Sunday, September 16, 2007
Better books
Another full day, this time between Clapham Junction and Battersea.
The first discovery was that there is a much better class of book in charity shops in this area, particularly in the Rumanian orphan ones, than there is in Epsom. From one of which I make the interesting discovery that, each year, the grunt work on maybe 500,000 US tax returns is done in India courtesy of the Indians being able to view scanned versions of the input documents through something called the virtual tax room. Maybe being a rank and file accountant is not going to be too great a career choice in the US for too much longer. And they do the same trick with X-rays and such. The US doctors, not wanting to disturb their golf or their sleep, have the things looked at over the wire by more Indians. Partly enabled, it seems, by massive investment in communications links during the dotcom boom. Good to think that said boom has good legacy.
The second discovery was that it is quite easy to get lost between Clapham Junction and Battersea park, heading North by West by North from the Latchmore rather than North by East. The differance meant that we had our picnic sitting on a large slab version of the stuff they make kitchen worktops out of - which I assume to be a granite version of chipboard - outside a flashy new building by Battersea Bridge. The building had a very large empty atrium area facing onto the river. Will have to make a point, next time in the area, of finding out what use they make of it. Not obviously the best place to put a car showroom, although plenty big enough for one. There was also a large steel barge, more or less in original condition, being used for something stationary which was not bulk storage. All very suspicious but we were not moved to make enquiries.
On the way to the picnic we come across a very odd nut tree. Unlike a proper nut tree it had a proper trunk but the twiggy bits and leaves looked quite like hazel twigs and leaves and the nut bit looked like an outsized hazel nut cluster, the wrapping with beech nut tendencies and the nut being of normal (long) hazel dimensions. Opened the thing up and one had something looking very like a hazel nut, slightly flattened. Smelt about but not quite right. Not bold enough to eat the thing.
On the way from the picnic we came across Ramsome Dock, a dock we have never been to before. Now clearly the home of many exiled Islington folk. Including a rather bizarre, but quite well stocked butcher. Who did foreign things like trimming the fat and meat off the thin end of the fore ribs - as if they were lamb chops.
And onto another first, to wit an exotic church from the Phillipines. It seems that some of them got a bit fed up with the Catholic church and founded their own version - Inglesia in Christo - which now has some million or so adherants. Their current leader being the gandson of their first leader. Not really very proper as they do not believe in the Trinity. But they had done a very nice job of colonising a redundant, relatively new, Anglican church and had a small sub-tropical garden which regularly won prizes for the best kept garden in Wandsworth or something. A fitting introduction to the gardens of the same sort in Battersea Park, our ostensible destination.
Having finally got to the Park, quite unable to recapture the bubble experience previously reported on, despite their being very fine red granite benches to lie on and give it a go.
PS and why has blogger started to lapse into German?
The first discovery was that there is a much better class of book in charity shops in this area, particularly in the Rumanian orphan ones, than there is in Epsom. From one of which I make the interesting discovery that, each year, the grunt work on maybe 500,000 US tax returns is done in India courtesy of the Indians being able to view scanned versions of the input documents through something called the virtual tax room. Maybe being a rank and file accountant is not going to be too great a career choice in the US for too much longer. And they do the same trick with X-rays and such. The US doctors, not wanting to disturb their golf or their sleep, have the things looked at over the wire by more Indians. Partly enabled, it seems, by massive investment in communications links during the dotcom boom. Good to think that said boom has good legacy.
The second discovery was that it is quite easy to get lost between Clapham Junction and Battersea park, heading North by West by North from the Latchmore rather than North by East. The differance meant that we had our picnic sitting on a large slab version of the stuff they make kitchen worktops out of - which I assume to be a granite version of chipboard - outside a flashy new building by Battersea Bridge. The building had a very large empty atrium area facing onto the river. Will have to make a point, next time in the area, of finding out what use they make of it. Not obviously the best place to put a car showroom, although plenty big enough for one. There was also a large steel barge, more or less in original condition, being used for something stationary which was not bulk storage. All very suspicious but we were not moved to make enquiries.
On the way to the picnic we come across a very odd nut tree. Unlike a proper nut tree it had a proper trunk but the twiggy bits and leaves looked quite like hazel twigs and leaves and the nut bit looked like an outsized hazel nut cluster, the wrapping with beech nut tendencies and the nut being of normal (long) hazel dimensions. Opened the thing up and one had something looking very like a hazel nut, slightly flattened. Smelt about but not quite right. Not bold enough to eat the thing.
On the way from the picnic we came across Ramsome Dock, a dock we have never been to before. Now clearly the home of many exiled Islington folk. Including a rather bizarre, but quite well stocked butcher. Who did foreign things like trimming the fat and meat off the thin end of the fore ribs - as if they were lamb chops.
And onto another first, to wit an exotic church from the Phillipines. It seems that some of them got a bit fed up with the Catholic church and founded their own version - Inglesia in Christo - which now has some million or so adherants. Their current leader being the gandson of their first leader. Not really very proper as they do not believe in the Trinity. But they had done a very nice job of colonising a redundant, relatively new, Anglican church and had a small sub-tropical garden which regularly won prizes for the best kept garden in Wandsworth or something. A fitting introduction to the gardens of the same sort in Battersea Park, our ostensible destination.
Having finally got to the Park, quite unable to recapture the bubble experience previously reported on, despite their being very fine red granite benches to lie on and give it a go.
PS and why has blogger started to lapse into German?
Monday, August 08, 2011
Arts & crafts
Mentioned arts & crafts on Saturday, back with them today, prompted by inspecting the works of the contractors Surrey County Council - or perhaps Epsom and Ewell Borough Council - see fit to hire to look after verges and such like in our area.
So it is hard to make a living at many arts & crafts. We have the case of the trestle table recently built by yours truly with the materials costing more than the finished table would probably cost at IKEA. So even allowing for a considerable speeding up if I was doing this sort of thing for a living, I would not make much of a living. I could not possibly charge the £60 or more an hour commanded by car mechanics around here. I heard recently about the plight of tailors and dressmakers: very few people are prepared, for example, to pay for the labour which goes into their new suit, perhaps a week's work, at the car mechanic's rate. Much rather go to Marks & Sparks for which they only have to pay at China factory rates and blow the balance on booze. Then we have artists proper. How many people are prepared to pay for the two days it takes to produce an original piece of modern art? The sort, that is, which involves a bit more work than emptying litter bins onto unmade beds. So these sorts of arts & crafts don't work very well because people are not prepared to pay what it costs. Too much craft chasing too little money. Factories possibly producing inferior goods, but at a superior price. Other sorts of arts & crafts are hard because there are too many people at it. How many of the dancers pumped out by our stage schools wind up getting paid to dance? How many of the musicians pumped by by our music schools wind up getting paid to do that?
Whereas we do not seem to be able to deliver the quite modest skills required to keep our verges neat and tidy. This is not unskilled work but somehow the council never seem to wind up getting people with any skill to do it. Let alone care or sensitivity. They just whang their sit and ride lawn mowers around with gay abandon, rarely troubling to adjust height or pace of the cut to the condition of the ground or to the condition of the grass. Often bumping into young trees, with the result that the bases of many of the young trees planted at some considerable expense along Horton Lane are badly, in some cases, fatally, damaged.
The same thing with the flails that they use to trim the hedgerows. Plenty of young trees down the same road carry scars large and small from being hit by a carelessly manoeuvred flail. And then why do they use a flail for mowing suburban hedges at all? They would get a far less ugly job done by using a hedge trimmer.
Last but not least, we have the chaps that lop branches off trees. To be fair, the ones who work for the people that call themselves tree surgeons, do seem to understand that you cut a branch off at its root, where it joins the parent branch. This both looks neat and heals over. Whereas horns look ugly and are apt to die back. Something not understood at all by the verge chaps. With the worse case I have seen recently being a tree lopped to facilitate the construction of a temporary bridge at Earlsfield Railway Station. I can understand that the chap doing the lopping might not know or care, but one might think that at least one of his or her colleagues did.
Here, we have no craft at all. Just cheap labour. But I suppose another aspect of the same problem: collectively, we are not prepared to pay for quality in our daily lives. We focus of quantity rather than quality. Two pints of rubbish ice cold lager are better than one decent pint of warm beer.
The good news is that for the first time since I gave up my allotments, I have picked some hazel nuts. There are quite a few hazel nut bushes down Horton Lane, enough that the squirrels have not stripped the lot, well before there is anything inside them. Which is what happens to the hazel nuts in our garden. So, the other day, I picked three rather green looking hazel nuts. One contained a nut about the size of a large pea, one the size of a small pea and the other small. The first two tasted OK. So we shall go back in a few weeks and see what we can do. Seems a bit of a waste to pick them when they are so young; better to take a chance and leave them for a week or two. Hope that neither squirrels nor humans catch on. I shan't wait until the Autumn which is when we picked them when I was a child. Global warming no doubt.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Calming down day 2
The blogger people must do something clever with the recently published pictures - in the sense of cutting them down to bit size. Loading does not seem to be delayed at all. I continue to be impressed with the technology.
A second national design institute is falling. The new first class stamps - of which supply was needed to deal with those whose cards caught us out - appear to have acquired an ugly numeral one in the top left hand corner. A shame given that our regular stamps used to be quite decent looking. The first institution was the Landranger maps which started out really good and are now becoming progressively more gaudy. Perhaps they will start showing RSPB reserves in some lurid colour to complement that they use to show National Trust places. Perhaps someone will have a go at our banknotes.
Cambridge connection visit yesterday. Largeish meal in consequence, unusually running to four courses. Started off with exotica including strange fish lumps - mostly involving legs - in olive oil, snail pate - which appered to consist and taste mainly of pig - and some strange triangular fish lumps from Spain via a tin. Fish lumps cunningly wrapped in a tomato paste sheet about 1mm thick. How on earth did they do it? Followed by roast surloin, this being all the Cheam butcher could manage in the continuing chaotic run up to the New Year. Went down OK but not as good to my mind as other species of rib. Moist, very slightly pink with a slightly grainy texture. More like steak than roast. But the gear near the bone of which there was plenty very good. Another time I shall attempt to cook one of these hotter and faster so that we get brown outside and pinker inside - something we don't usually manage very well except with very large joints. Accompanied by mashed potatoes enlivened with bean pudding (vide supra), carrots, parsnips, brussel sprouts and cabbage. Followed by, exceptionally, three puddings one of which was christened something to do with Mars due to the interesting minced hazel nut patterns on the meringue. And one of which involved condensed milk cooked in such a way as to turn it brown (deliverately). The whole accompanied by rather posher wine than we are used to. And a giant grapefruit (aka pomona) to finish off with. Oddly, for such a large fruit, very small seeds. We will attempt to germinate - other citrus seeds germinate readily enough so perhaps these will.
Second post Christmas visit to Cheam today, getting somewhat wet on the way back. Butcher and baker now both open. Earl Grey tea famine averted by the Cheam High Street Budgen's which was surprisingly well stocked - complete with friendly check out lady who assured anybody who wanted to know that the quality of gossip far surpassed anything to be had in the Sainsbury down the road.
Talking of whom, I have not yet managed to attack their web site and complain about their mixed organic nuts - which seemed very dry and are strongly suspected of being more than a year old. But managed to get some rather more respectable walnuts from Epsom market - which appear to have arrived from California via the Netherlands. Roll on getting a decent crop from my various hazel nut trees, fresh hazels being a much more interesting proposition than the oven dried things one gets otherwise. Got a couple of handfulls this year, deer permitting, might get rather more next year.
Maybe we get to the allotment later if the rain stops. But bonfire delayed again.
A second national design institute is falling. The new first class stamps - of which supply was needed to deal with those whose cards caught us out - appear to have acquired an ugly numeral one in the top left hand corner. A shame given that our regular stamps used to be quite decent looking. The first institution was the Landranger maps which started out really good and are now becoming progressively more gaudy. Perhaps they will start showing RSPB reserves in some lurid colour to complement that they use to show National Trust places. Perhaps someone will have a go at our banknotes.
Cambridge connection visit yesterday. Largeish meal in consequence, unusually running to four courses. Started off with exotica including strange fish lumps - mostly involving legs - in olive oil, snail pate - which appered to consist and taste mainly of pig - and some strange triangular fish lumps from Spain via a tin. Fish lumps cunningly wrapped in a tomato paste sheet about 1mm thick. How on earth did they do it? Followed by roast surloin, this being all the Cheam butcher could manage in the continuing chaotic run up to the New Year. Went down OK but not as good to my mind as other species of rib. Moist, very slightly pink with a slightly grainy texture. More like steak than roast. But the gear near the bone of which there was plenty very good. Another time I shall attempt to cook one of these hotter and faster so that we get brown outside and pinker inside - something we don't usually manage very well except with very large joints. Accompanied by mashed potatoes enlivened with bean pudding (vide supra), carrots, parsnips, brussel sprouts and cabbage. Followed by, exceptionally, three puddings one of which was christened something to do with Mars due to the interesting minced hazel nut patterns on the meringue. And one of which involved condensed milk cooked in such a way as to turn it brown (deliverately). The whole accompanied by rather posher wine than we are used to. And a giant grapefruit (aka pomona) to finish off with. Oddly, for such a large fruit, very small seeds. We will attempt to germinate - other citrus seeds germinate readily enough so perhaps these will.
Second post Christmas visit to Cheam today, getting somewhat wet on the way back. Butcher and baker now both open. Earl Grey tea famine averted by the Cheam High Street Budgen's which was surprisingly well stocked - complete with friendly check out lady who assured anybody who wanted to know that the quality of gossip far surpassed anything to be had in the Sainsbury down the road.
Talking of whom, I have not yet managed to attack their web site and complain about their mixed organic nuts - which seemed very dry and are strongly suspected of being more than a year old. But managed to get some rather more respectable walnuts from Epsom market - which appear to have arrived from California via the Netherlands. Roll on getting a decent crop from my various hazel nut trees, fresh hazels being a much more interesting proposition than the oven dried things one gets otherwise. Got a couple of handfulls this year, deer permitting, might get rather more next year.
Maybe we get to the allotment later if the rain stops. But bonfire delayed again.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Fresh nutlet
BH was reading Laurie Lee this morning and learned that he went to Vigo knowing nothing more about Spain than that Seville had a barber and that Barcelona had a nut. Well, he knew more than we did as we did know about the barber but had not a clue about the nut. Luckily, Mg G. soon redresses the balance and we learn that there is a special sort of filbert grown around Barcelona, which presumably gave its name to the Barcelona Nut Company (http://www.barcelonanut.com/) which looks to be big in the US of A, in particular in that part of the US of A which gave us 'The Wire'. I think filberts are the long sort of hazel nut rather than the round sort, from which I deduce that Barcelona is not responsible for those overkilned brown hazel nuts we get from Spain at Christmas.
Yesterday to Epsom station for a bit of train spotting, hoping to see again the strange train I saw the other night. Locomotive at both ends, something very inferior to the Class 45 locos the better trains from Cambridge to London used to be pulled by. It had the same general shape as a 45 but it was smaller all round and had a shorter snout; I think now maybe Class 38 but this is denied at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_Rail_modern_traction_locomotive_classes which claims that such things were never made. Anyway, between the two locos were maybe half a dozen recycled passenger cars, painted a dingy yellow. Some of them still had windows through which one could see sink, kettle, coffee pot, a range of flat screen PCs and a vacuum cleaner. And there were some large contraptions. The only person involved appeared to be the driver marching sturdily from one loco to the other. But what it was all about I could not tell; nor could the Portuguese (I think) lady who had charge of the platform at that time. So imperative to see the thing again and have another crack at identification. But failed. The thing was nowhere to be seen.
Foiled here, we carried on to the South Bank to pay our third visit in three weeks to 'Eat'; indeed our second visit to this very branch in two weeks. A far more sensible place than the poncy eatery entirely inappropriately called 'Canteen'.
Then off to hear Imogen Cooper play Schubert. A triumph, played to a nearly full and very enthusiastic house. Off to a stunning start with impromptu number 1 in C minor (D899, part), through to the climax of a sonata in B flat (D960) and wound down by what the chap behind me thought was one of the moments musicaux (D780). Sadly, my stock of Schubert piano music very thin so it may be a while before I track it down. Amazed, once again, by the way that one piano can fill a big hall, even when being played very quietly. Reminded of a cheap crack that Norman Lamont made at the expense of one of his hard working mandarins, who, thinking to congratulate him on his handling of a meeting, told him (Lamont that is) that he thought he (Lamont again) handled the silences very well. Lamont relates, we all laugh. But we were all wrong. Managing silences in meetings is a very useful art. And managing - or perhaps timing - silences is something that Imogen Cooper did very well last night. Not to mention the telling chords dropped into those silences. And then there was the thought that how odd it was that a composer who died of the clap in his mid thirties getting on for 200 years ago, speaking through a lady in middle years and a posh piano, could hold 1,000 of us in thrall for a couple of hours. You are not going to get much more immortal than that. Odd also that we in Epsom should rate the creative arts so highly. All those hoodies doing substance enhanced conceptual art at http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/. When there is so much to be had from reproductive arts. A point that D H Lawrence made many years ago in 'Women in Love' when castigated by a tiresome lover that he ought to be creative rather than copy the creation of someone else.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tree nuts
Spent the first part of this morning browsing 'Woodlands' written by Oliver Rackham and recently published by Collins. Which entered Epsom Library on 27 March 2010 and had not been taken out by late June when I found it on the new acquisitions shelf.
It turns out that Rackham is an authority on the history of woods. Which turns out to be far more complicated than I had thought. So, for example, there does not appear to be agreement on the nature or extent of woodland cover in England in pre-historic times or when that cover was removed - although much of the removal appears to have been pre-Roman. He rather debunks the idea of there being such a thing as natural wood, wood untouched by human hand. No such thing exists in England (apart from anything else, we have been around for about as long as the trees. That is to say, since the end of the last ice age) and he is rather doubtful about how much of it there is elsewhere. With the result that restoring woodland to its natural state is rather like restoring Stonehenge to its proper state - there never having been a time when Stonehenge stood integral and entire. The thing was a process rather than a product.
Plenty of woody factlets.
So, for example, many trees live in symbiosis with specialised fungi which live in and around their roots and which serve to move matter between the roots and the surrounding soil. The fungi do a rather better job than root hairs and if, for some reason, the fungi get sick or go missing, the trees are apt to get sick and go missing.
That roots are not necessarily deep. He alleges that the roots of many big trees are surprisingly shallow, with most of them within a couple of feet or so of the surface. Perhaps that is where most of the grub is.
Some trees will evolve very slowly compared with small animals. They might live for a long time, they might reproduce vegetatively and only reproduce sexually rarely, if at all. So evolution is going to proceed at a very leisurely pace.
He is clearly very fond of Hayley Wood in Cambridgeshire, a place turned over to the naturalists when I was a child and which we used to visit occasionally on Sundays. At that time, before nature had been properly invented, we usually had the place to ourselves.
Hazel seems to have been a very important tree in the past. Which makes me wonder what a big hazel tree would look like? Do they get big? I have only seem them up to maybe 12 feet high, and then, only because of careful pruning of the many shootings from the stool. The biggest in our garden is maybe 8 feet high, having been cut to the ground some 5-10 years ago.
A red herring was the notion, introduced by the BH when she was turning the pages, that the word conifer comes from conys or rabbits, via the tendency of pine trees to grow on abandoned rabbit warrens, which had a tendency to be located on sandy ground which was too dry for broadleaved trees. OED suggests that this is twaddle, with conifer being derived in a much simpler way from cone. Failed to track down this herring through the index, which seemed to be fairly inaccurate.
Which brings me onto the quality of the book as a whole, marred to my mind by poor book design. Quite a fat book at getting on for 500 pages. Four fat clumps of photographic illustrations arranged evenly through it. But with the illustrations being detached from the relevant text so one does not get much value from them, despite their quality and interest. The thing would have done better in a larger format with pictures integrated into the text, after the fashion, say, of a Thames & Hudson picture book. The tables have all been relegated to the back of the book, so again, one does not get much value from them.
Then while Rackham is clearly immensely knowledgeable about woods and trees, his narrative ranges far and wide. Leaving me with the impression that it must be full of all kinds of errors. One person cannot be that accurate or balanced over such a broad field.
And the book is a bit disorganised and repetitive. So, all in all, an almost endeavour. There is so much here, but which would have so much benefited from a stronger grip. Perhaps a younger collaborator or a stronger editor. But maybe this past master of Corpus Christi is far too big a cheese to get a grip on. So he was allowed to go his own way.
Friday, January 08, 2010
24 hours
24 hours and 4 dispirin later that is. I had forgotten how you can take a bang, think you are OK and get home OK, only to be overtaken by all kinds of aches and pains later. But, hopefully, over the worst.
Decided against popping down to the A&E for a wash and brush up just in case. Would have been a bit of a problem getting there and would probably have been a bit of a problem being seen. I dare say, almost up to Saturday night closing time standards. Then one would have had to put up with been told what a prat one had been by all and sundry. Alternatively, some locum from Zindankovska explaining that cold weather was a jolly good thing as it generated lots of extra work at double time for the likes of him. Instead of that, FIl and BH gathered up 11 preparations for use in cases of bruising and presented them to me in a plastic tub. If I get tired of reading all the boxes, they do have some more salted away. I am also becoming better acquainted with a substantial bent wood walking stick which we acquired from some car boot sale on the off chance. Got to pondering about what it was made of. Light and fast growing which brings ash, beech, chestnut and hazel to mind. Not ash as the knots are not arranged in anything like opposite pairs. Grain not right and weight not right for beech. No idea what chestnut looks like in this state so I plump for hazel. Try asking Mr G. and all he can suggest is cane and hickory, both aliens so doubtful in this case.
But have learned a little humility. That while it might not have happened on a good day, it might easily have been a lot worse. That it does not take much from being a free-standing person to a high-dependency person. So no more taking chances on ice and maybe a bit more understanding of those with mobility problems.
So not in the best position to throw stones today, but was amused nonetheless to learn that Ms Harman, that doughty publisher of rules for all and sundry, is said by the DT to have been using her mobile phone while trying to extract her car from its parking slot. The charge on that front dropped as part of a plea bargain.
Interesting puzzle yesterday, while dozing. I had the snippet of a dream in which there was a senior moment. That is to say I put the butter in the oven instead of the refrigerator or some such. The puzzle being, was the dream just replaying some senior moment which actually happened in the past, or was it a dream state senior moment. That in the dream I was holding the butter, confronted by oven and refrigerator and the dream made the wrong choice and with the dream knowing shortly afterwards that this was a mistake. How can I discriminate between the two options?
And then, while reading the opening pages of 'Boule de Suif', came across the word flannel which the footnote tells me means red tabs, the sort of thing a colonel might wear. Turn to Littre which tells me that flannel is a species of woollen cloth but also that the word is used in a derogatory sense, just as we do in English. As least we used to in the civil service. This or that was a load of old flannel. Turn to OED which starts to suggest that the word was of Welsh origin as they have been making the stuff there for hundreds of years but then backs off. Quite right too as a Welsh origin does not fit to well with the French having the same word. But no mention of old flannel or red tabs. I suspect that this word for red tabs is slang and derogatory, and so related to our usage old flannel.
Getting bored with that, open up Powicke on Henry III and the Lord Edward again, where I read that in the middle of the 13th century, Henry and his cronies thought it was much more fun to bang around the south west corner of what is now France, fighting battles, besieging castles, spending huge amounts of treasure while in no way stopping the tide of the King of France reaching the Pyrenees, at a time when for a fraction of that treasure he could have conquered Ireland properly, in which case it would have become a proper part of the British Isles, like Wales, rather than a running sore. I suppose fighting in the bogs was all a bit naff. Much more fun to do it with all your friends and relatives, who know how to fight according to the rules, down in the Gascon sun. No sense of his strategic interest at all.
Also that marrying for love was a bit unusual for the aristos. of the day. Everything had to be subordinated to property interests, an important part of which was the castles aforementioned. And it was quite OK for reluctant brides to be seriously encouraged (to consent) by the two families concerned. But in the Ireland of the day they went one better. It was OK to use force. Presumably their faith in the sacrament of marriage was such that once you said the words the deed was done, rather like saying the words of a spell. Consent was irrelevant. Alternatively, consummation might have been the thing. Consent of parents, contract of marriage signed, marriage consummated and the job was done. Contract fully binding in the king's courts, with the priests not getting a look in. Plus, if you took out the insurance option, the king undertook to supply up to 67 knights for up to 67 days each, including horses, fodder, servants, armagnac at discretion and other rations, to enforce the contract, should any of the parties sustain complaint of breach. Copy of the contract held in escrow by the Knights Templar, just in case.
All this having previously read of a rather more benign example of forcing the hand, a proceeding which meant that the father could honourably avoid paying a marriage portion. If your chosen son-in-law kidnapped your daughter: it both showed that he was a man and absolved you from paying him to take her away. A nifty way of avoiding crippling marriage portion contests; but one which presumably only works very well when the daughter in question is desirable.
Friday, June 08, 2012
Its that senior moment time again
I had been almost free of senior moments in recent weeks, at least the sort that one notices, perhaps because of the change to my diet, with much lower intake of alcohol and vegetable fibre. Then over the last couple of days, three of the things.
The first took place in the extension, a place where I quite often go, either to place a full memory stick in its place or a washed wine glass in its. On this occasion, for the first time ever, I made a serious attempt to put a wine glass in the memory stick place, to the point where it had more or less got there before the brain went into reverse. This is the sort of thing that used to happen quite often in the kitchen, but never before in the extension. The second took place while I was consuming email, this particular email containing the word 'drs'. The brain locked onto the notion that drs was initials for either somebody or something, perhaps digital resource system, which used to be sold to government by the company formerly known as ICL, with the result that I completely failed to work out that it was simply an abbreviation for 'doctors'. And even when this had been explained to me, it still took a few moments to work out what exactly was going on. The third was a visual error. I was looking out over the back garden, admiring the wind in the left hand hazel nut tree. I looked away, thinking about something else, then looked back to find that a lot of the leaves on the tree had taken on a very pale hue. Was this some trick of the dawn light? After about a minute or so I realised I had locked onto a shrub near the hazel tree: the front end of the sight system had shifted from one tree to another while the back end had stayed put. Most odd.
I can also report the demise of the last three inches of pink sausage. Following the macaroni of on or about May 30th, went for an upgrade yesterday and replaced the dried basil by fresh basil plus diced pink sausage. Let the whole lot stand for a few minutes while the pink sausage warms through - no need to actually cook the stuff again - and serve. Very good it was too. I learned that fresh basil - which I had not cooked with before - smells rather like fresh mint. Also that it is not just gluten free macaroni which soaks up lots of heat. Even the ordinary stuff must have a very high specific heat as one has to have the heat turned well up to keep the ambient water boiling, far higher than one would for say for a similar quantity of rice or crinkly cabbage.
And then there are the tales from the kindle. I was finding the rather tatty formatting for kindle that comes for free from the Gutenburg people (http://www.gutenberg.org/) rather irritating, the particular case being 'Ivanhoe'. Furthermore, it had been alleged that if you buy a real kindle book things are not that much better, so I resolved on a further test and actually bought a kindle book, selected from the fiction pages of the TLS ('The Flame Alphabet' by Ben Marcus) and bought with a single click from Amazon. Well, one click after I had fought my way through the new-to-me search in the kindle part of Amazon which is quite different from the search in the other part, which I am used too. So far, in addition to the text itself, I have discovered a table of contents from which one can jump to a selected position in the book. So Amazon are doing something to adapt a book for a kindle. Maybe there will be other wheezes which my first foray did not come across.
All an expense of course. Presumably publishers are well on top of turning a word processor manuscript into a decent looking paper book but are only just starting out on the business of turning such a manuscript into as decent looking kindle book - a business which my admittedly limited experience with desk top publishing packages suggests might take a while.
The first took place in the extension, a place where I quite often go, either to place a full memory stick in its place or a washed wine glass in its. On this occasion, for the first time ever, I made a serious attempt to put a wine glass in the memory stick place, to the point where it had more or less got there before the brain went into reverse. This is the sort of thing that used to happen quite often in the kitchen, but never before in the extension. The second took place while I was consuming email, this particular email containing the word 'drs'. The brain locked onto the notion that drs was initials for either somebody or something, perhaps digital resource system, which used to be sold to government by the company formerly known as ICL, with the result that I completely failed to work out that it was simply an abbreviation for 'doctors'. And even when this had been explained to me, it still took a few moments to work out what exactly was going on. The third was a visual error. I was looking out over the back garden, admiring the wind in the left hand hazel nut tree. I looked away, thinking about something else, then looked back to find that a lot of the leaves on the tree had taken on a very pale hue. Was this some trick of the dawn light? After about a minute or so I realised I had locked onto a shrub near the hazel tree: the front end of the sight system had shifted from one tree to another while the back end had stayed put. Most odd.
I can also report the demise of the last three inches of pink sausage. Following the macaroni of on or about May 30th, went for an upgrade yesterday and replaced the dried basil by fresh basil plus diced pink sausage. Let the whole lot stand for a few minutes while the pink sausage warms through - no need to actually cook the stuff again - and serve. Very good it was too. I learned that fresh basil - which I had not cooked with before - smells rather like fresh mint. Also that it is not just gluten free macaroni which soaks up lots of heat. Even the ordinary stuff must have a very high specific heat as one has to have the heat turned well up to keep the ambient water boiling, far higher than one would for say for a similar quantity of rice or crinkly cabbage.
And then there are the tales from the kindle. I was finding the rather tatty formatting for kindle that comes for free from the Gutenburg people (http://www.gutenberg.org/) rather irritating, the particular case being 'Ivanhoe'. Furthermore, it had been alleged that if you buy a real kindle book things are not that much better, so I resolved on a further test and actually bought a kindle book, selected from the fiction pages of the TLS ('The Flame Alphabet' by Ben Marcus) and bought with a single click from Amazon. Well, one click after I had fought my way through the new-to-me search in the kindle part of Amazon which is quite different from the search in the other part, which I am used too. So far, in addition to the text itself, I have discovered a table of contents from which one can jump to a selected position in the book. So Amazon are doing something to adapt a book for a kindle. Maybe there will be other wheezes which my first foray did not come across.
All an expense of course. Presumably publishers are well on top of turning a word processor manuscript into a decent looking paper book but are only just starting out on the business of turning such a manuscript into as decent looking kindle book - a business which my admittedly limited experience with desk top publishing packages suggests might take a while.
Monday, September 05, 2011
Litter
Some months ago I had ambitions to become the honorary litter picker (unpaid) for our road and asked the hardware shop at Cheam if he could get me one. The thing arrived the following morning and I stumped up the £10 odd required. Later that day, FIL and I march up and down our road, picking up litter with it, achieving about a bucket full of the stuff in about an hour, wondering at times about the propriety of picking up litter from peoples' front verges or front drives. Might they think us a touch busy? As it turned out, we have not been moved to repeat the activity.
Instead of that, the litter picker does occasional service getting things up and down from the garage roof. Lots of bolts (for heavy things) and nails (for light things) in the rafters.
Until Saturday that is, when FIL loses his hearing aid while out on a walk. Or at least he thinks he has; lots of other places where it might have got to. A gadget which is both small and expensive: I imagine lots of them get lost, which is a bit of a pain for all concerned. So we go over the walk twice, about half of it on woodland paths on the fringe of Epsom Common. So there we are, walking very slowly down the road, eyes down, looking for small pink object. A couple of hours of which was surprisingly tiring: focussed vision must burn up a fair amount of brain power (I think that, depending on brain size and quality relative to the rest of it, brain power is about a third of the total. Vision maybe a third of that again? Think how much heat is generated inside a PC and that has a very small fraction of the computational capacity of a brain).
We do not find the hearing aid, but we do find that while there was not much large litter on the route in question, there was an interesting array of small litter. Filter tips from cigarettes probably the most common single item, although I did not notice either lighters or matches to go with them. Sweet wrappers. Popper packs for pills. Various biros and parts of biros. A small number of nuts, bolts, screws and nails. Various odd bit of metalwork. A small number of bottle tops. An even smaller number of plastic bottles. No glass bottles, although there was the odd small piece of glass from a bottle. One contraceptive. Lots of slugs: black, brown, short, long and fat. Some with horns out, some without. Some with visible spiracles, some without. Much smaller number of small snails, almost all of them having black and white shells and lurking under one particular hedge. Much evidence of dog life despite it being one of those areas where you are supposed to clear up after them.
A passing lady suggested that with school about to start, there was always a chance that some nosey child would light upon the thing. A notice offering a reward might encourage same. So, taking full advantage of our sophisticated home technology, we now have two notices, one strapped to a telegraph pole and one strapped to a lamp standard, advertising our loss and offering an unspecified reward. I shall be very surprised if anything comes of them.
Slightly more relaxed jaunt around Horton Country Park this morning, inspecting the harvest scene. Blackberries more or less done, but not in the market for them. Plenty of sloes, but not in the market for them either. Plenty of hazel bushes of various sizes, but very few hazels. There was little hazel debris on the ground so my bet is that there were few nuts on these bushes this year, rather than my having been preceded to the field by squirrel or human rival. Maybe they only bear every other year or so. Maybe these bushes were shaded out by the oak trees, at least in so far as bearing nuts is concerned. Maybe there was not the right mixture of male and female plants - although saying that I do not know whether hazels are self fertile. Lots of fruit trees are not, but then they are not nut trees.
Net result was that I was just about able to fill my pockets up. Somewhere between a pound and two pounds of the things.
But I did come across a clump of aspen trees. Somewhere else to go to admire the trembling. See May 7th.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Joyeux Noël!
Not that this screen thinks so. Had a bad attack of the flickers this morning before settling down. No doubt telling me to get my wallet out of its hiding place and move on from cathode ray.
We still have water, so, assuming it really was cold last night, the new water main house has done its job. No need to fork out for emergency plumbers from somewhere in eastern Europe. Or perhaps north Africa.
The lentil soup turned out pretty well with only a very modest number of dead flies floating to the surface (see 19th December). No where near enough to put one off the soup, to the point that there is now only a bit more than a pint left of the original gallon. But for the accompanying bread, a bit let down by what passes for a split tin white loaf from the in-store bakery at our local Waitrose. Might just as well have been one of the much derided loaves of Mother's Pride which used to be delivered by the milkman: crumbly, stale tasting after just a day and nothing much like the product from Cheam, which remains icily inaccessible. At least for me.
The crumbly texture might also affect the stuffing for the festive chicken: the bread for the stuffing having gone down to bread crumbs rather than the more fluffy product you get from real bread. And having forgotten to get the nuts, reduced to using some left over mixed nuts, also from Waitrose. Some not very good hazel nuts - maybe three duds out of twenty nuts - supplemented by some almonds. One dud out of twenty there. It will be interesting to see what difference using almonds makes - something I have never done before. Nor have I ever done mixed nuts before, not believing in the melange of a melange of flavours which results. Palette can't cope.
Maybe next year we will get the vermin people in to get rid of the grey squirrels from our garden so that we can have proper hazel nuts from our own tree, rather than the elderly, kiln dried continental nuts one buys. Different animal altogether. But I suspect a fair amount of slaughter would be needed to get this result; even to the point where our squirrel hating neighbours cry foul, never mind the squirrel loving ones.
I mentioned the other day that I had actually bought a book that Amazon proposed to me - the winner of this years Goncourt, 'La Carte et le territoire', by one Michel Houellebecq - of whom I had not previously heard. And I am not much the wiser now as it does not seem to be the custom of Flammarion to include a potted biog. of the author, in the manner of an English book. But I think he might be a bit odd: the book seems to be about rather odd people - anti-heroes even - including the author himself. Can't remember when I last read a book which included the author as one of the characters, in the third person, in this explicit way.
It is also clearly designed for the Christmas market as not very joyous Christmas Days figure quite prominently. So part 2 (page 127) opened this real Christmas morning on a fictional Christmas morning. The French is not too hard and I am learning some interesting new words. For example, the word 'people' seems to be used somewhere in the personality, celebrity, fashion leader area. A people is the sort of person who might exhibit him or herself in a fashionable and expensive restaurant. The word functioning equally as either singular or plural. Rather harder to decipher was 'bourrelets'. First I find that bourre is the sort of fluff that is scraped off of furry animals like sheep and goats onto prickly bushes like gorse. Be extension the low grade fibre used to stuff mattresses and cushions. By extension, a particular sort of cushion in the form of a tyre or do-nut. By extension, the tyre like folds growing around the neck of a middle aged chef in a wannabee fashionable and expensive restaurant. I least that is where I have got to. Not completely convinced that I have got it right. But rather a splendid word if I have; better than we have in English.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
On holiday
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.
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.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Sanglier sarnies
Turkey is now resting in peace, barring about half a pint of soup.
We made the soup stock by boiling the carcase for a couple of hours together with some mainly left over vegetables. Left to cool overnight, brought to the boil again in the morning and strained. Got about 5 litres of stock of a creamy colour which set to a very flabby jelly. Reheat; add some potatoes and when they were done some white cabbage and the soup was done. Very good. Good strong flavour so clearly plenty of e-numbers but all entirely organic and home made.
The remains of the meat was made into what we call turkey pie. Boil some carrots. Cook some onions in the brown jelly from the roasting. Make the onions and jelly up into a roux with corn flour and make up to volume with some of the soup. Add some coarsely cut button mushrooms. Stir the whole lot together into a pyrex tub. Top with mashed potato, make air vent in centre (too tall for the pie funnel) and bake for an hour. Serve with cabbage. Need to talk to the house shopper as we are down to our last two cabbages. Might need to get some from the allotment.
Today we move onto to fish to give stomachs a break from recent assaults.
Been reading an interesting Christmas present about Iraq by one Peter W Galbraith. What has stuck so far, is that whatever one might think about the wisdom of Western efforts over recent years, Saddam Hussein was a very evil man. Let us hope that the world will be a better place without him. But the manner of his going niggles me. Why did he not go out in slightly better style, as did two of his sons (although they may not have been given the choice). In so far as someone like him has honour, is it more honourable to face the music in the form of a show trial or to go down fighting? Macbeth went for the latter. But some senior Nazis were faulted for their suicides, so leaving their subordinates to take the rap alone. Maybe Saddam Hussein was hoping right up until the end that he would cut some shabby deal or that he would be rescued. For I long time after he was caught, I thought that he had done a deal but it seems I was wrong.
Yesterday an excellent visit to Painshill Park - a large landscape garden put together by an 18C plant nut who may have been related to the Hamiltons of Nelson fame. Fell into disrepair but someone has done a very good job of rescuing it. The senile trees which can figure so strongly in old gardens are not too conspicuous. Started off over the suspension bridge over the Mole - the sort of thing they might put up in Cambridge. But they need to clean the white paintwork which is turning very green. Then into the walled garden where I started to think that we might have arrived at an educational experience. There were large outdoor instructive posters everywhere - not my bag at all. Half expecting worksheets and audio guides when we bought tickets from the trusties - who take great pride in being independant and not being national trusties. They also have a very tasteful shed to work in containing very tasteful souvenirs. I think they got a prize for it. That aside, the educational experience did not come to pass and the epidemic of posters largely faded as we got into the park proper.
Two more features. First, it contains the largest cedar of Lebanon in Europe with a height of 120 feet and a girth of thirty. Very impressive. Second, their deer fence was put up with posts at around 20 feet centres - a good deal further than the six feet centres that I had been thinking of. This would get us down from 25 posts to maybe 6 or 7 - a far more manageable numbers. So maybe we are back into fencing at the allotment after all.
Resumed normal duties there today. Now nearly finished the first dig but there is still plenty of ground to be cleaned around fruit trees, bushes and the other perennials without the benefit of protective screes. Took down this year's runner bean sticks - a mixture of hazel thinnings from Horton Country Park, an ornamental plum tree and a hazel tree from our house garden. Need to think about what to do with the half which still have some life in them. Some of them had acquired plaques of an intesting spongy black fungus which I had not seem before. Others - I think the plum sticks - had the red spot fungus.
Have now picnicked twice on wild boar salami from Italy, courtesy of Mr Selfridge. Excellent stuff but I am not sure that I would have known that it was not regular pig - or donkey for that matter. We having bought some of this last from Savoy last year.
The baker had made some rather splendid New Year loaves today - round flat affairs with modest decoration. Very attractive. Assuming they were for sale, I should have had one. And given that he described himself as being open for orders only, he had a lot of cakes. Cheam seemed very quiet at 1100 so I hope he got some custom. Must find out why he makes Chelsea buns so rarely.
Noticed that Nonsuch School for Girls appears to have been taken over by David Lloyd and that the front entrance of the school has acquired the vulgar display which graces endeavours of his sort when they are trying to drum up business. Not like a school at all but I suppose they are still allowed to do that provided they don't get in the way of paying customers.
The lego tower did indeed make it to the ceiling, in good enough condition to place a shark on a little platform just under the ceiling. But, to be fair, the last couple of feet was more by way of an aeriel than a structure. And I had to use a stressing cable (in the way of Greek triremes) to keep the whole thing up. Sadly, it did not survive a visitor's inspection - the thought being that the stressing cable was a crane which could be played with, so photographic evidence is missing. Better luck next year!
We made the soup stock by boiling the carcase for a couple of hours together with some mainly left over vegetables. Left to cool overnight, brought to the boil again in the morning and strained. Got about 5 litres of stock of a creamy colour which set to a very flabby jelly. Reheat; add some potatoes and when they were done some white cabbage and the soup was done. Very good. Good strong flavour so clearly plenty of e-numbers but all entirely organic and home made.
The remains of the meat was made into what we call turkey pie. Boil some carrots. Cook some onions in the brown jelly from the roasting. Make the onions and jelly up into a roux with corn flour and make up to volume with some of the soup. Add some coarsely cut button mushrooms. Stir the whole lot together into a pyrex tub. Top with mashed potato, make air vent in centre (too tall for the pie funnel) and bake for an hour. Serve with cabbage. Need to talk to the house shopper as we are down to our last two cabbages. Might need to get some from the allotment.
Today we move onto to fish to give stomachs a break from recent assaults.
Been reading an interesting Christmas present about Iraq by one Peter W Galbraith. What has stuck so far, is that whatever one might think about the wisdom of Western efforts over recent years, Saddam Hussein was a very evil man. Let us hope that the world will be a better place without him. But the manner of his going niggles me. Why did he not go out in slightly better style, as did two of his sons (although they may not have been given the choice). In so far as someone like him has honour, is it more honourable to face the music in the form of a show trial or to go down fighting? Macbeth went for the latter. But some senior Nazis were faulted for their suicides, so leaving their subordinates to take the rap alone. Maybe Saddam Hussein was hoping right up until the end that he would cut some shabby deal or that he would be rescued. For I long time after he was caught, I thought that he had done a deal but it seems I was wrong.
Yesterday an excellent visit to Painshill Park - a large landscape garden put together by an 18C plant nut who may have been related to the Hamiltons of Nelson fame. Fell into disrepair but someone has done a very good job of rescuing it. The senile trees which can figure so strongly in old gardens are not too conspicuous. Started off over the suspension bridge over the Mole - the sort of thing they might put up in Cambridge. But they need to clean the white paintwork which is turning very green. Then into the walled garden where I started to think that we might have arrived at an educational experience. There were large outdoor instructive posters everywhere - not my bag at all. Half expecting worksheets and audio guides when we bought tickets from the trusties - who take great pride in being independant and not being national trusties. They also have a very tasteful shed to work in containing very tasteful souvenirs. I think they got a prize for it. That aside, the educational experience did not come to pass and the epidemic of posters largely faded as we got into the park proper.
Two more features. First, it contains the largest cedar of Lebanon in Europe with a height of 120 feet and a girth of thirty. Very impressive. Second, their deer fence was put up with posts at around 20 feet centres - a good deal further than the six feet centres that I had been thinking of. This would get us down from 25 posts to maybe 6 or 7 - a far more manageable numbers. So maybe we are back into fencing at the allotment after all.
Resumed normal duties there today. Now nearly finished the first dig but there is still plenty of ground to be cleaned around fruit trees, bushes and the other perennials without the benefit of protective screes. Took down this year's runner bean sticks - a mixture of hazel thinnings from Horton Country Park, an ornamental plum tree and a hazel tree from our house garden. Need to think about what to do with the half which still have some life in them. Some of them had acquired plaques of an intesting spongy black fungus which I had not seem before. Others - I think the plum sticks - had the red spot fungus.
Have now picnicked twice on wild boar salami from Italy, courtesy of Mr Selfridge. Excellent stuff but I am not sure that I would have known that it was not regular pig - or donkey for that matter. We having bought some of this last from Savoy last year.
The baker had made some rather splendid New Year loaves today - round flat affairs with modest decoration. Very attractive. Assuming they were for sale, I should have had one. And given that he described himself as being open for orders only, he had a lot of cakes. Cheam seemed very quiet at 1100 so I hope he got some custom. Must find out why he makes Chelsea buns so rarely.
Noticed that Nonsuch School for Girls appears to have been taken over by David Lloyd and that the front entrance of the school has acquired the vulgar display which graces endeavours of his sort when they are trying to drum up business. Not like a school at all but I suppose they are still allowed to do that provided they don't get in the way of paying customers.
The lego tower did indeed make it to the ceiling, in good enough condition to place a shark on a little platform just under the ceiling. But, to be fair, the last couple of feet was more by way of an aeriel than a structure. And I had to use a stressing cable (in the way of Greek triremes) to keep the whole thing up. Sadly, it did not survive a visitor's inspection - the thought being that the stressing cable was a crane which could be played with, so photographic evidence is missing. Better luck next year!
Sunday, March 30, 2008
The two sees
In this case computers and capitalism. Generally thought to be a good thing but the combination of which can sometimes have unfortunate consequences. The beef this morning being the elaborate fare structures that some industries go in for - my electicity utility and mobile phones being the two in mind. On Saturday I got a letter from EDF offering me a fixed price tariff for next year - which appeared to be some 15% more than the current tariff. But the whole thing came with an elaborate package of premium rates, seasonal rates and nectar points, the overall effect of which was that I couldn't be bothered to wade through it all. Not too mention elaborate provision for notification of tariff changes and cancellation of contract being explained in small print somewhere. Now in the days before computers, a utility could not bother with all this stuff. Its antiquated billing systems would collapse under the weight of tariffs.
So bring back the days when there was just one electricity company which was, no doubt, a bit dossy, but it had one rate for selling electricity and which one could trust not to rip one off too much. At least not by making large profits or paying their senior managers a lot more than I ever got paid. And even if they did make a large profit they were a nationalised industry so that was just a form of tax and so that was OK too.
But a mild counter stroke comes to mind, in the form of a short piece, I think from the Evening Standard, from the days when there was an Evening Standard and an Evening News, about how the divisional directors of London Buses did themselves OK, in a very discrete way, with elaborate panelled dining rooms and chauffer driven rollers. I guess this is all swept away now in the days of SouthWest trains the bosses of which no doubt go in for buying small Carribean Islands and hob-nobbing with P&B's. Maybe a bit of discrete self-indulgence was the lesser sin. I suppose the rich have a bit of a quandary here. A main point of being rich is to be richer than the next chap. And this does not have nearly so much savour if you don't know that the next chap knows it. But this also excites envy which might have untoward consequences. So do you enjoy your riches in private and bask in the dim glow of public approval or do you go for celeb-ration?
Yesterday, force majeure, we went in for a slighly novel recipe for the sage and onion stuffing with which to stuff our virgin reared organic vegetarian chicken from darkest Wales. Possibly from a subsidiary of the Duchy Grocers, definately via Cheam. The problem being that we had no sage - at least no more than a teaspoon of dried and no fresh - and no hazel nuts. We were reduced to using dried marjoram (which did not seem to smell of anything much at all) and Brazil nuts. Quite eatable but not, I think, quite up to snuff. Chicken went down OK though and the bones having been boiled for soup are now en-route to the compost bin. This last being a two stage process: into the bucket under the sink. From there to the dustbin on the patio. From there to the compost bin. The trick being to remember to empty the dustbin before it gets too heavy.
Yesterday our back lawn was more or less water-logged, although short of standing water. Very squishy to walk on, as I discovered when I went looking for the aforementioned sage. So this morning, when I finally have a slot to get back onto the allotment, is the ground going to be good for anything? Still, at the very least, I can take the cabbage cages to peices.
And I am now ready for the slugs. Decided not to spend £50 with Geo. Kelly on copper strips, rather to recycle the reel of 5 amp cable that had found its way into my garage roof. Maybe 50 meters of the stuff. I discovered that you could rip the white outer cover off: a good pull and one did about 60cm. Given that I had taken on some alcohol during the day, quite sweaty by the time I finished this first phase. Then left with a red plastic strand, a black plastic strand and a copper. Neither red plastic nor black plastic seemed to rip off so I had to take it of with a knife. Slightly faster - per strand - than the white stuff. Peel off a segment of the red (or black) cover, rather like peeling a potato, and the cover pulls off as easy as pie. Maybe 120cm at a time. All done by 2000.
I think I shall use the cable twisted into three, as it has been put back on the reel. Then make the twists up into L-shaped lengths. Maybe a metre long with 10cm returns. These can then be assembled into thin rectangles guarding the rows of seeds, pegged down at two of the four corners.
50m metres of three strands gets into what looks like quite a tangle on the extension floor. But resisted the temptation to meddle and it all pulled out OK. Remembering the Boy Scouts' adage that the worst way to deal with a tangle is to try to untangle it. (There is a proper word for this sort of thing but I can't remember what it is. Something of classical flavour. Aphorism perhaps? Maybe it will come to me by the time I next post). Learning, by the end, that the earth strand was, over the 50m, about 30cm longer than the shorter of the live and nuetral strands. With the longer being about 15cm longer than the shorter. Was this some quirk of the way that the stuff is made or was it some quirk of the way that I wound the three coppers back onto the reel?
So bring back the days when there was just one electricity company which was, no doubt, a bit dossy, but it had one rate for selling electricity and which one could trust not to rip one off too much. At least not by making large profits or paying their senior managers a lot more than I ever got paid. And even if they did make a large profit they were a nationalised industry so that was just a form of tax and so that was OK too.
But a mild counter stroke comes to mind, in the form of a short piece, I think from the Evening Standard, from the days when there was an Evening Standard and an Evening News, about how the divisional directors of London Buses did themselves OK, in a very discrete way, with elaborate panelled dining rooms and chauffer driven rollers. I guess this is all swept away now in the days of SouthWest trains the bosses of which no doubt go in for buying small Carribean Islands and hob-nobbing with P&B's. Maybe a bit of discrete self-indulgence was the lesser sin. I suppose the rich have a bit of a quandary here. A main point of being rich is to be richer than the next chap. And this does not have nearly so much savour if you don't know that the next chap knows it. But this also excites envy which might have untoward consequences. So do you enjoy your riches in private and bask in the dim glow of public approval or do you go for celeb-ration?
Yesterday, force majeure, we went in for a slighly novel recipe for the sage and onion stuffing with which to stuff our virgin reared organic vegetarian chicken from darkest Wales. Possibly from a subsidiary of the Duchy Grocers, definately via Cheam. The problem being that we had no sage - at least no more than a teaspoon of dried and no fresh - and no hazel nuts. We were reduced to using dried marjoram (which did not seem to smell of anything much at all) and Brazil nuts. Quite eatable but not, I think, quite up to snuff. Chicken went down OK though and the bones having been boiled for soup are now en-route to the compost bin. This last being a two stage process: into the bucket under the sink. From there to the dustbin on the patio. From there to the compost bin. The trick being to remember to empty the dustbin before it gets too heavy.
Yesterday our back lawn was more or less water-logged, although short of standing water. Very squishy to walk on, as I discovered when I went looking for the aforementioned sage. So this morning, when I finally have a slot to get back onto the allotment, is the ground going to be good for anything? Still, at the very least, I can take the cabbage cages to peices.
And I am now ready for the slugs. Decided not to spend £50 with Geo. Kelly on copper strips, rather to recycle the reel of 5 amp cable that had found its way into my garage roof. Maybe 50 meters of the stuff. I discovered that you could rip the white outer cover off: a good pull and one did about 60cm. Given that I had taken on some alcohol during the day, quite sweaty by the time I finished this first phase. Then left with a red plastic strand, a black plastic strand and a copper. Neither red plastic nor black plastic seemed to rip off so I had to take it of with a knife. Slightly faster - per strand - than the white stuff. Peel off a segment of the red (or black) cover, rather like peeling a potato, and the cover pulls off as easy as pie. Maybe 120cm at a time. All done by 2000.
I think I shall use the cable twisted into three, as it has been put back on the reel. Then make the twists up into L-shaped lengths. Maybe a metre long with 10cm returns. These can then be assembled into thin rectangles guarding the rows of seeds, pegged down at two of the four corners.
50m metres of three strands gets into what looks like quite a tangle on the extension floor. But resisted the temptation to meddle and it all pulled out OK. Remembering the Boy Scouts' adage that the worst way to deal with a tangle is to try to untangle it. (There is a proper word for this sort of thing but I can't remember what it is. Something of classical flavour. Aphorism perhaps? Maybe it will come to me by the time I next post). Learning, by the end, that the earth strand was, over the 50m, about 30cm longer than the shorter of the live and nuetral strands. With the longer being about 15cm longer than the shorter. Was this some quirk of the way that the stuff is made or was it some quirk of the way that I wound the three coppers back onto the reel?
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Back to normal grub
Now restaurant grub is all very well, especially for BH who enjoys a bit of flummery and a bit less washing up, but it is good to get home to proper cooking after a week of it. So, on Sunday, happy woodland finished chicken from Mr S. for the princely sum of £4.99. Roast with external stuffing , external to avoid FIL gluten problems. Stuffing breadcrumbs (white bread, crust removed), fresh sage, fresh hazel nuts, black pepper, onion, celery, one egg and topped with low grade bacon. This last to provide a bit of fat. Excellent stuff. Not on the same planet as the stuffing served by Mr Paxo or in the Toby Carvery.
Second half of the chicken went for stew. Boil carcase with one large onion for two hours. Pummel occasionally with the potato masher to bring out the juices. Strain. Wash detritus with a small amount of water to extract a bit more juice. Reject detritus. Add four ounces of red lentils. Simmer for a while. Add five medium sized carrots, not peeled but thinly sliced. Simmer for a bit longer, remembering that it is important that the carrots should not be overcooked. Those who like them that way can use tins to save time. Meanwhile, gently fry two large chopped onions in the chicken fat held over from the roasting tin from Sunday. Prepare cold chicken. Prepare mushrooms. Blend the whole lot together and simmer for a few more minutes. Serve with spring cabbage and white rice. Turned out really well. And for some reason tasted of cocoanut. Option 1, there is some active ingredient in common. Option 2, lentils associate to subcontinental food which associates to cocoanut. Option 3, the sauce has very much the texture of that of one of those very mild curries containing cocoanut, so associate directly to cocoanut. Must consult the curry experts in Tooting.
Then, thinking of a Tooting Zimbabwean who had once demonstrated to me the clicking aspects of her native language, coming home the other night, thought I would give clicking a go. Most intrigued to find that one could click more or less continuously, with variations, while breathing both in and out. Now I believe it is possible to blow a wind instrument on this basis, and birds can do it because they can breathe round and round as well as in and out, but I don't see how one can sing without stopping to breathe. Although experiment suggests that one can make noises when breathing in, noises but not song. At least not yet. Presumably singing requires air to be moving over the vocal chords in an upwards direction, on the way out, so that we can hear it. Only the stomach gets to hear what you sing in the downwards direction.
Opening remark notwithstanding, it being a fine Autumn day yesterday, across Epsom Common for lunch at the Star. Not a bad bit of calves liver for boil in the bag (or however they do it). On the way back, very surprised to put up what looked like a buzzard. Never seen such a thing in these parts before. Was it one of those kites which are supposed to be getting more common? Then thought to get back without being irritated by the activities of the eco-vandals, but failed. Stumbled across two of their activities: charcoal and pasture preparation for cows. First thought, very odd how the eco-chain(saw)- gang is allowed to chop trees down wholesale, whereas me, should I have the temerity to want to chop down some middle aged oak tree in my own garden, an oak tree which I planted and which is now smashing the drains, shading the jigsaw table in the back room and taking light from my dahlias, I have to go cap in hand to these very same eco-vandals to get their permission. Very odd.
Second thought, perhaps most of what I want from Epsom Common is peace and tranquillity, untouched by the busy world. A place where it is not all hustle, bustle and activity. Or loud with the chatterings of fools. And so, more or less any purposeful activity is going to detract from that. Doesn't matter how worthy or well-intentioned. To take away from the more or less religious feel to the place. Religious in that one can get the same peace in a large empty church. Just sit there in this large quiet space, with a nice bit of masonic beauty around one for occasional distraction. Maybe a bit of singing in the background.
Freedom pass now turned up, some weeks late. Pipped at the post by some interesting literature from the NHS, triggered by the same birthday event, suggesting that I ought to indulge in a bit of preventative maintenance. But it all looked a bit gruesome and I binned it. Despite the fact that I understand them to fill you so full of Vallium while they do it that you don't care any more. Foolish but there we are.
Chrome threw a wobbly today. Took a reboot and some huffing and puffing to get it back onto the straight and narrow again. It - or something at least, nothing else open at the time - even managed to get in the way of the task manager.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Disaster strikes!
First, the PC freezes on my first attempt at this post. A freeze out of the blue, something which seems to happen about once a week or so. Hopefully not the tip of the iceberg, or, if it is, no more fearsome than an iceberg lettuce, thinking of the wet lettuce leaves weilded in ritual punishment at one of my former places of work. Second, we learn that, having not attended the last bank holiday car booter at Hook Road due to activities the evening precedent, the next bank holiday car booter, due on Monday, has been displaced by a festival of history. The site is already full of tents containing people getting ready to display hazel wand splitting, sheep shearing, forming squares (as in battles), pig roasts and numerous other wonders. So no chance of getting a bargain book.
A neighbouring site, normally used as a recycling point and the car park for Christ Church, is already lined with small caravans. But I think these are probably real travelling people, the sort that visit Epsom for the Derby, rather than people intent on demonstrating medieval cooking habits. A pity that their number includes some proportion of dirty and violent, the small number of very flashy caravans that turn up on Derby Day notwithstanding. No harm in travelling but it would be nice if they had a bit more civic spirit. I wonder if their numbers are going up or down? I would have thought that the attractions have much reduced over the last fifty years or so. There was more point when the world was more rural and there was generally more space but all seems a bit squalid now. And one might have thought that one would get fed up with being shunned.
Third, we have the disaster of the cabbage. Walking past a Portuguese grocer the other day, noticed some very fine cabbages in their out-front display. Large floppy, dark green things, maybe five inches across and ten inches high. Didn't appear to be hearty like the Portuguese pointy cabbage I have been buying in Cheam. Carefully stood up in a small amount of water in white polystyrene containers to keep them fresh. Buy two of the things for about £2.50. Get them all the way back to Wimbledon where I have to change trains and so visit the Prince of Wales where I manage to leave the things. Don't realise until I am nearly back at Epsom; far too far away and far too late to think of going back for them. But a shame to think of such fine cabbages being consigned to the dustbins of the Prince of Wales. Which is where I imagine they will have wound up, not all that many people being interested in other peoples' cabbages. And now I am puzzling about what sort of a tense 'will have wound up' is. It sounds right but I can't put a name to it. Some sort of future perfect perhaps?
But we made up for this culinary disaster with a culinary triumph at http://www.sreekrishna.co.uk/index2.html. Perhaps the third time I have visited the place in the thirty five years or so that it has been open. The food there was good, of a generally veggie tone. The clientele included some, although not many, who might have been, or whose families might have been, from the part of India in question. But the parathas were really good. And despite perusing a very flashy Indian food recipe site turned up by Mr G., it remains a complete puzzle how the things are made. Circular, about eight inches across and a quarter of an inch thick. Fluffy, in the way of a croissant, but a dull pale brown rather than a bright yellow brown. And they appear to have been made in a roll; the things might have been slices of some exotic swiss roll. Rather in the way that Chelsea Buns are made. And then there was the matter of cooking. Baked, boiled or what? Maybe simpler just to go back there and have theirs.
And then there is a threat. A couple of weeks ago I managed to completely confuse the smell of mint sauce with another common food - which one I forget. And today I managed to completely confuse the smell of boiling beetroot with asparagus. Is the nose giving out? Has the consumption of yeast based products smashed the linings of the nasal passages?
I close with a prohibition of yore, which I came across this afternoon and which just goes to show that the art of nannying is not that new. It seems that as late as the fifties, some public libraries were defacing those parts of the newspapers they had available for reference which contained information about betting. Starting prices and that sort of thing. Partly out of a strictly nanny concern that poor working people should not spend their time and money on betting, a concern possibly nurtured by the parents of those very same people who thought that the national lottery was an appropriate way to collect tax on the quiet. Partly out of a librarians' concern that their reading rooms might be swamped by smelly betters. I wonder if the libraries kept unexpurgated copies which you were allowed to read in a private reading room upon presenting two autograph references from responsible citizens? MPs, bankers, estate agents, that sort of thing. People commanding respect in the community and who could be trusted. On the same sort of basis that exotic porn can be consulted in the British Library or the Vatican Library.
A neighbouring site, normally used as a recycling point and the car park for Christ Church, is already lined with small caravans. But I think these are probably real travelling people, the sort that visit Epsom for the Derby, rather than people intent on demonstrating medieval cooking habits. A pity that their number includes some proportion of dirty and violent, the small number of very flashy caravans that turn up on Derby Day notwithstanding. No harm in travelling but it would be nice if they had a bit more civic spirit. I wonder if their numbers are going up or down? I would have thought that the attractions have much reduced over the last fifty years or so. There was more point when the world was more rural and there was generally more space but all seems a bit squalid now. And one might have thought that one would get fed up with being shunned.
Third, we have the disaster of the cabbage. Walking past a Portuguese grocer the other day, noticed some very fine cabbages in their out-front display. Large floppy, dark green things, maybe five inches across and ten inches high. Didn't appear to be hearty like the Portuguese pointy cabbage I have been buying in Cheam. Carefully stood up in a small amount of water in white polystyrene containers to keep them fresh. Buy two of the things for about £2.50. Get them all the way back to Wimbledon where I have to change trains and so visit the Prince of Wales where I manage to leave the things. Don't realise until I am nearly back at Epsom; far too far away and far too late to think of going back for them. But a shame to think of such fine cabbages being consigned to the dustbins of the Prince of Wales. Which is where I imagine they will have wound up, not all that many people being interested in other peoples' cabbages. And now I am puzzling about what sort of a tense 'will have wound up' is. It sounds right but I can't put a name to it. Some sort of future perfect perhaps?
But we made up for this culinary disaster with a culinary triumph at http://www.sreekrishna.co.uk/index2.html. Perhaps the third time I have visited the place in the thirty five years or so that it has been open. The food there was good, of a generally veggie tone. The clientele included some, although not many, who might have been, or whose families might have been, from the part of India in question. But the parathas were really good. And despite perusing a very flashy Indian food recipe site turned up by Mr G., it remains a complete puzzle how the things are made. Circular, about eight inches across and a quarter of an inch thick. Fluffy, in the way of a croissant, but a dull pale brown rather than a bright yellow brown. And they appear to have been made in a roll; the things might have been slices of some exotic swiss roll. Rather in the way that Chelsea Buns are made. And then there was the matter of cooking. Baked, boiled or what? Maybe simpler just to go back there and have theirs.
And then there is a threat. A couple of weeks ago I managed to completely confuse the smell of mint sauce with another common food - which one I forget. And today I managed to completely confuse the smell of boiling beetroot with asparagus. Is the nose giving out? Has the consumption of yeast based products smashed the linings of the nasal passages?
I close with a prohibition of yore, which I came across this afternoon and which just goes to show that the art of nannying is not that new. It seems that as late as the fifties, some public libraries were defacing those parts of the newspapers they had available for reference which contained information about betting. Starting prices and that sort of thing. Partly out of a strictly nanny concern that poor working people should not spend their time and money on betting, a concern possibly nurtured by the parents of those very same people who thought that the national lottery was an appropriate way to collect tax on the quiet. Partly out of a librarians' concern that their reading rooms might be swamped by smelly betters. I wonder if the libraries kept unexpurgated copies which you were allowed to read in a private reading room upon presenting two autograph references from responsible citizens? MPs, bankers, estate agents, that sort of thing. People commanding respect in the community and who could be trusted. On the same sort of basis that exotic porn can be consulted in the British Library or the Vatican Library.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
More tweeting affairs
A day or so ago, was amused by the sight of a green woodpecker jumping down a tree. A most ungainly activity which reminded me rather of my attempts, many years ago, at abseiling in mid Wales. Woodpeckers do it much better going up. And then yesterday, BH tells me that a couple of them were at it on the lawn, right outside the back extension window, which given that the back garden rises away from the house, means that she had a grand-stand view. Much billing and cooing and marching backwards and forwards. Hunting for ants together. Regular - and regularly consumated - courtship performance.
She had the leisure to observe this sort of thing as I had been elected cook of the day. To celebrate, I indulged in a some variations. First course was a very large chicken - which the three of us managed to eat less than half of and which had cost just under a fiver from Mr S.. About the same as a lamb chop from Cheam. So the first variation was the use of brazil nuts in the stuffing, cooked externally in a white enamel pie dish on account of gluten free requirements on the chicken itself. Not having hazel nuts very often we usually use walnuts. I had thought that brazil nuts would be too hard and smash into powder rather than lumps but they were OK, despite the loss of fun-factor arising from use of ready shelled rather than entire nuts. Shelling your own better. Stuffing otherwise normal with bread crumbs, onion, celery, black pepper (bashed not ground) and egg. Covered with a few rashers of bacon to keep it damp. Plus a few knobs of dripping. Never much liked that fancy stuff involving meat or chestnuts.
Second variation was cooking a second course, something I do not recall having done for a very long time. Opted for the straightforward treacle tart, which must be about as calorific as Mars Bars. 6 ounces of short crust pastry, made with lard and self raising flour - despite BH's claim that one only used plain flour for such things. Whitworth's ancient cookbook ruled on this occasion; the claim that it better to follow the recipe when in unfamiliar territory being convenient on this occasion. Filling made with two ounces of whole loaf bread crumbs (admitting to use of blender to speed up the crumbing process, slow when we are talking whole loaf otherwise), one ounce of porriage and a lot of golden syrup. Despite which, still a rather stiff mixture to spoon into the tart base. Wound up with a slightly more rough cast finish than that achieved by the BH. Loosened up with a little custard made from a tin called Bird and which involved another dollop of sugar. Concession to slimming took the form of semi skimmed milk. The two of us allowed gluten managed two thirds of it at the first sitting. FIL had something else.
DT now into day 19 of the affair of the expenses, the whole business having occupied a huge number of pages. Fair enough, I suppose. If the team is on expenses it is not on man bite dog. Or man push wannabe but faint-hearted suicide off bridge. I wonder what it has done for its circulation? In the meantime, I am starting to think that some good might have been done by said right wing rag. Having taken their scalp as a consolation prize, MPs will be culled and the remainder might be prompted to give some thought as to their calling and to the behaviour proper to it. Maybe the House of Commons will actually start to do something other than preen itself and playing poodle - or perhaps fawn - to the executive?
She had the leisure to observe this sort of thing as I had been elected cook of the day. To celebrate, I indulged in a some variations. First course was a very large chicken - which the three of us managed to eat less than half of and which had cost just under a fiver from Mr S.. About the same as a lamb chop from Cheam. So the first variation was the use of brazil nuts in the stuffing, cooked externally in a white enamel pie dish on account of gluten free requirements on the chicken itself. Not having hazel nuts very often we usually use walnuts. I had thought that brazil nuts would be too hard and smash into powder rather than lumps but they were OK, despite the loss of fun-factor arising from use of ready shelled rather than entire nuts. Shelling your own better. Stuffing otherwise normal with bread crumbs, onion, celery, black pepper (bashed not ground) and egg. Covered with a few rashers of bacon to keep it damp. Plus a few knobs of dripping. Never much liked that fancy stuff involving meat or chestnuts.
Second variation was cooking a second course, something I do not recall having done for a very long time. Opted for the straightforward treacle tart, which must be about as calorific as Mars Bars. 6 ounces of short crust pastry, made with lard and self raising flour - despite BH's claim that one only used plain flour for such things. Whitworth's ancient cookbook ruled on this occasion; the claim that it better to follow the recipe when in unfamiliar territory being convenient on this occasion. Filling made with two ounces of whole loaf bread crumbs (admitting to use of blender to speed up the crumbing process, slow when we are talking whole loaf otherwise), one ounce of porriage and a lot of golden syrup. Despite which, still a rather stiff mixture to spoon into the tart base. Wound up with a slightly more rough cast finish than that achieved by the BH. Loosened up with a little custard made from a tin called Bird and which involved another dollop of sugar. Concession to slimming took the form of semi skimmed milk. The two of us allowed gluten managed two thirds of it at the first sitting. FIL had something else.
DT now into day 19 of the affair of the expenses, the whole business having occupied a huge number of pages. Fair enough, I suppose. If the team is on expenses it is not on man bite dog. Or man push wannabe but faint-hearted suicide off bridge. I wonder what it has done for its circulation? In the meantime, I am starting to think that some good might have been done by said right wing rag. Having taken their scalp as a consolation prize, MPs will be culled and the remainder might be prompted to give some thought as to their calling and to the behaviour proper to it. Maybe the House of Commons will actually start to do something other than preen itself and playing poodle - or perhaps fawn - to the executive?
Friday, September 02, 2011
Tourists
Leafing through the Mollison book (misspelt at August 23rd) yesterday, came across a boy who lived in the jungle in the Amazon somewhere. According to the note that came with him, his village made half their living from hunting & gathering. Proper Amazonian aborigine style. They made the other half of their living from charging people to come and peer at them. Supplement for taking moving pictures. Which made me think that there must be lots of people in the world doing this sort of thing.
Presumably in the US you have Indian villages run on the lines of Chessington World of Adventures. Or perhaps like Outward Bound: you pay them to pretend to be an Indian for a month or two. A lower grade version is those farms on our own celtic fringes which charge holiday makers for the privilege of making their hay for them.
I guess that aboriginal and untouched villages of aborigines in the world generally are as rare as aboriginal and untouched forests are in this part of the world. Rare to the point of non-existence. Which all goes to show that being an anthropologist is a very tricky trade; very hard to discern the aboriginal among all the clutter generated by interaction with the aliens.
Talking of forests, I have been reminded during the sloe harvest of the broad bean harvest in the days when I used to grow far too many broad beans (fava beans to aliens). Of the strange satisfaction to be got from poking around inside the forest of broad bean plants, spying out the pods of swelling broad beans. Very much the same as the satisfaction to be got from poking around inside sloe or hazel bushes. But not blackberries. The difference might be that blackberries mostly grow on the surface of the blackberry bushes, whereas sloes and hazels are often to be found hiding underneath.
The satisfaction might, in part at least, be genetic. We and our monkey forebears were gatherers of fruit and vegetables in the forests for a very long time - millions and millions of years - quite long enough for natural selection to work on the genes to reinforce features which were helpful in that department. Including here the sort of hand, eye and hand-eye coordination needed to be a good gatherer. And the positive feedback in the form of satisfaction to provide a bit of additional incentive.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
DTs
DT does it again. Now I imagine that 90% of its readership live in urban areas. And 90% of that 90% fancy that they have deep roots in the country and know all about country matters. So the DT translates this into the marketting position that bashing townies in favour of hard-working decent country folk will find favour with its readership and sell newspapers. They are probably quite right about this. (And I believe that the French go for country even more than we do. Perhaps because they have more of it). Now, farmers have decided that badgers are a bad thing and want to thin them out a bit. They too are probably quite right about this. But in their efforts to be supportive of anything that country folk might say, yesterday's DT alleged that the 500,000 or so deaths down to TB in this country from, say, 1850 to 1950 was down to the fact that there was TB in cows which was transmitted to us through their milk. But according to my (admittedly elderly) Chambers, only about 25% of TB was of the bovine variety, the other 75% being of the rather differant human strain. I would not have thought that a fact of this sort would have changed in the last 50 years or so, so the DT stands convicted, yet again, of rather overdoing things. (They might argue that the proportion of bovine TB is now much higher, but don't. And in any event, the fact that there is TB is cows no longer translates into TB in people, given pasteurisation and tubercular testing of milk). Which all goes to show that it is hard to be accurate and concise and that you should not believe everything you read. Chambers also tells me that that the earliest records of TB are Hindu and are maybe 7,000 years old.
Not being able to read everything you read, might push one towards a serious reviewing regime. Nothing gets published without the imprimatur of at least three respectable people. With the government keeping a register of respectable people - known as listed people (in contrast to listed buildings). With a whole agency devoted to its maintenance, with its associated tribe of directors general, directors and IT contractors. But I have seen an allegation that the Wikipedia no-review policy (or at least, review with a very light touch) has actually resulted in a higher standard of accuracy than prevails in the heavy review world of the Britannica. I wonder? It would cost a lot of time and effort to check such an allegation.
On Thursday to Hyde Park for a circumnavigation. First rate place with lots of interest, including lots of interesting plants, including lots of flowering trees. For example, we learn that pidgeons do not eat grapes but blackbirds will have a go. That the park is home to starlings, something we rarely see in our own garden. Also yet another thrush like bird. Fat, dark brown body with paler speckled belly, touch of red about the throat. Maybe a redstart.
We also came across some rather ill trees with rather odd bark, which I had never noticed before, making the base of the tree look as if it had been decorated with flat plaits of bark. And by coincidence I come across another one yesterday in the cemetary on Garratt Lane. Inspection of Polulin suggests that they might have been hornbeams, carpinus betulus, a member of the hazel family.
Various plantings of things which look very like foxgloves, some in flower, but which are not the sort of foxgloves you come across in the wild. Maybe some domesticated mutant.
A very discrete cluster of memorial boulders, dedicated by the Princess D from on high, to the various rocks and boulders in her life. At least that was what we thought, but the cluster was too discrete to be labelled, despite being a composed cluster. Nothing natural about it at all.
That forsythia was invented by one Mr Forsyth, sometime superintendant of the park. One could go on. But I shall hold my water for the next occasion.
Not being able to read everything you read, might push one towards a serious reviewing regime. Nothing gets published without the imprimatur of at least three respectable people. With the government keeping a register of respectable people - known as listed people (in contrast to listed buildings). With a whole agency devoted to its maintenance, with its associated tribe of directors general, directors and IT contractors. But I have seen an allegation that the Wikipedia no-review policy (or at least, review with a very light touch) has actually resulted in a higher standard of accuracy than prevails in the heavy review world of the Britannica. I wonder? It would cost a lot of time and effort to check such an allegation.
On Thursday to Hyde Park for a circumnavigation. First rate place with lots of interest, including lots of interesting plants, including lots of flowering trees. For example, we learn that pidgeons do not eat grapes but blackbirds will have a go. That the park is home to starlings, something we rarely see in our own garden. Also yet another thrush like bird. Fat, dark brown body with paler speckled belly, touch of red about the throat. Maybe a redstart.
We also came across some rather ill trees with rather odd bark, which I had never noticed before, making the base of the tree look as if it had been decorated with flat plaits of bark. And by coincidence I come across another one yesterday in the cemetary on Garratt Lane. Inspection of Polulin suggests that they might have been hornbeams, carpinus betulus, a member of the hazel family.
Various plantings of things which look very like foxgloves, some in flower, but which are not the sort of foxgloves you come across in the wild. Maybe some domesticated mutant.
A very discrete cluster of memorial boulders, dedicated by the Princess D from on high, to the various rocks and boulders in her life. At least that was what we thought, but the cluster was too discrete to be labelled, despite being a composed cluster. Nothing natural about it at all.
That forsythia was invented by one Mr Forsyth, sometime superintendant of the park. One could go on. But I shall hold my water for the next occasion.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Kindle affairs
Now finished my first Kindle read - 'Women in Love'.Also this morning, passed two feet of US classics onto Oxfam via the skip at Kiln Lane Sainsbury's. Mark Twain, Henry James and Richard Dana. Plus the odd extra like 'Tom Jones'. So I can now rest easy in the knowledge that should I ever be moved to read any of this stuff again, it is there at the click of a button. And maybe I will; availability at odd times and places might prompt consumption. Almost anything is better than television in hotel rooms or drinking alone in hotel bars.
On the way acquired a few extras which I didn't happen to have. So a book by Dana of which I had never heard and 'Moll Flanders' mentioned in this week's TLS.
A mention which stuck in the little grey cells because of the last sentence of the snippet illustrated, the product of a member of the SCR at the University of Kent. Little grey cells must be thinning out because I could not make head nor tail of it. I don't mind not making head nor tail of great chunks of Lawrence; its OK in that context. But in a serious weekly magazine its not OK.
The past few days have also seen the completion of the hazel nut harvest with a further 20lbs or so of rather small nuts from the thickets outside the entrance to Hook Road Arena. On the basis of a small sample, I think there will be nuts inside around half of the nuts; so just about worth picking and shelling. Presently drying out in the garage. And I am washing some sticky black stuff off of my hands. The nuts look clean enough but they must have traces of syrup of some sort on them: by products of the nut growing & feeding systems? Systems quite unlike those of, for example, apples, with the attachment between the nut and the nut case being a specialised transfer surface occupying a good part of the lower part of the nut.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Holes in the road amongst other matters
From time to time I have a pop about the shortcomings of our local councils, so I thought it proper to record the fact that the worst hole in the road that I know about is on private property, in the alley off East Street leading to the car park which serves the Majestic and Staples outlets there. This large hole has been there for as long as I can remember and is not something to attempt to cycle over. I wonder what duty they - Majestic and Staples in this case -have - if any - to keep their customer car parks and access to them in reasonable nic.
Having got that off my chest, the first thing of import today was a dream about being slated to appear in a duel. The duel was to be held in a rather small room and while waiting there while a bit of space was made, I rapidly lost my nerve. Apart from anything else the hilt of my sword no longer seemed to fit my hand and in any event was longer attached to the blade. My opponent looked very calm and collected. Plus he was a good bit younger than me. No-one that I knew. Perhaps it is as well for my pride that I woke up before the point of no return; I don't think I am made of the same stuff of all those chaps who got themselves killed by professional duellists rather than lose face.
Then, after I had woken up a bit, BH told me that she had found some nuts on our lawn, underneath our nut tree. I wondered why she was picking them up as I have only ever seen them with small holes in the side where the grey squirrel which knocked the things off has checked that there was nothing inside. On this occasion, no small holes in the side but there were some small nuts inside. So, somewhat later, passing the clump of hazel bushes outside the main entrance to Hook Road Arena, notwithstanding my remarks of 8th August, I thought I would try picking a handful, from the quite reasonable crop there. They were quite small but they were starting to turn brown. We opened them up after lunch today to find quite reasonable nuts inside. A little damp for my taste but if one kept them that would soon go. Shall we leave them as long as a week?
All credit to the council for thinking to plant such things. An interesting experiment in urban nuciculture.
We then moved onto the day's post which included an important communication from an outfit called 'Life Line Screening', a communication which was so important that they had got their computer to address the letter in something like the handwriting of an old person so that we would know not to drop the thing straight in the bin. But while each character was suitably old-style, to the point of illegibility, each instance of any one letter was the same, something of a give away. As was the ink with which the address was written being very like the ink with which the accompanying bar code was written. In case we needed further encouragement, the screening was to take place in that well known watering hole, the British Legion Club in the bit of West Street running up towards Rosebank. This bit of today's post has now passed on, through our shredder on its way to the compost bin.
I close with a suggestion for the powers that be. They should investigate the possibility of turning mobile phones and other such devices off in areas where there is trouble. A cheap option would be to have jamming devices installed on the top of police landrovers (see http://www.landrover.com). The sort of thing that you used to be able to buy in Tottenham Court Road. A smart option, but one which I would think could be organised in a week or two, would be to turn them off after they have been picked up by an aerial. Maybe one could be quite picky about exactly what area was to be blacked out. Maybe good phones could be excluded from the blackout. Maybe one could target particularly bad phones.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Dream time continued
This morning, in New York, or at least a version of New York. Bound out of some conference to get the subway to the hotel. Now, in the small number of times I have visited the place, I have not got the hang of their subway. All terribly confusing compared with ours. In the dream, not helped by their idea of a tube map not coding lines by colour. Rather they were coded by symbol, in the way that Ordnance Survey maps code footpaths. So rather than a simple coloured line you get dash symbol dash symbol and so on. Where the symbol might be, for example, a solid diamond or a hollow square. An arrangement I found, in the dream that is, entirely inferior to our own.
Anyway, climb onto a subway car and sit down. Try to puzzle out what line I am on, where we are and which way we are going. After some time, work out that I am two stops from the wrong end of the right line. Leap off. Spot delapilated and dingy train on the other platform which will, presumably carry me back the other way. Rush through the underpass, up onto the other platform to find all the other passengers getting off. The guard being very officious and official. Something wrong with something or someplace. After a while everybody gets back on again. Me included. Just about manage to find a seat, now encumbered with no less than three brief cases and two umbrellas. Have great rouble keeping them out of peoples' way. Start conversations with all and sundry around me about the difficulty of understanding how their subway system works. At first people are patient and helpful but eventually give me up as a bad job.
Get off the train in a rather smart new and leafy suburban town centre. Hotel nearby. Go for walk with someone who got off the train who turns out to be a school teacher of Latin. I start boasting about how much time I spent on Latin as a child - an hour a day, five days a week for five years as I recall, but I would not be surprised to learn that I exaggerate. In any event, don't remember very much of it now. Latin teacher boils with envy at the seriousness with which his subject used to taken in the old country. Latin teacher morphs into someone completely different and we carry on walking. Start to think that I am getting a long way from the hotel. Wake up.
Wake up to read all about the travails of parking in Exminster, Devon. It seems that cuddly Devon villages have just as much angst about parking as we do in Epsom. All kinds of problems. All kinds of interesting solutions. The big bad lorries from Tesco's being part of the problem. All those ladies taking their sprogs to school in great big GPV's being another part of the problem. But what they do seem to have going for them, is that the Parish Council is the fount of authority on such matters. And the Parish Council is close enough to its parishioners - they might even talk to them in the pub (Exminster still managing one such) - for them to be able to take their pulse properly. For there to be a real consultation. Everybody gets a say. More clearly democracy at work that what has to go on in larger places.
Which led me on to wonder how bad things would have to get with feral youth (the sort that terrorise special needs families to death on housing estates), before a quorum of adult males organise themselves and take them out. Maybe administer a bit of summary justice in the park. Not something to be attempted single handed these days, but I doubt if many gangs of feral youth would stand up to, say, ten men on a mission. If I leafleted our road on such a matter, would I muster 10? I rather suspect that I would. The problem would be to have enough energy to carry the thing through. To organise a meeting, to organise a posse, to procure and issue staves. Preferably the sort of things that boy scouts used to sport on parades, the size and shape of a broomstick but made of entire hazel. Heavy enough to crack heads and long enough to keep knives and bottles off, but not big enough to do serious damage. All this leaving aside the problem that if one was to administer summary justice in this way, one might get done for ABH on a minor if not worse. Conspiracy. Who knows. Much easier to lock the doors, hunker down and hope for the best; an easy option if one no longer has children at home who need to get out and about.
