pumpkinstrokemarrow

Spiffing new discovery for a breakfast time snack. Take 4oz of line-caught organic cod, bake with a little butter & onion and set aside. Acquire 6oz cold mashed potato, blend with the cold cod and shape the mixture into a flat cake. Gently fry the cake in 1oz of butter in a closed pan until one has enough brown crust. Serve. The only down side was the amount of washing up generated for one small, if tasty & calorific snack.

Over snack I turned the pages of the 'Metro' and the 'Evening Standard' acquired on yesterday afternoon's swing up Garrett Lane. Rather annoyed to find from the 'Metro' that some bookmaker has erected 100 feets' worth of outdoor sculpture entitled 'Roy the Redeemer' on the white cliffs of Dover. If I, as a humble taxpayer, were to paint my door the wrong colour or prune some tree in the wrong way, I would get a bunch of council or quango bisease baying at the door, despite its new colour. £1,000 fines all round for infringement of some daft regulation or other. But breathe the magic words 'outdoor sculpture conceptual performance', everyone goes all weak at the knees and the grants and permissions come flying in: the taxpayers and the national lottery players can all too easily wind up paying for some dreadful eyesore, with Hyde Park seeming to be a particularly popular site for such stuff. To be fair, I think the bookmaker has paid for this one and it might even be temporary, despite weighing 8 tons. The reports I have seen were agnostic on that point.

But it never ceases to surprise me how we, collectively, are happy to throw money at the chaps that punt this sort of stuff. Whoever wrote the story about the emperors' new clothes certainly knew what he was talking about.

And then in the 'Standard' I read about financial irregularities in the getting on for privatised world of education. What on earth do they expect if they give loads of money to people out there on the front line without the simplicity of profit & loss accounts to control how that money is spent? I dare say there is plenty more to come from the contractors in the business of placements for the unplaceable. I wonder what is to come when huge sums of money start swishing through the accounts of our local health centres - which I assume is what will happen when we get rid of the primary care trusts.

For the avoidance of doubt I should add that while profit might have other up-sides, for example in motivation and in the reduction in the desire for ever more complex performance indicators, it also has plenty of down-sides. And I note in passing that, according to Wikipedia anyway, the functions of primary care trusts are to be split between the health centres and local councils. Which sounds as if we are starting to rationalise local government a bit, with the local council doing everything governmenty on its patch. Which sounds to me like a good thing; a step on the way to breathing a bit more life into local government.

Also that the 'Prince of Wales' on Garrett Lane looks to have shut down for good. One of the dying breed of working mens' pubs, this one from Youngs. And that facilities for the disabled at Tooting Broadway are not as good as those at Earlsfield, let alone Epsom, even being let down by the Wetherspoons there, admittedly one of his earlier efforts. BH thinks that the Sainsbury's opposite might do the business; I shall check on the next occasion.