pumpkinstrokemarrow

Hampton Court now completed, only let down, for once, by the quality of the image provided by Nokia. It usually deals with bright light OK; clearly not so good in poor light. Unfortunately, by the time I found this out, the puzzle had been deconstructed.

A puzzle which was regular in the first way but not in the second, this last probably reflecting the large proportion of pieces which did not exhibit the nicely tiling prong-hole-prong-hole configuration. The largest proportion that I recall coming across, which leads one to wonder how many jigcutters an outfit like Falcon has. Do they, for example, use the same jigcutter for all the jigsaws of a given image? All the jigsaws of a given genre? In any event, it made assembly considerably easier. For most sections it was worth while to sort the pieces by configuration then play spot the prong or hole of interesting shape.

Started with the bottom edge, then the fence across the top of the grass. Then the daffodils, then the grass. Then the remainder of the edge, then the skyline. By the time the skyline was finished I had made several vertical inroads into the frontage proper and was able to finish that off quite quickly. Then right hand tree, then left hand tree, of quite different texture from that on the right hand. Then sky between white and blue, then fill in the remaining holes. The combination of sky colouring and piece irregularity making the sky a good deal easier than is sometimes the case.

This out the way, felt the need to raise my game, so started on the LRB. Bought on the strength of the rather good penultimate issue and the not so good ultimate issue. Perhaps a mistake as there was not much of interest to yours truly. Quite a lot of pages given over to a translation of a book by Carlo Ginzburg, of whom I had not previously heard. So far the number of pages and the impression of the content one gets from a metre away have discouraged me from getting started. A notice of a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi which I shall read given the family connection. Another of a biography of Henry VII, the reviewer of which gets a brownie point because he shares my dislike of people slipping into estuary vernacular in what are supposed to be serious books, presumably either in the interests of accessibility or street cred.. Not sure about the first and the second is certainly not a proper aspiration for a historian. Followed by a longish piece about Ms. M.Monroe, mainly concerned to tell us that the lady was a serious actress who got cheezed by always being treated as a bimbo. I believe that Sigourney Weaver is also sometimes cheezed for the same reason - but with the difference that she went to a posh school while Ms. M was a gutter job. Then down hill all the way.

Which led me on to wonder about the morals of Mr. Gotcha Loophole, QC, a barrister who specialises in getting rich people off offences they have clearly committed in spirit. Gotcha points out that all laws are written by humans and that humans err: so there will be lacunae, infelicities and loopholes. Which is certainly true, not least because our esteemed governments have become far keener on pushing through shed loads of legislation than on bothering to get it right. So apart from getting rich, his mission is to contribute to public welfare by carrying out fighting patrols on the obscurer frontiers of the law; a legal version of the badlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And given that he is patrolling from the legal side, we can hardly stop the man. But I do not care for him or what he does and I would not care to earn a crust in such a way myself. Once in a while for a lark perhaps, to liven up the dull procession of open and shut motoring cases, but not for a living.