pumpkinstrokemarrow

in furthest Isle of Wight but now made it to the internet bureau in Brading Town Hall (more of which later).

Yesterday through Brading Marshes, part of which is owned by RSPB. Where there is a different take on nature preserve management to that at Epsom Common. Unlike Epsom, where the chain saw gang and the cow huggers are clearly in the ascendant, at Brading there is a stand-off between the chain saw gang and the tree huggers with the result that they have come to an agreement whereby the chain saw gang is allowed to chop down trees at one end of the preserve and the tree huggers are allowed to plant trees - including much hazel for their nuts - at the other end. Part of the mix here is the preservation of red squirrels.

There were also quite a few older hazels, but none of them were very big and most of which had stolls cluttered with feeble new growth. Perhaps the only way to get a big hazel is to manage the thing oneself; nature is not going to make it by herself.

Lots of birds, including buzzards, sky larks and sparrows, none of which pop up very often at Epsom. But irritatingly, lots of birds which I could not identify. By the time I could focus on them they had gone. Eye reflexes clearly slowing down, might be regarded as a species of senior moment.

Pushed onto Brading Windmill, a site of historical interest managed by the National Trust. With a bearded and knowledgeable volunteer in attendance to tell you all about it. A volunteer who could chatter about Brading windmill in particular and windmills in general for ever - but who also took cues about when to stop. Clearly a superior trusty. The windmill itself was interesting, particularly as a piece of machinery. The sort of mill where the top bit which holds the sails can rotate on the tower bit so that the sails face the wind; I forget the proper name for such a thing. Now this top bit is just sitting there: why does it not blow off on a windy day? The sails make for plenty of wind resistance, a lot more, for example, than a chimney. The sails were mounted on an iron shaft, while the shaft up the centre of the mill and which drove all the machinery was a trimmed tree trunk. Interesting to see how rotary force was transmitted between the shafts and the large wooden gears. Quite differant situation to a waggon wheel where one only has to carry weight. I learned that the mill wheels themselves come from France in an early form of flat pack. That is to say in pre-shaped lumps of a very special sort of rock which are stuck together on site with plaster of paris and tied together with an iron rim. The rather rough and ready booklet told me that the mill stones needed to be be sharpened about once a month - from which I inferred that plenty of mill stone must have got into the flour.

The whole thing had been heavily restored, which must have cost a packet. Lot of woodworm and I spotted one bit of elm.

Back to Brading via the Propellor Inn. Steak and kidney pudding, mushy peas and chips for tea, sitting next to the bull ring. Pudding was a substantial affair, said to weigh 0.75lb and coming in a sturdy white plastic pudding basin. First time I had come across this particular sort of pie. The bull ring was a large iron ring concreted into the ground. The idea was that when you wanted some beef you tied a bull by the nose to the iron ring and then baited it with dogs for a bit to bring the flavour of the meat on before slaughter. I don't think the RSPCA could have been invented at the time. Nearby was an ancient pub called the Bugle, which, so the blue sign informs us, is not a sort of trumpet, rather a sort of bull.

In fact the whole town very ancient, a genuine rotten borough. Once upon a time it was a reasonably important sea port, known to Canute and William the Conq. and people like that. So it boasts a town hall, a very old church (in foundation at least), several pubs and several very old buildings. Including the Brading Experience, now shut, the taste for this sort of display having, it seems, past.

For the first time for a while, a walk on Epsom Common this morning, having largely avoided the place for the last few months because of the depredations of the chain saw bandits. More irritation than pleasure. But not too bad this morning. BH managed to navigate us through the bits of the common which they have not started on yet. And the odd glimpse of felled trees was softened by the summer grass.

One result is that I have now been around the all weather path around Epsom Common twice in 6 days, having not been around it for perhaps six months. Got slightly lost on one of the two occasions. The good news is that the snow effectively blankets the operations of the chain saw bandits and I did not notice the corpses of any trees, other than those which had expired of natural causes. On which subject, we learn from one of the common trusties, that the current hate is something called Turkey Oaks which are doing in the English Oaks. First thought was why not? If the Turkey Oak is stronger than the English one, why not let natural selection do its stuff? One might have thought that chain saw bandits, when in their environmental clothes, should be up for a bit of natural selection. But Mr G. tells me that the Turkey Oak was once widely planted for the speed of its growing but the timber is not good for much and the tree hosts a variety of wasp which does in the acorns of other varieties of oak, including ours. Cunning chaps these natural selectors. Second thought was that perhaps we should put up some defence of the English Oak. Third thought was not. Epsom Common is not a plantation, there for its timber product. It is, or at least it should be, the nearest thing to a bit of untouched and untouchable woodland that can be managed inside the M25. Turkey Oaks look OK & grow fast and that is enough for me.

Ornithological feast this morning. Around 0830 the back garden was very busy with birds on the bushes, particularly the fire thorn with its red berries and the yew with its pink ones. Lots of blue tits and great tits. One regular thrush, one irregular thrush. One green woodpecker, one red, white and black job. Several chaffinches. Several unidentified small brown birds. The odd blackbird, pigeon, starling and robin. One magpie flew overhead, clearly disdaining this veggie. fare.

The Epsom chapter has been on a fraternal visit to Vauxhall, where it seems their colleagues are about to waste a couple of mature mulberry trees near what used to be the Vauxhall pleasure gardens and is now a council estate. It seems that the juice from the squashed berries clashes with the latest municipal garden design directives sent down from Lambeth Town Hall, directives which mandate the use of granite sets for paving, sets which are badly stained by aforesaid mulberry juice. The idea that garden design directives might possibly fit in with or around mature trees in pre-existing gardens has not yet reached the Town Hall. The DT devoted a third of a page to the whole sorry business. It seems that some residents of Vauxhall really are disgusted; perhaps to the point of hugging the trees in question in order to keep the chain saw gang off.

Bit of public archeology yesterday, courtesy of the National Trust. Where they manage to put on a good show despite the burial mounds themselves not being that impressive. I imagine they would have been more so when raw and new, perhaps at a time when the landscape was less obscured by trees and bushes.

Shiny new exhibition and cafeteria halls. Exhibition hall has lots of educational panels, a sprinking of artefacts and some interesting reconstructions. I was very impressed by the sword, the construction of which was very complicated. A core and two edges. The core made in a long process of folding alternate layers of mild and hard steel, twisting the resultant bars into ropes and lastly welding two such ropes together to make the core. How on earth did such a process evolve? How much status did the smiths have? More or less priestly? What relation did this process bear to the Damascus proces of damascening sword baldes, also very strong and up for slicing through the rather thin armour available in those days. There was also very elaborate decorative metal work on a small scale - clasps and buckles and such like. Impressed also by the material poverty of the big cheeses of that time. They might have had some very fancy toys but that was about it. After that onto wives, slaves and other livestock.

Site rounded out by a couple of excellent circular walks, mainly through woodland. Some large trees, mainly sweet chestnut, and the largest ash tree I have seen since our visit to Cadbury castle. Views of the Deben, from where the funeral ships had been dragged.

Plus a nice bit of chain saw art of Spot the magic dragon. Whoever did it played to the tree as he found it, rather than playing with his chain saw. Far better than the stuff you get in Surrey.

Walking around Horton Country Park yesterday, I discovered that one of the chain saw gangs has made it across Christchurch Road and has started in the park. Not in force yet as all that has been done is that some of the underbrush around some trees they want to grow big has been cleared away. Trying to put the park back into the Park I suppose, but I would rather that they left well alone. I bet the birds like the underbrush too. In fact, in some parts of the Isle of Wight, the environment types make a point of growing the stuff special. Perhaps I should put the Epsom environment types in touch with them.

Although for the people of Malden Rushett it never stopped. The BP garage there remained open 24 hours a day throughout the holiday for the sale of petrol, diesel, charcoal logs for the barbecue, milk, wine, beer, confectionery and spirits. Maybe the odd pork pie. This also provided some facilities for those who do not celebrate the birth of Christ and who could travel from other parts of Epsom, so maybe I do not need to put in a complaint to the ECDE ( aka the European Commission for Diverse Equality. See above).

Saw an interesting example of lack of civic consciousness yesterday. Walking over the railway bridge at Ewell West, saw a chunk of bank which had recently been cleared of scrub, some of it quite big and leaving a fair amount of chippings. This job, presumably down to our friends at Network Rail, presumably needed four or five people. One to hold the chain saw, one to watch in case something goes wrong, one free to go to the gents (or ladies as the case may be), one to drive the van and so on. But they walked away leaving an unsightly collection of newly revealed litter, which it would have taken perhaps 10 minutes to clear up. Instead of doing that they charge off in their van to the next bout of scrub destruction.

And learnt something about wheat the day before. It seems that in order for wheat to be useful, its genome requires a gene which inhibits the shattering and so scattering of the ripe ear of wheat. Not too clever from the point of view of wheat in its natural state, but very clever for the domesticated sort as it gives one time to harvest the stuff. Mutation of a single gene is all that is needed for inhibition, something that could easily happen in the wild, perhaps reducing fitness, but not fatally. Now with maize, by comparison, shattering is controlled by a number of genes rather than just one, and the story was that it is rather unlikely that the necessary mutations would happen in the wild. So we only had maize in ancient central America by virtue of a breeding program to manufacture the stuff. So rather cleverer chaps than we had thought.

The current trend is for apology. In which connection I wondered about the casuality bill for freeing the slaves in the US. It seems that there were upwards of 500,000 deaths in the civil war from a population of 30m people, including 5m black people, including 4m slaves. So, putting it very crudely, one death freed ten slaves. Now I grant that the quantities are not commensurate, but that does seem to me to amount to a considerable apology of sorts. Pity that the reconstruction bit afterwards didn't go as well - in that respect anyway - as pious Northeners or sanctimonious Europeans might have hoped - these last having carried much of the trade and made much money from it, but having eschewed it by the time in question. I also learn what one might have thought of on a good day all by oneself - that is that the proportion of black people in the US has, in the main, declined since independance, reflecting the flood of immigrants from the poor and/or cold parts of Europe. From something under 20% to something over 10%. Or, in slightly more detail, falling to just under 10% at the time of the second war but climbing slowly since up to around 12% now. This last, courtesy of a very googlessible and useful table published by the US bureau of the census.

Quite taken aback the other day. As I point out from time to time, I have been an atheist all my life. No truck, at least on my own account, with Allah, Jehovah, Jesus or the Virgin Mary. Then, quietly minding my own business, reading about a Russian called Florensky. Or rather, of mixed Armenian-Russian stock from Tiflis, the same Tiflis where Uncle Joe went to school, at very roughly the same time. It seems that this Florensky was a very talented chap, good at mathematics and all kinds of other things. But that when he was in his early 20's he saw the light and after various trials and torments became a priest in the Russian Orthodox church. Something that was not that unusual at the time for intellectuals not attracted by the Social Democrats or violence. And all of a sudden, between mouthfuls of bread and butter (it being breakfast time), I suddenly thought that maybe there was something other than the physical world of gluons, glue sticks and Newcastle Brown. Maybe Euclid's fourth postulate has some ethereal existence, other than on ancient papyrii? OK, so not as bad as seeing the Angel Gabriel peeping out from behind a cloud but tendencies in that direction. A road to Damascus moment. Or perhaps a Eureka moment.

Been struck in various places over the last few days about the merit or otherwise of the provision of free entertainment in public places, entertainment which come in the form of flickering pictures and noise or just noise. TB often offers the unusual combination of flickering pictures from one machine and noise from another, a compromise which appears to satisfy both those who like to watch the racing while they drink and those who like to have some music.

Generally speaking, I find both a bit irritating. Depending on mood and context, one can often block the noise but I find the flickering much harder to deal with, even if it is at the periphery of the visual field. One really needs to have one's back to it, not always convenient.

Particularly irritating are those small waiting rooms you often get at the bottom of big office blocks furnished with large televisions. OK so the things are cheap and have become a bit of a must have amongst the office management fraternity, but why they should think that the average waiter would rather watch the box than read the paper, prepare for the coming meeting or just doze is beyond me.

Some shops don't do badly either. Once upon a time it just used to be shops catering for young people who played loud music to scare away older people. And some shops used to intersperse the music with spoken word advertisements, a particularly tiresome genre. I even recall some tale about supermarkets supplementing the oxygen in the air, which taken together with jolly martial music, stimulated the buying buds. But now even quite decent shops do it, M&S for example, a shop which used to be above such stuff.

And then there is always South West Trains. Once they discovered that they could pipe announcements into carriages there was no stopping them. And over and above the central computer generated guff, they even gave the guards discretion to use the thing as they saw fit - and some guards are quite keen. This for material which 99% of passengers find neither diverting nor informative.

On the other hand, I remember having a chat with the keeper of a small hotel about it, one of those small hotels with a big empty breakfast room. The keeper explained that she had experimented and found that, on the whole, customers found silence in a big empty room a bit oppressive. They liked a bit of light music, light both in the sense of easy going and in that of being quiet, in the background. Such music also served to cover the conversation of others if there were more than two people in the room; customers also liking a bit of privacy.

There is also the angle that sometimes one finds some conversations in waiting rooms really irritating. Perhaps one is waiting for a bit of dental treatment and some loud gent. is banging on ad nauseam about how his last experience of this particular treatment (as luck would have it) went completely pear shaped. Completely oblivious in his desire to sound off that his soundings might not be to everybody else's taste and with his interlocutor far too polite to tell him to can it. A bit of noise can mask such things a bit; a case of two wrongs making a right for once.

PS: made it onto Epsom Common for the first time for a few weeks the other day. All the way around Christ Church and back, a trip somewhat marred by the discovery that the Chain Saw Volunteers have been at it again since I was last on this stretch of the all weather path. Big trees, little trees, all sorts. But I don't suppose I am going to find the energy to put in a complaint to their forthcoming annual meeting on 24th April (see http://www.epsomcommon.org.uk/). Perhaps some concerned reader will act on my behalf.

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

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

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

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

On 21st April I noticed some strange white fluff gathering along the sides of the paths at a couple of places on Epsom Common. And now, more or less by luck, I am able to report a successful follow up.

Irritated on our walk around Horton Country Park today, otherwise a bright sunny morning, by the antics of the Chain Saw Volunteers (14th West Horton). Bashing yet another innocent & innocuous chunk of our rough woodland in the name of some ecofad or other.

Second attempt at making bread yesterday. Made the dough rather drier, did the rising bit in the airing cupboard rather than on the rather cooler dining room table and made the pound and a half of dough into one loaf rather than two. Result more like regular bread than the first attempt, but still some way to go to get to the white bloomers of Cheam. A plus point is that they stand rather better. I note in passing that buying the flour and electricity retail, means that the home made loaf costs as much about as the shop made one, never minding my labour. Perhaps those economists who bang on about economies of scale have a point.

Or rather an old fad returned. I happened to read that the Principle First Secretary of Status Quo, The Lord Mandelson, is rather fond of hot water with a slice of lemon, so I thought I ought to give it a go. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that. Make as lemon tea but omit the tea. Very good it is too. It did have a fancy three syllable name starting with C but I can't recall what it was and despite Mr G. being awash with hits on the subject of lemon and hot water - which suggests that I have locked into a very fashionable fad indeed - I can't lock down the name. Apart from being surprisingly palatable it has the advantage that one can drink a fair bit of it without overdosing on caffeine - which Oolong tea, the previous fad, seems to be awash with.

A capped off bit of pipe sticking out of the east garden at Hampton Court. Apparently it used to be something to do with steam engines and fountains.

A dress rehearsal for the Midsomer gathering of the Chain Saw Volunteers (14th West Horton), caught by an intrepid camera from the borough 'Insight' team, from the very magazine from which I read that central government is instructing local government to withdraw funding. Which all goes to show that all governments bang on about reducing red tape and not interfering while carrying on doing just that. Even in paltry matters such as borough rags. Notwithstanding (a Frenchy might use 'quandmême' here?), I am pleased to be able to put faces to all those dead trees.

Note that volunteer etiquette discourages the exhibition of weapons or dead trees in photographs of this sort as it encourages showing off of the worst sort, rather than volunteer spirit of the best sort.

Started off on a good note with a prompt and helpful reply from the Paypal help desk, well within their 24 hour target. I am confident that doing what they suggest will work.

First visit for a while yesterday, starting at Christ Church on the all weather track in an anticlockwise direction, then branched down to the railway, then onto the Wheelers Lane and Hook Road extensions.

Pleased to report that I spotted neither new chain saw activity nor cows, although there were a few foxes, not something I usually come across on the common. There was also a handsome dog rose, well into flower.

And an odd visual at the pond just by the keeper's cottage. This is a pond covered with duck weed, roughly circular, and the surface of which from a distance looks like a sheet of steel with some kind of matt green coating. Closer to, the sheet of steel resolves into something more mottled, but which started to throb or pulse in an odd way when one tried to focus on it from close quarters. I don't think there was anything odd going on in the pond, so there must have been something odd going on in me.

On the way out noticed the aspens last noticed on May 7th last year, but there was neither fluff nor shaking on this occasion.

Back home finished off  'Les Malheurs de Sophie' by one Comtesse de Ségur, a book to which I had been pointed by Drabble on puzzles, in a nicely produced edition from Hachette. Entertaining morality tales, first published in 1859, mostly about how Sophie manages to kill off all the various animals with which she is involved, rather more violent in that respect than English children's stories that I know, although for all I know, our stories from 1859, of which I know nothing, might be just as violent as their's.

Stories clearly very popular with lots and lots of different versions being available from Amazon France, including natty-little-frilly-pink boxes full of DVDs. Just the thing for a 10 year old female.

The Comtesse herself also has an interesting past, being the daughter of the chap who was the governor of Moscow at the time it was burnt down during the French occupation of 1812, subsequently exiled. Acquired her handle by marriage. So these typically French stories were written by a Russian. Maybe an outsider is better placed to capture the essential essence than an insider.

Finished the day off by finishing our first viewing of 'Barocco', a subtitled French hand-me-down from Bourne Hall Library for which I paid all of £1, double the asking price of 50p as I could not be bothered to wait for the attendant to finish with the customer in front of me who was into something complicated. A stylish affair, but so old that it did not resize to fill our not very large television screen. And while we got the general idea, the ins and outs of the framing political scandal more or less escaped us. I shall have to read what Wikipedia has to say about it before trying again.