pumpkinstrokemarrow

For the first time in many months I was moved to do some DIY today. The alternative was to learn about the vacuum cleaner with a view to getting some bits of fluff off the carpet.

The movement occurred when coming down from our loft and I brushed my back against the catch in the middle of the illustration. A catch which stuck out  from the frame of the loft hatch and which could do a serious injury to one's back should one fall back against it. Been wondering what to do about it for years, but today I was moved.

Mr Sod ruled some months ago that most of the second hand hardwood lying around the garage should be taken to the environmental waste transfer facility up the road, but there was still a bit left, amongst which I came across a bit of 4 by 2 West African mahogany, the sort of mahogany often used for window and door sills, and which probably started life in North London. Saw it down to 2 by 2 and cut it in over the catch. Two of the holes for fixing screws can be seen to the side of the catch. Maybe three hours for the whole job, quite enough to get me clear of the vacuum cleaner.

So I am now covered for falls down the hatch. Unlikely, at least, to tear a hole out of my back.

Two mistakes, neither of which is likely to be noticed by anyone other than a DIY type or a carpenter, and then only when the hatch is open and one is going up the ladder back to front. First, I did not scribe the housing for the top of the catch very accurately, so the clearance on one side is maybe 2mm while the clearance on the other is maybe 1mm. Never was much cop at scribing. Second, I quite failed to notice that the side of the hatch into which I was letting the mahogany was not symmetrical, with the left hand end point being of a different configuration to the right hand end point. The result of this is that while the four fixing screws are arranged symmetrically on the piece of mahogany, they are not symmetrical around the catch. Had I noticed, I think symmetrical around the catch would have been the better solution. Compromise probably not good, falls between two stools.

One stroke of luck in that it did not occur to me to check the clearance of the aluminium ladder which slides down out of the hatch once the door has been lowered, clearance which the piece of mahogany is eating into. But as it turned out, I was left with clearance of at least a millimetre. A miss is as good as a mile here, further movement being unlikely.

Now I can worry about the catch. A fairly lightweight affair into which one pushes the small shaped prong - maybe all of half an inch long - attached to the top face of the swinging edge of the hatch door. Push once to catch and push again to release, an arrangement which has always struck me as fundamentally unsafe - at least I have not stripped the catch down to check for some cunning wheeze. So if something gives way, the swinging edge will come swinging down and if one happened to be in range of this heavy chunk of swinging chipboard it might well be curtains. Quite a long shot, but Mr Sod is clearly abroad so maybe I ought to get around to it.

PS: notice the converted broom stick hanging at the bottom left of the illustration, used for the push once and push twice mentioned above.

First, cut down your middle aged willow tree.

Second, while still fresh, cut the primary trunk into 1.5 metre sections. For the best results the trunk should have a diameter of between 0.4 and 0.6 metres.

Third, lay a good looking section on a damp bit of ground in the shade.

Fourth, water regularly and wait for shoots to appear.

Fifth, watch while the shoots grow into a fine new tree. This being the stage we are at with the section illustrated.

Municipal authorities have become rather fond of putting sculptures & other artifacts in their public spaces, some of which work well and some of which work not so well. I suspect that the public served by these authorities is generally far less enthusiastic about this sort of thing than those responsible and have a tendency to regard ornamentation by passing pigeons and seagulls as entirely appropriate.

We learned while on holiday that Ilfracombe is no exception and the area in and around the Landmark Theatre has a number of these installations. There is, for example, a rather odd memorial sculpture of a girl on top of Capstone Hill, memorialising a young Russian girl. But it is decent and it is small; it does not greatly detract from this hill of outstanding natural beauty.

But North Devon has the distinction of being one of the many homes of the artist-butcher - butcher for his love of cutting up animals - D. Hirst. Some might think this entirely appropriate given the large number of butchers who used to operate in this cowish county. A D. Hirst who appears to have decided that he is not to be upstaged by a memorial to some Russian and wants to install a 20m high statue of a very pregnant naked lady, legs akimbo and holding a large sword aloft in one hand, in a prominent position at the end of the harbour pier. An installation which I regard as a rather gross intrusion into a quiet and peaceful harbour. At least one local that we talked to about it described it as rubbish (her exact word was a little more robust) but went on to point out that the artist-butcher had spent a few of his many quid on worthy causes - such as the recent firework display at nearby Combe Martin - and perhaps had earned his slot on the pier. With an eye to business, she went on to point out that the thing will probably attract people and their attendant money to the area. While I wondered about the extent of Hirsty involvement: did he just provide the concept and leave design and execution to others? Far too important a person to have to bother with the dirty detail.

For the record, I record that if this statue comes to pass, I and my attendant money will avoid visiting Ilfracombe. There is quite enough unpleasantness knocking around the world without gratuitous additions.

Until such time as it comes to pass that the thing is toppled over one quiet night and vanishes from further view. I imagine that there are plenty of DSS types living in the town who would think that such toppling would be good sport.

Nearer home, I was interested to read that the Tate, having removed many of their treasures to the basement (see my notice of June 22nd), are now recycling them in the form of a special exhibition. Inter alia, meaning what used to be free and comfortable will now be expensive and crowded. But at least they will be visible, albeit temporarily. And I suppose that the trustees can say that the treasures are, at least, being looked at, which may well not have been the case before. We need a properly promoted special to keep us on our toes.

Even nearer home, I have been busy with the culinary arts and made a treacle tart, something which we used to have quite often. Something which I had never made before, generally deferring to BH in the matter of puddings - although I did used to make cakes. I used the recipe from our Whitworth's recipe book, a sadly battered freebie from the days of our engagement and for the filling I elected to use both bread crumbs (bought express in the form of some kind of French loaf from Waitrose) and porridge oats, with only a modest five tablespoons of golden syrup. Not at all sure that I would care for a treacle tart made with treacle - the stuff which comes in red and black tins rather than yellow and green ones. This all went down quite well, although not all that like the BH product of former years. I was quite impressed with my short crust pastry, despite pressing it onto the (white enamel) plate instead of rolling it out.

But the tart was completely unlike the far more complicated - and far more syrupy - confection described in our Radiation cook book. Perhaps BH will rise to the challenge and knock out one of these last, one of these fine days.

The next item after the sterling effort of Surrey Roads on drains, was this rather unhelpful sign at the Pound Lane exit to Longmead Road.

Item 1, straight ahead is not an option at this junction. Just left or right.

Item 2, not at all clear how any one route from this point is going to take one to both Epsom & Horton Country Park. Epsom & Ashstead, Epsom Common & Ashstead and Horton Country Park & Epsom Common are all plausible. But not all four at once. And not from this particular location.

Maybe the answer is that there are not very many cycle paths, so if one wants to get somewhere without leaving them, one might have to go rather a long way around. For myself, I have never made much use of cycle paths, being a firm believer in wheeled vehicles sticking to the road.

Only just before arriving at this notice, strolling down the dual purpose path which runs along the Longmead Road, I had almost been knocked down by a teenager cycling the other way and paying precious little attention to where he was going. I don't suppose he would have bothered with a bell, even in the unlikely event of his bike having one.

Maybe we could persuade the community support men and women who roam our streets to issue instant fines to people cycling about either without a bell or failing to use a bell. I am told such things happen in Kingston upon Hull - but sadly not in Kingston upon Thames. Maybe I can find out more if I study http://policerecruitment.homeoffice.gov.uk/.

Coming through West Ewell on a clockwise swing around Horton lane today, I was privileged to come across the finest drain pump I have ever seen.

With its monster paint job - to which my mobile phone does little justice - it would not have looked out of place on the better class of fairground. Perhaps Midsummer Fair on Midsummer Common behind Cambridge (no relation of J. Nettles).

The fleet is showcased at http://www.hydro-cleansing.com but I have not yet worked out why this particular one had the special paint job. One of the chaps did tell me that they do make a special effort to keep it looking smart.

The second go at a 'JR JIGSAWS 500', the first being on June 11th. My comments on that occasion stand up well to this second occasion.

I would only add that, while all interior pieces are of prong-hole-prong-hole configuration - something which seems to be unique to this particular brand - there are lots of interior vertices which are not the meeting place of four pieces. Plus, solution is simplified by whole segments (a line of pieces, either horizontal or vertical) having alternating up and down prongs, which together with pieces having strong horizontal or vertical pattern means that one knows the orientation of any piece in the segment, thus substantially reducing the number of combinations to be checked.

Started with the top half of the edge then became absolutely sure than one of the middle right hand side edge pieces was missing, a thought reinforced by this being one of the few jigsaws in which the pieces had not been nicely bagged up for sale. Got a bit grumpy: should I abandon ship? Calmed down and pressed on, but for some reason decided to get on with the masts before doing the bottom half of the edge.

Then the white house, then the windows, then the trees. Then the piece which I was so sure was missing turned up. I had been confused by expecting a largely white piece, which was not what this piece turned out to be. The sort of error which, as it happens, quite often accounts for failure to find a piece.

Gradually worked down the image, operating on a broad front. The red hull was surprisingly easy, after which I tackled the bottom half of the edge, which also turned out to be quite easy. This now left two islands of sky to complete and one larger island of sea. Sky easy as there were no interior pieces - every piece still to do abutted one which had been done. Sea even easier as it was a single row, this despite two errors turning up at this point, each error being reasonably easy to fix, being the switching of two nearby pairs, one on the bottom edge and one on the bottom of the red hull.

Good sense of achievement on completion; clearly refreshed by the change of solution strategy.

There was also some interest in the way in which some pieces were found and placed. On several occasions I would be looking for piece A, scanning the loose pieces. Then without there being any conscious intervention, the brain spotted some quite different piece B, knew where to put it and sent appropriate instructions to the hand. On each such occasion the brain got it right - without there being any conscious thought about it at all. Such conscious thought and control as there was was about piece A. So it seems that there is plenty going on in the background which one is not aware of at all. Could it all get out control? Maybe being in control at all is all a bit of an illusion.

Celebrated with the first cow chop of the bag era. An extra mature chop from Manor Green Road, lying between the fore rib and sirloin sections of the cow. Cooked the 3lbs 6oz for an hour and twenty minutes, preheating the over to 180C, and then rested for 15 minutes. Oven door opened once at the start of resting to remove some fat to participate in the cooking of the mushrooms and to baste. BH thought the meat was spot on, I thought it a touch overcooked, a reaction to the recent underdone pork. Furthermore, not convinced about this extra mature business. Not sure that I don't prefer fresh. Certainly, in the past, I have not been impressed by the extra mature from Sainsbury's. Mushrooms lightly cooked in a mixture of fat and water. Served with boiled white rice and boiled summer cabbage. In the round, not bad at all. We will see how it does cold tomorrow.

PS: Chrome sickness is getting worse. Unable to post an illustration of this puzzle. Reduced to Internet Explorer to get it in. Which took a bit of fiddling around even there. What is going on?

The most rural food packaging of the holiday came from Hele Mill (http://www.helecornmill.com), with their flour coming in a brown paper bag which was not really strong enough for 1.5kg of the stuff. Label DIY with the only concession to the Quality Commission being a best before date filled in in biro. None of the many hieroglyphics which appear on, for example, packets of margarine from Sainsbury's.

Next up were the raisins from the Berrynarbor Community Shop (http://www.communityshops.coop/shop/berrynarbor-community-shop-and-post-office), imported from Argentina, parcelled up into 1lb (I think) clear plastic bags with labels front and back. Labels of identical size but different in content and looking reasonably DIY. Does Berrynarbor have sweated labour filling the bags from some much larger bag from the Argentine? Is this really easier than getting the raisins ready bagged from some wholesaler? How do they get the raisins from the Argentine to North Devon? Air freighted to Madrid then trucked north?

In the middle was something described as farm house cheddar from some named farm (possibly a real farm, if not the centre of operations) and wrapped in a yellowish translucent plastic printed to resemble a coarse cloth, presumably the idea is for us to associate with cheese cloth and artisanal cheese, even though this cheese, while entirely acceptable, had probably never seen a cheese cloth in its life. Plus a slightly posher label than that on the raisins, maybe the product of a packing station rather than someone's kitchen table.

Then, to remind us of metropolitan ways was the tub of Flora, in new colours, and describing itself on the top left of the lid as original and on the bottom right as new. BH was unable to detect any difference in the product.

But pride of place goes to the splendid chip shop on the front at Ilfracombe, possibly Maddy's on St. James's Place (spelling of James's from Google maps. Not convinced they have got it right). Illustrated for the avoidance of doubt. Two visits, and two fish specials on both occasions, both good grub and good value. But on exit, on the first occasion, we saw this wagon from T. Quality (http://www.tquality.co.uk/) pulling in to unload. We suddenly wondered how the fish was being delivered. Cut to portions? Battered? More or less cooked then refrozen then reheated to serve, like the bread you buy from many grocers? We will never know, but if I were a betting man I would say the fish was being delivered in portions, frozen and raw. Furthermore, T. Quality look to supply everything a chip shop driver could possibly want in the way of consumables - including here palm oil to heat (if not cook) the product and natty cardboard boxes in which to sell it.

I notice in passing that the waitress told us that the battered Mars Bars on special were very popular. I wonder if they came from T. Quality too?

And thinking about it, a lot easier for a busy chipper to buy its stuff from a proper wholesaler, which is what this outfit clearly was, than messing about with the vagaries of supply from the locals - there being at least two modern looking, if small, trawlers tied up at the nearby dock. And the local suppliers need a proper wholesaler who can cope with the vagaries of demand. DIY not really on on either side of the fence, as the old Etonian rhubarb grower from Axminster probably knows full well, despite his cuddly gardener presentation on the telly. One needs markets and wholesalers to smooth things out.

PS: Chrome playing up again. Have to spend some quality time with the thing. A pity, it had been doing really well until recently.

The Parochial Church Council at South Molton were asking 50p a go for redundant kneelers and I paid £1 for this one. A very good kneeler it is too.

I like to think that they would not be too shocked if they learned of the sort of kneeling that it is being used for now - rather different than that envisaged by the manufacturers. Who, I might say, did a good job: the PCC might have finished with it but plenty of life left yet, and far superior to the garden sponge variety which we already had in the shed.

Small prize for any reader who can work out where the picture was taken.

On Saturday 18th August to no less an establishment than Arlington Court, placed 82nd in the National Trust Hall of Fame.

An excellent place, rather along the lines of the much higher placed Polesden Lacey, this lower place despite once being the property of a companion of the conqueror rather than that of a Scottish beer heiress. Proper aristo. So we had an interesting house with interesting contents, plus shops, eatery, church and extensive grounds: just the thing for a dull but mainly dry day. Oddly enough, the descendants of said companion had a penchant for burial at Brookwood and other metropolitan necropolises. One can only suppose that they found North Devon a bit dull and spent most of their time in the metropolis.

The most interesting part of the house for me was the extensive collection of model boats, mainly faithful models between one and two feet long of warships of the Trafalgar era, some made by French prisoners of war to while away their captive years. It was a pity I did not own such a thing during the part of my childhood when I was fond of Hornblower books; it would have gone a long way to dispelling the mysteries of yards and running rigging. So I learned, for example, that topsail yards are lowered a little way down their mast for safe keeping when not in use. There were also a lot of shells (inside) and a lot of carriages (outside). We did not bother with these last, being sure that the real thing could not match the stuff of ITV3 costume dramas.

The gardens were graced with large numbers of araucaria araucana, the largest number I have ever seen in one place. Groves of them. I had always known that they were rather odd trees but I learn this morning the further oddity of their having very few relations. Not at all like most garden plants which mostly seem to come from very large families.

Very relaxed ambience. One was not constrained to walk a one way route and one was allowed to touch some of the exhibits. All very refreshing. A trustee told us that this was the new fashion; a move away from the previously precious stance.

Grub rather mixed. BH's jacket was rather tired while my soup was rather veggie. The rather dull soup which one associates with healthy living and the sort of soup which is sold in milk cartons. Not a bit of flavour enhancing bacon in sight. They did rather better at tea and tea cakes at tea time, even thinking to provide chaffinches to hoover up the crumbs.

Second hand book shop poor. Not sure why they bothered. Oddly enough the whole holiday only produced two second hand books - 'Uncle Tungsten' by Sacks and 'Black Beauty' by Sewell. I had been after one of these last for some reason or other - a reason which I have now forgotten but perhaps it will come back to me if I get through the thing - which seems, at page 50 or so, a touch unlikely. I declined a rather good, if rather battered, school edition of the two parts of Henry IV, not originally bought at the same time as the covers were subtly different, but overpriced at £4 each with the (South Molton) barrow boy not taking £5 for the two. Good because it included rather less heavy textual & literary stuff than Arden but rather more historical stuff about the dramatis personae. Which baron was bashing which and all that sort of thing. Possibly Ginn & Co. of Boston, USA.

PS: now found a Chrome troubleshoot button. Which resulted in something being done to Chrome. Not had a freeze since but early days yet.

Record breaking trip from North Devon yesterday, record breaking in the sense that it took us 7 hours and 13 minutes to make the trip, 3 hours and 13 minutes more than the expected 4 hours for the something less than 200 miles. Noon start. Lots of traffic on the North Devon link road and on the A303 west of Stonehenge. Quite a lot of caravans and quite a lot of what looked like rather ancient VW camper vans, which last I am told are back in fashion among surfonistas. But I don't think they were causing the slow down, rather just more traffic than the road could cope with resulting in queues to get off the sections of dual carriageway and bunching elsewhere. This last being a rather odd phenomenon; coming and going with surprising speed. Maybe I should have done that option at university, queue theory being quite trendy at the time.

As a result of all this we decided on a break at Countess Services, a tier three operation near Stonehenge, the food part of which appeared to be operated by both Little Chef (which I thought had gone bankrupt) and Burger King. Quite a novelty for us to eat in such a place, much more usually making do with DIY sandwiches at a fraction of the cost. BH had a tuna jacket, with the jacket looking as if it had been cooked some time previous and warmed up, but with the usual humungous dollop of mayo rich tuna and a few stray bits of lettuce. I had a burger, of substantial size but of interesting flavour and texture. Didn't look as if all that much of what you or I would call meat had gone into its construction. Served on a bed of some spicy red goo and came with a portion of chips. These last well coated with oil and some brown gear but a only very distant relation of what you might get in a McDonald's, never mind a chip shop. Glasses of tap water entirely satisfactory and served with straws. Tea entirely satisfactory, not quite as strong as seemed to the the custom in North Devon. Staff all friendly, all young and mostly female; we were impressed by the friendliness towards the end of what had probably been a long and busy day. Restaurant bright and clean, only let down by the toilets (including a DT), the cleaning of which was struggling to keep up with the steady flow of holiday makers - a good proportion of whom had probably not paid their way in the restaurant. £15 the lot.

My only suggestion would be that, in line with other operators, they extend their table numbering scheme to the tables themselves. As things stand, the orders have table numbers and the staff have access to a map, but the tables themselves are free of numbers. Perhaps the designer thought that numbers would spoil the otherwise clean lines of the things.

Onto the petrol station to see if we could buy some milk for our TV tea later, to find that one could either buy huge cartons of real milk or sensible sized cartons of something called Cravendale (there is a fancy looking web site but it is another one which Chrome does not cope with today), which we bought but which I assumed would be as destructive to the flavour of tea as long life or UHT. About which I was wrong and the resultant tea turned out to be quite drinkable, unlike the first cup this morning, made with thawed blue top which was not. All BH could think was that the flavour of the Cravendale cunningly covered that of the stale water which had been sitting in our pipes for a couple of weeks. We shall see what the next one is like.

While walking back from Heddon's Mouth last week we came across a dead fish on the path, maybe a foot long and partially eaten. Presumably a salt water fish as one would not have thought that the Heddon would support a fish of this size, certainly not this stretch of it. We also thought that maybe an otter had taken or found it, got tired of it or was disturbed and so dumped it on the path. Not the sort of thing that a walker on a Premier League National Trust Beauty Spot was likely to discard.

Then this morning, back home, for the first time I saw a pretty fox. That is to say it looked healthy with a handsome brown coat and a black tipped tail, not at all like the rather mangy things we have had hitherto. Presumably one of this season's crop, fed up by one or other of our carnivore loving neighbours.

It was on the back lawn, poking around rather disdainfully at a dead bird, maybe a blackbird. After a bit it wandered off and a magpie came down for his go, seemingly not in the least bothered by the fox in the vicinity. Maybe it, or its genes, knew that a fox walking away from a dead blackbird was unlikely to bother with a live magpie: I believe antelopes have this sort of intelligence about lions. In any event, the magpie had a more serious go at the bird than the fox. Maybe beaks better than canines for this particular stage of the proceedings.

By the time I got down to the lawn, the bird had vanished and I presumed that either the fox or the magpie had carried it off for private consumption.

Back in the kitchen squeamish enough to take the breakfast sardines from a tin with neither skin nor bone. Which turned out to be a mistake as they were a bit bland; no bite to them. So back to skin and bone next time, perhaps not Sainsbury's Basics, and hope that we do not hit another crunchy batch (of which we have had two so far).

PS: Chrome playing up again. Reduced to using Internet Explorer to get Dialachemist to work, FIL's gluten free bread stocks approaching critical. In Chrome, you could get the page up from the Google search results page and more of it up if one asked for the site direct. But neither way did the site work. No such problems with the rival product, despite it offering to remember my passwords - which I do not like - at all points.

I was rather put off the other day by a story about a young lady catching a big cat fish, I thought somewhere in Norfolk. The story came with a picture of her with the fish, in a pose which suggested that the fish was not going to make it back to the water alive.

Oddly, I can find no record of this news item in Google and I cannot now lay my hands on newspaper itself, despite grubbing around in the used newspaper trough. Mr. Google did find something about a giant sturgeon caught in British Columbia and something about a giant catfish caught in Essex, with the former at least being returned to the wild alive. But why not my news item? I am fairly sure I did not imagine it.

The point being that I am put off by the idea of spending an hour to drag a fish which is much the same size as oneself out of the water alive, for sport. It is not really the thought that even if one is not killing the thing it seems quite likely that it is being damaged. It is just that toying with a large animal in this way for fun strikes me as rather unpleasant, rather in the same way as those big game hunters shooting large land animals for glory strikes me as very unpleasant. One suspects a vicious steak in these big game hunters and while I would not go that far with big fish hunters, their sport is not at all to my taste either.

And despite my not being motivated in this by animal welfare, I perhaps should have been, having been alerted to the possibility of fishy pain and consciousness as far back as June 1st 2010. I still have my copy of the book by Braithwaite on full view in my study to prove it. And she has a post graduate degree from the University of Morse & Lewis PLC so she can't be all bad.

PS: the rash of page freezes continues. As much of the page is put up on the screen, as per usual, but the screen is frozen. One cannot scroll or click - except on the back button which does still work. All very odd..

Interested to read in the 'Economist' on the way home yesterday of the doings of a Chinese company called Huawei which, it seems, is muscling big time into the communications infrastructure market of the western world. Some people are concerned that the Chinese government may prevail on the Chinese company to abuse its position of trust and use said infrastructure for snooping. A legitimate concern given the track record of the various parties and one which I would have thought was hard to put to bed: how do you prove that a complicated device does not include some covert, possibly dormant, snooping parts? On the way I notice that one John Suffolk has acquired the grand job title (with the Chinese company) of 'global cyber-security officer', a John Suffolk who was a senior civil servant (having been parachuted in from somewhere in the private sector), so acquiring him is very much part of cosying up to our securocratic establishment. I came across him as the head of a bit of the Home Office with valiant and worthy objectives but which, at the time I left it, had succeeded in spending a lot of money without having too much to show for it. But he escaped without tarnish to a grand job in the Cabinet Office, from whence to China. Clearly a star at schmoozing around the higher echelons of government and its agencies.

Back home finished off a chance read of Sacks (see, for example, May 18) on the deaf - a short book called 'Seeing Voices' which I chanced across at Epsom Library. For an easy going book quite an eye opener. It turns out that sign language proper is a reasonably universal aboriginal language among the deaf. A full blown and very expressive language, quite different from, for example, signed English, which is just a mechanical transcription of English into signs. Prompted, I can see that sign might be very good at expressing space and movement. One product of all this is that the deaf can be very good at the minutiae of the movement of faces and hands: they can see things which the rest of us cannot. The Sacks line seems to be that the deaf should be taught this proper sign at an early age; this will give them community and enable them to develop - in a way that laboriously teaching them to speak and read English will not, this last being a very time consuming business. Striking the right balance between special needs & special facilities and integration is clearly tricky, with no simple solution. I suppose in passing that, like other minority languages, sign must include pots of imported words in order to function in the modern world. He also talks about the way that socialising in sign is very different to socialising with voice. A group of people can be conducting several conversations at once without getting in each others' way. One can converse - or eavesdrop - at a distance. Handcuffing a deaf person is equivalent to gagging a hearing person. Fascinating stuff, and I await my sign primer from the Galluadet University Press, via Amazon with interest. Gallaudet being a place for, and mainly of, the deaf.

PS: reminded of my entry of July 4th 2011 the other day by my purchase of a second potion dispenser from Boots. I had got used to the one I had and was looking forward to buying an identical one. Thought I had succeeded but get home to find that there has been a subtle change underneath. A change for the better, but a change nonetheless. Are thoughts of this sort going to be the only legacy of flogging through Houellebecq?

After not having done it since the spurt of activity in the New Year (see, for example, 10th January), did a bullingdon today. Illustrated for any readers who may be doubtful. Note the way that the emergency bag bag (from Osprey) rides comfortably in the luggage rack provided.

Both the supporting belt from http://www.sashstomabelts.com/ and the supporting computer from Serco http://www.serco.com/ behaved themselves with this last allowing me to buy a £1 access period online without any fuss and the docking station at Vauxhall allowed me to remove a bullingdon with a similar absence of fuss. So far so good. But before you buy some shares in Serco you should know that while I could hire a bicycle OK, I could not access their home page. Although to be fair, I am not confident that this is Serco's fault as the HSBC site has been playing up today as well: has Chrome acquired a nasty from somewhere?

Headed across the junction at Vauxhall Cross to find that if one crosses the line just before the lights change you are in serious danger of being run down by traffic heading south over Vauxhall Bridge. It also took a while to reacclimatise myself to lights generally: I had forgotten how many of them there were - but I had more or less got the hang of things by the time that I rounded the shard and headed back to Waterloo. Impressed with the top of the shard where the designer has cunningly avoided coming to a point. What he has done instead works much better.

Back at the ranch took a look at one of the daily emails I am getting from TFL about olympian disturbances (on the grounds that I am a paid up member of their cycle scheme) to be pleasantly surprised by its informative and easy presentation. A good bit of page design.

But then, BH innocently wondered under what flag olympians from Northern Ireland fly. Which takes us to an extensive entry in Wikipedia which explains that sorting all this out was a troubles in microcosm with lots of unpleasantness taking years and years to sort out. However, the olympic bureaucrats more or less held to the line that national olympic committees should reflect the political facts on the ground: it was no part of the olympic mission to support or otherwise sort out subnational aspirations, a line which suited us well enough but which did not satisfy all comers from Northern Ireland. We seem to have arrived at a compromise whereby individual olympians can decide whether to go with Britain or Ireland, a compromise which just leaves the bureaucrats to sort out what to call Ireland, a term which might be taken to include the north, which would not do at all. And the paddies themselves are not keen on Eire. Lots of fun to be had by all.

Puzzle 18 was the first puzzle from Schmid, presumably an entirely different outfit from the Schmidt of puzzle 3 back on 5th April.

Unusual in various ways, starting with the shape, which had the relatively high aspect ratio of about 1.519.

Started with the edge in the usual way, but finding it rather harder than usual I was diverted to the table and chairs before completing it. Table and chairs being very easy, being quite small and in very striking colours, very easy to pull out of the spread of pieces, the spread at that point being quite a large spread.

Then got back to the edge, during which I had some rather florid thoughts about missing pieces and charity shops with poor quality control. But all nonsense as all the pieces turned out to be present.

Next stop the buildings in the middle of the image, then the tree line, then the trees. Back down to the bottom to do the stones, then the water. Then the left hand green, then the right hand green. Then arch, then sky, this last being much easier than usual, being quite small in extent. This left me with two islands of blue flowers to deal with, to which end I did resort to sorting the remaining pieces by shape. Was then able to complete the puzzle with only a modest amount of trial and error, helped by the odd odd shaped pieces being scattered through the whole.

With the presence of odd shapes not detracting from the puzzle's vertexual regularity with, I think, four pieces meeting at each and every interior vertex. But there were a few continental bulges, that is to say cases where where the usual prong or hole was replaced by a bulge or a depression, something I have only come across in puzzles from mainland Europe. It was also the first puzzle in which I have noticed stretch. That is to say that the completed puzzle was firm, the pieces did not fit loosely, but one could stretch the completed puzzle by perhaps as much as half a centimetre in the long direction, rather less in the short direction. I shall have to try this again with the next one.

During all this I pondered whether puzzle solving ability was a one dimensional business. Whether one could rank puzzles and rank puzzle solving skill in persons in such a way that the two ranks matched, that is to say that a puzzler would always solve a high rank puzzle slower than a low rank puzzle. And a high rank puzzler would always solve a puzzle quicker than a low rank puzzler. I incline to an alternative theory according to which some puzzlers are good at say, 500 piece puzzles taken from purpose painted paintings, and some puzzlers are good at say, 1,000 piece puzzles taken from photographs of mountains. Rather in the way that some runners are good at the 60m dash and some are good at marathons. But one would need meaningful interaction with other puzzlers to get to the bottom of this one, a business on which I have yet to make a start.

On the other hand, I made the acquaintance yesterday of a bridge player who had been expelled from seniors' bridge game on the grounds that he had tried to claim the remaining three tricks of a hand by putting down his three cards which, as it happened, were the ace, king and queen of trumps. This proceeding was not allowed by his fellow players and one thing led to another. Maybe he does jigsaws now.

Following the notice on 19th July I have now finished kindling 'Odd Women' by George Gissing, BH having fallen by the wayside with her antique version from the library. Altogether too lugubrious to suit her just presently - and I stumbled a bit during the middle passage, which reminded me of the lecturing & hectoring tone of Tolstoy's 'Kreutzer Sonata', published just 4 years earlier and which shared a preoccupation with the women problem, clearly a hot topic at the time. Both authors recognised that the place of women in their world was not satisfactory.

I can see why Orwell would have liked Gissing, with Gissing having, in rather the same way as Orwell, a sharp eye for the various miseries of the lower middle class life of his time. A real compassion for the miserable lot of many single women, particularly those with pretensions but no means. I did not know, for example, that there were so many more women than men in England at that time - the odd women of the book's title. Gissing claims as many as half a million: I don't know how one decides how many of those were of a marrying age but if it was a significant proportion that is a lot of women condemned not to have husbands. I am reminded of the rather larger excess of men in the China of today. And I had forgotten, if I ever knew, how dreadful the working hours and conditions of the shop assistants in the bigger London shops were. Maybe things were not as bad as those portrayed in smaller, family businesses.

Fortunately, there is still a novel for me lurking in the lecturing; all is not lost because the women problem has moved on. A fine portrait of the matrimonial holes into which one can fall, in one case through too little thought (Monica) and in another through too much (Rhoda).

It is interesting to reflect on how the problem had moved on by the time that D H Lawrence got to 'Women in Love' thirty years later. I dare say Gissing would have found, and Orwell did find, his - Lawrence's that is - take rather tiresome. And ironic, that of the three, Lawrence was the one who came from the working class while writing about the rather different milieu (with their different interests) to which he had migrated.

On to 'The Nether World'.

PS: intrigued over breakfast by an advertisement from the John Hopkins University Press for a book called 'Practical Plans for Difficult Conversations in Medicine', written by one Robert Buckman, M.D., PhD. I wondered how many doctors read such a thing then found out that it might be a lot. Amazon is down to its last two copies and tells of a whole tribe of books with similar titles. An adjacent advertisement from the same publisher concerned the 'Ecological and Behavioural Models for the Study of Bats'. So how many people get to read both?

BH has been reading a book by Paul Theroux where she finds a snippet about going dolally, a bit of slang which I have occasionally come across in the past, meaning to go a bit gaga, but in a jolly and cheerful way. Hopeless but harmless. According to Theroux, the word came from the name of a mental hospital run by the Indian Army during the Raj to provide asylum for all the soldiers who went mad in the midday sun. Curiosity aroused, I ask OED who knows nothing about the word in any of the spellings that I try. But then we ask FIL, who says that it was the name of a large transit camp near Bombay, the camp through which, as it happens, he both entered and subsequently left India during his service there in the second war, more than 50 years ago. Not a mental hospital at all, although it was true that men sometimes went a bit funny while waiting there to ship out at the end of their tour. Demob happy. Finally, we ask Google Maps who finds the place in very short order, now known as the Deolali Cantonment. It seems that the Indian Indian Army was not so cheesed off with all things British that they found it necessary to raze this potent symbol of our rajtime authority to the ground. It rather looks as if they have just taken it over. Rather different to the experience in Israel where the Israelis have, certainly on occasion, made a point of trashing any facilities on land which they have been pushed into handing back to the Palestinians.

So presumably Theroux has unwittingly recycled a slightly shifted version of the story. Right sort of idea but wrong in detail.

Meanwhile, two not altogether satisfactory meaty experiences with meat from the Manor Green Road butcher. The fiirst concerned some sirloin steak, something I used to buy from time to time in the days when I used to cycle to Cheam. This steak was in good condition and I think I grilled it about right; still moist and just about pink in the middle. But shape bad, texture not great and flavour a bit thin. Shape bad in that the steak was not a thin (half inch thick) brick in shape. Rather a trapezium when viewed from above, a trapezium which tapered in thickness crosswise. Partly careless cutting and partly the inclusion in the sirloin steak lump meat which might have better been rib-eye steak. Texture and flavour probably down to the meat being of a lower grade than that from Cheam, maybe just passed through Scotland rather than reared in Scotland.

The second concerned a blade bone of pork, a joint we used to have quite often many years ago but had not had for some years. So the butcher neatly cuts the blade bone out of the pig and scores it. Just over 4lbs in weight. Rub salt into the scorings and cook the thing for an hour and a half at 180C, in a fan oven but starting from cold. The crackling turned out very well but some of the meat was a bit underdone, something I do not like in pork, partly because of parental anathemas of same on account of tape worms and such like pests. So not a butcher problem, but I do need to do something about the cooking time. Maybe start high and finish low with a much longer overall cooking time.

Following my post of May 28th I can now report that we three are successfully connected to NS&I. Two months to make three  modest investments! On the up side, the help centre operators are always pleasant and cheerful, which goes some way to making up for having to listen, for the umpteenth time, to various recorded messages while you wait for them.

Furthermore, the BH tax return for the year recently ended, is now 99% online complete. A tedious rather than difficult operation, although the drill does seem to change slightly from year to year. Much better than doing it on paper.

This interesting piece of the drawer's art has been on display in Horton Lane for the past few days, leading me to reflect on the changing fashions in these matters.

So 256 years ago, drawer fronts would have been made of oak or mahogany and half blind dovetailed to the sides.

Then 128 years ago, far too many people aspired to this type of furniture in their dwellings, oak and mahogany became expensive and the bog standard dropped back to red pine.

By 64 years ago, we had dropped even further back to white pine.

Then a mere 32 years ago, to birch ply. A good strong material, now expensive and not much used.

16 years ago to chipboard.

8 years ago to moulded white plastic.

And then, a mere 4 years ago we reached the stage of a white plastic version of brown corrugated cardboard, the stuff used for cardboard boxes the world over. The white plastic version being mainly used for estate agents' house for sale signs - and for the drawers illustrated.

Since then, drawer fronts disappeared into their very own exponential singularity and no-one knows what fashions rule there. But one could write an interesting essay about the interaction between drawer aspirations, the prices of the raw materials, the falling prices and rising capability of woodworking machinery and the rising prices and falling capability of woodworkers. But maybe that is for another day.

In the meantime my eye was caught by two nuggets from the Economist.

First, I was amused to read that despite the noisy national aspirations of some Scots, other Scots are very keen to join more fully into English life so that their 1.5 decent football teams can participate in a more worthy competition than that available to them now. Good that there should be this reminder of the disadvantages of being small and puny.

Second, I was very sorry to read that the maintenance money paid to the Royal Parks is steadily declining. We might have £20b to spend on running and jumping and £500m to spend on a big tent - but we can't find the £20m or so needed each year to do a good job on keeping up our Royal Parks, for me a really important part of our national life and heritage. As a result, whoever operates the parks these days finds it necessary to host all kinds of paying events - often noisy - with the result that much of the time much of the parks are not available for normal park life, partly because much of the grass has been destroyed by the eventers tramping around in the rain.

When I was at college we spent a lot time thinking about (or least being told about) how many statistical distributions wind up as normal distributions, aka bell curves, when the spans get large. So interesting to come across another example, in the context of another hand me down from Surrey Libraries about a climber called Alison Hargreaves and written by Rose & Douglas; a biographical companion piece to the 'Into Thin Air', which I acquired some years ago from a bookshop in Laguna Beach, the same day as I came across a chap checking the timbers holding up beach side properties for ants - ants which carry on a bit like our wood worms. To go with the 15 or so other books which I have about reaching into places which are very cold, very high or both. Must say something about me that I have them and it is certainly true that I am a lot more tolerant of cold than hot and that I am a lot better at endurance sports than sprint sports (better being understood in an entirely relative sense here).

Alison Hargreaves was a very talented climber who had a rather messy life apart from climbing. A messy life which included two quite young children, which I think should disqualify one from sports with as low a life expectancy as this one. The authors point out, for example, that of the people who get to the top of a mountain called K2, only about two thirds get down again. Alison was part of the other third. The disqualification even stronger in this case in that Alison was a mother, the loss of which I believe to be a more serious matter than loss of a father, even in our liberated age.

I was reminded of the bell curve by the authors setting out the life cycle of a sporting life. One starts quite slowly; the thing is no big deal. Then one realises one has talent, gets hooked on and progresses quite quickly. Parents, friends and coaches pushing hard too. Then one peaks, holds that peak for a bit, then gets tired of all the hustle & bustle and moves out of competition, losing form quite quickly. Then settles down into a slow decline into old age. Still retaining some core skills, still able to do it, up to a point.

Mountains being an odd sport in that one perhaps gets into it for love of the mountains and the open air. The love of the rush one gets getting to the top, or coming over a ridge or a pass and gazing out over the blue green yonder stretching out below. The sense of oneness with the other, a sense which I believe is mixed up with what Freudians call the death instinct - and not because one is tempted to jump off, rather because of the oneness. Death by merger not by trauma.

But then one gets competitive. One starts having expectations and worrying more about coming up to scratch than enjoying the mountains. And competitive can come to include all kinds of funny rules about what sort of climbing is allowed. Is one allowed to use rope at all? Is one allowed to be roped to someone else? Is one allowed to use rope that other people have strung up? Ditto ladders. Is one allowed help, with other people carrying one's luggage up the mountain for one? Is one allowed to hammer pegs or bolts (for additional support or safety) into the rock face? Is one allowed to use pegs which are already there? Is one allowed to trudge up the snow steps stamped out by someone in front - which might sound a bit picky but which can make a lot of difference when one is up in the death zone. Is being helicoptered to the start of the climb OK or should one hoof it from one's bivvy? Is bottled oxygen OK? What about the raft of other chemical aids that olympians gets excited about? It all gets terribly complicated and starts to seem a long way from getting a buzz gazing down over a ridge.

A gazing which, incidentally, is in my limited experience greatly enhanced by having climbed up to the ridge in the first place. The chemicals released by sustained exercise do something which just being dumped there by cable car or whatever misses out on.

Then there is the business of fear: the sort of climbing which Alison did was dangerous and was only possible at all if one learned to conquer fear. Not to be too thrown by the fact that one's spikes were resting on a couple of millimetres of ledge and that was pretty much all there was between you and the bottom of the cliff. And keeping this up for hours at a time. And being cold and tired at the same time.

Alison had the additional problem of money. She decided that she was not going to be a big enough star in rock climbing so switched over to mountain climbing, which last as well as being an endurance rather than a sprint sport, comes a lot more expensive. Suitable mountains tend to be in far flung places and one can't just potter over to the sea cliffs for a spot of climbing after lunch. One needs to have a considerable private income or be famous enough to command sponsorship deals. Sponsorship deals which need media charm and a steady stream of media friendly achievements. Something else driving you along, on top of the considerable competition within the climbing fraternity to be thought the best, or at least in the premier league. A need for a steady stream of achievements which seems to have been at least part of what pushed Alison up one too many mountains.

All in all, an interesting read about a very talented climber.

A snip from the TLS of 3rd August: clearly a book for people rather less squeamish than I am. Perhaps I would have been OK if I had never had such things shoved into me.

But you must hurry: Amazon, with whom the author has quite a respectable footprint, reports being down to their last six copies.

Going round the Horton Clockwise Walk this morning, noticed that there are some black blackberries in the hedges. Maybe not all that ripe, but black. This prompted me to make a move on the gallon jar of blackberry whisky which has been sitting in the corner of the study since January 17th, the odd bottle still sitting in the cupboard under the stairs, untouched.

The gallon jar has filled up six standard screw top booze bottles, washed but not sterilised, leaving a thick sludge in the bottom of the jar and maybe half a bottle of not so clear fluid. These last two discarded and the six bottles containing something that looks a bit like almost neat Ribena have now taken their place under the stairs. I think the original recipe said to leave the stuff for at least a year so we have a little time to go yet before broaching the stuff.

The blackberries were picked on or about August 22nd last year, being picked direct into the jars after BH decided that she had quite enough berries in her freezer and quite enough jam in her cupboards. Just as well I could find the relevant post as I could not remember whether the recipe involved sugar or not. It did.

Puzzle 1, why does Mr. Googlemail think I need to know about a ladies detective agency? How does he know that BH has read books about such an outfit in the past, the Botswanan one invented by a Scotsman? What does he know that I don't know? But I pass on the tip: 'Female Private Detective - traceinvestigationservices.co.uk - Genuine female agency - call now in confidence. Tel 020 3137 8003'.

Puzzle 2, how does the government think it is going to invent unpaid but meaningful employment for 1,000,000 sulky youngsters? A scheme floated in one or other paper the other day. Once upon a time, shortly after the second war when we had plenty of seasoned NCOs to manage things, we had national service, a splendid sink for unemployed bog-standards. A sink which served well until the economy picked up and we had real work for them. An economy which picked up and ran for years and years, a running which meant that I could walk out of school into paid employment (pay which included a cardboard record of national insurance contributions and a similar piece of cardboard to which holiday stamps were affixed) without much planning or aforethought at all. I could wander around the country picking up paid employment more or less when and where I felt like it.

But this does not run any more. We don't have the NCOs and we don't have the paid employment. But, the politicians say to themselves, there is plenty of work out there. There is litter to be picked, there are people with special needs who need to be helped, there are old people who need to be helped. There are companies which could cope with some helpers to sweep their yards whom they don't have to pay. Its just that there is no money to pay for the picking, the helping or the sweeping. No-one wants to pay the tax with which to make up the pay. So how does one organise 20 unpaid litter pickers? The simple option, that favoured in a slightly different context across the pond, would be to put them in orange pyjamas and chain them together into a chain gang. Provide chair and shotgun for a minder and off we go litter picking down Longmead Road. Up front costs fairly modest and just a minder to pay minimum wages plus 33%.

Oh no you don't says the Guardian. That is not showing enough respect for their human dignity and human rights. No pyjamas, no chains and no shotguns. Years ago when the country was still credit worthy and human rights had not been invented, the answer would then have been that we just ramp up a whole lot of low-tech high-labour infrastructure projects. Building roads across the wilds of the north country. Growing potatoes on virgin lands in the western isles. But the country is not credit worthy any more and can't borrow the funds needs to fund such projects. At which point I am puzzled. What on earth does one do instead that does not wind up costing more than the benefit? Even, perhaps, doing some good?

Having slept on it, thought we ought to continue to monitor the preparation for the Olympics at Hampton Court Palace, which turned out to be a good deal busier on Monday than it had been on the preceding Saturday. Now I have occasionally been to the same production of the same play twice. Occasionally been to the same special exhibition twice. Occasionally read the same book twice in one year. Been around the inside of Osborne House maybe five times - but this last at intervals of a year or more. So this is the first time I have been around a bit of heritage twice in three days. Next year, maybe go for the hat trick: three visits in three days? Could I wangle a free pass from the trustees if I promise to dress up and do a song & dance?

A good second visit; slightly surprised that the place stood up so well to a second visit so soon after the first, with one's attention sometimes straying from the labels (with their rather childish & irritating faux-old presentation) to the artefacts. Poked a few trustees, the first of whom knew all about mantuas but not about why everyone was dying of smallpox rather than tuberculosis. It turns out that mantuas were nothing to do with Mantua, rather a Stuart court fashion in dress, imported from France, which sometimes involved hoops, known as panniers, sticking out at the side. Whereas I had thought that pannier dresses were called just that and were a fashion of the Tudor rather than the Stuart court. It also turns out that the French name for the things (according to Wikipedia anyway) is manteuil, one of those rare words unknown to Mr. Google. Also unknown to all three of my French dictionaries, although the OED comes quite close with the obsolete manteil. So plausible, with plenty of manty words in the right general area, but maybe Wikipedia errs for once.

Not impressed by the various tier three luvvies dressed up in 17th century togs trying to impersonate personages of the period and be educational at the same time. They had loud voices and were very full of themselves (a bit like presenters on heritage programmes on television) and their humour & scripts palled very rapidly. Would have been much better to let us look at the artefacts in peace. One likes to think that the Palace is a cut above Chessington World of Adventures.

But very impressed by the chapel ceiling on the second visit. Something to lose oneself in while the priest whacked out the sermon. Or hopefully mumbled so as not to distract the younger members of the congregation  from the important business of exchanging charged & significant glances with members of the opposite sex. An important bonding opportunity, or at least that is what the goings on in churches in costume & detective dramas would lead one to believe. We have also learned, after visiting the outside of the Palace for twenty years or more, that the roof which we had taken to be the roof of the chapel was actually the roof of the great hall - observing in our defence that great halls and the naves of chapels & churches were, after all, built in much the same way, so it is not surprising that they look very much the same. Its just that there are not that many great halls surviving so one forgets.

Tilt Yard restaurant shut, perhaps because it had been given over to the olympians, with the catering contractor trying manfully to deliver sausage rolls and other snacks from trestles outside the east front. They clearly needed a bit more practise because the serving girl was taking ages to pop a sausage into a bread roll, despite the sausages being spread out in front of her and the rolls being precut for the purpose. My sausage was good but the roll was entirely ordinary, if bulky, being made of the same sort of stuff as is used by the hot dog barrow boys on the south bank. But very pleasant to snack out in the gardens in the sun.

BH very tickled to have to enter and exit through the fancy wrought iron gates between the privy garden and the river, the ones which have been partially painted in gold and which look a bit odd. This also gave us sight of some men from the XXX battalion of the YYY regiment guarding the railings between the river and the main entrance into the Palace. Stolidly standing at 20 yard intervals, three feet back from the railings. They were neither armed nor in ceremonial dress and it was not at all clear whom they thought might attempt ingress by this particular route.

PS: rather put out this morning to find that the entire front page of the Guardian has been given over to a swimmer, a jock to use a bit of transpondan lingo. To think that the Guardian used to be the thinking persons' paper from Manchester; persons who rose above such crudely pectoral competitions.

Spotted by BH outside the south front of Hampton Court Palace, a plant first known to us as the title of a rather decent murder mystery (which turned out not to be a murder) from Australia (in our case pre-owned by Surrey Libraries), where lantana seems to grow more or less wild on embankments and suchlike, a rather florid version of our own bramble or dog rose.

We must have come across them at the Palace before because BH knew straight away what they were, from maybe 50 yards. It took me, however, a few seconds to bring the relevant data back online.

I plead in mitigation that this specimen is rather small and has a short trunk, not visible in this picture, while the plants in the film were scrubby rather than trunky.

Not the pleasant resort town in the south of Tenerife where one or two relations by marriage had houses, rather the mysterious summer flowering trees with flowers very like those of the spring flowering horse chestnut.

We have now come across two such, one with leaves related to those of a chestnut and this one today with leaves quite unrelated, at least to the unbotanical eye.

So the question is, what are they? Our rather elementary tree books do not go so far as to allow identification by flower.