

What about noise words. Suppose you were looking for a house in a village with a baker and you search for 'village with baker'. Should Mr. Google strip the 'with' out of the search term before visiting the indexes? Should it do it both ways?

And that has, I think, more or less worked this topic out of the system and I can get on with the morning's tasks. Which this particular morning revolve around the sourcing and erection of a new indoor washing line. But it would be fun to go on a tour with lectures of a Google facility. I wonder if they do such things; the Pentagon does, or at least used to.

Questions for revision: 1) how much do the answers to searches vary over time? 2) how much of this variation is down to variation in the resource applied to the search? 3) how much of this variation is down to variation in the population of web pages? 4) is there seasonal variation? 5) if not, why not?

Part of last night's discussion was about whether one could work out what it happening by experiment. Putting in all kinds of searches and seeing what you got. Tweaking one's own web pages and then searching for them, after allowing a suitable interval during which the indexes could catch up. How long does this take? Can you pay Mr. Google for fast catch up? Yet another project for the university of the fourth age. My view last night was that it might take some time - and that remains my view this morning - although it might be good fun. Quicker to do a bit of searching about searching.

Monday, February 21, 2011

 

Test post

Unable to paste (CONTROL + V) from Notepad via IE8 when I could from Google Chrome.

Next stop the BT IT support service I have just signed up for. Good start in that I get through to a person after just one 'key one now'; from Newcastle as it happens. Try various things without success and then try installing the fresh-on-the-street IE9. Installation went OK but resulted in my not being able to post to blogger at all, never mind copy from Notepad. Clearly Microsoft and Google are on different planes and getting further apart by the release. Which is not BT's fault at all.

Reduced to a crash installation of Chrome. Installation went OK but I don't seem to be able to get favourites to work. But this post has posted so not all is lost!

The quick brown fox junped over the lazy dog.

And, eureka, copy from Notepad is alive and well again too.

Which is quite enough IT for one morning.

 

Paris 1919

Just finished an excellent and accessible account of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 by one Margaret MacMillan, last noticed on June 7th last year. I think I must have been moved by turning over the pages of the other book - 'Dangerous Games' - once again to get this one. Something called a trade edition from Random House which has been printed on unusually cheap paper and which would have benefited from maps which fold out for viewing while reading and a diagram of the timetable.

On the first point, perhaps de-luxe editions, of which this was not one, should come with a little packet of maps to be consumed in parallel with the book, rather than building inferior maps into the book. Alternatively, the publisher could put a selection of suitable maps up on a web-site. Or a CD. Not as convenient as paper but better than an atlas. An atlas is a necessarily blunt & often heavy instrument and the maps need to be tailored to the book. I should say that the maps in this book were satisfactory although they could have been bigger and better; the problem was getting at them.

On the second, MacMillan chose to present the large amount of material by losing part. So we have chapters on Bulgaria, Turkey, China and so on. But what we gain in comprehension about the problem of China we lose in grasp of the process as a whole: the problems were all being dealt with in parallel, many of what were thought of as small problems in the margins of what were thought of as large problems, but there was too much going on for this reader to be able to grasp the whole.

The book and the peace is enlivened by all kinds of tittle-tattle about the players. Their lives and loves. One hopes that most of it is true. It would be annoying to find later that the book was merely reproducing the ill-informed gossip of the day.

I share various other bits and pieces. With, of course, the advantage of nearly a century of hindsight.

Anglo Saxons sometimes make the French out to be the villains of the peace. Greedy and vindictive. But this book reminded me that the US had little to fear from troubles in Europe and the UK was protected by its navy. And we had already impounded the German navy, merchant marine and colonies, so we had got what we wanted. The French, following the devastation of northern France, were simply anxious to avoid a repetition of what had happened to them twice in living memory. What became thrice in living memory for some of them. On this book's account, the Italians were far worse than the French.

And we were careless enough to let the German admiral scuttle his fleet in Scapa Flow as a gesture of defiance when he learned of the terms of the peace. The US was probably pleased rather than otherwise that the UK did not get to get this useful addition to its navy. They were as keen to get to be in charge of the seven seas as they are to keep charge now.

Some of the smaller players, very hot on self detirmination when it came to getting their own independance, were sadly indifferent to the rights of others and generally greedy when it came to settling boundaries. The Poles and the Czechs being examples.

Also true that self detirmination was an insufficient criterion for the invention of new countries. Much of Central Europe was terribly mixed up and one also had to have regard to viability, transport and security. Railways and junctions seemed to be of great interest. The Clapham Junctions of Central Europe had to find good homes. Altogether too much for the peace makers of the day to cope with. We solved some of these problems after the second world war by going in for large scale ethnic cleansing. After the first world war that only happened between Turkey and Greece - after the Greeks overreached themselves.

There might have been some hope for Palestine, what is now Israel, if we had managed to make the whole of Syria independant, that is including what is now Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. A large and strong Syria might have been able to make room for minorities - to the benefit of all. A hope which was very much alive when Weizmann first met Feisal but which was snuffed out when we snuffed Feisal. Figuratively, of course.

The US was already starting to worry about Japanese power at this time, despite their being on our side and having provided useful naval support during the height of the German submarine campaign. Part of their reward was a whole bunch of islands in the Pacific, in some of which they built large naval facilities before the second war. Which then had to be reduced at great cost.

All in all a rather shabby peace. But better than those that had gone before, and probably much better than that which the Germans would have imposed had they won. They were fairly fierce after the 1870 war and looked set to be more so had they won the 1914 one. Furthermore, natural justice had a voice for the first time at such an event, even if it did not prevail. And although it gave the Germans debating points, it did not cause the second war. Apart from the Germans themselves, that was more to do with the various weaknesses & errors of those who won the first one.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

 

Pomolo

Now half way through our second ever Pomolo, the first having been noticed on November 29th last. A little drier than the first, perhaps been in the shop for a little too long, but quite eatable just the same. More fun that its small cousin the grapefruit as one can spend many happy minutes fiddling around with skin and pith. Bit like a pomegranate in that regard.

The shop was in North Cheam and carried an interesting range of groceries and vegetables. I also bought a mouli, the stump of which I finished for breakfast this morning. A sort of giant white radish, much milder than our small ones. Rather good. While in the shop, I also made the acquaintance of a carpet seller, originally from Lahore, who was also an enthusiastic cook. It seems that he had married an English girl who stuck to English cooking and his children followed suit. So although it is not the custom for men in Lahore to cook, at least not in a private capacity, he has now become, on his own account, an excellent cook. He advised me on the proper use of the jars of ready made sauce of which the shop carried a wide range. Sadly, the carpet selling business had gone bust in a rather messy way. He was very sour about the ways of banks. Much the same story as used to be common among the builders in TB: the banks encourage you to borrow to build your business, but when they lose money in some far flung land you have never heard of, they pull in all their loans in this one.

My problems are rather more homely. So over the past few days I have been pondering over the role of string, twine and rope in my life; a role which it seems to me is larger than average - although I do know one or two other people who are keen on string. Must of been something which happened when I was very little.

The result is that I keep significant supplies of both twine and rope hanging in the garage roof. Twine is sizal and comes in large balls from agricultural shops - for example Mole Avon at http://www.moleavon.co.uk/ - while the rope is blue nylon and comes in similar balls from similar shops. And not only do I keep supplies of new, I carefully hoard the old, tying all the scraps together and hanging the resultant hanks from the roof. Hanks made up in the special way I learned in the Boy Scouts - or perhaps when Outward Bound. Interest in string not quite as strong, but still present: this one more the preserve of the BH.

A related interest is knots. So I can still tie a reef knot behind my back and a bowline with one hand. I could probably still do a back splice although I have not tried that one for a while. No opportunity missed to demonstrate my skill with the Spanish windlass. And nothing but a full blown square lashing good enough to tie a couple of sticks together.

Which then associates to knives. One clearly needs a decent knife to mess around with rope. On which front I am sorry to have to report that I have lost track of my army style knife with a two and a half inch knife blade and an old-stype can opener on the front and a three inch spike on the back. A spike which we used to be told was for getting stones out of horses' hooves but is actually for getting knots undone which have been strained tight and hard. Laguioles might have excellent blades - the best I have ever come across - but they come with neither can opener nor spike.

 

We are celebrating

Celebrating on two counts.

First, attendance at the second Succoni concert; every bit as good as the first. With the new-to-us Suk meditations making a successful amuse-gueule.

Second, the discovery that what we had thought to be the bottom of the range HP printer which came with the new PC can scan. So scanning capability is restored and given that printing on the new printer seems to be quicker, if of lower quality, than that on the old printer, it is getting to seem unlikely that I will attempt to install said old printer on the new PC.

Friday, February 18, 2011

 

Up the pan!

I read in yesterday's 'Guardian' that the 'fine dining' end of gastro pubs are into a whole new form of flannel. The idea is that after you have discussed your requirement for wine and water with the chit from Rumania, you summon the salt pan with whom you can discuss your requirement for salt on and off the table, the salt pan being named for the legendary Mr Pan, the founder of modern salt cuisine, who lived in Harbin during the second half of the 19th century. (For some reason my shiny new PC is inhibiting a paste from Notepad so I am able to include Harbin neither in the native script nor in the authorised transliteration. Maybe a setting in IE 8: I have had problems of a similar nature in hte past when blogging from an Internet cafe. Maybe something to be sorted out with my missold support from BT). I dare say that I shall find on my next visit with Mr Sainsbury that he has devoted maybe half on one side of an aisle to various salts. Not, of course, including Epsom Salts which lives with the medicines rather than with the condiments.

Not to be outdone, there is a piece in today's DT about how the Chief Medical Officers of Health are foaming at the mouth about all this and are in urgent consultations with the chaps from Fountain Court to see if the 2006 tobacco regulations can easily be extended to salt or whether it is going to be necessarty for the PM to find some time in his busy calendar for a small bit of primary legislation.

Turning to home cuisine, a couple of very satisfactory and simple dishes over the last couple of days. First, a chick pea (from Turkey) stew flavoured with tomato, onion and tenderloin. Simmer chick peas for a couple of hours. Dice onions, tomatoes and pork. Add and simmer for a further couple of hours. Good gear. Second, a sort of Lancashire Hot Pot. This because our freezer contained a pack of stewing lamb from the Sainsbury's basics range, described as slow cook cuts ideal for casseroles. 1.081kg (are the scales used in their butchery department really that accurate?) for £5.39 (even their cash registers do not attempt the third decimal place). Describing the motley collection of lumps as cuts was rather gilding the lilly: off-cuts would be a better term. Off-cuts from one of the other strange offerings in the basics range. So we had fore arm cut off of a shoulder of lamb so that the shoulder is a nice tidy shape, a couple of slices of neck of lamb and quite a lot of crudely chopped lumps of breast of lamb. All rather off putting. However, pressed ahead and browned it all in some dripping. Added some coarsely chopped onion and a little water and simmered for a couple of hours. Added a couple of ounces of red lentils and some more water. Tastefully arrange some sliced peeled potato on top. Simmer for a further 45 minutes and serve with savoy cabbage. Very good it was too, despite the crude butchery and the quantity of linings.

And then to Orwell to finish off 'Coming Up for Air', an excellent book, sourced I think from a stall outside the museum inside Bourne Hall. Mystery how a chap who was born in India and went to Eton knows so much about the lives of children and shopkeepers living in small country towns before the first war and about suburbanites generally between the wars. Vert funny he is about them too. Shades of Sinclair's Babbitt of 2nd February 2009. Also reminds me of reading, many years ago, about how someone from the communist block in the late fifties was amazed how well Orwell captured the tone and (cabbagey) smell of large blocks of municipal flats in his country in the now more famous 1984. Of which, oddly enough, the present book is, in many little ways, a precursor.

But if I was Orwell I might be a little irritated by the biographical blurbs at the beginning of this 1989 Penguion edition. Orwell gets say 4.5 inches while one Dr. Peter Davison gets 1.5 inches. Orwell writes the book while Davison writes 2.5 pages of introduction. An introduction which is mainly focussed on the near 100% absence of semi-colons. Something Orwell apparently took a deep interest in; he was certainly interested in language if all the newspeak in 1984 is anything to go by.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

 

Postman Pat

Today was the day we chose to deliver 150 or so letters for a residents' association that the BH used to be involved in prior to FIL's arrival on the scene. These 150 addresses are scattered more or less at random across the 3,000 or so addresses in the area in question. So not just a question of shoving one through every door.

Step 1: policy. We decide that, all things considered, the best thing to do is get the print shop to copy & fold the letters and then for the two of us to push them through letter boxes according to the list (see step 2). Decide against sticking the things in envelopes and addressing them. Decide against posting them. Having done the job, I think BH was right to overrule my advice. Hand delivery quicker than enveloping, addressing, stamping and posting would have been.

Step 2: create list of names and addresses from a spreadsheet originally derived from the Electoral Register. Remembering that each postcode is supposed to be something that a postman can conveniently walk around, decide to sort by postcode, rather than trying to do something clever with the first address line which contains both street number and street and which would not sort terribly well. Minor catch in that maybe 20 of the addresses did not have postcodes and appeared in a group at the end of the list.

Step 2: first quarter I do by myself in the car. This is quite slow and involves a lot of walking backwards and forwards to the car.

Step 3: second quarter we do together in the car. I walk about while BH drives about and supervises. Much faster.

Step 4: third quarter BH does by foot. This is the dense quarter clustered around our house.

Step 5: fourth and last quarter I do on the bicycle with a DIY clip board made of a scrap of hard board hanging around my neck and holding the address list, the supply of letters and a biro. All held together with two of the same sort of bulldog clips as I use as bicycle clips - that is to say the pale triangular ones with the folding arms, rather than the dark cylindrical ones with fixed arms.

Step 5: home to a well earned cuppa.

By the end of this little job one has quite a good idea how to go about it - although the plan is that there will not be a repeat.

I now know, for example, of all kinds of nooks and crannies in the ward which I did not know of before. Strange dog-legs on streets. Funny little tracks and alleys round the back of things.

I learned of the wide variety of housing in the ward. From the fairly grand to the fairly scruffy. Where either or both of house and front garden might be grand or scruffy. No high rise and not many flats. No dogs.

I learned of the wide variety of letter boxes - including here both the letter boxes which are actually holes in the door and those which really are boxes stuck up somewhere near the front door. These last are much easier to get post into as many of the holes require trickery to get light weight letters through. I got better at this with practise. Perhaps I will have a pow-pow with our postman about what sort of letter boxes he goes for and amend our letter box accordingly.

I learned of the wide variety of schemes for numbering the houses in streets. Some of which did not seem to have much rhyme or reason at all. One could, perhaps, engage the branch of mathematics which tries to impose order in the form of streets and numbering on connected but otherwise arbitrary networks in the Euclidean plane. For those with a taste for science fiction, one could move onto other kinds of plane. Maybe the surface of a Calibi-Yau manifold (8th December)?

I learned of the wide variety of numbers on houses. Or not. And some people like their house to be addressed by name rather than by number. Right pain. How on earth is one supposed to know where 'Mon Repos' is in a road of a hundred houses? Especially when the house sign is in small letters which you have to peer over the fence to decipher. Shouldn't be allowed; except perhaps in those odd places which do not number in a sensible way.

PS: lots of people seem to be chipping in with pop-up advice about how I should be setting up my new PC. Including various HP pop-ups. Maybe they will calm down after a few days or I will learn how to turn them off. Maybe I will get PayPal to work again. But that is probably not a new PC issue.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

 

Up and running after a fashion

Bit the bullet yesterday and off to John Lewis at Kingston (upon Thames) to buy a new computer to talk to the Internet, to find that John Lewis are not really into desk top machines any more. Luckily, BH knew how to skip through the Bentall's centre to PC World where they were. Rapidly buttonholed by a pleasant young man who rapidly sold us an HP Pavilion Slimline - off the display shelf as it was the last one - 20 inch wide format screen and a cheap printer. Plus a three month service agreement to get me over any teething problems. Got it all home without getting wet and without dropping anything.

Managed to copy the folders I wanted off the old computer onto an external drive OK. Installed MS Office, up to the point of authentication, OK.

Then, when I started on the Internet, the fun started. Put the Total Broadband CD (from BT) into the Pavilion to be told that the user I was logged in as did not have administrator rights, what control panel was telling me notwithstanding. OK, perhaps the PC World people had locked that user down in some cunning way as it was on display. Create a new user. Same problem. Exercised my shiny new service agreement with PC World. Phone quickly answered by a young lady who did not take more than a few seconds to explain that this was not unusual with these discs and told me the workaround. Disc now whizzes into life and asks me whether I am installing from new or whether I am adding a computer to my installation. Which question does not seem to quite cover what I want to do, viz, replace one computer with another. Try add to be told that there is some compatability problem with this version of Windows and the install stops at 53%. Just stops and hangs. No helpful messages or anything. Try from scratch and it just stops at 53% without saying anything at all.

Clearly time to talk to the helpful people from Bangalore, who for once are not helpful at all. Oh no sir, that sort of thing is not our problem. You have to talk to the supplier of your computer. But your disc is five years old; are you sure it is not out of date? Well, you can buy a new disc from a BT shop or from their website. I can't do anything from here. Thanks a bundle. Hang up to go and visit their website where I cannot find any buy new disc options. Phone another support number where the chap really is helpful. Might even live in England. No, you do not need discs any more but if you sign up for a three months support agreement I will get you up and running in no time. Getting a bit frazzled by this point, so I go for it. To find that all I had to do is plug the new computer into the existing router and I am on the Internet. No need to install anything at all. OK, so I might have been a bit dim, but I think I was missold. The really helpful chap had been told enough that all he had to do was say plug the thing in and it will work, not sell me some support.

And in case you are wondering, the reason that I did not just plug it in anyway was that my BT instructions are very firm about not plugging your computer into the router until the installation software tells you to.

Move onto setting up Norton. Now my existing Norton account is a 3 user household thing with 2 users to go. So I thought I could just spend one of the two users remaining on the Pavilion. But what I wind up with is a free 9 day trial of some fancier product. My account page tells me that the older product is not available for download. Which is a pain as Norton are plugged into my bank somehow - although a quick peek at my accounts there does not tell me how - and I do not want to wind up paying twice. But I can't find the Norton support option which produced some really helpful help a few years ago. Just a whole lot of help pages which do not help in this instance. Still, I do have interim protection. Put Norton aside for another day.

For a bit of relaxation, move onto installing the cheap printer. Manage that without serious incident. Manage to activate MS Office online without having to do hardly anything. Much easier than the phone option I have used in the past.

For a bit more relaxation, install Dropbox, having carefully put an up to date copy of my Dropbox folder where I think Dopbox will look for it. Fail completely and it creates a new one which it then proceeds to synchronise. An operation which is successfull but takes most of Tuesday night.

Despite dire warnings from some blogger or other, allow Rapport to reinstall. It never caused me any bother and HSBC clearly think that it provides useful additional protection.

Chrome, Google Earth, Nokia, Olympus and etc & etc to come. Done quite enough for now.

Instead, a bit of destruction therapy. As I have mentioned before, I don't like leaving my hard discs lying around, so I extracted the disc from the old computer. That was easy enough, a lot easier than it was on the Viao, but I still couldn't actually get inside the thing. Instead, more or less sawed it in half with a hack saw then bent it double with a club hammer. Interestingly, the actual business part of the disc appeared to be two shiny metal discs, each perhaps 1.5mm thick and mounted perhaps 5mm apart on the same spindle. Not the single platter ceramic affair the Viao had at all. However, the important thing is that I don't suppose anyone at the waste transfer station is going to be so keen on investigating my affairs that they will try and read what is left - which might well be possible if you throw enough time, toys and trouble at it. Who knows.

I close with a nice new word that I found yesterday while recovering from all this: squailer. It seems that a squailer is a stick which has been weighted at one end with wire or some such and which is used as a missile against small animals and large birds. One goes squailing with it. Just the sort of way that gangs of teenage boys would spend their time on Epsom Common a hundred years ago. This courtesy of one G. Orwell - although I don't know how he knew because he went to Eton where I imagine such an activity would have been regarded as very common.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

 

More copying

On 10th February, under the Mubarak banner, I noticed a book about the joys of copying by a chap called Marcus Boon, rather snottily reviewed by a colleague from Cambridge.

Taking the matter a little further, I find that he has nailed his colours to the mast by making his book available as a free, 304 page pdf file from the web site of the Harvard University Press, presumably the same sort of thing as one would put on a kindle. So I march off down to the West Hill print shop with the pdf on a stick to find that they will run it off for £11.23 - same price for single and double sided. Go for single sided and I am soon clutching 2 inches of paper. The last 15 pages or so of the 304 pages are blank so that was a few pence down the drain.

Back home I discover that one can buy a pukka copy with hard covers from Amazon for £18.95 plus postage and packing, some other sorts of new copies at various prices from £9.22 and some used from £8.51. Bit of a puzzle why the Amazon site sells various different varieties of new at such widely different prices. Are the cheap ones paperbacks?

So I have spent about the same as I could have spent with Amazon. An upside is that when I have finished with the book, having opted for single sided, I have a splendid pile of paper to add to my scribbling heap, value which I would not have got from a book version. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see how easy it is to read a book in loose A4 format. Can one read such a thing in comfort, in bed?

I had not thought about the loose aspect when at the print shop, so they did not punch holes for me. So the thing to do was to drill a hole in the top left hand corner and tag the thing with a black Treasury tag (Treasury tags are colour coded for length). Clamp the block of paper between two bits of wood and go for the hole with an electric drill with a 3/16 inch bit. Clearly not intended for drilling paper as it took a bit of a push to get the bit through. Plus there was a rather unpleasant smell; the sort of burning flesh smell you get when you are having a big chunk of tooth drilled out. Whatever do they put into paper to make it do that?

All I have to do now is read the thing. A quick glance suggests that the author is very into Buddhist meditation groups which, on his own account, attract all kinds of odds and sods and which might account, in part anyway, for the snottiness of the colleague mentioned above. Real scholars don't go in for this sort of nonsense.

Moving onto scholars of a different sort, yesterday evening at the 'Shy Horse' we met a couple, the wife half of which had spent many years working at an Esher preparatory school (http://www.milbournelodge.co.uk/), the sort of place where they do common entrance, cold showers, games and Latin. This school used to be an independent with an owner headteacher, but on his retirement after some 50 years in the hot seat, the place was bought up by an educational corporation called Cognita (http://www.cognitaschools.co.uk/). I was amused to read on the latter's web site that while each of their many schools has a lot of autonomy, the head really is the head, the schools also benefit from all the support and common services which come from being part of a big group. Just the sort of argument the Old Labourites used to advance in favour of LEAs. But Blairites and Cameronites are clearly not impressed by this capitalist example. They firmly believe that head teachers should spend their days worrying about leaking roofs, pot holes in the bicycle sheds and the pay & conditions of their cleaners. Good for them to have a break from all that Latin.

I might add for connoisseurs of the shiny white plates used in most restaurants and pubs these days, that at the 'Shy Horse' they have moved onto plates which are completely unsymmetrical. To be more precise, a roughly right angled triangle with rounded corners and sides in proportion three, four and five. You get one of these if you have fish. I had meat and drew an oblong plate with sides in proportion one and three.

Monday, February 14, 2011

 

Freecycle

I recently learned about an outfit called Freecycle - a sort of Ebay without the money bit - to be found at http://www.freecycle.org/. The idea is that rather than bothering with Ebay or taking the thing in question to the waste transfer station to be landfilled, you just post the thing on this site, then someone comes and takes it away and provides it with a good home. So in my case, with thoughts moving to a staider form of bicycle than the Trek I have now, I decided that my No. 2 bicycle, a good ride, but intended for someone younger or fitter than me, was surplus to requirements. Post the thing on Freecycle and within say half a day I had maybe ten expressions of interest. Gave the first email in my telephone number and he had taken it away for his son within the hour. Just the result I wanted. I shall use these people next time I have something somebody might want to dispose of. The only bit of pack drill was that I thought it proper to email all the people who emailed me to say how things stood. But this was knocked on the head by taking the advertisement down.

After which I settled down to digest two titbits from the DT. The first concerns a place called Castle Drogo, a sort of fake castle in the Teign valley in Devon, built for a successful grocer around the time of the First World War. Bad timing as, if the costume dramas are to believed, it started to be hard to staff up these kinds of places shortly after. Bad building as well, because although the grocer hired the world famous Sir Edwin Lutyens to design the thing, it seems that Lutyens was not very good at roofing. Perhaps he was out at lunch that day and gave it to the boy to do. Whatever, the roof is now leaking badly and the National Trust is calling for funds to mend the thing. Which all goes to confirm the building viewpoint of TB where architects and building inspectors are held in very low esteem. All book learning, rules, regulations & trouble making and no experience of actually building anything. Apt to forget that the main point of a building is that it should keep the wind and the rain out.

The second was about starlings. I have occasionally, but not recently, seen spectacular throbbing clouds of starlings. Last time that I recall being around the tower of Gloucester Cathedral at dusk. Which really was spectacular; but over the last couple of years I have only seen the odd tree top full of starlings, no throbbing clouds at all. But it seems that in some parts of the country there still are said throbbing clouds but the local farmers want to blast then out of the sky. It seems that one throbbing cloud can get through an awful lot of grub. Worse than locusts. Maybe the DT will keep us posted on whether they get their way. Perhaps RSPB or Greenpeace should be asked for a view? Sir Trevor McDonald OBE? I think that he has views on things now that he has retired from reading other peoples' on the telly..

Sunday, February 13, 2011

 

Bad English

Had occasion yesterday to mention good and bad English. So right on cue, booting up today, I get a pop-up from BT about a critical update to the help part of their broadband system. Well, their broadband system is fine and their help desk people are helpful, but it seems unlikely that this update to my desktop help is critical. And if it were, they ought to know that their just saying so is not enough in this critical - not to say cynical - age. So I invited the pop-up to try again later.

After that, with the rain easing off, a quick trot around what is described as the all-weather path around Epsom Common. Definite signs of spring with plenty of catkins showing, celandines and dandelions sprouting. I had not realised that dandelions, at least the woodland margin version, were so fast off the blocks. There were also one or two plastics pinned to trees setting out the spring programme for the chain saw gang, together with some explanatory notes. Is there hope that they are starting to realise that not everyone is keen on what they do and that a bit of flannel is needed to calm us down?

Earlier in the week I had thought to buy some gammon from Master Butchers in Manor Green Road. No big deal, just about £10 for a 4lbs slice off the leg of a pig. BH simmered it up with some cider and other bits and bobs and very nice it was too. I helped the proceedings along with some cheese and onion sauce, which turned out well despite being made with corn flour. Feeling rather full, thoughts turned to the ham in the fridge. Which on closer inspection turned out to be five 1oz slices of honey roast British ham, sold by Sainsbury's under the 'Taste the Difference', the 'Mix & Match' and 'Any 2 for £4' banners. The slices were of a rectangular shape with rounded corners, not much like any pig I have ever seen but a good shape for putting into sliced bread sandwiches with marg.. On still closer inspection, we thought that each slice probably did come from just one leg; the stuff was not reconstituted chunks. Perhaps that is the 'Basic' banner. So the bottom line is that we have 5oz of not very good but convenience ham for £2 as opposed to 4lbs of very good ham for £10. From which we deduce that one pays quite a premium for convenience. A factor of 2 or thereabouts?

Talking of Sainsbury's, I was commissioned to buy some yoghurt the other day. Get myself up to Kiln Lane without a problem. March down the length of the shop to find that yoghurt occupies one side of an entire aisle. There must have been hundreds of different lines. I eyed all this stuff with dismay, alongside a lady of similar age. We agreed that whichever one I picked was probably going to be wrong, so there was not much point in trying too hard. As it happened we were wrong and I was right. But it all goes to show that we can't be that badly off if we can afford to offer so much choice. I suppose there was slightly more point about the aisle which offered the yoghurt than there was in the aisle nearby which offered hundreds of different lines of bottled water. What about the planet? Why are Greenpeace not on the case, slashing the tyres of the water delivery lorries? Or better still having pretty young ladies lying down in front of them?

Saturday, February 12, 2011

 

Its that bread again

Conferred with two serious amateur cooks about the trials and tribulations of bread making last night, both of whom had gone through the bread making fad some time in the past and who were surprised that it has taken me so long to get around to it. I explained that the bread I was getting was quite eatable but did not taste of anything much and not much like baker bread. We agreed that making plain white bread was difficult and this was probably the reason that in-house recipe books and in-store bakeries are full of flavoured bread. The flavour obscuring the underlying truth that the basic bread is not very good. Both thought it unlikely that the flour was the problem. One thought that the oven might be the problem, possibly an inaccurate temperature gauge, with bread being sensitive to cooking temperature. Also that the finish of white bloomers was achieved by brushing some milk onto the loaves before putting them into the oven. And finally that the solution was to be found with one http://www.danlepard.com/ - this being the site of the bread correspondent for the 'Guardian'. The other thought that adding some vitamin C might help. And that swapping cooking oil for lard was unlikely to help.

Today went for bread 9. No change apart from increasing the amount of flour slightly and omitting the salt. Thought about using cooking oil but didn't. Thought about putting our fine jam thermometer from Zeal's of Wimpole Street in the oven to check the temperature but found that it only went up to around 200C do decided not to risk it. Took a peek at the leopard but have not got through to the bread bit yet so help from that front yet to come. Results at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls as usual.

We then moved onto the question of educating our young people in the uses of the English language. It appears that a correspondent of the 'Independent' was disgusted that his daughter was invited by her English teacher to write an essay on the use made of English in 'East Enders' - the popular television show. My argument was that one could indeed write an essay of this sort, although one might have to watch a fair amount of the stuff first and it would help to have a script. One could drone on about the impoverished vocabulary and the simple sentence structure. About the use of regional accents to signal personal qualities like trustworthiness or friendlessness. About the use of slang and expletives. Was it really necessary? About how the portrayal of popular speech in east London was rather inaccurate. Certainly out of date. Plastic cockneys. The opposing argument was that young people should be exposed to good English not to bad English. To expose them to the classics. To which I reply, a point, but it all depends on context. Maybe 'East Enders' is a place to start. Or maybe the young people will think the teacher is a twat for trying to be trendy. Maybe more properly an undergraduate rather than a school thing, with the greater maturity being brought to bear by the undergraduates making the essays fly. Who knows?

Back at the TB, a discussion of the proper arrangements for young people who need serious care. One point being that the bottom can drop out of support arrangements when a child reaches 16. Another being that work of this sort can be tremendously rewarding - provided you are the sort of person with the special qualities needed for it. Another hypothesis, it being by now quite late, was that a good proportion of the children with problems were the children of the unfortunate young women who were banged up in the mental hospitals of Epsom (and other similar places), having demonstrated their moral turpitude by getting themselves pregnant.

Wound up proceedings by the first Bolivar No. 1 for quite a while; a Christmas present which I thought the time had come for. A good smoke. I was lucky in that it was not one of those Bolivars with lumps of stalk blocking the air flow so it drew properly and one could savour the flavour in comfort.

Friday, February 11, 2011

 

Brainy people

It is often alleged that people who are superior in the creative department are apt to be inferior in the mental health department. An allegation I go along with on the basis of gossip. Think of all those people who thought you needed to be a drunk in order to be a modern American writer.

Moving beyond the gossip, prompted by the TLS to read a readable book called 'Gifted Lives' by one Joan Freeman who appears to be something of an expert in these matters. World expert in fact. An expert who has put together all kinds of reports and statistics about the fate of the gifted: not that this book is really in that category. More a collection of cautionary tales. Part of the attraction being that I used to be a moderately gifted person myself, although second division person to the premier division people which are the subject of this book - that is to say somewhere in the top 0.2% as measured by IQ. No idea what mine might have been, but it was not that. Don't think I went to school with any either. But there are connections nonetheless.

The source for the book is a sample of some 200 children which Freeman has followed since 1975, all with fancy IQ's and many with serious musical talent. The substance of the book is 20 vignettes drawn from the 200. I have not found any words about how representative or not the 20 might be of the 200. Nevertheless, I share some factlets, in no particular order.

Of the 20, a good proportion fall by the wayside. Some fall into trouble, some have ordinary - possibly happy - lives as adults- and just some are extraordinary as adults. While the Bell Curve pair - Herrnstein & Murray - might well argue that IQ is positively correlated with outcome, a very high IQ is clearly not a sufficient condition for a very high outcome.

There is an element of hot housing in the better schools. Gifted children are treated like race horses or boxers and, with great care and industry, brought to the right pitch for the day of the examinations. But the gifted children going onwards and upwards afterwards is another matter. They may just have peaked early. One is reminded of the habit that plants bought at the end of fancy garden shows have a habit of snuffing it a few weeks later. Whence, presumably, the phrase 'hot housing'.

There is a problem with labelling. If one says the gifted word to a child or a parent, all kinds of expectations my be set up. Expectations which can result in all kinds of damaging behaviour. On the other hand, pretending that a gifted child is normal doesn't work either.

There is a problem with accelerating, moving children up through classes faster than their years, once thought to be a cheap way to cater for gifted children. Something which happened to me in a small way. The catch being that such acceleration is apt to mess up the child's social life and development.

There is a myth, mentioned above, about gifted people being mentally defective. The Freeman story is that gifted people are, if any thing, in better mental shape (on average) than normals. But their gifts result in all kinds of pressures and problems arising externally. So maybe not mentally defective but there is a risk that they will be made so.

My only comment on the book would be that, as directed as much at the US and Canadian markets as the UK market, the text includes quite a number of irritating explanatory chunks for the benefit of transatlantic readers; chunks which irritated this UK reader and which would have been better as footnotes at the bottom of the page. For example, an explanation of what goes on in the city. Something for the next edition?

It would be interesting to read about people who are similarly and precociously gifted for football. They must have many of the same issues. But I bet you don't get to read too much about it at http://www.premierleague.com.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

 

Mubaraks (2)

A further thought on this front. Maybe he, like others before, really believes that he needs to stay at his post lest his country fall apart or worse. His fellow country men and women are not fit to look after their own affairs; take him away and all kinds of dross will come out of the shadows to fill the vacuum. Much better that I hang on a little longer, despite my failing health and the state of my garden. The fact that my family and I have salted away a good bit of my country's dosh is beside the point. Or at least, is not the main point. And the cunning thing is, the chap might have a point. He has so managed things that he really is indispensable.

Lest we be too smug, we Brits. used to have the same thoughts as regards India. No way that they could look after their own affairs. Far too complicated. Far too backward. Need a few whites on deck to keep the ship of state on a steady course. And as for Ireland, a complete basket case. No hope at all. At least that was what we thought in 1922 or so - and look how well they have managed since then.

Back at the TLS, intrigued by a review of a book about copying. The book being by Marcus Boon, Associate Professor in the English Literature Department at York University, Toronto (http://www.marcusboon.com/), and the review being by Simon Jarvis, Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University, Cambridge. In one of its politer comments, the review describes the book as being vanishingly trivial. It clearly got up this reviewer's nose big time.

Now I have no idea what the book is about, beyond it 1) running on about the large amount of copying that goes on and 2) claiming that copying is generally a good thing. Plagiarism is OK. And I have no idea if the book is any good but I would have thought that there is plenty of material out there.

Life is only possible because certain specialised chemicals can not only build copies of other chemicals needed to sustain growth and life but they can also pull off the trick of building copies of themselves.

Much of the interest of computers lies in their ability to copy and move around huge amounts of information without making any mistakes in the process. I don't need to bother to design the moon shuttle, I just pull the design off the NASA shelf and feed it into my factory.

While if I make a copy of the Picasso painting sold for £25 million or so the other day, a copy which cannot be distinguished from the original without the aid of a PET scan, I get banged up for fraud or worse. My picture, if I own up to copying it, might fetch £2,500 on a good day. What is all this about? I read once that the ancient Chinese were much more relaxed about copying. A good copy of a good vase was worth pretty much the same as the original. And, according to the DT, they remain pretty relaxed about copying, being rather good at eliciting the necessary information from western technology companies.

And then suppose I write an essay on Aristotle for a seminar at the University of the Fourth Age. No-one expects me to come up with anything original. All I am doing is making a patch work quilt of other peoples' work. Or building on the shoulders of giants, a practise made respectable by no lesser a mortal than Sir Isaac Newton. I suppose the idea is that I am supposed to do a bit of re-mixing. Not good enough just to quote greats chunks from said giants. And certainly not good enough not to acknowledge the quotes in a weighty bibliography at the end of the essay. But the point is, no progress without copying. Progress is a cumulative process. The world is far too complicated for it to be anything else.

I am sure that Mayor Boris could spin a decent article out of this lot - he seems to manage a fair output on top of his mayoral duties - or even a short book. Mr. Boon managed 285 pages, presumably including notes, maps, bibliography & etc & so forth. So that's the target.

PS: getting very nervous about the PC. All kinds of things have gone missing. And the only way to fire up Word seems to be to open a pre-existing document and click on new document... Not good that Windows can lose all kinds of stuff without producing a report for me. What kind of integrity control does it have? Or not have.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

 

Dropbox drama

The Evesham PC used here for Internet purposes took three goes to get going Monday and during the third there was much unpleasant looking CHKDSK activity. Arrived in Windows XP to find that the Dropbox folder had vanished. Maybe other stuff had vanished but the Dropbox client wanted to know what was going on so I knew about that. Maybe the fact that Dropbox must be plugged into some Explorer interface makes things a bit more fragile than they might otherwise be.

Next stop was a Dropbox faults forum. Post the problem and get an answer within half a day, quite reasonable given the time lag between here and the US, from where I assume that this product is run. No magic wand but I do get a road map. Check the disc out. Which works the second time around. Relink the PC. Which, after around 16 hours or so, results in the 4Gb or so of missing folder being reconstituted. So I have learned that the offsite backup side of this product really does work and that maybe we need a new PC. Off to John Lewis to see what they can do for us. Maybe next week.

In the margins, off to Wisley to look at the spring bulbs - snowdrops and crocuses as it turned out. Spent a bit of time in the pinetum where they have some very fine pines, a lot of them more than 100 years old. Surprised once again, coming out of a large and full car park, how few people there seem to be in the gardens itself. A bit of space and a few shops can soak up an awful lot of people. A good proportion of whom appeared to be more senior than ourselves; mid week is clearly quality time for seniors time. I think I prefer things a bit more mixed.

Attempted to have lunch in the peaceful, half empty restaurant to be told that there would be a wait of 20 minutes before they would be able to take a drinks order. So we decided to use the more crowded and democratic cafe where we were sitting down with our trays in about 15 minutes. With, in my case, quite a decent portion of aubergine and lentil curry with white rice. Not great, but entirely OK for the money. Not really very keen on aubergines, curried or otherwise. We then got to wondering about the staffing arrangements. Yesterday's sun had clearly drawn out hordes of seniors. But how much can they flex the catering arrangements? It is not like Chessington World of Adventures which is next to a sea of houses containing people who can work there. Who can perhaps be summoned in the middle of the morning to do an extra shift when the sun pops out. Wisley is out in the sticks and such houses as there are may not contain the sort of people who want to bang out aubergines and lentils to the likes of me. Which is perhaps why the catering was struggling. I imagine the manager put most of his (or her) resources into the cafe; that is the way to get through the numbers. One person in the cafe is going to get through more people than one person in the restaurant, enough more to make up for the smaller spend per person in the cafe.

Comparisons with Chessington not out of place. Wisley runs to several large car parks, several large shops and a variety of catering facilities. They have a butterfly experience in a large new glass house. My father, a member of the RHS in far more stuffy days might not have been impressed to see what has become of the place. But the large new glass house did contain a fair bit of interest, and the bit without butterflies was neither hot nor crowded. Lots of interesting plants. In particular, lots of interesting cacti and succulents. Made a change from pine trees.

Back home to pork soup. The usual drill is pork, pearl barley, white cabbage and mushroom. But on this occasion I had a peeled potato left over from yesterday to use up. So I grated it and added it at the beginning. Which had an interesting effect on the scum one gets off of the boiling pork. Wonderful creamy stuff, frothing up rather in the way that milk does. There must have been some tricky interaction between the starch in the potato and whatever it is in the pork which scums. All died down after a while and the resultant soup was tip-top. Did maybe three pints between us for tea and I shall now move onto the balance for breakfast.

And by the time that I had tried the 8th bread, which was not bad at all, I was left feeling rather full. To the point of dozing in front of ITV3.

Monday, February 07, 2011

 

Mubaraks

Been pondering about why it is that 80 year old presidents find it so hard to move on. The chap in Egypt is said to have salted away lots of dosh somewhere, so why doesn't he do a runner to Dubai and live out his days in one of those palaces built on small sand banks? One might have thought that at his age and 30 years in the hot seat he might like a break, to turn his mind to higher things and prepare for the great leap forward to come. In the middle ages, the more sensible kings used to retire to monasteries, leaving the children, wives and barons to fight it out among themselves.

I suppose that, apart from finding it hard to let go, there is the problem of letting go without getting hurt in person or pocket in the process. And of taking care of all one's clients and dependants. The new crowd might amnesty you, and possibly your wife and children if they have not been too greedy, but are they going to amnesty all your secret police and thugs - to whom you have a duty of care?

On a lower plane, yesterday to London Town again for a spot more culture. Start out with a couple of Beethoven piano sonatas at the Wigmore, played by a couple of youngish French chaps. Very good they were too. House full and enthusiastic. One encore.

From there, moved onto the Toucan at Wimpole Street, formerly famed for its huge collection of Irish whisky to find that it is the Toucan no more and has been taken over by some Italians. Not very much Irish whisky but the warm guinness was OK and they did some cheap and decent lunch time snacks involving, inter alia, a fair amount of mozzarella.

After which, after having passed the place closed many times, found St Peter's Church open - also known as the Institute for Contemporary Christianity (http://www.licc.org.uk/). Get in to find that, office intrusions notwithstanding, the place is a handsome baroque church which turns out to have been built by the same chap who built St Mary le Strand (see December 8th). There was also some interesting stained glass, designed by Burne Jones and executed by Morris & Co.. Never seen anything like it before. The guide explained that Morris & Co. did not approve of putting reproduction stained glass into old churches and only did this one as a special favour to the then vicar. Or perhaps rector. And I think that they had a point: the stained glass was interesting but did not suit the building particularly well.

Next stop was the Sotheby's sale room in New Bond Street to take a quick peek at the stuff in their impressionist and modern art sale this evening. Or to be less economical with the truth, we did not go down New Bond Street with that in mind, rather I was looking for Davidoff's. Failing that we had to make do with Sotheby's. They did, as it turned out, have some very fine pictures on show and the place while busy was not crowded in the way of one of those art exhibitions put on by the Royal Academy or the National Gallery. Bought souvenir programme which came with a very fancy carrier bag to show off on the way home and a mini-programme inside the main-programme which one might pass onto the BH. As with the Canaletto (see January 15th), surprised at how feeble the illustrations looked compared to the real thing, still fresh in the mind's eye.

Interesting to see the sort of people who go to such things. Lots of suits talking into their mobiles: were they buyers for oligarchs? Some arty people there for the pictures. Some people who looked as if they might be rich. Some tourists. One chap who looked as if he might be a footballer. Sotheby's people cruising around looking for fat cheque books to stroke. We could have spun out the people watching aspect of the visit in the tea room which looked to have recently been installed in the entrance corridor but we were a bit tired by this point so we didn't. And we didn't have the £20m or so to hand needed to buy a middle ranking Picasso - a sum which would buy one side of the road in which we live - so didn't leave a bid at the desk.

PS: I find this morning that the Davidoff's web site is blocked. Presumably it counts as advertising tobacco in some forbidden way.

 

Sacconi quartet

The people at Dorking have gone for a younger quartet this year so we got to hear the Sacconi Quartet (http://www.sacconi.com/home) on Saturday, the first of their series of three. And very good they were too, bringing a bit of youth and zap to the proceedings. But not so youthful that the viola player didn't wait to start a second movement until a presumably older gent. in the back row had stopped mumbling. Programme went small, medium, big rather than the more usual medium, small, big. So we started with Wolf's Italian Serendade (never heard before), then Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 (never heard before) and finished with the reasonably familiar (but not too old to hear something new each time) Beethoven's Op. 59 No. 1. A musical feast of climbing. Wolf started a bit jerky - at least it seemed so to me - but settled down to something rather good. Smetana good and Beethoven the business. Although the joined up, last two movements seemed to sag a little: perhaps I was getting tired. Or perhaps the glass of cheap wine (sold in small bottles with uninteresting labels; not as posh as what you used to get in BA club class) was a mistake.

Yesterday, a swing through a part of the Sussex countryside we do not know so well, not even to the point of knowing whether it was east or west. Never mind hawk from hacksaw. Vaguely east from that nest of mixed holies at East Grinstead, through Forest Row and Groombridge, ending up for our penultimate stop at the Beacon in Tea Garden Lane (http://www.the-beacon.co.uk/). Interesting place with a grand site and grand beer - Landlord again plus some more local stuff which I was not able to sample on this first occasion. I imagine they do good food. Villages on the way were an odd combination of twee, old and shabby. Quite a lot of pubs which had expanded into the gastro/hotel business. Quite a lot of large leylandii. Perhaps there is a top-notch breeder in the vicinity. Generally, a good mix of mature trees, suggesting that there is money in the vicinity too.

Home to a spot of Rotman's group theory. Odd how after all these years, turning the pages of Penrose on the secrets of the universe and Yau on the shapes of the universe has stirred the mathematical juices again. Humbling to realise how little of what there is I learned at university.

This morning, the first swing out on the bike for a while. Half hour run round Horton Lane. Cold wind but no ill effects so far. We will see what the story is at the end of the day.



Sunday, February 06, 2011

 

The longish march

On Friday, rather than doing one of my regular circuits in the immediate area, I decided it was time for a change and decided to walk from Waterloo to Tooting Broadway, which turned out to take something over two hours.

First stretch, Waterloo to Stockwell via the Oval. A not particularly salubrious area where I learn that Job Centres do not have toilets for their customers. But, in my case, being decently spoken opened the door of the toilet for the disabled. Playing the old boys' card was helpful too. Too bad if you are one of the the sturdy beggars who populate these places: but it is probably also true that, collectively, the sturdy beggars who are so keen on being shown 'nuff respect man' are not very good at respecting the sanitary property of others.

As far as I could see the shrine to Jean Charles de Menezes has finally vanished from outside Stockwell Tube Station. Not that this sorry affair was ever brought to a very satisfactory conclusion, not at least to my mind.

Second stretch, the more familiar Stockwell to Clapham Common. I was reminded of what a smart suburb this must have once been with lots of grand houses. Pepys died in one of them, at that time a house in the country. There was also a grand building which had once housed a branch of the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society, from the glory days when the cooperative movement held its head high. There also used to be a very fine Courage pub a few yards north west of Clapham Common tube station. All red plush, polished woodwork and saloon bar. I think it is now an O'Neill's and not the same at all.

Third stretch, from Clapham Common to Tooting Broadway. Balham market was down to one stall but perhaps that is a day of the week thing. Maybe it still functions on Saturdays. Tooting market was alive and kicking though. Paid a visit to a couple of charity shops to check on the standard of their books. Both quite good and I emerged with a rather good AZ road atlas of Great Britain and a slightly soiled 'Hamlet' from the Cambridge School Shakespeare series. First thought was that it would be a good teaching aid, although it had very little to say about the poetry of the thing. The focus was on content rather than on rhyme or rhythm. Do school children still get taught about meters? Second thought was that it might be a constraint for a good teacher. The book gives what might well be a perfectly decent appreciation of the play. But at the same time it forces you down its road; it might discourage one from straying off its beaten path. Rather in the way that seeing the film of the book before reading the book can force you down the film's way of seeing things. Makes it much harder to make one's own way. The Arden editions are both more informative and more neutral - but certainly less accessible. Although not as inaccessible as the Cambridge editions for grown ups - edited for the syndics of the Cambridge University Press by the late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson. As it happens, I have the 'Hamlet' in this edition; the same sort of thing as Arden but printed very small and with the notes consigned to the end, rather than printed at the bottom of the page. First appeared in 1934. Don't like it at all. It also occurs to me that I probably have more copies of 'Hamlet' - three - than I have seen productions - discounting the Oval effort noticed on 26th November last, the last probably being a Sir. P. Hall effort at the theatre at Leatherhead. A theatre which now hardly functions at all. The world has moved on past it.

But the prize of the day was the fine Slazenger umbrella I found on the train home; much better quality than the one I was carrying. A nicely made thing. So I proudly carried two umbrellas the rest of the way home, only to find in the morning that one of the plastic fittings at the apex of the brolly, the things which attach the ribs to the apex, had broken in half. The umbrella still worked and the previous owner may not have noticed the defect, but it was only a matter of time before the loose rib end would break through the fabric covering. Could not see any way to mend the thing, so, sadly, consigned to our green wheelie bin.

Friday, February 04, 2011

 

Trials and torments

Now had two further attempts to get the scanner to work. First attempt, simply rerun the large file downloaded from HP. Runs to the point where it wants to do a restart, but then silence after the restart. Printer uninstalled so neither printing nor scanning. Second attempt, go for the second of the two installation files offered, this second one ten times as big as the first at around 350Mb. Maybe this includes the bits of the product which does scanning. Runs to the point where it invites you to turn the printer on and plug it in. Runs to the point where it wants to do a restart. Then the install pops up and resumes. There is hope! After a while it announces that all is well. The only bit that I skip is product registration which got into a muddle with the Yahoo browser which I do not ordinarily use.

Inspect control panel and the printer has sprung back into life there. Try a print from Word and that springs into life too. Try a scan from HP Gallery and it springs into life to the extent that HP Gallery can now see the scanner. But when I attempt to fire it up I get a whole new error; rather larger than the one I was getting before. Try to scan by hand by pressing the scan button and get the same error. Maybe the scanner really has gone wrong?

Total expenditure of my valuable time now of the order of 6 hours and still no scanning. Would buying a new one have been a better option?

Back on the bread front things are much more satisfactory. Yesterday's wetter dough effort gave an improved result. Loaves which looked like loaves and which felt and tasted more like loaves than hitherto. See http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls for all the gory details.

Dropbox also satisfactory in that I find that it preserves the public link across file update. One does not have to issue a new one every time the file changes. So some of the geeky things are working.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

 

Fast food

This, it seems, is a bacon and cheese sandwich with the bread bit having been replaced by two battered chicken fillets. A bit rich for me I think now that I am off the bike, but you can get them from KFC.

Picture from http://vdc-citymouse.blogspot.com/.

 

Chain saw alert!

Walking around Horton Country Park yesterday, I discovered that one of the chain saw gangs has made it across Christchurch Road and has started in the park. Not in force yet as all that has been done is that some of the underbrush around some trees they want to grow big has been cleared away. Trying to put the park back into the Park I suppose, but I would rather that they left well alone. I bet the birds like the underbrush too. In fact, in some parts of the Isle of Wight, the environment types make a point of growing the stuff special. Perhaps I should put the Epsom environment types in touch with them.

More serious, they have done rather a vicious job on cutting back some of the path side hedges with a tractor mounted flail. I dare say the hedge will grow back but it looks a right mess at the moment. Why could they not leave the underbrush alone and take a bit more time to cut the hedges neatly with a hedge trimmer, or maybe even by hand?

Back to another round of slow cook oxtail. 16 hours again at 90C with some onions and mushrooms added for the last 4 of the hours. Very good it was too, the onions and mushroom providing a good bit of garnish. Served with mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts.

In the evening, to Bath's Theatre Royal's presentation of West Yorkshire's Playhouse's production of Alan Bennett's 'The History Boys' at Kingston (upon Thames)'s Rose Theatre. My previous experience of Bennett had been limited to going to the flics to see 'The Madness of King George' and a quick flick through the relevant chapter of Bennett's memoirs. As a former scholarship boy (failed) myself, I thought there might be something here; bit of nostalgia even. Started off rather badly; none of the actors seemed to be pitching their voices right. Then rather put off by the amount of bad language; a fact of life in secondary schools these days, I dare say, but I don't need to have my nose rubbed in it. Scenes interspersed with song and dance routines. Setting seemed to be a curious muddle of everything from the 50's of the last century to the present. Things got much better in the second half. Good use of the revolving stage. But the overall impression was that this was a light piece, and a piece which was much more about the trials and torments of the school life of gays in general and Alan Bennett in particular, than it was about the trials and torments of scholarships. More a series of sketches than a narrative, perhaps reflecting Bennett's early work with the likes of Dudley Moore on 'Beyond the Fringe'. Maybe the idea always was that the thing would be a film. Which is, perhaps, the next stop.

Followed by a check with 'Les particules élémentaires', which I had thought I would have a go at following 'La Carte et le territoire' (see, for example, January 7). To my mind, much inferior, despite winning various prizes. Some of the same things come through. The neat insights into contemporary life. The insight into the lives of contemporaries with unusual private lives. The preoccupation with death, decay and reproductive plumbing. But awash with pretentious porno.. Porno. which is dreary and depressing rather than arousing. Perhaps that is his point, but it does not make for a very cheerful read. Maybe my French is not up for porno.. Some space is given over to Aldous Huxley, his 'Brave New World' and 'Island', but without Houellebecq appearing to have read either very carefully and without appearing to have any appreciation of the qualities of other books, such as 'Point Counter Point'. I gave up about half way through the 300 pages. Organised, incidentally, in the same unusual way as the more successful effort read previously (twice).

Much more fun with M. le Comte d'Herisson, mentioned on 1 February. I share a snippet. It seems that at the time of the restoration after Napoleon, there was much speculation about the survival of the son of Louis XVI, who would have been around 10 at the time that his father was executed. Speculation which was interesting because if the pretender was who he pretended to be, the then current incumbent of the throne, Louis XVIII would have had to step aside, something it seems he was rather loath to do, despite not being much good at this kinging business. Loath to the point of tampering with the evidence and suborning of witnesses. The pretender did not make it.

Presumably because of issues of this sort, it seems that giving birth, if you were anywhere near the throne, was a fairly public affair. The world had to be satisfied that the new egg was indeed hatched by the queen. One could not, of course, be completely sure that the new egg was indeed a royal egg: that had to wait for the invention of DNA. But at least one could be reasonably sure than the new child had the right numbers of arms, legs and so forth and that a proletarian child with the right numbers of such things had not been substituted for a royal one with the wrong numbers.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?