pumpkinstrokemarrow

After just over six years of blogging I have decided that the left hand tail has got too long. And I am too scared to try to connect the existing blog to a new and improved template, so operations have now been moved to http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/. PSMV2 being a short version of pumpkin stroke marrow volume 2. The volume was required as PSM2 was taken.

Have now finished the book, having acquired and started it on our summer holiday (see August 26th). It was an interesting read even though the reason why I wanted to read it in the first place still eludes me. But I was reminded of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and was not surprised to read in Wikipedia that the book had originally been intended for adults and triggered a wave of interest in horse welfare.

Bearing reins were a particular target, being straps commonly used at the time of writing to force the head of a fashionable shaft horse up, a practice which is uncomfortable for the horse and can lead to long term health problems.

The large numbers of brutal horse men and boys was another, with alcoholic drink being cited as a strong contributing cause. I suppose at a time when horses were all over the place and a lot of life was pretty brutal anyway, it was inevitable that there would be a lot of brutal treatment of horses. Unlike cows - of which there were presumably comparable numbers but, I would imagine, were the subject of far less wanton cruelty - they lived with us and worked for us - and there were both good and bad relationships with horses. Furthermore, provision for horses in old age not too clever and I suspect that the phrase 'going to the dogs' originally meant being sent for dog food when you were too old to work any more.

Broken knees get a fair amount of air time, which prompted me to find and peruse an article on horse damage by someone called 'Claims Five' in the horsey part of the online Guardian, an article which reminded me that mending damaged horses was a lot harder than you might think, much harder than mending apparently comparable damage in humans. There are also some interesting guidelines about horse euthanasia lifted from http://www.aaep.org/euthanasia_guidelines.htm. No doubt we will get there on our own account one day.

The story is written in the first person by the horse in question, Black Beauty. Now while I doubt whether horses are capable of thought - the story does not require speech or great intellectual gifts - I do not doubt that they are conscious. They know about pain and pleasure, they have memory and they have fear and anticipation. So in owning a horse you are taking on a big responsibility - that is if you don't cave in and decide that one large animal owning another large animal  is not really on. This is what, I think, has most struck me. Not yet a veggie., but there are maybe glimmers of the veggie. light!

BH tells me that the book was banned in South Africa at one time because it was thought that the title might corrupt. I should have thought that the content would have been far more corrupting - the read across from horses to slaves - albeit in its modified aparthied version - being all too obvious.

A not very good snap of a singular beech tree at Claremont, from last week. Singular not because of its girth which was substantial but not unusual, but for the length - maybe 10m - of straight clean trunk, which is unusual in beech in my experience.

Visit enhanced by quite a decent sausage roll. The wrapping was the usual rather fatty puff pastry favored by our sausage roll makers, but the inside was unusually tasty sausage meat, served warm which is how I like sausage rolls best. Neither hot nor cold. Plus the minced meat was not cut with all kinds of exotic fruits, vegetables and spices. Whoever, for example, thought of the strange idea of putting leeks in sausages?

Moving on to the tea party, I want to record my contribution to not paying tax for the UK Chapter of this illustrious organisation.

We deploy what is known in the taxing trade as the surviving partner concession. So rich person (1) marries a younger person (2) sufficiently before death. All assets then transfer without tax to person (2) on the death of person (1). Person (2) then marries a younger person (3) sufficiently before death. All assets then transfer without tax to person (3) on the death of person (2). I see no reason why this process should not continue ad infinitum or at least until the Ides of March. It might come to an untimely end if the last person fails to remarry before expiring him or her self, but taking care with medical matters and employing the services of a specialised matrimonial agency should mitigate this risk.

If we all do it, the inheritance tax take would fall to pretty much zero, which is where, of course, it ought to be.

And gays are OK because the concession has recently been tweaked to include their marriages.

One of the freebies picked up at the Olympia the other day was a nicely produced booklet for children called 'À la découverte de l'Europe', also, I now find, available in a very whizzy online format. Must have cost a bit to put together.

An engaging and jolly introduction to the world of Europe. I learn, for example, that the Germanic peoples were the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths and Vikings and that the Germanic languages are Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish. Neither of them groupings which I would have come up with unaided. More interesting, the booklet suggested much similarity between the United States of Europe and the United States of America. Europe has 25 or so states, half that of the US, but very much the same order of magnitude. As are the populations, products and such like. But with a big gap between the small number of states with more than 35 million people and the rather larger number with less than 15 million - with nothing much in between. Including both Cyprus and Malta - the former surprising me, being in two rather unsettled halves, with one half more or less belonging to a non-member, Turkey. And the structural arrangements looked to be very much modeled on those of the (US) constitution, with executive (the Commission), legislature (the Parliament (roughly congress) and the Council (roughly senate)) and justice (the Court); perhaps appropriate as the constitution was very much the product of the European enlightenment. Not to mention the comfort blanket of the euro over a good part of the whole. Will it one day come to rival the dollar? No doubt much political science ink has already been spent on compare and contrast, so no need for me to add any more to it.

The other diversion was prompted by the childhood adventures of Oliver Sacks in the world of photography, adventures which have now sparked my own, albeit transient, interest. What exactly was a contact print? I asked Mr. Google and found out roughly what a contact print was, but could not find any nicely potted essay about photography, in general. So off to the library where in short order, in far less time than that spent online, I found and took out 'The History of Photography', a fat older book from OUP from 1955, formerly of Sunbury and now of Epsom Library. But an excellent introduction to the whole business. The glory days of chemistry, research (not the institutional, team work stuff you have to do now. Private enterprise by yeomen, gentlemen and a few ladies), patents and fortunes made of the second half of the nineteenth century. The searches for just the right chemicals to do the job, searches sounding not so unlike those we do these days for drugs. Fascinating stuff - but in large part made obsolete by the replacement of analog film processes by digital ones. A lesson, inter alia, on how easy it is to get diverted away from the business in hand, be that painting the kitchen or whatever!

Off to London today to see what was cooking at http://www.languageshowconnect.co.uk/ at Olympia, a place I have not visited for a very long time.

On the first leg from Vauxhall Cross to Abingdon Villas (in Kensington), I carelessly broke the 30 minute Bullingdon barrier, costing me an additional £1, so maybe I had better start wearing a wrist watch again so that I can keep a better eye on the time. I then thought to visit St. Mary Abbots church (who is St. Mary Abbot?) but was caught out by getting there a few minutes before they started a Choral Matins, something I do not think one comes across very often. I find from their site (http://smanews.weebly.com/) that they also offer services using the Common Prayer Book, Sung Eucharist and Taizé Prayer, which last does not look very Common Prayer Book at all. But I do not suppose that any of it is to be found anywhere near Epsom and it would probably have been interesting inside, so I must go back on a week day and hope that the place is open. Second leg back towards Olympia no problem.

Onto to the show where there was plenty to interest, despite the rather loud background music. Two stalls offering tuition in British Sign Language, one offering Esperanto and lots offering Spanish. One could, for example, learn Spanish in the shadow of the Incas in Guatemala. I might even take up the offer of access to an online BSL learning package at a modest £14.99 a year (special expo price offer from http://www.signworldlearn.com/). One stall offering jobs for those who could speak appropriate Asian languages in the security service. A lot of youngish people milling about, with a sprinkling of slightly eccentric looking older bodies. I guess I fell into the latter category.

Onto Kensington High Street where I took my first fall, finally getting around to getting a bicycle helmet, in part because most of the people you see cycling around London have them now. Sold a rather more expensive hat than I was expecting at CycleSurgery, a Giro Aeon at near £XXX, but at least it was a good fit. I dare say there was a premium for the location and the helpful staff - but help which one would not have got buying the thing online.

The second fall took place on arrival back at Vauxhall Cross where I was inside the Bullingdon barrier by 1 minute but needed lunch, and for the first time for a long time went into a Prêt, a chain which has always irritated me, perhaps because it is successful and run by a couple of old Harrovians (or some such), but also because of their claims for their sandwiches, which I find tiresome. As I do the inverted snobbery of leaving the accent out of the word 'Prêt'. However, needs must, so today I wound up with a large cup of orange lentil with coconut curry soup with two micro baguettes. The curry was not particularly hot by curry standards, although I would have preferred less hot, but was quite a decent soup nonetheless and the rolls were quite decent rolls, despite their silly packaging. As, I might add, were the rolls in the sandwich bars we used to have in the seventies before they got pushed out of business by the like of Prêt.

And then home to the first flexing of my prize Thornton slide rule for some years. It just happened that when there was a need, it was nearer to hand than the calculator. And quicker for the sort of sum in question.

Quite by chance, I find that two important features of my civil service life are no more.

First, bullingdoning across Vauxhall Bridge I noticed that Riverwalk House is being demolished. A small, rather dreary looking 12 story tower block, probably from the 70's. Rather dreary inside too, and the whole only relieved by quite a decent Henry Moore in the garden. The home for a while of the late Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (an outfit with a rather grander title and rather grander aspirations than their product justified, at least by the time that I got there) and my home for a few months. I was cycling from Liverpool Street at the time so it was handy that there was a store room in the basement which doubled as a bicycle shed.

Second, cruising around the Internet, I noticed that Filenet had been gobbled up by IBM. Filenet had grown from nothing to be quite a big company by the end of the millennium on the back of selling large optical discs and associated imaging and work flow systems to insurance companies and the like for hard core image processing, and I got to know them on the back of their document management product, knowledge which earned me one or two trips across the pond and one or two more to the back rooms of the National Archives. Not to mention one to the storage company somewhere in East London which took on some of our paper records, where we learned to horror of some senior staff that our vital records were apt to be stacked up next to pallets of baked beans. Who know what else beside. Not clear from the Wikipedia entry whether Filenet's fortunes were declining as their specialised offerings became less specialised, perhaps with some of them being given away with Windows, whether the founder-owners wanted to cash in and go surfing (the company was Californian) or whether the company was simply an attractive plum to pick to a cash rich IBM.

PS: idly wondered about how protected the images were on yesterday's pictures library. Answer: fairly well, with no saving allowed at all, unlike some picture palaces which let you save a thumbnail. On the other hand, you can save a screen scrape. Presumably with some loss of resolution and not good enough to hang on the wall but possibly good enough to include in a word document. The stolen image looked OK on my screen but did not come out very well on my cheap skate printer - which does well enough with pictures from some more legitimate source.

After something of an interval, back with this river scene from Falcon, made in Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Photograph from Vic Guy - an outfit which for once for an outfit on a jigsaw box, I can actually find on the internet. See http://www.vkguy.co.uk.

Quite a dear outfit, with the price for a slight variation on this very scene being around £40 for a 24 by 18 inch print. Easy enough to find by using key words in their advanced search facility. Some lucky soul must have spent many hours keywords this extensive image library. It is suggested that for commercial applications, such as jigsaws, I need to get in touch for a custom price.

I then see that the picture is of Worcester cathedral, a place which I have never visited and which I had not realized looked more like a large parish church than the home of a bishop, despite being a great favorite with Good King Joihn. But armed with this information I find that I can buy this actual scene for the same price as the variation. Catalog number 017758-19. Just to be sure that all is well I put the catalog number to Mr. Google who comes straight back with Worcester Cathedral from one V. K. Guy. Clever stuff!

But oddly, he can only offer 4 images from Surrey, two of which are a grotto at Virginia Water. But I suppose for an outfit based up in the lakes of the far north one should not really expect more.

A pleasing, gentle puzzle; good for winding down, Doing a few pieces here and there. Very regular with four pieces meeting at nearly all, if not all, interior vertices. Only a sprinkling of exotically shaped pieces. With the expanse of water made easy by strong colour and pattern coding. No problem knowing which way round a piece should be. And with the sky made easy by not being very big and being broken up with a lot of well defined cloud.

Started with the edge, which I completed, albeit rightly nervous about errors in the top edge. Then the skyline, then the boat line. Not able to complete this last and had to turn up into the cathedral to anchor it, not reaching the right hand edge until some time later.

Buildings easy. Then start pushing out from the boat line.

Steps easy. Then thought to do the flower-water line but ended up just doing the flowers. The line was not well enough defined to be helpful. Now left with two islands of water, two islands of trees and two islands of sky, knocking them off in that order. Slowed down towards the end by the need to fix some errors in the top edge.

Interesting how the water turned out in this photograph; the strong texture struck me as being more like that of a painting. Maybe someone has written about how such images get generated from mobile surfaces. Is it some arcane mathematical consequence of capturing a fixed planar image of something exhibiting both reflective and prismatic features moving around in three dimensions?

Today was to have been the first visit to the St Luke's autumn season of lunch time concerts, but it was cancelled at such short notice that I got to do the margins anyway.

Got to Waterloo while still puzzling how they were going to take down the tower crane strapped to the side of the tall tower going up on the upstream side of St George's at Vauxhall (http://www.stgeorgewharf.net/). Far too tall for a mobile crane to reach it - at least so I would have thought - so all I could think of was that the upper sections folded down, from which position they could be lowered down the side of what was left of the crane. If each section of the tower was secured to the one below by four suitably complicated bolts, one at each corner, undoing the two inboard ones ought to make this possible. Clearly taking down would be a good subject for a televised web-cam. There must be lots of frustrated senior builders like me out there to watch it.

Bullingdoned from Waterloo to St Luke's. First stand on arrival was full, second stand also full. But I learned how to ask it where a not-full one was and got an extra 15 minutes for my trouble. The third stand was indeed not-full and turned out to be conveniently near Whitecross Street where I was able to buy my usual tea and bacon sandwich. I was entertained while I ate it by a rather broken down gent. who explained to me that he was 72, a veteran of both Royal and Merchant Navies and that he had visited 46 countries in his time at sea. He was born in Portsmouth which gave me the entrée with my naval connections there and I was pleased that the young, busy and foreign waitress was able to give him time as he flustered about.

For once the bacon sandwich was supplemented by something from the lunchtime food market in Whitecross Street, in the form of a considerable wedge of bread pudding for £2.50. I was attracted to it in the first place because it was whiteish rather the the brownish one gets from regular bakers, but it turned out to be rather damp, rather free of fruit and rather oddly flavoured. Some spice which I did not recognise but did not much care for. But I got it down OK.

After the concert that wasn't, taxied back to St. Batholomew the Great with a pleasant and talkative young taxi driver who told us all about her two daughters, her ambitions to get them into a forthcoming academy (a spin off from the Olympics it seems) and the lack of decent night life in Stratford. Which last is odd given my understanding that the place is crawling with youth from all over the globe. She wasn't too sure where the church was but between us we got ourselves to the entrance arch in West Smithfield. Church just as impressive as last time (May 12th) with a novelty in the form of a memorial tablet on the wall, the head in which was supposed to weep, although the trusty told us that weeping was now off as the radiator which had been placed underneath the tablet had dried up the tear ducts. I wondered whether, if it did weep, that would count as a miracle, given that whoever erected the tablet (ever so many years ago) had had the intention and expectation of weeping inscribed on the base. I thought that maybe miracles had to be surprises; disqualified if you planned for one.

On exit we were treated to the sight of a paramedic on a bicycle heading into the nearby Barts.. A bicycle with very large baskets and with both it and its rider decked out in full green, yellow and blue glory. One comes across policemen on bicycles quite often, so all I need now to complete the picture is a fire fighter's bicycle, perhaps with a little trailer as their stuff is both bulky and heavy.

Bullingdoned back to Waterloo where I had another opportunity to try my hand at the W. H. Smith express (DIY) checkout with a copy of the Economist, with which I have been getting on rather well. Maybe it will topple the TLS off my top spot. And my first opportunity to walk the length of the fine new mezzanine level, which I rather liked, even if the shops selling things like shirts masquerading as luxury shirts were not all to my taste. There were also a couple of decent looking snackeries.

Home to Epsom, with the train thoughtfully stopping just outside the station so that we could admire the antics of the large dump truck as it failed to dump its load of rubble into the large skip, the edge of the skip being slightly too high for comfort. And the lumps of rubble were a bit too big to be wanting to poke them into life with a shovel from the edge of the skip; far too much chance of going down with them.

On Monday to Wisley, which as far as I can make out is our first visit since last spring, when we visited on 9th February and 10th March. I think I must have got in a muddle because is has taken a lot of faffing around with blog search, google search and wimdows explorer search to establish this elementary fact and I can only plead in mitigation that one of the relevant entries turned up by google was confusingly assigned to both February and March. Clearly getting too old for this sort of foot soldiering.

Started off with elevenses, which in my case included a pastry which was warm and fresh but which was mainly a vehicle for a large amount of fat and sugar. I prefer a bit more carb..

First proper stop was lots of autumn dwarf cyclamen. Second stop was lots of autumn crocuses, which BH was quite sure were not crocuses at all. Which google confirms, assigning them to a different genus, the colchinums. A different genus despite looking just like large crocuses of the proper sort and growing from bulbs just like crocuses of the proper sort. However, I was quite unable to get the two sorts of crocus on the same taxonomical tree so some of the mystery remains.

Then off to the north arboretum where we were once again dazzled by the huge variety of pine trees. All sorts of shapes and sizes. Then to the hot house for the huge variety of hot plants there, being particularly keen on the hot dry ones. Apart from being hot, I was rather reminded of being in an art gallery. Lots of earnest people peering at works of art in an unnatural environment, in this case works by nature rather than by an artist. Nature has been very generous in its provision of plants, our seeming to have a lot more sorts of large plant than we have sorts of large animal - for which there is no doubt some simple eco-reason.

Also struck by the large numbers of hot plants from either South Africa or Mexico, although by way of variety our mother in law's tongue (see October 8th) seems to be of Nigerian origin.

Then to lunch, on this occasion deciding not to use the canteen and gave the restaurant a go instead. Discrete and efficient service. Fairly short menu - probably sensible for this sort of place. I liked my smoked halibut starter, despite not usually being that keen on this particular fish, despite its habit of growing to prodigious size. Chicken satisfactory but I could find no trace of the advertised puy lentils among the bits and bobs surrounding the chicken. Vegetable supply a bit short altogether. Golden fruit sponge marred by the inclusion of ginger in the fruit, a root of which I am not hugely fond. There was also far too much custard but that was OK as BH was not having pudding but was content to hoover up most of my custard, being rather fonder of the stuff in soup format than I am. Water served cold but otherwise OK. Overall, low on volume and high on calories, but an entirely decent lunch for the occasion. Light enough to enjoy as part of a visit, rather than so heavy as to terminate the visit. We also learned that all the catering at Wisley - there are maybe half a dozen fooderies there - are run by a catering contractor. Also probably sensible.

Then down to the south field through a splendid hill side garden full of all kinds of strange and unusual hydrangeas to find what looked very like the Henry Moore statue which used to live near the Serpentine, although the finish appeared to be some thick white paint rather than the limestone I remember. A little googling today establishes that there are a number of these Moore arches about and that this one is made of white fibre glass, and is indeed different from the one that I remember. While the ladybirds seemed keen on the fibre glass, large numbers of them being parked on it, I now know that while I prefer travertine to fibre glass for these purposes (even if it does not wear very well. See 21st July), Moore remains far and away my favourite sculptor for outdoor sculpture.

Along the way we came across a sign saying that something was sponsored by the Witan Investment Trust, an outfit which their web site says offers private investors a portfolio of global equities managed by a selection of hand-picked managers chosen because of their success at delivering long-term growth. Their web site is also one of the many which throws Chrome into a sulk these days. Must talk to the people at BT support about this: last time they moved me from some beta version of Chrome to a real one. Hopefully they have a few more tricks up their sleeve as Chrome, which I like, is becoming tiresome. Presumably the RHS is out there touting for corporate sponsors, along with lots of other attractions in the land.

We also came across a strong and sickly smell, which one might have thought came from a restaurant kitchen ventilation system, maybe the staff restaurant given the position. But no, it turned out to be the distinctive smell of what was described as the largest deciduous tree to be found in Asia.

All in all, a tribute to the wealth of attractions in and around Epsom that we visit this one so rarely.

Perhaps I was a little economical with the truth in my comments about boxed sets on the 14th as we do in fact own one of the modern sort, to wit 'Games of Thrones' series 1, purchased for around £25 from Amazon (before VAT) or around £3 an hour - which I guess is quite a lot by cable TV standards although quite a little by DVD standards. There are booklets, one thoughtfully setting out the main characters in a family tree. There is also an aboriginal language, either real or invented, to add a bit of colour to the savages.

The purchase was intended to fill the gap in the ITV3 schedules left by the thinning out of the older detective drama, not being that keen on the younger detective drama, which we find a bit brash and loud. Also a tendency to do a Guardian on us when all we are looking for is some anodyne entertainment - ironically enough a tendency which I used to sniff at in the in-laws who used to go in for Morecombe & Wise for much the same reasons. We got our money's worth although we have about run out of puff about half way through the second time around.

Opening sequences very clever with someone having had a lot of fun with the computer graphics. But they do wear a bit thin after a while. Perhaps they ought to be tapered, starting at say 5 minutes and working down to 1 by the middle of the series. I grant that you do need something to set the mood and scene, but maybe not the full 5 minutes every time.

Staging good, slightly marred by a tendency to chuck in gobbets of sex (both regular and gay), bad language and violence where they are not really needed. Except, to our minds, to earn the 18 certificate needed to generate sales in the core target audience of young adults.

Story good, drawing lines from the geography and political affairs of both old England and further afield, and bowls long nicely, slightly marred by a tendency to chuck gobbets of political and social science into the most unlikely mouths. Chucking which played havoc with the characterisation. Gobbets which rather reminded me of Star Trek, which also used to go in for this sort of thing, at least in the series which was around when I was at London's lead establishment for the study of such matters, that is to say the London School of Economics. Regular weekend afternoon fare while one waited for the pubs to open.

Shaun of the Bean was an honourable exception to all this gobbeting, and as well as being honourable, he was also brave, loyal, decent, dumb and kind to dumb animals. The catches being that all these admirable qualities cloaked a past reeking of butchery in the course of stupid feudal feuds and that his best mate was a drunken, whoring oaf who enjoyed - and still enjoys, despite his advancing years - all this butchery for its own sake.

Is it more than a coincidence that in a not very large cast we have two pairs of what are effectively rather nasty single mothers (who also happen to be queens) with really nasty sons? Or that the most thoughtful member of the cast should be a dwarf? Does the Guardian have a seat on the advisory board?

Epsom market did not have anything very enticing in the way of apples on Saturday so on Monday I bought a pack of Jonagored apples from Belgium via our trusty Costcutter. Looked fine, flesh texture fine, flesh taste OK but skins bad. Rather tough and sour, at least to my palette. A serious failing as I prefer to eat my eating apples with their skins on. The balance is being cooked as I speak, with my consolation being that eating apples generally cook much better than cooking apples. From all of which I deduce that while Belgians might make the best chocolates and the best detectives in the world, they do not make the best apples. Nor, I note in passing, do the French. The best apples that I know come from England.

The fact that Golden Delicious was one of the ancestors of this apple may be the root of the difficulty. Another apple which I do not care for, mainly because of its soggy flavour but also because of the texture of its skin.

I collect another fact from a quite different sphere of endeavour from the TLS of 21st September. It seems that some academic has ruled that a civil war is 'a sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battlefield deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of inflicting upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities the insurgent sustain'. As a former statistician I should applaud the care with which this definition has been constructed, with this definer clearly having had a very clear idea about which conflicts he wanted in and which conflicts he wanted out. But if his idea is as clear as all that, what value is added by capturing that idea in a definition? Does the definition have predictive value? Does it add value? Does being so nice about scope advance the study in question? Are there so many civil wars knocking around that this sort of statistical nicety is helpful? As it would if, for example, we were trying to tie down the meaning of the word 'household' for the purposes of a census of population. There are far too many households to enumerate so we really do need to try to have some shared understand of what we mean by the word.

I think my answers to these questions are none, no, no, no and no.

Odd how I know, but I had two dreams last night, of which I can only remember an outline of the second. Slightly puzzled that I am so sure that there was a first, a first of which I can remember nothing. Remembering how fast dreams fade away if one does not work them over as one wakes, perhaps I only just caught the fading trace of this one, the empty shell, the box that it came in, as it were.

The second dream was slightly unusual in that it included a named person, a person who has never, to my knowledge, featured in my dreams before. Possibly triggered by recently popping up in real life. The dream pursued by my growing ambitions of being a busy. Moving beyond picking litter and complaining to the council about their infernal misdeeds to the affairs of the realm. In this case a flagrant abuse of our benefit system by a gentleman from Ghana, who, it seems, was able to claim enough benefit to run palm wine parties for his buddies on two nights in succession, claims which it seems, were entirely legal and above board. I decided to do something. To devote my quality time to scouring the laws of the land to find something that would enable me to win my spurs as a busy by putting an end to the palm wine parties. But then I found out that the Ghanaian in question had served in our own British Army, with distinction, in the second world war and all of a sudden the desire to bring him to book faded away and I woke up.

My working over of my dreams was overlaid by a sudden awareness of a new example of the Stonehenge problem. The problem, which as my heritage minded readers will recall, involves deciding exactly which version of Stonehenge to replicate when building a replica in some heritage centre near the original. A replica which visitors are actually allowed to visit and maybe even touch. The problem being that Stonehenge, like any large or complicated artefact, is a process in time rather than an object fixed and perfect in some particular point in time.

The new example is really a problem for the deity. When he performs the miracle of the resurrection of the body, how is he going to decide what version of each body to use? Is the soul invited to nominate a date in life? Is the soul allowed to chose what clothes to be resurrected in? On style of haircut and length of toe nails? Before or after four teeth were removed to make a bit more space for those which remained?

Perhaps the deity just takes the DNA (conveniently available in a little capsule at the back of the soul) and grows an ideal version of the body from that, unencumbered by considerations of how the body had actually turned out. All one would need would be a suitable growing medium, something to provide for the various needs of body and soul of the growing replica. One would want, after all, for all the replicas to be decently educated and properly brought up. Getting more tricky, which archangel would be responsible for the tricky business of injecting the original soul into the completed replica?

I close with a reminder from Amazon (in my morning email) of the way that 'boxed set' has reentered the realm of consumer snobbery. I remember the first time around (for me anyway), when a boxed set almost invariably meant a slim but substantial box containing a number of classical LPs. Usually, but not always, accompanied by a booklet telling one all about it, nicely got up and and printed in a size to match that of the box, not at all some cheap little leaflet sculling around loose, the sort of thing that is apt to fall out of a Saturday newspaper. I still own quite a few of them. Then last week I learned from advertising hoardings on the way to Epsom station that boxed set is all about selling off back numbers of television programmes, served up in a much smaller but rather fatter box, complete with the booklet, naturally. Or in the better class of boxed set, booklets. Not to mention the interviews with the stars and all the rest of that good stuff.

Interesting to see how Amazon prices the boxes, with quite a lot under £10, although sadly none of our ITV3 staples. I did pause on the 'Chronicles of Narnia' - we used to quite like the adaptions of childrens' stories which used to appear late on winter Sunday afternoons - but did not get as far as the checkout. Perhaps there is material here for a PhD in media studies at our University of Creation (http://ucreative.ac.uk/).

Moving on from the litter bin we got to what had been the site of the water tower last reported on on June 5th.

Our responses illustrated the BH tendency to put a more positive spin on things than I. So arriving at the site we found that all the rubbish and the superfluous  fences had been removed and the memorial pillar, illustrated in the previous posting, had been completed by the addition of a tasteful rectangular metallic plaque saying something of the history of the place sitting on top of a trapezoidal slice of tropical rain forest sitting on top of the square pillar itself. The pillar was now sitting in the middle of a disc of grass, one side of which can be seen in this illustration. The right hand part of the illustration gives some idea of the state of most of the rest of the site. A few trees had been planted, which, despite all the recent rain, did not look very happy at all. Maybe they will survive if they are not co-opted into the games of the children of the affordables, but I would not place money on it.

So my first thought was that whoever was responsible for the garden had run out of money and simply shouldered shovel and left. They had got it wrong again.

While the BH first thought, much more positive, was that what I took for a bit of derelict flower bed was actually a sanctuary for wild and meadow flowers. Which on closer inspection it probably was: far more flowers about than were likely to have arrived by natural causes. It might well all look rather good by next summer.

Which is interesting. Because this is a sort of gardening of which I entirely approve, even practicing it myself in a small way, on, for example, the new daffodil bed. But it never occurred to me that they - whoever they might be - would ever do such a thing. Much quicker to find fault than to think about what they might be up to.

Took a stroll this afternoon through the housing estate which has been made out of what was the Horton Hospital, a place whose interesting history is reported at http://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/horton.html.

Sight of this litter bin which was both very full and battered beyond its years prompted me to wonder about the maintenance arrangements for the large amount of green space which the planners (or somebody) insisted was left around the houses. The sort of thing which they seem to be much better at in the US - at least those parts of the US which I have visited.

And only moments previously we had been gazing at some low wooden rails bordering grass verges, made up from treated four by four softwood, which looked as if it would start to fall down in not very many years time. Would it just be allowed to rot away or was somebody going to do something about it? What prompted the architects to erect fencing with such a short life? Is it all a plot to allow the green space to degrade to the point where it becomes brown space and the council is allowed flog it off to another lot of developers?

I was interested in the front page picture on today's DT, there because the lady television presenter - of whom I had not previously heard - thought that paternity leave was a waste of time. Interested that is in why the DT thought that either the picture or the opinion that came with it were the sort of stuff from which front pages were wrought.

To the right of this picture the DT started the day's coverage of the wretched Saville business, which got me wondering about the course that the various enquiries might take. Will all kinds of women, once disturbed young women in care, be bribed by the promise of compensation to come forward with all kinds of allegations which it will be impossible to verify? I had always assumed that the industry as a whole was awash with rather tacky - if not illegal - behaviour, so will there now be allegations about lots of other personalities? What about all the groupies milling around, a proportion of which are going to be both forward and under-age? But I am sorry that our very own Beeb appears to have been so slack about it all: it is not as if they are some grubby production company operating on sofas in some back offices in Soho.

But inside I was cheered up by a sensible article about the impending badger wars (see September 21st). DT right on message on this one. But disturbed to read that that other national treasure, the RSPCA, has been the victim of animal righty entryism, which, as some of my older readers might remember was the favoured tactic of the reds in the early seventies. Cuddly old ladies and their bequests for cats and dogs pushed aside by badger hugging long hairs.

DT dealt with, I started to turn the pages of the catalog for the 39th Camra Beer Festival at Cambridge, Camra being a gang for which I used to have some time as the rescuers of warm flat beer from the dearth of the early seventies, at which time about the only brewer which could be relied on to sell the stuff was Charringtons with their entirely decent IPA. Not sure if the stuff is still for sale; their sober and sensible pubs seem to have been long gone.

However, I got less keen on them after the battle was won, the great majority of pubs started to carry warm beer again and Camra moved onto to fringe beer. A battle which remains won because, while I imagine that the volume of warm beer sold is falling and younger people are mostly on the lager, most pubs still carry the stuff and it is usually entirely drinkable. With the exception of Wetherspoons which used to sell regular warm beer but now seems mainly to sell the rather fringe beers which featured at this Beer Festival. Beers which make me think that they come from a very small brewery for the good reason that the demand for the stuff is very small. Plus I find the penchant of small breweries for names like 'A Limp Pig Gold' and 'Muck Cart Mild' rather tiresome, much preferring more neutral names like 'London Pride' and 'IPA' - empty vessels as the advertising folk would say. Names without baggage.

As far as I could see, this Beer Festival attracted few main line brewers. No Greene King, no Fullers, although we did get Harvey's and Otter, both of whom I regard as respectable, if not main line; branch line rather. But I expect it did attract plenty of people who can get just as silly about their beer ('beautiful citrus and pine notes. Smooth and velvety, a medium ...') as some wine people can get about their wine - while the point of the stuff is to drink it, not do a Guardian on it! And when you had had enough of minority taste beer, you could also have tried ranges of cider, perry, mead and cheese. But there was a disconnect in that I imagine that very few of the entirely decent pubs (from what I remember of them) advertising in the catalog sold any of the stuff on offer at the festival. Warm beer maybe, but fringe beer probably not and mead certainly not.

There was also some sob stuff in the margins of the catalog about the demise of the Great British Pub and how the government ought to do something about it. Stuff which annoys in just the same way as heritage folk who do not seem to recognize that times change and that people who own old buildings have to make a living out of them. Which they can't do selling a couple of pounds of home made toffees every week while all the real shopping is done at the proper shop down the road, if not at Amazon. So Camra will not be joining that select band of good causes to which I direct my odd coppers.

The last Camra Beer Festival that I went was a huge affair in Alexandra Palace before it burnt down. In those days you still got proper brewers at such events and I am fairly sure, for example, that Arkell were there. But even then, after trying two or three bitters, I settled down with a beer I liked. Not really into this changing flavour every half; it puts one off one's stroke. Similar to the problem I have in changing gear if I try, for example, to watch Miss Marple immediately after watching Poirot. Or even watching a telly version of Hedda Gabler too soon after watching a stage version.

This morning saw the end of the record breaking chicken we bought at Manor Green Road against last weekend, a chicken weighing in at the impressive 6lbs 10oz and said to be outdoor reared - in which connection one needs to be mindful of the fact that some chickens prefer to be in the shed than out in the wild woods. Something in their genes telling them that wild woods are apt to host wild animals. There was the impressive example somewhere along the A303, recorded May 3rd 2010.

Roast and hot provided the first two meals. Served with the first brussels sprouts of the season, possibly the first since the bumper purchase last Christmas, recorded December 24th 2011. Satisfactory.

Roast and cold - with hot vegetables - provided the next two. Oddly, even better than hot,something I have noticed before with pork but not with chicken, often finding cold chicken rather dry and clogging (in the throat).

Stewed up, with the judicious addition of orange lentils and Portuguese bacon, amongst other things, for the next two, Served with boiled white rice and more brussels sprouts.

Soup, made by boiling up the carcase with various fresh, dried and pre-owned vegetables, for the next one.

Balance of the stew, with Costcutter noodles, for the penultimate and antepenultimate.

Balance of the soup, augmented with some water in which some posh potatoes had been boiled, for breakfast for one this morning. The end.

So 10 meals from this chicken, around £1 per meal; rather dearer than Sainsbury's but then he does not sell m many chickens of this size. And the bigger the better seems to be good for chickens: flavour coming with age and size.

While yesterday was another day for 'Hedda Gabler', viewing the 1981 YTV production featuring Diana Rigg from the Avengers and Mrs Hudson from Sherlock Holmes: rather to my surprise this seemed to be the only version of this popular play that Amazon sold, apart from versions in strange US flavoured formats which I don't think our DVD is flashy enough to play.

But it was very good with a strong cast, although I had actually only heard of Diana Rigg and Mrs Hudson. The former did well as the coldly beautiful Hedda and the latter did well as the kindly family retainer, also known as the maid.

A minus point was it took a few minutes to adjust from the Old Vic cast to this one. Another minus point was that I found the set a bit too sumptuous. Would a brand new PhD with prospects spend quite so much, even if besotted with his new wife? A plus point was sticking to the script, not so much of the paddy freelancing in this version. Another plus point was the way that Diana Rigg got across that while Hedda was a rather dangerous & needy person, she also had a point when she explained that the reformed alcoholic needed to go to alcoholic parties in order to prove to himself and others that he was free of the addiction. The problem was her doubtful motives and her timing.

All in all, after making due allowance for it being on the small screen rather than under the arch, every bit as good as the Old Vic production.

There is quite a decent pub of this name in Churton Street in Pimlico, a pub which used to be managed by a sometime manager of TB. But this is not the subject of today's homily, rather the Constitution of the United Stated of America.

I have been moved in this matter by a summer edition of the NYRB (August16), an edition with a good proportion of good stuff amongst its 88 pages. As is usual with magazines of this sort, the term book review is a bit of a flag of convenience under which your reviewer can bang on about whatever takes his fancy, but the NYRB is none the worse for that. And a fair proportion of the matter does not even bother with the pretense, like the article by His Eminence Dworkin on constitutional aspects of providing what the rest of the civilized world would regard as a very basic sort of national health service.

Dworkin, after pointing out the quaintness of the leading power of the late 20th century being governed by a document written in the late 18th century, explains that the constitution lists those powers which are given to Congress, powers which were listed at a time when the armed forces and the taxes to pay then with were the main businesses of states. Anything not so listed is a matter for individual states to deal - or not to deal - with as they see fit. Obama's problem being that national health services were not around at the end of the 18th century and that the founding fathers would probably not, in any case, have regarded health as a proper matter for Congress. So there has been a big debate in the Supreme Court, a court in which, despite all the legal flummery, most of the votes are cast on party lines, about whether it is constitutional to hang health care under the clause of the constitution which empowers Congress to regulate commerce between states, just sixteen words in the original, including the words which include regulation of foreigners and natives, thus: 'To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes'. Strange that such a matter should be debated with such heat & earnestness on such grounds. But perhaps not quite as strange as it sounds: opinion is very divided on the merits of a national health service - even one dressed up in insurance clothes - and it is perhaps just as well to let everyone let off their considerable heads of steam.

I then remembered that my picture book about George Washington picked up from a recent car booter (the one which included a picture of his masonic apron, embroidered by some nuns from the Nantes of the absolutist and most Catholic France if you please) also included a picture of the constitution, as agreed in 1787 and running to all of six and one half pages. A surprisingly short document - although I dare say it gets a lot longer when you start to count in the various amendments.

I asked Mr. Google who turned up lots of stuff including http://www.archives.gov which tells you all you are ever likely to want to know about the subject. A very nicely got up piece of internet educational material. Perhaps befitting the solemnity with which citizens talk about their constitution.

And then the following week, I read that the USA is not the only country tied up in a constitution. We gave the Germans one at the end of the second world war, a constitution designed to deny power to the center, to stop Germany becoming a world power again. A constitution which may make it difficult for the Germans to bail out the poor old Greeks as they have their constitutional court too.

Amused to see that some oik has taken the law into his own hands, expressing his irritation that the works of Master Rothko attract such ridiculous prices by defacing one of same.

But saddened to be reminded that my own work by the Master (illustrated), picked out of an old-style junk shop some years ago, in what is still one of the few remaining grotty bits of Pimlico, was for some reason left out of the famous catalogue prepared by Sir A. Blunt shortly before he died and so is unlikely ever to realize its true value. At least until someone sees fit to produce a new catalogue.

I was particularly taken with the way that the beautifully executed texture of the brown part of the image conveyed one's inner ennui, in part occasioned by one's misfit with one's image of the bright and sparkly outside world, expressed here by the nicely judged crooked fit. Needless to say, the actual bright and sparkly outside world rarely lives up to its image, without, that is, a little help from pills or poppers.

Abex rules!

PS: also saddened to record that I shall no longer be able to visit Ilfracombe, with the Hirst monstress having now been hauled into place on a 20 year tenure. See August 30th. Maybe some other oiks?

That is to say the mother in law sort rather than that that you can eat. A dish which was a regular item on my school menus but which I do not recall eating since. The pink/brown bumpy - pimpled if you like - skin was a bit off putting then and I think it would be even more off putting now: maybe in this more squeamish age the butchers take more care to skin the skin off.

I think that this sort grows out of doors in the fine botanical garden at Puerto de la Cruz but this recently relocated specimen has grown well in our indoors. It even looks to be on the point of flowering - see the shoot at the bottom left.

Much discussion just presently about repotting, having managed to head off the idea of dividing, which I think would be a shame.

We celebrated the flowering with a round of cheese scones, the construction of which was unusual on two points. First, the only butter to hand was frozen, so I grated it into the flour with a cheese grater, the peelings being very sticky and in shape not unlike the sort of shavings you might get from a soft mahogany with a plane. Second, being a bit unsure about the quality of the cheese that I was using, I fortified it with a dash of Lincolnshire Poacher from Waitrose, a cheese which they manage quite well. Scones were good, although we did not manage all 13 in the one sitting, leaving 2 for breakfast. And I think I might have done better to have cooked them for 11 rather than 10 minutes - the trick being for them not to go a matt dark brown. They should be a bright, speckled, orangey brown.

PS: I wonder now about the 'than that that' at the beginning. It sounds OK but what about the grammar?

On this occasion, on the various flavours of danger, which I allowed two dimensions. Dimension 1 was the chance of being badly damaged, if one was being picky maybe in the form of a probability distribution. The distribution would tell you what chance there was of damage of some specified severity in some specified interval. Dimension 2 was the length of the period over which one was expected to accept this risk. The rather obvious thought being that it gets harder to accept any particular risk as the length of the period increases - but there are some rather less obvious ramifications.

So Russian Roulette not too bad because the period is short. One just cranks oneself up (as it were), hopes for the best and pulls the trigger. Bungy jumping a bit harder because the actual act takes a bit longer: the weighing in, the climbing up onto the platform, the strapping on of the harness and finally giving the nod to the chap pulling the lever. Infantryman in the trenches in the first war or bomber crew in the second very hard because one had to accept a high level of risk (and stay functional) over long periods. Rather worse, perhaps, than an infantryman in say, Marlborough's time, when battles were few and far between and rarely lasted more than a few hours.

Then one has the climbers, like the one I read about recently who have to contain fear for perhaps a small number of days at a time (see August 3rd). Then the pioneers on the route to the South Pole who accept a rather lower level of risk but have to carry that risk for months at a time.

All brought on by coming across the autobiography of Sir Francis Chichester in the local library. Spotted quite by chance but picked up, in part anyway, because of our visit to his ancestral hall in North Devon (see August 26th). At least I think he is a junior twig on the family tree concerned. Hitherto, I have vaguely thought of him as being a yachtsman who took one trip too many and had to be winched off, more or less to die.

But having read his book he now strikes me as a much more substantial person - although quite possibly a hard person to be around for any length of time. So he goes off to New Zealand as a young man with hardly a bean after the first world war and makes a lot of money. He then goes back to England, gets a bee in his bonnet about flying and decides to fly back to Australia single handed, something which had been done just once or twice before. This takes a couple of months or so. Lots of opportunities for getting lost, forced landings in the middle of nowhere, robbery with or without violence. Very tired for a lot of the time. Sometimes hard to stay awake in the air. Lots of repairs needed along the way, repairs requiring a good range of engineering and carpentry skills. Not to mention band-aid patches on the thin fabric which covered the wings. At one point, just having survived yet another brush with death, he just gets out a cigar, puffs up, pours himself a large brandy and flies along as happy as can be.

On arrival, takes himself and plane to New Zealand on a boat and then wants to fly back to England, starting with a flight across the Tasman Sea to Australia, maybe half as far as going across the North Atlantic and three times as far as his plane, now converted to a seaplane by the adding of floats, can fly on one tank. But all is not lost. He spots a couple of small islands, one at the one third and the other at the two thirds mark. The only catch being that they are quite small islands, quite easy to miss - with missing being almost certainly fatal. But he gets himself a sextant and works out some tricky way of reducing the risk of missing - the catch being that one has to take the sights (having waited for the sun to come out) and do the complicated sounding calculations with one hand while flying the plane with the other. I had always been rather impressed that Captain Scott & Co. could keep up this sort of thing while dying of cold, but this sounds even harder. But this one managed.

On from Australia up through the East Indies etc, crashing while doing an exhibition flight in Japan. A crash into wires stretched between two mountain peaks which no-one had thought to tell him about and which were more or less invisible from the air. Reduced to taking the steamer home.

Back in England, he spent most of the war years teaching navigation in the RAF, rather miffed that he was not allowed a navigator wing on his tunic as he wore spectacles. This meant that he had little cred. in fly-boy bars, which he thought was rather unfair, all things considered. Then back to making money, starting with navigation board games, then jigsaw maps, then paper maps, then the Chichester Guide to London to which we were introduced by a helpful City of London policeman in the late seventies. Very good little guide it was too, much better than an AZ for central London, but sadly it does not appear to exist any more. At least not in Amazon, which knows all about it but has not got one.

He then takes up yachting and, without too much relevant experience, joins the single handed race across the Atlantic, which he wins in 40 days or so. But 40 days without much sleep and with much wrestling with a boat which sounds much too big for handling single handed. Chances of being brained by the main boom or speared by the spinnaker pole much too high. Not to mention sails being carried away, monstrous seas & winds, the possibility of icebergs and a brand new automatic steering gadget (developed from models on the round pond in the Kensington Gardens) needing plenty of running repairs to keep it on automatic.

Still game, a couple of years later he has another go, this time racing against the clock rather than against other yachts, and manages to clip a few days off his previous time. Arriving on Independence Day, which earned him a nice telegram from President Kennedy.

It seems that part of the attraction is that, away from people, one starts to experience a strange & exhilarating oneness with one's boat and with the sea. A very bubble full thing, entirely appropriate for the era of flower people and LSD!

Yet another manufacturer. Made in Ireland for Arrow Puzzles from a picture from Pictor International of London. This last outfit clearly has existed with an address in Soho but I not very clear whether it still exists. Possibly mixed up with a defunct outfit called Imagestate PLC. Probably not, as one would expect a media outfit to have a web site. But somewhere along the way I came across the arcane discussion at http://www.nagele.co.uk/Stockphotochat/monkeys.htm about another picture outfit called Getty. Sadly I can't source his motto "semper in excreta sumus solum profundum variat" despite its extensive Google footprint: was it just made up in the bar by one of those Eton types who run our country these days? All good fun...

As was this jigsaw, taking rather longer than usual to complete. Pictured here on top of a go board which I painted - in india ink on top of clear varnish on what I think is an obeche drawing board - some 40 years ago. Not been used for that purpose for as long as I can remember.

Started with the edge, as usual, but there were mistakes and it was not completed at this stage. Moved onto the skyline which provided some useful corroboration of the width of the thing.

Next came the window and its reflection, conspicuously coloured and easy to pick out of the heap. Ditto the base of the tree occupying the top half of the right hand edge.

Worked up the tree for a bit, then, unusually branched off to do the sky, perhaps because it was a small sky which could be knocked off quite quickly. Then the gate, then the thatch.

The rest of the puzzle was a bit of a muddle, with no clear direction or strategy. Simply pushed out from areas of the puzzle which had been done into areas which had not. A rather random process spread over several sessions, picking first on one area then another. Somewhere along the way picked out the pieces for the right hand tree started earlier and knocked that off for a bit of light relief.

A fairly regular puzzle, so not clear why it took so long to solve. Perhaps the lack of strong markers in what was left after the thatch. But despite the cheap appearance of the thing, the pieces were OK to handle and it was a pleasure to solve.

I should probably feel sorry for the civil servants caught up in the recent railway franchise fiasco, let us say Franchise Z.

Loosely retold, it might go something like this. Business man A was making a jolly good thing out of Franchise Z.

But the rules say that Franchise Z has to be re-tendered once every so many years and its time had come, the idea being to stop people like A making more money than is decent out of government contracts. Even the Tories have some scruples. So the race was on.

As it turned out business man B wins the race. Business man A screams not fair to the roof tops. He may well arrange cozy chats with chaps he knows on the ministerial team. One of these chaps is the minister C who signed up to B, but who is now persuaded that he has made a mistake. Not fair on the staunch and stalwart A. So he instructs the luckless civil servants to review the paperwork, just to be sure that everything is ship-shape, bristol fashion and above-board.

Surprise, surprise, the civil servants take the hint and duly find something wrong with the process. Not due process at all. The race has got to be rerun with subtle changes to the rules. I observe in passing that all this is likely to generate plenty of scraps for the legal eagles. Will they grow fat to the point that they can't take off any more?

Minister C now has to dump the blame somewhere. Guess who gets it? Still, the worst that is likely to happen is that some senior civil servant gets to collect his nice fat pension a bit sooner than he (or she) was expecting. I don't suppose they will sink so low as to dump the blame and exemplary disciplinary action on some bag carrier for some typing error.

Now who thinks that this is all a fantasy? The product (or perhaps produce is the better word) of a sour-grapes addled conspiracy theorist?

Following the report of 30th September (on http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/), to Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic yesterday. Half price Wednesday afternoon matinée, reasonably full stalls, bit sparse in the upper regions. Quite a lot, but by no means all, the audience looked retired like ourselves. Some of their accents were quite bog standard, not the sort of thing one would hear at a full price performance at all.

But before the off, to the noodlarium in Lower Marsh, a place we may not have visited since before FIL came to live with us. Still there and busy - our previous visits being in the evening. Same sort of grub, excellent value for money, but something seems to have happened to the mixed seafood noodles. I remember the noodles in question being soft noodles, but the choice yesterday was crispy noodles or soup noodles. Not being that keen on crispy, opted for the soup, which was fine apart from the liquid portion being rather peppery. Rather too peppery by the time one had got to the bottom of the bowl. We will visit next time when it is not so busy and have a proper study of the menu.

I notice in passing that the vegetable market in Lower Marsh seems to have given way to lunch tents (like those in Whitecross Street, near St. Luke's) and the second hand book shop seems to have given way altogether. A book shop to which I owe my account of the Cromwellian invasion of Jamaica, an invasion known quaintly at the time as the western design.

Onto the play itself which seemed very familiar, even making allowance for having had a quick read, but cannot find any mention in the blog, so the last time must have been at least six years ago. But probably not as long ago as for the lady in the queue for the (disabled) loo who was explaining that when she last saw the play it was Peggy Ashcroft in the lead. Or perhaps I have got this wrong - and this was not my fault for eavesdropping. It was the sort of voice which wanted to be eavesdropped - and it was that she thought that this was the best Hedda that she had seen since she saw Peggy.

But she was right that it was a good show, with a strong cast, even if I thought that the Brian Friel had been a bit over enthusiastic about padding the play out. But then, what do you expect if you invite an Irishman to pad something out? But I did like his injection of an interest in words, particularly words from the US, into the character of Judge Brack. I note in passing that Friel has been awarded the Ulysses medal by UCD, an honour he shares with the tarnished ex-president Clinton, among others. See http://www.ucd.ie/.

The play retained for me its primary impact, being for me a play with two linked strands: first the proper place of women and second the work of creation in the academy (as opposed, for example, to creation in the studio), with the second of these being the one which struck me yesterday. I got to ponder. This primary impact is the response to the thing portrayed. Later, one might respond to the quality of the portrait - when one might love the portrait but hate the subject of the portrait. Or wax lyrical about the place of portraits of this sort in the history of civilization as we know it. Later still, one might respond to the quality of this interpretation of the portrait. I was very conscious that most of the comment which one overhead in the margins of the performance was about this last, this secondary impact or derivative interest. As if people had either lost interest in what was primary or were embarrassed to talk about it in a public place. Which I thought was a pity, particularly as this was a translation of a play which is not poetry. One does not spend all that much time lost in admiration of the language, although one does respond to the odd neat turn of phrase.

Only really bad thing was the cold draft coming out of somewhere on high. Not as bad as the Duke of York's last week but I could still have done with a scarf.

PS: back home with the orange lentils, had a  new experience. Having simmered the lentils for a couple of hours, left them to stand overnight. In the morning, they had separated with a fine white layer maybe a quarter of an inch deep lying on top of the much deeper orange layer. Don't recall this happening before. And then, by the time I had finished cooking these new-to-us lentils, there had been a modest invasion of dead flies. Clearly time for another try with Sainsbury's customer services, not having got anywhere with Tesco's last time and as a result I was impressed to get though to a nicely regionally accented call center person within about 30 seconds of dialing the number printed on the packet at around 0830 on a weekday morning. As well as being accented, she was also very keen on the word 'fantastic' which she must have used at least a dozen times during our short conversation, following which I will deliver the (near empty) packet to Kiln Lane later this morning and await developments.

Notwithstanding all this, I think I prefer the slightly coarser texture of lentils which have not been cooked for quite as long.

Back to the Wigmore on Sunday for the second concert of the season, Susan Tomes and Eirch Höbath offering Mozart, mainly violin sonatas. It was, I think, the first time we had heard any of these sonatas since we heard Lupu & Goldberg do them, just about 40 years ago.

Got off to a good start with there being no engineering works on this Sunday evening, otherwise very much a reprise of our outing on 19th September. But there had been a run on cake at Ponti's so the last slice of polenta cake in the house was rather larger than last time, while the bowl of tiramisu was rather smaller. Maybe the slimmed down tiramisu was going to stretch to a few more portions; perhaps just as well as the calorie count of the stuff must be pretty horrendous.

Wigmore Hall not as full as usual, although maybe usual for a Sunday evening, not a day on which we usually attend. I found the piano a bit loud, not piano at all, in the first sonata, K305, but after which the pianist made a little speech about how these sonatas were written before the arrival of prima donna violinists and the job of the violin was to accompany, not quite a full partner. Which perhaps accounted for their weak presence in the repertoire - but which I also found a little tactless, with the luckless violinist standing by! As it turned out the three sonatas which followed (K379, K304 and K454) were much more balanced in this particular way. Also that I liked what I knew better than the new, that is to say the middle two sonatas better than the first and last; liking the first movement of K379 well enough that it will probably serve as closing music for an upcoming funeral. But all good, with the diet varied with a couple of rondos for piano alone (K485 and K511).

For a change took a taxi across London to Waterloo so that we could see the sights and catch an earlier train than we might have otherwise.

On arrival at Epsom I was very pleased to find that the shiny new DT was still shiny and new, so a vote of thanks to Network Rail (or whoever it is who is responsible for such things in these days of franchises and subbing) for their excellent provision of such - one on each island - at Epsom; the best provided station that I know of, and as luck would have it, our own.

Ashley center today not quite so good. For the second time in a couple of week, DT shiny and new but with no hand drying facilities. Unusually for me, sufficiently moved to mention this fact to a lady cleaner who just shrugged and walked off, which was a mistake because this really got me moving and I started to search the place for the manager's office. This seemed to have disappeared, but eventually a car park attendant directed me to a security office where the lady behind the jump at least gave me a decent hearing, apologised and may even go so far as to speed up repair. She might also have a pop - well deserved - at the cleaner. Maybe I really do have the makings of an urban busy, something which FIL was certainly up for in his prime, so maybe it is rubbing off from my long association with his daughter.

Perhaps my busyness was connected with the rather unusual dream I had had the night before. Back in the old Treasury building, the locale of so many of my dreams, where I had picked up someone else's briefcase on the way out. The lowest grade of black plastic civil service briefcase, containing nothing but a small plastic box with luncheon sandwiches inside. I noticed a rather severe middle aged lady, sombre reddish business suit, full head of straight hair but a bit lank and graying, in a bob. Someone I knew very slightly, by name Elizabeth Falk. After I had passed her, I realized that I had picked up her brief case rather than my own and went back to swap them. By the time I got back, the swap had transferred from my brief case to my bicycle and Ms. Falk was so angry that she had had my bicycle carted off to the lower depths of the buildings, many feet below ground and somewhere really obscure which was going to take me a while to find. While this finding and recovering was going on, the dream moved on to the problem of cycling home, from a building which had moved to Victoria from Whitehall and a journey which seemed to involve crossing to the south of the river and then a long swing to the west before cutting back to the east. With a complex junction on the way which seemed very familiar but which I could not then and cannot now put a name to, despite a fair amount of cogitation both in and after the dream. Furthermore, I was fairly sure while waking up that Ms. Falk was a real colleague, but fully waking up decided that she was probably a confusion with Elizabeth Frink, a famous sculptress whose work I do not care for at all. The bicycles were probably lifted from adventures with Bullingdons, but how did Falk/Frink get into the dream? How could the dream be interpreted as wish fulfillment? Perhaps the answer will come to me tonight.

I learned this morning of the take over of the gentlemens' hairdressing industry in parts of Surrey by criminal elements from south eastern Europe. Bosnia, Albania, Montenegro, the Cayman Islands and Serbia were some of the places mentioned.

It seems that these elements are setting up hairdressing operations all over the county, working very long hours and offering very cheap haircuts, generally undercutting the business of aboriginals. More seriously, it is alleged that one could never make a living like this and that most of these operations are covers for the more serious businesses of money laundering and sex. Not that great for the first as the turnover was not strong enough to hide much of a load, but I was struck by what a good choice hairdressing was for the second; the perfect excuse to have a continual stream of men of all ages coming and going without arousing suspicion. A far cry from the days of the discrete offer of protectives.

It is further alleged that some of these so called hairdressers smoke on the job. That is to say that you get left on the chair, wrapped up in your nylon sheet, while he takes a fag break outside. Awful.