pumpkinstrokemarrow

Interesting senior event the other day involving brown bread. Did all the usual things then popped the twice risen dough  into the oven shortly after lunch, a lunch which consisted of some rather splendid plain sausages from the Manor Green Road butcher, great fat things weighing in at maybe 4 to the pound, so fat that I snoozed off while waiting for the bread to cook and did not wake up for the pinger. With the result that the bread was cooked for more or less double the time - 40 minutes instead of 20 - that it should have been. I assumed that the bread would be a write off, but it turned out to be dark brown rather than black and when cooled down bread rather than rusk. Not as good as it should be but still better than shop bread. One can only suppose that crust is quite a good insulator.

The next item was finishing off an explosive international bestseller called 'Gomorrah' by Roberto Saviano, a book which was indeed both interesting and depressing, but also rather badly written. Full of all kinds of high flown burblings, burblings which may have been the product of translation but which may have been the result of the author being a philosopher. A story about the doings of the criminal clans & gangs that appear to run much of Naples and the surrounding region, being big into fashion, drugs, guns (and such like), construction, waste disposal and local government. Tentacles spreading all over the place, even to Aberdeen.

The clans & gangs appear to operate very much as regular businesses, providing goods and services which people want in a more or less regular way. With accountants and management consultants. With lots of illegals & immigrants in their work force. But giving themselves a competitive advantage by not being stuffy about resort to violence; violence to punish, impress, intimidate or damage. Violence which includes very nasty murders: often not enough just to kill someone; a more serious point has to be made by torturing the unfortunate first. Killings which might include people only very vaguely connected with the problem in hand, almost random. A culture in which dying like a man is more important than life. A particularly nasty kind of violence which reminded me of doings in Ireland in the past.

The chaps who rise to the top of this particular heap appear to have quite short reigns and to live holed up in very fancy fortified houses, out in the country. Some of them are into bourgeois trinkets such as fancy paintings and books. All a bit like robber barons in the high middle ages - so odd to think that Italians were getting out of the middle ages long before we got around to it. No longer a surprise that a country that puts up with all this for so long, puts up with a Berlusconi.

The book would have been much improved by being turned into a picture book with lots of maps, portraits of people and portraits of places. Perhaps like the bible book I mentioned on 16th July.

The last item was deciding not to read my latest find from the second hand bookstall at the entrance to the museum at Bourne Hall, 'The Meaning of Light' by one Michael Cox, a very fat, uncorrected bound manuscript from John Murray which was not for sale or quotation and for which I paid £1.50. I had been completely taken in by the spoof preface which explained that this was a reprint of a lost & lurid Victorian masterpiece (there appears to be lots of sex, drink, drugs and violence), whereas actually it is a pastiche of same, recently written by a retired publisher as part of his fight against cancer, 694 pages of it. This particular copy also included a couple of clipped newspaper reviews, one neutral and one against. The odd thing is that the author got paid an advance of £430,000 - odd  that is until one takes a peek at Mr. Google who finds lots of very positive comment about the thing. Still not going to try to read it though. En route to the Oxfam skip at Kiln Lane.

But what is the purpose of an uncorrected bound manuscript? Perhaps if you are in the book business with access to the machinery, this is the cheapest and most convenient way of knocking out a few copies to be read by your readers. Perhaps publishers have focus groups and other panels made up of the more or less general public to test drive stuff before decisions about publication and marketing are  made.

We decided that yesterday we should have our very own Olympic experience, getting as close to the action as was comfortable.

Started off the proceedings at Epsom station a good two hours after the rush to Dorking to see the lycras grinding up Box Hill, by which time all was quiet and all the electronic gates were working satisfactorily. Took a train to Hampton Court where there was more lycra action promised for the afternoon. Hundreds of barriers and hundreds of security people, these last looking young, foreign and idle. Not many lycra spotters at this early hour so we were able to nip into the Palace without any bother, a Palace which was eerily quiet for a summer Saturday afternoon. So quiet that while they had fired up the barbecue in the kitchen experience, they only had plaster meat lumps, unlike the last occasion I was there (with FIL) when they had real meat lumps.

First stop was the tarting experience, a collection of paintings and other artefacts celebrating the sweaty court life of the Stuart restoration. Lots and lots of paintings from the Lely & Kneller partnership: maybe they had teams of apprentices to do the boring bits while the maestros themselves just put their imprimaturs on the nearly finished products. Interesting to see how alike all the ladies looked. Was this just the effect of their all being dolled up in the fashions of the day? Which I was intrigued to learn included the ladies wearing what passed for nighties for the first part of the morning, the time of day when one would sit (or stand, or lie) for one's portrait. Would all the ladies in a similar collection of photographs from the 1960's look similarly similar to the viewer of the 2160's?

I was also intrigued to learn that the point of beauty patches was to cover up smallpox scars, a disease which looked to have carried off a good proportion of those painted, with childbirth accounting for a good proportion of the remainder: TB did not seem to get a look in with this lot and I wondered why, without coming to any conclusion. Something else to ask Mr. Google in a quiet moment. On the other hand, Barbara Villiers lived and scandalled to a ripe old age, in which she was the subject of a rather splendid portrait. At which point I paused to ponder on the use of these rather grand rooms for an educational display, complete with the sound and light effects thought to be a necessary ingredient of such displays these days. First thought was that it was rather odd; Queen Mary II must be turning in her grave. Second thought was that it was hard to find a sensible use for such rooms - and as they were, they were not nearly as dull as the more or less empty rooms we came across later in William III land.

Then onto the Chapel, the Kitchens, Henry VIII land and said William III land. Quick whizz around the gardens, a little past their early summer best now but still looking pretty good. Meantime much noise from the main road signalled Olympic activity. Leave things for half and hour or so, by which time it was safe to venture out into Olympic land, from which the not very large crowds were rapidly dispersing while the older security guards extracted the last drops of their temporary glory. Amused to see that the prime corner site between the railway station and the river which has been derelict for years and which is still, I believe, the subject of a long running dispute between nature trusties, heritage trusties and fat cats about future use, had been cleaned up and grassed over so as not to make a bad impression on our visitors. So there is at least one useful by product of the games, albeit temporary.

10 minute wait for a train onto which the whole of the waiting crowd was loaded and so set off for the return to Epsom, accompanied by a herd of very cheerful orange clad Hollanders who told me, once they grasped what I was asking them, that they did indeed come from the Holland region of the Netherlands. And so we completed our brush with the Olympics. Run quite close enough, thank you.

Souvenir picture above of some impressive looking temporary plumbing behind some temporary Palace marquee or other.

The mixed fish soup turned out very well, to the point that BH had some for tea, despite the heat.

Simmer some white potatoes, cut into about 2 cubic inch lumps, for about 15 minutes. Add maybe 2 ounces of finely slivered white cabbage, including stalk. Simmer for a further 5 minutes. Meanwhile gently fry some Sainbury's finest back bacon (probably not smoked) cut into 1cm squares in some butter (brand not important). Add that to the potatoes etc. Gently fry the piece of smoked haddock and the piece of fresh cod, skin down, to the point where the skin detaches. Flake and add that to the potatoes etc. Simmer for a further minute and serve. Very nice it was too, with the two of us doing the three pints in a sitting.

Then this morning off to Loyld's to get the large FIL prescription, against his return from hospital, to find that his gluten free bread had been included on the prescription, this despite, as I found out later, BH carefully scoring that item out on the repeat prescription form. This because we read somewhere that it cost the NHS about twice as much to do it this way as it would cost us to buy direct, over the Internet, from their supplier. Now as it happened the bread part of the prescription had not arrived, so I thought about cancelling. But why would you do that said that chit, it doesn't cost you anything if you get it from us.

I then left to walk off the 15 minutes or so it was going to take to assemble the rest of the order - and to ponder what to do about the bread. How long would it take to explain to the chit that we could rather pay £10 for the bread ourselves than have it free from an NHS which had had to pay £20 for it? And take a lot more flapping about while it was at it. On the return straight, I decided that it was my duty as a citizen to explain this to the chit and to get her to try and cancel the order - which had almost certainly not left the bakery up north at that point. Entered the shop with a stern demeanour to be greeted by a maturer dispenser who took in the stern demeanour at a glance and cancelled the bread order without bothering with the impending lecture.

This triumph of the will called for macaroni from Italy (preferably the fluted stuff) with pink sausage (from Poland), a dish last savoured in Norfolk (see 10th July). As it happened I already had the sausage, the onion and the basil. So off to Alio's for the fluted macaroni, where my choice of something called sedani grandi from Poiatti of Sicily (http://www.poiatti.it/) (headquartered perhaps 80km west by south of the Corleone of Godfather fame) was duly applauded by Alio himself. Inter alia, the stuff was said to yield a pleasant aroma when cooking, unlike the more basic product from Sainbury's. I have also learned that the sedani bit of the name of this particular pasta doubles as the word for celery - with the look of the stuff indeed being suggestive of that vegetable, at least once someone has noticed the suggestion for you. Cooked it for ten minutes, not being sure about the aroma as I was simmering the onion in some butter and basil at the time. Maybe the kitchen aroma was more to do with the basil. All turned out very well with the 10 ounces of sedani grandi sliding down our two throats in one sitting.

Following the soups mentioned yesterday, back on the case with a fish soup for Wednesday lunch. Simmer some white potatoes. When half done add some onions, cut like one opens an orange, segment wise. Skin a piece of smoked haddock (something which I have not done for a very long time and was rather easier than I was expecting. Presumably helped along by smoking amounting to half cooking) and chop coarsely. Add to the mix and simmer for a further ten minute. Serve.

Will probably follow up with a mixed smoked haddock and fresh cod version this evening.

However, yesterday, fortified by the haddock soup, had a very good session on puzzle 17, so good that I was able to finish it before breakfast this morning. A Waddingtons Deluxe 500 piecer of Willow Cottage, Norfolk - a rather grander version of the cottage that we stayed in the other week. And rather grander than the surprisingly large number of Willow Cottages that Mr. Google turns up in Norfolk. But a rather unsporting previous owner who had seen fit to pack the edges pieces separate from the rest. Being a sporting sort of chap I mixed them back up again.

Started with the edge, as usual. The two chimneys. Then moved onto the white walls and the windows - the white being easy to pick out and the windows being easy to fit together. Do the post on the left. Take the wall up to the first course of the thatch. Do the thatch-sky boundary. Then the strip of lawn. Then the sky, which being not more than three courses at most thick was a lot easier than usual.

Then moved onto the flowers, which slowed things right down. Eventually the action boiled down to pushing out from the big flower clumps. Picking out the colours and shapes worked without needing to sort. Had an wet accident at this point when I found out how easily the rather thin picture bit will come off the cardboard backing bit if a piece gets wet, but luckily, I had a glue stick near to hand to repair the damage.

This just left the interior of the thatch. Having done the top and bottom courses, the interior, like the sky, was three courses at most thick, and was knocked off in very short order. All done and dusted before breakfast, so off to the newsagent for, this being a day of luxury, both the DT and the Guardian - in which last I was rather put out to find coverage of the Olympics which would have done the Sun or the Daily Mail proud. Pages and pages of the stuff. There might even have been a pull out supplement. Hardly a pompous article about bog standards in sight. Then I remembered how Wetherspoons fell from a state of entertainment free grace and installed large televisions in all their pubs because they were losing too much business when the footer was on.

Then there was a rather irritating piece about how some property developer is going to spend hundreds of millions of pounds building stuff around the shell of Battersea Power Station. Why on earth can we not just knock the thing down and develop the site decently? There is always Bankside for aficionados of electricity company brickwork. Not to mention giant underground caverns filled with all  the latest arty junk at which the Arts Council has seen fit to throw our money.

On the other hand, the Economist had some sport explaining how the Olympic Games are a very bad thing for the host city but a very good thing for advertisers, contractors and the fat cats of the International Olympic Committee, which last ought to be up there with the bankers on our hate lists.

PS: I am not alone. The two older ladies running the second hand book stall attached to Bourne Hall Library Museum are clearly fully paid up Olympics haters. They thought the money might have been better spent on houses or something like that. But allowed that my notion of giving them a permanent home on Mount Olympus had its points - the Greek one that is, not the Cypriot one.

We have celebrated the return of summer with soups on the last two days. The first was made by boiling up the remains of a small Waitrose chicken with carrot and onion. Strain, add a bit of chopped smoked back. Add some finely slivered white cabbage. Add some Sharwood's noodles and then serve after a few minutes. The second was made from the broth in which a bit of beef was boiled for yesterday's lunch. Add the remains of the chicken soup. Add 3 ounces of pearl barley and stand for a while. Bring to the boil and simmer for a while. Once again, add some chopped smoked back, some finely slivered white cabbage and then serve after a few minutes.

Add some cold mashed potato to what is left and leave to stand overnight. Warm up for breakfast, to make an excellent start to the day.

While all this was going on, pondered on a scene in 'Vintner's Luck', either a charity shop job or library cast off. In any event a rather odd film, but watchable none the less.

One scene involved a young lady being prepped for a breast cancer operation. All done very tastefully, but one did get to see some flesh. The point of interest was that although she appeared to take some potion just before the off, there was plenty of screaming once the doctor got under way (behind closed doors). Now the film was set in France, in the early nineteenth century, so laudanum would have been available. Why did they not dose her up with that to the point where she did not feel the pain?

Thought 1, fairly sure that it was not routinely used in the field hospitals of the day - although I seem to remember that C. S. Forester talked about Captain Hornblower having a small bottle of the stuff - and I would have thought CSF was careful about background of that sort.

Thought 2, was that the stuff was expensive or hard to get hold of, but that does not fly because the patient was rich and the surgery was planned.

Thought 3, ask Mr. Google, who directs me to a rather odd but rather interesting site called http://www.general-anaesthesia.com/.  The thought there is that the amount of laudanum needed to deal with surgical pain is almost as likely to kill you as the surgery itself. If this is the case, it was not much of a choice: do nothing and die fairly unpleasantly later; go for the laudanum and maybe die fairly soon; or, go for the surgery without laudanum for the increased chance of survival but with much pain in the short term.

There was plenty of other stuff of interest, some on the relationship between pain relief and consciousness. Some of which reminded me of the claim by R. Penrose that consciousness will only be explained by the invocation of quantum effects.

PS: still being troubled by the mysterious white background which has to be turned off geek-fashion (see June 21st). When will the blogger crew get around to fixing whatever it is? On the other hand very impressed that I can fill up my elderly data stick to beyond 99% without it squealing. A far cry from the days when discs started to squeal at not much more than half full. Maybe it helps that the number of files is and has always been quite small.

Taking a quick look in our local Oxfam shop to see whether they had anything to compete with 'Poirot' this evening, I came across the book inside the dust cover illustrated instead. The illustration was cut by the husband of one of my father's elder sisters, known to me as 'Uncle Mac'. A relic of the days when more people were familiarly known by their surnames than is the case now.

I was vaguely aware that he did illustrations, his woodcuts being more usually intended to be kept in portfolios or hung on walls, but this is the first time that I have come across one in a bookshop.

As it happens, while the book looks to be a post-war economy job and a little tired, it also looks to be the sort of thing that BH might read. The tale of a chap who decides to go for the country life (perhaps after having done a stint on active service during the second war and wanting something peaceful & productive) and start a farm in the Welsh hills - these being, as it happens, the subject of many of Uncle's woodcuts. I have some such on my walls.

Being on one of my regular clockwise circuits of Horton Lane yesterday, happened across one of the regular car booters at the Hook Road Arena. A little late in the day, but a nice sunny day so had to give it a look. Turned out to be pleasantly crowded and with a higher than usual standard of merchandise - that is to say with more merchandise which was vaguely of interest to me. Arena itself was in good shape despite all the rain we have had recently.

There were, for once, a lot of jigsaws with the ruling price for a 500 piecer being 50p - compared with the Epsom charity shop £2.50. One round fish for FIL, one round flowers and one oblong scenic for me.

One child's book for 50p.

I looked at an interesting piece of rope, maybe an inch in diameter, twenty feet long, with a hook at one end and a shackle at the other. Useful object to have in the back garden for the amusement of passing children of a certain age but also rather heavy for a rather hot day and certainly far too expensive at £15. Did not seem likely, not being much cop at haggling, that I would get the thing down to the £5 I might have paid for it and then phoned BH to come and rescue me with the car. She would not have been pleased, it being Sunday roast day, with pudding. Cherry pudding as it happens, possibly according to the recipe for a cherry batter pudding from Limousin, aka clafoutis.

But then I came across two cheerful young ladies disposing of a heap of clothes plus some bric a brac. Nothing of interest there but they were laid out on a cloth on a folding table, one of the long thin ones, the sort of thing one might use for wallpapering although it looked a bit high grade to have been bought for the purpose. Maybe a barbie table. I was rather struck by the cloth and enquired whether it was for sale. After exchanging significant glances with the sandwich eating lady 2, lady 1 told me that it was. How much was I thinking of paying? Thought hard, peering suspiciously at it and came up with £5. Further exchange of significant glances and my offer was accepted. And yes, they could change a £20 note.

So I am now the proud possessor of a handsome bit of linen or linen like cloth, about 2.2m by 2.5m and printed with a pattern a bit like the sort of thing you might get on a rug from somewhere eastern. Or perhaps on M&S pyjamas. BH not too impressed, but at least she did not have to come to my rescue. One day I will find  use for the cloth. Maybe for a picnic? Maybe as a throw, to borrow a word from a Saturday supplement about stylish living?

This followed by Sunday roast and that followed by fluted macaroni (see July 10th) at tea time. Macaroni boiled with a few chopped stalks of celery. Dried basil, chopped garlic, chopped smoked back and chopped onion all gently fried in a little butter the meanwhile. Strain off the water and stir it all up. Very nice it was too.

When I first saw this item (in yesterday's DT) I was a bit concerned at what appeared to be a punitive fine. What if this was some small, generally decent operation which was going to be driven out of business by a fine of this sort? Would we have come out ahead?

I then ask Mr. Google about the operator who turns out to have a fairly fancy web site (http://www.caretech-uk.com/) from which we learn that 'CareTech is a principled service provider ... live and breath quality'. The turnover appears to be of the order of £50m with profits of the order of 10% of turnover. So maybe the fine is both proportionate to the offence and to the offender. But I do hope that sentencing guidelines do include both elements.

The same issue contained an allegation that the Syrian government operates two of the world's largest warehouses of chemical weapons, in this case sarin, mustard gas and cyanide. If true, sad that a poor and troubled country should spend its money on such things. One then wonders who sells them - thinking that it is probably somebody living in Eastern Europe. Hopefully not us.

BH has worries of a different order, being concerned that the Olympics are being held during Ramadan. Does the IOC take such things into consideration when coming up with dates? What does it take into consideration? A little work with Mr. Google and I have my very own copy of the Olympic Charter, a smartly produced document smelling of expensive international civil servants. All it says about dates - a search of the PDF document finding very few of them - is that 'The dates of the Olympic Games are determined by the IOC Executive Board' while there are reams and reams of stuff about governance. Entirely appropriate for an outfit which I believe to be in the rather venal grip of a bunch of people mostly originating from immature parts of the world. The lands of the fat brown envelope.

Odd that amongst all this stuff on governance there was not more about dates, at least to the point of saying how and when they were fixed. Maybe two weeks at the discretion of the host city falling between the fourth new moon after Easter and the second old moon following. Something which excused the date clashing from Ramadan from time to time. The simple option of replacing the phrase  'after Easter' in the foregoing by 'after Ramadan' does not work as we really do want the weather to be good. These are the summer Olympics after all.

Odd also that we have not noticed any notice of this matter. Do Muslims not do sport of this sort? Maybe their attitude to the Olympic Circus is one of their plus points.

Back to Epsom Common for once in a while, for an anticlockwise turn around the all weather part, excluding the Wells loop but including the Wheelers Lane loop. I am pleased to say that I saw no signs of chain saw activity although there was an important notice pinned to a tree which may have been threatening something of the sort. Whoever provided the Chainsaw Volunteers with a laminator has a lot of arboreal litter to answer for. But the Volunteers had chopped down a patch of bracken and the cows were back on the case, spraying global warming into the summer sky.

I was reminded of my mother explaining to me that the commies often got their way on boring committees (this was in the early sixties of the last century when otherwise respectable people could still be commies) because no one else could be bothered to turn out for them. In the same way, our Chainsaw Volunteers get away with murder, in this case of trees, because not enough people are willing, able or otherwise competent to turn up for their committees and vote them down.

I then got to pondering about the renovation of the Moore sculpture which has been missing from Hyde Park for quite some years now, a sculpture which, as it happens I used to be quite fond of. A pondering which was prompted by reading that the renovation had been completed and the sculpture reinstated. It seems that, like capitalism, the statue had been in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, in this case literally as the creviced white limestone which Moore had used for his material, while pretty, was not very suitable for his design. So the renovators stuck it all back together with an internal, invisble network of stainless steel rods or some such.

Now my father used to propagate a theory that true beauty lay in the successful alignment of structure with function, a beauty which he was accustomed to see in the results of evolution, for example in teeth, his speciality. But in the case of this sculpture the structure was not aligned with the function and is only so aligned now by subterfuge. The sculpture does not work as a piece of stone and is flawed for that reason. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to let the pieces lie where they fell, assuming that they would have eventually fallen. Being a Royal Park they should have been able to wangle an exemption from the various Health & Safety edicts which such a proceeding would no doubt have contravened.

The first round puzzle in the current series, a 500 piecer from Waddingtons. The colours in the illustration do not do it justice, but it was the most satisfying puzzle yet. Perhaps they have a point when they explain on the back of the box that 'dedicted puzzle fans have always favoured Waddington jigsaw puzzles from the quality and value'. This one, as it happens, £2 and with the pieces still in their unopened bag, never mind used, from some charity shop or other.

For some reason I found this still life far more satisfying than a photograph of a train or even of Hampton Court. I liked the richness and variety of tone, quite hard to translate from the picture on the box to the puzzle itself. The puzzle was about the right level of difficulty, with a slow start then gradually gathering speed as one got the hang of first the roundness and then the picture itself. Maybe I liked the food & drink subject matter? Was I being subtly stroked by the drink in question being a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin, a rather fancier looking bottle than I can afford but a tipple of which I partake in its cheaper variants when I can get them (see, for example, August 13 & 17 last year)?

The picture was the product of one Raymond Campbell, a gent., possibly a gentleman painter from Surrey and almost certainly a boozer given the prominence of bottles in his pictures, not that much younger than myself and who has an extensive presence on the web even it he, oddly, does not bother with his own web site. Interestingly, the web says that he declined the privilege of going to art school, preferring to teach himself.

Did the border OK, but then slowed right down when I started on the bread. Completely disorientated by having a round puzzle which seemed to mean that one had no idea which way up a piece was, although after some hours, if not days, I worked out that round puzzles have a geometry of their own, a geometry which gets quite strong as you get nearer the centre of the picture. The puzzle was very irregular in that lots of pieces did not meet at the corners, lots of pieces had irregular shape and a high proportion did not have the regular hole-prong-hole-prong formation. Lots to take on board.

Eventually got through most of the bread then moved onto the labels on the bottle. Then the grapes. All this, leaving various holes along the way, holes that were gradually stopped up as one came across the offending piece while looking for something else.

Then the cheese, which seemed a lot easier than what had gone before. The crept along the board, from right to left, knocking off the knife, the napkin and the glass along the way. The leaves. The bottom of the image. Now done apart from the background tiles.

These, while standing for the sky you get in many puzzles, were a lot easier than the average sky. Made a framework by doing the grout between the tiles first and then the rest of it fell into place quite quickly, the irregularity becoming a plus rather than a minus once there were few enough pieces for the brain to scan them quickly and reliably for shape.

Brain clearly tired out by all this as I fell into a strange error in Waitrose shortly after, wanting to buy some cheese to go with the brown bread which would be baked later in the day. A white goat from Swaledale, fair enough. But then I spotted something which looked a bit like cheddar, not something that this Waitrose really majors on. A cheese which described itself as oak smoked. I then, quite unconsciously, translated this phrase into mature, traditional, farmhouse, heritage and decided that the cheese was just what I wanted - to be rather surprised by the smoky flavour later in the day. The brain had clearly got its descriptors for fish and cheese muddled up.

With the result that I have now got rather a large lump of cheese which tastes rather like the smoked Bavarian I used to buy off fat plastic wrapped sausages of the stuff. With or without small lumps of ham incorporated.

Greenpeace continue to mount demonstrations which may or may not be legal but which as far as I am concerned go well beyond what is reasonable. This latest one was said by the Guardian to have shut down lots of Shell petrol stations in London and Edinburgh and involved interfering with the emergency shut off switches. In a world where crime, riot and terrorism lurk not too far beneath the surface outfits, like Greenpeace would do well to rein themselves in a bit and set a better example. Stop giving the various security industries yet another excuse to get even more pervasive and intrusive than they already are. In the meantime I shall continue to try to make sure that none of my money winds up in their coffers.

What one might think about drilling for polar bears in the Arctic is beside the point. But the man from Shell was a model of self restraint: '... we respect the right of individuals and organisations to engage in a free and frank exchange of views ...'.

Further irritation caused by trying to get into the spirit of things and see a bit of Olympic Torch - although I am pleased to say no-one is yet suggesting that I should actually go and see any Olympics, paraplegic or otherwise. So I get onto what I presume is the official Olympic web site and ask it all about the doings of the torch in and about Garratt Lane and what do I get but a rather badly presented bit of map. After much huffing and puffing and some help from Mr. Google, I eventually discover that the place to find out about the torch is not the Olympic web site at all but the BBC web site, which explains in great detail the progress of the torch down Garratt Lane. It seems that it will end up in the car park of Tooting Bec Lido where Samsung will be laying on some entertainment.

It certainly used to be a very fine lido with plenty of spectator sport on offer on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Maybe just the place for womens' bantam weight water polo. Maybe Samsung are sponsors of same?

Then settled down to last week's TLS and ground to a halt in the middle of some Lit. Crit. thing about George Eliot. All terribly heavy going and one starts to wonder why we are buying feed for these people. If they want to do this stuff in their own time, fine, but I am not sure that I want to be paying them to do it. But then I am not sure what I want English Departments in universities to be doing at all: they should exist, they should be doing something and I am very doubtful if scoring them according to the number of papers they publish is the way forward, but that is about as far as I get.

But the good news is that I skimmed a piece about a chap called Gissing, very popular in his day, said by Orwell to be a fine novelist and said by Wikipedia to have had an interesting early life. So off to Gutenburg to pull down three of the novels with special mentions in Wikipedia and I am now stuck in to 'Odd Women' on the kindle. Sufficiently interested to get same out of Epsom Library (to their credit they had one other book by Gissing on their shelves) so that BH and I can read the thing in parallel. Or almost in parallel as BH does not always read books from start to finish and sometimes tackles them from other directions. I shall report further in due course.

Following jigsaw 16 of one of the sunken gardens at Hampton Court (see July 7th) we decided yesterday that it was time to pay another visit to the real thing.

So off we go on a warm and muggy day to find that the Palace and its environs were littered with marquee fun. Not clear if this was the debris from the Hampton Court Flower show or the beginnings of some Olympic festival or other: has the womens' bantam weight water polo been moved down to the Thames? We managed to park in our usual car park despite these hazards and headed off through the rose garden  - looking pretty well despite the dreadful weather - past the maze and out of the Lion Gate.

Cast around for the Italian restaurant more or less opposite the Gate which we used once before - though I can find no blogord - and which turned out to be La Fiamma (http://www.lafiamma.co.uk/). One large party of ladies lunching left plenty of room for us and we wound up with a good table next to the open French windows. So I had a view of Bushy Park while BH could keep an eye on the ladies lunching. Despite this we failed to work out what they were up to and there was no opportunity for a discrete word with one to find out. Their lunch had a leader who gave the lunch the tone of an Amway gathering - a pyramid sales outfit we had come across in Palmers' Green more than thirty years ago and which still appears to be very much alive at http://www.amway.co.uk/. The other ladies appeared to have day jobs and each had to do a couple of minutes spiel on what that was; middling sort of people who sounded as if they were in business in a modest way - beauty parlours, flower shops and that sort of thing. It all seemed a lot more focused than a social meeting of the ladies chapter of the local chamber of commerce, but what exactly it was will remain a puzzle. Good thing for La Fiamma though as their lunchtime would have been a bit quiet without them.

I was able to admire the comings and goings of the deer out in the park, with some of them, complete with large antlers, coming very close indeed. Others were keeping the underside of the park trees clipped nice and even, even rearing up on their hind legs to grab offending twigs when need arose. All very pretty in this context but must be a right pain if you get them in your garden - far worse than the foxes and squirrels that I moan about. And people do, not so very far at all from where we live, and we certainly had them stuffing themselves on our allotments when I used to do that.

Started off with antipasto for two, a handsomely arranged selection of savoury vegetable and charcuterie. I followed with an Italian variety of sirloin steak which turned up, in another handsome arrangement, looking for all the world like three rather fat and rather brown sausages, complete with a rich looking dark brown gravy. On closer inspection the sausages turned out to be thinly cut sirloin steak wrapped around peppers from more than one country. BH had something pastary involving duck breast. Both very gool. Washed down with a screw top Sancerre. Tiramisu for pudding turned out to be mainly flavoured cream, washed down with rather a fine pudding wine the name of which I forget but possibly a 2006 Capitelli IGT. All in all a very good meal, handsomely presented in a handsome restaurant. Lets hope they do enough business in the evening to keep them alive until we next think of going there.

After lunch took a turn around the newly gilded Diana Fountain, which has retained the interesting property of appearing to lean to the left from whatever angle you look at the thing. An illusion which has been going on for me for some years and I cannot work out how it works. Most frustrating.

All of which gave rise to an odd dream later in the day. I got it into my head that there was some sort of church somewhere on the south side of Hyde Park, a classic revival church looking rather like a small Greek Temple. Sat by itself in an island of green park, but near a tube station. Involving some steps down and some steps up. I had the distinct impression that I had visited this place in dreamtime before, but quite some years ago, and it took some while, while waking up, to convince myself that the place did not really exist.

And then later still we were in evacuation mode. Everyone to leave the country, or at least the area, double quick. BH thought it would be prudent if I stocked up with some warm vests for the purpose, to which end I went into this rather odd gents. outfitter, the sort of place which should have an elaborate display in its elaborate shop window and lots of elaborate woodwork inside. Lots of small drawers. But this one was not like that at all, with the several rooms inside heavily draped in white sheets instead. A connecting passage. The rather odd shop keeper appeared upside down at a hatch and tried quite hard to sell me some thin woollen sweaters on the grounds that they would do much better as vests than real vests. But I was not convinced at several pounds each and settled for just three, pending further consultation with BH. Forgetting that we were supposed to be doubling out of the area.

No idea what brought on either dream. The second, at least, had the virtue of being brand new rather than a retread.

When I was little and lefty, I used to talk in bars about how capitalism was bound to imminent collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Talk of  which I was reminded this morning by a chance phrase in yesterday's Guardian about how UK spenders are not spending enough to pull us out of the recession. The contradiction being that I thought we largely got into our present pickle by spending too much, spending too much of other peoples' money.

To which an economist might respond that it all depends. You have a system with two constraints, one about spending too little and one about spending too much. Without more information it is impossible to say whether or not there is a market solution which satisfies both constraints. Nice fat grant needed to study the question at a proper depth.

There was also rather a tiresome article about the evils of outsourcing. Fair enough that it pointed to the various pitfalls & pratfalls of outsourcing, but no recognition at all that outsourcing is now a mainstream tool of management in both private and public sectors and that, other things being equal, it does make good sense to concentrate on core business and to get someone else to worry about the stuff round the edges. It is entirely likely that a catering contractor can make a better fist of running your canteen than you can. A catering contractor that can provide muscle, skills, standards and career opportunities that you are no position to match.

The trick being not to outsource your core business along with the bathwater.

In the case which is presently in the news, maybe the Olympics people should have contracted with the Census of Population Field Force people rather than some temporary staff agency. The Census people have plenty of experience of hiring large numbers of people for a short spell of boring, badly paid but important work and I do not recall them getting into the news in quite this way. But I suppose that is completely off message: public good, private profits better is the war cry of our present leaders. With an unconscious nod at Orwell.

North Norfolk turned out to be rich in churches. A lot richer than one might think likely for a stretch of not very good farming land, but I will wonder about that another day.

Started off with Wighton Church, in the village where we were staying, a large place with a flint exterior, a small congregation, a tower, two aisles, a nave and a chancel, kept open more or less the whole time, this openness seemingly the product of the 'Open Churches' initiative of the Diocese of Norfolk. But not so quiet that it did not run to a couple of cheerful cleaners on the following Friday.

The north aisle was used to display some obsolete agricultural implements and the coffin carriage (if that is the right term) illustrated. The carriage seemed like a good idea: one could load the thing up at home, walk it to the church for the service and then on into the yard for the burial. No need for any other carriages, horseless or otherwise. Quite a lot of the churches we went to had them, although, sadly, none of them appeared to be in use. And they wouldn't really do in Epsom where the walking and pushing involved would be a bit much for us older participants. And more or less out of the question if one opted for a cremation - which would be miles and miles away.

The next visit was to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, a very important place in its day, started up by a Saxon noblewoman with a rather French sounding name (perhaps her married name) just before the Conquest, broken up by Henry VIII and with restoration starting towards the end of the 19th century. Oddly enough the biggest element of the shrine is (high) Anglican, with the Catholics holding the ground at the Slipper Chapel, the last of what used to be the way-stations on the way to the shrine proper. Anglican was sufficiently high to have relics, these including a piece of the True Cross, some relics derived from a martyrdom by barbecue and a replica of a nail from the True Cross. Now I can see how a relic might come to be important, but I have not yet been able to find out how a replica of a relic comes to be a relic itself. And at least two of the rugs in side chapels appeared to be of Muslim origin. All rather impressive none the less.

On an ecclesiastical par with Our Lady of Knock, said by John McGahern in one of his novels to function as a sort of matrimonial agency for those of middle age, although there was no sign of that sort of thing at Walsingham. Oddly, Walsingham is a much older shrine than Knock, despite the zeal of the Irish in the first millennium.

The Anglican bit of http://www.walsingham.org.uk/ seems to creak a bit but the Catholic part is up and running. On the ground we also have space for both the Greek and the Russian Orthodox.

A couple of days later, more or less by accident, to Binham Priory (http://www.binhampriory.org/), not that much older than that at Walsingham, but which turned out to be a very well presented bit of architectural and ecclesiastical heritage. The priory was all ruined apart from what had been the nave of the priory church and was now the parish church, rather nicely touched up with the help of Lottery money and such like. Touching up which stretched to a brand new DT.

Interested by the ruins of some large and fancy columns outside, columns which were faced with a thin layer of dressed stone but which were flint rubble inside. The things must have been made by building a shutter, as one would for concrete, setting the face stones, facing out, on the inside of the shutter and then filling the thing up with flint and mortar. Quite a palaver, particularly when you came to the arches which sat on the columns and which appeared to have been made in the same way.

To retain a sense of proportion, a quick look at the nearby Langham Church, distinguished by sloping columns to the south aisle. Like those of St David's in Pembrokeshire, in which last case I think the sloping was on purpose, something to do with balancing the forces of nature.

For variety, then spent some hours in Blakeney where we were interested to find an outside wall mounted combined thermometer and barometer, originally sold by Negretti & Zambra, once a name to be conjured with in the world of scientific instruments. This one was in a natty oak, glass fronted box maybe two feet high, six inches wide and four inches deep. The barometer's mercury tube looked to be about half an inch in diameter with a float carrying a vernier scale sitting on top of the mercury. Was I seeing straight? Maybe the answer is to be found at http://www.negrettiandzambra.co.uk/.

Onto to the very grand Blakeney Church out on the road to Wiveton (just to confuse). One large tower, one small tower, one chancel, one nave and two aisles. Lots of fancy woodwork including a hammer beam roof to the nave. Some interesting stained glass. A grade one listed building, one of the no less than 96 churches listed by English Heritage for North Norfolk. Maybe it is not such an accolade after all. Or maybe I have not quite got the hang of their web site.

Rounded off our little tour at the end of the week by going back to Walsingham, visiting the Catholic shrine then the Anglican. Tea and and toasted tea cake taken with the Catholics while we were waiting for two bus loads of pilgrims to clear the (new) church associated with the (old) slipper chapel. New church rather impressive. The cloister ran to a few martins, the first we have seen for a while.

Wound up the visit with BH buying me a third edition of a nice picture book about the Old Testament by one John Drane. Excellent souvenir.

Following the recent rain, the jelly lichen on the back patio is spreading its wings, fuelled by the water making its way down from the back garden, with the path ending at the top right of the picture acting as the main conduit. Mainly a dull green but with some dark brown.

Up the steps, up the path and under the shed. Probably the furthest extent ever. BH is glaring at it and there is dark talk of visits to the garden centre to buy a suitable weed killer.

Rather better illustrations are to be found at http://www.uklichens.co.uk/ but I don't know of any better specimens as I don't recall ever seeing the stuff before it started blooming in our garden. The book says damp limestone terraces up north.

It is also a good year for blackberry shoots with one of about six feet long overhanging the path at the end of our road. Maybe an inch in diameter where it joins the main branch. I would think that it is the growth of two years. It was also rather dangerous and quite likely to get entangled in someone's face - the very incident which I remember being told that carried off my paternal grandfather when he was younger than I am now and was doing something or other in a field on his holding. Something about the wound to his eye turning to fatal septicemia because he wouldn't go and see the quack about it.

Now we live in a decent suburban road where we look out for our neighbours and don't have many all night parties, so it does not say much for our sense of civic duty that the thing has been hanging over the pavement for some weeks before I get around to cycling the few hundred yards down the road to cut it down. Where were all the other chaps who lived so much nearer? Maybe admiring the thing from their front windows? Would things be any better in Garratt Lane?

To be fair, the offending shoot originated on the bank of a stream and was thus either the responsibility of the Council or of the Water Board. Not for a mere citizen to interfere, to take the bread out of the mouths of their contractors. Perhaps the proper course of action would have been for me to send an email to my LibDem councillor and get her to run with this interesting baton, while we could run a sweepstake on how long it took for the shoot to vanish. Much better use of our time.

Not the first time I have noticed such a thing. A couple of years ago an ornamental bush of box on a grass verge near here, perhaps a cubic metre's worth of bush, was getting overrun by another blackberry plant. The owner of the £500,000 worth of house which fronted onto the bush did nothing about it for months or maybe even years, waiting I think until the council did indeed get around to it.

A not very good shot of what appears to be party gear for hire from a hairdresser in Garratt Lane. From which we deduce that they clearly have more exciting parties than I ever managed to get to.

But appropriate as I have just finished rereading 'Typee' on the kindle, a novel about life on a Marquesan island published in 1846, partly based on the author's own experiences and partly culled from those of others. One thing which I found surprising was his idealisation of life on a Pacific island, a life which appeared to involve neither crime, disease nor hunger. So quite unlike the more recent experiences of Lucy Irvine and Thor Heyerdahl. And quite unlike my recollection of stories about savage warfare between the various tribes of Hawaii. Another was the appearance of sex - to a far greater extent than was the case in the polite literature of this island at that time. Never mind Jane Austen.

The other novel just finished on the kindle is 'Ivanhoe', having been knocking around since around 25th May, and more or less contemporary with said Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice'. As it turned out, once I buckled down to the thing, it was more readable than I was expecting, certainly a lot more readable than when I last tried it, perhaps 50 years ago. And while he does allow some taint of anti-semitism into his prose, overall he is fairly sympathetic, I dare say rather more so than many of his contemporaries.

Scott goes so far as to preface the book with an essay in the form of a spoof letter to one Rev. Dryasdust containing, in addition to the odd bit of untranslated Latin, presumably intelligible to his readers, some interesting reflections on historical novels of this sort. He seems to have some understanding of my dislike of the blending of fact and fiction. He had also given some thought to the business of bringing alive one time for the people of another, which he appears to think needs a sort of compromise. It is no good reproducing things exactly as they were as it would not be understood and a degree of translation is required to make the earlier time intelligible to the later. Which makes me wonder whether, if one was able to exactly reproduce an early 17th century performance of a Shakespeare play, whether anyone around now would be able to understand it? How much of the original do we have to cast away to make what is left of the thing live for today's audience? Has anyone thought to do translations, doing away with the need to swat up on all sorts of obsolete vocabulary, rather as one might translate the 'Iliad'? And presumably losing much of the poetry on the way. With the fact that Scott sees fit to include such a discussion in this preface suggesting a more sophisticated readership than I would otherwise have thought.

I turn from my mental arithmetic to the arithmetical standards of the population at large to notice a page 2 piece in a recent 'Guardian' about death taxes, a piece which might fall short of the how awfulls you would get from the 'Daily Mail' but not by that much.

Along the way it mentions that 89.2% of adults in the resident population of England think that the government ought to do something about the costs of care for the elderly, a mention which does not go on to explain that all these resources have to come from somewhere. Government can only provide services to the extent that the population is prepared to pay taxes - this being a population which seems to think that government ought to be able to get along with a 25% share of the national cake rather than the 50% it needs - along with more or less all the other civilised countries of the world. (And half of which population, so it is said, cannot name the Prime Minister). So we do need to do something about arithmetic in our schools. Make the little darlings answer questions like 'if you have 5,234 old people who need an average of 3.54 years of care at £676 a week, how much do you need to put on the basic rate of tax to pay for it? Extra marks for answers which take account of leap years'.

And while we struggle along, getting little further than a rather poor standard of public debate, the Irish appear to have a scheme up and running. A national register of places offering residential care. A scheme called 'Fair Deal' to spread the load a bit, with a proportion of the costs coming out of general taxation rather than out of the pockets those lucky enough to live for a very long time. Or unlucky I suppose, depending on your point of view.

The general idea is that if you sign up for help with your care home costs, the state might take up to 80% of your income plus 5% of your capital each year, this last for up to three years. As a basic deal, that sounds pretty good to me. Hopefully their civil servants have crossed all the eyes and dotted all the tees, dealt with the old miser who when up against it would rather give his house to his son than let the state get a share of it - or, to put it another way, pay for his own care. Or somebody who expects fancier food than most old people are content with. Or somebody who spent most of a long life paying little or no tax at all.

Maybe I will take a peek at whatever small print is lurking at http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=16363. Maybe it is another example of how small outfits can just get on and do things which big outfits tie themselves up in knots over. Big is not always beautiful and it is sometimes a lot more complicated.

Following the report on May 28th, can now report further bureaucratic fun.

We are still working with the nice people at the NS&I call centre, having successfully completed the setting up of just one out of the three accounts we launched on  May 28th. The successful one involved a letter from them printed on a specialised piece of paper and containing a temporary password and us supplying yet another set of security information. How on earth do these people think we are going to keep and keep track of secure copies of all this stuff? And maintain the fiction that we do not peek at each others accounts? A fiction which has to be maintained as I recall one call centre operator getting quite huffy when she quite mistakenly thought that I was doing FIL's banking for him. Threatened all kinds of dire things like freezing the account.

On the other two accounts we were promised the letters containing temporary passwords but these never turned up. And it now turns out that I cannot ask for duplicates unless I can answer some security questions of which I have no recollection and about which I can find no paperwork. Not even in the nearly always helpful gmail. And the first question they wanted me to answer over the phone was so obscure that I have no idea what the right answer is, let alone which I might have told them. My last post suggests that I did indeed supply the answers some security questions but it is odd that I did not keep the paperwork, usually being quite meticulous about such things. Must have been yet another senior moment. Maybe it will turn up mysteriously in six months time when this has all be sorted out otherwise.

All this bother for some quite minor investments. It would have been hugely easier to do something of the same sort with Halifax.

All having been made so much more tiresome by the country being tied up in knots by the data protection act. Simon Jenkins was banging a similar drum in the Guardian yesterday when he pointed to the nonsense that the freedom of information act is dragging us into. As various people have pointed out over the years, the way to hell is often paved with good intentions.

And then I thought that given all the kerfuffle of the last few months it would be interesting to know how my weight is doing. Didn't think to ask them at the hospital yesterday but happening to be at my GP's today I asked the nice people behind the counter there if I could be weighed. Oh no sir, you have to make an appointment to have the nurse take your blood pressure and weigh you. Why don't you try Boots? Well, I did and they don't have a weighing machine any more, they just have a machine into which you put money and it tells you about your fat body mass ratio or something. Why don't you try Lloyds? Which I then did and the nice people there weighed me on their imperial bathroom scales higher grade. Go home clutching a piece of paper saying 14.36 stones. Once I got home I felt sure that it should have said 14 stones 3.6 pounds. But I could not be absolutely sure. Still, either way, after some minutes manipulating the calculator on the PC and the weight conversion tool on the Internet, I seem to have put back on around 4kg in a couple of months, so that is a result of sorts and celebrated by taking the first spin on the bicycle for more than 3 months, a sedate couple of times around the block. Will I be moved to buy a helmet, something I was starting to think about when bulling around on the bullingdons?

The bad news is that there was a time when the sums involved would have counted as mental arithmetic.

I shall probably have a dream tonight about those far off, rose tinted days when railway stations used to have large red person weighing machines and small green plant label printing machines. At least they did at Cambridge railway station.

Yesterday into a village in darkest Surrey called Compton to visit the Watts' shrine, Watts being a successful Victorian painter and sculptor who, oddly, declined a baronetage at the the time that Millais got his. The same chap whose horse we disliked on August 2nd last year.

First stop was the memorial chapel, kindly donated to the village by his grieving widow and more a memorial to some of the rather odd fancies of the arts and crafts people than anything else. Quite a promising confection from the outside, in red brick and terracotta, set amid some handsome trees, including some large beeches. Inside however, one's first thought was that the place would make an excellent film setting for something from Tolkien. All hobbits and runes - and which reminded BH of the mosaic above the stage at the Wigmore Hall. A lot of people had worked hard on the thing but the overall effect was not very holy, with the lack of holiness being highlighted by the large voices of the groups of ladies who lunched in the surrounding area. (The place might have been a village once but I expect that the nearest thing to a villager today would be the Polish housekeeper or the Filipino maid).

Second stop was the gallery, home to a large number of works of the master. Sadly the galleries were not really big enough to show the larger ones off to best advantage, something that many of them needed. One was also conscious that the chap was very into bared & stretched necks with heads turning away. Was he interested in sacrifice? Overall, the quality was rather mixed to say the least, although I did like some of his portraits. Bit of a mystery how the chap made so much money that his widow (he took a second, much younger wife, quite late in life) could set up and endow the shrine. Although not so much that they disdained money from the likes of the National Lottery. They are also in transition from a small place to a big place marked up on the tourist trail, taking buses. The systems are creaking a bit, and for my money it is a pity they were unable to continue small and cosy.

We also got to see the sculpture studio which contained, inter alia, the plaster version of the offending horse, sitting on its own little bit of private railway.

Tea room very dinky but also very crowded so we decamped for refreshment to the refectory at Guildford Cathedral.

Back home to check up what Canady had to say about the chap to find a handy one page potted biog., not terribly flattering but fair enough given what we saw at Compton. But at least we read the Canady after the event, having seen the stuff with a clean slate first. Remember the Barnes Foundation at Philadelphia which is said (by the TLS) to refuse to label its pictures - many of them very serious stuff, all paid for by sales of a potion for VD by the name of Agyrol - for this very reason.

Back home also to a very fine pizza of BH's own confection and involving cheese from more than one country. Helped along by Dr. Loosen, purveyor of a wine containing less alcohol than any wine that I remember. Good stuff though.

Rounded off the day by an unusually gripping film called 'Housekeeping', most unlike the usual sort of offering on the Film 4 early evening slot. Sufficiently moved to buy the book of the film.

Various culinary matters to report from Norfolk.

I start with the bad news, a kipper smoked in Cley and sold in Wells, having been assured by the fishmonger that this very item was sold by Harrods of London. Lightly smoked, light in colour and rather damp looking, which last meant that I opted for slow grill rather than the slow simmer we give kippers from Craster. I think it arrived on the plate as was intended, with white flesh rather like smoked mackerel in texture but which hung onto the bones and skin rather harder than I found desirable. An interesting flavour, not particularly unpleasant, but nothing like as pleasant as that of a kipper from Craster; maybe too much of the bloater about it. Made up yesterday with a visit to Waitrose of Epsom to buy some proper kippers. Entirely satisfactory.

We visited both cafés at Holkham Hall and we pleased to find that one could buy both bacon sandwiches and meat pies, perhaps reflecting a fairly high density of visitors from up north. Meat pie quite satisfactory but I was reminded that I prefer its meat and potato cousin. All meat is a bit strong and one can get more of the meat and potato down. We also tried the cake, also quite satisfactory.

There was another pie opportunity when we visited Walsingham Farms Shop (see http://www.walsinghamfarmsshop.co.uk/) in the margins of our visits to Our Lady. On the first occasion we bought a tenderloin, a tenderloin which to judge from its colour had come from a pig which had been slaughtered more or less that day, more or less on the spot. First half went to make a meat, onion, potato and cabbage soup while the second half went to make a meat, onion and tomato sauce to go with some rather fancy macaroni, bought from a rather fancy grocer in Blakeney. Tortiglioni medi 24 from Castiglioni, a little larger than regular macaroni and with fluted outer surface, fluting which made an important difference to the way the stuff cooked, in so far as I could judge from the blurb (in Italian) on the box. In any event, sauce and macaroni went down OK, washed down with some rather nice white wine from the same establishment, but not having spent anything like the £40 a bottle quite a lot of his stuff went for. Must be a fancy class of holiday maker at Blakeney, maybe not from up north.

On the second occasion we bought a pork pie, a pie which had been pressed out of a machine which was standing behind the counter. Not bad at all. Maybe we shall try something else from his considerable range of pies when we next visit. We also bought rather a good cheese, quite wrongly described as cheddar: it might have looked like cheddar but it had a much more interesting flavour than is normal with cheddar, something a touch more sophisticated than damp and sour. Went under the name of 'Green's Mature' (and I now find from google that it probably was cheddar after all and can probably be bought from http://www.farmhousecheesemakers.com/. Maybe I will give it a go).

For a posh meal out we went to the Crown at Wells Next the Sea (http://www.crownhotelnorfolk.co.uk/). Main course was very good, being a low tech. version of the cow chop they sell in Florence, quite possibly made with beef from the herd of light brown cows we passed the following day out on Holkham marshes. Possibly South Devons (there was talk of same somewhere along the line) but certainly serviced by a dark brown bull (illustrated). Preceded by charcuterie, bread and olives served on a couple of slates, one at least of which looked as if it had done time on a roof. Followed by a cheesecake, described as cooked despite having a biscuit base. But it was very good too. All washed down with a jolly little Sancerre and wrapped up with some Armagnac. I would only fault the feeble horseradish sauce, which appeared to consist of cream with just a hint of horseradish.

For a not so posh meal out we went to the Swallows at Little Walsingham, the sort of old style café which thinks it proper to serve its meat pie with dabs of no less than seven vegetables, all of which had been cooked quite some time before I got around to eating them. Quite eatable and they also did rather good cakes. Walls adorned with signed pictures from various stars of the small screen, such as Inspector Morse and a very young looking Inspector Lewis. Maybe they follow the Roman path.

Somewhere along the way we had stewed gooseberries, like broad beans very easy to grow but very dear in the shops. So long since I have cooked them that it took two goes to get it right. I might also plead having to use pale brown sugar cubes in mitigation. But once they were right they were good: no need to dress them up in tart, cream or custard at all.

Came across yet another example of Canadian generosity in the church at Wighton, with this tablet telling how an Ontarian on a family history holiday paid for the failing tower to be rebuilt, plus the acquisition of some new bells. The bill must have been considerable.

I suppose the reason that all this generosity seems to be Ontarian is mainly arithmetic, with Ontario accounting for more than half of the English speaking population. See http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html.

Interesting to see how they handle the provincial angle there: a lot more important than our statistical regions and a lot more numerous than our countries, particularly if one excludes such anomalies as the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which is usual, I think, in British statistical circles. Interesting to see how gross structural features of this sort drive the national statistical products: one size does not fit all - which must considerably complicate the job of the international collators in places like the UN and Eurostat. And probably makes for lots of errors in those natty cross country tabulations which the Economist is fond of.

PS: need to go to Google school. Five minutes failed to reveal to me who this Leeds Richardson is. Is he anything to do with the Leeds Richardson Construction Company? Is he anything to do with any of the various ancient Leeds Richardsons listed?

Thinking to holiday in Norfolk last week, tried booking a hotel on the Ordance Survey Landranger sheet number 132 (possibly the best maps in the world. I have never found anything better for holidays). Having never thought that this was going to be a problem just before the main holiday season kicked in, we failed to find a hotel which could do the whole week. Most could do most of the week, with the difficulty being the middle of the week. To be absolutely fair, the Ramada at King's Lynn could have done our business, but BH was not impressed by the idea of staying at a hotel with an address on an industrial estate, despite the town being old and important enough to have deserved to appear in many episodes of 'Timewatch'.

Next stop was http://www.cottages4you.co.uk/, an outfit which we had not previously used, but from which a helpful operator found us an entirely suitable cottage in a place called Wighton. Quite a stroke of luck since we wanted to occupy the day after the day after we spoke to her. Another stroke of luck was that the inhabitants of Wighton seemed to be deep into flowers; to the point of our holiday cottage having a fine, flower filled garden. For example, the clematis illustrated.

At some point during the week we found out that the likely reason for hotel problems was the arrival of the olympic torch and its attendant caravan of people, vans, security men and women, minor celebrities and what have you in north west Norfolk. I was also very unimpressed to learn that that the torch was not actually being carried about, rather it was moved from town to town by motor vehicle and just carried through the actual towns by actual athletes. Has athletics so far declined that we cannot muster enough distance runners to carry the thing night and day through our green and pleasant land? Did the security men and women belong to a union which objected to their working in the dark out in the country where there might be funny noises? In any event, sufficiently unimpressed that we decided not to go to Fakenham to see the thing, choosing rather to spend the relevant day on the first of two visits to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. But we did get to see some inflatable souvenirs of the torch on the bus home.

We were also treated to an impromptu rant from a chap of about my age & inclinations at the vast waste of money involved in the whole olympic business. Most entertaining; perhaps we should have invited him and his wife to the pub to share the full story.

Back at the cottage, I was further unimpressed to read that we have been keeping Ian Brady alive by tube feeding for 10 years or more. Why on earth do we not let the chap starve himself to death? What decent purpose is served by keeping him alive? Where is the Christian charity (which we are supposed to be signed up for) in dragging out his life for him? I would go further and make sure that suitably lethal pills were made suitably available to people who commit unspeakable crimes. I dare say a good proportion would make use of them.

Back at the house, BH & FIL were both even more unimpressed to find that tennis had disturbed the second episode of  'The Hollow Crown' on BBC. To the point that they gave up and went to bed. They had both liked the much lauded first episode, while I did not like the ten minutes or so that I saw at all, for me a production which had been taken over by the costume and set designers. And I did not think that a king of some years standing would toy with his pet monkey while conducting state business of life and death.

For puzzle 16 we had been looking out for a rendering of one of the sunken gardens at Hampton Court which brought out the subtle patterns of green, rather than just focussing on the flashy colours of the summer bedding plants. Not quite the same thing as puzzle 7 of 25th April at all; the focus there was more brown brick and green boring.

Eventually, last week, we ran one down in the Sue Ryder shop at Wells next the Sea (entirely appropriate given that FIL was staying at the time at an establishment operated by the organisation started up by her (Sue Ryder) and her husband (Leonard Cheshire)). A Falcon deluxe 500 puzzle, £3.50, the box rather faded, probably the result of sitting behind an ozone filled seaside shop window for too long, with the puzzle itself having been done at least once and with a couple of split prongs, but otherwise in good condition.

Started by sorting to edge, skyline, sky and rest. Did the edge, then the banqueting house at the right of the picture, a banqueting house which happened to be open to visitors one Sunday earlier this year (see 17th January). Then moved onto to the paths, then the garden wall, on this occasion not being tempted to an early attempt on the rest of the skyline.

Next the flower beds, made easier by their arrangement into sub-beds of distinctive colour and texture. Made harder by doing the jigsaw on top of a table cloth on top of one of those insulating mats which you can still buy from John Lewis. This one had been folded for some time with the result that the creases did not lie flat and the jigsaw had to make its uneven way over the humps and bumps. Most unsatisfactory.

At this stage finished the skyline before moving onto the pink flowers occupying the bottom right of the image. Then the grass, then the green band running across the middle. Then the pudding trees to the left.

Last but not least, moved onto the sky, large enough to justify sorting and with the illustration being taken at this stage of the proceedings, clearly showing the pre-eminence of the prong-hole-prong-hole configuration. There was enough variation in colour and shape that quite a lot of pieces were spotting without having recourse to trial and error. Most satisfying, ample reward for the slog of the intervening trials. Solution from left to right because of the stronger (and so easier) colour variation on the left. I was slightly slowed down by error in the middle of the sky edge, but not too much, it turning out that the error was no more complicated than the switching of two pairs of pieces.

As far as I can remember, four pieces met at every interior vertex. No overhangs; a regular puzzle.

Have now taken the plunge and mown the new daffodil bed, with the plan being to cut it at least once before the end of the season, with the intention being that the grass should be fairly short when the bulbs next want to come up, hopefully some time early in 2013.

Note the extension to the traditional chestnut fence (I assume sweet chestnut rather than horse chestnut, on the grounds that the former seems to throw out straight shoots very readily), intended to keep the neighbouring miniature fox hound out.

Chicken wire hangs down from the extension, not visible in this snap. But it does seem to do the trick and hopefully the bald patch in the corner where dogs and foxes used to jump will now recover. Just visible.

Sadly, we find that the smell of the hound, contrary to contrary report, does not keep the foxes out of its own garden, never mind ours. So there are presently some young foxes which are as tame, say, as the ducks in the park expecting picnic leftovers. Maybe I will get one of those red-neck hi-tech catapults off the internet yet. Or maybe when the hound starts to adolesce and to chuck out lots of the sweet smelling sex hormones, they will scare the foxes off.

PS: I wonder in passing what adolesce might mean in Dutch. Perhaps a real world visit to http://www.adolesce.nl/ is called for.