pumpkinstrokemarrow

On October 26th last, I reported, after some vicissitudes, buying a pair of Merrells.

Took a week or two to break in, but once broken in, very comfortable. Probably walked 25-30 miles a week in them in the four months since. My only complaint is that, along with other trainers, they are not bicycle toeclip friendly, being too fat at the toe. Part of the price one has to pay for serious foot comfort. So no good for my own bike, but fine for a Bullingdon, Bullingdons not having anything like toeclips.

But they are now showing signs of wear. They are a bit down at heel, although not revealing any foam filled voids as yet, and the composite complications which make up the inside of the right heel are now starting to unravel. Bits of black foam falling out, revealing sturdy plastic backplate. A U-shaped bit of milky coloured plastic something less than a millimetre thick. Still perfectly comfortable & wearable but we will see whether we get the six months that the chap in the shop thought was reasonable for trainers in daily use.

On the horticultural front and following the post of 13th February, I can now report that the lid free compost bin seems to be rat free. Compost sitting on top undisturbed and no signs of tunnelling works. So hopefully that problem has gone away.

The cuckoo pint and the celandines are up, although the latter are some way off flowering. Unlike the ones along the bottom of the stream banks along Longmead Road which have been in flower for a week or more. Furthermore, Longmead Road also sports some early dandelions, even the odd clock, the first I have seen this year. From which we deduce that the stream keeps the cold off a bit.

Following the post of 24th January (and the one before that of 8th May last), the scaffold did indeed rise to the top. Furthermore it was very neatly wrapped in a plastic wrapper labelled 'Erith Demolition' (http://www.erith.com/index.html: the enabling specialists, whatever that might mean. Apart from sounding generally helpful).

This all happened at a time when it was very cold - by our standards anyway - and the chaps from 'South London Roofing' agreed that it would be pretty cold up there first thing in the morning. Bad enough on the relatively sheltered roof of a suburban house, but once you are up there in the wind, no fun at all... I also find that 'South London Roofing' is not a very Google friendly name as a quick search reveals two web sites with that sort of name, neither of which appears to be the outfit in question. To be fair, I dare say there are a lot of roofing contractors in south London.

Now much warmer and the scaffold is falling again, this time taking the water tower with it. The amount of noise being made is quite modest; maybe the wrapper helps on that front. But they are consuming a fair amount of fuel and a fuel bowser is busy delivering some more on the other side.

Back at home, a minor panic with the printer. Yesterday afternoon it ran out of paper, as they do, but an ink warning light came on at the same time and declined to go off. Touch annoying, being fairly sure that I had replaced both ink cartridges - with the genuine HP ink, costing about as much for both cartridges as the printer is sold for - fairly recently. So this morning I thought that I would check the manual and further thought that it would be quicker to get it from the PC than nip upstairs and get the hard copy. Had clearly not thought to name the copy which I had downloaded some weeks previously, so was unable to find that. But onto Google and after a few minutes fighting my way through invitations from HP to buy things, I found my way to another copy of their manual and this time gave the download a sensible name so that I will be able to find it next time. At least that is the idea. I then read that the warning light was indeed about low ink - by which time it had gone off.

The bit of good news is that I now know how to estimate the ink levels. Bad news is that the black ink is indeed getting low. Which means I am spending a lot on ink. Maybe if I invested in a more expensive printer I would get through less of the stuff? Or which used something less expensive? Can I be bothered to investigate? Would it be simpler just to buy a few shares in HP?

After something of a gap, started reading McBride on 18th century Ireland again, thinking it best to go back to the beginning. Even reading the preface and introduction this time. But it still seems a reasonably balanced book; less need to bash the Brits at all points than there might have been 20 or 30 years ago. Maybe the hatchets really are rusting away, if not altogether buried, after nearly 100 years of independence. Presumably in 2023 or so there will be some monster celebrations, assuming that is that their public finances have recovered by then.

But I share a snippet of a different sort. It seems that the educated Irish were keen to be fully part of the Enlightenment Era, very strong across the water, to the point where they were lampooned in 'Gulliver's Travels' for their interest in the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers. There was also a chap called Molyneux who invented a very important puzzle which went like this. Suppose you taught a chap who had been blind from birth all about spheres and cubes. To the point where he could readily distinguish them by touch. Suppose then that there was a miracle (this is Ireland) and said chap could suddenly see. Would he be able to distinguish a sphere from a cube without touching them?

An interesting problem which, it seems, continues to vex the educated to this day. But I don't think the question admits of a simple answer, yes or no. I think it would all depend, both on the chap concerned and the way in which the experiment was conducted. The problem being compounded by not being able to repeat an experiment as the subject of the experiment would be damaged, perhaps changed would be a kinder word, by the experiment. I am reminded of the debates about nature and nurture. One used to have very noisy arguments about this, with some people taking what seem now like quite extreme positions - but I don't think that this question admits of a simple answer either. Generally speaking, both nature and nurture have their part in the final product,  or perhaps just some feature of interest in the final product, but I am not sure at all that it makes much sense to say that one part is bigger than another. Parts may well not be commensurate enough to make such comparisons valid.

Interesting stuff, unlike recent issues of the TLS in which I have not found a great deal of interest. The latest, however, did bring me my second snippet in an article by one Ari Kelman, a Californian historian, about perceptions of the American Civil War, nominally a review of four books about the same. I had not really thought before what a tricky subject this was. Partly because, at least until the 60's, many in the south got very dewy eyed about the gallant confederates, with very little regard for their slaves and the lack of progress made on that front despite and since emancipation. So, for example, the South Carolina chapter of the Civil War Centennial Commission saw fit to do some of its business in a segregated hotel in Charleston. Kelman also claims that the Woodrow Wilson of the 14 points, someone whom many nationalists from small countries in Europe got very dewy eyed about in the aftermath of the First World War, was a stalwart segregationist.

Last weekend we went to Hampton Court to inspect the progress of the spring bulbs and happened, for once in a while, to visit the Mantegnas in the Orangery - 'The Truimphs of Ceasar'. Paintings which I remember as being dingy to the point of invisibility but which on this occasion appeared to have been both cleaned and illuminated - to the point where one realised why the puff on the Hampton Court Palace web site might rate them as 'some of the most important Italian Renaissance paintings in the world', albeit a rather generous rating.

So I decided that a follow up was in order. First stop was six page essay on Mantegna in the always handy lives of the painters by Canaday, an essay which suggested that the man, more or less previously unknown to me, was certainly worth a look.Second stop was my 1937 catalogue of National Gallery holdings of Italian paintings which told me that they included three large and three small Mantegnas. So the place is clearly worth a visit.

Kicked off from Vauxhall and as I had a little time to spare before rendezvous, headed down river. First item of interest was the first white blossom of the year, whitethorn I thinks to myself. But investigation today suggests that it was neither whitethorn nor blackthorn, although I still think it looked rather like the latter, also known as sloe. Must take a closer look next time I pass it. Past the small queue into the aquarium and the rather larger queue onto the wheel - this on a February weekday, albeit fine. Onto Waterloo Bridge where I was very puzzled by the version of the Union Jack flying over Somerset House: as far as I could tell it was black and white with a white border, not the usual red, white and blue at all. Most improper on a state building but presumably something to do with London Fashion Week. Back up the other side of the river to deal with a bit of unfinished business from May 21st last year, the memorial to Samuel Plimsoll. A very proper memorial indeed, decorated, as was the custom of the time, by a near naked but curvy lady, dark brown in hue.

Up to a rather noisy Trafalgar Square via a bacon sandwich to inspect the rocking horse which had been erected the day before on the fourth plinth. The DT was rather kind about it, explaining how it was gently poking fun at the equestrian statues elsewhere in the square. I thought it was decent but dull & ugly. Not a very memorable bit of sculpture at all. Furthermore the designer had not had proper regard to how the thing sat on the plinth. Or perhaps he has some other plinth in mind when the year is up.

And so onto the Mantegnas which, as luck would have it, were all present and correct: an agony in the garden, a madonna and an entry - this last being very much in the same genre as the pictures at Hampton Court, the only catch being that my elderly catalogue describes it as the triumph of Scipio, whereas the label on the painting described it as the entry of the cult of Cybele.

Interesting stuff. The agony reminded me both of surrealists and pre-raphaelites. Rather poignant in its portrayal of Jesus, very private in his vision of his doom to come, while his closest associates snoozed and the soldiers headed his way, his capture just being a chore which did not touch them in any personal way at all. No need to interrupt one's conversation. In something of the same way, the earnestness of Cybele's priests was contrasted with the relaxed, witty and chatty stance of the waiting burgesses. Yes, they had turned out for this important event but there was no need for them to interrupt their conversations either. I was reminded of an incident in, I think, something by George Eliot, where she talks of the way that true believers have no problem with chatting and laughing in church while, perhaps, arranging the flowers, in a way that a solemn non-believer would think quite improper. The true believers can be truly relaxed in the midst of their beliefs. But I think I liked the madonna best - despite the ungainly child Jesus and the rather odd face given to the madonna. A very serene composition.

I note in passing the strap work on Cybele's cart, which I had not realised was a classical as well as a old English motif.

I did eventually finish the first pass of  'L'Art français de la guerre', noticed on 12th and 27th of December last, but ran out of puff on the second pass. Bookmark has been at page 63 for some time now, so not clear that I will ever get to checking all the words that I do not know - and perhaps making a bit more sense of the thing.

All in all, in so far as I made any sense of it, rather an odd book, odd in some of the same ways as the Goncourt winner of the year before, 'La Carte et le territoire'. The same rather chunky plot: there is a connecting thread but one would not be surprised to learn that some of the material had been published separately as short stories or something of that sort. The same tendency to focus on the plumbing side of life and on violence. Full frontal rather than soft focus. Perhaps either the French or the Goncourt jury go in for that sort of thing. Maybe we do; I do not read much contemporary English fiction.

Subject matter rather different though, being mainly to do with the various nasty wars the French were involved in between 1940 and 1960. I suppose the up side is that the French are facing up to the nastiness. Granted we had rather less nastiness (not being invaded certainly helped), but we do not care to dwell on it. On the other hand, we are rather fond of tales of mainly decent chaps doing deeds of derring-do behind the lines - 'The Guns of Navarone' would be a good example - and we are rather fond of fairly anodyne costume drama - 'Foyle's War' would be a good example there. We - Spielberg on D-day for example - might go in for full on violence, but not generally of the nasty sort, the sort of thing that colonial powers got into when trying to suppress determined nationalists. Proper soldiers fighting other proper soldiers in the open, in uniform, more or less keeping to the rules of war. But my knowledge of such matters is very patchy: maybe a proper survey of the field would reveal that French tastes in war film are not so very different from our own.

As it happens, one of the patches was picking up at the library for £1 a DVD called 'Glorious 39', a costume drama come thriller set in a tale about those in England who in 1939 and 1940 were all for cutting a deal with Hitler, a tale which I would like to think has little connection with what actually happened. OK, so there were such people about but they did not go in for murdering people with whom they disagreed. The film was a reasonable watch but nothing like as good a film as 'The Remains of the Day', a film set in a similar tale of appeasement.

PS: talking of checking words, we had occasion to check 'roan' last night. I had always rather vaguely thought that a roan was a horse which was some kind of red or brown in colour. But checking reveals that I have been wrong all these years. A roan is an animal in which the prevailing colour is thickly interspersed with another. So a strawberry roan is a roan in which the prevailing colour is strawberry. Generally but not necessarily a horse. Roan is also the name for a sort of cloth that used to be made in Rouen. Two other meanings listed.

Yesterday was the day of the Mutter-Previn master class at St Lukes to which BH and her SIL were slated to attend, so having delivered them there I had an excellent opportunity to take a stroll around that part of Hackney, and, as it turned out, Islington.

Started out by heading up the City Road towards the Angel, passing the Eagle (see November 25th) on the grounds that it was a touch early to be taking refreshment but then coming across the City Road Basin, a way station on the Regent's Canal. All looked fairly quite although there was the Islington Boat Club and there was the Islington answer to the duck house made famous by the furore over MPs' expenses, this duck house taking the form of a float with three tasteful twig nests on short pillars. Right background is a National Grid sub-station, presumably supplying power to an important part of London and provided with rather more serious protection than the rather larger sub-station we have at Chessington.

Branched north at this point to find myself out of Hackney into a rather posh part of Islington, old style terraces and a fair sprinkling of posh cars. I also came across a rather unusual Catholic church, St John's of Duncan Street. Great barn of a place, a little cold, with stations of the cross which appeared to be reproductions of renaissance pictures of the same. The organ was a mere 50 years old, but was large and impressive and was being used for practise. To give the Catholics their due though, their churches are nearly always open, which is more than can be said for the Anglicans.

Into Upper Street where I spotted a silver two seater, open topped Mercedes heading south, shiny silver rather than matt silver, possibly something from their SL range. A bit too obviously flash for a drug dealer so possibly a footballer from nearby Arsenal. Worked my way through to Chapel Market, still alive and well although the vegetable side of things was a bit thin. But there was a shop offering the necessaries for dealing with rats and mice and there was an eel and pie shop. There was also a well stocked hardware emporium, though not well stocked enough to have anything which would do as a suitcase handle.

Looped round into Pentonville Road, back down the City Road and this time into the Eagle, which while carrying a verse of 'pop goes the weasel' on the outside wall, was entirely gastro pub inside. One of the bar snacks was something called warmed edamame beans with sea salt (£2.50). I was not sufficiently curious to buy some to find out what they were and settled down to a decent pint of pride to the accompaniment of rather too loud music. This was followed by a quick spin up Shepherdess Walk which contained a mixture of what looked like old commercial property and sixties housing estates. There was also a Holy Trinity Church which was shut but did have a lot of perforated dwarf cyclamen behind the railings, perforations which we do not get on ours. What would be doing such a thing at this time of year? Round the other side was a war memorial board the like of which I had not seen before either. It was in three roughly equal parts, part 1 first war, part 2 second war and part 3 blitz. It was this last part I had never come across before, perhaps reflecting my sheltered life.

And so back to St Lukes to pick up the master classers, down through Whitecross Street where we were sorry to see that one of the last chunks of original terrace was up for demolition, and wound up the proceedings with tea and cake, rather dear, in the café in the Barbican Centre. But which gave me the necessary to stand all the way to Epsom, there being some problem with the trains at Waterloo. BH was stood up for twice and I was offered once.

Lastly, somewhere along the way I was approached by a beggar, that is to say a decently dressed older man who seemed a bit confused and told me some story about having mislaid his wallet in the nearby Moorfields Hospital and could he have 80p for the bus home. I gave him a fiver for which he very nicely called down the blessings of God upon me. For once I think I was touched by a worthy beggar - having too often over the years been touched by unworthies - or at least people down on their luck spinning you some yarn to get money out of you. One would not mind so much if they told you something closer to the truth.

It being pleasantly mild yesterday afternoon, clearly time for a stroll in London. Starting at Waterloo, the first stop, the chipper just past the Old Vic in Waterloo Road being shut, was the more exotic but equally excellent Mamuśka (http://mamuska.net/), a relaxed and informal Polish restaurant at the Elephant and Castle. I played safe with bigos, but some interesting shredded beetroot and some pierogi were added to broaden my horizons. On my next visit I shall be more adventurous.

Basic needs fulfilled, we decided it was time to head up towards St Pauls to inspect the reconstructed tower of St Augustine's, built into the newish St Paul's choir school, just to the east of the cathedral itself. On the way we took in the wardrobe dealer illustrated, the first time I have come across a business with this description, sadly shut. To be fair, I imagine the market in free standing wardrobes is relatively weak these days, probably confined to rooming houses. We, along with the rest of the world, have fitted cupboards in our bedrooms; ugly & space consuming but practical.

Very impressed by the reconstructed tower; a fine bit of repro. baroque. Also impressed this morning to think that a church so close to St Paul's proper was destroyed in the blitz. It must have been a near thing for St Paul's the Proper.

Not so impressed by the bash-the-bankers camp. It looked well past its sell by date. Just hanging on for form while they are ground down by the wheels of justice. This is not to say that they do not have a point but it is a pity they could not have found some less messy way to make it. It is perhaps a weakness of residential protests that they will attract a rather eclectic bunch of people.

Bussed it back to Robert Dyas in St Martin's Lane to see if they could help with something to rebuild the handle of one of my trusty Globetrotter suitcases (as featured in all the best television dramas set between 1930 and 1950). They were unable to help, so perhaps a visit to the giant one in Dorking is called for. Or maybe the fancy hardware store - some relation to Buck & Ryan, late of Tottenham Court Road - in Guildford. I shall report further in due course.

On the train home, thoughts returned to matters of public policy. First, I read somewhere that the Battersea Power Station site is presently worth, encumbered as it is with a lump of heritage, about £500m. This number would double if one was allowed to flatten the lump. No contest to my mind. Complete mystery why we persist with trying to find a use for this eyesore instead of cashing the site in to help with our disordered finances. Second, I also find it odd that we propose to save the money being spent on an army vehicle park near Tewkesbury by shipping all the vehicles to some place in Germany. Apart from anything else, what about the damage to our balance of payments? Third and last, I am wondering when the Canadians will cave in and start to sell some of their huge supplies of fresh water to the US. It is going to happen one day, wilderness & salmon rivers notwithstanding. Will it happen before the Germans restart their nuclear power programme?

It seems that I have become a trendy, having spent most of my life being an anti-trendy, which as all good therapists know is just a mirror image of a trendy; one has not really moved on. So perhaps instead of moving on I have just moved in.

The subject of these profundities being the baking of bread, with me being about to remove one of the loaves from my 102nd baking from the freezer against this evening's tea. Bread which is serviceable but not fancy: I have not turned out to have the knack, the patience or whatever else it takes to make really decent white bread. Noting in passing that even the Mill Road Co-op in Cambridge manages better white rolls than I can; at least they are decent fresh. I don't suppose they stand well but they didn't need to.

Trendy because there is lots of stuff in the weekend newspapers these days about the making of bread. About the whereabouts of artisan bakers. About the smells and joys of freshly ground flour from the watermill. So, last night I was invited to hunker down in front of the old Etonian cook on the box doing his stuff on bread. Possibly beamed live, direct from his riverine & organic bakehouse. An invitation which I declined. And then this morning I find myself reading in the Saturday DT about a metropolitan micro-bakery. A bakery which appears to be run by two teenagers out of their mother's kitchen and which, again, looks to be baking sour-dough bread which is a lot prettier than I can manage.

The tone of the article is very light and jolly; just the thing to glance at over breakfast. But one does wonder how much of the story is missing, how much drive and bother it actually takes to sell bread out of the family kitchen. They might only be baking one day a week but that can only be part of the story. Getting the ingredients, preparation, sales, marketing and publicity (of which this article by Mum is part) must account for a good bit more time. And what about the bizzies from the council? I thought there were rather fierce rules about what kind of a kitchen you can sell food out of.

I assume that the correspondence address in Buckingham Palace Road is not their own. They value their privacy that much. But whose is it?

On 25th October last I thought to keep the grey cells ticking over by taking a look at a DoE consultation document about a new approach to special educational needs and disability. This week it is the turn of a rather elderly Bank of England report about inflation. Or to be more precise, from August 2011.

It all started off rather well. I decided that I did not want to print the thing off myself, or get the local print shop to do it. Rather I would get the real thing. To which end I phone up the Bank and speak to a very helpful young man who for the very modest sum of £3 gets the thing in the post later that afternoon and with me not much more than 24 hours later. The thing turns out to be a handsomely designed and produced booklet of some 50 pages, only marred by the bottom corner of the contents page having been caught in a mangle at some point.

But then I start to read the thing, and the going starts to get heavier.

There were lots of charts. Some of them looked quite pretty, but many of them were more or less incomprehensible - and that to someone who was reasonably numerate and used to know something about economics. Presumably the intended audience is professional economists who might be expected to understand this sort of stuff - rather than the general reader or a politician. But I offer two comments. First, the things that the charts were displaying were quite often quite complicated artefacts, subject to all kinds of issues of data and definition. One was not at all confident that the authors of the report were not being too clever by half. Second, a lot of the charts when in for giving spread forecasts with probabilities attached to them. Which all sounded very scientific but left me with the feeling that the forecasters have not actually got a very strong grip on l'actualité.

I trundled fairly briskly through the five sections on money & asset prices, demand, output & supply, costs & prices and the prospects for inflation. And while I could understand quite a lot of it, taken a sentence at a time, not all that much sank in. I now know that credit for big companies is not too bad but that for small companies is still tight. That demand is pretty feeble. That there is a lot of slack in the employment market. And that the prices of imported commodities have risen a lot over the last year. And that is about it. No big picture.

So I do not pretend to understand the policy decision to hold the bank rate at 0.5% and the stock of asset purchases at £200 billion. As far as I could make out the high inflation was the product of high import prices, particularly high energy prices, somewhat mitigated by weak growth in wages. So how does the policy decision bear on high import prices?

But I do pretend to wonder whether there would not be room for a shorter and easier document which would be a bit more accessible? But which maintained the standard of design and production of this one. This is all important stuff and the more of us who understand something of what our leaders are up to the better.

Also whether our economic policy should revolve around keeping inflation at around 2%. Don't we have other problems at the moment? And anyway, if external forces push inflation up to around 10% what on earth can we do about it? Might it not be a good idea to drive down import led consumption with a bit of price inflation? A contribution towards living within our means?

A few days ago FIL got a bit impatient about the non-appearance of the new winter aconites and bought two small pots in flower to stick in the bed as a consolation prize. Which I did, planting them in a bit of the new bed which had been well turned over by worms or cats and discovering on the way that winter aconites have plenty of root, at least these two pots were well pot bound. I imagine that they had been brought on in some greenhouse in the Netherlands so it remains to be seen whether they survive the rest of our winter. Anyway, down the garden this morning to see how they were doing, which was OK. But found that at least 4 of the original planting are poking up through the grass. So maybe we are going to be OK after all.

Carried on down the garden to see how the new lid free compost heap was getting on. Where I find that there were still signs of rat activity, but much diminished. Last week's kitchen waste had not been dragged underground in the usual way, rather just sitting where I had put it. So this week's dumped on top of that and the remaining portion of lid at the back of the heap removed, a lump of it falling out in the process, so if we ever revert to lidded compost that will be another bit of DIY.

In the meantime I got around to noticing that the newly installed washing line on the rotary drier had indeed stretched a good bit, so got around to pulling it through and doing a more permanent job on the two joins which I had left done up with sisal on the last occasion (see January 19th). Found it much easier to install the bolted washers with a labourer (ie BH) to hold the line while I held the screwdrivers and so forth. With a bit if metal work skill it would have been easy enough to knock up a version of the washers with a couple of prongs to hold the line in place - but in the absence of skill where am I to find such things?

Last item on the morning's agenda was a second coat of Weathershield on the batten holding the plastic guarding the new lock for the garage (see February 10th).

All the while pondering about how tricky it is to be a bank more or less owned by the government. OK, so the bank lost billions and billions of pounds making, or at least buying up, dodgy loans on a large scale and that nice Bank of England has now printed billions and billions of pounds which have gone to repair the bank's balance sheet, rather than to fuel inflation or generate work. After which the government said 'no more casino banking! Stick to proper banking'. But now the government is whining because this same bank does not want to throw a small amount of money down the drain after the large amount of money it lost in the first place by lending it to the sort of small businesses which are very apt to go bust in the present climate.

Which gives rise to a bit of déjà vu. I remember when we first moved to Epsom in the late eighties, around the time when another property bubble burst, lots of small builders were very cheezed off because having been encouraged to borrow to grow for years, their banks were suddenly calling in lots of the resultant loans because of the hole in their balance sheets caused by some massive speculations in South America which had gone pear shaped. I wonder how right the memory is one this one? I think it would take longer to check than it is worth.

Lots of people apart from me have commented on the unfortunate trend away from equality, towards a world where the top 5% or whatever of people earn 100 times more than average people. We are told that the Swedes manage to incentivise their big people with a much more modest multiple of 10, a multiple which does much less to create envy, anger and crime in the lower reaches than ours.

So, as a former civil servant, I was sorry to read of large numbers of people who are effectively, if not formally, senior civil servants, arranging their affairs (usually by the creation of a nonce company, possibly in the name of their dog or some such) to avoid paying the tax that regular civil servants pay. People who are mostly getting paid in excess of £100,000, which even in these inflationary times is still a lot of money. I mourn the passing of the days when senior civil servants were in it to serve the public good, maybe collaring a bit of gong or other glory on the way, but not particularly in it for the money. The days when the civil service was a genteel place to work, somewhat removed from the rough and tumble of the world of business.

Particularly since it is far from clear to me that the coming of the rough and tumble over the past twenty years has done much to make the service more efficient. While it has certainly done much to inflate the salaries of those occupying the upper reaches and much to inflate the turnover of the management consultancies. Not to mention the way that senior staff brought it from the outside to populate the upper reaches are allowed to bring all their friends and relations in with them.

I allow that there is some force in the argument that it would be more healthy if pay and rations in public and private sectors were pretty much the same, job for job, and if there were more mobility between the two sectors. But jobs for life suited me - and I also think I gave good measure.

I seem to remember that when I was about 15 we used to read books like 'Coming of Age in Samoa' and have earnest and solemn discussions about the strange goings among the strange peoples on on the far side of the world. I also remember that in those far off days when we used to make boilers and ships and things, that there used to be quite boisterous rites of passages for apprentices learning about such things much closer to home, albeit up north. A bit later, one moved onto Lévi-Strauss, when the story changed but the earnest and solemn discussions did not.

All of which has now been put into perspective by my own rite of passage into senior citizenship. It turns out that there are three parts to this rite, all now completed in my case. First you get your pension, second you get your free bus pass (called a wrinkly in this part of England) and third you get to visit the endoscopy unit - from which I exhibit the wrist band, suitably redacted in the interests of data protection.

We celebrated with a visit to the Salvation Army Community Centre at CB1 2BD (http://www.camsa.org.uk/Centre/TheCentre.aspx), where for the modest sum of £3.25 I had what they called a small breakfast, complete with toast and tea. Given that the small breakfast involved sausage, bacon, egg, beans, mushroom and tomato, I am not sure that I would have managed a large breakfast. It was also equipped with plenty of people fully up for nattering, scrabble or whatever. A good facility.

PS: I ought to say that the endoscopy unit was not nearly as bad as it sounded. An excellent bit of medical technology which, for a bit of grief in the short term, can save a lot of grief in the long term. Be bold and use it!

This morning I was pleased to see that the road mending scene was alive and well. In the days before we were reformed by Mrs Thatcher, we used to make jokes about the number of council workmen needed to admire a hole in the road - while today I was amused to see a crowd of council contractors standing around their four vans and one dropside while one of their number did something to a traffic light up a ladder. One was, of course, entirely confident that the contractors were doing the job for a lot less than those dossers from the council used to cost.

And yesterday evening, the Café Rouge scene was also alive and well, fuelled according to the pleasant young staff there by overflow from today's Valentine celebrations. Very pleasant meal at a reasonable cost, made the more so by BH acquiring some voucher from Tesco which took 40% of the food part of the bill - which discount paid for a bottle of their reasonably priced and reasonable tasting wine. How was the 40% split between the two parties? We also found out that it was possible to turn off the rather hot radiator which we had been sat next to. An unexpected bonus, only flawed by our forgetting to turn it back on again when we left.

But it has to be said that the food fare was adequate rather than good. There was a basket of a variety of mostly inferior bread. The Ceasar Salad starter was fine but a little thin at the price. My Toulouse sausage was not as good as those knocked out under that name by the butcher in Manor Green Road. And the Tarte Tatin was much too brown and soggy for my taste, reinforcing my view that this particular outfit is not very good at puddings. But BH thought her mussels were good.

While this evening, the chicken soup was truly excellent. Boil up carcase of a large chicken with half a head of celery, three onions and three carrots for about six hours and strain to yield about 3 pints of stock. Add 2 ounces each of pearl barley and red lentils and simmer gently for about 50 minutes. Add some chopped chicken, chopped mushrooms and some cold sliced newish potatoes and away you go. Newish in the sense that they were the size and shape of new potatoes and even tasted vaguely like them - but no idea where they came from.

Bath smelt of swimming pools this morning. Must be one of those times when the water people shove a dose of chlorine through the (drinking) water to clear out a few bugs. Maybe they had a dirty leak somewhere.

While down the garden we have vermin. Readers may recall that the compost heap at the bottom of the garden has a lid on it. Not something we ever bothered with in Cambridge where the garden might almost have been in the country but we never had foxes digging into the compost, so there was no need to cover it with anything more grand than a bit of old carpet to stop the dry stuff at the top blowing about. Here in the suburbs however we have lots of foxes, not yet seen off by the shiny new beagle puppy next door.

And I like to put all our food waste on the compost on the grounds that one gets better compost that way. With the catch being that foxes like items like beef ribs, which they dig up, scattering bits and pieces far and wide in the process. So BH said no. It has to stop. So I put a lid on the compost heap, a lid which was last refurbished October 14th or so, 2010. And the lid did indeed keep the foxes out but it also created a haven for rats. It proved impossible to make the compost bin rat proof, so being fox proof, relatively warm, and full of food, from time to time one got rats. The evidence was mainly in the form of all the minced compost thrown onto the top of the heap from their tunnellings.

Last time this happened I got some rat poison, stuff that came in blue pellets and put it in a tray on the top of the compost. After a while we had one dead rat and no live rats. Problem went away for a bit. But I did get ticked off for using rat poison in the vicinity of cats, even though the cats could not get directly at the stuff.

And now we have rat or rats again. Much evidence of tunnelling and one morning there was even a sighting. First line of attack was to disrupt the tunnels by poking them out with a suitable pole, and quite big some of them seemed to be too. The thought was that rats are relatively clever animals and if I kept smashing up their tunnels, they would move on. But no luck. They seemed to keep going. Furthermore, they were probably eating all the red worms which make the compost tick, indeed, that might have been what they were tunnelling for.

Then I had another brain wave. Given that we are probably going to have foxes anyway, compost for them to poke around in or not, why not just take the lid off. The compost is quite soft and the foxes might dig the rats out in short order. And if not the foxes maybe the cats, cats not being too hot at digging but pretty good at sitting and waiting. So that is where the matter rests at the moment. Lid off.

I am also conscious that the council are now collecting food waste from the little green plastic buckets (with fox & rat secure lids) with which they have supplied us, although I have so far declined to play. But given that they are going to collect whether I play or not and that I understand that the food waste is put into some huge fermenter out of which they get some useful energy, rather than just blowing it into the air in the way of a compost heap, I suspect that it would actually be more eco overall if I were to play. This suspicion has yet to be translated into action but that day may soon dawn.

Nice and bright along Horton Lane this morning where a dozen or so large thrush like birds were flitting through the hedgerow trees alongside the golf club. Big things, bigger than a blackbird but smaller than a wood pigeon, grey brown on top and pale underneath, not hugely speckled as far as I could see. Back at the RSPB identification widget to decide that the they were probably missel thrushes. Only weak part of the identification being the absence of conspicuous speckles.

Further along the lane, I got onto wondering again about large numbers (see January 23rd). First thought was that one needed some rules. Rule 1, the number has to be a large positive integer. Rule 2, the number has to be a property of some object or situation. Rule 3, determination of the number has to be replicable. One might devise further sub-rules about what constituted admissible replication in this context. Different times? Different people? Different places?

An example of what I mean by rule 2 would be to say that the target number is the number of prime numbers less than 10^100. With a bit of effort one could come up with an upper bound for such a target number that one could compute in reasonable time. Which might prompt one to add a rule 4, that determination has to take less than some designated time. Or a rule 5, that the equipment required to make the determination should not cost more than so many dollars. Or pounds sterling if you prefer.

Another scientific number might the number of carbon atoms in a molecule of some known protein. Which would be OK but probably not very large. Or the number of base pairs in some particular chromosome. Which I suspect might be larger but not so OK. One cannot rely on a chromosome always having the same number of base pairs. Bits might get missed off or left off the ends.

More mundane, one might have a carefully made, sand tight box, perhaps made of stainless steel with welded and polished joins. One then fills it up with a coarse washed sand - the idea of the washing being to remove all the smaller grains - and counts the grains. If one allowed a grain of sand to the cubic millimetre, a cubic metre of sand would contain around 1,000 million of them. A respectable 10^9. But I suspect there would be difficulties at the margin. Some of the grains would fall apart during the counting process, or perhaps disintegrate more or less completely. And then,what sort of machine would be needed to count the grains in such a way that they could be counted again? How would you stop the odd grain lodging in the mechanism?

Next thought was Lego. You could have a sealed box containing some known number of Lego bricks, perhaps direct from the manufacturer. You then make a mound of such boxes. All you have to do is count the boxes. Could you be sure that among a million boxes - assuming you could lay your hands on that many - that there were not going to be some duds? A spot check of boxes would not really amount to determination. And how do you spot check boxes in large numbers while remaining sure that none of the bricks are leaking out? Remember all the fuss about hanging chads in the Florida part of a recent presidential election.

I think that one of the triggers for all this was reading in Yau about a breed of geometer who make a living by devising complex surfaces and then counting the number of different, infinite straight lines which can be placed on that surface. It seems that if you get the surface right, the number is both finite and large. And determinate. So perhaps the criterion for success should be informal rather than rule driven. The panel of judges just have to like the thing, to find the number and its determination attractive.

Perhaps set up a challenge cup with a prize of £100,000 every fourth year. The sort of thing that some slightly eccentric billionaire might put up the dosh for?

Last summer (July 7th) saw what these days is for me a fairly major bit of DIY in the form of two trestle tables. Yesterday saw the DIY bug bite again, but only in a very modest way.

A year or so ago, our garage lock was getting a bit sticky so I invested in a new padlock from Sterling (http://www.sterlinglocks.com/) at a shop in Garratt Lane. This, despite being described as weatherproof in their catalogue (see WPL149), has now succumbed to the weather and had become a real pain to open in the morning. Much fiddling around with key, hot water & three-in-one oil and with the situation not much improved by wrapping the lock up with a cloth blanket in a plastic bag.

So off to Travis Perkins down Longmead Road to see what they could do and for £11 we have a shiny new padlock from Squire - a firm with whom I have had more to do than with Sterling - graded 4 or 5 out of 12 by the home security police. I note in passing that the general shape of their keys has not changed over the years although the end you hold is now plastic clad rather than bare metal. Presumably plastic cladding is cheaper than metal.

Given the short life span of the Sterling lock, I decided it would be best if the lock was provided with a shelter, to keep the worst of the weather off if not the cold. Various options sprang to mind but eventually decided that a plastic flap over the lock was the thing. And so, a couple of hours later we have the fine flap illustrated, the flapping bit being cut from a bit of surplus oil cloth - this being my name for stuff which appears to be woven but which is faced with plastic. We can now sit indoors in the warm worrying about how long it will take the sun to rot the plastic; hopefully not before we have sourced something a bit more substantial. Perhaps a bit of black rubber sheeting? Would that look a bit gross against the black of the white door? But I nipped out for long enough today to put some Dulux Weathershield Gloss on top of the undercoat of the same name, illustrated. In my experience, very good stuff.

All of which has reminded me that working with your hands out of doors at this time of year is not much fun. All frozen and fumble.

Some while ago now we came across an amusing little wine in the Italian restaurant which occupies what used to be the King Billy in Ewell village, something called Greco di Tufo. Entirely new to us and we liked it a lot. So off to Alio's to see whether he could muster one among his large selection of Italian wine and he could. So so far so good. The catch was that he never had any again, despite mentioning it once or twice and I did not like to make a positive order of it. Then yesterday, while purchasing the tea time kippers from Waitrose I happened to notice that they carried the stuff, a brand called Terredora at around £13.50 a pop. Grabbed two bottles to find when I got home that I had got two varieties: one 'Terre degli Angeli' with a red decorative badge and the other 'Loggia della Serra' with a yellow decorative badge. Started with the angels and were entirely satisfied with the product. Kippers, said to be from Craster, also entirely satisfactory (simmered rather than grilled, which last we find a bit strong on the palette).

Which leaves me not buying kippers from fish men on stalls because, generally speaking, their kippers are not very nice at all and not buying this wine from the otherwise very handy Alio's because he does not stock it in a reliable way. While Waitrose scores on both points.

Generally speaking I do not get in a stew about the way that the big stores are smashing the small stores because I believe that the smashing arises from quality. They win because they have a more competitive offering. But I can get in a stew about worthies who moan about the death of the high street while doing their shopping, along with the rest of us, at the big edge of town supermarkets with their big car parks.

However, last week, one of the papers had a new to me argument about the issue. Which was that all the big supermarkets pay their people minimum wage, thus keeping the checkout price of grub down and corporate profits up. But a good proportion of these people are on benefits as the minimum wage is not a living wage for an adult with a family, so the taxpayer, that is to say you and me, are making up the difference while the supermarkets get to keep their profits, less the bit of corporation tax which they have not managed to avoid. It would be interesting to see the results of a survey which tested this theory. Is it dented by the fact that 99% of the workforce are either young or part-time housewives and therefore not deserving of a living wage?

If the theory true, it would all be a bit annoying. But I guess one's annoyance should be tempered by the thought that small independents probably pay their people even less than the big boys and are probably not able to offer anything like the same perks.

Today is the day of the 100th bake of bread since the start of the fad, something more than a year ago, last reported on on New Year's Day.

I did not mention that during our visit to Leatherhead on 1st February we were able to buy a centenary present for the bread fad from the furniture shop operated by the Queen Elizabeth Foundation (QEF) in Church Street. Now it so happens that we have been using a kitchen table which came from my parents and was probably bought in the early sixties of the last century. Fairly standard fare for the time: 3/8 inch birch ply top, topped with formica and edged with aluminium, beech frame and legs underneath. The top was around 2 feet by 3 feet but came with two folding flaps which, when deployed took the table to around 3 feet by 3 feet. Quite some time ago we decided that the hinges to the folding flaps were host to far too many bugs and removed them. Some time before that the formica had been damaged - quite a feat as the stuff is pretty robust - a lot more so than the stuff used to face up kitchen furniture these days. And the joints to the frame have been getting steadily looser, without my having been moved to do anything about it.

So in the QEF shop we had the luck to come across a very similar item, not quite as grand as our own but probably rather newer and certainly in rather better condition (illustrated). Chipboard top, topped with yellow check formica, a pattern which I understand might be called gingham if it was in an apron. Same sort of frame and legs, but with the variation that the legs are bolted into suitable recesses at each corner of the frame with butterfly nuts and bolts, rather than being mortised and tenoned. Corners reinforced by some special pieces of something which looks a lot harder than beech; maybe something tropical. An early form of flat pack. BH very taken with the thing and at £25 was clearly what we needed to mark the 100th bake.

We were not put off by signs of someone having fallen rather heavily on one corner, damaging the recess holding that leg; this was soon put right with a bit of G-cramped Unibond. Trial erection yesterday showed a further flaw in that not all the legs were of the same length, so it mattered which leg went where. Permuted two legs and all was well and we were able to install the table in time for the 100th bake. A lot more steady than the one it replaced too.

Details of the 100th bake to be found at the usual place, that is to say http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls. And in case you are wondering, the significance of the table is that that is where the bread is kneaded when it is not being air kneaded. Steadiness helpful if not essential.

I have commented before on the large café in Chessington Garden Centre, a business which profits from the large amount of car parking available and the relaxed attitude of planners towards diversification of agrictultural and horticultural premises. Today, we thought it time to carry the research a little further and try 'The Olive Tree', a rather smaller café, part of the rather more poshly located Ashtead Park Garden Centre, with the RAC golf club just along the road. The club might have been sold off to the Americans, but the place is still quite grand and it probably still needs a bit of pull to get to be a member. The only time I was there - as a guest you understand - I was quite impressed to find that they sold a very decent pint of Courage's Directors' bitter, in a comfortably shabby bar.

Back at the garden centre, 'The Olive Tree' occupied a large hanger, only approached by running the gauntlet of a lot of the sort of merchandise which does not grow, indoors or outdoors, the sort of thing that might house plants at Wisley or Kew and which must cost a fortune to heat in the sort of weather we are having at the moment. Quite a big operation with at least two people working there today, with not very much custom mid morning when we were there. There must be significant overheads to carry through the slack winter days.

One tea, one coffee and a bacon sarnee came to around £8, roughly double what I paid last week near St. Luke's. The bacon sarnee was quite presentable, although a little dry and a little light on bacon, at least compared with that from St Luke's. On the other hand it did come with a small heap of mixed salad leaves and a little bowl full of ketchups in sachets. Furthermore, they offered a selection of no less than 3 cakes - large gooey affairs looking for all the world like real sponge cakes - which were gluten free. Far more attractive selection of such things than I recall seeing. So we got a slice from one, complete with its proper little cake box, as an afternoon treat for FIL. All in all, an attractive and comfortable alternative to more traditional venues - and entirely suitable for ladies who lunch who may not care for these last.

Home to resume my interrupted reading of Hodgkin on the Anglo-Saxons, where I came across what I thought was an amusing snippet relating to the Arab conquests mentioned on 30th January. It seems that around the year 775 of the Christian era (AH 158) there was an important king of Mercia called Offa. Mercia at this time occupied a large proportion of what is now Middle England and ran to several mints, one of which minted for Offa a replica of a dinar minted for an Abbassid Caliph. The replica went so far as to reproduce - probably without any inkling of what it meant - the minter might have thought it was just decoration of some sort - the inscription which read 'There is no God but God, and Muhammed is his Prophet'. According to Hodgkin it is quite likely that some of these coins were included in the tribute that Offa thought it politic to offer the Pope. This last bit being the bit that caught my fancy: I wonder if the Pope knew what the inscription meant? Would he have cared that an important member of his flock was peddling such stuff around the world?

Grateful to the British Museum for their picture of this coin, but disappointed to find that they do not believe the yarn about the pope.

Yesterday was the day of our first concert of the Dorking Halls Concertgoers Society of the season, being down for the three string concerts from the Elias Quartet and possibly one other - our usual drill being to do the chamber but not the orchestral. A society which has provided us with convenient music for many years.

Yesterday, the offering was a touch lugubrious. Started easily enough with Beethoven Op. 18 No. 6, a relative of the Op. 18 No. 4 which I had a thing for for a bit, then moved into Britten Op. 94, a string quartet composed on his death bed and premièred by the Amadaeus Quartet shortly after his death. After the interval a couple of much more cheerful Purcell Fantasias then into Mendelssohn Op. 80, composed in the wake of the death of his beloved sister and shortly before his own death. So by 1700 the sky was looking a bit dodgy, the snow had begun to fall and 15cm was forecast for Heathrow. More than enough to bring our world to a grinding halt. Was it a good plan to trust ourselves to the roads of south Surrey on such a night? After some humming and hawing we decided that it was and boldly set off for Dorking, getting there OK in only slightly longer than the usual time, but to wonder about what the car park was going to be like a few hours later. But we carried on into the hall, rather than turning around then and there.

To find that the audience, as well as being its usual old was decidedly thin. I guess old age does not go well with hilly country roads in the snow. They do, after all, quite often get blocked when it snows. So we felt a bit sorry for the Elias Quartet, whom we had heard to packed houses at the Wigmore Hall and St. Luke's last year, but who last night were playing to a thinnish house in an echoey, old and decidedly provincial hall. But they rose to the occasion and put on a stirring show (BH's taste for modern music continues to surprise), only slightly marred by the gentle hum of some heating equipment high up in the roof. I guess being able to bash it out in such circumstances is all part of the training of an entertainer.

In the interval we puzzled about the curtains to the main stage, not being used on the occasion. Whacking great blue velvet things, but which managed to hang well out of vertical, with the foot of the curtain perhaps a metre in front of the seven metre drop. Furthermore, the curtain fell in nicely rounded and even bulges, bulges for which I am sure there is a curtain makers technical term, unknown to me. How was it all done? We were a bit shy about climbing up onto the stage to take a peek so we never found out. Maybe if we go along to one of their book fairs we will be able to take a less conspicuous peek at the mechanism.

After the show out to the car park where a fair amount of snow was lying around. Fortunately the car is relatively new, started first time (we have had a lot of starting problems with cars over the years. Must be something we do)  and after a short while were rolling down the unusually quiet A24 back to Epsom at a steady 20mph in reasonably heavy snow. Epsom Town turned out to be very quiet for a Saturday night. But all went well until we got into our own estate and thought to try the brakes - to be greeted by all kinds of unpleasant noises and some rather unusual braking action. Presumably the brakes were full of ice or something. So gingerly down the road and rather relieved to find that we could get the car up onto our drive - the gentle slope involved has been too much in snow in the past.

PS: checking the accounts with the Charity Commissioners this morning, I see that the Society is now running at a substantial loss, a loss which I would not think was sustainable for more than a few more years. And they are squeezed between the need to contain costs and the need to buy attractive performers. It would be a great pity if they folded.

Season restarted yesterday with some Mendelssohn - two of the four pieces for string quartet Op. 81 - and the Brahms Clarinet Quintet from members of the Nash Ensemble. Never knowingly heard the Mendelssohn before but that was good and the justly popular clarinet quintet even more so. Although, to carp, I did think that the strings could have turned up the volume at times, being a bit overwhelmed by the clarinet. The thing is supposed to be an ensemble piece, not a clarinet piece with some string trimmings while the clarinettist catches his breath.

Two nice touches. First, the radio 3 announcer cut right down on the warm up talk. Last season they were in the habit of giving us a rather gushing rehash of the programme notes, which I found a bit irritating: if they want that sort of thing for the radio broadcast, the things are not live and they can always add that later. Particularly given that I believe they are not above tinkering with the tape of the performed music should that be necessary for some reason or another. Second the chairs we were sitting on appeared to have been supplied by a gang called Amadaeus - and subsequent perusal of http://www.amadeus-equipment.co.uk/ suggests that this was indeed the case. Presumably a wholesaler rather than a manufacturer. Hard to see a big enough specialised market for musical bums on seats to justify specialised manufacture.

St Luke's - or at least those parts of Old Street and Whitecross Street - boasts an enormous numbers of cafés and luncheon food caravans. Lots of oriental but a respectable sprinkling of more western fare, egg and chips sort of thing. One is supposed to use the place with the most customers, but I was in something of a hurry, settled for the place with the least and I was served with a perfectly decent bacon sandwich and a mug of tea in no time at all. Very reasonable it was too.

Got home to read a moan in the DT about all the people who have got a criminal record according to the criminal record computer who should not have. Once again, the DT completely fails to recognise that in an operation of this sort there are going to be mistakes, particularly since we have never been taken (here in the UK) with the idea of a national identity scheme. The complaint should not be that there are mistakes, rather about process. Could the guardians of the tablets have better processes for getting the data on and better processes for redress when the inevitable mistakes come to light? Should there be regular quality checks by independents (bearing in mind that such checks are pay day for expensive consultants)? I don't know whether one is allowed to see one's own record if one suspects that it is either wrong or that it should not be there - but it seems reasonable that one should be allowed so to do.

Last week, for once in a while, a visit to Leatherhead, an old Surrey town with a poor reputation in Epsom. Something to do with relocation of bombed out east enders after the second war, but that does not stop the place coming somewhere near the top of the heap of the price of house league.

Despite the remodelling of the town centre and the odd show off pile overlooking the Mole, it still retains something of the small country town about it, with little odd alleys containing little odd cottages. The church was also an odd looking place, but shut during the winter apart from divine service, so we did not get to see the inside. But on the outside one had a yew avenue, a large grave yard, a stone slab roofed lych gate, a view of the nave dormers (unusual feature in a church, but one which I have seen somewhere else in the not too distant past. Wilds of Surrey or wilds of Romney Marsh) and a very battered beech tree. Not clear what it had done to deserve being cut about in the way that it had.

Across the road there was an interesting relic of civic spirit in past times in the form of the Leatherhead Institute (http://www.leatherheadca.org.uk/), containing, inter alia, the first library that I have come across for ages that is neither serious nor public and carrying much the same sort of stuff as one might have found in a Boots library back in the 60's of the last century. Plenty of senior activity available: standing up keep fit, sitting down keep fit, bridge and all the rest of it.

Feeling economical, we thought to take lunch in the Wetherspoons, but having taken up seats changed our minds and went to the Italian next door (http://www.vecchia-trattoria.co.uk/), a comfortable place where the staff, unusually, made no attempt whatsoever to put on Italian accents, this despite the Italian village décor. Very reasonable - and reasonably priced - meal - and if the four quarters pizza was a touch spicy and salty for my taste, they did a very nice tiramisu, described as home made. I liked it for being on the dry side of damp and firm, which I prefer to the soggier versions. But you do need to strike a balance; there is some point in the sogginess, so the trick is not to take it too far.

PS: magpie activity in the back of the back garden this morning. Plenty of them but, for some reason, today they are not sitting in pairs. Clearly a singles event.