More red book

Been having a bit of a feast of red books lately. First the Agatha, then the ogre and now another. This another prompted by Sacks (see 23rd November), as a result of which I thought I would read something more about the periodic table. Now, ordinarily, for a purpose such as this, I would go and have a browse in Foyles, where I would almost certainly have found the sort of thing I was looking for, lurking somewhere between popular science and an undergraduate text.

As it was, I was reduced to asking Amazon which is a much less reliable procedure. Ask him about periodic tables and he comes up with a whole lot of stuff, including a book called 'The Periodic Table' by one Primo Levi. Well, I thought to myself, Primo Levi was a chemist. Perhaps he had a youthful fascination with the periodic table and has moved on enough from his bad war to write about it. So I order one up and a few days later a rather nice book turns up from the Everyman's Library, as a piece of book production very like the L'ogre noticed yesterday, complete with silken bookmark. In this case with the book having been pressed sufficiently for the bookmark to have left a mark, or rather a dent, on a surprisingly large number of pages.

It turns out not to be about the periodic table at all, rather a sort of memoir loosely keyed to 21 elements from the periodic table. From just before the second war, during the war (including just one from his days near Auschwitz) and after the war. The life and times of a budding, then a working chemist. A very moving memoir, quite different from that of Sacks, whose early life was rather gilded by comparison, except perhaps with regard to his rather dreadful boarding school, an experience Levi was spared.

Very striking what a ramshackle place the Italy of the late 30's was. How old fashioned the teaching of chemistry was. There were nice glimpses of the rather humdrum life of an industrial chemist in the late 40's, fussing perhaps about the chromium content of successive batches of something or rather to get mixed up into paint. A chemist who got his hands dirty, quite unlike Sacks - who did not, as it turned out make it to chemist at all. Plus, a rather odd post-war glimpse of the German chemist who was his boss near Auschwitz.

All in all a tremendous find, and a piece of pure luck. I shall probably go back now and re-read the two books by Levi which I already had. One, sadly, in a Folio edition which I shall probably find rather irritating, far inferior to Everyman's. Hopefully such matters will not distract me too much.

L'ogre

Tiring for the moment of Agatha, renewed my study of contemporary Goncourt laureates with L'ogre by one Jacques Chessex, prompted by a notice of a translation in the TLS.

Amazon came up with rather a posh version, not your usual cream coloured paperback at all, rather a hardback, nicely bound in red cloth and complete with red ribbon to mark one's place. A book club edition, but a slightly posh book club which has, inter alia, the affectation of numbering each book, this one being number 4967. For the money I also get some flannel wrapping: some notes by the author, some pictures of the author and various short essays by literary types. Not like your Anglo Saxon book club edition at all, with these last generally pumping out very cheap editions for the readers of things like the 'Daily Mail' or the 'Readers' Digest'. This (late lamented) last being the subject of one of my mother's pet hates along with, for example, Enid Blyton.

I learn from Wikipedia that Chessex is rather a rare bird, a Roman Swiss whom the French have seen fit to honour with a Prix Goncourt. Roman Swiss being the proper way to describe a French speaking Swiss, from the western part of the country which used once upon a time to be part of Roman Gaul. He appears to be a Catholic so maybe the Roman Swiss are not Calvinists.

The book itself is, in some ways, very much of a type with the other two Goncourts that I have read recently: a fascination with cutting & blades (in this case cut throat razors), sex (in a sort of detail which decent Anglo Saxons eschew), the macabre and death. It was sold as a study of someone who grew up fatally damaged by an overbearing father. I was a bit lazy about looking up the words that I did not know and so have probably missed a good deal, but, nevertheless, I am left with the thought that the author read a bit of psychology about overbearing fathers and then built his novel around what he had read. While there is much of interest in the novel, the basic story line of fatal damage seems contrived.

I share one snippet which particularly caught my eye. It seems that outside the Lausanne crematorium there is a Café Du Crém, a regular café but with a bit of space at the back where family parties emerging from the crem. can assemble for the ceremony of glass of wine with slice of cake. Front reserved for locals. So much more civilised than the arrangement at Randalls, our local crem., where the only refreshment opportunity is the outrageously grand and expensive red brick pile known as the Woodlands Park Hotel (http://www.woodlandsparkhotelcobham.com/). Not the sort of place for a ceremonial glass at all - not unless, that is, there are rather a lot of you. And pubs are not much use for the purpose either. So I am very taken with the idea of a reasonably plain, French (or Roman Swiss) style café, just outside the crem. gates. It would be such a sensible arrangement.

I would guess that having the café run as part of the crem. operation itself would not really work. Such a place would be a bit institutionalised, perhaps too much like a National Trust canteen, and you would lack the leavening of locals and non-crem business to lighten the tone. Furthermore, you want a boundary or transition zone between the world of the quick and the world of the dead and a café inside the crem. would not be that.

Jigsaw 3, series 2

The second Elite 500 jigsaw, once again in the National Gallery (one supposes that Elite 500 found the local shop convenient), a Canaletto depicting the celebration of the feast of San Rocco, a saint believed to be good with the plague. Once again, cleaned since Elite took their image.

An interesting picture although I found the crowd scene at the bottom unconvincing. The perspective does not seem quite right, possibly because the master has played fast and loose with the vérité on the ground, at least according to the technical notes on the National Gallery website. He also stooped to the use of compasses to get his roundels round, with the holes left by the compass clearly visible when up close and personal.

I then pondered about the use of what we would now call old masters as items of display, just about visible below the awnings, to advertise the wealth and power of whoever it was organising the celebration. No prosing about the quattrocento here thank you very much. And then poking around on the web, I find that the church they are coming out of is the dingy building on the right, whereas the grand building opposite is the home of a charity, not all that unlike some modern charities in that all the dosh seems to go on fancies for the trustees, rather than on the starving millions. See http://www.scuolagrandesanrocco.it/ for a rather stunning shot of the interior.

Started with the edge then did the sky line. Then tackled the various strong horizontals: the awning and the ledges surmounting the two rows of windows. Did not actually finish any of them until much later but they provided an admirable spring board for spreading out. Building, then crowd, then sky. This last helped along by sorting.

For once in a while, only the second occasion in what must be more than 30 jigsaws now, there was one piece missing, the hole more or less in the centre of the image, and a chain of three pieces next to the hole duplicated. Now this is not the sort of thing that is going to happen while doing the jigsaw at home. But then I observe that the cutting is not very clean, so maybe what has happened is that the cut jigsaws were not coming cleanly away from the cutter. With the missing piece left behind for the jigsaw next and the duplicated pieces left behind from the jigsaw previous.

Having knocked this off, did a round of Horton Lane, anti clockwise, for the first time for a while. Rewarded by three tweets along Longmead Road. A small egret (although I failed to notice the yellow feet and the crests), a sphere of mistletoe and a treasury tag, size two and a half inches. Who on earth among the denizens of the Longmead Road would want such a thing as this last? Or had it escaped from a visiting waste transfer vehicle?

PS: I wonder how you feel if a year ago you sold HP a parcel for £10b which they have now decided is actually worth £5b. Do you feel ashamed of having ripped them off? Do you feel clever for having ripped them off? Do you sue them for defamation of character? I think, one way or another, I would feel a bit uncomfortable. Retirement a bit tainted. But then it was never likely that I was ever going to be in this sort of position, so maybe what I might or might not have felt is not very much to any point. But I should add that I type on an HP Pavilion Slimline PC with which I have been very satisfied. Perhaps they should have stuck to them and printer ink and not messed with this clever stuff from Cambridge.

Back on the bread

Hopefully I can kiss goodbye to Waitrose brown bread for a while as I am now back in production with my own bread. Waitrose brown bread flour fine; Waitrose brown bread not fine at all. Haven't lost my touch and a third of a loaf went down well for tea today with some of the Dolomitian (not to be confused with Domitian) cheese bought in Leatherhead the other day.

Important though to let the bread cool before eating it. A bit bland, rather a waste, eaten while still cooling. One of the various baking tomes I skimmed said something about how cooked bread needing a little time for the flavour to develop.

But I am starting to worry about the non stick coating on my two loaf tins (from House of Fraser), about 10% of which is now inside me. I was a bit annoyed when I bought the things, but it seems that these days you cannot buy a domestic baking tin without the non-stick, which for all I know is crammed full of all  kinds of rare earth metals from the Congo which do shocking things to my endocrine balance, never mind that of the poor saps who have to mine the stuff in the first place. And it is all quite unnecessary, at least in my limited experience. Grease and flour an old-style baking tin and nothing much sticks anyway. Plus you know where the grease and flour has come from.

I wonder if commercial bakers have access to baking tins without the non-stick? I would not be that surprised to learn that the stuff is banned in that context.

On the up side, the banners have gotten around to grapefruit which has suddenly popped up on the quite short list of things to be avoided when on the warfarin. And, coincidentally, the DT runs a piece today about how grapefruit interacts in a most unpleasant way with all kinds of prescription medicines for all kinds of unpleasant diseases. Oranges and lemons escape the net for the moment at least, despite having much in common with the other citrus, which is just as well, as while I do not do much grapefruit, I do do quite a bit of oranges and lemons. Presumably I had better lay off the pomelos just to be on the safe side (see, for example, November 29th 2010 in the other place).

On the down side, I failed yesterday at my first Soduko for what must be months, if not years, perhaps as long ago as 2009 (the record in the other place being suspiciously thin). Got off to a flying start to this one from the Guardian, then got stuck. So gambled on guessing which of two squares was a '4' and the flying continued. Until I landed in a cul-de-sac from which backing out did not appear to be an option. All of which goes to validate my folk theory that a valid Soduko contains just enough information to let you get on. If you have more information and you are getting on nice and fast, something is probably wrong

People in glass houses

I have been getting indignant over the last few days about the various multinational corporations, some of which have the nerve to preach about all the good that they do, which so arrange their affairs as to pay little if any corporation tax in countries where they do plenty of business, in particular this one.

Then today I read all about the British Virgin Islands (http://www.bvi.gov.vg/) in the Guardian, a place with a population of around 25,000 and with government spending of perhaps £200m a year, of which perhaps half is derived from fees associated with the registration of around 1 million more or less dodgy companies. Companies which only exist to facilitate tax avoidance or to confuse the paper trail of more or less criminal activities. Confuse to the point of confusing any form of enforcement activity.

Our own government - ultimately responsible for the goings on in this place - won't do anything because otherwise we would have to stump up the £100m which would then be needed to balance the books. All very shabby.

No doubt the smooth talkers in the FO would explain, if cornered, that if we don't do it someone else will. The same defense as is used when selling outrageously expensive and unnecessary military toys to poor countries in places like Africa. But as far as I am concerned it stinks and should never have been allowed in the first place. A blot on our landscape which makes it hard for us to get all high and mighty about the aforesaid multinationals. The least we could do is shut the business down. I would happily forego that extra emptying of my orange wheelie bin if that is what it would take.

PS: not been able to verify any of the numbers at the BVI website. Not quite up to the standard of your average government department. But then it is only about the size of one of our parishes, never mind local authority.

Penderel's Oak

Having sampled the steak and kidney puddings at the Epsom Wetherspoon's (see 5th November) we thought we ought to see how they were in London Town and so made our way last week to Penderel's Oak, an establishment which may be named for a Civil War woodcutter, illustrated by the National Portrait Gallery. To think that there must be a whole department at the Wetherspoon's HQ given over to researching these names and coming up with suitable collateral to stick on the walls of the pubs in question. Just the job for a graduate of fine arts from some part of Chelsea. Or possibly a Sloane. All part of the price of your pint - at least it would be if I had graduated from the apple juice I am presently confined to.

Steak and kidney puddings were fine, served quite quickly considering that the place was quite busy. Only complaint was the peas which I suspect had been simmering in a bath of warm water for rather too long; long enough to have acquired a slightly odd flavour.

We took the opportunity while in High Holborn to visit the Principal Registry of the Family Division of the High Court to see to a little matter of probate. The staff were coping well given the cuts they have had to absorb (I think Kenneth Clarke offered up some very fine cuts during his tenure, as befits a former chancellor) and we got our business done OK although it did take a little while to learn that my braces would set off one of those airport scanners but we got there in the end. However, I would offer one suggestion. Someone could number and print off the daily list (I expect that they have access to Excel which could certainly do such a thing) and stick it up on the wall. One could then check that one was on the list without bothering reception (which was discouraged) and one would have some idea of how long one was going to wait by the progression of the numbers. A very simple scheme, just like that used by the blood people at Epsom Hospital and not unlike that which used to be used at the deli counter of our Kiln Lane Sainsbury's. I don't think these last do it any more; maybe demand for taste the difference deli no longer justifies such an arrangement. But a very simple scheme which would make the inevitable wait pleasanter than it might otherwise be.

Bought a small white loaf from Paul (http://www.paul-uk.com/) for the rather extravagant sum of £2.40 or some such. The pretty young lady on the cash desk was most puzzled that I could not be bothered with some reward scheme or other. But sir only has to log on and you have your reward. That these people should think that one was either so keen to make a penny or so bored to want something of this sort to do. But the bread was OK. A bit hard, no good for bacon sandwiches or anything like that, no good for crowns but fine sliced thin and buttered.

Then back to Waterloo where I bought the first 'New Statesman' that I have bought for some years, possibly many years. A magazine I first came across when it still had the aura and reputation of a serious lefty person's mag., back in the 60's of the last century. Approximately 9 pages were given over to the mess in Gaza and nowhere in those 9 pages did I come across my solution to the mess which is to hand it over to Egypt. OK, so the people in Gaza are not Egyptians and the Egyptians are not so flush with dosh that they want to take on more than a million slum dwellers, some of them violent. But in time, Gaza would be absorbed into Egypt and the slum dwellers would gradually come to aspire to something better than bashing Israelis. The sore would be lanced. We could even pay the Egyptians to do the job. I don't see a down side so what is wrong with the wheeze? Then 11 pages were given over to a bunch of critics opining on what they thought was the book of the year. A form of literary entertainment for which I have no time at all. I really don't care what this or that member of the chattering classes thinks about such things. Let them stand or fall by their regular reviews. So not really terribly impressed. It may be some more years before I buy another.

Then home to various snippets from our expiring subscription to the TLS. First, the admirable generosity of the widow of T S Eliot was in part funded by the royalties she got from performances of the musical 'Cats'. Second, it seems that one Charles Haughey was once in solemn conclave with the Catholic Church about the immorality of one Edna O'Brien. As far as I can recall Haughey was scarcely a monument to morality himself. He may even have been a great old philanderer in his young days - this being one the charges levelled against Edna. But then she was a lady and different rules apply. Third, a Guardian journalist reviewing Jack Straw's memoirs, observes while closing that the Human Rights Act worked much better than the Freedom of Information Act, because the party had done its homework on the former before getting into power. The inference being that it just rolled along with the latter and got into the mess we now have. I wonder if he is right? I am certainly signed up to the notion that our governments pass far too much legislation and would do better to do better with much less. Maybe compulsory grouse shooting was not such a bad idea after all. In any event, more on freedom of information in a forthcoming post.

Agatha

After the massive dose of Trollope reported on 12th November, I had a go with 'Daniel Deronda', which was fine but the sentences were quite long and the thoughts quite complicated and I rapidly found myself working through our small collection of Agatha Christie.

Which led me onto ebay: why not buy lots of them? And ebay did indeed have lots for sale, a lot as single books and a lot as small collections, say of uniform Fontana paperbacks. Some of these collections struck me as bveing rather dear; the collectors have clearly moved in. But then I chanced across a 37 volume opportunity published by Heron, an outfit of whom I had never heard. But by the time I have worked through 37 of the things if I want any more I can just start at the beginning again, the pleasure will be renewed indefinitely. Plus there was a directory of characters appearing in the entire oeuvre, just in case, for example, one got into an argument about which Poirot Master Plenderleith appeared in.

My ebay bidding technique was a little rusty and what I seemed to be doing was bidding in however many £1 increments was needed to cover the current top bid, up to a maximum, say M - while I thought I had just bid M. In any event, a day or so later the collection was  mine for £24 plus £30 postage. A grand total of £1.42 per volume, not that far off what one might pay in a Hook Road Arena car booter.

The 38 books were quite decently bound in red with gold trim and a gold bookmark, which will save tearing corners off of the sports page of the DT. Quite a lot of the books were bound 2 up, with two novels to the volume. Or one novel and a batch of short stories. The paper is stiff enough and the books small enough that they can be read with one hand while in bed, a useful property now that the nights are getting colder. Not so much needs to stick out. One beef would be that the gutters are a little narrow, a defect in a tightly bound book - with most modern books, particularly novels, being so bound. Another would be that the books are completely lacking in the scholarly apparatus that one would get from a fancier publisher. The volumes are not even numbered, one does not even know in what order to place them on the bookshelf. There is no flannel about the author or the circumstances of composition or publication. No explanation in footnotes of obscure terms like 'pony trap'. Just a bare date of original publication.

It is not altogether clear who Heron books are or were but the heron tab at http://www.hcbooksonline.com/ clearly knows all about these ones. A rather unusual site which seems to sell an eclectic mixture of new and old. But I do learn that the set ought to be of 41 volumes not 37, probably excluding the 'Who's Who', so from time to time we are going to come unstuck and not be able to read all about some television adaptation.

Next we had the question of book shelf space. The existing Agatha frees up maybe 6 inches but we are looking for four feet and I fairly quickly decided that I am not, any time soon, going to prune out four feet of books in favour of Agatha. There are limits. Fortunately, BH was not averse to getting a new (to us) book case so off to the QEF furniture shop in Leatherhead, where we are dissappointed. But there was a rather lonely looking Italian food fair selling rather posh lines in bread, cakes, cheese, sausage and sweets. We settled for what turned out to be some rather good bread and cheese. The cheese came from somewhere up an Italian mountain, perhaps in the Dolomites, and in the form of a round maybe a foot across and three inches deep, a hard pale yellow cows' cheese with small holes scattered around the centre of the round. Grey cloth rind.

Then this morning off to the Princess Alice Hospice furniture shop in Epsom (occupying a more or less new and rather grand premises which they have failed to find a regular tenant for) where we did our business for £25. 1970s style teak finished chip board, two shelves topped by a drawer and which now looks very well in the front bay (until recently occupied by FIL). Made to measure.

We can now spend happy months working out which volumes are missing and running them down in sale rooms - that is to say car booters, second hand book shops and ebay. Indoor and outdoor fun.

Facebook

I don't use Facebook too much, but I thought I would share this blessing which has appeared on my login page.

Science

Resumed reading 'Uncle Tungsten' by Sacks after something of a gap, the book now having been part read since August 26th (see the other place).

It is an interesting read, but what has most struck me over the past week is the huge difference between a moderately clever person (myself) and a seriously clever person (Sacks). OK, so as a teenager I had a chemistry set and played around with it. My father allowed me to play with his rather grand microscope. I went to a school where I had a good chemistry teacher. But I was a midget compared with Sacks who, at the same sort of age, was busily conducting all kinds of quite serious home chemistry experiments, experiments which these days would probably result in the social workers removing him from the family home because of the risk of his being badly injured if he were allowed to stay. For a while, for example, he was keen on growing exotic trees by planting sticks of zinc in solutions of, for example, silver salts, following here, it seems in the footsteps of medieval alchemists. Then he got keen on the colour of the flame with which elements burnt, from which he moved off into spectroscopy. I vaguely remember thinking it would be fun to have such a thing - but unlike Sacks never made the leap to actually having one.

At one point he discovers the periodic table and is enthralled at the way that this deceptively simple table brings order and cohesion to the elements which make up our world. It is not just a random scatter of elements, it is a system of elements. I was rather taken aback to discover that the vast majority of elements are metals, say nearly 100 of the total of 120. There are really not many elements like carbon and sulfur. And furthermore, hydrogen appears to count as a metal, albeit a generally gaseous one. I shall have to have a little poke around and see if I can get myself a periodic table to hang on my wall.

In the meantime I have been prompted to do a bit of alchemy of my own.

Take four pages from a celebrity chef cookbook. Four sides typeface, two sides black and white photograph, two sides colour photograph. Shred more or less down to dust using one of those two way paper shredders. Tip into a tea cup and add enough malt vinegar to cover. Place on one side, stirring occasionally.

Take five pounds of potatoes and peel, preferably rather coarsely using one of those ancient potato peelers where the blade is whipped onto the handle with twine. Tip the peelings onto the compost heap and wait for the slugs to arrive. In reasonably warm weather this might take between 36 and 48 hours. You will then have a random mess of green and brown slugs more or less covering the peelings.

At dusk, sprinkle the marinade over the whole. Come back the following morning and, lo and behold, the slugs, both the green and the brown, will have aligned themselves on a north-south axis. It seems that there is something about celebrity chef detritus which sensitises slugs to the earth's magnetic field. Hence the alignment. But it does not work with black slugs. For them you need to use a lady celebrity chef cookbook. Wonders never cease!

PS: sorry to read over breakfast of the latest incursion of central government into the affairs of local government.  It seems that no less a personage than the Secretary for Communities, Communists and other Dumb Animals is having a rant about the failure of certain local authorities to collect orange wheelie bins at what he believes to the be appropriate frequency. If they don't get their act together he is going to make further deductions from their block grant. You might think that local government, trying to make a fist of cutting their budgets by 25% or whatever it is (you try cutting your household budget by that kind of amount) is perhaps best placed to make the best judgement between, for example an extra collection of orange wheelie bins and closing another yet youth drop in center. But oh no, the Secretary knows best. The Secretary needs something to propel him into a television studio lest we forget who he (or she) is. Sad how intelligent people of all parties solemnly swear to stop meddling with local government when in opposition, but go smartly into reverse as soon as they are in power.

Schubert

Yesterday to the QEH, our first visit for maybe as long as 18 months (see March 28th 2011 at the other place), having lost the concerts booked for last winter, where we heard the Jerusalem Quartet (http://www.jerusalem-quartet.com/), supported by Gary Hoffman, doing the Quartettsatz (D703), Beethoven 18.6 and the Schubert quintet in C (D956). Excellent programme, with the Beethoven nicely poised between the two Schuberts, and an excellent concert. Slight faux-pas when some of the attendance thought to clap at the end of the third movement of the quintet. It was not clear whether this was the transatlantic custom (which I loathe) of clapping at all points or simply a mistake: one starts and the sheep follow. On this occasion I was a slightly puzzled sheep.

Some of the quiet moments in the first half were disturbed by the bracelet of the young lady sitting immediately behind me. She was quite young, of student age, and was fidgeting a bit, with the result that her large bracelet  tinkled. I was surprised at how irritated I was by the tinkling: ordinarily one can shut such distractions out, but I could not on this occasion and instead of listening to the music as I should have been, I was thinking murderous thoughts about the owner of the tinkle. But to be fair, when I suggested at the interval that she take it off for the second half, she was a bit stricken and removed the offending bracelet immediately.

I mourn the passing of the QEH of my younger days. A dignified concert hall, in quite large part given over to chamber music with a pleasant and spacious ante-chamber. A dignity which has been sacrificed on the twin altars of austerity and accessibility. Austerity meant, for example, that the toilet facilties are a bit tired and the disabled toilet was not working at all. Plus it was lurking inside what was otherwise a ladies toilet, necessitating a certain amount of explanation to worried ladies who thought I was lost. Accessibility meant, for example, that what was a pleasant ante-chamber is now cluttered up with a temporary stage - perhaps for rap performances to make the disaffected youth of Lambeth feel welcome - and a bunch of sofas giving the place the feel of a rather tatty Starbucks. As if we did not have more than enough of such places already. Plus various food outlets completing the tone. But there is hope: most of the similar rubbish has now been swept away from the concourse of nearby Waterloo Station, so perhaps the South Bank managers will get the idea.

I note in passing that the Israeli origins and name of the quartet have attracted the attentions of people who want to protest on behalf of the Palestinians, and their last few concerts in the this country have been disrupted. This resulted in more visible security than is the custom for the this venue but there was, in any event, no protest, at least not one which penetrated to the interior of the hall.

Grumbles

I read in the Guardian of yesterday of the sad case of a young lady badly injured in a car crash, with the injury compounded by the death of her mother. While the crash was someone else's fault, they have not thrown the book at the someone else, so presumably the fault was not deemed to be huge. The point of raising all this though is the matter of compensation, amounting to £23m in the form of  £7.25m down and £0.27m a year for life.

Now it is all very sad and the life of a young lady has been badly damaged. But I grumble that an award of this sort is disproportionate. It may be that she needs full time care but it is hard to see how that comes to the sums mentioned, sums which will be drawn from the motor insurance premiums of the rest of us. It is right that the collective takes the cost in this way, but it is wrong that the cost has been set so high. What on earth are the people who claim or set compensation payments of this sort thinking of - other than their own payment by results? We need to get a better grip on this sort of thing.

I wonder how many victims have declined to play the game. Mr. Lawyer, I dare say you can wangle £X out of the system for me (gross) but this is not the sort of game that I want to play. I do not need money of that sort to rebuild my life out of the wreckage. Bog off.

Whereas down at Greenpeace they seem to have missed a grumble. It seems that someone has invented a eucalyptus version of leylandii which you can plant across hundreds of square miles of what was tropical rain forest in Brazil in order to grow fuel for power stations. The point of the new version being that it grows fatter and faster than anything much else on earth - and on the face of it providing part of the solution to our energy and global warming problems. But Greenpeace object to everything, so why are they not objecting to this? I have not seen a peep out of them? Asleep on the job? They could make an awful lot of noise about loss of biodiversity if they put their minds to it. Not to mention loss of habitat for one of the last tribes of cannibals on the planet. Not to mention that awful word genetic modification.

I grumble at Greenpeace for grumbling about everything and never providing solutions, but then, this morning, it occurred to me that their role is that of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, a role which used to be explained to one in civics classes. It is the duty of the Loyal Opposition to oppose, to pick holes in, to rubbish whatever Her Majesty's government proposes to do, without regard to what they might actually think about it. If whatever it is cannot stand this sort of heat then maybe we should not be doing it.

One advantage of this arrangement is that debates about proposals are something of a performance. Both sides take the performance terribly seriously but once the performance is over they can calm down and saunter out together to take their tea and crumpets. We avoid the solemnity and pomposity of the true believers, the people who really care about a proposal. Right pains in the behind mostly.

But one can go too far. It can become offensive to have people debating a serious proposal, a proposal affecting, perhaps, the prospects of hundreds of thousands of poverty stricken inhabitants of our inner cities, who clearly do not really care. This is serious matter about which people should care, not spin entertaining lawyery quibbles and paradoxes or score entertaining points off of each other. The sort of thing some of us started to learn about in the debating societies of our schools.

Somehow, we need to strike a decent balance.

Deed is done

The TLS has now been struck off in favour of the NYRB. I have had subscriptions to the TLS before but they have all suffered the same fate after a run of issues which failed to interest me. I have not had a subscription to the NYRB before so it will be interesting to see how long that lasts: will its focus on US politics cheeze me off after an issue or two? It will also be interesting to see how many issues of the TLS I buy the hard way - it costing quite a bit more to buy the thing in a newsagent than by subscription.

In the meantime I headed off to my new source of cheap books in Epsom Market, with my eye being caught by the moss illustrated on the way. On the pavement opposite our local primary school the council has erected a row of handsome wooden posts, which I hope were not illegally logged from some east Indian tropical rain forest, to deter the parents from parking on the pavement - the school having plenty of land but having been laid out in an era when primary school children generally walked to their neighbourhood school rather than being trucked in. However that is not the point at issue. The point at issue being the moss. Why do hardwood posts of this sort encourage the growth of moss at their bases, particularly on a east-west axis? The posts are in a reasonably shady bit of road but they do not in themselves make that much more shade. Do the posts collect water by some mysterious process of nocturnal condensation? Have the posts been the subject of some infantile nature project? The east-west orientation may to do with the fact that the posts may be in the sun when the sun is low in the east in the morning and low in the west in the evening, in the shade otherwise, the posts thus hiding their eastern (that illustrated) and western hinterlands from half of what little sun there is. A simpler explanation could be built around the tendency of contract cleaners to sweep along the pavement but not have the energy to go all the way around obstacles. I have inspected some concrete posts in similar positions nearby but these do not attract moss in this way at all.

On to Epsom to visit the man in the market, there several days a week for the sale of bric-à-brac and second hand books. The books are all simply priced at £1 the hardback and so far I have been tempted by three.

First, an Agatha Christie. Not unreasonable at £1 but nothing special. A late attempt to move beyond her proper milieu of country & country house crime into international crime, a move in the direction of such johnny-come-latelies as Ian Fleming, who were perhaps starting to dent her sales a bit. The two do share a certain snobbery about things.

Second a portrait of the Mississippi in old maps and pictures. A nice picture book from the US, a relatively new book from Rizzoli of New York via Random House of the same city in 2008, a book which reminds me how big the French were in North America at the beginning, before they were largely chucked out by the True Brits. I learn that one Lieutenant Zebulon Pike bought 155,000 acres of land, at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers from the Dakota in 1805. Given that the Lieutenant was travelling rather light, it would have been interesting to learn on what his title to the land rested; no digitised land registries which can be updated from one's iPhone in those days. How many beads or axe heads did it cost him? Was he allowed to pay in IOUs? But then I start to wonder whether the tale is true at all - it certainly looks a bit different from that in Wikipedia. I was also interested to see the way in which the Mississippi meandered; what they told you about meanders in geography classes really is true. It also seems, very US this, that the good citizens got fed up with the way that their property prices jumped about when the course of the river jumped about so told Uncle Sam to get in there with his Corps of Engineers and get the thing under control - at taxpayer expense of course.

Third, a rather old fashioned potted history of Florence, bound in grey cloth, a bit like a Phaidon art book, but actually published by the Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, in English some time before 1963 when it became someone's Christmas present. A book sufficiently old fashioned that all 231 photographs and maps have been stuck in, this being before the days when you could have such pictures printed directly into books and usually had to settle for having the picture pages bound in a clump in the middle of the book, rather than having a picture next to the relevant bit of text. Arranged in twenty chapters (listed at the back rather than the front, in the continental way), covering such things as the spirit of Florence, Florentine sculpture, a rest in the gardens and Brunelleschi. A nice middle sized sort of book that one could comfortably browse while planning a visit, while there or while in reminiscence mode. Well worth its £1 although I shall now have to have regard to the pressure on shelf space.

I note in passing that this was also the day for lamping up the Epsom Town Christmas Tree. No apprentice up a ladder mind you, two adults and a cherry picker taking their leisurely time about it.

Hoods

Finger continues to hover uncertainly over the 'delete standing order for TLS' option in my online bank account. The magazine has continued to disappoint. However, it did come up with something of interest, which I have now read, 'Among the Hoods' by one Harriet Sergeant.

Ms. Sergeant is a right wing think tank apparatchik who also writes for right wing newspapers, of an age to have at least one son of the same age as the hoodies with whom she was engaging.

The engagement appears to have been facilitated by a retired hoodie who can turn on considerable charm and both loves and models flashy clothes - but notwithstanding his retired status he dies in a very banal and unnecessary way in Jamaica about the time the book draws to a close. The engagement mainly takes the form of buying the hoodies - usually two or three from four or five core members of a gang - meals and taking them on outings. A few stray thoughts follow.

One of the hoodies has occasion to brush his teeth, whereupon his gums start to bleed big time. It seems that when in care it is one of one's human rights to be able to decline dental care which this hoodie did, with his mouth in a bit of a state in consequence. The sort of thing that my father used to see in the slums of Hartlepool during the depression years - an era one might have thought was not going to return.

One of the outings was to the Tate Rubbish, a place with reasonable numbers of groups of young ladies. So the hoodies start to swagger a bit and then edge over to one such group. Group thinks that they are terribly cool - but then suddenly realises that these people are not dressing up as hoodies, they really are hoodies. Exit group very fast. Odd how it is thought cool to emulate one of the lower forms of planetary life.

Life for hoodies seems very precarious. And for many of them very seedy, with foul accommodation and nothing like enough to eat. Many of them are more or less illiterate and more or less unemployable. Many of them have mental health problems. The odd bonus from crime appears to be rapidly dissipated on some form of conspicuous consumption or other - often clothes. They do seem to be obsessed with clothes.

But before one starts to feel too sorry for them, they are also without morals. They live on very short fuses. They mug and rob when they can, partly for the money and partly for the thrill. They appear to have no compunction or remorse about the amount of damage that they are doing. Knives and guns are part of their lives. This despite their odd flashes of considerable charm.

One admires the guts of Ms. Sergeant in mixing with these people, and taking them to places for which they have no manners and where they are apt to start shouting at the staff at the least provocation. On the other hand, by being with them in this sort of way, she is condoning, in some part at least, what they get up to. She and her tale are tainted. But, as she would no doubt say, how else do you get the story?

One of her points is that young men need lots of exercise and lots of activity, this is what good schools are good at and universities should carry on the good work. In the world of the hoodie there is none of this. Just a lot of frustrated and angry young men. As an aside, I remember once in the TB a chap explaining to me that it was alright for me because if I got angry I could verbalise my anger. He, the chap, could not do this beause he did not have the words. He could only bash people, which he recognised was not always a good way forward. I imagine many hoodies are in much the same position as my chap.

But she is very keen to rubbish the support systems that are in place and the people working in them. OK, so they are not working too good, but what does she suggest? Her own efforts did not bear much fruit with of the four hoodies with whom she was most concerned one would up a successful criminal, one in a mental hospital, one in prison and the last one dead. And she appears to have given them a fair amount of quality time. Her rubbishing rather smells of a knee jerk right wing reaction; anything provided by the state is bound to be rubbish. Why not let my mates in Corporation X make some money out of it instead? That said, there does appear to be a fair amount of room for improvement.

All in all, rather depressing. But I do have some wheezes. My first would be to try and get more good people working at ground level: it all reminds me a bit of the mental health world where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth but precious few quality people prepared to get down to the grunt work. I guess the answer is to throw some money at it. And my second would be to build lots of higher grade hostels in the affected inner city areas, something much more like student hostels of the 1970's than the rather grubby hostels-in-the-community we have now. Hostels big enough to run to sports & such like, a proper canteen, rudimentary health care and other support services. All in all, something of a return to the asylum concept we binned in the closing decades of the 20th century.

The other angle is, of course, to legalise and then regulate drugs.

Warning!

We have been phoned up half a dozen or more times this week by a number withheld which wants to know, in a subcontinental voice if not from a subcontinental call centre, what sort of washing machine we use. Sometimes they just call and there is silence, sometimes you get the full washing machine patter. What on earth are they up to? One would not have thought it was anything much to do with our washing machine. Is it a matter which I could trouble our shiny new PCC with? Will he have teams of people fielding emails of this sort? Chris Grayling certainly does and in my very limited experience his machine works well.

More interesting, I have been experimenting with a new sort of fish soup, at least a sort of fish soup which I have not made for a while. Slice about 2oz of pork tenderloin into 1cm cubes and fry gently in butter. Add a couple of coarsely chopped onions and fry for a bit longer. Peel some potatoes - number according to the number you plan to feed - slice them coarsely and place on top of onions. Cover with water and simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes. Slice about 12oz of skinned haddock fillet into bricks maybe 1cm by 1cm by 3cm and place on top of the simmering potatoes. Stir the fish in a bit - gently so as not to knock the potato around too much - and simmer for a further five minutes. Not bad at all but I think on the next outing I will use smoked haddock (see 11th November). And maybe I need to consult some Irish potato experts about what sort of potato would be most suitable; ideally something a little firmer and yellower than the whites I used today.

And then some news from Waitrose. The good news is that their Lincolnshire Poacher is proving a reliable hard yellow cheese. It even has rind for those who are sentimental and we are getting through a fair amount of the stuff. Read all about it at http://www.lincolnshirepoachercheese.com/.

The bad news is that their whole meal bread is no good, despite the fact that the whole meal bread I have been making with their whole meal flour is fine. The lady behind the counter explained that the stuff is nearly made in a factory somewhere and then delivered to the fairly small kitchen behind the shop for finishing. This probably accounts for the bread not being properly cooked and having a rather sticky texture. But it does not account for the flavour which I do not like at all. So, this morning, I thought I would try one of their premium breads, cooked off the premises, on this occasion a mixed wheat and rye sour dough. A plus was that it was properly cooked and the bread had a good texture. The minus was that I do not much care for the flavour of sour dough bread. But it was better than their regular whole meal nonetheless.

Jigsaw 2, series 2

An Elite 500 jigsaw, one of two, from the Oxfam shop in Ewell Village. 99p each. Made by Philmar, yet another jigsaw outfit which is very visible on the web, for example on ebay, but which does not have its own site - presumably because they are no longer up and running. Is there a niche here for chaps like me to set up sites for defunct jigsaw manufacturers as a home for all the information you could possibly need about them? Would this count as an infringement on copyright?

This particular puzzle is described an an antique love scene by Garafalo. The National Gallery has this and maybe half a dozen other paintings by him and will sell me digital images of same. A low grade student image for private study only comes in at £50 - very close to the price charged by Vic Guy for a photographic image of Worcester Cathedral (see October 19th in the other place). Perhaps market forces really are forcing prices together. But what student is going to pay £50 for an image which he or she can browse on the Internet for free? And if they live in London, maybe even go and take a peek at the real thing? Mysteriously, the chap is missing from my usually reliable Canaday, which seems odd for a chap with a presence at the National Gallery. But alive and well on Wikipedia.

The puzzle was quite difficult, although a pleasure to solve in a leisurely way, in part because it was all very brown, while the real thing has clearly been cleaned since Philmar took their image and is now much brighter in colour. Not altogether comfortable with this business of restoring pictures; not an unreasonable thing to be doing but one can never be quite sure that one is heading back to the original and one may have become quite attached to the old, faded and unrestored picture. Maybe high grade replicas would be a better way forward, leaving the original to moulder?

Edge first. Then the red and white cloths. Then the scene in the top left, or at least most of it. An interesting example of the growing interest in landscape, with allegory no longer quite enough. It took quite a long time to adjust to the quite subtle changes of colour in the landscape, changes which were more or less invisible at the start of the proceedings. But once one has tuned into the palette as it were, one can motor along quite quickly, selecting the right piece by its colour.

Then the faces, then pushed out from the faces to do the bodies, gradually filling in the interstices. Why are cupids so often as obnoxious looking as this one? Is that all part of the allegory?

This leaving the dark, top right quadrant, for which I sorted the pieces by prong configuration. And given that there was quite a high proportion of pieces which were odd in one way or another the dark quadrant was not as bad as one might have expected.

One panic along the way when I was convinced that a piece of the boundary between the top left and top right quadrants was missing, a piece which should have been conspicuous for being half white and half black. Which I failed to find until fairly near the end because I had earlier decided that the missing piece was actually part of the white cloth and the brain's search algorithm omitted this piece from its search for the boundary piece without further reference to me.

Turning to the jigthoughts of 1st November, the jigsaw did not have properties 2, 3, 4 or 5, although the pieces were in a roughly rectangular array. An exotic touch was a small number of prongs which needed to be clasped by two half holes, rather than the simpler and more usual arrangement of a prong fitting in a hole. Achieved by stretching (say) a lower piece to include half of what should have been the upper piece, including half a hole, thus preserving the count and property 1 - while breaking property 2. Properties 3, 4 and 5 were nowhere.

Virtually no jigsaw dust.

PS: a tweet in the form of a twit-twoo. Or put another way, the first evening visit of an owl to our back garden for quite a long time. We used to hear them along the stream behind the houses opposite, but haven't heard one there for a bit either. This one was undoubtedly an owl, despite its cry being closer to a twit than a twit-twoo. Perhaps it will work up to that on its next visit. Perhaps there is a sex difference here?

PPS: I actually voted for a PCC yesterday, one of the few occasions on which I have voted in recent years. A vote on this occasion because there was choice, I thought the contest was reasonably open and I did have a view on who should have the job. That is to say the chap who has been chairman of the Police Authority for a bit. At least he should know the ropes while the new arrangements settle down. Then we can see. Meanwhile, counting proceeds as I type.

Policemen

The day approaches when we will be able to vote for our very own Police & Crime Commissioner. A wheeze which may turn out to be better than the Police Authorities we have now, although I still hanker after a world where the primary tier of local government gets to do everything, including police, education and health. Give us local authorities with a bit of clout, some more serious money raising powers and less interference from the centre - but that is another story.

Coverage has been fairly thin here although our local free paper (no longer delivered in our road) did carry election addresses for each of the six candidates, and very short they were too. As a result of which I thought that the current chair of our current Police Authority was the best bet. The Labour man made a bit of an ass of himself by promising all sorts of things he was not going to be able to deliver, although in his favour it should be said that he was the only candidate to come out strongly against privatising the police.

I wondered about the support that the new commissioners were going to get. Were they expected to do their business out of their own front rooms? Poked around on the web a bit but wound up sending in an email enquiry to some Home Office enquiry processing unit, which to do them justice got around to replying within a few days. The only catch was that they didn't answer the question. All they said was that 'PCCs will be required to appoint a head of paid staff and a chief financial officer. The head of paid staff will be responsible for employing the administrative staff and for acting as monitoring officer for the PCC. The chief financial officer will be responsible for advising the PCC about their financial obligations and the impact of their spending decisions. The PCC may appoint other staff, but all employees will be politically restricted and appointed on merit'. Which is all very well but it does not tell me what funds the PCC will have for his office. He will need office space, meeting space, policy wonks and support staff and one might have thought that there was some central guidance on the matter. Does he sponge off the relevant local authorities? Is he brigaded with the local courts & justice people? Is he funded directly by the Home Office? Who sets his budget? Who checks his claims for petrol for driving all around the county counting policemen?

As a former bureaucrat, I think that these sort of things are important, will crucially condition the way in which PCCs do their work. So why the complete silence on the topic? Why did it not occur to the Home Office to answer the question properly? Why does it not occur to the media to ask the question?

Disgusted of Stamford Green

I came across this poster outside the 'Epom Playhouse' this morning, with the good news being that as well as a hospital, Epsom also runs to a theatre, although, to be fair, it is a theatre which we generally use to see films which flit through the commercial cinema in Upper High Street too quickly for us to catch them - assuming that they make it there at all.

The bad news is that whoever designed this advertisement for an offering by the Mid Surrey Theare Company saw fit to build in a very life like graffiti. One has to look twice to decide whether the graffiti is there by design or whether it is a later addition. A building in which, to my mind, is legitimising the activities of the twerps with spray cans. How are we supposed to explain to our children that graffiti is bad if apparently respectable people are doing what amounts to the same thing?

Perhaps I should raise the matter with our Residents' Association who can then raise the matter with our Leisure & Culture committee (see http://www.epsom-ewell.gov.uk/EEBC/). Or perhaps I should stop that portion of my rates which goes to subsidise the operations of the Playhouse, and then make a scene in the magistrates' court when I am summoned to explain myself.

Probably not worth complaining about the general tattiness of the advertisement (note, for example, the white weight holding it down from the wind), a general tattiness made possible by someone inventing a cheap process to transfer full colour images to large sheets of plastic. A process which does nearly as much damage to our visual environment as cheap booze in supermarkets does to our pavement environment. So much better in the days when one had to stick up paper posters on odd bits of wall, paper posters which nicely biodegraded before the word had been invented.

Note also the statue of a very young and very lightly clothed young lady rear right. I wonder if the Playhouse is wise to publically exhibit such a thing in a month when we are seeing, if not finding, peddoes and worse under all sorts of unlikely beds.

A massive dose

This period of convalescence has been marked by a massive dose of Trollope, taken mainly in Kindle form, but some print and some pictures.

Started off by finishing off 'Framley Parsonage', using the nice Oxford Classic edition purchased (second hand) last time around, purchased just after I had dumped my Trollopery in favour of Kindle, on the grounds that I might be too groggy to take care of a Kindle. Then moving onto the Kindle I did 'Orley Farm', 'The Prime Minister' and the 'Warden'. By the end of which I was having trouble remembering what 'Framley Parsonage' was about and keeping the incidents of one separate from those of another.

Interestingly, while I had remembered a lot of the set pieces from my original readings (some of which would have been maybe 40 years ago when we used Harringey West Library for the purpose), for example the manners of a commercial room in a hotel ('Orley Farm'), most of them had been interfered with in some way or another. Bits had been added or subtracted, or perhaps the whole thing had been transposed to the wrong novel. The general tone was preserved, but sometimes a little shifted.

For light relief we had DVDs of BBC adaptations of 'Barchester Chronicles' and 'The Way We Live Now', both rather good (and good value from Amazon at around £1.50 a viewing hour with no advertisements), although the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman) had been allowed to steal the show in the first. 'The Warden' was a gentler and more thoughtful book than the BBC were suggesting.

Indeed, I was again impressed by the way that Trollope included serious commentary on his life and times in among his tales of the crooked paths of love on the way to (generally) happy endings. Serious commentary dished out with a pleasantly light touch.

So, for example, he allowed that the Church of England did carry plenty of sinecures which were in need of reform, be most of the incumbents ever so decent and worthy. And that while some of those attacking the church on this and other matters might have been thoroughly unpleasant people, they may well have achieved more with a few lurid pamphlets in a few weeks than more genteel methods had achieved in years.

Serious commentary which is largely absent from more recent light fiction. So while Agatha Christie might tell a good yarn, her books contain no commentary. There is little character and virtually no content, beyond a bit of nostalgia from an old lady in the 1960s for the morals and manners of (some rose tinted view) of the 1930s. You have a good feeling after reading a Trollope, which goes beyond providing a bit of relaxation, a sort of waking sleep. You have been made to think, at least a little bit. There is something there worth talking about in the pub.

The only down side was the irritation caused by the formatting of, in particular, 'Orley Farm' being very poor on the Kindle. OK so I was using a free version from Gutenberg and the Kindle is best at continuous text, not liking anything more complicated than paragraph breaks, but it did seem to make a terrible mess of this one. So I am now lashing out on the £1.95 complete works from Amazon and I shall report later on whether the formatting of this particular member of the oeuvre has been sorted out.

Polsedon Lacey

Following our first meal out of the new era at Wetherspoons (see 5th November), we have now followed up with a second at Polesden Lacey, where two meals cost perhaps three times what two meals cost at Wetherspoons: quantity about the same, quality rather better. BH had liver with vegetables, I had sausage with vegetables. The mashed potato was really a version of bubble & squeak, there was crinkly cabbage and the whole was quite strongly flavoured with gravy. But fine.

We were interested by the party of tandem cyclists in the canteen at the same time - the drill being that the chap on the front of the tandem could see while the chap on the back was blind. A fine bit of volunteering - I just hope that the chaps on front don't get carried away. I wouldn't like to answer for a tandem in a jam with the chap on the back not being able to see.

We also took the opportunity to visit the nearby fish shop at Bookham. Must be doing OK because we remember visiting the place years and years ago and it is still there - but it is odd that it is almost invisible on the web. Good variety of wet fish, some large crabs, some kippers which I was not too sure about and some smoked haddock which we took. A bit dark for natural (rather than dyed) but the first two thirds did well for lunch today and the last third went down well in the remains of yesterdays chicken fricassée served as soup. A soup which was predominantly yellow, but with highlights of other colours provided by left over vegetables left over from lunch. BH had taken the wise precaution of cooking the haddock before adding it to the chicken with the result that the result was not too salty.

PS: just been rather dismayed to discover that the new template I am using does not seem to include a search button like the last. Nor does Google search seem to get at the blog in the same way that it got at the last. These are features which I make quite a lot of use of so all very tiresome - and all goes to show how things get missed by informal testing.

Abuse

The sorry mess that the BBC has got itself into over abuse in childrens' homes North Wales maybe 40 years ago is all very depressing.

I was lucky enough, back in December 2008 (see December 18th of that year in the other place, search there for  bryn estyn or ask Mr. Google about bryn estyn pumpkinstrokemarrow), to come across an account of this abuse and the media & judicial abuse consequent by Richard Webster, published in 2005. He left me in no doubt that more damage had been done to care workers by the various investigations than had ever been done by care workers in the first place, the result on the one hand of poor procedure and on the other of a media feeding frenzy.

It is very depressing that despite the valiant efforts of Richard Webster, we do not seem to have got any better at dealing with this sort of thing. At least the target in the present case was strong enough to defend himself - unlike some of the poor sods caught up in all this first time around.

However can you recruit decent people to work in these places if they have to run these sorts of risks? It is not as if the money is any good.

Sadly the answer will probably be more rules and more supervision - but no more money for the chaps on the ground. Lots more busy people wailing about how awful things are - but who have no great desire to get down to it themselves. Writing fat procedure manuals and moaning about others much safer. Too many chiefs and not enough indians. Not that I can say too much; I have never tried this sort of work and I doubt whether I would be any good at it. But I do try not to knock those who do.

Christingle comes early

I am not usually a believer in starting Christmas activity until the second half of December, not feeling very festive until then. So last year we did not get to the Chessington World of Christmas (CWC) until December 17th. This year however, on the feeble excuse that I needed a new litter picker, we paid an early visit, to find that late on a Saturday afternoon the place is in full swing. Not sure if Santa had checked in, but pretty much everything else had, including the Lomax village noticed last time.

We found some splendidly kitsch fairies with toadstools which might have done rather well as a Christmas ornament in our front room front window. But after some humming and hawing decided against. Maybe we will look again next year.

I thought this year that I would illustrate part of the very large and impressive shed which contains most of this stuff. A shed fully part of an operation fully licensed for the sale of plants and plant food, for consumption on or off the premises.

Presumably CWC is sucking a lot of money out of the system that would otherwise have been hoovered up by shops in Epsom town centre. I would not have thought that it would be worth Wilkinson's while now to attempt to compete in a serious way and they will just do a few baubles for those too lazy to leg it out to Chessington. One might even need to go as far as the West End to get a comparable display - where Fortnum & Mason certainly turn themselves into a bit of a bazaar for the occasion.

The problem with the litter picker is that the trigger often jams before the jaws are fully closed, making the picking up of leaves from the new daffodil bed much more of a pain than it should be. One can make some progress by varying the grip and the hand, but it is not very satisfactory; and, after all, the things are designed to be used by geriatrics. I have noticed that the chaps from the council use a rather different model with rather different jaw action and on the basis that the council ought to know about litter picking, I had thought to get one of those, but as it turned out CWC only sold the same model that I had already. However, their models did not jam in the shop so at £12.99 I was taken for another one - but this time I will keep the details of the purchase so that I can amuse myself by writing pompous letters to the wholesaler should this second one start to jam. I shall report further in due course.

BH not too impressed to find that CWC was out of stock of bulb fibre. All kinds of bales of fibres for this and fibres for that, a lot of which I had never heard of, but nothing so simple as bulb fibre. But she was able to buy a planter to plant bulbs in, with the result that my tomorrow's project is drilling some holes in the bottom of it, the designer of this particular planter clearly not being very up on plant drainage.

Plumbers' Guild

On 16th August 2007 I speculated in the other place about a place called Megaisle, where evil bankers extracted a parasitic living out of the decent hard working plumbers.

I now learn, from the Economist I think, about a rather different sort of Megaisle, a world where one has the powers - the people with all the dosh and all the levers of power - and the proles - who have pretty much nothing.

Megaisle is blessed with abundant supplies of energy, let us say in the form of oil. Now it is true that it takes a certain amount of bother to set things up, but once they are set up one simply operates as a giant petrol station. People come along and give you lots of money to fill up. Then, with that money you can buy whatever you want; no need to bother with the tiresome business of growing anything or making anything. Or interacting with proles.

The number of people required for all this is very small, with the result that the vast majority of the proles don't have anything to do. From the point of view of the powers there might be some merit in having a cull, just leaving enough to provide a pool from which servants, pole-dancers and such like can be drawn. But the powers have not quite got around to a cull yet, they simply keep the proles on rather short rations. Don't bother too much with their health or education or anything like that.

But there is a catch. There are very long pipelines which are used to move the oil around from one part of Megaisle to another and these very long pipelines are an easy target for direct action by disaffected proles or, indeed, by terrorists with less scruples and more obscure agendas. So the powers have to spend a significant proportion of the dosh on security, to the point where security is far and away the biggest employer in Megaisle. Security which can also be used to push back on the proles should they get restive.

So what is different about this vision of Megaisle, is that the proles, unlike the plumbers, are more or less superfluous. There might be millions and millions of them but the powers don't give a toss. They are just the dross floating around beyond their known world. Over the horizon. It doesn't really matter what they get up to or don't get up to - so long as they keep their distance. No social contract being enforced here thank you very much.

Judy

BH has become something of a fan of Judge Judy, who has managed to knock 'Neighbours' off the late afternoon ironing slot.

She got very cross with me when I explained that my understanding was that, while the cases presented were probably real enough, the show as a whole was a creation. Maybe not a scripted performance, maybe not even rehearsed, but certainly managed. I believe, for example, that the studio audience is paid. Are there auditions and screen tests for prospective litigants? One can see that from the point of view of the producer of the show, there maybe ought to be. I find the whole fake-real ambience of shows like this (I am told that our own 'Antiques Roadshow', for example, is managed in much the same way) rather distasteful, preferring to keep my fact and fiction reasonably separate. BH and I have to agree to differ.

But yesterday, I had rather a different thought. That it was rather distasteful that a very rich woman should make herself even richer by shouting at very poor men and women on television. The strange fact that they volunteer to be humiliated in this way does not go very far to excuse her.

PS: one might argue in Judy's defence that justice is a show. A performance put on for the jury and for those of us who care to see justice being done. A performance put on by lawyers who share many tricks of the trade with the luvvies. So what is so terrible about being up front about it? Answer: there is a big difference between putting on a show in order to make money and there being a show as a by-product of making justice.

Guardian!

BH took pity on me and brought home a Guardian today, rather than the DT, which made a nice change. It might be a bit pompous, particularly if you read it too often, but at least there is content and the things that it rants about are generally more worthy than the things that the DT rants about.

The illustrated advertisement shows that the jobs pages are indeed on form. Whatever does a multicultural research fellow (Shakespeare) have to do to earn maybe half as much again as a front line EO in the Department of Work and Pensions leading a team which tries to place difficult to place people in Scotland?

Curiosity aroused, I trundle off to the Warwick recruitment place where I am told that in order to apply I have to register with their online application system - a wheeze which neatly transfers a lot of the administrative hassle of filling vacancies from the chap with the job to the chap who wants a job. If I am careful I will spot the opportunity to upload my CV and perhaps one other supporting document into my application. I had quite forgotten about all this dreadful stuff - which I got out in time to mostly avoid.

Onto the job description where I find that the project is all about studying the performance of Shakespeare by Black and Asian groups since the second world war. The lucky fellow looks to have to work to a Principal Investigator most of the time, but also keeping an eye on the Project Leader. Lots of outreach to all kinds of community groups. Knowledge of Shakespeare probably only peripheral to the requirement; one can pick up enough from York Notes or BBC back numbers as one goes along. This project is all about community and accessibility - no need to fuss about drama, poetry or anything like that.

Not clear whether the participation of people of colour in performances dominated by people without colour qualifies. For example, Lenny Henry as Othello. And then, what about the polyglot gang from India who did Midsummer Night's Dream at the Roundhouse? Or the couple of Zimbabwean mime artists who did Hamlet at the Ovalhouse. Presumably these last two are disqualified because although they are BME (see below) they don't live here. I dare say one could clarify these points at interview if one got that far.

One of the duties is the construction of a web site and a relational database, this being the bit that I could do. A database which will presumably record every appearance of every BME artist or artiste in any show with a vaguely Shakespearian flavour. Perhaps a gay Macbeth on stilts to explore the relationship of Macbeth's dream with the blood curdling vendattas of the stilt fishers of the lakes of western Kashmir? A mine of information for PhD candidates of the future, free to BMEs.

And at the end of it all there is an international symposium, with the published proceedings counting towards contributor publication scores. Very important these days: no publication in qualifying publications, no job.

And am I left with the sense that there is lots of outreach, workshop, seminar and publication. Lots of package but very little packet, rather as in the game of pass the parcel. Or lots of headings and very little content, rather as in a report from the late lamented CCTA. But I have very little sense of what it is all about. What it is all for. Maybe that is all part of the initiative test for candidates. But on the whole, I think the EOs mentioned above will be earning an honester crust.

PS: and in case you are wondering, BME stands for black minority ethnic. Poor English but there you are. See, for example, the rather splendid web site at http://www.bmenetwork.org.uk/. The research fellow will be expected to know all about it.

Very slow

In my various meanderings about the properties of jigsaws on 1st November I listed a property 4: four pieces meet at every vertex.

I am now rather cross that despite being in possession of the relevant information - in this case about how the cutting dies for the cardboard jigsaws that I solve are made - I completely failed to observe that there was a symmetry issue here. A sort of senior moment.

Cutting dies are made out of (say) 1cm strips of bendy steel with a sharp upper edge. In essence, the die maker lays parallel strips on the base board, sharp edge up and running from top to bottom, maybe an inch apart. The strips will include all kinds of wiggles reflecting the prongs and holes of the intended jigsaw, but we are talking of continuous strips. The strips are then fixed down.

The die maker then fills in in the other direction, but this time instead of a small number of long strips we have a large number of short strips of steel, one for each piece. And while the die maker may choose to line all these left-to-right strips up, as if they were a single, continuous strip, he does not have to. The short strips may be always aligned (in which case the jigsaw will have property 4), mostly aligned, sometimes aligned or more or less never aligned.

With the result that pieces are always aligned vertically but may not be aligned horizontally. Or vice-versa in the case that the die maker does it all the other way around. In the illustration, A is always aligned vertically with B, but may or may not be aligned horizontally with C.

So the puzzle has orientation. Top to bottom is different to left to right, a difference which can be exploited in solution.

PS: it would be interesting to see such a die. How do they fix the strips to the base board firmly enough to stand perhaps hundreds of cuttings? And how do you get steel which is hard enough to hold the necessary edge while being soft enough to be bent into the necessary shapes? The die has to hold the edge as I do not see how one could sharpen a completed die. Would it be worth taking one to pieces to sharpen it - then put it back together again?

Jigbooks

I reviewed some properties of jigsaws on 1st November and now notice a book about same, a book which, I might say, takes no interest whatsoever in the formal properties of these fascinating puzzles.

So far, my second book about jigsaws, the first being the memoir by Margaret Drabble, noticed in the other place on June 14th amongst other dates. A quite different sort of book this one, a book written with all the love and care of someone - Tom Tyler - who has spent a good part of his adult life in and around jigsaws, rather than that of someone, albeit a gifted amateur, who has come rather late to the craft.

The first interesting point about this book is that its purchase, from Amazon, was the first occasion on which I noticed that the Amazon price was not the best price on the street. On this occasion, we learned from a leaflet accompanying the Saturday DT that an outfit called Postcript would have supplied the book for something like half the price that Amazon required. To be fair, Postscript (http://www.psbooks.co.uk/) do seem to rather specialise in this sort of coffee table book for the discerning buyer. The sort of books which one suspects were made to be remaindered, with some obscure shop in some obscure town serving to offer them at what is described at the proper price and from which very few purchases are ever made. It would not even need to be open very often or for very long to comply with the laws of the land concerning sale price labeling.

But the main point is that the book has done what I wanted. I have learned something of the history of jigsaws, something of their manufacture and something of the worlds of jigsawyers and jigsaw collectors. A regular cornucopia of jigfacts.

I have, for example, been conditioned by having restricted myself, in large part, to machine pressed jigsaws, with the way in which the cutting dies are made (by hand) accounting for much of the regularity that I was talking about on the 1st. Saw cut jigsaws are much freer in their composition, also rather prone to the inclusion of whimsies which I find a little irritating. I like the regularity of the machine pressed puzzles. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how hard I would find it to switch to the hand cuts. Would the whole pace & nature of the game change? Would one enjoy the various traps and pratfalls which the enterprising hand cutter had worked into your puzzle, traps and pratfalls which make cunning and subtle use of the subject image? Certainly, some of those illustrated in this book look as if they would be very difficult to solve. It would not do to be in a hurry or to be competitive.

Then I think that it would be fun to visit a jigsaw factory. But maybe that would take a bit of organizing. Maybe it would be easier to visit a jigsaw museum. So I ask Mr. Google about jigsaw museums to find that there are plenty of museums offering online jigsaws of their exhibits (see, for example http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk. Clearly my notion of using jigsaws as an art educational aid is not very original at all) but none where the jigsaws are the exhibits. One would have thought that there would be such a thing somewhere. The sort of thing you might come across in Brading (on the Isle of Wight), or Yarmouth or Blackpool. I shall try to remember to keep looking.

The book goes on to explain that there is now a computer controlled contraption which enables one to cut a wooden jigsaw using high pressure water jets - the same sort of thing I presume which dental hygienists like to attack one's mouth with. Hopefully this will mean that one will be able to commission a jigsaw of more or less any image one likes, of more or less any degree of difficulty - without the expense of a hand cut. If one had a companion machine that could apply a digital image in a suitable way to a sheet of plywood one would be away. And I would hope that such a companion machine would be available, art shops having been able to transfer images to hardboard - thus avoiding the need for the glass which reflects - for thirty years or more. It may even be that the imaged boards that they produce are already of jigsaw quality, that is to say that the image will stand up to and survive the cutting process.

In the meanwhile, there are plenty of people out there who make their living cutting puzzles to order. So I shall spend a happy breakfast hour dreaming about the image that I shall have turned into a puzzle for some upcoming birthday. Shall I go for a photograph or a painting? Shall it be a landscape? Shall I tour the National Gallery to select a suitable image? In the case where the artist has fussed about the frame - Holman Hunt, for example, was apt to - would it be appropriate to include the frame in the image?

And so one might go on.

Remember, remember, the 5th of November...

Certain amount of firework activity hereabouts, activity which has been running pretty much steady but not large since Halloween.

Which brings to mind the idea, probably more fantasy than reality, than when I was a child one celebrated Guy Fawkes Night on Guy Fawkes Night, whatever day of the week that it happened to fall on. And one did not, small boys with bangers and urchins doing penny for the guy aside (some of these guys were quite elaborate in those days, well worth their penny), celebrate it on other days. I don't suppose this can be quite right as I do not suppose one would have celebrated on a Sunday, but I do believe there is some truth in it. Also that one detracts from the mystery of the event if one allows it move around at the whim of people who like to keep things nice and tidy.

That apart, I find that I do not remember all that much about childish Guy Fawkes. We lived on what was then a newish housing estate and the plot next to our house had been kept vacant against the possibility of the builder getting his paws on the field behind. A vacant plot which contained the odd sections of trunk of an elm tree which had been pulled down and which we used for the purposes of fireworks, generally with two or three other families. I do remember that the eating aspect of fireworks was more important to me than the fireworks aspect. While for my mother, sparklers were the thing, writing messages with sparklers. Marsh mellows on sticks were fun but not particularly nice to eat. Sausages were much better and I vaguely think that we might have wrapped potatoes in foil and cooked them in the ashes. This being in the days when we bought potatoes from the market on a Saturday from a chap who actually grew the things - and who did not bother to wash the earth off as thoroughly as is the custom nowadays. I wonder if we did twists and dampers and scouting things like that - a well made twist with well made jam being a fine thing on a cold evening? And that, is about the extent of my associations with Guy Fawkes. Maybe some more will come to me overnight.

We celebrated today in a slightly different way, taking our first meal out of the new era, selecting our local Wetherspoons for the purpose. Not too crowded, food served quickly and good facilities. On this occasion two steak and kidney puddings for £6.49. Chips not that great, but a very decent meal for the money; maybe even better value than McDonalds. Certainly easier to eat, as I find McDonalds a bit full of sticky yellow goo for rapid consumption. (The last time must have been when stranded at a filling station on the outskirts of Cardiff, maybe ten years ago).

Followed up by the first bit of DIY of the new era, a bit occasioned by the pull ring of my shiny new box file from Staples falling out. Generally speaking I find Staples stuff OK and as we have one in walking distance, I use it. Must have spent a fair bit on genuine HP ink there over the years, never having gotten around to using fake. But this pull ring just pulled out, rather than pulling the admittedly full box file out of its hole. On inspection, I find that the thing was only held onto the cardboard of the box by a rather feeble rivet. Poke around in the cold & gathering gloom in the garage to find that I do indeed have suitable nut, washer and bolt to replace the rivet. Drill out the hole in the pull ring and away we go. Pull ring now firmly attached. The only worry is that there are two box files and I am not at all sure that I am going to be able to manage the same nut, washer and bolt combination to do the same job on the other one. The trouble with just keeping a great heap of such things loose in a box: one can nearly always find one of what one wants, but finding two the same is generally quite challenging. That requires a visit to Screwfix.

Aide memoire

In reporting my recent perusal of 'Black Beauty' in the other place (October 24th), I mentioned what I had learned to be the obnoxious practice of forcing horses to hold their heads up with gadgets called bearing reins.

Since then I have been trying to work out whether the various horses which figure in the various costume dramas we watch here  - Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Barchester Towers and their like - have been fitted with these things. The horses do seem to hold their heads up but they are never in the right position for long enough to check for a bearing rein. I suppose I am going to have to resort to the pause button - a zoom button being too much to hope for on our bottom of the range DVD player. Or do the various replay sites on the internet have such a thing?

The point being that this seems to be an excellent issue to stir up the costume drama world with. It may well be that the clerics of places such as Barchester did indeed insist on their horses being fitted with bearing reins but is it fit that in recreating such places for our evening edification, we should recreate this particular iniquity? It all all very well making actors smoke on the job (I observe in passing that a lot of Trollope's characters smoke a lot of cigars); they are consenting human beings. They can chose not to play the game. But this is certainly not the case for dumb animals.

Maybe I could interest the Badger Brigade in the issue? Give them something to bite on in the slack season before the cull gets under way again?

Maybe it would be worth campaigning to get the Board of Governors of the BBC to issue a code of conduct controlling the use of bearing reins in productions which they commission - an outright ban being perhaps a little millenarian at this time?

PS: with thanks to Mr. Google for the illustration. Does anyone know where it comes from?

Mediffairs

I share my pearls of wisdom on two matters.

The first concerns a drug which, for present purposes, may be called poppyparazodamiene, 30 portions of which were issued to me for use as required during my recent visit to hospital. As it turned out, I was fairly needy and was getting through my supply fairly quickly. So I started to worry about what would happen if I ran out? I had no idea how long the need would persist for but the prospect of being very needy was not pleasant. Now it is not the sort of thing that you are going to be able to get over the counter at Boots. Or at Lloyds for that matter. So I apply to my GP who kindly arranges for me to be given a further 100 portions and there is now nothing to worry about.

But being of a worrying disposition I manage to come up with something. My need is showing signs of abating and it is possible that I will not need any of the additional supply. But my understanding is that, in this event, I cannot usefully return the stuff to the pharmacist. His instructions are to send all returned medicines to the incinerator and I can see that in the great scheme of things it might not be worth his time to try and sort out the stuff which can safely be reused from that which cannot. So my worry is, supposing this stuff is expensive? Maybe even very expensive - I don't happen to think that it is, but it is always possible.

And my question is, given that we need to manage the potion bill for the nation at large, where should the price of the stuff bite? Is it enough that the GP, who is or is about to become the budget holder, worries about this, and if he decides that the potion costs a lot relative to the transaction cost of a prescription, he can always prescribe in smaller volumes? Is it right that I should be worrying about the costs of potions when I should be worrying about getting better?

My answer, is that it would not hurt for prescriptions to carry a price ticket. Those who do not care what they spend in this way will not be hurt and those who do care will be able to do so. This is, of course, quite different from asking people to pay at the point of delivery. Hopefully we have, in large part, got away from that and will not return, bullingdons permitting.

My second concerns the possibility of getting lost in the system and I spent my quality waking up time this morning thinking about I how would reduce this possibility.

Step 1, get the IT department to buy some decent work flow software. It seems quite likely that there is something available on the shelf, perhaps a spin off from all the billions poured into healthy IT by the Blair Brown team. The outfit called Filenet (mentioned in the other place on 20th October) used to sell the sort of thing that is needed.

Step 2, divide the hospital up into teams, with team leader roughly equating to consultant.

Step 3, make a rule that when anyone is admitted to the hospital for more than a passing visit, they are assigned to a team. That person is then the responsibility of that team and it us up to the team leader to make sure that the work, that is to say the patients, flow (systems of this sort not called work flow for nothing) through the system in an orderly way.

Software of this sort is very good at keeping teams up to scratch. At making sure, for example, that observations are made and recorded (in which connection, see 25th September). At raising exception reports. At escalating problems to senior management. Generally making sure that the flows are orderly.

Step 4, make rules for transferring someone from one team to another. Maybe another team at another location - this last apt to be slightly tricky as it is too much to hope for that the other location will be operating the same work flow software. Some sort of protocol which requires a positive acceptance from the receiving team before the donor team can sign off.

Step 5, make rules about who is allowed to do what to which records. So a member of team A is not, for example, allowed to tamper with key details of a patient assigned to team B.

Step 6, add some bits and pieces to do team maintenance. For team members and team leaders to come and go. Sometimes one can deal with this by talking of roles rather than people.

Over a liquid lunch, a work flow salesman might get quite enthusiastic. Use the system for controlling the management of patients in quite a detailed way. So for example, a request by doctor A to nurse B do procedure C on patient D might be expressed as a work flow. An item, rather like an email, which arrives in the nurse's in box. Authority, documentation, everything he or she needs to get on and do the job. And make the record afterwards.

In other process or transaction orientated industries all this is bog standard stuff. Been around for years. But has it percolated to the health world yet? All this being prompted by reports in the DT which suggest that it has not percolated as far as North Devon.