pumpkinstrokemarrow

After fancy food at Tower Bridge, returned home to a simple supper of macaroni. Boil 4 ounces of macaroni with 2 ounces of celery, chopped across the stalks, for 10 minutes or so. Drain off the water, sprinkle dried basil and grated parmesan and serve. Far too simple to appear on any restaurant menu.

Followed yesterday lunch time by baked cod from the man from Hastings, served with boiled potatoes and crinkly cabbage. Cod not that good, don't think it helps being summer, but better than the mackerel from Tower Bridge. Perhaps food is like clothes: you have to pay a great deal for simplicity done well. There is nowhere to hide, so it has to be absolutely spot on. On the other hand we failed at Il Ponte by aiming too high on the menu. We clearly need more practise at sussing out menus.

Following my post of 16th February, I can now report two supplementary rites of passage. First, I have obtained one of those natty little plastic contraptions to help me keep track of what pill I have taken when. Second, I have paid a visit to a podiatrist (http://www.maryrigal.co.uk/), not being able to reach my increasingly dodgy toe nails any more, at least for the present. An establishment which I have been passing several times a week for many weeks now and which I have finally made a very satisfactory contact with. Shy at my age!

But I am sure there is a business opportunity in the plastic contraptions. One can already buy fancy little pill pots, perhaps in the 'Crown Derby' range, to hold pills. But such pots are just that, with all one's pills mixed up in the one pot, not good for those with ageing grey cells. There must be a market out there for fancy pill pots, with separation into morning and afternoon and into days of the week, along the lines of the plastic contraptions, but made out of porcelain or silver gilt rather than plastic. Decorated with cupids, swags or shepherdesses according to taste. Show off items to be kept on an occasional table rather than hidden away in the bathroom as if taking drugs was something to be ashamed of. Maybe with compartments for recreational drugs as well as compartments for the other sort. Perhaps I could persuade the Rolling Stones, people of an appropriate age, inclination and image, to do a promotion? How much would it cost to get the Chinese to knock up a few samples for me? Would they think it such a splendid idea that they would do it for free?

On second thoughts, maybe I should approach Damien Hirst, the doyen of Brit Crud and strong player in the luxury end of the tack market. There would be an excellent fit with his pill colour dot fetish. Maybe a box made out of crytallized body parts garnished with sapphires? Or perhaps body parts enshrined in sheets of perspex, rather in the way of better class souvenirs?

Then in years to come, one could go to special exhibitions of the things at the V&A or the Wallace Collection.

Following an interesting report in 'Private Eye', we though we would go and take a peek at the Bermondsey crack house, which turned out to tastefully housed in what looked rather like a repurposed electricity substation and disguised by the addition of an entirely ordinary family car.

In the course of our expedition we passed two rather grand looking Catholic churches, the particularly grand one at dock head (http://www.dockhead.com/index.html), but both, unusually for Catholic churches, firmly shut. But then, it was both lunch time and Bermondsey, not that far from the badlands of Peckham.

Lunch at the Tower Bridge Café ( http://www.lepontdelatour.co.uk/ ), a rather splendid conversion job in a former warehouse or some such. Smart décor and smart service from genuine Frenchies. No eastern Europeans here, not front of house at least. BH very happy with her dressed Dorset crab, rather liking having the thing reduced to little piles of meat, rather than having to fight one's way through a whole lot of body armour. I had a grilled mackerel; not as good as a fresh grilled mackeral - caught that morning sort of thing - but not bad for a restaurant and nicely presented. Washed down with a rather expensive but rather good bottle of Sancerre - a wine on which in these low beer days I am becoming keen. Two nifty deserts: English rhubarb tart for me and a floating island for BH, something with which she was familiar with from recipe books but with which she had never been up close and personal.

Best bread I have had in a restaurant for a long time. Thin diagonal slices of white flute, not charged despite our having two goes at it.

I was also very impressed in these nannified days to be offered a rather posh selection of cigars along with the coffee, and I was assured that I could smoke one on the terrace. I was not so sure, with none of the then present occupants of the terrace appearing to be smokers. Plus I thought it a bad day to resume the habit. Maybe I will fall on the next occasion.

As one might expect in a new conversion job, there was a nicely equipped DT. But I entirely failed to manage the entry protocol, mistaking the large buttons which were supposed to be used to warn the thing of one's approach in a wheel chair and which I mistook for door handles. I had to be warned off the ladies toilet.

After lunch we inspected the creek (fomerly Bermondsey dock, of the dock head aforementioned) first noticed late on the afternoon of around March 13th when it looked very forbidding and Dickensian. In yesterday's bright sunlight it seemed much more benign, not Dickensian at all. Although it did turn out to be a rather Dickensian area with sundry streets and schools named for him or his books. Not to mention Marshalsea itself.

Eleven days after my first notice, have now finished 'The Hare with the Amber Eyes' and very good it was too; it earns the various accolades which decorate the covers of this Vintage edition. Pleased that I have a signed copy (something which I am usually a bit sniffy about), sorry that I do not have a hardback with higher grade illustrations. But no doubt a charity shop will yield one before too long and in the meantime one can always go to http://www.edmunddewaal.com/ - where I find I like the man's book better than his pots. At least the ones which I have seen so far.

A fascinating story woven around a banking house, founded by a Russian Jew in Odessa, and the fine collection of netsuke built on some of the proceeds of said banking. One thread is the family, spreading through Europe and beyond, swept by the harsh tide of history. Another is a fascination with objects and their history and their possession. And then there is the fascination of a family which had entertained the likes of Proust and Renoir to tea. One member of which furnished some of the ingredients for Swann - although I wonder now whether balance should have included the Baron de Charlus here. The bad days for Jews in Austria, bad days which persisted after the second world war. I was reminded of a talk I once had about where duty lay for a person who had bought something valuable for cheap, in good faith, but which turned out to have been looted or stolen from a Jew at some point in its recent past. How odd it must be to stand in the street, look up at some grand building in Vienna and think that this grand building, now home to some banal company or other, was once the family home of some of one's great grandparents. What used to be a maid's room in the attic is now home to the first aid supplies mandated by the health and safety people.

The thought that anger with bankers is not new. If one had been ruined by the great depression, one might well be angry in the huge house of a rich banker stuffed with huge expense: antique furniture, old masters, gold pots, the lot. Wealth which had been sucked from the blood of honest workers. An agitator would not have to work that hard to work up my anger and outrage.

A regular treasure trove of insights into all kinds of odd and unexpected things. The hare might be the thread but there is a lot of ancillary material sticking to that thread.

Last week a further visit to http://www.ilponte.co.uk/ where we find that they have revived the tradition of the dinner dance, a formula which used to be common in country hotels - such as the one at end of Collumpton as you head out towards Exeter - when I was little and which was also adapted for use in night clubs both shiny and sleazy. So, the last Friday of each month (or some such) a bit of space is cleared in the middle of the restaurant for band and dancing and the bright and not so young gather in their finery to dance the night away - and some of the finery was very fine & skimpy too. Some male customers who were smartly turned out but who were not very comfortable being in a building and preferred to smoke outside; maybe more used to caravans. The result of all of which was that we had to take an outside table, a little cool but which gave a ringside view of the Friday evening goings on in Ebbisham Square. And quite a lot of it there was too, for example the contents of the nearby fitness club being turned out in their towels on account of a fire alarm. One can only suppose that they were not paying enough subs. to have someone on duty, on the spot, to turn the thing off. The only down side was that we made the mistake of going for food at the fancy end of their menu, without thinking that the kitchen would be struggling with the numbers. Stick to pizza and such like next time.

Two brushes with the bureaucrats today.

The first, with Halifax, did not start too well but finished well. Start bad because we found that we could not fire up a new ISA for a new customer, that is to say FIL, without making an appointment and coming back in a few days. End good because although we were seen 13 minutes late, the young lady who saw us, despite quite possibly having been to a local comprehensive school, was very pleasant and knew how to deal with the older customer, explaining clearly what she was doing while making appropriate responses to senior short stories. A credit to Halifax.

The second, with NS & I, the people who sell premium bonds, was online, tiresome and unfinished, this last despite it having taken maybe 90 minutes to make three straightforward applications. Whole new lot of security credentials to remember. Not allowed to use my usual password because it did not contain a special character (with the computer failing my first attempt at a special character because it was one of a dozen or so excluded special characters which they do not tell you about until you try and use one) and I now wait for them to send me some stuff through the post for signature and return. NULL & VOID if I fail to turn the things around within 10 days or something. But I wonder how quickly they will draw down the monies from our accounts: already, maybe?

Once we get through this first round, we may then try connecting BH's ancient, old-speak premium bonds with the new-speak one. Maybe I will score in time for her next birthday. Maybe I will give up the unequal struggle.

I suppose in fairness to NS & I, one might say that they have to keep track of zillions of penny packet accounts  coming in plenty of different flavours and many of which have been inactive for years. But are they so different from a retail bank in that regard? Also that it is hot afternoon and once it all starts going wrong, the temper gets a bit short and then more starts going wrong. Need to take many deep breaths to keep vaguely on course.

It has been a good weekend for brickabrack.

Started off at Bourne Hall Library where I acquired two films and two books for the grand total of £3.27p. A good haul, with, for some reason, Bourne Hall Library offering far higher grade cast offs than Epsom Library. Half the haul was consumed last night. First, a German entertainment called 'Eden', a romantic tale involving a very talented, very fat but more or less asexual cook. Kept us happily engaged for a couple of hours with little recourse to either flesh or blood. Good sound track with real music and a good proportion of silence. All in all, excellent value for money. Second, a Chinese entertainment called 'UFI in Her Eyes', in the form of book tricked out to mimic the sort of file secret policemen might keep on a subject. A rather good bit of book production from Random House but flying the (at least once upon a time) very respectable Chatto & Windus flag. A cautionary tale, breezily covering some of the same ground as 'Country Driving' noticed on March 1st last year. Very good, if not quite excellent, value for money.

Then today was the first car booter of my season at Hook Road Arena. Spent rather more than at Bourne Hall, coming away with a fine wooden walking stick of the right length and made with the approved bent wood. Plus a large rubber ferrule. At £2, vastly superior value for money (VFM) to the new one sourced from Worcester Park. Then there were three 500 piece jigsaws, not all of recognised brand but one cannot be too picky at 10p each; a huge undercut of what seems to be the going rate at our local charity shops. Outing completed with 3lbs of quite respectable cherries, these at the full rate of £2.20 the pound.

By coincidence, I was moved this morning to take a look at my three volumes of statistical hubris called the CODOT classification, dating from the seventies of the last century and sourced at a previous Hook Road car booter. An enumeration of some 3,500 occupations, intended to support the central management of the UK labour market and the production of statistics thereabout, an enumeration which presumably drowned in the rapidly evolving labour market and the shrinking role for central management. I had been moved by reading an article in the TLS about what some might regard as a thousand pages of psychiatric hubris, the new and enlarged edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V (or DSM-5 for the less pretentious)) from the American Psychiatric Association. I wonder in passing whether this is a US association which by its name extends its jurisdiction to Canada, Central and South America? Not to mention the Falkland Islands and the Galapagos Islands.

The article has many words on how this latest edition seems to be in thrall to the pharmaceutical industry, the psychoanalytic industry being in decline. It notes in passing that the psychoanalytic people were not all that interested in this DSM sort of thing at all, whole person people before their time - with the result that the DSM committees were packed with chemical cure rather than talking cure people.

It explains how Big Pharma wants a stable classification to support its research, development and marketing activities, none of which is very easy if you do not have lots of handy pigeon holes into which people can be shoved after filling out a few pages of questionnaire. They want to be able to say if you have a patient with diagnosis A give him (or her) lots of our shiny new drug B - not forgetting that some of these shiny new drugs are, indeed, shiny. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Notice also that Big Pharma has plenty of incentive to bring all kinds of behaviours into the psychiatric net inside which chargeable treatment is applicable; behaviours which would once have been contained or managed by society at large more or less for free.

Along the way, it seems that in order to get the insurance money needed to pay for mental health treatment, you have to have been diagnosed to a DSM recognised disorder which is included in whatever insurance you happen to be carrying about. DSM brings order to the otherwise messy world of mental disorder insurance. For which purposes it is also good if diagnosis is repeatable. That is to say if psychiatrist A diagnoses disorder B in person C at time D, it is good if psychiatrist E comes to the same diagnosis B at time F where F is not that much bigger than D. All of which has conspired to encourage a tick box job on symptoms.

The trouble seems to be that mental disorder is a complicated beast, not presently reducible to a hierarchical classification which reflects facts on the ground in a scientifically or medically satisfactory way. We do not yet know enough about mental processes or disorders to be able to do this - and it may yet turn out that the brain is sufficiently plastic to make cut and dried diagnoses at the DSM level of detail inappropriate and unhelpful.

A different sort of trouble seems to be that one has to pay to look at DSM IV TR, this being the current version. It might have been mainly produced by people on the public payroll but the public does not get to look at it without flashing the plastic again. See, for example, http://www.appi.org/Pages/default.aspx.

Messy old world out there.

The other day back to St. Luke's for more Bach, fortified by the now traditional bacon sandwich from Whitecross Street. The Bach was brought to us by a personable Iranian, Mahan Esfahani on a handsome harpsicord, a harpsicord which was sufficiently grand to have a delicately painted soundboard, with the delicate painting invisible unless you were up close and personal with the thing. We got a sonata, then some preludes and fugues from the well tempered clavier book and lastly a partita. Hearing them, one wondered how one could ever play such stuff on a piano - but we shall find out next week when we will hear just that.

Afterwards, on the way to the local Wetherspoons, nearly knocked down by rushing youth, which reminded us that people occasionally get murdered in Old Street. Took my first pints of beer since my operation. Very good it was too and no untoward side effects. Pleased to report that the DT was in better condition than on my last visit: not only were all the bits present and working but the thing had been freshly cleaned and no longer smelt of drains.

Wandered back across Blackfriars Bridge and along the river to Waterloo.

Somewhere near the place illustrated, Ballet Rambert is building a new corporate headquarters. I had not realised they were quite in this league so I was prompted to take a look at their website. Very flashy it was too, so flashy that it takes ages to download through my total broadband connection.

A bit further down the road I came across a flashy coach called 'Veolia', an outfit that I thought were into dust carts. But they have a flashy website too and so I now stand corrected; as well as dust carriers they are one of Europe's leading people carriers.

For the first time in some time, took a sandwich from the Waterloo 'Upper Crust', an outfit I used to shop with quite a lot when I used to travel quite a lot. Settled for a cheese and tomato baguette, having forgotten that they put an unwanted dollop of mayo. into the things. OK otherwise.

Then for the second time in some time, took an 'Economist' to be slightly irritated by their know all tone. But amused by one page of advertisements. I could buy the Albanian national oil company or a ministry watch from Dent. These last must be prodigiously expensive because on their website (http://www.dentlondon.com/), instead of a price you get 'Please fill in the form below and we'll be in contact as soon as we receive your message. Depending on your requirements, we will then arrange for a Dent representative to meet with you at the earliest opportunity'. But maybe if you can afford to buy an oil company, you can also manage the odd watch. Alternatively, if neither of these opportunities attracted you, could tender for the supply of engineering services to do with the construction of a railway tunnel somewhere in northern India. Whoever makes up these pages must have a sense of humour.

The presently convenient DT on the exit platform at Epsom remains clean and sparkling.

Prompted by a long article in the TLS, wound down with a partial viewing of an entertaining rendition of 'Ivanhoe', made up from a television series from 1982. Apparently the thing is shown on Swedish television every New Year's Day. Why of earth do they do this? Why on earth would the Swedes be into Walter Scott at all? Why would anyone these days? The man might have been a monster star in his day, to the extent of having a railway station named for his work (a feat not matched by the bard), but I think I completely failed the one time I tried to read him. I can feel a visit to Gutenberg coming on...

PS: (later) it did. Kindle now ivanhoed. Plus, Amazon think I might like the Christopher Lee flavoured version. I expect I'll go for that too.

Early this morning, I had occasion to ask Mr. Google where the King's Head was, this being the name of a public house in Epsom and I wanted to be sure I had got the right place, there being various public houses in Epsom the names of which involve some combination of monarch and head. I fairly quickly find that the proper name is 'Ye Olde Kings Head'. Mr. Google not very strong on apostrophes but one site was, to wit http://www.pepysdiary.com/, which tells me that Pepys visited the place at some point.

I did not care to comply with the pack drill associated with this site - could one be sure that they were not worms or worse? - so I visited my own copy of the diary to find that the public house, complete with apostrophe, figured in the index and that the man himself visited the public house itself on Sunday, July 14th 1667. We learn all about the experiences which followed upon his drinking four pints of water from the well. There were also some experiences involving sheep up on the Downs.

Ten out of ten for whoever produced the index to the diary, which given that my copy is dated 1974, was presumably compiled before computers lightened the labours involved. Presumably hundreds of slips of paper containing candidate index entries instead.

I also notice that the average Pepys entry is rather longer than my average blog entry. Must have been an energetic chap.

PS some days later: it now turns out that I was far too quick off the blocks on this one. BH explains that the King's Head in question is now under the Ashley Centre. Reread the diary entry and find that she is probably right. Ask Mr. Google the right question and http://www.epsomandewellhistoryexplorer.org.uk/ looks to confirm: 'Epsom's first major building, the King's Head dominated the High Street until it was pulled down for shopping in 1957'. The accompanying picture suggests that it was far more suitable for a gent. of the standing of Pepys than the present house of similar name.

A further round of cheese scones on Sunday, with the variation that I used some yellow margarine from Sainsbury's rather than the usual butter. I don't suppose I would have known had I not known already and think of all the furring of the arteries that has been headed off. But the reason for using the margarine was not that; rather that the online supplies of butter were depleted and I could not wait for the offline supplies to be brought online, that is to say thawed. So now you know that we are a household which freezes its butter.

Followed on Monday by a further round of chicken carcase and mashed potato soup. Really can't think why I had a down on putting mashed potato in soup for so long. Presumably a bad experience when very young.

And then yesterday boiled flank of beef. The flank came in the form of two gently curving rib bones, each of which with the covering meat etc was around 10 inches long by 2.5 inches deep by 1.5 inches wide. The plan was to boil rather than to bake and the problem was what to do the boiling - or at least simmering - in. Eventually opted for the John Lewis fish kettle which was just about long enough but just a bit on the shallow side: I don't like cooking with the boiling liquid half an inch from the rim. Pressed ahead though, with the meat snug in the kettle and tricked out with some chopped onion and celery. Bring to the boil and find large quantities of water being dumped on the top of the cooker. This was partly due to the half an inch from the rim problem just mentioned but partly also because the lid of the kettle fits outside, rather than inside the kettle. Something which, despite having possessed the thing for some years, I had not noticed, or at least not worked out the significance of before. So the steam condenses on the underside of the lid, runs down the underside, over the rim of the kettle and down onto the top of the cooker. Lids from the better stores fit inside. After further deep thought lighted upon what turned out to be the entirely effective solution of placing some foil on top of the meat but under the lid, thus trapping most of the condensation inside.

Carried on simmering for 5 hours at which point the meat was more or less cooked but the hour was well short of lunch. So drained most of the liquor off and left the meat to rest on a low heat for a further two hours. Liquor turned into gravy by the addition of some corn flour and gravy browning (the active ingredient of which appeared to be sugar). Serve the two bones tastefully arranged on a roasting dish to the accompaniment of boiled white potato and boiled white cabbage. Very good it was too - provided that is one is not too veggy. Lots of interesting bits and bobs on full display.

Did one of the two bones, with the second reserved for sandwiches. Always a surprise how much well cooked meat firms up when it cools. And being quite fatty, it should make for good sandwiches: cold beef of a better sort can be a bit dry.

Puzzle No. 11 is a first in several ways. It is the first jigsaw in the present series which I have bought from new, albeit from Amazon rather than a proper shop. Pieces not large but of reasonable thickness, nicely finished and good to handle. A pleasure to work with, unlike some of its cheaper colleagues.

And then it is a picture of a place which Mr. Google can find more or less instantaneously and which I learn is the up north answer to tea at Fortnum and Mason's. Same sort of presentation and same sort of prices, as can be seen at http://www.bettys.co.uk/. I imagine the shop in the puzzle, in Harrogate, is the original and the other four or five branches build the brand. Have they, or will they, overreach themselves in the way of so many niche businesses? Dilution of the love and care which made the original what it was? Love and care which does not translate very well into a process & procedure manual for the instruction of youngsters from eastern Europe who may well have other things on their minds than protection of brand, perhaps their drinking & social lives. My only recollection of Harrogate is staying there one wet autumnal night, rather like the one illustrated, and having trouble finding anywhere to spend it, eventually lighting upon a couple from the US in a pub, a couple the lady of which slept with her very large dog; a chocolate coloured animal the size and shape of a Doberman but can't put my finger on what it actually was for sure. But I can't imagine wanting to wake up with a whacking great dog snoring on top of one. The gentleman of which was very proud of his very large, cushioned and motorised chair, used for snoozes at all times of day. Motorised in the sense of orientation; it did not run around on wheels.

It took a little while to get into the mood of this puzzle. Spent the first day rather struggling before moving into gear on the second. Edge, then the big first & second floor windows, then spread out into the other windows. Roof lines then roofs. Lights in trees, then tree lines, then trees. Car. Finish off the bottom of the image. Sky. Which last was a lot easier than it might be, being well keyed by both colour and stripe. Hard bits were what was between the roof and the big second floor windows and the display windows at street level.

A regular puzzle, with four regular pieces meeting at most corners. Except near the end, no sorting other than pulling the pieces for the bit at hand out of the general heap. Colour and texture of piece more important than shape.

Diet varied by reading a country house murder mystery from the author of Winnie the Pooh. I learn, along with the 413,233 readers of the Times (for whom this was a freebie; I had to pay 50p for mine at a garden fête), that A. Milne, after reading mathematics at Cambridge, went to work for the Punch and was a writer of adult fare before finding his true niche as the inventor of Pooh Sticks. This mystery, 'The Red House Mystery' is a slight thing, if engagingly written. One can get through it without too much trouble, but I doubt whether I will bother with a second reading. For me it falls between two stools: it lacks the muscularity of A. Christie (never mind G. Simenon) while not offering enough whimsy or cerebration to make up. Odd to think that such stuff was being knocked out at much the same time as A. Huxley was knocking out his rather more cerebral fare for cerebrants all. While both were very much products of their time.

For once in a while a remembered dream, interesting because it must have been two parts. I mainly remember the second part, but there must have been a scene setting first part, some time previously, perhaps earlier in the night, which I only remember much more dimly.

Living in Cambridge, coming up to retirement. I have one last Gateway review to do before I pack up. Bit silly doing it at all in the circumstances, but I go for it anyway; one last bit of travel on business. Travel, in this case, to a place called Shepreth, a short train ride away from Cambridge, home to some government agency which is the subject of the review. Nothing else known about it, in any event non-existent as I do not think there are any such in Shepreth. Nothing in the dream about my colleagues on the review, of which there would usually be two.

In part 1 of the dream I get as far as looking Shepreth up on the Internet. Take a look on Google Earth. The place seems to be quite substantial but there is no sign of any pub or hotel at which I might put up. Faff around for a bit and then light upon a B&B on the outskirts where I book in. The landlady is concerned to provide an evening meal, despite my explaining that my time of arrival is uncertain and in any event late.

Onto to part 2. I am having an afternoon after-pie siesta and wake up a bit late. Rush around putting my things to together and get off to the station and onto the train to Shepreth. One of those scruffy two coach affairs which you are apt to be sharing with interesting rural packages - such as boxes of newly hatched chickens. As I get off at Shepreth I realise that I have come out without my mobile phone, without my laptop and without any of the papers about the review. I can't even remember where the review is to take place. Or where I am supposed to be staying that night. Will I be able to make the review up as I go along?

Wonder what to do. Should I phone up BH and ask her to drive over with the necessary? This seems a bit hard on her. Should I get the train back to Cambridge, get my stuff together and come back in the morning? A taxi? This seems a bit hard on the landlady of the B&B who will lose her custom and payment. Being out in the country, there is no-one on the station, there is no taxi and the only phone box in sight contains no phone, so I wander rather vaguely into the centre of Shepreth which does indeed look just like it did on Google Earth. Substantial market square but seemingly containing no pubs and no hotels. There is a house with an open door at the corner of the square and despite the lateness of the hour I go up the steps to the door and on in, hoping to find somebody who can help. Maybe locate both B&B and agency for me. A friendly woman turns up in a morning coat, rather like BH in manner and appearance, but somebody else, none the less. She seems more concerned to be friendly than to be helpful, at which point I wake up.

Perhaps there will be part 3 in which I find the B&B, find the agency and do the review.

Utilities seem to have fallen prey to the same disease which afflicts telephone companies and financial services companies, with their complicated fare structures making their bills more or less impossible to understand, on or off line. But while British Gas contents itself with a simple Director of Customer Services signing their letters, one of them - I forget which - goes so far as to have a Director of Customer Experience or some such. Progress!

Meanwhile, back with Brighton, time to enumerate our ecclesiastical experiences there.

No. 1. St. Nicolas, Brighton. Not long in this one as they were limbering up for a mid week morning service. But long enough to take in a high church ambience, a fine Norman font and the smell of luvvies. Plus that of a quick pre-service fag in the porch.

No. 2. Royal Chapel, Brighton. Impressive wooden building from the inside, painted in pale, near-white tones with a silk finish, more or less square with a large and high lantern. Good place for a bit of quiet recruitment, away from the bustle of central Brighton.

No 3. St. Peter's, Brighton. A large and impressive place from the outside, but closed, apparently having been turned over to the people who operate the Brompton Oratory for refurbishment and subsequent use according to their rites.

No. 4. St.Paul's, Brighton. A strangely impressive establishment, to which we were drawn by its tall and elaborate tower. Present home to something called the Wagner Movement, which appeared to be Anglo-Catholic but which Wikipedia says is all mixed up with the Tractarians from Oxford. Handsome nave roof, of a configuration which I had never come across before. Handsome stained glass, of Pugin design if not construction. See S. Shepherd (2009). Ongoing intrapucine dispute about whether chairs, red or brown, should be preferred to pews.

No. 5. Hove Cemetery. A large establishment complete with a proper old style chapel house with left and right hand chapels with a high entrance between to take a horse drawn hearse. Not quite as fancy as that we came across in East London on May 5th, 2010. A proper establishment in the sense that old graves were allowed to moulder gently away: the paths were kept open and the weeds were kept down, but little or no officious upkeep or restoration. Maybe they have a program of turning sectors over to nature preserve when the youngest grave is 66.67 years old, a period chosen to make it unlikely that any relatives are near enough to care one way or the other.

No. 6. St Julian's, Kingston Buci. Kingston Buci being also known as Kingston by sea, to distinguish it from the parvenu version near Epsom. It is claimed that at the time of the Domesday Book, Kingston paid more tax than Brighton, having the advantage & commercials which come with a safe harbour. A very old church, substantially rebuilt in the 11th century. Handsome double decker pulpit (illustrated), rather like those seen last year in Romney Marsh, not so far away as it happens. The property at one time of one Ralph de Buci, a companion of The Conqueror, who probably knew FIL's great-great-great-great...grandfather, one Count Eustace. They may even have shared the odd cup that cheers.

No. 7. St. Mary de Haura, New Shoreham. A very large church, with some old bits, including some impressive Norman columns. Very large, despite the nave having been lost: all we get is the chancel and the crossing. Mr. Google alleges that the haura bit is Old Friesian for harbour; not a special virgin at all. And sadly, the church wardens had found it necessary to erect substantial iron railings to keep vandals - and us - out of the body of the church. A reminder that while Shoreham might have lots of twee shops (including no less than two butchers, one with the remnant of the wooden booth in which the cashier used to sit), they also have their dossers and worse on benefit.

All 7 - note the magical number - well worth the visit. Visits which, in our case, were more or less accidental.

In or around the panic recorded on 21st December last we acquired a set of headphones to plug into the PC into which I am typing, headphones which have never been on BH's head, never mind used for the intended purpose of Brucie Replay.

However, yesterday she noticed that an Orson Welles version of Macbeth had nearly finished playing on BBC2, so having caught the last two minutes, I trotted across to the trusty BBC iplayer to see the thing properly. Not present then and not present now, at least not for me; so not so trusty after all. But in the course of fiddling about with the thing, was reminded that the only way I had to poke the headphones into action seemed to be to activate an annoying jingle, sourced from who knows where, called 'Bagbaby'. Presumably & partly as a result, when I woke this morning I thought that it would be far more fitting if I put Shostakovitch's preludes and fugues onto the Internet computer and used one of them for the purpose of poking the headphones into life.

Leap out of bed to inspect my backup records and decide that I have not retained a CD copy. But I do have a copy on a PC so am able to burn a new one and from thence copy it onto the Internet PC. A process which takes maybe 10 minutes, considerably less time than it takes to play the preludes, after which the headphones are behaving themselves and are presently pumping No. 4 into my ears.

I learn that this particular music is far too rich to attempt while doing anything else, so not fitted for the banal intended purpose at all. Also that earphones make one's ears rather hot. Plus a touch of earache. How on earth does FIL manage for hour after hour? Maybe the circulation in his admittedly elderly ears is a bit attenuated.

Will I ever get around to the mysteries of Windows Media Player? It seems to be doing the business, but I am not very sure how I got there. Will it continue to play the preludes in the right order? The way that they have been named suggests that it might.

PS: given up on BBC and bought a copy of the film from Amazon, from someone who said that he had just two left. Presumably the BBC screening has prompted a run on the things. Or perhaps it is one of those just two's intended to prompt purchase rather than to inform.

Started off at the Palm Court chipper in the middle of the eastern pier, last visited on or about New Year's Eve (see http://www.brightonpier.co.uk/palm-court-restaurant). Pretty good gear, with the only complaint being that my cod was slightly fishy. We were sufficiently charged up by our lunch that we managed to get a touch of sunburn afterwards while dozing on a sheltered bench and I was reduced to covering my face and hands with the Florentine scarf which I had thought necessary to shelter me from the sea breezes.

Tried the bar at our hotel later, which turned out to have nothing in common with the grandeur of the hotel at large. An entirely banal hotel bar, the sort of place I usually avoided when travelling for work. We paid about double what we would have paid at TB.

The following day in the tea room in the Royal Pavilion, following my own efforts of May 13th, took pear tree water (http://www.peartreewell.co.uk/) with fresh sweet scones, the sort with dried fruit in them (no citrus peel please). Fresh out of the oven they were and good for bought, although not quite as good as my own. Very slightly sticky, and in any case I prefer cheese to fruit: they had the cheese sort, but looking at them, not very clear what sort of cheese had gone into them so passed. In any event, presumably they mix up enough dough for a day or two at a time then bake the scones in small batches. Entirely manageable in a small & not too busy kitchen such as this one was.

Later on, having had a light lunch, went for a rather grander fish supper than that from the 'Palm Court' at a place called Arch 139 (see http://www.arch139.com/, operated by an outfit variously known at Beach Hospitality Ltd and Coastal Hospitality Ltd), an establishment listed for us in a foody bit of the DT. Very good it was too. For me, higher grade fish cakes followed by a grilled lobster with sautéed potatoes (something I have never managed to cook myself in a satisfactory way) and green beans, washed down with a touch of Sancerre. The service was sufficiently sensitive that I was able to vary the cheese, fruit & veg. and biscuits to bread and cheese although I stopped short of trying to get them to give me just one sort of cheese rather than a medley and they could not resist adding some grapes by way way of token fruit & veg.. Bring back the cheese board from which you were able to select what you wanted! That said, the four cheeses they gave me were all pretty good. 8 out of 10 for the beach flavoured DT; quite impressed that a small place like this had one at all.

Came down a notch or two for lunch the day after at the Wetherspoons at Brighton Marina, a new build affair with lots of old style chunky woodwork inside. Some with gothic styling. The usual good value.

Took our pre-supper drink in a very proper public house in Western Road. More or less original layout, plenty of interesting clientele and plenty of real beer, if obscure of brand. Luvvies strutting their stuff for free upstairs. I took my first half pint of beer - said to be rather wind inducing for persons in my condition - since before the deluge. Very nice it was too.

And then for supper to the Regency Restaurant, on the corner of Regency Square, an interesting establishment of café format doing bacon & egg sandwiches in the morning and fish flavoured meals later (http://www.theregencyrestaurant.co.uk/). Whitebait good but I suspect that my dover sole had been cooked from frozen, possibly even reheated in a microwave. Not bad and not dear but not the greatest thing in dover soles and I would probably have done better to stick with cod. But BH was well pleased with her mussels. Tiramisu good. Sancerre two thirds the price of that of the grander establishment of the previous evening.

Closed the session with a couple of toasted tea cakes in a retro tea shop (with a teddy bear theme) in Shoreham. Very good they were too, sufficiently so that I was moved to take a takeaway rock cake away in case I felt hungry later.

Just spent a few days in Brighton (which I might say we found to be very disabled person friendly). Didn't pack any books to read as I would have done in the olden days, just taking the Kindle along to continue with 'Typee' or whatever else might have taken my fancy.

In the event I bought three more old style books, two new and one pre-owned, 94mm worth in total. The first, 'The Hare with Amber Eyes' came both author signed and discounted from the same shop from which I bought the 'Neibelungenlied', nearly two years ago. I read a review of this book around the time it was published and nearly bought a copy then and it turns out to be a good read now, with connections to various matters in which I take an interest, for example the relationship between an artist and his customer. About a third of the way through now. The second came from a shop in the northern branch of the lanes, where we were pleased to find a number of second hand bookshops as we had thought that their expulsion from the original lanes had meant no more bookshops. Also discounted, Oliver Sacks on something which he calls musicophilia and which seems to be an interesting collection of various neuro- and psycho-logical ailments with a musical flavour. Brain clearly quite a strange beast in the music department. About two fifths of the way through now. The third was both the heaviest and the cheapest, by some margin. Also the only hardback. Sourced for a donation from the shop attached to the life boat station at Brighton Marina and the proceedings of a conference about the long term benefits and performance of dams, published by the British Dam Society (http://www.britishdams.org/), intended as a companion piece to 'Cadillac Desert', another excellent find from a charity shop (1st October 2011). Not got very far with this one yet; struggling with the technicalities of refacing a dam with a rubber membrane. But very chuffed to find that Amazon want £86.66 for a new one or £73.66 for a pre-owned one. Clearly got a terrific bargain. The sort of thing that Foyles would have sold over the counter in the olden days, at the published price of £95.

Kindle stayed in its bag for the duration.

We were sharing our hotel with two outfits which caught our eye. First we had the annual conference of the Association for Continence Advice (http://www.aca.uk.com/). I wondered how many of them could spot a bag wearer at 100 paces. Then we had the 6th International Conference of the World Federation of Skull Base Surgeons (http://worldfederationskullbasesocietybrighton2012.com/), people whom it seems are interested in the way that the brain is connected to the face, something which I am interested in for other reasons. Naturally, I tried to pass myself off as someone from the second group rather than the first.

On 26th October I reported buying a pair of Merrells, having become disatisfied with Nike, despite the noisy glamour of Niketown at Oxford Circus.

These took a little breaking in, but once broken in were very comfortable, and when in health I do 5 or 6 miles a day in them. As it turns out, they lasted about the same six months that I was getting out of Nike, with three failures cumulating to the need to replace. The undersides of the heels were wearing down, with the base course showing through the wearing course - to use a blacktop analogy - and the backs of the heels were breaking down. This last was probably down to my failure to used shoe horns to put the things on, just cramming my feet into the things any old how. Thirdly, the right hand shoe was developing a hole around the little toe, the lightweight net filled leather network construction not coping with the right foot bashing into something at some point.

So off to 'Walkabout' (http://www.walkaboutepsom.co.uk/) to get a new pair, having observed that this establishment was a Merrell stockist. Also the place, as it happens, from which I sourced my ice walking strap-ons. Show the trainers which needed replacing to the chap behind the jump. Oh no sir. We don't stock that model. Whereupon he goes back to doing the crossword, giving me the message loud and clear that trainers of the sort I was wearing were scarcely better than leisure wear; not the sort of thing that a hard core outdoor store would stock. As an afterthought he added 'Why doesn't sir try Millets?'.

Which I did, and rather to my surprise Millets did stock the shoe in question, in the right size, but sadly in the wrong colour. So I had to settle for brown shoes rather than the green shoes that I had got used to. The brown seemed very bright and brash; easy to see why Millets had brown in stock rather than green. However, my eyes have got used to the brown, and my feet have got used to the new, rather more quickly than on the first occasion. We will see if we get the same six months out of these ones.

Six months being, as it happens, the estimate of useful life given us by the chap at Cotswolds of Kingston (the Surrey one, not the Sussex one), when buying the first time around.

PS: Mr. Google knew that I wanted the Walkabout in Epsom. He is clearly storing up important information about me. Next step: find out what sort of an outfit Walkabout it. Franchise or what?

Had an intriguing thought this morning, on reading that would be bombers are invited to think about the virgins waiting for them in Paradise when the going gets a bit rough, when the black clad troopers are baying at the door. It seems that the proper word for said virgins is 'hour', presumably not pronounced in the same way as our word of the same spelling, but presumably closely related to the word 'houris' with which I was already familiar. The intriguing thought was that the word could also be closely related to our 'whore', a word which for me has negative rather than positive charge.

Google neither confirmed nor denied the thought. The word 'whore' seems to come from our Anglo-Saxon rather than our Latin roots, but also a word with relatives in India, so quite an old word, which might well, it still seems to me, be linked to the houris in Paradise.

Further work in the OED clearly called for after breakfast.

It turns out that I was a little unfair on returns at the Festival Hall on April 23rd. Not only did my return of that day get returned to me as a credit note, but I have now discovered that up to 48 hours before a concert they will take any ticket back against a credit note, without regard to selling out. A policy reasonably clearly set out in their terms and conditions if one bothers to read them.

Now for many years before I packed up work, I had been passing a burlesque house, just out of Vauxhall heading towards Waterloo, called, as I recall, the 'Queen Anne'. An establishment sufficiently famous to get itself into such organs as the 'Daily Mail' and the 'Evening Standard' from time to time and which was run by a rather tough looking lady from Chard. Also quite near a second hand office block into which the Treasury was once thinking of moving, before the newly installed Gordon instructed whoever it was who did the cost benefit analysis to do it again. Yesterday, I noticed that it had become a tea room so I thought I ought to give it a go, and so after doing my returns I strolled back to the tea room to take Chelsea bun with tea. Very good they were too, although not cheap. But one does not mind paying for quality, quality which included a good range of cake, mostly English style. A pleasantly run operation with a pleasantly amateurish feel about it - which last did make me wonder a bit how long it will last. Must take BH there while it does.

Over the tea and bun it seemed appropriate to read the 'Daily Mail' on offer where I read - learn is perhaps too strong a word for this newspaper - that the Warfarin with which I have now become acquainted is the subject of a lot if not most of the prescriptions which get known to be wrong. Given the number of health warnings which come with my prescription, I can only suppose that the number of mistakes is related to the large numbers of prescriptions rather than to any particular propensity to error.

Two other sights on this occasion. The first was a large mobile crane in the precincts of the Festival Hall, a large mobile crane which when erected became a small tower crane, complete with what looked like a lift running up the side of the tower to carry the driver to the cab at the top. Never seen such a thing before. The second was a rather odd looking tripping boat called, I think, the 'Spirit of Chartwell', the very same boat which is shortly to carry the monarch down the river and which I saw slipping under Lambeth Bridge. Where by odd I mean that the thing looked as if it had been stripped down for an overhaul which was still in progress. Have they got time to finish the job before the off or did I get the name wrong? See http://www.spiritofchartwell.com/ for how the thing is supposed to look when it is not carrying The Queen.

I move on to the less depressing topic of baking, the loaves illustrated being the product of the latest bake. Got them into the oven in the nick of time, which meant that they very nearly held their rise, that on the left hand having just one small dimple or depression and that on the right a rather larger one.

More than half of the left hand one went down with our smoked loin and mustard at the first sitting.

All followed up by another round of cheese scones yesterday. Fully the calorifically unsound equal of a full English down at the caff, with the scones, more or less consumed in one sitting, containing 3oz of butter and 4oz of cheese in addition to stuff like flour and half strength milk. Very easy to make at home and very hard to supply in a caff. The things do not stand at all well.

On April 28th I noticed a book about bad things done by the British in Kenya in the course of the Mau Mau rebellion, prompted originally by  piece in the Guardian. This same piece prompted a former district officer in Kenya to write in to explain that Monbiot & Elkins (the author of the exposée) had got it all wrong and what actually happened was that the Brits toiled manfully & decently to contain a civil war which had broken out among the Kikuyu.

Which I do not believe is a fair representation of what happened, despite the Elkins book continuing to irritate. It has the same dull and dreary tone that I have come across in other lefty diatribes about the awful deeds of governments past and present. The heaping up of dubious oral testimony from blacks about events which took place over half a century ago. Very little oral testimony from the whites, dubious or otherwise. The book reads more like an article in the newspaper which has got far too long than history.

I share a snippet about libraries. It seems that in some camps the regime was so brutal that the prisoners were reduced to passing messages to each other by putting them inside innocuous looking books in the prison library. I was rather struck by the brutality of a regime which ran to prison libraries and my degree of belief in the parallel drawn between the Nazi concentration camps, Stalin's gulag and the Brits was somewhat diminished. But despite all this, I think Elkins gets nearer the truth than the Guardian correspondent.

And to be fair to her, she does allow that the rebels did some bad things too. Like killing any of their own who did not sign up to the rebellion.

But could a better job of it been done? Has a better job been done?

Today is warm here in Epsom and it seems right to announce the coming of summer.

The bulbs in the new daffodil bed are now over and their containing grass maybe half a metre high, with some colour provided by forget-me-nots. Not clear whether they came with the 'Meadow Mix' grass seed (or whatever it was called. Something like that anyway), with the compost dug in before seeding or after the event. I will probably make the first cut at the end of the month with a second pencilled in for Michaelmas.

Whereas the long established daffodil bulbs at the bottom of the garden came up and are now dying down, having, almost without exception, failed to flower. Not clear what is wrong; tree felling & lopping in the neighbouring garden meant that there was a lot more light than they were accustomed too, but I would not have thought that that would have been a problem. Celandines done, having flowered well this year. Lords and Ladies in sympathy with the daffodils and going over without much in the way of flowers at all. The various clumps of mushrooms pushed up by the recent rain - some coffee brown and some a creamy white - now dying down again. Bluebells - mainly the gross Spanish sort rather than the delicate aboriginals - in full flood.

No newts to be seen this morning. maybe they have done their spring duty and have sunk back down to the ooze at the bottom for a well earned rest.

Having taken stock, away on the Horton clockwise circuit, where for the first time this year I was moved to remove both scarf and jacket. Hawthorne flowers smelling good; one of the insect attracting chemical smells from flowers I rather like; some of those we get later in the year can be a bit rank. Plenty of lycra types pushing up and down, some of them causing blockage by cycling two up. A bit naff, but not as naff as the large number of people who see fit to cycle on pavements these days. OK so it is allowed, encouraged even, on some pavements, but I do not care for it as a pedestrian and I very rarely did it in my cycling days. And if I did, I made sure that my bell was operational. Unlike the middle aged, respectable looking lady who shot out of Station Approach, on the pavement, the other day. A few seconds either way and she would have had me: at 200lbs laden even a slow moving bike can do a lot of damage.

The sun being out, the suburban air is full of the droning of lawnmowers. Music drifting out of the windows of late rising adolescents in houses and boy racers in cars. No doubt later in the day the smell of burning cooking oil from barbecues will be added to the mix. Last but not least, before noon, the waste transfer station was doing a roaring trade with the queue of around 1,000 metres stretching back into Longmead Road. What was it like early afternoon, a few hours later, when all the lawn clippings were due to arrive?

Our first metropolitan concert after the break this week, one Pieter Wispelwey (from the Netherlands) doing two of Bach's cello suites at St. Luke's. Nearly full house, including a sprinkling of young people who looked to be interested in the fingering, maybe from the nearby Guildhall School of Music. Nicely introduced by a lady who I think introduced herself as the director of the St. Luke's operation; did her business with neither gushing nor feeble wit. Cello suites - numbers 3 & 6 - very good, admirably suited to the venue and occasionally reminding me of the bagpipes, in that he managed a melody on top of a drone. Not bad for an instrument out of which you are doing well to get two nearby notes at once. While according to some chap at the Guardian, culled from the Internet, the third was love and the sixth was transcendence. Well maybe. But I am not sure that I would be good for all six of them in two sittings on one day, as recently offered at the Wigmore Hall. It was sold out though, so there must be plenty of people out there with more stamina than I.

Disdaining all the food of diversity on offer from stalls, having rather lost my taste for spice, such as it was, had taken elevenses at the Market Caff in Whitecross Street. Tea and bacon sandwich, as usual.

Lunch at the nearby Wetherspoon's was the usual good value and served with impressive speed. 7 out of 10 for the DT. All present and correct but a touch shabby and with a curious smell.

All followed up by BH leading us down an alley, on a whim, to Saint Bartholomew the Great, truly an architectural gem which neither she nor I had ever come across before, tucked up next to what was left of the meat market and St Bartholomew's Hospital. Also quite near the 'Hand and Shears', a pub in which I worked for a spell many years ago. Run at that time by a Czech tankist who washed up here after the second war, with a taste for food, drink and Švejk. My knowledge of the last of these three, if not the first two, stood me in good stead. Two sorts of Courage bitter for sale at that time, both very good - but don't seem to see too much of either these days. Does Courage still exist as anything more than a brand name?

Saint Bartholomew got off to an unusual start by being the first church which I have come across, which was not a cathedral, ancient monument or Westminster Abbey but which charged an entrance fee (of £4). Not that I have any objection; I visit the places as a tourist rather than as one of the faithful and it is entirely reasonably that I should contribute to the cost of keeping them up. It turned out to be a seriously old church with quite large chunks dating from the time of King Henry I. As far as I can recall, the only Norman piers in London, excepting perhaps the Tower of London. Unusual apsed east end. One monument to a local hair merchant (one wonders what sort of hair. A by product of the butchery or the hairdressing business?) and another to the founder of Emmanuel College at Cambridge. All tastefully restored. A church which looked to be of a musical high church persuasion, something which we might have sampled one day had it been a bit more handy to Epsom.

Outside there was a tablet marking the quartering of the Scottish traitor, William Wallace. A punishment perhaps well suited to its location next to the shambles. I think the tablet said rebel, but I also think you have to be a traitor to earn a quartering.

Home to be irritated on the way by union leaders for the civil servants moaning that the proposed changes to their pension arrangements mean that they will have to do more work for less pension. What on earth do they expect? I for one would not get too upset if it was decided to cut my civil service pension by say, 5%, to help with the national debit - but I can see that one would need some tapering arrangement so that those who had been among the lower paid get off lighter than those who had been among the higher paid. (For the avoidance of doubt, I fell between these two stools). And then there are the people who bang on about the quality of public services but are bang off when it comes to paying their share in the form of taxes. From which we can only suppose that a substantial proportion of our population are indeed arithmetically challenged, as alleged by the DT. Either that, selfish or greedy.

PS: the answer to the Courage question is no.

The other evening, feeling the grey cells to be in good form, attempted to resume reading P. H. Wilson on the Thirty Years War, a hefty tome more than a couple of inches thick.

Given that I had retired for the night by this point, the weight proved rather challenging when lying down so put it down again, and then, having left it alone for some weeks, picked up the Kindle for consolation. There my investment in http://www.gutenberg.org/ paid off and within a couple of minutes I had got the Kindle off 'Great Expectations' and onto Melville's 'Typee', not read for some years, and a book which Wikipedia tells me was the author's début effort and far more popular than the rather denser 'Moby Dick' during his lifetime. Certainly entirely suitable as a bedtime read.

But then, in the morning, moved to buy another heavy tome which, impressively, arrived the following day, with the label illustrated. Clearly a complicated operation, involving lots of long codes which were all-bar-one unintelligible. So I thought it likely that depot 676 (MTCH) was probably in Mitcham. But what did 'HDNL' stand for? What is a round sector? Is that to do with the warehouse or the distribution side of things? Why does it need two bar codes? One for me and one for the book?  And then, in a final flourish of distribution technology, underneath the label I found a number of small plastic slips, looking rather like miniature elastoplasts but not stuck down in any way, just systematically lodged between the very sticky label and the packet itself. What on earth were they for?

All of which reminded me that if Amazon were to run tours for geeks I would go for it like a shot, there being lots to interest a former IT person. But it would need to be a tour for a small number of the right sort of people, together with a proper guide with time to accommodate our various interests. Our visit to Sellafield a couple of years ago was a complete waste of space on account of failure on both counts.

On the gastronomic front, having forgotten our two-for-one vouchers, paid our first post-operative visit to ASK. Pleasant ambience, very much like Pizza Express or Carluccios. Bruschetta not too hot, with the tomato goo cooler cold rather than warm, which is quite wrong for me. Pizza of the thin kind and good, with quite enough goo on the regular version not to need the £1.50 worth of supplement on offer. Tiramisu OK, enhanced with a glass of pudding wine, this last having arrived on chain restaurant menus. The world moves on. And 10 out of 10 for the DT. Sparkling and fully equipped; the best yet. All in all, another good lunch.

Followed up later the same day by mashed potato soup. Take half a tenderloin and chop it coarsely. Take two onions and chop them finely. Simmer the lot for a couple of hours. Add good dollop of mashed potato and stir it in. Simmer for a few minutes more and serve with thawed out, buttered white bread.

It has been a dull month for me in the TLS. Far too much poetry and far too many far reaches of bardolatry. But there has been a splendid diversion in the form of many column inches devoted to whether or not a rather nondescript portrait of a rather nondescript middle aged lady was or was not a likeness taken from life of Jane Austen. We are treated to an article by the current owner followed by an article by the advisor to the previous owner followed by a letter from the previous owner himself. Serious austenophiles all. It seems that were it to be proved that it was a likeness taken from life, its value would move up from maybe £1,000 to maybe £100,000, without their needing to be any corroboration that the likeness was anything like the lady herself.

One then thinks of how the value of a nondescript painting might move from £1,000 to maybe £1,000,000 when today's expert pronounces that it is, without any doubt whatsoever, a long lost work of this or that league première master. At one time I thought this was just silly: a good painting was worth a lot of money, a bad painting was not. But I now allow that a bad painting by a good painter can sensibly be worth a lot of money, in part at least because the bad painting might plug a hole in what we know about this very important person. Might be of great significance in the History of Art. And then there is the collectors' valuation of rarity.

Although thinking about it, there is more to that than just rarity. If I empty my dustbin onto my bed, the configuration of rubbish is rare, probably unique, in that there is no other collection of quite that rubbish in quite that configuration. If I was a celebrity this rubbish might be valuable. But what, given that I am not? If I were a collector, I would want the objects collected to be of a sensible size. To be robust, stable and long lived. I want to be able to keep my collection in a fairly small space where I can gloat over it. It should also be a collection of something. Porcelain fishes, bronze lady ballet dancers, coins, stamps. The somethings need not be man made but they should be complex, with some intrinsic interest. So a fancy conglomeration of crystal is better than a pebble off a beach. It helps it they are pretty. I also suspect that one does not really want one's porcelain fish to be unique, just rare. Then I can have long conversations with other collectors about our chances of getting our paws on such a thing. Cumulatively, I think considerations of this sort exclude rubbish on beds, even unmade beds.

And then there was the advertisement for a head of ICT at some school or other in the Guardian. I was interested to read that this person would supervise a staff of six, this in a school with around 1,000 pupils. If we suppose that the overall staff ration is 1:20, we get a figure of 50 staff. So, by the standards of the Treasury anyway, the ICT department is large if we look at the numbers of staff, small if we look at the number of pupils. Is there some organ of central government which monitors ratios of this sort? Where does the bulk of the effort go? On maintaining the 100 or so PCs available to pupils who tend to be rather rough with them? On providing support to members of staff who are far too old to know which way up to hold a mouse? On driving complicated software which spits out a shiny new timetable every now and then?

But first, an exit report on jigsaw 10, another £3.50 job, this one from the AA - another bunch of people who were once proud to be mutual but who have now been made over into a profit taking organisation, now hiding under an umbrella called 'Acromas', itself hiding under an umbrella made up of a clutch of private equity outfits. It seems that the money used to buy the AA is swinging around the neck of Acromas in the form of a millstone of debt, which might possibly go bad in the present climate, which might mean another swathe of job losses somewhere in the system.

Back at the jigsaw, I had not known that the AA were in the jigsaw business. Presumably, like other own brand goods, the own brand owner gets one of the leading brands, say Falcon, to knock out some stuff for them. A two edged sword for Falcon: they get some business at what might be a slack time, but the AA is taking a slice of the action and possibly building up market share at their expense. Made with thin card and with very regular pieces, with very little variation other than the inclusion of a higher than usual proportion of hole-hole-prong-prong pieces, without which the jigsaw would have been even harder to complete. As it was I made a lot of mistakes, some of which required a bit of unpicking, rather than simple swapping of a couple of pieces. I had to rework the top of the left hand edge several times, and I would not like to put serious money on that part of the puzzle being right now.

Edge first, with aforementioned errors on both left and right hand edges. Then the railway, then the train & smoke, then the grass. Then the trees in shadow above the first coach, then the right hand trees, this turning out to be the hardest part, then the left hand trees. Each zone being nicely coloured coded for easy sorting, with the exception of the last two tree zones where some of the pieces which turned out to be left handers were initially mistaken for right handers. It is, of course, possible that the ultimate tree zone only seemed easier than the penultimate because the number of pieces had, by then, been reduced to the extent of this last, solution time being strongly dependant on the number of pieces in hand.

For a touch of variety, read the 'Guardian' in the intervals of assembly, in which I was rather irritated by the headline of the piece about an alleged miscarriage of justice. It seems that a lady, now in her sixties, was convicted of murdering her elderly aunt, for whom she was the primary carer, who served around 12 years and has had various appeals turned down. Conviction and sentence upheld. But the Guardian has been digging and now alleges that evidence about another suspect, subsequently murdered in some drugs spat, was suppressed by the investigating police to keep the rather weak case against our lady look better than it really was. As is often the case in these disputed cases, the evidence which convicted her being quite slight: no bloodstained hammer covered in her finger prints or anything clear & simple like that. Conviction by hunch of investigating officer - hunches which are not always right, which is why we go in for evidence and stuff like that. The Guardian headline then proclaimed that this new evidence proved the innocence of the lady. Perhaps just about true in the sense that the new evidence, if it had been available at the original trial, might have made her conviction unsafe, made the evidence presented fall short of the standard of beyond reasonable doubt. But this is not the same, in ordinary parlance, of saying the the lady is proved to be innocent. We do not prove people to be innocent, we fail to prove them to be guilty.

Nevertheless, on the face of it, despite this lurch towards the standards of the red tops and the DT, there is, at the very least, a bad smell hanging around the investigation. A taint.

More or less polished off cold for Monday lunch, after which the carcase was boiled up with carrot and onion, and, by way of a change, a good dollop of mashed potato. Some bone and bits from some grilled pork added towards the end of the boiling. Strained, added a bit of cooked, cold & chopped chicken back in, ditto pork. Then some of the flat noodles from Blue Dragon, simmer for 8 minutes and consume. The potato proved to be an excellent thickening, body giving ingredient.

Thus fortified off to see 'KaaFila', a hand me down from Bourne Hall Library which I had thought was a gritty tale about the misadventures of wannabee illegal immigrants in the middle of Asia, but which turned out to be a song and dance comedy about same. It seems that the Indians are sufficiently relaxed to make slightly black comedies about people throwing up their lives in India to try to make it, with the help of gangsters, to the UK. In the event, unable to watch it all the way through. Might have been better if one had not been dependant on the subtitles - not least because I suspect that some of the humour depended on the shifts between languages.

I then had a ponderous thought, prompted by some infelicities in 'Frost' - that is that it is hard to make television drama really realistic. The things are done on the cheap and there are always slips and cracks in the realism; little things which are not terribly important but irritate by looking wrong. A problem which can perhaps be more readily avoided in the more stylised, more oral world of the theatre where the thing is held together by the quality and rhythm of the language. One does not attempt realism in the way that television drama does, realism which we have come to expect - but does it add much to whatever, if anything, the piece is about? I am reminded of the observation that once, when performing, I think, Titus Andronicus, it was enough for someone to tie a red ribbon around a wrist to say that violence had been done. There was no need to more or less do it for real, on stage. Maybe the people who run the 'Globe' should take note.

PS: blog search being wayward again. Results are being put up in some apparently random order rather than in post date order again. And a search for noodles fails to find the post of April 8th while a search for costcutter does. And then subsequent searches for noodles do find it, the relevant entry seemingly having been poked into life. Whatever is their algorithm up to?

A return to the clockwise Horton Lane run yesterday where I scored three demi tweets. That is to say a sighting good enough to say that it was a small multi-coloured bird, probably a finch, but not good enough to say exactly what sort of a bird, never mind finch. White hawthorn looking good - although not clear why it is lot more out in Horton Lane than it is in our front garden.

Oddly enough, later in the day, getting on towards midnight, Horton Lane reappeared in the form of noise pollution. Some young bog-standard who thought it clever to charge up and down in some noisy car with much revving and squealing of both brake and tyre. Must have gone on for half an hour or more; quite an attention span for such a person. Or perhaps, being mindless, they can carry on forever if not disturbed. Worst incident of this sort that I can remember. See March 31st for the last occasion that all this was in the news.

In between, came across an item in the 'Coeliac News' about how prescription policy varied from county to county across the country, with some counties bearing down on the free or subsidised supply of gluten free bread. A subject on which I am allowed to be holy having forced FIL off free prescription onto buy-your-own bread, having read that the prescription bread costs the NHS several times what it costs to buy the stuff for yourself in a shop. Possibly a mild version of the disease which has military ashtrays coming in at £500 a pop, instead of the £5 you or I might pay in Wilkinson. Expensive stuff, the sort of paint needed camoulflage an ashtray in the desert.

So, the question is, when is it right for something to be provided on a prescription, which means that it is likely to be free or near-free to the old and near-old?

Given that we have a national health service, free at the point of delivery, it is right that medicines should be subsided in this way, although it would be good if we could devise some not too unpleasant way to bear down on the huge amount of waste that this seems to involve. But is gluten free bread a medicine?

When FIL was first diagnosed, maybe 50 years ago (he has a very small Coeliac Society membership number), gluten awareness in shops and their suppliers was close to zero. It was quite hard to get hold of gluten free products, they were not much good but they were expensive. In these circumstances, perhaps not unreasonable that society should draw some of the pain and make the stuff available on prescription from the chemist. A small catch being that as the consumer is not then paying at the point of delivery, he has no incentive to be careful and the supplier has every incentive to get him to call down as much as he can get away with. Another catch is that the stuff is bulky and does not keep very well; a lot more of a pain from the chemist's point of view than aspirin or oramorph.

Furthermore, in the intervening 50 years, our supermarkets have cottoned onto the free-from market, a market which includes free-from-gluten, and all kinds of gluten free products are available from them, including bread. I dare say the stuff is a bit dearer than regular bread but not hugely so. So why should the taxpayer continue to pick up the tab for this basic foodstuff? The taxpayer does not pay for your water so why should it pay for your bread? No longer relevant that it is a slightly odd kind of bread.

As it happens we do not buy in a shop as FIL is a bit fussy about brand. We use Dialachemist, an outfit about which, unprompted, Google tells me 'You've visited this page 2 times. Last visit: 24/02/12'. A new to me feature, presumably all part of what seems to be a lot of activity on the user end of the Google offering.

PS: thinking of military ashtrays I wonder if the military are allowed to smoke in their tents in the desert or whether that counts as a workplace in the sense used by the tobacco regulations? Do the NAAFIs have to cover up their displays of duty freeze? Do squaddies puff as much as they used to? After all a lot of them come from the lands of beers and pies where smoking is popular. Could I revive the cult dedicated to the worship of the ancient Mexican goddess of smoke (Tzitzimitl) and get exemption that way, along with the luvvies on their stages?

My first puzzle from King, so of my total of 9, 5 are from Falcon and the other four are from other outfits. This one, despite the English flavoured packaging, originated in the Netherlands.

Paid the large-for-me sum of £3.50 for it from a charity shop - but it was still in its original shrink wrap and it was probably in a good cause. Pieces quite small and thin and not having been used at all meant that sometimes one had to use a bit of force to get the right piece in the right hole. A lot of irregularity of the second sort - that is to say a good proportion of the time one did not have four pieces meeting at a corner, which made solution harder than it might otherwise be.

Started with the edge, then the waste paper bin, then had a go at the white patch bottom right. But then settled down to do the flowers which meant getting lots of little islands, two or three pieces apiece, scattered across them, but having to work for quite a long time before they got connected together. Then there was a clear tipping point, about half way, when the flowers had sunk far enough down into the frontal cortex that one could pick up what was clearly part of the flower part of the picture and within seconds get it into the right hole, possibly after a couple of false positives. Accelerating into the finish, after which one had the background to fill in in slow time. Not too bad though, being reasonably clearly colour coded, with the colour including a soft diagonal stripe to give you orientation in addition to position. Only beef was the cover picture which had not been cropped to match the jigsaw, causing a little confusion in the early stages. Jigsaw colour sometimes a bit adrift from the cover colour but then it nearly always is.

Celebrated by buying another jigsaw new from the same outfit from Amazon, which after postage came to about double what I paid the charity shop. We will see how this branching out into a very different product area affects their recommendations: I have not yet been moved to buy one of these but they have not been that far off the mark.

Followed up by a ham sandwich, on white bread with just a touch of mustard. The bread came from a foody fair at Hampton Court and came to me as French but it seemed entirely English to me, both in shape and texture. Just the ticket for the ham, whatever. Not that it ought really be called ham as wanting some smoked, went to the butcher in Manor Green Road who explained that he only did smoked ham at Christmas. Didn't shift otherwise. But he did have some smoked loin, so I had a go with a 3lb piece of that and handed over to BH for cooking, that is to say gently boiled with a few veg.. A bit crumbly fresh but very good now that it has sat for a couple of days. Lots of fat to keep it moist and gunk up the carving knife. I shall have to look into whether one can properly call smoked loin ham: does the use of the word ham to designate a way of preparing meat predate its use to designate a part of the body?

The other culinary novelty has been some butter, garlic, onion, yellow pepper and tomato sauce, sauce to which I added maybe a level tablespoon of sugar towards the end of the cooking period, this last being the novel bit. Maybe half a cup of water. A good way of energising some otherwise rather dull grilled spare rib.

Rather shocked to read in this morning's DT that maybe a quarter of animals slaughtered in this country are slaughtered without prior stunning, thereby causing a lot of additional fear and pain. To me, the industrial slaughter of mainly large and sentient animals for food is fairly distasteful already, without allowing practises which might possibly have been sensible 2,000 years ago to make it a lot more so. Most of the religious involved seem quite civilised in other ways, so why do they persist in this barbarity? What sort of a god are they answering to?

One can only suppose that the numbers of such animals are far in excess of the numbers of relevant people because food processors like to be able to label their products as fit for consumption by relevant people, the production runs for whom might otherwise be too small. I find the DT line that abattoirs save significant money by not bothering with stunning a bit unlikely.

Then intrigued to read about the sale of a chunk of heritage to the Chinese, to wit the Weetabix Corporation. It seems that the Weetabix family, having been in the chair for more than 50 years, decided to cash in and sell out to a private equity outfit for some £642m nine years ago. The private equity outfit has now sold 60% of its share to the Chinese - not known for their love of milk covered breakfast foods but there is certainly room for growth - for £720m yielding a return which the Guardian computes to be 500%. Not quite sure about the sums but the return does look to be quite reasonable. The private equity people took a punt on breakfast cereal and did OK. Can't really quarrel with the the large return: they are betting with their own money - or money which at least has been lent to them for the express purpose of such betting. They are taking a risk while the Weetabix family is blowing the dosh on the geegees. But the Chinese are clearly buying up the family silver. How long before they are supervising our budget, rather in the way that the Germans are supervising the Greek budget now?

At the other end of the financial scale I heard yesterday of a new-to-me  manifestation of the poverty trap. Suppose I am 60, have no income and no savings but am eligible, amongst other benefits, for housing benefit of £100 a week or £5,000 a year. Suppose now that I inherit £100,000, the income from which might presently be £5,000. When I declare the £100,000 to the housing benefit people they will stop the benefit, leaving me with a net gain in income terms of ziltch. Which is fair enough; why should the taxpayer pay for your flat or whatever when you have money sitting in the bank. But the rule might encourage me simply to blow the £100,000 and carry on claiming benefit. The same, I guess, for older people who blow their savings to make sure that it is the taxpayer that pays for their care when they come to need it, rather than themselves. I'm can't think of a solution to either problem, so I leave them as puzzles for readers.

And then there was an irritation of a different sort as I was on the inbound leg of a light version of the Horton Circuit (clockwise) when I came across an abandoned bag from the nearby Tesco Express. Two thirds of a tuna sandwich was falling out of the bag and one third of a cup of chocolate was sitting on top of a nearby bollard. The package that the sandwich came in announced on the one hand that it was a £2.50 meal deal, then just a sandwich at £1.35 and then reduced to £1.15. All a bit confusing, but no excuse for buying the stuff and then abandoning half of it on the pavement. When I was little I was trained to eat food that I bought for myself and to put the rubbish in a litter bin. In this case there being a litter bin within 25 yards or so. Was the perpetrator on housing benefit? Was he a school boy trying to impress his mates with his get one over the gown-ups bravado? Or was it simply someone in a hurry who had not been brought up very carefully? It was certainly the sort of area where such people breed & multiply.

First stop today was a visit to Earlsfield with the idea of turning right out of the railway station rather than the usual left, where the first place that caught my eye was a business originally established to rewind the armatures (if that is the right term) on your electric motor. Since establishment I think they have moved into some related lines of business, which is just as well as I imagine the amount of rewinding business in Earlsfield these days is modest. Presumably, once upon a time, the area was a hotbed of electrically powered light industry.

Into the 'Wandle' for a little something, to be greeted by a sign which said that one was only allowed to smoke in the designated area by the gate, that is to say, by inference, not in the garden at large. Have foodies succeeded in chasing puffers away from their outside foody experiences? The barman was a bit puzzled and pointed out that all the tables outside were equipped with ashtrays and he thought it unlikely that anyone would complain if we used them. Which, as it happened, we did not. Instead, quite a decent bottle of Italian wine at £25, served in rather large & delicate glasses which it would have been rather easy to break. No disabled toilet, but the gents did run to proper hand washing. Owned by the people at http://www.capitalpubcompany.com/, who have bothered to include a rather nifty map showing their outlets.

A little late in the season, I then decided it was time to visit the green alkanet at Raynes Park (see 24th and 28th February 2011), only to find that last week had seen a twinning visit to Raynes Park by the Chain Saw Volunteers (14th West Horton), with the meeting being held in the public house formerly known as the Raynes Park Tavern opposite Raynes Park Station. On leaving the meeting the volunteers were having a smoke at the quiet end of platform 4, when they noticed the thriving green alkanet and trashed the lot. Just as well that it is strong stuff and fighting back, as can be seen in the illustration. But why couldn't they just have their smoke and leave the plants alone?

But I was pleased to find that on the path between Epsom Station and TB, there was a clump of the stuff which they must have missed. Hopefully none of them are reading this.

On the other hand, having been completely sure that the Raynes Park Tavern had been renamed during some refurbishment, as far as I can tell from Google it has not been. Furthermore, while it flies the John Barras flag, this is now just a brand name owned by the people at http://www.spiritpubcompany.com/spirit/en/home, one brand name among many. And their otherwise fancy web site does not seem to include a list of their many pubs so I was unable to confirm absolutely that there had been no name change. Must remember to take a look at the place when I am next going through northbound. Can't see the place southbound. But rather depressing to think that the décor of one's favourite boozer is not the more or less accidental product of a long standing & loving tenancy, rather just the ready-to-go creation of some creation arts graduate in the marketing department of a pubco. Plastic all the way through, despite appearances.

That out of the way, it dawned on me that it was just about seven times seven days since I interrupted bread making and that with seven being such a strong magic number it was was clearly an auspicious day to resume. So I did: Waitrose flour, Sainsbury's rape and Tesco yeast. Had not forgotten too much about the process, the only error being not to think to turn the oven on at the right moment with the result that the second rise was a little too long. I had also forgotten the rather different taste of the white bread I make to that from a bakery, not that that stopped me consuming the former at a considerable rate. My very own foody experience. See http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls for further details.

Have now completed my second tome from this master of contemporary literature, entitled 'Freedom', having read 'Corrections' previously.

A rather long book but I got through it at a reasonable pace. Not too many longueurs. The attention paid to the gruesome details of North American sex reminded me of Houellebecq (see for example 3rd February last) and while it did rise above pornography, I prefer my books to be softer focus about such matters. Quite enough gritty realism in real life these days; a taste which copies across to the television with my much preferring the banal mysteries of Poirot to their contemporary equivalents.

I wonder what sort of a person would write such stuff and am reminded of a comment about Joyce's 'Ulysses' to the effect that it might be a great novel but the sort of person who could write such stuff must be very odd indeed. Better known through the medium of his writing than in the flesh.

That apart, plenty of entertaining material and comment on the contemporary (mainly middle class) scene in the US - including quite a lot of stuff on how Bush feathered the nests of his cronies, not least by providing superb opportunities for profiteering in Iraq. Plus quite a lot of stuff on the eco-scene and the eco-warriors. Material which is probably all the more entertaining for being foreign; the same sort of material about the UK would have nothing like the same piquancy. Probably also prefer to have fun poked at others rather than my own. Patriotic to that extent.

Despite having read the book all the way through, I have no idea why the book is called Freedom. Perhaps one is free to invent reasons. Freedom is just a label, about as significant as calling a quintet a trout: one has to have a title so Franzen or his publisher obliges. But should one be able to condense the content of a novel into one or two words? Should the title be more than a label? I shall ponder while the smoked haddock simmers.

PS: interested to read yesterday about the earnings of the brother of the man who worries about the economy on behalf of the party which used to worry about the needs and aspirations of the working man. OK, so the brother is no doubt a worker too, probably a very hard worker. But he is also a successful player in one of the extractive industries, that is to say one of those industries which somehow manage to extract a huge number of currants out of the communal puddings to pay their chaps, despite it being quite unclear how many puddings they are contributing or how much pudding, with or without currants, is left for the rest of us, working away in other kinds of industries, maybe productive.