Public Health Warning

I have just read that there has been an outbreak of the public art disease at Epsom Railway Station. It appears to be the result of an infection by the virus PAVsa14, first isolated by the Exeter Public Health Laboratory following the recent outbreak at Ilfracombe. A few days later, while still in a weakened condition, the station suffered the installation of some large and ugly public art by the University of Creation (http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/).

For once, the Home Office has done better. The decoration added to its new building (five or six years ago now) is not too bad at all - maybe the difference being that it calls it decoration rather than art.

Be alert! There may be someone near you planning to infest your visual field with something ugly or worse - and remember that not all the someones involved here have beards and not all of them mutter: some of them appear quite normal.

I ought also to record that the Sainsbury's Food Science Laboratory have failed to isolate the cause of the black fly disease in the admittedly small sample of red lentils which I submitted to them. Next time I get a good infestation I will bottle it up and send it to them with full details.

Jigsaw 1, series 2

Item 1: the first jigsaw of the new world. Item 2: jigsaw numbering seems to have come adrift. A total of 25 boxes while the last recorded is jigsaw 24 (October 19th in the other place). Bit of a fag to go through the record and sort it out. Maybe there should have been a spreadsheet?

So we have a management decision to move onto series 2 with this first jigsaw having once been sold under the trade mark of 'Good Companion', said to be the sixth of a series of six. This is my first puzzle from these people, but a quick peek at Google suggests that they were a serious player in the jigsaw scene in the 50's and 60's of the last century. See for example the list at http://www.mycollections.me.uk/jigsawcompanion.html - which does not, as it happens, include this particular one, probably rather more recent than those listed and certainly, at 500, the wrong number of pieces.

The most unusual feature of this jigsaw was the dust which came with it. Normally, jigsaw dust is fine and blue and is left behind when one breaks up the completed jigsaw for rebagging. The dust from this jigsaw was in the form of short curly fibres, up to perhaps a centimeter in length. Colour right but shape entirely wrong. Thinking about it, maybe the dust is a by product of the cutting process, with the cutter punching out very thin lines of card along the lines of cut. A cutter which does a bit more than cut through the material; it is taking a bit of the material with it.

That apart, a pleasant, easy going jigsaw, one which I was content to work at at a very relaxed pace. No pressure to finish this or that section by this or that time. Rather lackadaisical about it all, with little clear direction of attack, other than features like masts and boats - which were easy but which did not, as things turned out, greatly aid solution. Flashes in the pan.

Started with the edge. Then tried for the boat line, doing about half of it. Tried the red roof line and did about half of that. Did rather better on the white roof line and on the building underneath. Then moved onto the people. Then the mast, then the tree growing out of the edge of the pond.

Then the left hand slabbed path, with the waterline being harder than one might have thought. Some of the pieces needed did not stand out of the heap at all. Having been filling in here and there as I went along, this left a couple of islands in the top half of the picture and the watery swans occupying the bottom right. This last turned out to be quite easy, with good colour & texture coding of the water between and around the swans.

One mistake in the edge turned up while completing the puzzle, with the cygnet to the right of the image being placed two pieces further down the puzzle than it should have been.

On a culinary note, I would like to record the first boiled chicken this household has seen since the days when one could buy boiling fowl from butchers. This chicken was a happy woodland reared bird from Lidl of Chessington and was boiled for an hour and a half along with onions, carrots and celery, the idea being to maximise production of health giving, gut friendly soup.

A little overcooked, so damaged during extraction from the boilpan, but when cold looked a lot more like a cold roast chicken than you might expect.

First outing was cold boiled chicken with hot mashed potato and warm white sauce. OK, but the texture of the chicken was a bit odd, a bit clingy in the mouth. Would have been quite hard going without the sauce.

Second outing was stirred into some lentil soup made with some of the liquor from the boiling. Not having butter, onion or bacon, the soup was a little bland but was entirely eatable. I might add in passing that the white bloomer sold by this Lidl and taken with this soup, while only a distant relation of the proper bloomers sold by proper bakers, was rather better than those sold by the mainline supermarkets.

Two muddles

The first muddle is entirely unforced, entirely avoidable. It seems that a Welsh pub keeper who discovered a body in his toilet at the start of a busy weekend thought it best to move the body to an upstairs bedroom for discovery after the busy weekend. The body involved is said to have died of alcoholic poisoning, so perhaps one of his regulars. The pub keeper has now been sent to prison for 15 months for perverting the course of justice or some such. Which seems completely disproportionate; hiding the body in this way was a stupid and crass thing to do, criminal even, but is it necessary to waste so much public treasure on the business? Don't we bang up quite enough people as it is? One can only suppose that the pub keeper's attitude must have really peed someone off, a someone in a position to get the book chucked at him. Complete failure to recognize that he sold the booze that killed the boozer when perhaps he should not have. Complete failure to eat lot of  humble pie from a position of weakness.

The second muddle is more complicated and arises from a desire to bash all those rich bankers who claim child benefit, a benefit which is presently cheap to administer because if you have a child you get the benefit. No pack drill about income or need. It was also handy in that it funneled money direct to the mother who might spend it on the child, rather than going through the father who was more likely to spend it on himself.

Lots of ink being spilled in the newspapers just presently about all the dreadful tax forms decent middle class folk are going to have to fill in in consequence of this change - although it also seems that if they simply elect not to bother with child benefit at all that they get let off. A nice illustration of the difficulty of both being fair and sensible at the same time - especially if you have the DT in red top clothes breathing down your neck. Will anybody come clean about what proportion of the benefit being saved is being gobbled up by increased costs - including here those of those of us filling up all these extra forms? Perhaps it will all get easier if they ever get universal benefit off the ground.

I hope that lots of said decent middle class folk will simply elect not to bother with child benefit. Benefit which is small compared with their income and which government could probably make better use of elsewhere. Depressing how few people in pubs seem to look at things in this sort of way. Even people who are otherwise intelligent, educated even.

The Fix

I have now had my first experience with morphine, at least the first one that I know about.

The natty contraption illustrated is about as complicated as, say, your average central heating controller, but with the additional complication of having a moving part, something which pushes the plunger of a large syringe by a set amount. The sort of something which used to be quite tricky to organise when I was a child; motors were either on or off and were not designed to work in steps. Maybe things get easier if you graduate from Meccano.

Anyway, the point of the thing is pain relief and when you press the (out of picture) button you get a shot of morphine sulphate - which either is or is dissolved in a clear liquid - and the machine both stops you having too much and keeps track of what you have had. But there were side effects.

The first was that although I get on trying to read my Trollope - either Framley Parsonage or Orley Farm, both fairly light fare - I found I was making no progress. I seemed to be able to read the words but they were not sinking in and I found myself reading the same few sentences over and over without any of it sinking in.

The next stage was that the screen on the Kindle started to go a bit funny. Instead of a flat matt screen, the thing acquired depth; a bit like peering into an aquarium. Pages were on what looked like windows opening into the Kindle. One was looking through the screen into some strange Kindle world or other.

This was no good so I put it away and tried shutting my eyes. When thoughts started to wander through the mind, rather in the way that they do ordinarily, but which were nonsense. Nonsense in the sense that the sense of a sentence like 'I will need some clean sheets to make the bed in the morning' depends on the fact that everybody knows that making beds commonly involves sheets. But in my case the sentence might have arrived as 'I will need some sheared sheep to the make the bed in the morning'. Complete garbage, and I knew it, without it having the virtue of being fun, titillating or otherwise pleasant. Luckily I must have fallen asleep soon after and by the time I woke up the effects of the stuff had worn off.

Presumably recreational users make some rather different arrangements.

Degraded

Following my post in the other place (http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/) of 24th March, I should now record that I have been cast out of the Ancient & English Order of the Bag. Due order and decorum require that the shrine illustrated should now be dismantled and BH is on the case. I watch afternoon telly, but, hopefully, will be up for something more demanding in a day or so. Maybe even a jigsaw?

A cull

Following yesterday's post, I have now selected two feet of Thackeray, Elliot, Dostoevsky and Turgenev for culling, a culling which leaves me no Thackeray, some Eliot, a little Dostoevsky and most of the Turgenev. First thought was that out of sight, they will be out of mind and never read again. Second thought was that the Dostoevsky had been in sight for years and had been rarely, if ever, looked at. Third thought was to buy the collected works of Conrad from Amazon for the princely sum of £1.92 to assuage guilt, a purchase which probably increases the chance that Conrad will get looked at. Increases from non zero I might add.

Collected works somewhat marred by the inclusion of illustrations which the kindle is not very good at; it should stick to the text which it is good at. But there is a table of contents, without which, finding the book which one wanted would be tiresome.

Next step is to divide the two feet into two piles: one pile which goes for waste paper and the other pile which Oxfam might glance at.