Saturday, April 30, 2011

 

Miscellaneous depressions

Start with the small one, which was the result of walking back the mile or so from Sainsbury's carrying around 20lbs of flour and a few other oddments. I was carrying them in a proper ruck sack, just the right size for the job, but I would not have wanted to have been carrying very much more. Which sounded a bit feeble when compared to the 112lb bags of cement I used to unload when small and the 90lb packs that the French foot soldiers of the first world war used to have to hump about. Not to mention the 224lbs sacks of peas and such like that the parents of people I used to know used to have to hump across scarily bending plank walks across dykes in Lincolnshire.

To divert attention from such thoughts, I computed how much money I was saving by baking my own bread. Excluding fuel, I am getting around 3lb 8oz of bread for perhaps £1 in materials. So even if we include fuel but exclude labour I am still doing quite well. Add in labour at minimum wage and I am doing quite badly. Happily, by the time I had reached this point I had got home and could move onto other matters.

Then we move onto an article about the future of the Royal Mail in some pull out from the Guardian. A future which it seems will mainly be populated by self employed delivery people working from home at minimum wage, fed by crates of mail to be delivered delivered from the warehouse they never need see. No more cosy jobs in sorting offices with canteens, company, sports & social clubs, pensions, sick pay and other perks & perquisites. So part of the price of most people getting richer is going to be a lot of other people with crummy jobs.

And lastly we had a DVD sold to me by Bourne Hall library for £1 and called 'Ahlamm', a film from Iraq of which I had never heard before. A film set in and around a mental hospital in Baghdad, in and around the time of the second gulf war. A film which shocked by its portrayal of the casual brutality of the Ba'athist regime, a casual brutality which rather reminded me of that of the dying Austrian empire portrayed by Jaroslav Hašek in Švejk. A similarly multi-ethnic world. And by the casual brutality of what came after, when the Ba'athist fist was removed. Not much helped by the lack of proper preparation by the invaders. The film is not saying that the invasion was wrong, but it is saying that there was a bad regime and that it was replaced by a bad mess; something we got into without due care and attention.

The film was rather badly made by our standards, but it was not much the worse for that. One soon got used to it.

 

Clever old Google

I happened to enquire about the origin of the word barbecue in window 3 while editing an old post in window 2. Google was keeping an eye on the goings in in window 3 and posted these barbecue flavoured advertisements in window 2. Does one really approve of all this attention to detail?

Hopefully would not have worked had I been using some other search engine in window 3. That is to say, hopefully Mr. Google cannot see the inner workings of Microsoft.Bing. Or maybe it can if I am doing it from Chrome. Always supposing that Microsoft let you use their product inside the big, bad rival product. Perhaps I ought to give Bing a go, just to see.

The surprise is that barbecue is quite an old word with OED listing its immediate precursor, an outdoor cooking word from the Carribbean, from something from 1691.

Friday, April 29, 2011

 

This very royal day

As a lapsed republican, I am moved to comment on today's royal list, prompted by the omission of two of our dearly beloved former prime ministers. Off to the Guardian which thoughtfully provides a downloadable spreadsheet of the 281 invitees which were on the list released by the Lord Chamberlain. The Guardian seem to have left the 7 Spencers off their version - sloppy editing - but it is still possible that this is essentially the dinner list for this evening, as, according the horse's mouth (http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/), of the 1900 people invited to the Abbey, 600 get to have lunch with HRH the Queen and 300 get to have dinner with HRH the Prince. They don't say whether the two lots overlap at all.

According again to the Guardian, the two most recent prime ministers (Labour) were omitted and the two before that (Conservative) were included because the Prince does not like lefties, his idea of what constitutes a lefty clearly being very inclusive, and Prime Minister Cameron thought it would be cool to go along with the Prince. Not very constitutional at all to my mind.

And then the leader of that country so tied up with our history, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, seems to be missing. As does any representative of our gallant ally, the United States. But the bosses of Gibraltar, St. Helena and the Falklands are in with their partners. As are the Beckhams. Mrs. is clearly a master of string pulling if not dressing.

Closer home, becoming something of an expert on hawthorn flowers. Horton Lane has lots of pure white, great swathes of the stuff. A much smaller amount touched with pink. So where is all the pink stuff that Proust runs on about? On the way home came across a rather scrawny, red hawthorn tree down Longmead Road - some sort of unhealthy garden version - and a few more down my own road. The pink flowers were doubles and while florid from a distance, nothing like as pretty close up as the singles. And then this afternoon we finally come across a pink hawthorn in Nonsuch Park with single flowers, like the white ones only a delicate, graded pink. Much better.

And on nettle flowers. All the nettles seem to be in flower at the moment. Plenty of regular nettles down Longmead Road with their rather dowdy flowers, but broken up with scattered clumps of the much smaller white dead nettles. Plus some of the very small purples. And elsewhere, the odd clump of the very pretty yellow nettles, these last much the same size as white dead nettles. At least I think these last are nettles; they have a nettle like appearance and habit. They also grow at the bottom of our garden.

PS: a lot of starlings about this morning, not something I see much of, although they were very common when I was young in Cambridge. And a possible sighting of a gold finch in the form of a flash of red, green and yellow in a tail. But whatever it was, it declined to sit still where I could see it and study it properly.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

 

The day of the stake

After a weekend of hotel and pub food, needed something simple. So started off on Monday evening with a vegetarian red lentil soup. Vegetarian in the sense that I did not use any bacon, just onion. And no carrot. Made up the flavour deficit with garlic and pounded black pepper with coriander. Results satisfactory.

Followed up Tuesday lunchtime with a light steak for lunch. The steak came from Manor Green Road and was described as sirloin. It came sliced off a large piece of beef, fresh out of its shrink wrap and not looking very pretty in consequence. Also rather large and rather pale. Nothing much like the sort of sirloin steak I was used to buying from Cheam. However, grilled as briskly as our electric grill can manage, it tasted a lot better than it looked. Moist with a good flavour, slightly let down by the texture which was not quite as grainy as it should have been. Served with Jersey Royals, sprouting brocolli and a 2003 Valpolicella Ripasso from the Montezovo stable (see http://www.montezovo.com).

Snoozed away the afternoon, then off to the Wiggers to hear Alexander Melnikov do the Wanderer Fantasy from Schubert, seven Fantasies from Brahms and twelve preludes and fugues (of the twenty four) from Shostakovitch. Plus a short encore. I don't think I had heard any of it live before and did not know the Brahms at all. But Melnikov, while not having flamboyant body language gave the music plenty of pep. And while he was not flamboyant he did have some interesting ticks. So at one point, during a pause, he noticed a speck on one of the keys and took down his handkerchief to wipe it away before resuming. A thing I had not noticed in piano before was that his left hand work quite often came over with the feel of a cello lead in a string quartet. The music also struck me as being very masculine in tone, which reminded me in turn of the absence of female composers on scenes past and present. What do w-libbers have to say about that?

All rather emotional stuff, especially the Shostakovitch, and I was quite tired by the end. So not now sure that I would have wanted to do all 24 in one sitting. While a chap a couple of rows up was scribbling notes on his programme through the whole of it and would no doubt have taken all 24 in his stride. Presumably a critic. But it struck me a bad manners to be visibly scribbling in this way; I can see the point if you have copy to get out quick and I do things of a similar nature myself on occasion, but one should not be caught at it.

Sufficiently overwhelmed that the following morning, that is to say yesterday, I moved onto the next level of senior moment by moving beyond nearly doing the wrong thing. Like bending down at the oven door all ready to put the milk into the oven. Yesterday I went the whole hog and put some Salad Cream into my freshly bag brewed tea. The excuse is that item 1, I was also preparing my breakfast sardines, in which I always use Heinz Salad Cream (Original) rather than Hellman's Mayonnaise which I do not much care for. Item 2, for reasons which I need not go into, the Salad Cream is kept upside down in the fridge door, next to containers for the three sorts of milk we (three) use. So not that hard for there to be some neuronic crossover resulting in a pouring crossover.

Tried to recover my poise on a new sort of Soduko I had noticed in the DT, called Sujiko. I could manage the one called easy-peasy without too much trouble but got stuck on the one called improver.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

 

Hotel inspections continued

Continued with the fairly new Holiday Inn at Solstice Park, mentioned in the postscript to the previous post. Smart new building, although old enough that rust was showing through on the steel work of the roof - it being one of those curved and sloping roofs, presently fashionable, which sit on top of buildings and the edges of which project some feet- sometimes a lot of feet - beyond the walls, steel work thereby made visible underneath. Also visible to the weather. I think a lot of grander buildings - such as the Pompidou Centre - which wear their structure on the outside in the same sort of way, albeit on a larger scale - have similar problems. Architects of today have perhaps forgotten the function of cladding in clothing.

Smart modern room, which I much preferred to the rather older, repro-furnished rooms of the Mercure, discussed previously. Duvet a much more sensible thickness too. Green gesture outside our window in that the flat roof below had been planted with what looked like a grass-sedum mixture, so that we saw a pleasant green carpet instead of the usual chippings. Perhaps from http://www.enviromat.co.uk/.

There were a couple of catches though. The screws holding the net curtain rail to the head of the window had come out of the head of the window and the rail was just lodged up there - all ready to fall down when the BH disturbed the thing. And then while the remote control to drive the air conditioning unit appeared to have idiot proof instructions, we could not get the unit to respond to instruction. Reduced to crawling underneath the thing and turning the power off so that we were not treated to assorted whirrings and whizzings all night. Luckily, the resultant temperature was OK.

Back home to read of a very proper spat in the TLS, where we read all about one Peter Thonemann, Forrest-Derow Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History, Wadham College, Oxford, who the previous week had loftily rubbished some small books with pages made of lead, thought to be ancient. This week, the chap thereby rubbished has come back fighting, citing all kinds of scientific and other evidence in support of the ancienity of these lead books. He suggests referring the matter to the world expert in such things, one Dr. Ziad Al-Saad of Amman. Hopefully he has not been caught up in the recent bother there and is still in a position to help. And another chap, encouraged by Thonemann, uses the occasion to trot out his own bit of forgery detection. While I completely failed to recover the offending article by Thonemann from the TLS Archive, despite my remembering my credentials there for once in a while. Has it been discretely removed to avoid embarrassing the great and the good?

PS: on March 24th I mentioned the difficulty that Chrome was having with Flashdance. Also with some other plug-in called Gears. Particularly irritating when I am booking tickets for a show - these plug-ins seemingly being involved in the display of seating plans. Luckily, I have now turned up someone on their help forum who, instead of having a rude or crude pop at Google, suggests upgrading to the Chrome 11 beta. This has now been done - very painless - and the difficulty has vanished. Four hours in and counting.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

 

Corrigendum: Stonehenge

On the 18th April I suggested that the offering at Stonehenge was perhaps not all that it might be.

Well, having been there, I am happy to report that the presentation of this World Heritage Site (see http://whc.unesco.org/. From which I learn that Stonehenge's nearest rival in UNESCO-speak is in Korea) is much better than I had thought. The visitor centre is a bit thin for a site of this importance, but access to the henge is OK. I had thought that one was restricted to a circular walk a hundred yards or so from the henge itself but I find myself quite wrong. In the first place the circular walk is not that far from the henge and in the second place the circular walk is not circular: the first portion runs inside the primary embankment and gets one quite close enough to the stones to be impressed. And, as it happened, the day we visited was watering day, with the turf at the very centre of the henge actually being watered.

According to the two trusties on duty (the henge being a combined services operation for English Heritage and the National Trust), the path has not been moved for twenty years or so. So either my memory of a circular and remote walk is defective, possibly fuelled by regular sight of people trudging around it from the A303, or we last visited the place more than 20 years ago, at which time the walk really was circular.

And furthermore, despite the wide and long path we have, the grass was very worn, at a time of year when one might have thought it should have been at its peak. So I accept that a short path would get badly eroded. It would also get very crowded, judging by the number of people there around 1000 one fine morning in late April. So I stand corrected. The path arrangements are OK.

Our exit was marked by the sight of the second swallow of the year. The first having been a bit further west, a day or so previously.

Decided that the rather small shop did not improve on our book by Dr. Burl, so settled instead for the current guide. So we now have the 1959 guide from the Ministry of Works (including a substantial fold out map), price 1 shilling, the 1980 Pitkin guide, price unknown and the 2005 English Heritage guide, price £4.99. They are all quite well produced things; not exactly complementary, but interesting to have all three nonetheless. We learn on the way that one of Dr. Burl's middle names is Woodruff and we wonder whether he has any connection with the Lyme Regis ones.

On the way home got to thinking about Egypt. The henge is from roughly the same time as some of the comparably large monuments in Egypt, monuments which share an interest in management of the dead. But monuments which were supported, I would have thought, by a rather richer agriculture than that of the high chalk downs of Wiltshire. Clearly room for a UNESCO funded analysis of outlay around the world and over the millennia on funerary ware as a proportion of GDP.

And then moved onto possibilities for the visitor centre. Today I favour having a working replica. Find a suitable site within a mile or so of the henge itself and then get a team of luvvies who will pay English Heritage to be allowed to erect a replica of the henge using tools and materiel of the time. The idea would be that they would kick off at sunrise on the Spring equinox and finish at sunset on the Autumn equinox, with the winter period being allowed for putting the replica site back to its starting position, ready for the next round. The luvvies would be required to live in period costume, to live in period accommodation and to put up with being gawped at. Proper Big Brother stuff. Recreational substances would be permitted when they were not actually on set. Serious penalties for missing the Autumn equinox. Random selection of a miss related number of luvvies for televised sacrifice?

One would need to do a bit of work to find out in what state to deliver the stones and how far from the replica henge to dump them. Get this right and construction would run, as desired, from equinox to equinox.

PS: the heritage people presumably had no control over the statue erected in front of the nearby Holiday Inn at Solstice Park. A rather ugly Neanderthal affair, with the kneeling, rather furry looking man maybe 10 foot high, rather in the style of a lot of French or Spanish outdoor figure sculpture. But one which overlooks the fact that the people who built Stonehenge were more or less the same as us, albeit a bit thinner and smaller on account of their uncertain diet. Not like gorillas at all.

Monday, April 25, 2011

 

Canadian Heritage

We have now made it to the Wolford Chapel which we were reminded of when visiting Exeter Cathedral on 23rd April. Sufficiently organised that it was open late on Easter Sunday afternoon and that the maple leaf was flying outside (from the post in the middle of the picture).

A little bit of Ontario just north of Honiton in Devon, containing various Canadian memorabilia in addition to the tomb of Lt. Gen. Simcoe and some interesting church furnishings.

These last included a painted board with the ten commandments behind the altar, which reminded me that we are commanded not to make images of anything in heaven or on earth. More specifically: '... any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth'. A rule which I believe that Muslims take more seriously than we do.

Unfortunately, not sufficiently organised not to have run out of leaflets and the one illustrated was recovered from underneath a rhododendron bush outside. We assume the perforations result from rodent action.

PS: the interest arising from my mother having come from Canada and her younger sister (and others) now living in Ontario.

 

Magic squares

Following the report on magic squares on April 12, I am pleased to announce the publication of a first edition of an Excel workbook which computes the things. The algorithm from TB actually appears to work, although I had to put a limit of 1,000 in as Excel got into a bit of a twist when I tried 4,035. Not that I believe that anyone other than Excel is in the wrong.

And I can also report that both diagonals add to the same total as all the rows and all the columns do.

Down load http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/magicsquare-20110425a.xlsm. Put the size of the magic square in the first cell and fire up the code in module 1. A reminder of one of the many 80-20 rules, with this one being the one that says you can get code which works for 20% of the effort required to get code which works for someone else.

Signed copies available on application.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

 

Hotel inspector

Hotel Inspector is one of the BH's favourite programmes so we decided that it was about time to try a bit of inspecting for ourselves. So off to the 'Mercure Exeter Southgate', a place which is mostly about 30 years old, in what used to be a car park below the city walls and above what used to be the RD&E hospital. New bits follow the finish of the old bits with red brick, sash windows and some stone bits. The builders had clearly been got at by the heritage people.

Inside we found a large new build wooden staircase, made out of pine but including a bannister with banister rails and a heavy wooden hand rail, properly shaped around the bends and which reminded me of those in the 1910 Treasury Chambers, although these last were of some more serious material. Not sure now whether it was mahogany or oak. Might have been both: mahogany for the ministers and oak for the servants. There was also some elementary carving. The whole thing presently a bit new looking, but it will look well once it tones down a bit. As far as I can recall, Wetherspoons are about the only other people who still go in for such things.

Room entirely decent, if not very large and overlooking the huts for the workmen engaged on a refurbishment programme. But we had completely forgotten about the bane of this sort of hotel room: noisy air conditioning, uncomfortably high temperature and a great thick duvet, this on an unusually hot April afternoon. Turn the air conditioning off, open the windows (someone having thoughtfully half removed the catch from the sash, which meant that one could lodge the thing in an open position. Which would not otherwise have been possible as the installer had not got the sash weights quite right. Can't get the staff, even in these far flung provinces) and remove the guts from the duvet. Quite a reasonable night's sleep.

Hotel customer computer in a cupboard like space and not working. Perhaps the heat got to it. Not like the flashy great free apple in the Novotel at Ipswich (see September 21st last). Luckily the cuts have not yet reached the Devon Library Service, so here we are.

But before that, to breakfast. Amongst other things I had bread and ham. The ham was quite good; not shiny in appearance, with a good texture and all the stuff on the plate looked as if it had all come from the same animal. Not the reconstituted stuff sold by Sainsbury's at all. But the bread rolls were poor. Not altogether clear where they came from. Small white affairs which looked a bit hand made but might well have actually come from some factory via a deep freeze. No where as good as the stuff knocked out these days by yours truly.

And then onto the cathedral, a place which I must have visited a dozen or more times but still managed to surprise me. An architectural treat, a lot of the interior detail of which has been tastefully restored. So, for example, I thought the vaulting of one of the ceilings was much improved by the compound ribs being picked out in dull red and green. Lots of tombs and memorials, ancient and modern: several for knights in armour and one for the inventer of what is now Ontario and who is responsible for the Wolford Chapel near Honiton which, having passed mapled-leafed signs for it often enough, I had assumed was the chapel for a war grave for Canadians. Quite wrong. We shall try and put the record straight by paying the place a visit on the way home. Not so impressed by some of the modern art although there was some very good embroidery. Outside one was amused by various gargoyles, some quite new and rather good. Someone in the deanery has a sense of humour. We were also amused by the north door, a rather grand affair which one might have thought was for the private use of the bishop, but which was labelled 'STAFF' in large black and white, which rubric does include the bishop but I am not sure if he would see it that way.

There was a fair of activity inside the church with people getting ready for the Easter services tomorrow. What with that and one thing and another, quite struck with the sense of a cathedral being a very live thing. Far too big and far too old for it to be a tidy integral whole. Much more a patchwork of all kinds of bits and pieces, certainly from the outside. Quite a lot of restored stone work mixed in the old. Quite a lot of change as new bishops left their marks on the efforts of their predecessors. So, for example, someone had punched a north transcept window through the pilaster work of the Norman north tower. So the idea of trying to restore the thing to some mythic past is clearly not going to work. It's not there.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

 

Off to the geegees

Wednesday to the spring meeting up on the downs, our first visit to the new stand. And much smarter than the old one it was too, although it was just as hard to get a drink, unless you wanted champagne. Reminded me, for some reason, of a continental railway station concourse.

One plus was that we happened to buy our tickets the day before, so for £20 each we got entry, fish & chips and a pint (there was a glass of wine option for the ladies). Whereas had we paid on the day that little lot would have been £16 + £7.50 + £4.10. A useful saving which entirely made up for throwing money down the horsey drain. The fish & chips were fresh and not bad at all, served up by a polite young lady down from Twickenham for the day. Not too much fish but with the chips quite enough to fuel one up for the main business. The pint was cold lager, with no warm beer in sight, either on tap or in bottles.

Another plus was that because the spring meeting is not that busy, us who had paid to get into the regular stand had access to a good chunk of the posh stand where one could buy oysters and stuff like that. And more important, get a good view from a balcony in the shade, this last being an important consideration in the full afternoon sun.

A minus was that we did not manage to pick any winners. The ticket illustrated yesterday being one of the losing three.

Back down Chalk Lane to the Amato which was open and was selling warm beer, taking in on the way some interesting erect catkins, rather like midget horse chestnut flowers, but green rather than white. After the beer we decided that we needed some proper grub but did not fancy proper cooking. Maybe the Portuguese café in South Street could do us a tin of chick pea stew - the sort of thing that they sell in the bars on Tenerife. As it turned out they did do tins of chick peas but not chick pea stew, so we settled instead for a tin of trotters and beans, known to them as chispalhada (refeições tradicionais). Which is a bit odd as the recipe offered by Mr. Google under this name involves pork chops and beans rather than trotters and beans. A Portuguese mystery. Moving on, it was lucky that the café keeper explained that we should have the stuff with boiled white rice, moistened with a little gently fried onion. Lucky because the chispalhada turned out to be very salty and liberal with lumps of fat and bone, and would have been a bit strong neat. Unlucky because I overcooked the onion - which would have been fine for a hamburger with ketchup but was too strong for the delicate trotter flavour.

Perhaps next time we will try the tripe version.

 

Tuesday

Being a fine warm day was clearly a day for a trot - brisk walk perhaps - around Epsom Common. The first item of interest was two places on the circular path where white fluff had accumulated on the sides of the path to the extent that it looked a bit like a rather feeble snowfall. At the first place I could not work out what was doing it, beyond deciding that there was far too much of it for it to be brushings from dogs - which, in any case, tends to accumulate around benches rather than paths - or seeds from dandelions - which does, furthermore, not tend to drift around in small clumps of down. Rather single seeds. At the second place, found that the culprit was a stand of tall slender trees with pendant green catkins maybe two inches long and up to a third of an inch in diameter. The fluff was growing out of the body of the catkins and the leaves appeared to be growing out of the base of the catkins - but they had not got far enough for them to be any help with identification. Will I remember to check in a week or so's time? Presumably an evolutionary variant on the cotton theme.

The second item was a team of what looked like young men working under the banner of the Lower Mole Conservation Trust or some such, presumably in some kind of tertiary education of an environment or ecology flavour. Now it is well known that young men like playing with internal combustion engines, they like noise, they like danger and they like making a statement which is going to annoy adults. A scrawl in red paint across the front of a bridge on a dark night ticks two boxes. Chopping trees down on the Common while the pubs are shut ticks three. So we have the team. But my vote would be, if they have to chop things down with much noise and fanfare, that they should be taken to a forestry plantation where that is the idea. Keep them out of our recreational forests. And if there are not any working forests to hand, let them troll off to mid Wales where there are plenty.

Later on in the day off to Cavendish Square to admire their tulips. We had seen a splendid bed at Polesden Lacey, planted with a mixture of bright reds, yellows and oranges with purple highlights. Very effective it was too, so we wanted to see how they had managed in Cavendish Square with their rather smaller bed, but with a similar colour scheme. A little late in the day when we got there, but pretty good. Pretty good indeed for a metropolitan square.

Beforehand, we had finally got to the linen cupboard in Great Castle Street when it was open. A rather old style shop carrying every sort of table and kitchen linen you could possibly think of, set out on sturdy wooden shelves, running around & up the walls and which may have been older than the owner, a gent. of around our own age. Plus various other lines around the edges. A regular Alladin's cave for the ladies; perhaps the ladies' equivalent of the wonderful old-speak ironmongery we came across in Montgomery once and where I bought a beautiful long handled axe. Well balanced and not too heavy, not at all like the clumsy great things you are apt to get in garden centres and builders' merchants. The only pity is that I do not get to use it enough or take proper care off it and the wedges are working loose.

Afterhand, to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Elias Quartet do Beethoven's Op. 95 and Op. 127, with a touch of Kurtág in between. The Elias Quartet which I had first heard doing the Mozart Clarinet Quintet with Michael Collins (see post of 11 March). We were sitting very near the front - row E - so the rawness, punch and verve of this young quartet was very audible. To the point that we were rather overwhelmed by the end of it. Goodness knows what sort of a state they were in. Puzzled on this occasion by their ability to make a huge shift in emotional tone after a break of just a few seconds. Calmed down with a mouthful of left-over red washed down by a dose of 'Famous Grouse'.

PS: technical beef. If I search the blog for 'Mozart' the most recent hit is something on 9 March. If I search for 'mozart' up pops the post of 11 March, despite the fact the Mozart is spelled Mozart in both places. Whatever is the so rarely fallible Mr. Google up to?

 

New technology

Not the same as in the olden days when all you got was a numbered card and you had to try to remember what horse you had backed, how you had backed it and for how much, all through a haze of beer and sun. The only clue was the name of the bookie, with the name being no clue as to where on the course he (rarely she in those days) might be found, always assuming that he had not done a runner. And with your bet having been inscribed by hand into a large ledger by a gent. who could convert a bet into money while he wrote. Computers have taken all the challenge out of on-course betting!

Furthermore, tearing up and flinging away a losing ticket made of substantial card was a much more satisfying act than tearing up these flimsies. To the point where we did not even bother to tear this one up.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

 

Tauchnitz

Nearly finished reading a fascinating little find at the bookshop next to Earlsfield Station; well worth the £1 I paid for it and fits in well with the current fad for things old German. 'The Lugwigs of Bavaria' by one Henry Channon and being volume 5,216 in the Tauchnitz Edition collection of British and American authors, published in 1934. Dedicated to Diana Cooper, presumably the famous Diana Duff-Cooper of that era. This particular example originally sold in 1943 in Frankfurt (M), presumably the one on the Main rather than the other one, and to someone who appears to think that the place is spelt 'Frankfürt', a point on which Google, for once, is agnostic.

Apart from being an interesting read about the later and often eccentric (or worse) Wittelsbachs, the wrapping of the book is a mine of information in itself.

Point 1, the Germans must have been a cultured bunch to be reading so much stuff in English. Hard to imagine an English publisher knocking out a 6,000 volume collection of books in German. The French too, as Librairie Gaulon & Fils of Rue Madame in Paris, had a license to sell the things in France. There is, however, an instruction that the book is not to be introduced into the British Empire or the USA. The 'and U.S.A' of the original being a rare lapse. Perhaps I should report the man in Earlsfield to the trading standards people.

Point 2, despite it being 1943, it was still possible to buy a book in Germany which in the catalogue of the collection at the back, included a couple of books by one Israel Zangwill and some more by a chap called Oscar Wilde. Even some D. H. Lawrence. I had thought that all mention of people of this sort had been expunged from the bookshops of the Third Reich.

Point 3, while the catalogue does include real books by the likes of Shakespeare, the bulk of it appears to be pot boilers, murder stories, romances and such like. Books which probably sold millions in their day and would now be hard to get hold of. The back cover features Winnie-the-Pooh with the original illustrations and 'The Techniques of Marriage' by Mary Borden, the distinguished novelist of the US of A.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

 

What passes for news from the Telegraph (tnaka DT)

The biggest headline in yesterday's DT was about Whitehall blunders, which on closer reading appear to amount to careless censoring of documents published on the internet under the freedom of information act. The headline has no doubt prompted massive intervention by the security industry in the censoring industry. Massive pay day for all those security consultants who can now spend happy weeks explaining to the humble censors how they might better do their work. Was it in the public interest for the DT to explain how easy it is to leave text under stones in word processing documents, stones which are not that hard to lift up and text which you had intended to be private? Was the whole thing a put up job by the United UK Federation of Security Consulting Contractors? Is the expense involved in responding to this headline justified by the improvement in state security? Have resources been diverted from the fight against terrorism? Or from our crime ridden streets?

The second lead on the front page was about the iniquity of Labour Councils holding cash reserves at the time of cuts to the bone. Or perhaps 'cuts to the chase', a phrase which I have completely failed to elucidate the origins of. Any more than those of 'stone the crows'. No more than a passing mention of the idea that financial managers need to have cash reserves or the fact that there may be severe penalties for any kind of overrun. The Treasury behaving in this matter rather like your listening bank which bangs you for £100 for technical infringements of your agreement with them (a practise now sanctified at great expense by the High Court).

This while the standard of debate on AV has improved slightly. To the point where one commentator was arguing that AV might result in less proportional representation rather than more. The idea being that in a year where one of the two big parties does badly, AV will make it do even more badly. Which if true, is to my mind a serious point against. And leads me to wonder about why we got rid of the multi-member constituencies which we used to have 100 years ago. Could they be the basis of a better answer? Let us hope that the media will answer all these questions and more over the coming weeks.

Further into the DT we read of some ground breaking research from Cambridge which suggests that the Last Supper might have taken place on the first day of Passover (15th Nisan) rather than one some day tied to some lunar calendar which was in wide use at that time and place and which we have now mapped onto our lunar calendar for Easter. The article, if not the research, then goes on to suggest that this would make Easter a fixed date rather than a moving date, which I have not yet worked through, my understanding being that Passover moves in relation to our solar calendar too. All of which begs the question that if you want to celebrate the anniversary of something, which calendar do you use? One might argue that the Last Supper being in the first instance a celebration held by devout Jews, ought to be tied to the Jewish religious calendar, rather than some other, possibly newer calendar which does not carry any relevant cultural baggage.

While all this is working through the system, we are taking bets on whether the arrangements for computing the date of Easter will be changed - a matter with which, the Queen as head of our church, will have to be fully involved, assuming she can spare the time from the upcoming wedding.

And lastly we came across the scandal involving the historic Beacon Park in Lichfield, historic in the sense that it was once a medieval swan reserve, one of the first in the country. It appears that the council have spent more than £4m on a new toddlers playground which majors on sand and rocks. I suspect the scandal is more or less a split between the better offs and the worse offs. Those from Islington (as it were) are all for sand, rocks and creative play while those from the Longmead want a bit of flashy playground equipment. I thnk the DT might have made a bit more of this item than it did, relegated as it was to a 2 inches by 1 inch filler, rather than a substantive article with pictures of park and its disgusted users.

Monday, April 18, 2011

 

Fad

A graph illustrating a fairly steady bread fad, now running to 27 bakes since the start of the year.

 

News from the Guardian

Interested to read in the Guardian last week about how our shiny new RAF Typhoons, the aeroplanes formerly known as Euro-fighters, and costing maybe £150m a pop are not much good for whacking Libyans, leaving aside the question of whether one thinks that that is a very good idea or not. The story was that the Typhoon was designed to take out the sort of thing advertised on March 13th, although it may not, in the event, even manage that. So is it that both sides of the rusting iron curtain still locked into the sort of toys needed to fight each other - rather than fighting the sort of people we are actually fighting? Although it is said that in the past the Russians were more practical; more into sturdy mass production and less into fancies. That was how they beat the Germans.

Or is it all just more evidence of how good the private sector is at sucking money out of the public sector? And running on about how inefficient the public sector is while they suck.

The same issue carried a piece by Sir S. Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust, telling us that we should stop being so solemn about old buildings. Rather we should be trying to get some value out of them. I rather think he has a point, certainly about Stonehenge where we are only allowed to approach to within a hundred yards or so in case we damage the SSSI, SSHI and probably sacred turf. Unless, of course, one happens to be one of those talkative beards from some television history program in which case it is total access for the whole media circus plus free drinks, public denied for the duration. We are planning to visit the place in the fairly near future so I will be able to report on what can be seen from a hundred yards. Perhaps we will find a virtual reality experience in some giant new underground (underground so as not to damage the aforementioned turf) visitor centre where one can pick a role and get the whole thing. Smells and all. Actors dressed as Asterix & Obelix wielding plastic sickles. Much better than peering at the real thing through the sheep & mist.

In the meantime, we paid a visit to Polesden Lacey (built with McEwan's beer money not gin money as reported on November 1st last), to see how they were doing with their 250,000 visitors a year; a premier league operation in NT speak. As it happens, we visited on the day of the dog fair and some days before the tulip fair. Which was just as well as most of the thousands of tulips kindly provided by deJager tulips (http://www.dejager.co.uk/product?ipg=5205) were full on and quite spectacular. Not the sort of show one can put on in an Epsom front garden but just the thing for a place like this. They will be a bit past their peak by the day intended. What will they do with all the beds when the tulips are lifted? Will they have numbers of fancily dressed deJager staff patrolling the tulips on fair days? None to be seen yesterday. Is it the thin end of the wedge? Will NT properties be going in for big time sponsorship, rather in the annoying way of some schools now?

In the meantime, a well presented and very attractive property. We only did the outside but there was plenty there, although I only found out about an atlas cedar after we left (see 8th April). There was also an efficient and very reasonably priced canteen - it perhaps being a pointer to the future that the canteens, shops and so on had a bigger footprint than the stately home itself. I had a couple of the best sweet scones that have bought for some time. Maybe an all time best. And they could provide FIL with a decent looking gluten free bread roll to go with his ham salad. The ham did not look bad either. All in all, a good day out.

By way of comparison I wondered what their neighbour, Chessington World of Adventures do, and after a little while I find myself at Merlin Entertainments (http://www.merlinentertainments.biz/en/homepage.aspx) who do publish an annual report, but which is not quite as open as that from the National Trust. Trade secrets perhaps. The best that I could do was find out that the six 'Resort Theme Parks', of which Chessington is one, did around 12m visitors in 2009. So Chessington runs at maybe 10 times the number of visitors as Polesden Lacey - a bigger operation altogether. Even so, the Polesden Lacey operation includes 500 volunteers which must tax the organising powers of a significant HR department, volunteers not always being the easiest people top organise.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

 

Food matters

On Friday to the Antelope in Mitcham Road to see if they were still doing sausage rolls. This a pub which used to be called 'Jack Beards' and which before that used to be a den of iniquity & recreational substances. I can't remember what it was called for that portion of its life. But the Antelope was still there and was trying very hard to be the sort of pub that you now get in Clapham North. Warm sausage rolls still available, probably manufactured on the premises out of sausage meat and a very fatty variety of pastry; quite eatable in small numbers. Warm beer satisfactory. Along the way I was reminded what a huge place it is, with a large front bar, a back bar, a function room and now a smoking (gar)den. The back bar and function room being large & high and done out in rather tired, dark brown wooden panelling and such forth. Must have been quite the gin palace in its day, entirely in line with the more or less contemporary grade 1.7 listed picture palace up the road, now a non-smokers bingo hall. Oddly, as far as Mr. G. is concerned, the place is just a bingo hall. It seems to have lost caste as a monument of cinema history. Illustration from http://moblog.net/home/.

Back home to start on the bread and sausage from the Smak of the previous post. Both satisfactory if not great. Sausage very like a thin version of French garlic sausage; entirely eatable but one would not want too much at one go. A bit bland, pink and fatty.

At which point BH had a brain wave. Why not make it into spicy lentil stew? This being her variation on the lentil soup which I make, culled from Sainsbury's recipe library (volume rice, beans & pasta) and which used to be made on a reasonably regular basis. Fry up some paprika, bacon, garlic and onion. Add red lentils and water. Add tin of tinned tomatoes. Simmer for half an hour - the lentils should be soft but still entire at this point - then add sliced sausage and simmer for a few minutes longer. Good stuff; entirely satisfactory destination for grade 1.7 listed sausage. But next time I make it - this dish having hitherto been a BH affair - I shall try using real tomatoes as I find the taste of tinned tomatoes a bit tinny and penetrating. Although in the this case, the interior of the tin was white not tinny. Perhaps the raw steel plate had been coated in some kind of cheap white plastic, rather than expensive tin. Not a tin at all.

After which one tucks into this week's TLS, which saw fit to carry a two page spread on the same Sybille Bedford who had been irritating me on 7th April. Great minds clearly moving in adjacent waters. Whoever wrote it seemed to have a lot of time for the lady, who managed, despite her unorthodox start to and continuation in life managed to live to something close to 100. I am also told of a particular celebration of food in 'The Legacy' which I had not read as a celebration at all; rather a report of something close to the obscene. Perhaps in working up the article the author had not troubled to check the context of the bit she was remembering. More interestingly, she reminded me of how, when drawing on bits from one's own life to make fiction, one does play fast and loose with the bits, sticking them together into an assembly quite different from that in life. The bit in this case being the father, down to a cellar full of old claret and having little besides, teaching his daughter the mysteries of his claret, in lieu of a of a more orthodox education.

All wrapped in a large picture of a famous poetess with a fag on, another coincidence to which I shall return shortly.

PS: back situation uncertain. A touch wobbly after mounted outings two days on the trot. Better give the Trek a rest for a day or two.

PPS: stumbled upon http://www.superscholar.org/features/50-most-influential-books-last-50-years/ this morning. I shall be reviewing their list shortly. Cunningly qualified by 'most influential', eschewing the more usual 'most great'. A much more flexible quantity.

Friday, April 15, 2011

 

Back on the bike

As previously mentioned, did not follow up on buying a retro Pashley, but today was moved to get back on the Trek and went down to Surbiton and back; probably a bit further than Cheam and back. No bad back effects so far.

On the other hand, I found that the road to Malden Rushett is in a reasonably bad way, despite some of the kerbside bike-busting potholes having been filled in since my last visit. Much worse than Horton Lane - so following the drift of yesterday's post, what has Horton Lane got which Rushett Lane and Longmead Road haven't?

Then, at the entirely straightforward 4-way roundabout providing access to Chessington North station, some chap in a hurry in a small cheap car thought to drift out over the white line just as I was passing in front on him on the way to the second exit, that is to say straight ahead. Must have missed my back wheel by a whisker before whizzing off to join the queue at a traffic lights fifty yards down the road. Not just the lycra loonies on the road.

On to Surbiton, swing round into Ewell Road and down to Tolworth Tower where I find Smak, a Polish/Russian delicatassen where I buy some sausages which look a bit like a large scale version of a kabanos. Maybe a foot long and three quarters of an inch thick. With quite a decent looking round loaf to go with it; pretty much the first loaf I have bought since the start of the bread fad (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls). This because baking does not fit into today's busy schedule. I shall report on them in due course.

Back home to ponder about the tale of two books. I had ordered a book called 'Clinical Linguistics' written by, let us say, A1, published by B1 and sold by C1, some bookseller from Ohio sailing under the Amazon flag. I might say, incidentally, that the reason for wanting the book has little to do with either clinics or linguistics; rather a family matter. Some weeks later, that is to say a couple of days ago, on the last day of the delivery range which was given to this order, a book turns up. Not clear how exactly it got to Epsom: it had been posted via USPS - presumably the parcels bit of US Post (the cycle team people) and delivery had some connection with some warehouse in Slough called 'La Poste UK Ltd'. Not PLC so probably a bit dodgy. Now if the thing had come by air one might have thought it would have taken days rather than weeks. While if it had come in some container by sea one might have thought it would have taken months rather than weeks. Had it been waiting at 'La Poste' to be inspected by sniffer dogs?

So now we get to open the book and find that it is indeed called 'Clinical Linguistics', but it is by A2 rather than A1 and published by B2 rather than B1, although I grant that B1 and B2 do start with the same letter of the alphabet. I tell the bookseller from Ohio that I am happy to keep the wrong book - sending it all that way back again does not seem very save the planet - but what about the right one? By return I get a very short email saying that they do not have the right one. Which brings me to the odd bit. How did the right one get onto their catalogue - and it was still there last time I looked - if they have not got it? You don't just invent books, you write their details into the computer from the copy sitting in front of you. Don't suppose I am ever going to sort any of this out as the Ohians seem to be a bit short on chit-chat. Perhaps, to misquote the immortal Ryan when asked about the location of the customer service desk for his passengers at Heathrow, which bit of BUDGET and SERVICE do you not understand? And I am not that bothered that I shall try to reverse engineer their warehouse system from this error.

So I guess I shall have to accept the invitation from EDS to "... head to www.blah.blah to experience your online journey with us today ". Imagine spending one's life dreaming this sort of guff up? For electricity suppliers?

Thursday, April 14, 2011

 

To DIY or not to DIY

Having reported bottling out of making garage doors on 8th April, I am pleased to report that I did actually manage some DIY on the shed door.

The shed, perhaps 20 years old now, has a rotting back end built into the gentle slope which runs up from our kitchen window. This despite various bits of concrete deployed inside and outside and with the result that the shed has distorted enough that top corner of the door which is supposed to swing actually catches on the door frame. For some time now it requires some force to open and shut the thing and even more to latch it. Nobody said anything and I did not do anything. But for some reason, yesterday, I decided to do something about it. And rather than trying to call in a shed consultant from checkatrade (http://www.checkatrade.com/), I decided to attend to the matter myself.

Moved bench and tool box onto the patio. Connect two speed electric drill to suitable extension lead. Deploy hard core G-cramp from north London. And a couple of hours later one side of the head of the door frame has been raised half an inch, a nice new, mature oak door stop (of unusual section because the door no longer fits the door frame very well) has been nailed to the swing side jamb and the latch has been adjusted by moving it up a couple of inches. Not too bad a job to the casual eye, but one of those jobs which leave one a bit unsatisfied as one knows about the various bodges and batches under the covers and at least one of which might catch the eye of a proper carpenter. Luckily, no proper carpenters resident and I usually forget about the bodges and badges after a few days, so I will soon be able to bask in the glory of a job well done.

Back indoors, I finished off the second pass of 'A Legacy'; much easier to follow the story the second time around. The foreign names must have finally penetrated what is left of the frontal cortex. On the other hand, I find a lot of the interactions between people, particularly those between the various women involved, very odd. I think that some of this is down to poor editing but some of it is down to the author being on a different plane to yours truly. I just look at the words and wonder whether people really would behave like that. Not a problem I have, for example, with Tolstoy's main line productions. I don't spend time when reading them worrying about whether they are plausible; they work without needing to work at them.

Although that said, my mother used to say that something that was easy was unlikely to be worthy. And it is certainly true that I probably wrote plenty of dreadful stuff about the likes of Tolstoy in those far off days when I was expected to write book reviews for the consumption of the English teacher. Maybe a page of exercise book apiece and I don't recall ever being asked to share any of it with fellow children.

I do wonder now how much of such highbrow stuff sank in: would I have done better to stick to Allan Quatermain and Captain Hornblower until I knew a bit more about the birds and the bees? I do know that the edition of Hornblower which I had as a child now fetches a good bit in book fairs, along with all those fancily priced Peter Rabbits, Puddle Ducks and what have you.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

 

Surrey priorities

Following my report on cycle path repairs of February 23rd, the Surrey roads people have seen fit to pour even more resources into Horton Lane and are now having chunks of the nearly new carriageway proper resurfaced. As far as I could see there were cracks which I dare say would get worse over time, but hardly cracks to get in a stew about. The condition of nearby Longmead Road was much worse. I wonder whether the difference was that Longmead Road serves commercial people and the inhabitants of a notorious estate, unlike Horton Lane which mainly serves people who live in nice houses which are not now owned by housing associations and which have never been council houses? Or is it one of those finance nonsenses whereby the man from the ministry which looks after Longmead Road has done his budget for this year while the chap from the ministry which looks after Horton Lane had a bit of dosh to clear at year end?

I can also report that the Horton Lane repairs were graced by the presence of a lycra looney on a bicycle who saw no need to pay any attention to the traffic lights controlling the movement of traffic through the repairs.

Yesterday we escaped south to visit the tomb of John de Waltone, the son in law of Odo de Dammartin (perhaps descended from a companion of the conqueror who hailed from Dammartin-en-Goële), embedded in the base of an outside wall of the church at Walton on the Hill. Not clear how much of what we could see dated from the time of his decease in the 13th century. We also came across a very old lead font, from the same sort of time. An elaborate affair which looked as if it had had a troubled life, having been reduced in size at some point, a reduction which did serious damage to the decorations. There were also a few of the grave boards which we had first come across at Mickelham last October. And the roof was odd in that it contained some dormers; not something I recall seeing in a church roof before.

Took refreshment in the Fox & Hounds, once a village pub now an eatery. We happened to be armed with a whole lot of vouchers which meant that we could have two courses for £5 or three courses for £10 - a rather odd price structure. But even at £10 good value, only marred by the Greene King IPA being rather past its best. I suppose trouble is that the sort of retired folk like ourselves who mostly keep the place going do not drink enough of the stuff for it to be kept in good condition. Far too keen on the Pinot Grigiot.

Regulation shiny white plates of various shapes and sizes, all decorated with large zigzags of chocolate drizzle prior to adding whatever meal one was having. See http://www.thefoxandhounds.net/.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

 

Mentals

Talking to a mental nurse in TB the other night, I thought it proper to demonstrate my mental arithmetic and told him something about perfect numbers (see 3rd April). Rather to my surprise he retaliated with magic squares. That is to say a square of numbers of side N populated with the numbers from 1 to N*N in such a way that the row totals and column totals are all the same. I think he said diagonal totals as well but not too sure on that point.

He then went on to demonstrate an algorithm for constructing magic squares, said to be of his own invention and to work for any positive odd number N. It started by putting a 1 in the top middle cell. There was then a small number of rules about what to do next, the important one being that if the cell above and to the right was available, put the next number in that. It worked OK with N=3 and N=5. I have not checked the illustration above with N=7. But my first thought, a few Browns down, was that this was silly. Why should such an algorithm for moving around the square deliver such a result?

Back home, I could have written some Basic code to do the job in Excel - populating the square and then checking the result. Try it for a few large numbers and if that worked the algorithm would be sound. Not a mathematical proof but good enough for ordinary mortals. I, however, wanted to play the extraordinary mortal and wanted to prove it proper and I think I am starting to see how one might approach the problem. But some way off a working proof.

Then, more prosaically, we have been pondering here in Epsom about the mysteries of AV, something which I am vaguely for, thinking it likely that it will make for a modest increase in the number of Liberal MPs. Not that is something I am particularly keen on, but I do think that it would be proper. While we pondered, up pops Andrew Gilligan, who after rocking the ship of state with lurid revelations about the invention of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, went on to work for that bastion of Middle England, the DT. Google suggests that he is rather a strange bird; perhaps you have to be to be an investigating journalist. Yesterday though he seemed entirely benign with a fairly banal half page article about AV, mainly revolving around the antics of the Australians who already use such a system. He comes to the fairly comfortable conclusion that AV is entirely practical - in the sense that one can still count the votes - but will not make a huge amount of difference. But there was no analysis, just anecdote.

Now I would think that in the space of a day or so one could download the results of recent general elections in some suitable form and run various simulations of AV on them - which might well give one a more informed idea about what AV might do - this in a land where we do have a significant middle party, unlike the Australians. How many constituencies are there out there with a 6-4-2 split of the vote, with the dropped 2's giving the 4's the victory by a short head? (Which I think would be a reasonable outcome). Is there a hack out there with access to a research assistant with basic skills? Is the standard of debate going to rise in the interval between now and the referendum?

Will the reds and the blues move off their rather simplistic vision of AV being the end of parliamentary democracy as we know it - just because they are apt to loose a few seats and so be forced into showing the Liberals a bit of respect. Will they make any attempt at argument on principle?



Monday, April 11, 2011

 

Art house

Someone who is clearly into interior design in a big way, from http://walter-pall-bonsai.blogspot.com. Not sure that I would feel very comfortable in such a contrived & clean interior.

Better suited to a fancy car showroom, which is what closer inspection of the bonsai blog suggests that it is.

 

Hard to please

Prime Minister Blair used to irritate me by staying at the houses of his rich friends in warm foreign parts. Or perhaps people who thought that doing him such a favour would be repaid in some discrete way. Whereas Prime Minister Cameron irritates me by pretending to be an ordinary joe having to sit about in the airport lounge for hours waiting for his budget airline flight. Perhaps his security detail all have to dress up as ordinary joes too.

Point one, without going to the lengths of a Sarkosy and whacking out £150m on a A330-200, I do think it would be sensible for Cameron to have access to some sort of private plane when he travels.

Point two, Wilson used to troll off to the Scilly Isles where I think he was more or less left alone. Don't recall pictures of him buying ice creams in the papers. But he did not expect to be able to go to Ibiza and to be left alone there. Don't suppose that would be his idea of a holiday anyway. Perhaps Cameron could go to St Helena for a spot of whale watching.

Point three, prime ministers don't do holidays. They don't do spare time. They are on the job the whole time; that's what they signed up for and we voters expect nothing less in these troubling times. If Cameron doesn't want the job on that basis there are plenty who do.

An irritation nearer home has been a book about Greece by one David Brewer, which came warmly recommended by someone in the TLS and published by Tauris.

Point one, bad type faces and bad page layout.

Point two, inadequate maps. Plus they don't fold out. I won't hold this last against Tauris since virtually no-one offers the reader that convenience these days, despite the onward march of technology.

Point three, the writing style of a blogger rather than that of a historian. Text larded with all kinds of slightly relevant trivia.

On the other hand, the subject matter is interesting and I have learned that Greece is yet another place which never was a state in the modern sense before it was carved out of Turkey in the 19th century. Started out as a bunch of city states spread around the western end of the Mediterranean. City states which happened to have invented culture as we know it. Then came the western Romans, then the eastern Romans, then the French, then the Venetians and then the Turks. At no point in all this was there a state called Greece and the people who spoke a version of Greek and went to Greek church were spread all over the place, a bit like the Irish or the Jews. Getting from there to the Greece we have now was a painful and bloody business.

Saturday, April 09, 2011

 

Tescos

Off to Tesco's Leatherhead yesterday to check up where my complaint about flies in the red lentils had got to, the complaint having been made on 19th October last. Oh, said the helpful lady at customer services. You should have had a reply long ago, maybe 5 weeks or so after the original complaint. Do you have any record of the complaint? No, we wipe them at the beginning of the year. But you can phone head office she says, proffering a slip of paper on which she had written a telephone number. Maybe I will let it go this time, and next time the flies appear try the Sainsbury's customer service people.

Then off to the beer aisle where I find that the choice of bottled English beer is not that good. But manage to find a dozen or so Pedigree and make it up to a round 20 with Spitfire, having duly clocked the ticket which says 4 for £5. Approximately a third of the price at your average pub, although the Epsom Slug & Lettuce ought to be mentioned in dispatches for selling Bombardier at £2 or thereabouts; more or less Wetherspoons' prices.

I then thought to demonstrate to FIL the wonders of self checkout. Start feeding the bottles through. Have to wait for supervisor to authorise me. Feed a few more through and the thing seems to jam. Supervisor clears something. At which point we hit the weakness in the user interface: if you are buying lots of the same thing it is hard to tell from the display how many of them you have successfully registered. Well I did my best and after about six supervisor interventions I got to the point where I was invited to pay £18.78p. Not quite right I thought to myself. But near enough the £20 it should of been so perhaps I will not pester the supervisor yet again. March out of store with the 20 bottles. Back home, peruse the bill more carefully and find that I have only paid for 14 of them and that the bill should have been £25 not £20. Maybe the rather hot afternoon yesterday had knocked out the mental arithmetic circuits.

But I now start to feel a bit guilty of shop lifting. On the other hand Tesco would no doubt think I needed medical assistance if I tried to put the matter right with them. So I thought I would put it right by making a donation to charity.

Off to the internet and call up justgiving. Thought to give the money for pigs for Haiti but that one was oversubscribed so I settled for Motor Neurone Disease. And then the fun started. Not for the first time, I had awful trouble working through the donation process, mainly caused, I think, by my getting confused between my justgiving account and my paypal account. I almost gave up but in the end got around the problem by flashing the plastic. Only to discover after the event that instead of making a one off donation (plus Gift Aid) I had set up a monthly donation. Not what I meant to have done at all. But by now I can log into my justgiving account where I find that it is easy enough to turn the thing off. So I have left it in place for the moment.

Friday, April 08, 2011

 

Tweets

Nice bright morning so clearly a morning for the Common rather than Horton Lane. Maybe I would tweet another green finch, having had one confirmed sighting earlier in the week and several possibles last week. Something of which we had lots when we used to live in Hambledon (near Portsmouth) but which we do not see much of at all in Epsom.

As it turned out, there was a lot of bird song but not a lot of visible bird life and no green finches. Total tweet was one magpie, two jays, two blue tits, one blackbird and one wood pigeon. On the other hand there was a fine display of dandelions at the bottom of Wheelers Lane and I got to find out about an interesting specimen on Hook Road. A tree which has been growing slowly in a front garden there for years, for some time on a bamboo cage and now on a more substantial wooden cage, and the owner of which I got to meet for the first time. The thing turns out to be a weeping blue atlas cedar, the non-weeping version of which is a large native of the Atlas Mountains, large in the sense that it will grow into a big tree. Quite rare in this country as it is too slow growing for your average gardener, although the owner of this weeping specimen thought that there was a good non-weeping specimen in Kew Gardens. Maybe I will remember to look when I am next there - although I am a little put off by their moves, along with Wisley, in the direction of a theme park or adventure playground. I like my gardens sedate and full of plants, not attractions.

On the way to Hook Road, passed under the East Street railway bridge where I was rather alarmed to see a large circular saw which appeared to be being used to slice up the brick abutments - with trains running over and road traffic - including me - running under the meanwhile. Hopefully they know what they are doing.

Which reminds me that it is time to report on the first of the various DIY ventures nearer home this spring: the replacement of our garage doors. These wooden doors were probably more than thirty years old and were starting to look a bit rough, not having been painted during our tenure and parts of them being rotten beyond painting when we arrived.

Now the doors are of what seems to be an unusual design, at least around here where I know of just one other like it. In three panels which fold up against the left hand frame when you want to put the car in the garage. Or much more likely, if you just want to use the garage as a passage to the back garden, or get to the freezer, the right hand panel can be opened and shut like an ordinary door. An arrangement which works well for us but which no-one much else has emulated. Which also requires special ironmongery, inscribed 'HILLALDAM'. In the days before internet I had kept an eye out for the things, one important part having gone missing and which would need to be replaced when the doors were replaced as I would not have wanted to carry the bodge forward onto new doors. Without success. Then along came the internet, one types the magic word into Google and he comes up with a gang called Hillaldam Coburn who make a range of ironmongery for doors which they call Foldaway, mainly for commercial use but which looks to be pretty much what my garage doors were installed with. The only catch is that as a private citizen I am not allowed to buy this sort of ironmongery myself, I have to go through a special intermediary called Travis Perkins. But this is not too big a problem.

The much bigger problem is who is going to make and install the doors? I have all the gear needed to make them, including sash cramps and excluding power tools, except a decent joiner's bench. But I could probably manage and it would probably take me two or three weeks to make, paint and hang the things. Energy and enthusiasm not there. And what about the wonky back on a dodgy bench? Asked two or three people round about but no joy. It seems that while you might call yourself carpenter and joiner on your van that does not mean you want to actually join anything. Rather buy it in, mark the price up and install it. The people in TB thought I was being lazy, perhaps normal for a public servant, but perhaps time that I got off my butt and did some real work for once. Still no enthusiasm. Doors still hanging there getting slowly more disreputable. How long would it be before they actually fell apart?

Then more or less by chance we found someone who would make the things. A chap who called himself carpenter and joiner and was willing to do some joining. Quite a decent job, not perfect but perfectly serviceable. Took him something less than a couple of weeks all in. All in, probably a better job than I would have done.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

 

Health & Safety

It seems that the rules in South Dakota for when this sort of thing happens - a bit of trouble with an overheating axle bearing to be precise - are very precise. DO NOT MOVE THE TRAIN. And that whatever luminary wrote these particular rules made no allowance for the possibility that the train might be stuck on top of something which burns good.

Another bit of inanity was posted in yesterday's DT. Our great leader of Cameron was moved to build on the growing tradition of asinine apology, in this case for the fact that certain parts of the population of certain parts of the northern part of the Indian subcontinent do not get on with each other too good. OK, so the whole thing blew off on our watch, but the not getting on had been going on for centuries before we arrived. Hopefully not for centuries after we left.

Perhaps I should suggest to our leader that he instructs our men and women in France to agitate for an apology from the President of France for the odd but still deplorable fact that people with Anglo-Norman names are still slightly richer than people with Anglo-Saxon names. Or perhaps we should agitate with the King of Norway.

And then we came across a much smaller inanity posted on a board outside our local hospital. Long may it live! The post told us that smoking will not be permitted in the car park and will not be permitted inside cars inside the car park. Leaving aside the bossiness which we allow our servants to get away with (notice that they avoid the 'your car park' speak for these purposes), I object to the grammar. It is not as if the NHS has posted a smoking warden in a watch tower in the car park who issues permission, or not, on every occasion that someone thinks to have a drag. Giving permission is not an active and ongoing thing; permission has either been granted or withheld. So, on the assumption that the notice was talking about a current prohibition and not a future one (in which the average dragger would have little interest), I think the notice should have told us that smoking is not permitted in the car park and so on. Should I send a 'disgusted of Epsom' email to the CEO of the hospital? Someone whom I suspect of being a lady and earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to water her KPIs. I wonder what her spelling and grammar is like.

Nearer home I have been reading 'The Legacy' by Sybille Bedford. This is the lady who wrote my two volume biography of Aldous Huxley. She is also a lady whom my mother liked to read, probably by association with Aldous H, the light of her sort of youth. I also remember going to a dramatised version of 'The Legacy' with her in London; I recall it being rather dull and my being rather adolescent about it. So there is track record. But for the life of me I cannot remember why I thought to read her now, which this morning I find irritating.

We almost certainly have had a copy at some point, probably my mother's, but it was nowhere to be found. Probably a victim of one of our culls. Next step was Surrey Library where I could find nothing by the lady in their online catalogue, never mind 'The Legacy', and was reduced to getting a copy from Amazon. This despite the book being billed as a modern master piece, this being old posh speak for number one international best seller. And which I now find to be both funny and informative - a very good fit with my recent Winder read (March 18) on Germany. The only catch being that the book is about a complicated family with complicated names and I should have been drawing up a diagram as I went along. Maybe I shall do better second time around.

I close with a computing irritation. HSBC seem to have done something with the presentation of their mastercard bills which results in a lot of black oblongs on the printed page, burning up untold amounts of genuinely expensive HP toner. I am fairly sure that this is a new irritation. Do their test packs not include printing stuff out on the sort of cheap printers that their customers are likely to be using?

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

 

World's End

Up to yesterday we knew of just two world's ends: one near Hambledon in Hampshire and one near Chelsea in London. Quite by chance we have now discovered another behind the Chalk Lane Hotel - which does not do afternoon tea so is not really a proper hotel at all - in Epsom. World's End turns out to be the name given to the lane running between what was the back of Lord Rosebery's Durdans estate and the Woodcote estate. A bit of dead land colonised by an interesting mixture of trees, ponds, houses and occupants.

The wall illustrated is the back wall to the Rosebery estate and it is interesting because it is in large part made of chalk. It is also perforated by a very grand back gate, large enough to admit the large carts which used to bear the necessaries for Rosebery racing suppers. The lane itself is unadopted which means that there are DIY lamp posts rather than council ones, one of which is visible in the illustration.

We also came across some large and very fine sculptured hedges, hiding the houses which have now filled up the Woodcote estate from the garden of an elderly lodge near the Chalk Lane Hotel. Didn't seem right to peep over the wall and take a picture as the garden was occupied at the time. So no illustration on this occasion.

After this pastoral interlude, greeted this morning, while only just awake, by some strange beeping noises. Decided that it was not part of the dawn chorus. That it was probably not emanating from one of FIL's various contraptions, rather from something in the kitchen. Peered suspiciously at the cooker which is rather prone to beeping but it was not the right sort of beeping. Peered suspiciously at the central heating clock which might well be into beeping. Then BH suddenly thought that it might be the carbon monoxide detector palmed off on us (for forty quid or something) by some pushy gas maintenance man a few years ago. Climbed up onto the kitchen units and retrieved the offending detector which did indeed turn out to be the source of the beeping. It appeared to be a sealed unit with which we meddled at risk to life, limb and warranty. So took the thing onto the patio and administered three bashes with FIL's trusty club hammer. This was enough to reduce the thing to a reasonable number of pieces, including three perfectly ordinary batteries, presumably near end of life, thus initiating warning beeping. Plus a printed circuit board which looked impressively complicated. All now consigned to the regular dustbin. BH will look suitably vague if the gas maintenance man has the nerve to mention the thing again.

I close with a quote from the man (Boon of 25 February and other places) who writes about copies: ' ... and compare them to Chinese qi, Tibetan rLung, and Indian prana. Without claiming that these words all refer to the same thing, one can say that mimesis plays a crucial role in all such theories, since the search for the fundamental building blocks of reality is almost inevitably a mimetic one. This applies equally to traditional or religious models, to the reductionisms of contemporary neuroscience, and to the laws of physics and the quest for a theory of everything. These words serve to track or label qualities of flux, transfer ... '. Plenty more available.

PS: please do not confuse the Lord Rosebery who is the subject of the first part of this post with the seed potato of the same name. No relation at all.

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

 

Signs of spring

Off round the circuit yesterday morning, and a nice sunny spring morning it was too. Needing to pay a visit to Epsom Coaches it was convenient to do the circuit anti-clockwise rather than my usual clockwise, which gave me a different view on the stream down Longmead Road, with the result that I discovered a new-to-me flower. A whole nest of them growing on the banks of a bit of the stream, a conical compound flower, rather the size and shape of that of a horse chestnut, quite close to the ground and certainly not attached to a tree. Perusal of our Collins' guide revealed that it was the flower of the butterbur (white sort not creamy) which, if I keep an eye on it, will have grown very large, rhubarb like leaves by mid-summer.

Along the way we learn about the lesser and greater water parsnip. What relation they are to the land parsnip which one roasts was not clear.

Carrying on round Horton Lane greeted by a splendid display of spring flowers growing in the roadside verges. Lots of dandelions, daisies and others. Glowing in the mid-morning sun. So all was well and good until I spotted one of the grass cutting contractors in the distance on his sit-and-ride busily cutting them all down while he paid attention to whatever was being played into his ear plugs. My beef being that at a time when local councils are supposed to be making the deepest cuts for a generation they can still find the money to chop down the spring flowers. Perhaps it is the same chap who likes to chop down trees on Epsom Common on his days off? Or maybe it is a chappess.

Many years ago there was a chap called Leslie Chapman who, while grass warden of various air force bases, made the interesting discovery that if you mowed the grass just a couple of times a year there was a gain in amenity in that you had the grass and its flowers to look at and a considerable saving of money over mowing the grass twelve times a year. More recently the grass warden at Nonsuch Park has, independently, made the same discovery. So there is hope that Epsom Borough Council will get there in the end, perhaps when the contract they have let and which presently ties them into twelve mows a year come hell or high water comes up for renewal. (One of the many savings which can be attributed to the introduction of large professional buying departments and contracting out to local government).

Back home to the morning's perusal of a back number of the LRB, where I was intrigued by the volume of advertisements for psychoanalytic and creative writing training. Purveyors of such training must know by experience that the readers of LRB are apt to be into that sort of thing. As it happens one of the purveyors is a gang called CFAR (see http://www.cfar.org.uk/), from whom I used to take a magazine. And as it further happens, Mr. Google saw fit to append an advert. for this very same gang to an email I was looking at his morning. Clearly a chap of great knowledge & cunning.



Monday, April 04, 2011

 

Policiers

Now rather full of same having spent the night before last on a French one called 'Spiral' and last night on an British one called 'Lewis'. Interesting differences in tone, although it is hard to be sure how much of this is down to the lure of the novel and the half understood foreign rather than any real difference.

But, leaving that aside, the French seemed to be much more into flesh, both dead and alive. They portrayed their police as possibly well intentioned but a lot more violent towards suspects and others than would be permitted on the sort of English policier that I watch - that is to say, not the late 'Bill' and not very often 'Taggart'. They also take (illegal) drugs. There is more interest in character and less interest in plot - something which I also noticed in Simenon during my phase on him. Passing interest in the scenes and difficulties of modern life, but without coming across like New Labour, social workers or preachers on the preach. Much interest in corruption in government and the crude manoeuvrings of the ambitious in the workplace - something with which we hardly bother at all.

Whereas the British make the things more or less into costume dramas. Much focus and loving attention on quaint milieux, habits & settings, antique motor vehicles & steam engines and regional accents - in this case Oxford University. And, luckily for me, as I am a bit squeamish that way, neither focus nor loving attention on medical matters, contraptions or injections. (I have always thought that US producers were a bit keen on this sort of thing).

Characters usually not much more than cardboard cut outs. Straightforward people with well signalled characteristics, either good, bad or of class (or lack of it). Little visible violence although there is usually an abundances of corpses. Much focus and loving attention on complicated plots with lots of kippers and with the ambition of the producers seeming to be to ensure that the audience is more or less completely lost by the end. Perhaps this encourages repeat, income generating, viewings. Oddly, the episodic format, which I rather like, is more or less out now, outside of the world of soaps. Each 1 or 2 hour chunk is self contained, while the French still go in for lots of episodes. Perhaps the old-fashioned teaching methods over there deliver audiences with slightly longer attention spans than ours.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

 

Heritage time at Belsize Park

One of the older pictures which survived the cull at Tate Real was this 17th century view of Belsize House, I think looking south with the smoking chimneys of London in the distance to the left.

According to Goldschmidt & Howland, the estate agent for the area (http://www.g-h.co.uk/): "Perfectly positioned for Hampstead walks and West End shopping, the existence of “Belsize” remained an historical secret until the beginning of the 14th century, when Sir Roger le Brabazon reportedly left land in the area of Hampstead Manor to Westminster Abbey.

Almost 200 years later, the area was in the news again, this time following the construction of the original Belsize House. The property was reported to be most impressive, however it was the rural outlook that particularly pleased. By the early 1700s the picturesque grounds had been developed into something of an entertainment park, a cross between Las Vegas and the Ken County Fair – gambling, dancing and mud-wrestling set against the backdrop of an idyllic countrified setting. This resulted in riotous behaviour and traffic jams in Belsize Avenue, finally followed by a court order demanding its gates be closed for good".

I can't get a very good fix on the site, but my AZ suggests that there is a memorial statue to one S. Freud nearby. What would he have made of mud wrestling?

 

Disturbing thoughts

The first of these concerned what it might feel like to have a new face - something which has happened to one or two people in the last few years. We suppose, for the purpose of this thought, that the new face really is new & nice. That it is not all puffy, swollen and showing the joins around the various edges. For example, around the eyes. The thought then being that my face is an important part of my identity, certainly more important than a leg or an arm and perhaps more important than the interior of the head, and to abruptly switch from one to another would be rather unsettling to say the least. To the point where one might need counselling or trauma therapy. I then thought that it might help if one moved, away from people who had known one before and into a place where there were very few mirrors, where one could build a new life and get used to one's new face at a suitably sedate pace.

But even with state of the art, fourth millennium surgery there might be a few glitches: perhaps the nervous network which, having matured through one's childhood, once produced a characteristic grimace, would now produce something quite different. One would not have charge of one's face in quite the way that one did.

Now that computer imagery is up to the mark, clearly the subject for some sort of film: a psychological comedy perhaps?

The second thought sprang from the enthusiasm with which medicos thrust cameras into orifices these days. So one is lying there, in some discomfort, somewhat déshabillé, perhaps gazing at the interior of one's own stomach on a wide screen television, when all of a sudden all kinds of strange monsters swim into view. Perhaps the sort of strange monsters from British Columbia which were celebrate by S. J. Gould in 'Wonderful Life'. (Monstrous in the sense of strange that it is; these monsters were not very big). Perhaps some of the monsters would be talking to each other. A whole intelligent community peacefully going about their business in one's interior.

So, it being the day of strange thoughts, and having been prompted by Gould (see previous post), then thought to pay a visit to the Pre-Raphaelites at the Tate Real. Where we find that about a quarter of the place has been closed for a makeover and that all the older pictures, say up to around 1900, have been condensed down into what can be badly hung in one large room. Most of the rest of the place had been given over to more recent work of, to my mind, rather mixed quality and interest, despite all the helpful & educational labels explaining their place in the world of art. Stuff which I had thought had been safely confined in the converted power station down the river where it would not annoy me. Luckily, I only learned afterwards that I could even have seen an example of an arty pickled sheep. What an earth can Mr. Tate make of all the stuff that they are stuffing into his splendid bequest? OK, so the chap made his dosh flogging sugar from the colonies, but I bet that he was quite into Pre-Raphaelites and would not have approved of pickled sheep at all, however arty they were.

There were two results though. I found on this occasion that I rather liked the 'Ophelia' from Millais and the 'Beloved' from D. G. Rossetti. Both pictures which I had rather disliked in the past. And the second of which, my having forgotten its name, prompted me to ask Google, which, I find can put up lots of small pictures of pictures by a named artist, thus enabling one to put a name to a picture very quickly. Not sure how reliable it is though. Not exactly a catalogue raisonné, more the sweepings of the Internet.

We then moved onto higher mathematics in the form of perfect numbers and perfect quadrilaterals. A perfect quadrilateral being an oblong with integrally lengthed sides with the additional property that the area is the sum of the lengths of the four sides. Then we have a perfect number being an integer with the property that both one less than itself and one more than itself are the areas of perfect quadrilaterals. The point of interest being that the ancient Persians or some such, a gang without proper numbers never mind equations, knew all about such things. To the point that they knew that there was just one perfect number, viz 17. Which meant that the roofs of their better temples were always held up with 17 columns, with each column being assembled from 17 drums.

It is not too difficult to exhibit, by means of a picture of a right hyperbola (y=2x/(x-2)), the rather small number of perfect quadrilaterals, but how did the Persians do it? Did they make up squares with pebbles and try to rearrange the pebbles?

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