pumpkinstrokemarrow

Now finished the book by Barney White Spunner, noticed above (18 August). Good read, all the way to the end. Apart from being good history, it contains a good selection of factoids. For example, the subject of a lady's painting, posed above, was one Corporal Clay, a prize fighter, amateur model and hero of Waterloo. He took part in the famous charge of the heavy cavalry which finished off the charge of the French infantry - one of various necessary conditions for victory. Sadly he died of wounds in the mess that followed our cavalry's failing to stop and overunning. Interestingly, Spunner, a cavalryman, thinks that Wellington fought the battle in the wrong place and would have done better at Quatre Bras, partly because Wellington's battle map for Waterloo did not cover quite the right area. Even more interestingly, my other detailed account of the battle, in a bigraphy of Wellington by one Sir Herbet Maxwell, Bart., places much less emphasis on the charge of the heavy cavalry and makes something of the careful choice of Waterloo for a defensive battle, the position having first come to Wellington's notice the year before.

Another factoid was the finding, on the Household cavalry's return from the second war, a couple of old soldiers in the Knightsbridge barracks who had spent the entire war sharpening swords for the final push, on horseback, into Germany. And another was the capture by HCR of something which became known as 'Cavalry Bridge', exploiting a weakness in German staff work to break through their line, 'a turning point of the [1945] campaign in France'.

Back at Burke's peerage, was challenged to find the gentleman in Jane Austen for whom it was favourite reading. The result of this was that I learnt that I knew her novels a good deal less well than I thought. However, while I had thought he was in an interior, he was run to ground on page 1 of 'Persuasion', Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch-hall in Somersetshire. Burke's peerage is not referred to specifically, but there is a reference to the 'Baronetage' being his only reading, so I think I can claim the point. Sir Walter, however, is either a member of a fictitious Elliot family or an extinct Elliot family. The best Burke can do is an ancient Eliott baronetcy of Stobs, a Scottish rather than a Somerset family. Perhaps Jane did not take the baronetage as seriously as her creation.

And back in the kitchen, have found out a new cut-prive version of kedgeree. Take four ounces of cold, boiled white rice. Take twelve ounces of smoked haddock. Cook this last in a little butter and milk. Flake into the rice, return to the cleaned pan with a little more butter, heat through and serve. Very satisfactory - and without all the cholesterol in all those eggs that we would usually have used. Very handy for a quick breakfast dish.

DT gets off to a good start yesterday with the information that St Michael's Mount is under threat by rising sea levels. Page 3 lead. I found this quite alarming as Epsom is only a hundred feet or so above current sea levels. Calmed down when the small print explained that what they actually meant was that the causeway to the Mount may no longer be passable, even at low tide. Further in, there was a large picture of a tiger in a pond with duckweed, said to be desperate. Not at all clear why. Maybe their correspondant could smell the fear on the tiger - although this seems a bit unlikely as presumably the picture was lifted from some wire service to fill a bit of dead page. And then, a couple of days ago, we were told that the entire Best Western customer database had fallen into the hands of a hacker, with the clear implication that it was for onward sale to Al Quaeda. Today I get an email from Best Western (as someone who has patronised one of their establishments in the recent past. I rather like them) explaining that there was a security lapse (virus infestation) in one of their hotels in Germany, permitting access to details of ten people who had recently stayed at that establishment. They are working hard with the relevant regional, national and international authorities. And then a few days before that, the story of the old lady who was funding a rest home for her friends out of the proceeds of a thriller that she had just published at the age of 90 or something. Always wanted to be a writer. It turns out that the enterprising lady made use of the services of a vanity publisher, which is to say that she pays them rather than the other way around. It seems that several papers picked the thing up before the TLS blew the whistle, the TLS properly being more learned in the arcana of publishing than the DT.

Back to decorating yesterday. With the first coat of crushed apricot on two of the four extension walls. For some reason I could not get the name Cloudsey Shovell out of my mind while I was doing this. Checking afterwards in Chambers (a good source. And being published in 1956, entirely independant of Mr Google and other internentiles), I find that Sir Clowdisley Shovell was a notable naval warrior in the War of the Spanish Succession, drowned along with 2,000 odd others, off the Isles of Scilly when returning to base for R&R in 1707. I must have come across him in my recently acquired book about the Household Cavalry by Barney White-Spunner (vide supra). But quite failed to make this, or any other connection, while actually painting. The vapours from the crushed apricots must have got to me. Maybe I could get into business selling them as an illegal psychoactive substance?

Or maybe it was the cabbage soup. The day before the BH had firmly declined any further lentil soup. But circumstances conspired against her and I was allowed to make cabbage soup. Simmer six ounces of pearl barley with thin crosswise sliced celery for an hour or so. While this is going on cut half a pound of roast Polish bacon (vide supra) into centimetre cubes. Wash a goodly quantity of crinkly cabbage leaves. Cut each one down the middle of the tough central rib, then slice thin crosswise. Add cabbage and bacon to the pearl barley about ten minutes before the off. Add mushrooms about five minutes before the off. Unusual flavour but good. We did the whole lot, maybe half a gallon, in one sitting.

By way of conclusion I should correct the impression that I may have given that pies are rare in Devon, on the basis of recent experience in Exeter. There are pots of them in Dawlish. Provided you go before 1700 on Sunday (when lots of eateries seem to shut), no problem at all.

Have recently acquired some educational DVDs. The first cost £2 from a charity shop and was supposed to guide one through one's body. From the Dorking Kindersly stable. Looked like a snip until we found some small print which said Windows 95 only. And it resolutely refused to load in Windows XP - which I thought odd. My theory being that one can usually move up on the platform software but not usually down. We did manage to browse around the DVD and found various pictures and video clips of body parts - the standard of which, although moving and in colour, did not seem to be an advance on a tatty old nurse training paperback which happened to be at hand. So lots of gloss but not so much content. We also found 30 audio clips containing an enthusiastic male voice from the US congratulating one on getting a score from 1 to 30 in the quiz. In fact, the whole system seemed to be very fragmented, with lots and lots of files containing small bit maps of small bits of screen - presumably all to be assembled by the program which we could not run.

The second was rather dearer at £9.99 from a shop in Exeter called 'The Works'. Brain Training on three DVDs: starter edition, advanced edition and deluxe edition. Now these did work on Windows XP - although not out of the box. Loading up the CD resulted in a message about some component being missing. We then inspected the CD and found a readme file which said that one could load the missing component - the .NET framework - by hand, without being connected to the Internet. Which we then proceeded to do. But how many people would bother with that? I thought educational DVDs were supposed to be plug and play. And, in this case, the intended audience would not have had a clue. I was also reminded of my concern that it is getting harder for the amateur to run a PC which is not connected to the Internet. So much of the out of the box stuff assumes that one is. At worst things do not work and at best one gets irritating messages which one does not know how to disable.

Despite the full glory of the .NET framework, the product itself was surprisingly un-glossy. Quite backward looking really, often falling through to raw Windows message boxes. Very little attention paid to fonts and dialog box design (something that Microsoft, to their credit, take a good deal of trouble with). And, to my annoyance, find that BH has more brain power than myself - at least as measured by one of the ten or so tests offered. The three editions all looked much the same so it was hard to see where the value in buying all three was (if they didn't come as a collection, as our's did) - the only differance I could spot being the glossiness of the Soduku offered. This last having the advantage that one could turn the difficuly up and down so that one could feel good doing a puzzle a good deal easier than the moderate one on the back page of the DT. There is also the advantage that I can now abandon the stray thoughts I have had over the months of knocking up a Soduku game on Excel myself. Game support seemed manageable - if tedious to code - but, irritatingly, I had not managed to think up a way of generating puzzles.

The Works also offered a splendid book - down to £6.99 or so from £30 - about the horse guards by the appropriately named Barney White-Spunner. A very heavy book for its size with lots of good pictures and lots of odd factlets. So, for example, there was a passing fashion in the early 18th century to have black Life Guard trumpeters in yellow uniforms and mounted on grey horses. And that the Princess Royal was the second colonel of the guard to be portrayed in woman's dress. The first was some transvestite colonel, also from the early 18th century.

And then we find another shop in the same chain at Taunton, where I am able to pick up a recently published modern history of India, also, I think, favourably reviewed in the TLS, for £3.99 for getting on for three inches of book. As it happens, both books come from Macmillan - so where is the connection with the works? Or are Macmillan in trouble?

Talking of enthusiastic male voices, why is it that British television documentaries have to be delivered by bearded gentlemen from the north of Britain, manically shouting at the camera in some regional accent? Why is it thought inappropriate to talk in a more natural way? Why do we need such heavily accented mood music? Presumably the producers of these things know what they are doing, but as far as this viewer is concerned, the shouting is a complete turn off. I never watch the things.