pumpkinstrokemarrow

First irritation, is the huge amount of coverage that one erring school master (kidnapping school girl) and one erring politician (shouting at policeman) generate. In the first case, I imagine that all the coverage and subsequent shemozzle will do far more damage than the kidnapping, so called, ever did in the first place. The second case just seems silly. It is a nature of the game that politicians are a bit highly strung, they are going to blow off from time to time. Are we gaining that much by paying so much attention to one such blowing off? Is the man's ability to control his tongue, or rather lack of it, all that relevant to his business of whipping? Who cares, apart from the press? I dare the policeman concerned has heard far worse in the badlands of Peckham. But were his copious & contemporaneous notes made in the interests of providing himself with a bit of cover in the event of trouble or in the interests of a having a bit of fun at some else's expense, of whipping up the press?

Second irritation arises from the packaging industry. In their efforts to preserve the sterile state of their products, the packagers have produced packages which are hard to open without introducing a whole lot of insterility of one's own. First example is band aids. These are now so sticky and so cunningly wrapped up that it is impossible to get one on one's bleeding finger - one cannot usually call on help at these times - without getting on's grubby & bloody fingers all over the things. Second example is Sainbury's full strength (vegan friendly) peanut butter, with the containing jar being sealed by a circular foil like disc glued to the top edge of the jar. Once again, the glue is so strong that one cannot get the foil off without a great deal of fiddling about, quite likely to result in fragments of fingered foil reaching the pristine surface of the peanut butter.

The packagers of dried fruit and vegetables are just as bad, with ever more cunning openings to the packets which I can rarely get open and emptied without some of the emptying being on the floor. And trodden in raisins are neither a pretty sight nor particularly savory to clear up.

But there is better news on the pulses front. Spring cleaning a kitchen cupboard prompted me to use up a few ounces of green lentils and a few ounces of orange lentils. All helps to keep the dead flies under control  (see September 21st). Boil the green lentils for ten minutes, lid off, remove red scum and then strain the red water off. What unpleasant chemicals does one get rid off with this boiling lid off business? Why do green lentils generate red waste water? After these wonders, add fresh water, the orange lentils and three stalks of celery, sliced thin crosswise. Bring to the boil and take off the heat. Some time later, bring to the boil again and simmer gently for a couple of hours. For the last quarter of an hour add 2 cubic inches of Portuguese bacon (see 27th September) chopped fine and two or three cooked potatoes chopped coarse. Adjust the water content as you go, as necessary. Serve with brown bread without butter. My first venture into the world of mixed pulse soup for a very long time - and very good it was too.

I close with a report on the LRB picked up on a recent passage through Waterloo, a picking up which involved my first unaided use of the self-check out machines at Smiths, which now I have got used to them are rather better than their queues.

Unusually dull issue, for a magazine which I usually enjoy after having left it alone for a while, as I had done on this occasion. Apart from the usual slew of intriguing small ads, there were just two items of interest in the 40 or so pages. One was a piece about being incarcerated in rather insalubrious circumstances for a day or so in New York as a result of being picked on for some elderly non-payment of speeding fine in the margins of being picked up for turning right when one should not have, or some such. A bit depressing that in the land of the free they find it necessary to be so heavy handed. Puts one off going there. The other was a review of a book about a son of Queen Victoria, whom everybody had thought was hopeless. But this turned out to be a good thing. He did not meddle in affairs, but he liked dressing up, waving at crowds and spending time with his various lady friends. He was unusually untouched for somebody of his time and class by snobbism, racism or antisemitism. And a lot more people turned out for his funeral than for that of his mother. Constitutional monarchy rules!

Near miss on a Bullingdon yesterday, clocking up exactly 30 minutes to get from Vauxhall to the Strand, finding on the way that all three stands near Trafalgar Square were full, this being around 1800 on a Friday evening. I also learned that getting across Victoria Station from Vauxhall Bridge Road to Buckingham Palace Road is quite a performance if one wants to stay on the road. Maybe it will get better when the current round of road improvements has improved.

From the Strand to the 'Maple Leaf', a Canadian theme pub, the name of which I vaguely remember coming across before. Very crowded and noisy with downstairs toilets decidedly retro.

One of the internet reviews of this establishment commented that the poutine was rubbish, poutine being a word I have come across before. Both blog and google search say that my only use of the word was on February 19th 2007, but my recollection is that it came from reading a Fred Vargas story, part of which was set in Quebec and which Amazon France tells me that I bought in 2009. I was impressed that I was able to get at my Amazon history so easily, but puzzled about the poutine. Maybe the memory connections for this word have got muddled up.

Next door was a restaurant called 'Steak  & Co' but which had a number of what looked fancy hams hanging in the window. More puzzled. From there past the 'Lamb & Flag' from where the the crowd was spilling out of the pub, down the alley and almost into Garrick Street. Far too crowded for a non-alcoholic refreshment, although in the dim and distant past they used to do very good bread and cheese at lunch time. So onto St Martin's Lane where I found a nice quiet café, Fernando's I think, where I was able to have a ham sandwich with a bottle of still, room temperature water without mood music. The waitress was slightly puzzled that I should want warm water but trotted off to the store to get one just the same. Ham sandwich came on ready sliced bread, but with the slices maybe half an inch thick. Presumably the factory bread answer to all this baguette and panini stuff - and fine for a ham sandwich. Ham thin but decent.

Onto to the Duke of York's to see 'Jumpy', a tale of angst concerning the response of a couple of middle aged couples to the extravagant doings of a just under (sex) age daughter, the pull being Tamsin Greig as the mother. As it turned out, a rather drab & dreary tale, rather too long, far too much bad language, a lot of thigh and some humour. A minimalist set, decorated in white satin finish emulsion, balanced by loud and unpleasant music between scenes: there may have been significance in this last but it was quite lost on me. Some rather heavy handed gestures towards the femmy movements of the 1970's. Some rather heavy handed moralising. An incestuous play in that two of the adult roles were luvvies. I have noticed before that some luvvies seem to love writing luvvies into their plays and other luvvies seem to love playing the resulting luvvy roles; a love which goes back at least as far as the bard and even our own 'Midsomer Murders' is mildly infected. Females OK (I particularly liked Seline Hizli as Lyndsey), juvenile males OK, adult males somehow rather irritating, not sure why. The experience was not improved by sitting in range of vent blowing out cold air - and I had no scarf to provide comfort for the neck.

This morning was an HSBC morning.

First call, our local branch. Yet sir, three bags full sir. Would sir like to take a seat and a colleague will be with you shortly. Ten minutes of sitting in the sun (for some reason I really suffer if I have to sit in the sun behind glass) to irritating hold music without further action was enough and I was off.

Second call, the call center. I got through to a person after another ten minutes of 'click 4 now if you want a dog license' and still more irritating hold music. Unfortunately the line was bad and the accent of the person was thick. Presumably my accent was just as thick to her. After a while through to another person without accent and I was able to start my business. At the end of all of which I had told one computer and two persons my account number and sort code.

Maybe one day some marketing wonk will spot a business opportunity in people like me who would be more than happy to pay some bank charges in return for some decent service. I bet there are plenty of us. In the meantime, I do not suppose for one moment that any of the other high street banks would have been any better.

Despite having had a rather busy morning, we decided, nevertheless to use our tickets for the Pre-Raphaelites at the Brit Tate yesterday afternoon. It was also an opportunity to replenish smoked bacon stocks from the Madeira Café (see http://madeiralondon.co.uk/) at Vauxhall.

Perhaps because they realized that I was not the only one was slightly annoyed at having to pay to see a lot of pictures which one used to be able to see for free, the curators of this exhibition had pulled in a lot of other pictures from up north and elsewhere. Lots of good stuff, nicely hung, but for me Holman Hunt was the man of the day, the oddly masculine faces of some of his ladies and the light of the world notwithstanding. But it is interesting that workers would queue up to pay a shilling a go to see this last, which must have meant more than than the fact that retail prices have gone up by a factor of around 25 since then would suggest (see Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, May 1994). I was particularly taken with his hireling shepherd, only slightly marred by the drone of the conductress of some school party. Good to see the scapegoat again, brought down from Liverpool for the exhibition.

A couple of the famous pictures, awakening conscience and marianna seemed very small and dark in this company: was this because they had not been cleaned? Because of some vagary of the technique or paint used?

I also found two famous paintings by Ford, the baa-lambs and the last of England, both much better in the flesh than they were in reproduction - although I was still not that keen on them. This was also true of most of the reproductions in the souvenir book (very reasonably priced at £19.99), with the reproductions looking very pale, at least so long as the real thing was fresh in the mind's eye. I wonder if it is possible for reproduction to get any better? Or have we long reached the limit of what can be done with a printing press on paper?

All in all a good exhibition, crowded but not crowded out, despite the bad gallery manners of some of our foreign guests. I will be back.

It is also seems that Brit Tate is remodeling the main entrance and the big pillared gallery which the entrance leads into. Both of which I liked the way they were - despite the recent tendency to hang lumps of scrap metal from the ceiling - and so it remains to be seen whether the change - presumably expensive - will be an improvement.

Today was the day to call call centers. The prize for the most irritating hold music went to Liverpool Victoria of Bournemouth, with Aviva of Norwich second by five lengths. Special prize to Alliance & Leicester for bureaucracy run wild.

I do not greatly care for the few paintings of the painting Mr. Ford (aka Ford Madox Brown) that I know, finding his 'Pretty Baa-Lambs' particularly odd, at least in reproduction which is the only way that I have seen it. But I do know the name so the adaptation of a book - Parade's End - by his grandson (aka Ford Madox Ford) for the telly did catch my eye.

Unfortunately, as a serious follower of the Brett version of Holmes on ITV3, I had not cared for the BBC version at all, taking, for some reason I can't put my finger on, a dislike to the lead, Benedict Cumberbatch. No reflection on the chap's ability, it is just that he was not tellyvisual for me. And this dislike tainted my view of Parade's End, where I did not get beyond minute seven of episode one. On the other hand, I was moved to look Ford up in Wikipedia and then Gutenburg. Parade was missing from this last, presumably not out of copyright, but The Good Soldier was present and has now been read.

I found it a rather odd book and I am not sure that I want to read another. Partly because the four main characters are such oddities, all people born with many advantages but who manage to make a terrible mess of things. Partly because the novel is not sequential, darting backwards and forwards in time, a technique which I have never cared for. I like my stories to go forward, at least most of the time, the Odyssey notwithstanding. I suppose that the novel is part of the turn of the century shift in interest from the outside to the inside of events. Not quite from the conscious to the unconscious, but perhaps along those lines. But I prefer Lawrence.

Me notwithstanding, Ford did well, despite having to change out of his German sounding name - Hueffer - in the margins of the First World War, to the extent of collaborating with Conrad on three novels, and Conrad is a writer with whom I do get on.

PS: as a former acquaintance of process and method in the IT industry, I was interested yesterday to come across an example of same in the health industry. We commented as a nurse was filling out some form about some procedure, a procedure which in our old mental hospitals one would have just got on with and done, and she returned as quick as a flash that if you didn't write it down you hadn't done it. Documenting what was done was an important part of the deed itself. I was reminded of testing IT systems, another place where this maxim runs. Essential to the maintenance of good order and discipline as time, circumstances and people move on.

That is to say that yesterday was the third outing on the Bullingdons of the present, second series. Only managed two legs as it then started to rain in quite a big way at lunch time: first leg Vauxhall Cross to Finsbury Circus, second leg Wormwood Street to Jewry Street. The failure was in the first leg which took 38 minutes, a good 8 minutes clear of the 30 minute limit for a free ride, with the fact that the intended stand at Wormwood Street was full only accounting for perhaps half of that excess. As it happens, two full stands on this outing, I think the first time I have had one full stand, never mind two.

Asking a full stand where the nearest empty one was proved completely beyond me, despite finding a hopeful looking slot into which to shove my key. A wheeze which, as I understood it, would have extended my free period - provided of course that it had not already expired - by a generous 15 minutes.

By way of factoids, I offer the naming of Wormwood Street from the wormwood which used to grow on and around the more or less derelict city wall (Weinreb & Hibbert), and the usefulness of wormwood in killing fleas in hawks, this last being turned up by the compilers of the OED from 1486.  Presumably a problem in the mews of the late Plantagenets and early Tudors.

The excuse for the outing was Open House London 2012, having been given a free copy of the smart booklet by Sutton Library. Started off for the Bevis Marks Synagogue to be put off by a prodigious queue. Then to a rather spectacular bar-restaurant called the Drift and spread over several levels in a large corner of the equally spectacular Heron Tower. Their rather snazzy website at http://thedriftbar.co.uk/ gives something of the flavour of the place. On this Sunday morning we were offered the brunch menu, and I settled for a posh version of bubble & squeak, which was handsomely presented and came with some good bacon and a nicely poached egg, but I could have done a much better job at the bubble & squeak part of the operation. But worth every penny for the ambience. Presumably mega crowded on, for example, Friday afternoon and evening but fairly quiet on a Sunday morning.

The plan then was to walk to Trafalgar Square but we diverted to Spitalfields Market and then chanced across the Sandy's Row Synagogue. A handsome building inside, which started life providing facilities for Huguenots in the mid 18th century and was then repurposed for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe in the mid 19th century. I learned that, along with Catholic churches, a synagogue will always have a red light burning in front of the sanctuary, a practice derived from Exodus 27:20-21. Symbolism presumably differs in the two cases, but I dare say neither bother with the lighting grade olive oil specified in the good book, although the lamp in the synagogue may have been made of the specified brass. Maybe Wikipedia is not quite right about all this.

Spitalfields did not offer much of interest, so quickly back to the Broadgate Centre where we were able to inspect two art works. We did not realise that the first art work was an art work at the time, consisting of a lot of beams let into the roof of a long and dreary corridor, or perhaps cloister. But we now know that the beams are called 'Alchemy'. Peeping out of the corridor onto what we took to be Broadgate Plaza, we had a back view of a bit of large, shiny black figure sculpture, possibly a reclining baby Bhudda, large size. But we now know that it is the Broadgate Venus, offered to us by a Columbian. According to the leaflet she is reclining serenely. See http://www.broadgate.co.uk/Content/PDF/BroadgateArtLeaflet.pdf.

Then to Liverpool Street station to get out of the rain, a station which I used every day for several years but was hard put to recognise yesterday. Plus, I could understand why the indicator board might not show anything for Cambridge, most of those trains having moved to Kings Cross, but what about Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich which did not appear either. Have these places fallen off the rail network?

Number 11 bus back to the Aldwych where we had a look at King's College Chapel and St. Clement Danes, this last being primarily a war memorial to the RAF. Both very striking, but with St Clement Danes being a lot more holy than Kings College Chapel - in which I did not much care for the stained glass. Also a pity about the truncation of the roof for some anatomists - particularly since a student told us that all the medical and dental parts of the college had been moved to Guys. The dental cases were now full of sporting memorabilia. Near two years since we last visited - see December 8th 2010.

At this point the weather showed no signs of improving so hoofed it left to Waterloo, picking up a lady driven taxi on the way.

That is to say, yet another front page piece about how awful it is that old people might have to sell their houses so that they can pay to live in care homes.

On the off-chance that some DT readers might want to rise above the level of the redtops, I rehearse the simple argument.

The amount that governments have to spend is a complex product of the amount there is and the level of taxation. In most advanced countries this level has hovered around 50% for a long time, with the US being the odd man out, believing in reliance on self rather than reliance on state. Part of this stability arises from the fact that electorates are apt to punish governments that push the level up - electorates liking to get a pint out of a half pint pot, a liking which the irresponsible encourage.

Given other priorities in the UK, this amount does not run to paying for the care in care homes of the rapidly increasing number of old people who are no longer able to live in their own homes or with their own families. Reliance on state off.

So these people are going to have to resort to reliance on self, which is quite likely to mean that they will have to sell or mortgage their largest asset, their quite possibly empty homes. But what is so awful about this? Someone has to pay and, collectively, we have decided that this should not be the government, that this should not be a burden on central funds, that we do not want to collectivize or socialize this risk. We may change our minds on these points, but it seems unlikely that this will be any time soon.

PS: thinking of the US, I am reminded that I was puzzled that Obama, in the context of knocking Romney, referred to us as the oldest ally. I thought it was French power, arms & money which enabled the US to win their independence from us. That doesn't make us their oldest enemy but it doesn't make us their oldest ally either.

Even more puzzled that the US electorate seriously thinks of making a president out of a rich Mormon who presumably signs up for stuff like 'Mormons believe in a friendly universe, governed by a God whose work and glory it is to bring his children to immortality and eternal life. Mormons have a fairly unique perspective on the nature of God, the origin of man, and the purpose of life. For instance, Mormons believe in a pre-mortal existence where people were literal spirit children of God, and that God presented a plan that would allow his children to progress and become more like him. The plan involved the spirits receiving bodies on earth and going through trials in order to learn, progress, and receive a "fulness of joy". The most important part of the plan involved Jesus, the eldest of God's children, coming to earth as the literal Son of God, to conquer sin and death so that God's other children could return. According to Mormons, every person who lives on earth will be resurrected, and most of them will be received into various kingdoms of glory. To be accepted into the highest kingdom, a person must fully accept Christ through faith, repentance, and through ordinances such as baptism and the laying on of hands'. Lots more of this can be found for you by Mr. Google.

Yesterday I was tempted to break my alcoholic fast, a fast which is now of two months duration. I decided against but the temptation was probably responsible for the two part dream about cigarettes which followed.

In part 1, I was in the buffet car of a railway train, rather scruffy and crowded.  A lady in a slightly dowdy but once smart red business suit near me lights up. Feeling busy, I take it upon myself to explain to her that while I was an ex-smoker who fully understood her position and I agreed that the present rules are a bit fierce, the rules did not, nevertheless allow of smoking in buffet cars. The lady then took it upon herself to explain to me that the rules had been changed, unbeknown to me, and that it was now possible to smoke in buffet cars and designated areas of carriage ends, designation taking the form of white lines painted on the floor. There was some jostling and shoving taking place between smokers and non-smokers across the white lines.

In part 2, as part of some subsequent sequence which I cannot now remember, I was given a packet of cheap cigarettes. After a bit I tried one and did not enjoy it. After another bit I tried another and still didn't enjoy it. Woke up rather cross with myself that I was in danger of starting smoking again, a habit which I did not even seem to enjoy any more. A rather dim bit of dreaming as I have not smoked cigarettes for a very long time, having converted to cigars, with the exception, in the olden days anyway, of Derby Day for which I bought 40 Gitaines, a brand of cigarette which I doubt is still obtainable in Epsom. Mr. Google offers the poster illustrated from https://marketplace.secondlife.com/, but the image is not mine. Not my idea of a Gitaine smoker at all: where's the grubby hat and raincoat for a start.

On to breakfast where I was interested to see an advertisement for the post of Governor of the Bank of England in the Economist, sufficiently interested to print off the 20 page application pack.

The main result of which was that I was pleased to see that this appointment had been shoehorned into the standard process for senior public appointments. That candidates actually had to fill up an application form and attend an interview. The whole thing was not done with smoke and mirrors at the back of the Carlton Club (http://www.carltonclub.co.uk/). It would be fun to be a fly on the wall and get to peek at all the applications. I wonder how many cranks, creeps and other undesirable outsiders get to apply?

Will any real bankers apply? Would they be welcome? Presumably there are bankers out there who have made a big enough pile that they can now hanker after the glory and the gong?

The selection process for this high profile post was to be led by the low profile permanent head of the Treasury. It must be odd to be selecting someone who is likely to become more important than oneself, someone who will earn a lot more than oneself and who will be in post for some time after one has retired. But the smoke and mirrors survive to the extent of the permanent head passing a list of names to the Chancellor who passes one of them to the Prime Minister who might pass it on to the Monarch for her seal of approval (usually forthcoming).

Applicants are invited to put down their race (black, brown etc) and nationality (english, welsh, mixed etc). It does not say but I don't suppose foreigners are completely excluded by the need to be security cleared. They are also invited to put down their disability status and, if reasonably disabled, to put in for the interview access scheme, a mild form of positive discrimination. Are we ready for a blind governor, the success of David Blunkett notwithstanding?

Applicants are also invited to explain why they have the seven (that magic number pops up yet again! Who says this process is scientific?) cardinal virtues of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. So interviews might be quite lengthy. But at least applicants are spared a selection center, a procedure rather like 'Big Brother' which is much loved by consulting human resources types. Might get results, but all a bit phoney and undignified. Managed to get through my career, such as it was, with just one of the things. Failed it, as it happened and British Telecom never got to know what they missed.

On the other hand, the cold war now over, applicants do not have to certify that they are not and never have been members of the Communist Party. Perhaps this survives, hidden in the security clearance which does get a mention. And one could always declare any such affiliation in the section on political activity.

The appointment is for a maximum of 8 years but I did not spot anything about probation, break points or termination for misbehaviour in a hotel room. Perhaps the appointment is, what used to be called 'at pleasure', which I believe meant that the appointment was at an end if the Monarch withdrew his or her pleasure. None of that nonsense about unfair dismissal applies. There is also the point that the more grounds for dismissal that there are the less independent the post looks: heaven forfend that the Chancellor should attempt to interfere with the Bank.

The first half of the application form is decorated, top and bottom of the page, with the interesting rubric 'PROTECT [IL1]', presumably a relic of some system for giving important documents security markings, unused in this case. A sloppy bit of template design which would not have happened on my watch, tiresome though templates can be.

And lastly, somewhere it is pointed out that this post does not fall within the scope of  OCPA, the web site for which suggests that it should. Maybe this post is just a tad too august for them: see http://publicappointmentscommissioner.independent.gov.uk/.

From time to time I have recorded the appearance of what look like small dead flies floating on the surface of our lentil soup. Perhaps something which hatches if the lentils have been stored too long. Happily the dead flies have been absent for some months, but I am sorry to report today that they have reappeared. Not in large numbers, but reappeared nonetheless.

We had become rather relaxed, with the result that I am unable to say from where these particular lentils were bought, or when. Most likely Sainsbury's, but I cannot be sure.

I do know that the last time I made a serious effort to complain about dead flies, it was the Tesco at Leatherhead, where, despite the complaint being logged by a very nice young customer service support officer, nothing ever happened and by the time I checked back with them all trace of this particular incident had vanished from the log, at least that part of the log which was visible from the customer service station.

The way in which we can get worked up over the fate of selected animals is an odd and enduring - but not endearing - feature of the English scene, a thought prompted by extensive coverage in yesterday's Guardian of the great badger scandal, that is to say that our security service is gearing up to slaughter millions and millions innocent baby badgers, deemed - or doomed - to be a threat to the state of the nation.

One strand of this is the way this particular sort of animal cause seems to draw in all kinds of people fully up for gung-ho activity (of a sort which reminds me both of the wide games we used to play in the Boy Scouts and the paint ball games played by those a little older, all of which can be played at night, in the woods), activity which can easily lurch from oh so very worthy fun into the dangerous and illegal.

Greenpeace people and the anti-GM people get up to the same kind of tricks. Perhaps it all scratches at an anarchic urge, a reaction to our so-ordered and (so the sociologists tell us) so-empty lives. Cuddling a smelly baby badger and getting one over a would be badger culler puts meaning back into my life. Or is it more like one of those cults we used to wring our hands about, the sorts of outfits which sweep up all sorts of vulnerable misfits? I am also reminded of the people who were jury acquitted of destroying a field of maize with fire, despite there being no doubt that they had done this very expensive deed, on purpose and with malice aforethought, at farmer and taxpayer expense.

Leaving aside sentiment about the fate of some badgers - the numbers of which I presume to be piffling in comparison to the number of pigs slaughtered in the name of sausages and pies - I am not very clear on the merits of the business. I understand that there are an awful lot of badgers about these days, although I am neither sure why this should be nor privy to what damage they might do, to crops for instance - apart from carrying TB, TB which does damage dairy herds. Badgers are quite large animals and must need a fair amount of grub to keep going. Do they graze off fields of turnips otherwise intended to feed the pigs to make the sausages and pies? But whether the rather large sounding costs of culling the badgers is justified by the results in bovine health in much less clear - although if I was one of the many struggling small dairy farmers, I dare say I would go for any initiative paid for out of central funds which might help.

At least in my young days we used to demonstrate about something which was both wrong and important, even if the manner of the demonstration was at times silly. I still firmly believe that the world would have been a better place had the US desisted from interfering in the affairs of Vietnam - and a lot more people would have been able to live out their lives in relative peace & quiet than was in fact the case. It was also a lot more damage than, as it happened, we had managed in Kenya just a few years previously, but damage about which I knew nothing until much more recently. I don't remember there being any demonstrations about it, although one or two eminences, for example Barbara Castle, did have an honourable go.

A picture of just the box on this occasion, the snaps including the completed puzzle not being very good. Pity the ancient Nokia can't deal with reflection from the puzzle surface.

Another first, this puzzle being the first from 'jr' puzzles, printed in Stockport and labelled in English, French and what looks like Spanish, although the word given for puzzle is the intriguing looking 'palapeli-pussel'. Which Mr. Google suggests might be Finnish. He also comes up with a computer game called Palapeli - so, sadly, someone has already had my idea of putting a jigsaw onto the little screen. But now that someone else has done it, I wonder how much like the real thing it would be? There would be lots of pluses, one could, for example, make more or less any image one wanted into a jigsaw (although such making would take no account of the image, it would just cut according to some stored pattern). I suppose the relationship would be something like that between the kindle and a real book, with the kindle being useful but not being the real thing - although I suppose that eventually the world will be full of people who never knew the real thing and so would not miss it. Would find the real thing smelly and clumsy - thinking here of the very real BH aversion for the smells of second hand book shops.

Back at this puzzle, started in the usual way with the edge, on this occasion completed before moving off elsewhere.

Then the skyline, then the roofs and the half-timbering. Found pushing down onto the walls hard, so went for the line across the lower part of the image: the top of the weir, the path and the railings. This went OK, then pushed down from there to complete the weir and its surrounds.

The the treeline, then pushed up from there to complete the buildings. Then down to do the three islands of tree that this left.

Then the three islands of sky which completed the puzzle. For the sky, I resorted to sorting the pieces by prong configuration.

A fairly regular puzzle, with most pieces much the same size and with four pieces meeting at interior vertices most of the time.

A successful puzzle, not visited by smells of tobacco, mistakes or panics about missing pieces.

But what sort of a castle was it? Were the half timbered bits planted on what was left of a proper castle? Was the whole thing the fantasy of some inbred princeling (the sort of chap who would try to marry into a proper monarchy)? Hiring village girls to let their hair down from tower windows and generally play at dungeons and dragons? Unfortunately, Mr. Google is far more knowledgeable about jigsaw puzzles of the castle than he is about the castle itself. Surely the place was not knocked up just to serve the jigsaw, calendar and chocolate box industries?

Back to the Wigmore Hall last night for our first concert of the new season, not having been to the place since around 25th January to hear Elisabeth Leonskaja playing Schubert, last heard at St. Luke's last November (see 18th November) playing Beethoven. I was able to guess her age about right, her turning out to be just about 4 years older than myself.

Started the evening with a visit to Ponti's at the corner of Great Castle Street and John Princes Street, another place we have not been to for a while, for coffee and cake. Fine place, good service and good cake. In my case, their take on tiramisu which was both substantial and very good. Made rather in the way of our trifle rather than a slab of cake that you cut into oblongs to serve. BH had a warm yellow cake made of polenta. We were also entertained by a continental couple of middling years - maybe 30-40 - who had the temerity to neck inside the restaurant and smoke outside. Can't think when I last saw public necking of this sort so early in the evening, that is to say around 1900.

Started the concert itself with D557, which I found rather playful. A good opener. Followed by two half sonatas - D566 and D840 - of rather more tempestuous tone. At this point I was finding Leonskaja a touch fast. Not bothered by the loud - which did, however, bother the fidgety gentleman sitting next to us who was quite, and rather unecessarily, rude about it. Then in front of us we had what I took to be a foreign family, homely looking (in a good sense that it) wife, adolescent son and a serious looking father with a neatly trimmed beard. The wife did solitaire on her phone during the interval and both father & son appeared to fall asleep during the second half, the latter with head nestling on the maternal shoulder.

The second half was the much grander and later D958, justly popular. Followed by two nicely chosen encores, probably both movements from one or other of the other two late sonatas.

All in all, an excellent return to the world of metropolitan concerts.

PS: odd illusion at one point. The bit of the hall which contains the performers is apsed, with what looked like dressed marble blocks (they might actually have been more akin to veneer than blocks) on the front of the spherical bit, running around the vertical, semi circular edge and with heavenly mosaic facing up the body of the apse. Now the front face of the dressed stone was stable enough, but the other edge, the one actually facing down, sometimes seemed to be facing down and sometimes seemed to facing out, for the all the world like one of those trick paintings of perspective, although on much simpler lines than those by Escher. Furthermore, when the facing down edge was facing out, the apse, which was quite real enough, looked even more real. With more depth, as if the sky part of the mosaic really was sky. Maybe I had overdosed on the tiramisu.

Now near the end of the 1.5kg of stone ground flour from the mill at Hele Bay (27th August and http://www.helecornmill.com). In the event, the bag has held up despite acquiring a small tear in its side. The flour itself has done well, giving the bread a more interesting flavour than that from Waitrose, a flavour which more than compensates for the more small rise.

Given that I am using 8oz of stone ground to 2lbs of white to make my wholemeal bread, bread which turns out at the dense end of what is reasonable, one wonders how people got on in the olden days when they could not afford all the waste involved in making white flour and maybe lived on bread made with 100% stone ground. Must have been real heavy stuff, and more so if unleavened, and one can understand why pharaonic teeth were mostly ground down to the gums by their democratic gesture of eating the same bread as the workers. Or perhaps they had no choice as white flour and sieves had not been invented at that point.

A couple of days ago a bunch of what looked like pigeon wing feathers appeared at the bottom of the back lawn, presumably discarded from some fox's supper. This morning, the feathers were still there and a rather small and ill looking fox was sitting beside them, picking for fleas. And next to the fox, maybe six feet away or so, were a couple of magpies, magpies which looked quite unconcerned by the presence of the fox which, one might have thought, would stand a pretty good chance of grabbing one. Can't see a cat missing at that range. So were the magpies just lucky, do they know something about the fox that I don't, do foxes not like magpies (for breakfast anyway) or am I wrong about their grabbing speed?

On this occasion, both fox and the magpies retired from the scene without there having been any action.

PS: dwarf white cyclamen coming out down the bottom of the garden. Quite a good spread now from the giant mother corm, six inches or more across.

Following the Sacks read recorded on 9th August, I have now had a go at two books from the one and only university for the deaf, Gallaudet, one called '1,000 Signs of Life' and one called 'Language in Motion', both selected more or less at random from Amazon searches, something I do not do very often. The latter was a very good introduction to the whole business of Sign, in particular ASL. But while one comes away with the thought that if one was younger and had more time it would be interesting to try to learn the language, mainly because it looks to be a lot more unlike English than the French or German one was apt to learn at school, the story I came away from Sacks with stands. The story from that easy going read was good.

But it was interesting to read about punning in ASL, some of it coming from the sign for something being a variant of the sign for some prominent characteristic of the something, an arrangement which some of the somethings sometimes find offensive. So, for example, one of the signs for 'Jew' is or is close to the sign for 'beard' (a word that I, a hearing person, use to label the earnest types with loud regional accents who dominate the television documentary airwaves. No reflection on their religion whatsoever). One of the signs for 'Methodist' is or is close to the sign for 'enthusiast'.

I wondered about the lack of a written version of ASL. English is subject to a lot of normalising pressure from the media, a lot of it printed. There are lots of books about English. There are dictionaries. There is the internet. We all speak it in much the same way. But there is no widely used system for translating ASL into text and while one might have books in the form of a DVD, I have no idea how much of that there might be and what the quality might be like. Rather patchy I should imagine: a lot of work over the centuries has made books what they are today, an investment which has not been made in books for the deaf. Which must mean that ASL varies a lot from speaker to speaker and from place to place. Perhaps to the point where some ASL speakers have trouble understanding others - which rather goes against the whole communication point of language in the first place. And maybe the ASL tradition is the sort of oral tradition that anthropologists go on about, the sort of tradition that gave us those pinnacles of world literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey. At least for those few of us who can still read the lingo - which I should say does not include me

Another rather down point was the way in which some ASL speakers are a bit snooty about ASL speakers who were not deaf from birth. They rather resent, in particular, hearing people muscling in on their scene , a scene which they cannot really understand. An understandable if rather tiresome point. Surely it is better for some of us to try to engage with them in their language, rather than always making them engage with us in ours?

Are any other universities for the deaf? There must be a lot more deaf people in China and India than in the US, but maybe there the deaf have no choice but to go to a university for the hearing. Google comes up with various deaf departments within hearing universities which no doubt provide support for the deaf to exist in a hearing world, but do they provide community in the way of Gallaudet? Given that the (fully) deaf are maybe 0.2% of the population, a full blown university may not be viable in a country much smaller than the US. By way of comparison, maybe twice as many people are (fully) blind.

Bottom line, getting the right balance between segregation and integration is not easy. We don't even know what the balance is, never mind about how to get there.

PS: now moved on from macaroni to pearl barley. First go was to pad out the remains of the steak and kidney with some of the stuff. Second go was to make a sort of beef porridge from pearl barley, lentils, onion and stewing steak. This last, not for the first time as I recall doing something of the sort before, maybe without the lentils.

After the car booter, a taste the difference but cut price duck for lunch. May be 6 person-meals for £7 for what was not a bad duck at all.

Thus fortified, to Claremont Landscape Gardens, a sort of miniature Penshurst Place (see September 2nd). Lots of handsome trees and lots of young families. We also saw a kingfisher over the lake, the third time that I have seen such a bird in my life. A kingfisher which appeared to hover over the water before darting off.

Took tea and cake, in my case a coffee and walnut cake. A large piece of rather stale cake with the staleness somewhat disguised by rather a lot of sweet brown goo by way of icing; but I suppose one should not complain too much towards the end of a Sunday afternoon.

Back home to a supper of macaroni light. That is to say boil up macaroni with chopped onion and dried basil, allowing 4 ounces of macaroni, one large onion and a teaspoon of basil per person. Drain and top with grated parmesan to taste. Without our more usual celery instead of the onion a little bland, but entirely eatable and moderately healthy, quite low on fat anyway. I note in passing that consumption of macaroni - in various forms but not as macaroni cheese which I now find rather heavy, even when the sauce is cut with onion - is now running at maybe a third of a pound per person per week, from a start point near zero. Consumption of red lentils maybe another a third of a pound per person per week, consumption having recovered from an earlier stoma nurse ban. On the other hand, consumption of red meat is much reduced, only having bought one cow chop this year.

We have also noticed how dear red meat is. So the other day I did steak and kidney, which did 5 person-meals for a bit less than £10 - rather more than duck and a lot more than chicken. But good once in a while, just the same. I also learned that some saucy ladies buy their stewing steak from Sainsbury's then go to the Manor Green Road butcher to buy a little bit of kidney, not sold at the other place. Seems a terrible cheek, but maybe the butcher was pulling my leg. In any case, his kidney supplies are a bit erratic: no handy white plastic bucket of the stuff like the man at Cheam and one usually has to settle for frozen.

PS: back home from Claremont, we investigated kingfishers to find that their Latin name derives from the Greek halcyon, amongst other things a bird which used to nest out on the sea around the time of the winter solstice and so charmed the gods of wind and water that there was calm for the time it took to raise the brood. Hence the current meaning of the phrase halcyon days. This from the OED rather than Mr. Google who knew about lots of halcyons but not, seemingly, this one.

To borrow Louis XVI's account of the day's hunt in the Imperial & Royal Hunt Leger on the day, I seem to recall, of the storming of the Bastille. That is to say that he had been out hunting as usual but came back with an empty bag, so the account was just the one word.

In my case, the rien refers to my not buying anything at today's car booter at Hook Road Arena (see http://www.hookcarbootsale.com/). A rather quiet affair compared with the last one I attended, with quite a high standard of goods on offer, but nothing that I actually bought. For a change I went round starting at the far end, working back towards the beginning, giving one a rather different take, given that the sellers at the beginning are the ones that get up at the crack of dawn and have rather a different tone from the more relaxed and amateurish sellers who like a decent breakfast before kicking off.

So I might have paid £10 for a facsimile edition of a set of maps of Surrey originally made in 1739 - but the facsimile was a bit old and tatty and the maps themselves were not very pretty. Not a good year for making maps. I might have paid £2.50 for a 1,500 piece jigsaw which appeared to be Nelson's 'Victory' in full dress for some kind of water gala - but 1,500 pieces was too much of a challenge, particularly since the table in the jigsaurium in nowhere near big enough for a jigsaw of that size. I nearly asked the price of an oriental copper or brass tray, circular and about 10 inches in  diameter, incised with a rather engaging pattern - but we have quite enough lower grade ornaments of that sort already. We are supposed to be slimming them down to reduce the dusting load. And then there were some very good value oranges at 8 for £1 - but I had only the day before stocked up at Costcutter and more than double the price, which to be fair to Costcutter is still very reasonable. And so it went on; the first car booter that I can remember at which I went no further than the 50p entrance money. Not even a lady in full shador to liven up the proceedings. But there were some glossy women's magazines - 'Elle', 'Marie Claire' or something like that - from somewhere eastern to judge by the script in which it was printed, which led me to wonder how Muslims stood on such magazines with all those pictures of ladies advertising make up and clothes. With some of the ladies not wearing too many of these last. Are ladies in Saudi Arabia allowed such things in the privacy of their own homes?

Exited by the path which runs down the no-man's land between one older bog standard estate and one new build bog standard estate, this last taking over most of the grounds of what used to be an asylum. I am pleased to say that they have left at least some of the fine specimen trees planted by some tree loving asylum superintendent. No-man's land not too salubrious, probably not a place for a dark night, with the remains of no less than three fences running down the asylum side (see above, the middle fence being hard to pick out in this snap. New build to the left). The inhabitants of the new build, quite apart from not being too impressed by this no-mans land, are probably even less impressed that a road has now been punched through it, connecting the old and new estates. Will the drug fuelled fiends from the old be spilling over into the new?

Back with the report into the Hillborough disaster, I have now got to page 20 of 395. The terms of reference of the panel are rather odd, being focused on the orderly placing of every last bit of documentation about the disaster and its aftermath in the public domain, with help, as appropriate, from the Keeper of Public Records. This oddness is presumably routed in the circumstances in which the panel was empanelled. It also seems that the disaster was a compound of ignorance (of the possibilities for disaster inherent in this particular football match in this particular stadium, despite various warnings and incidents over the years) and organisational failure (break down even) in the police and ambulance services and in the football club concerned; not the fault of any particular individual (although in the olden days heads of services were expected to take responsibility for what happened on their watch). All this was known before the panel started its work, so I can only suppose a lot of the rest of the report is about the various efforts made by interested parties to pass the buck and to cover their tracks. As I said yesterday, all very sad that the disaster of the disaster itself has been compounded by nonsense of this sort.

More than twenty years after the event, we are still grinding away at the sad business of the Hillsborough disaster. It is a great shame that the circumstances appear to warrant stirring the whole business up again, a stirring up which I suspect will do little more than feather the nests of those paid to stir. The sort of stirring up of muddy bottoms which we seem to make something of a habit of. Or is it just the media?

No more support for the poor sods on the ground who have to try to maintain public safety in sometimes trying circumstances.

But one might have rather more sympathy for the police at large if they did not seem to be institutionally incapable of admitting error. Snafu even. A reflex reaction to close ranks and deny everything at the least hint of trouble - when a timely and honest admission of error who do much to clear the air and make way for trying to find ways to avoid future error in a cooler, less adversarial climate.

But I am getting a little ahead of myself. Back peddling, the coverage of the publication of the latest report in yesterday's Guardian did not advance much beyond the how awfuls, so I thought that it might be an idea to take a peek at the report itself. Ask Mr. Google and all he seems to be able to do is turn up a whole lot of media coverage of the report, which I assumed, without looking, would be about on the level of the Guardian's. If not worse. Poke around with variations on the search terms without getting much further forward. Try Amazon, who can indeed sell me a copy of the last report, now 20 years or so old, and a large selection of more recent books - but not the latest report. Then I think that maybe some organ of what used to be called HMSO (maybe this organ is actually still alive) would have a copy of the report? Bit more digging and I arrive at the organ called TSO and the screen illustrated - which tells me that I could indeed buy a copy of the report for the modest sum of £60 or so - if it were in stock. No offer of a pdf download or anything like that.

Maybe being police flavored it comes under the Home Office. No joy. What about the Office for Media & Fun? No joy there either. Then somehow I got hold of the idea that the panel producing the report might have its own website - which indeed it does. Bingo, I now have my own copy of the report, in electric form at least, and maybe I will come to a more informed opinion. Possibly with the help of the print shop down the road who will print it off for me for a lot less than £60. Who makes the pricing decisions on these things? I do not suppose there is the remotest likelihood of recovering the costs of the panel from sales, so why not more or less give the report away? A nominal charge to deter wasters?

But it is not very clever that it took so long to get to the horse's mouth. What went wrong there?

PS: some time later. Now got a bit deeper into the Guardian, where coverage was redeemed by some sensible remarks from Simon Jenkins. Next stop the report itself!

We may have let our last copy of Charles Sale's 'The Specialist' go, but I must have inherited something of my father's interest in such matters, snapping this rather grand workman's privy in Longmead Road. Installed for Skanska by http://www.davlav.com/ who look to be able to meet any conceivable requirement in this area.

This two seater might even have air conditioning and is certainly not the bottom of the range. Looks much grander than, for example, the sort of thing provided at many public events, such as flower shows at Hampton Court.

However, the care of Skanska for their employees is not always matched by their care for us. So the other day I was walking past one of their sit and ride diggers. The digger was swinging backwards and forwards as a pile of something was moved from one place to another, with the top of the digger arm catching the bough of a small tree above on each swing. Either the operator had not noticed or could not be bothered to make the additional hand movement required to lower the arm to miss the bough to save the tree. All rather irritating but I was not sufficiently moved or sufficiently brave to pull the driver up.

Then a few yards further on I walk past their empty van, with window open and radio blaring. I suppose the work is boring if you have to do it week after week, but I never felt the need for music while I worked. All rather distracting. Although I do sometimes have music on while I read - usually with the result that I read rather than listen, which apart from irritating others in the house shows scant respect for the composer. It is not as if I play the sort of incidental music intended for background rather than foreground use.

But I had done my bit that day so I could feel a bit high and mighty. For the second day running I had passed  some broken crockery on the path along Horton Lane, just by the shiny new mini Tesco. On this occasion, having passed it by about fifty yards, came across an empty and reasonably clean plastic bag so picked up the bag and retraced my steps. To find that the crockery was the remains of two broken plates, small dinner or large breakfast, of two different patterns. They did not appear to have been used recently. So how did they get there?

A puzzle which has intrigued me and I have been inventing not very plausible scenarios since. Was it someone returning from a Hook Road car booter with too much secondhand crockery in too small a plastic bag? Was someone taking a plated up meal to an elderly relative and managed to drop it? The rain and foxes cleaning the plates before I got to them. Did some punk snatch a likely looking bag and then chuck the lower value contents? What sort of a person would drop two plates and just leave them lying?

PS: do not confuse Skanska (http://www.skanska.co.uk/) with Svenska ( http://www.svk.se/). Maybe these sorts of words are common in Swedish and all sound the same in English.

We had occasion today to look at a Red Cross site about wheel chairs. I have twice had the occasion in the last month of so to buy a book the title of which associates to deaf which associates to disabled (of which more anon). And some months ago I signed up for a couple of other disabled flavored outfits.

So now someone sees fit to send me an email - not a pop-up advertisement - for a guide to claiming money off the government on account of my disability.

So the question is, by what route did this email get generated? Are Google playing match maker between my emails and people who want to sell me things? I was aware that they did this to the extent of targeting me for pop-ups but emails is new - and rather more intrusive, with the suggestion the the people who want to sell me things now have my email address. Maybe I ticked something or failed to tick something in my account profile which controls this sort of thing? No big deal really, the white paint might have worn off my delete button but I do still know where it is. Maybe I should put a drop of white gloss on it just to be sure - assuming that the white gloss did not dissolve the button that is. But it is the sort of thing that makes BH quite cross; cross enough to move her email account elsewhere - and I do not suppose that she is the only one.

But having let off steam, I have now got to the bottom of the offending email and find that actually it is connected with the RADAR people, one of the aforesaid disabled flavored outfits, one with which I am otherwise well pleased. The service they provide in the way of DTs is excellent. So both the fact and the uncouth loudness of the email are forgiven and Mr. Google emerges with his reputation unspotted.

Then yesterday was the day of the extraction of a loose front tooth. A banal enough incident, certainly at my age, but the point of interest is in the sensations generated.

We are told by advertisements on tube trains that problems with heart might manifest themselves more or less anywhere in the upper heart side of the body, going as far as the upper arms and the lower jaw. Which makes one think that the way that the brain maps the nerve signals coming from the heart is a bit hit and miss. That the brain's map of the heart is not much good. And then we read in war stories about pains coming from absent limbs, this being more a matter of the brain's map of the limb in question being a bit out of date. Reboot the system and all will be well.

The sensations arising from the extraction fell somewhere between these two examples. In the first instance, before the anaesthetic wore off, such sensation as there was, mild pain even, came from the upper front teeth and the front palette which had not been disturbed. As the anaesthetic wore off, the pain moved to the lower front teeth where it belonged. A rather mobile pain, seemingly located in the teeth which remained rather than the sore gums where the tooth had been removed. And then in the morning, a farewell mild pain from the uppers again.

In the meantime, other odd sensations from the bite, which had been disturbed because the tooth which had been taken out had projected by a millimeter or more above its neighbours, making it a bite tooth if that is the word for teeth making contact with their oppos when biting lightly on an empty mouth. A tooth which had taken a bit of stick over the years when biting into raw carrots and such like. But I got quite a lot of sensations from parts of the mouth where teeth had been missing for years, where there was no question of any biting going on. It was if the brain's map of the jaw had been thrown into disarray, a disarray going rather further than the bits of the bite which had been changed. All settled down now with the right sensations from the right parts of the mouth.

Sutton Library have had stacks of books for sale on both occasions in the last few months that we have paid them a visit. All spread out in a rough and ready way in a bunch of carrels. A lot of popular fiction but with a few nuggets lurking amongst them.

One such 50p nugget was 'Ambling into History' by Frank Bruni, being mainly a portrait of former President Bush the younger, a portrait mainly derived from the author's assignment to the press team covering the first Bush presidential campaign. But also a commentary on such campaigns in general, a commentary which makes one wonder again whether the way in which we organise the election of our leaders is likely to result in good leaders. Bearing in the mind that the answer no is not a solution to the problem; no is not a prescription for some better way of doing things.

Bush emerges from the portrait as a more complex phenomenon than he went in. While there were a few blots on his record and he not a clever clogs in the way of a Blair or a Clinton, the man was no slouch. For example, both he and his (popular) wife appear to be serious readers. And his presidential campaign was a very tightly organised operation, assiduously cultivating his image as a man of the people, of the people and down among the people. An act which he pulled off far better than many others. He managed to appear with representatives of pretty much every minority and special interest group - other than those obviously a bit commie. He worked the fact that he could speak a bit of Spanish. He managed to say very little about tricky issues, sticking to homespun observations about the importance of the family.

The man of the people thing was a good way of turning his risky penchant for loose, chatty and jokey talk to good advantage. He managed to make a virtue of not turning in the kind of virtuoso performances of the Blairs and Clintons. He was just himself while they were just puffed up fakes. How could you possibly know where their real men were? He managed to make a virtue of not being that keen; he carried on taking his time out come hell or high water. Not being that keen is something that I like, finding the greed and lack of scruple or constraint with which our politicians hang on to power rather distasteful.

I was amused that he spent much of the time while seeking nomination fighting off challenges from the right. Trying to be be more right and more holy than they were. But once he was seeking election he had to fight his way back to the middle ground occupied by a large proportion of the electorate. Without giving it much thought, I suppose this is much the same as what happens in our own Labour Party.

I was also amused by the fact that while he spent so much time cultivating his image as the salt of the Texan earth and loved wearing a stetson, the family palace was in Kennebunkport in Maine. Just where all the rich wasps whom he affected to despise had theirs. And, as it happens, not far from where the Canadian branch of my family took their trailer for their holidays.

Some of the wondering about the way campaigns are organised came from incidents which Bruni relates, which were pretty much trivial in themselves but which the campaign teams and the press whipped up out of all proportion. To the point where the froth became the story. Where the way that a campaign team handled this white hot froth was an important indicator of how their candidate might one day handle an issue for real. But maybe a story which was only read by campaign and media types. The rest of us, while munching on our breakfasts, just glanced idly at it before moving onto the next preacher who had had his hand up a skirt or the next dog which had bitten a man.

PS: there is now some doubt in my mind as to the meaning of the word carrel. I had thought it was the sort of specialised trolley used in libraries to hold books in transit. Usually about three feet long, three feet high, two sided with perhaps three shelves to a side. One might use one at home to hold the books one happened to be using at the time. But Wikipedia alleges that they are a sort of high sided study cubicle, designed to allow private study in an otherwise private space. The precursor of the sort of thing that you get in some open plan offices. And OED says that it is an obsolete (obsolete that is in 1893) word for a sort of unspecified fabric which gets the occasional mention in books of the 16th and 17th centuries. So I don't know any more.

Must be something about the finish of the pieces of this jigsaw, a first from Hestair Puzzles, which makes them more reflective. To look at their, colour is as strong as that on the lid of the box, but one would not think that from this old-speak Nokia facilitated illustration.

Started off badly, put off by the strong smell of tobacco coming off the newly unwrapped pieces. Visions of some scruffy & elderly gent., quite unlike myself of course, bumbling around in a mess of half finished jigsaw and fag ash. Or perhaps, given the strength of the smell, pipe droppings. Fortunately, the strong smell was much attenuated by the time I had finished. Either the smell had blown off or that part of the smelling apparatus had turned itself off.

Turned all the pieces face up, sorting edge from other onto the table. Not sticking with an earlier scheme of sorting out the sky or anything else at this stage. Got the edge all done, except for one piece. I was completely sure that the scruffy & elderly gent had lost the missing piece down some nook or cranny in his scruffy & elderly armchair. Some time later it turned up, with my only excuse being that it was a lot darker in colour than I was expecting, a darkness which clearly made it invisible.

Next stop the sky line, then most of the big tower on the left.

Then the path line. Having been successful with the path line, thought to do the weaker line of the base of the château but this was a complete failure. Much more success with the dormer windows running along the top of the right hand facade, and then working quite quickly out from there to do most of the rest of the building. Two panics on the way, both making me think that there were missing pieces. One panic resolved by BH finding the offending piece on the floor when she cleared up the following morning. The other resolved by my finding that I had made a mistake in the lower part of the left hand facade.

Gradually filled in what was left of the bottom half of the image, getting stuck in the ribbon between the path line and the bottom edge. A stuck which was resolved by finding that I had made mistakes in the bottom edge, mistakes which were only resolved by removing the offending section of the bottom edge, placing the pieces in the row above and only then refitting the bottom edge to the row above.

Sky not too bad at all, there being a fair amount of colour variation. There was also an unusually high proportion of prong-prong-hole-hole cut pieces, also making things easier.

Mission accomplished. With very little sorting during the proceedings. I sorted out the grass and flowers below the path line and at the end I sorted the sky pieces by prong configuration. For the rest, relied on Mark I Eyeball picking the required piece from out of the spread on the table.

Puzzle finished, I close with report of a minor irritation from Amazon. Some time in the past few months they have started pricing their stuff exclusive of VAT, with the VAT only being added in when one comes to the checkout. With the effect that one, despite trying to keep a grip on this fact, thinks that one is paying less for one's product than one is. One gets hooked by what looks like a good price and is too committed by the time that one realizes that it is not quite as low as it looks. A dirty trick. One might think that Amazon make quite enough money of us (out of which I understand that they manage to pay very little corporation tax to us or to anyone else) not to chisel in quite this way.

No doubt, if prompted, they will come up with some specious but unassailable accounting argument for having made the change. Maybe one could whinge louder if the standards of public life in general were higher in such matters.

Prompted by Drane, have now read my first book of the Old Testament, the book of Nahum. But before you think I have been busy, you should know that this is one of the shortest books of the bible running to just over two pages, spread over 3 in my copy of the authorised version and with just 3 chapters.

I could not make a great deal of sense of it but as luck would have it we had occasion to visit St. Mary's at Cuddington which gave me an opportunity to read the book in a more up-to-date translation. The book was set out as verse and turned out to be a paean of praise to the destruction of a bronze age city in what is now northern Iraq and which was called Ninevah. In the round, a peal of joy in the face of the destruction, rape and pillage of the enemy. Perhaps entirely appropriate to the rather smash and grab style of politics which characterized the region at the time, but perhaps rather unhealthy that many of today's Israelites should look to stories such as this for their inspiration as they re-establish themselves in their one-time homeland. I wonder if they have rebadged some part of their government 'The Department of Homeland Security' (see http://www.dhs.gov/) after the pattern of their sponsors?

The church was about 100 years old and was built in response to the growth of what is now the posh part of Worcester Park. Lots of rather grand houses, quite handy to Worcester Park station, almost as convenient as a commuter station as Epsom and rather nearer Waterloo. The church was quite handsome, particularly the chancel, at first entrance, but it grew cold on one. Not impressed by the sight of the vicar in what looked like his running gear. Not for me to say, but I don't think I would have been very impressed if I had been a prospect. Clerics should wear clerical gear and not demean themselves by trying to be one of the chaps; the same pratfall into which the likes of our late leader Mr. Blair dive with great gusto.

The second of our two visits on this heritage weekend was the nearby Shadbolt Park, once the garden of a tree enthusiast of the same name and now the property of the council - with the house having been found good used as a surgery for a GP. A small park, but a peaceful place just to sit and ponder. To let the eyes wander over the interesting trees. Sadly, not so small that the council can afford to keep it fully up to scratch. Signs of neglect around the edges.

Just finished Gissing's 'New Grub Street', which I think will be my last trip with this once popular author, at least for the time being. Might be good stuff, good portraits from his life and times - but all very sad and dreary.

This book was a tale of struggling literary people at the end of the 19th century. The people - mainly but not only men, many of them with solid classical education (scarcely relevant to whacking out pot boilers) - who tried to scratch a living in the middle ground between journalism and serious novel writing; people who were not good enough or lucky enough to be able to write annual novels which were both good and successful. For every Trollope there were pots of strugglers & stragglers - and even he, for much of his writing career, had the cushion of his Post Office salary to fall back on when the muse failed him.

As in the 'Netherworld', Gissing spends a lot of ink explaining that poverty does bad things to the morals. Much easier to be decent when one has an allowance or inheritance to live decent, without scrimping and saving every last crust.

All seemed very autobiographical. One felt that he had done his crusts in a cold garret. That he had thought, often enough, about ending it all - as one chap does in this book.

And then there was the sex problem. Gissing seems to recognise that most young people need a sex life, without quite spelling it out. But if one was middle class the only way to get one was to marry. But if one was lower middle class, say a struggling literary gent., one could not afford to marry, unless one was able to marry money. As a bachelor one could live for very little, smart enough on the outside but cold garret on the inside, but this would not do if one married a middle class lady who - even if she married for love - would expect to live with a bit more style and who would not put up with what most working class ladies had to put up with. The alternative was to marry an aspirational working class lady who would look up to one, live in a garret now in hope of something better later - with the catch being that said lady might become a bit tiresome once initial passion had run its course. Vulgar & common even. Gissing, having done this sort of thing himself, was able to wax very eloquent on the whole subject.

And even I remember that at about the time I married, aspirational working men regarded getting married as the death of their hopes. Instead of marching onwards and upwards they would be dragged down into a sea of damp nappies and screaming children. On which subject, in writing from the 19th century, one quite often comes across sentiments about so and so being lucky either because they did not have many if any children or because not many if any of them survived. Didn't get so dewy eyed about babies in those days, not if one could help it.

Along the way I was struck by the shift in the meaning of literature over the years. Originally literature was an attribute of a person. One had literature if one was acquainted with books and learning. It then came to mean the business of producing same. Literature became an occupation: I work at literature. Then it came to mean some of the product, just the books themselves, leaving the products of other sorts of literary endeavour out. And lastly, it came to its present meaning of just those books which are deemed to be worthy. Worthy enough to be published in one or other of the collections of world literature or world classics. Or worthy enough to be made into a costume drama. Or even worthy enough not to be read by anyone under the age of fifty; far too worthy (and therefore dull) for anyone younger.

PS: my own father chickened out. He might have had arty interests but his line was that, certainly for most people, art should be a hobby not a profession. Make the money to buy your books by working as a house painter (or whatever). Don't try to write the books to make the money to buy the bread. There is also the point that many a good hobby has been spoilt by making an occupation of it. Takes all the fun out of it. Unless, of course, one is a genius.

The fish man from Grimsby gave up on Epsom market, don't know why as he seemed to do a reasonable trade - although the fish man from Hastings who comes on a different day may have been eating into his turnover. Grimsby has been replaced by Folkstone, in the form of one of those market caravans, the same shape as the sort with which you might go on holiday, but with a long hatch & counter running along one side, usually quite high up to deter grabbers. Staffed up by a shifting band of ladies selling shell fish. They even do jellied eels, which are not, I imagine a particularly popular item in Epsom. Far too posh for that sort of thing.

And here is the helpful account from TFL to prove it - a helpful account which is available more or less instantly. I suppose they started out with the intention of providing users with online access to the account and so were able to do a good job. Much harder for the people who have to graft user access on after the event.

The plan was to pay a ceremonial visit to South Molton Street, by way of homage to our recent visit to South Molton itself, although I was unable, on the train into town to make up my mind as to route, beyond thinking that I would cross Vauxhall Bridge rather than heading off into south east London. As it turned out, it was a bright sunny morning on the bridge with the river looking great in the sun, so I decided on a left turn along the embankment, not that one could see all that much of the river from there.

Got to Chelsea Bridge to be greeted by a bit of old style public sculpture (see August 30th), florid green affair which might be condemned as a touch peado if one thought to erect such a thing now, but which was quite OK at the time. Which all goes to show that calling the Victorians repressed is a bit of an over simplification. Hang a right up Flood Street and dock the Bullingdon at the junction with the King's Road, having got reasonably close to the half hour limit. Don't want to get done for an unnecessary pound after all; matter of pride. Needing to take a walk for the ten minutes or so before I would be allowed to take another bike, off down Flood Street in the other direction to see if I could get into the Chelsea Physic garden on the strength of the BH National Trust membership (they will sometimes just look you up on their computer if you don't happen to have one's card about one's person). Access denied. Problem 1 was that it did not open until noon. Problem 2 was that it turned out not to be a National Trusty place at all but another independent. They are also looking for volunteers, so maybe that would be an option when other options start to run out of puff. Ought to get a good class of volunteer at such a place. Head back north to see if I could get into Christ Church. Access denied. The lady who was watering the roses explained that they had given up opening the church because they could not muster a rota of volunteers without which there was too much theft and vandalism - and this in one of the most expensive areas of London; an entirely suitable place for the pretentious Commander Bond to have his diggings. A pity, as a subsequent read of the story of the church on their web site made it sound interesting.

Cracked on until I reached an interesting looking building called Rossetti House. Looked it up this morning to find that Rossetti had indeed lived in the area, in a house with an acre of garden, but not this one. Perhaps this one was in a corner of what had been the garden. But I do now know that its flat 3 made £1.3m last time it was on the market - so what on earth would the whole acre be worth now? Must make it to the Rossetti house proper some time soon and in the meantime I can ponder on what connection the painter might have to http://www.rossetti.com/. Perhaps it is a common enough name among Italians.

Back to the bike rack, and checked out the very same bike again and headed off to Mayfair. Round Hyde Park Corner (turning left so no big deal), up Park Lane and around Marble Arch, following the full blown route for motorised vehicles rather than taking any short cuts, east down Oxford Street until I got to Bond Street. Checked the bike back in, checked that South Molton Stret was still there and then walked down to Conduit Street, by which time I was allowed to check out another and head back to Vauxhall Cross. Good to be reminded of how much money there is in the West End in the form of expensive clothes and expensive cars. Slightly put out by the amount of traffic - including what seemed like a great many very large buses - and the number of traffic lights, but still made it to Vauxhall Cross with 6 minutes to spare. Not impressed by the fairly new DT in the bus station which there were no facilities for the drying of hands.

The fourth leg of the day's biking was from Fitzrovia south, having tubed it up to the north of town in the meanwhile. Managed to get shouted out once by a passing cyclist as I poked my nose out from between two buses, not noticing him coming up fast on the outside. Cut up once by a middle aged cyclist, younger than me that is, who cut me up on the left at some traffic lights and then proceeded to obstruct me by his slow get away at the change of lights. I forebore shouting at him. Having checked in for the last time, off to the South Bank Centre to try out the DTs there, to find that the place was full of accessible noisy activity, not the quiet and tranquil place it used to be at all. Furthermore, I could not find an unoccupied DT and what I did find only offered rather poor quality paper hand towels. All in all not very impressed with the state of DTs in top notch tourist destinations at this very important time for the disabled - a time when one might expect there to be a lot of them about. To be fair, the first time that I have not been impressed.

Closed the proceedings by buying some excellent Savoy cheese - possibly raclette - from a cheese stall next to the South Bank Centre. Also a loaf described as London White, which was not much like the white bloomers that I used to buy, not least because it was cooked for rather longer than is the custom in London, but which went down pretty well with the cheese nonetheless.

Sometimes I wonder about what makes ivy go. It seems to thrive, on the ground, in the shade at the bottom of the garden. It also seems to thrive up spindly & straggly trees at the edge of woods where they can get some light - for example those along the edge of Epsom Common. I have also heard it alleged that it thrives on trees which are sick and are unable to resist its embrace. I suppose the idea, which sounds a bit far fetched when articulated, is that the healthy tree can erect chemical defences against the advances of the ivy up and into its trunk. Far fetched, but I believe that there are some quite tricky chemical interactions between the roots of trees and the fungi with which they live in symbiosis. Or around the dead bits of trees and the fungi hammering at the gates. So who knows?

Then yesterday, near the Epsom Common end of Horton Lane I came across the tree illustrated, the clearest example of an ivy stunted tree that I have ever come across - although, once again, this Nokia picture does not do it justice. The left hand side of the tree is healthy enough, but the right hand side had been left very weak by the strong growth of ivy, now severed at the base and browning nicely. I do not suppose that the tree will ever regain its balance, but what caused the ivy to rampage up the right hand side of the tree rather than the left hand side in the first place? Did there used to be another tree to the right which weakened that side of our tree, thus leaving eco-space for the ivy to rush into on its death & destruction?

Back home to be greeted, courtesy of the National Trust, with a begging brochure from the Woodland Trust (http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk). A gang which I had warm feelings about; they hug the trees which I love. But this brochure has rather put me off. If I give them money, which I was on the point of doing, I get all kinds of bits and bobs as part of my membership pack. For all the world as if I was the birthday boy visiting McDonald's (http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk) for my birthday party and was being presented with my goodies bag on exit. The brochure is now shredded, on the way to the compost heap and the donation was never made. Not the first charity which has got up my nose with the junk they send you by way of inducement or thank you: the money is supposed to be spent on the trees.

I suppose the media & advertising types who carry so much weight in today's world of charities know what they are doing: what is good for DFS or Viking River Cruises is good for the Woodland Trust. But I don't have to like it.

PS: even the shredder protested and needed to be cleaned after doing most of the deed.

Two postings in the Guardian which caught my eye. First, the possible accession of an identical twin to the presidency of the United States. My belief is that the psychology of identical twins is apt to be unusual and that this will result in quirks of behaviour which a close observer, such as a psychoanalyst, would notice. Perhaps a more significant first in this respect than mixed race, although I dare say that too leaves its mark. Second, the appointment of a Bazalgette to the chairmanship of the Arts Council. Amusing to think that the man that bought us that sewer of the mind, Big Brother, might well be a not very distant descendant of the Bazalgette, celebrated with a tablet on the embankment, who brought us the sewer of the body. That is to say, the genuis underlying London's grand if aging network of sewers. It seems that other qualifications for the post include an active interest in the doings of the Royal Opera. But will he invite the Dame Trace to join him on the Council along with the the Dame Kiri Te?

And given some of the odd beliefs ascribed to some of yesterday's reshuffle promotions, perhaps this Bazalgette believes that Shakespeare, in addition to being the name of quite a decent brewer was also the nom de plume of the Duke of Wilde.

There have also been some interesting dreams. First point of interest is that quite a large proportion of my dreams are built around my time at the Treasury and placed in a version of what was then the grand and rambling old Treasury Chambers. OK (a locution which I recently learned came to England via the United States from West Africa), so I was there for quite a long time. Rather too long, I dare say. But why should my dream world deny all the time that I spent in other departments? Or indeed my life before or after the world of work? It is not as if I was anything at all grand at the Treasury, just a back office person. Second point of interest is that my dream last night, at least the one that I remember, was something of a parable, whereas Freud claimed that all dreams can be interpreted in terms of wish fulfillment. I dream of things I want to happen, probably in rather a wrapped up way. But this dream was more by way of a warning, expressed in two or three short stories, vaguely drawn from the IT world of the Treasury (in the days before it was flogged off to be farmed by Fujitsu). The warning being not to interfere in other peoples' practices and procedures. Never mind how dumb you think these people, practices and procedures are, they probably take account, in one way or another, of whatever it is that you are trying to fuss them about. So don't.

There have been a lot of reports recently about bad behaviour and worse by staff in care homes. So lastly, given that we have had recent occasion to interact with the staff at maybe half a dozen facilities offering services of one sort or another to our senior citizens, I should like to record that the front office people - all women as it happens - with whom we dealt struck us uniformly kind, decent and efficient. One would have no qualms about entrusting one's senior to any of them; their mercies really would be tender.