Visit the jigsaw

Given that we could not afford the painting, clearly time to visit the actual scene painted (see 27th December last for the last such visit to a place rather than a painting), only to find that the painter must have done something a bit tricky. We did not think that his scene was possible from the southern embankment, the angles being all wrong. But we were impressed by being under the wheel, it having been some time since we had been there. I wondered when they would have to do some maintenance on the axle, which some engineer told me was a marvel of steel forging, probably not something that we could still manage at home in the decline of our manufacturing industry - but at least it was pulling in lots of foreign tourist dosh to make up. So long, that is, that it does not all leak out to some shady haven in BVI, rather than swelling the national coffers.

But we decided to get to the jigsaw via Vauxhall Bridge where we were treated to the sight of a heron dozing on a bank. Just upstream of the heron there was an outfall, discharging something pretty brown and grotty looking into the Thames - a grottiness which was clearly in the eye of the beholder as a flock of terns thought it was just the thing for a spot of late breakfast. Pushing on we took our late breakfast in the relocated members' café at the Tate Proper, where my tea might have been made with leaf rather than bag but was pretty foul. The lady next to us thought that this was the result of using far too many leaves.

Next we paid a visit to the Lowry exhibition, taking advantage of our member's ticket which gets you in with neither ticket nor queuing, quite a big plus. Crowded, but not unpleasantly so. I did suspect one of the crowd of having having their earhole commentary turned up too loud, but it turned out that the curators had seen fit to include musak in the mix and the noise was coming out of official loudspeakers rather than unofficial earholes. Should they ask for my comments, which they sometimes do by email, I shall make a stiff complaint. I might also take the opportunity to ask if they could not find something better to do with the former sculpture hall than pretend to be the turbine hall downriver.

The paintings were much better than I expected, much more main stream, although I thought that sometimes he was being a bit lazy and just whacking them out by rote to pay the bills.

Many of the pictures were composed with sky at the top, mills in the middle and people scurrying along the bottom, the whole being framed by a strong kerb running along the very bottom. Strong horizontals to balance the verticals of the mills and their chimneys. Diagonal smoke to give the composition a bit of variety.

The people in some of them reminded me of Jack the Dripper. You need to be maybe 12 feet away to the get the effect.

Many of the frames were unexpectedly grand.

He must have made the most use of black of any famous painter. He must also have been rather odd, a thought which was subsequently confirmed by Wikipedia. Which also told me that Salford have seen fit to spend more than £100 million on a gallery to hold their holdings of his paintings: I wonder if this figure is right: it seems an awful lot for a cash strapped council to knock out on the local dauber. Has Wikipedia slipped up for once?

A lot of funerals.

We shall be back.

Thought to go to lunch at the restaurant in the entrance hall of No. 4 Millbank, a place at which I had been lunched by salesmen on several occasions in the past. I should have been alarmed by it not having a web site, although it did have a web presence, and when we got there found it had been rebadged as 'The English Pig' and was just shutting for the day, this being followed by permanent closure on Friday. But they do have a web site at http://theenglishpig.co.uk/. So no lunch there. Luckily there was the 'Quirinale' (http://www.quirinale.co.uk/) just around the corner, a very pleasant establishment in a sub-ground which gave us an excellent lunch at a reasonable price. A place which sold a good range of wine and a good range of Italian cheese. In fact, I don't remember being in a restaurant which took its cheese so seriously. They also served their cheese in small doses with a larger dose of bread, that is to say the right way around; so often you get a refrigerator cold brick of indifferent cheese with just a morsel of indifferent bread.

Students

The Evening Standard carried a piece yesterday in which it reported much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the upper reaches of the London Fire Brigade (should it not be the London Fire and Rescue Service or some such?) about the number of false alarms they were having to deal with at the likes of hospitals and student halls.

First thought that was given that fire services spend most of their time sitting around, does it really help in the overall scheme of things, to make all these hospitals and students halls spend a lot more money on their fire alarm systems than they are now? Or have fire services fallen into the same trap as hospitals, trying to run at 99% occupancy rather than the more sensible 66%?

Second thought was of my short stay at the fire service college in Morton-on-Marsh. Most afternoons there was a fire alarm from one of the accommodation blocks scattered around the campus, alarms apparently caused by the showering habits of the overseas firemen who accounted for much of the business of the place. They were showering for far too long or with the doors open or something, with the resultant steam setting something off. Everybody out, followed by fire engine trundling over the grass.

I note in passing, that, as a matter of organisation, a lot of these foreign firemen were in the corresponding foreign army, an arrangement I do not think we ever had here. There was also a splendid painting in the officers' mess by a Pole of a fireman rescuing a damsel in virginal white & distress, a painting which Google seems to know nothing about, so I am unable to reproduce it here.

Jigsaw 18, Series 2

Rather a long time since I last reported completion of a jigsaw, but here we are now with another 99p job from the Oxfam shop at Ewell village.

Another Falcon de luxe, described this time as both fine art and nostalgia. But much the same sort of thing as jigsaw 16 of 12th June.

This one is a trimmed version of a splendidly garish painting by one John Macvicar Anderson, that well known painter from Glasgow who died in 1915. He died at the ripe old age of 80, so he must have made quite a good thing out of of it. You can have your own print of this painting for a mere $49.99 from http://www.allposters.com/, while the painting itself last went under the hammer in 2003, on which occasion it went for a little more than £125,000. Bit too strong for me. There is also the confusion of there being an architect of the same name. Is it the same person?

An easy going puzzle, but one on which I got off to rather a slow start. Pace, as seems to be usual, gradually increasing to a breathless finish late (for me) last night.

Edge first, then the skyline, a skyline which with all its ups and downs covered a lot of ground. Then the bridge line, then the buildings between. Then worked down over the water. Then worked up over the sky. Just one mistake along the way, a bit of sky which I put in the right place but the wrong way around. A lot easier than jigsaw 16, despite coming from the same part of the same stable. Nice positive feel to piece placement and I was only occasionally doubtful about whether some particular piece went in some particular hole or not. So much so that I was occasionally able to place a piece on the basis of a fit on just one side, rather than the much more usual two.

Easy to follow colour & feature coding. Then the gently waving horizontal cuts, just about visible in the illustration, made finding pieces from the heap a lot easier than it would otherwise have been: there being small pieces, wedge shaped pieces and large pieces. Quite unlike, in this respect the very straight jigsaw 15 of 19th May. But it does seem that all Falcon jigsaws have keys which help one crack the thing; so in this one wavy lines, in another some other wheeze. Is it all down to the taste of the die cutter? Were they real craftsmen, something after the way of a crossword puzzle compiler?

Mostly regular with exactly four pieces meeting at every interior vertex and with few if any pieces of the two-prong-two-hole variety.

Ventnor Botanic Gardens

A couple of weeks ago to Ventnor Botanic Gardens, now devolved to a not for profit company from the council. Lots of volunteers. One effect of which is that we now have to pay – but hardly a lot for the amount of garden that you get. A place, which as a result of some quirk of of its under-cliff & south-facing location, is able to support plants from places which are rather warmer by nature.

Increasing focus on plants which like it hot and dry. Lots of stuff from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico. Enough variety for one to be very impressed by the very variety of large plants; the invisible hand of evolution has been very busy. Why are there so many different sorts of large plants, seemingly a lot more sorts than there are of large animals, which last can only amount to a few thousands? E. O Wilson (see 6th June), is not helpful, only telling me that there are a lot more sorts of animals of all sizes than there are plants of all sizes, a rather different matter altogether.

Lots of echium pininana (curiously, also known as giant viper's bugloss) which clearly like the site as they are seeding all over the place. Rather spectacular; well liked by some small bumble bees; very large plant for a biennial. I dare say it could be considered invasive in places such as this where they thrive, but management have settled for the soft option of allowing it to be an ornament rather than a pest.

A good showing of agave, possibly agave deserti, a rather handsomer plant than the other candidate agave americana; in any event a plant of which I am fond and always seek it out in places such as Wisley, where there are some particularly fine specimens in the dry end of their large new glass house. Maybe they are not so handsome when gowing in the wild.

Hottest hot house I recall being in. 90F and it took my breath away a bit. Pleasantly amateurish affair with lots of mouldering debris built into the display. Centre piece a lilly pond with giant water lillys – the things about four feet across and with raised edges – so big that they look as if a small person might safely sit in one of them.

Hop yard looked a touch half hearted, but maybe hops are only just getting underway at this time of year. Maybe eight rows, with serious poles and wires, but only four with plants, two small and two big. Maybe the latter were a bit older.

Two cafés, one upstairs for drinks and cake, one downstairs for drinks, cake, sandwiches and light lunches. All very artily presented by an executive chef no less, service a little slow. Bit heavy on the dressing on the salads. In particular, some brown stuff which came out of a yellow plastic bottle and which was delivered by squeezing: lots of restaurants these days seem to use it on lots of dishes, more or less making it the third millennium version of brown sauce. (On which subject, reading the label, I found that the brown in brown sauce was a cunning combination of dates and molasses, displacing most of the tomatoes in the otherwise rather similar tomato sauce. Both contain lots of sugar in one form or another).

The whole place was pleasantly relaxed, not taking itself quite as seriously as a place like Wisley. A real pleasure garden as much as a botanic garden. So a good long visit to their bricks followed by a rather quicker visit to their clicks at http://www.botanic.co.uk/, the name of which suggests that they must have been fairly quick off the blocks.

A pair of blue eyes

An early Hardy novel in the handsome 'New Wessex Edition' from Macmillan, a hardback version, perhaps the hardback precursor, of the Penguin Classic edition of 'Two on a Tower' noticed on 15th July. And like this last, also from the library, with the loan sheet inside the front cover endorsed both  'group loan' and 'group housebound', and with many of the date entries involving someone or something called 'artemis'. Perhaps, in the main, an older person's read?

A novel which lifts large chunks from the long courting of Hardy's first wife and which was written shortly before he married her. My recollection is that this novel, while helping to get Hardy established in the literary scene, did not do particularly well, but perhaps it did well enough to set him up in the married state - his wife being from a class which did not boil its own eggs. Nothing much would get done in the household without the paid help, wifey being far too posh to polish. But what did she think about being held up to the gaze of readers of serialised novels in this way? The portrait was not particularly unkind, but I would not care to be exhibited for inspection & discussion in this way, to be pawed over by the great unwashed while they slopped down their beer or cocoa or whatever: perhaps you need a strong streak of exhibitionism married to a strong streak of literary ambition (for one's partner, in this case) to get over one's scruples in such a matter.

A novel in which Hardy could not resist flaunting his hard won education, with cultural, literary and classical allusions scattered throughout. Rather tiresome when taken at this dosage, but luckily something which he grows out of in later novels.

Much gentle humour of the sort also noticed on 22nd July - something that the likes of Waugh and Maughan do not manage; their humour has a much sharper edge to it, spiteful rather than playful. A trait perhaps reflected in Hardy's kindness to budding or aspiring authors in his old age; he was always willing to give them a bit of time and trouble. And worked around the humour, quite a lot of gentle musings on death and quite a lot of them around graves. A consciousness of the fickle, fragile and transient nature of the lives of his times - ironic considering what turned out to be his own considerable longevity, and this despite his pipe.

I also remarked on that day my easiness of belief, a remark exemplified here in that it did not occur to me until I read some of the wrapping that one of the main characters in this book is based on one of the main characters in Hardy's life, a main character whom I had read all about in Tomalin. The correspondence is clear once it has been pointed out, but when first reading the book I was far to wrapped up in the story to think on where this particular character had been lifted from.

Nor was I aware of the constraints imposed by serialisation, which in this case required forty chapters of roughly equal size, each closing in a way to encourage the reader to wait for the next. One might have thought that one would notice this when reading the thing in book form, but I did not.

And I have only just noticed, as I type, that the loves of the tragic heroine, herself with damaged ancestry with her mother having married well beneath herself, had a steady upward trajectory: first village boy, then village boy who goes on to better himself, then learned literary & middle class type (the main character of the previous paragraph but one), then fourth and lastly a lord, a courtly and courteous lord from the same ancestral stock as herself and whom she marries. Only to be carried off in childbed a few months later. Perhaps it is this steady climb which gives the novel, with all its twists and turns, a bit of backbone to steady the reader on his way; it seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

A eureka moment: since writing the foregoing, it has dawned on me that maybe the whole idea is that she gets better at lovemaking, gets more ambitious and aims higher. There are various pointers to this in the text. But I also think that part of the point is that improving her game does not necessarily improve the outcome.

All in all a good novel, if not quite a masterpiece. A much more comfortable read than a lot of modern fiction with all their explicit sex, violence and unsettled mores. In which I might be showing my age; it may well be that Hardy's novels were lambasted in his own day for exactly the same trio. But I assert not: I think that Hardy was a very shrewd observer & recorder of human affairs, affairs which have not changed that much in their essentials in the years since his time and crafts which so many of today's writers neglect. Their interests and skills lie elsewhere.

PS: I close with the observation that Hardy was one of the few famous novelists to survive the cull which followed the arrival of the my Kindle. We still have our Hardy paperbacks while Elliot, Lawrence, Trollope and Tolstoy have largely vanished, vanquished by electrical freebies or near freebies from Gutenburg and Amazon. A mixture of Macmillan, Papermac (a flavour of Macmillan) and Pan paperbacks which survived on a BHular whim.

Corrigendum

Following the picture from a 1950's Polish book about Polish buildings in which Polish Jewish buildings are almost invisible (see 22nd July on Churchill)), I post a picture of one in Kracow dating from the 15th century, from Wikipedia. Not to mention the many pictures which must have survived the destruction of the buildings themselves in the Second World War. Which confirms my suspicion that there is no good reason for the lack of visibility.

Wikipedia also tells me that Jews started arriving in Poland at roughly the same time that William the Conqueror was arriving here. They appear to have been welcome for the first 500 years or so of their stay, but this welcome faded with the decline of the Polish kingdom and the rise of the partitions.

Health matters

I was interested to read in a recent DT that Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Health, the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt does stints as an incognito ward orderly or some such.

Now while I might think that what he his doing to the NHS is very wrong and quite unnecessarily destructive, my first thought was good for him. It can only be healthy for a chief executive to get to see what the grunts on the ground have to do; something which, I believe, is quite the thing in the private sector. So the boss of Tesco's will put in a bit of time, from time to time, as a check out lady or a shelf stacker.

My second thought was that maybe it is just a publicity stunt which will just create extra work for the regulars on the ward which he orders, it being hard to treat such a person in the more or less natural way you might treat a real ward orderly on a real orderly's wages. Furthermore, there is the danger of a little knowledge being dangerous: Mr. Hunt might start lecturing his professional help about how wards should be run on the basis of two afternoons a quarter.

On the first point, modern politicians are usually (but what about our late leader, Mr. Brown?) very good with people, particular the people: tucking into pies with the chaps at football matches, knocking back the grits at netball. The younger Bush was said to be an absolute wow at this last. So maybe it is not a point at all. And I have heard that Mr. Branson's troops think that he is a wow too, despite his being on my personal hate list (a list which also includes, amongst others, Mr. Dyson of cleaning tornado fame and that other Jeremy, Paxo, from University Challenge and the Garrick Club (failed)).

On the second point, his CV at http://www.jeremyhunt.org/ tells me that he is a very able man, whatever he might be doing in his day job. He is said to have learnt Japanese while working over there. He has built his own business in the past. So he might be arrogant and far too sure that he is right; but I am not sure that this has anything to do with his ordering of wards.

So maybe am I back with my first thought.

Rather different is the case of the so-called investigators from Channel 4 who masquerade as trainee NHS call centre operators and then blow the whistle for our entertainment. They would no doubt argue that without this kind of deception one is never going to learn the truth about the awful goings on in these places. But I worry about the erosion of standards in a world where telling lies, perhaps over a period of some weeks, to your employer and to your colleagues is OK. I look back to those good old days when decent citizens would not tell a lie, whatever good intentions had been used to pave the road to hell.

So on this one, I am neuter. Uneasy, but not enough information to go on to go any further and I am not going to waste quality time consuming the entertainment in question.

Epsom Common

A stroll anti clockwise around the all weather path this morning, thinking that it would be nice to walk out of the sun, which it was.

I am pleased to record that I came across no signs of recent activity of the chain saw volunteers, although the unsightly fences for the methane squirters were still in place. On the other hand someone, probably just a vandal rather than a conscientious objector to the activity of the volunteers, had taken a saw, chain saw or otherwise, to some of the nice new wooden signs put up last year.

No animal life worth mentioning, and the next best thing was a couple of ponies being barebacked by a couple of young ladies. On the vegetable life front, interested to see that many of the older oak trees on the Common have dead branches, particularly lower down, under the canopy, which they are slowly shedding. In this respect just like the older oak tree next door which overhangs most of the back of our back garden. Maybe one fine day, something large will come down.

A bit odd that I can find no record of walking on the Common since 21st January when there was still snow on the ground. It is true that I have largely abandoned the Common in favour of the Horton Lane circuit but I feel sure that I have been on the Common since January: record keeping not up to snuff at all.

Cakes and Ale

Following the end of the post of 5th July, I have now gone through ‘Cakes and Ale’ a couple of times – so despite what I am about to say the thing was clearly gripping to that extent.

The Kindle version included a substantial introduction from academe and a substantial preface by the author, the latter written some time after the event and covering, amongst other things, the allegation that he was having a pop at Hardy. Both interesting adjuncts to the text itself.

An easy enough read, but a rather awkward feeling book, with the framing device of have a first person narrator not working very well for me. Maybe writing a novel about writing & promoting novels is not that easy, even though it must be tempting; that is, after all, what a successful author of novels, even short ones, has had time to get to know about. Plus Somerset Maughan struck me as being rather bitchy, in the same sort of way although not as badly, as Evelyn Waugh. Maybe more than a touch of class snobbery towards those, like Hardy (and like himself) who were of modest origins, ambitious and keen to better themselves, this last including ingratiating themselves with people with little merit beyond their titles. He also struck me as being far too interested in the transient and confected nature of most literary fame, leaving the unfortunate impression that this was mainly because he suspected that his own was going to be very transitory. Confected in the sense that writing a good book was not really the point; it was knowing how to puff it that counted, knowing how to be nice to all the right people and how to get one’s face in all the right papers. Longevity was a help too – where Hardy scored big time. I note in passing that we have a recent demonstration of confection from the Potter stable.

And OK, some of it could be read as a bit of a pop at Hardy, a bit tactless perhaps given what was known about his relations with and his poetry about his first wife, not to mention the consequent insecurity and angst of his second wife, but it did not strike me as a big deal, although there were words about the not so nice details of looking after an old man, words which would strike a chord with anyone who has had a spell at it. Furthermore, a lot of novels of the time included pops at recognisable people, Aldous Huxley for example, a contemporary of Maughan who gets a slight mention in this novel, and with spot the model being a popular drawing room sport for the literati of the day. And what is more, I do not find his portrayal of himself, the narrator, as being at all flattering and in one memorable scene he portrays himself as a bit of a prat; a memorable scene which had a real life model which his contemporaries knew all about - so he did take it as well as dish it out. While Hardy was rather different in that a lot of his most memorable confections are taken from himself, his life or his wife: he stuck himself in the pillory, rather than others: very public spirited of him.

Nice tale about the author (the author in the book who can be taken for Hardy, Driffield, not the writer of the book itself or the other, younger, author in the book) doing a bunk in the middle of the night, leaving all his creditors in the lurch. A practise which was called shooting the moon, a natty bit of slang which I have not come across before and which Wikipedia/Google suggest is to do with a card game called 'Hearts' in which shooting the moon is a known gambit. Not a game I have ever heard of.

An interesting read, but I don’t think I shall be venturing further into the Maughan oeuvre.

Estate agent's view of Seaview

The developer's view of the place you can buy into from the previous post.

O to be a caulkhead!

Once upon a time we harboured ambitions to move to the Isle of Wight and to become honorary caulkheads when I gave up work - full rights to use of the name being only generally allowed to those born on the island. But once I had given up work and the move became more possible, it also became less attractive and we never did it, although we continue to visit the place for summer holidays.

We were reminded of all this a couple of weeks ago when taking a stroll through Seaview, an Isle of Wight version of Southwold or Wells-next-the-Sea. A place full of Surrey accents and Range Rovers; sufficiently Surrey that the inhabitants are far too tasteful to go in for the Hummers that you see in some parts of the island.

Round the back of the part of Seaview which looks more like the estate agents picture which I am about to post, we came across the collection of overgrown beach huts illustrated, one up and one down and you can stay over in them although you are not allowed to live in them over the winter.Yours for £200,000 or so a pop.

Or if you don't fancy that the same people have refurbished a close full of beach chalets just up the road for upwards of £250,000 a pop - and you are allowed to live in them in the winter.

After toying with the idea over the cup that cheers, we decided that this was far too strong meat for us, tying up far too much money in what looked like a very speculative venture. Much better to stick with renting cottages from other people.

PS: during the composition of this post, there being a hiatus in the supply of home baked, we tried out a 'stoneground boule' from Waitrose, a small white loaf for the large premium price of £1.83. Looked good from the outside. First slice from the outside looked good from the inside. Good texture and taste. But as one progressed further into the loaf, one found that it was decidedly under cooked and doughy in texture. I think this particular soi-disant in-store bakery does not bother with flour or anything like that and takes in their bread half done and possibly frozen, just finishing it off in-store - so maybe they forgot to thaw this one out before trying to bake it off. In any event, not impressed by this particular effort from the usually reliable Waitrose. Although that said, I have noticed that their regular white loaves are not very good either. Fortunately, we only rarely need to buy such things.

An up side was that the transaction did suggest that my shiny new bank card is indeed in working order.

It's that moan a minute time again...

My bank have thoughtfully sent me a new credit card, my old one being set to expire next month. But not so thoughtfully they have changed the number, a change which means that I have now spent around two hours faffing about with keyboard and telephone trying to sort out the change, the challenging bit being remembering who needs to be told and then doing whatever it is that they want done.

Score so far, done four, of which I was able to verify just one by making a small trial purchase, this option not being available on the other three. Failed the fifth and now too grumpy to try and do any more today; I shall just wait for the payment that that one is connected to fail.

A good example of how service providers transfer administrative costs to their customers as part of taking them on the online journey. But I suppose I will think that it was all worth while in a few weeks time when it is all bedded down and confirmed to be working.

Which reminds me that the gas people have just sent me another incomprehensible online bill. Another gang which is into stuff the customer by option and information overload. An old trick from the bad old days when it was used to keep stroppy trade union officials under control.

Prime on

As is often the way in this country, we pick up a wheeze from over the pond some time after those over the pond have tired of it. In this case, now that we are perhaps, in this country at least, emerging from the mess triggered by the sub-prime fiasco in the US, we appear to be going for a sub-prime fiasco of our own by providing government money to underwrite housing loans to people who can't really afford them.

The Guardian describes this as a £130 billion bung to the housing finance industry, which seems a bit OTT, it not being at all clear to me exactly how underwriting dodgy housing loans gets turned in government expenditure, although it clearly does in one way or another. But, in any event, the government expenditure looks to be substantial.

So, if such monies are available, why not just chuck it at the social housing sector? Pay them to build houses rather than paying the finance industry to build loans? I suppose the trouble is that paying to build houses sounds much to much like a nationalised industry and is therefore bad. Paying to build loans is just helping out our friends in the financial services industry and is therefore good.

Further annoyed by remembering reading a short book about a stint in the world of gangs by a middle aged and middle class lady, the relevance here being that one conclusion that I took away from it was that the provision of decent housing for young people, along the lines of university accommodation, accommodation which comes with a degree of support and supervision, might be a good thing. But I cannot trace the thing now - even going so far as to ask Amazon from whom I probably bought the book. Sadly they only keep customer visible records for the past year or so - but quite enough to be quite shocked to see how much stuff I buy from them.

Pressing on, I finally solve the search problem. I ask Google for the book and he comes up more or less instantly with 'Among the Hoods'. I ask my blog for hoods and it comes up with 12th November 2012. So, as ever, I failed because I had failed to light upon the search term which produced a short list containing the right answer. Interestingly, using the Windows 8 search facility of my file copy of the blog was hopeless because that has a file for each month, and pretty much every month contained the search terms I was using: a month is too big a unit for searching to work well. But armed with hoods, I tried it with 'hood', which again seemed to return pretty much every month. Tried it with 'hoods' and got the search results down to three months, the first one being the right one. Google are clearly doing a very good job at the search game.

An anxiety dream?

We are to visit Houghton Hall in the fairly near future to see some of the pictures which Prime Minister Walpole's profligate son had to sell to Catherine the Great to cover his gambling debts. An exhibition in the wilds of Norfolk and which appears to be more or less sold out (see http://www.houghtonrevisited.com/). Are all the Shearings' coaches within a hundred miles beating a path to the door? Will the exhibition be packed with people much older than me, fitting the exhibition in between comfort breaks?

But for some reason, last night I had a mild anxiety dream about our forthcoming visit. There was no doubt that it was Houghton Hall that I was visiting in spirit, although the location had been changed to somewhere near Gower Street - perhaps reflecting my current predilection for cycling around central London - and the building had been changed to a very large but entirely imagined part of the University of London. At least it was not a building that I remember visiting in dreamtime before and I do not recognise any features on waking up. I was also my myself, which is not the plan at all.

Start off badly, arriving rather later than I intended. The trusty at the door makes me and a couple of other people wait, but then goes off somewhere leaving the door open. We nip in to find ourselves in a tatty & narrow corridor, painted in pink. Go down the corridor expecting to find myself in the exhibition and it all seems wrong. The right sort of space but the wrong sort of contents. I start to get worried that the exhibition will close for the night before I have found it.

Bustle about and the scene shifts to the roof. I need to climb up a short tubular steel ladder to the ridge from where I can get back into the building. I have some difficulty with the ladder, the steps being in the wrong places for me, and have to apologise to the two boys coming up behind me. The ladder pulls away from its fixings but I manage to get onto the ridge. Back down into the building where I find myself in some administrative part of the university. Lots of smart young women busy at something. [Editor's note: you used to get smart young women working behind the university scenes in my day. I wonder if you still do?] Work my through them without anything of interest happening and find myself in the student bar, a large darkish space, the walls of which are decorated with murals. Paintings, but the wrong ones and not very good ones. Busy with young people - too young for me to feel much connection with them - but not crowded.

Two young men standing next to rather than on a small stage doing a rather odd rendering of Peter Sarstedt's hit from 1969. [Editor's note: I remembered the tune alright but it took a few minutes with Wikipedia this morning to recover his name.]

Scene shifts again and I find myself outside in the dark in a courtyard. I can see lots of large rooms in the building rising up around me but none of them look like the exhibition. And I am pretty sure that by now the exhibition has closed, even to the valued holders of timed tickets.

Eventually I find that one side of the courtyard is large windows onto a very large & ornate room, somewhere between the Festival Hall and the Albert Hall in size, but a banqueting hall rather than a concert hall. Rather unimpressive; I had thought a 17th century oligarch would have done rather better for himself. Perhaps a mock-up done on the cheap. But, at last, I have found the pictures I have come to see - the only remaining problem being that I cannot get very close to them. No door in sight and the place is being got ready for a banquet. Experience a banquet like Walpole would have laid on for his friends and relations at £75 a head plus postage and packing. Lots of tables and soft lights. Some customers already taking their seats. Some young musicians done up as page boys practising something medieval at the dais at the right. Pictures not very impressive at all.

Head for a Northern Line tube station, in the dark and in the rain.

Wake up.

Must try to read Plumb on Walpole again before we go. The product, I think, of the Oxfam shop in Kingston.

Elkins and out

Previously logged on April 28th and May 13th last year in the other place.

'Britain's Gulag' having languished at the bottom of a pile for getting on for a year now, I decided that it was time to polish it off, one way or another. Polishing off did not include actually finishing wading my way through any more accounts of colonial brutality, but I did come to the summary of events which I offer below.

The inhabitants of what is now Kenya were fighting each other for land and status long before we arrived, it being in the minds of some of us to civilise them. Maybe to introduce them to Jesus and to sell them the strange idea that one wife good two wives bad. Maybe also to do something about their terrible sanitary arrangements.

Another part of this civilising process was to bring in lots of white settlers (many of them rather unpleasant types and not even proper farmers) and to give them lots of land. Land to which there might not have been any clear title beforehand, but which was certainly denied to the blacks afterhand. A process which rather reminds me of the current doings with settlers in Israel.

After a while the blacks, in particular the Kikuyus, had had enough and started to make trouble, trouble which some have dressed up into a civil war among the blacks, rather than a push for justice from the whites. We pushed back with all the brutality documented by Elkins. A brutality which gradually seeped into the awareness of folks back home, with Barbara Castle being one of the honourable few who tried to do something to stop it, aided and abetted by African-Asian lawyers, that is to say Kenyan lawyers of Asian ethnic origin. Eventually, in the early sixties say, the (home) government of the day realised that while it might have succeeded in containing its problems in Kenya, its position in Africa was untenable and we had to get out (all this being at roughly the same time as the French messes in Algeria & Vietnam). The alleged rebel leader was released from prison and became leader of the new country; a leader who was magnanimous enough to crack jokes with the governor who had had him jailed, and whose desk & office he had taken over. A leader whose main business was to bury the past, for better or for worse; a burying which us brits were only too happy to go along with. And Barbara Castle was given other fish to fry.

Excess deaths as a result of our incompetence, racism & attendant brutality look to be in excess of 100,000; a disaster of the same order as that perpetrated in Iraq some sixty years later. As the French would no doubt say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But the numbers are contested and a few minutes with Wikipedia gave me the following abstract: 'This article examines the allegation that up to 300,000 Kikuyu and others died as a result of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya in the 1950s. This figure was based on comparative numbers from the 1948 and 1962 censuses, but they failed to take into account the changes in the tribal classifications and differences in the coverage of the two censuses. Using data from the 1969 Kenya census, we have reconstructed the levels and patterns of mortality in the 1950s, and we show that mortality of the Kikuyu was consistently lower than those of the Kamba, Luhya and Luo peoples. We have also used unpublished data from the 1948 census to estimate infant mortality among the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru prior to the emergency. Using this figure as an indicator of ‘normal’ mortality, we have compared them with the estimates derived from the 1969 census, and so calculated the number of ‘excess’ deaths. They amount to perhaps 50,000; more than half of them were children under 10. Given the fragile nature of the data and assumptions, our estimates are subject to large margins of error, but they at least give us an order of magnitude'. Will we ever come to rest?

PS 1: Elkins is an acclaimed Professor of Bash the Brit Studies at Harvard University, so I expect that she is more personable in person than she is on the page. And to be fair to her, while her book could have been a lot better and a lot shorter, it did serve its purpose. I do now feel I have something of a grip on the whole sorry business.

PS 2: Microsoft seem to have fiddled with my desktop again. Having just about learned how to fire up Notepad (which I use to strip unwanted formatting from things), they have seen fit to move it in the course of last night's very important update.

Bad timing

I shall complain to our family holiday planner about her failure to take into account either the existence or the dates of this festival, advertised in Yaverland Church, which would have been just the thing for a convert such as myself.

The small online jigsaws so far found at their site have been some compensation. It may be that there are some large ones too.

See http://jigsawfestival.wix.com/iow.

In praise of Yaverland

A place which Professor Google knows all about and of which he has lots of pictures. This one, a view looking north from somewhere near the car park, seemed to capture the spirit of the place quite well.

The car park is quite large and was never completely full when we visited, despite the hot and beachworthy weather. It also comes complete with a toilet block (very clean and decent for such a place) and a café which, amongst other offerings, does a fine line in rock cakes, a variety of cake to which I am partial. A clear plus point for the place.

The beach extends in both directions, Yaverland to the north and Sandown going on Shanklin to the south, these last two being a lot more resorty than Yeverland, if a touch decayed. Large, mainly sandy and not completely covered at high tide. At least it was not during the course of our visits, which ran to around every other day for a fortnight. Interestingly eclectic bunch of users: seaside flotsam, serious sun worshippers and serious pie worshippers. Some foreigns. Some people who smoked and a small number who liked radio with their sun. Lots of cute children. Lots of dogs. On some days, too many jet skis. On quite a lot of days, a small guard ship, possibly HMS Tyne, one of Her Majesty's fishery protection vessels.

Swimming very good, sometime with waves large enough for body surfing, although I did not manage much of that this year.

Geology very good too, Yaverland being the eastern extremity of the Isle of Wight spine, where many millions of years are compressed into a few hundred yards of cliff. A well known haunt of fossil hunters which comes complete with its own dinosaur museum (http://www.dinosaurisle.com), a place which we have enjoyed in the past but of which I can find no record. And if that is not enough for a rainy day, there is also the tiger refuge which, inter alia, takes in the unwanted tigers of celebrities (http://www.isleofwightzoo.com).

And then, for history lovers, there is the mid 12th century church of St. John the Baptist, tucked behind and originally built as the private chapel for the very historical but very private Yaverland manor house. A church sporting no less than two well preserved Norman arches and one large Norman cooking pot. Interesting Victorian altar piece behind the altar, decorated with a mixture of lushly sculpted and mosaic saints etc. Some of the mosaic being touched up with paint, rather in the way of stained glass. Some handsome flowers, perhaps the business of the lady of the manor. We were also offered the services of a lady flautist who is to be found at http://www.iowflute.com/, perhaps not the lady of the manor, just the hired help.

And last but not least there are the Fort Spinney holiday chalets right behind the car park. A place where, in decent weather, one could have a good holiday without a car.

On coincidences

I noticed 'Two on a Tower' on 15th July, a novel which exemplifies the allegation that Hardy was too dependent on extravagant coincidences to keep his plots on the boil, this last being an unfortunate necessity for the author writing for serialisation.

But thinking about it some more, I am not sure that the use of coincidences is such a bad thing, provided of course the reader is able to suspend disbelief, something with which I have little trouble, being quite happy to take things at face value, a quality which makes me an easy target for conversational traps, but which also makes it easy for me to enjoy books and films. Easy to please.

The up side is that the author is able to conduct interesting thought experiments without having to go to the bother of dreaming up a plausible story in which to insert the thought experiment. It is enough to allow that he probably could have given a bit of time; this particular story might not be very likely but there are stories out there which were which would exhibit the same moral dilemma or whatever. The dilemma and the participants' reaction to it are of interest, well worthy of discussion in the saloon bar over the cup that cheers. The story in which it is inserted is a bit of a side issue.

So in this case, the stars of the story engage in a bigamous marriage as a result of a misunderstanding about the date of death of the lady's first husband. A bigamous marriage which is not criminally culpable as it was the result of an honest and reasonable mistake, but which is nevertheless null & void, irrespective of the subsequent relations between the pair. The moral dilemma being whether they should immediately get married properly, or whether they should reflect on whether, given the then prevailing circumstances, they might do better not to. A serious moral dilemma, certainly amongst the middle classes, the core royalty generating readership, of the day.

And 'Two on a Tower' is quite strong enough to sustain such a discussion.

Churchill hits the bin

On November 7th 2010 I bought a 7 volume history of Churchill, which I never studied closely enough to realise until today that volume 8 was missing (probably making it worthless; proper book collectors are more picky beasts). I am clearly going to fail the coveted M.Phol.. I did come across an odd companion volume from the dozen or so available over the intervening period, but had the good sense not to buy them.

And I did make an effort with the first volume at around the time of purchase, and was entertained by his doings as a young man - for example having a Royal Navy cruiser at his beck and call as he toured east Africa together with a train from the very front of which he went hippopotamus shooting or some such; the great white hunter. But the effort flagged and I have not opened one for some time.

But yesterday, new purchases piling up in the study, they failed to make the cut and all two feet of them are now in the garage awaiting delivery to the Oxfam skip at Kiln Lane. Will the book sorters at the Kingston Oxfam - from whence the book came in the first place - think it worth lugging them back there? I celebrated by buying a handsome art book from behind Churchill's Iron Curtain for £2.50 from the charity shop operated by the Childrens' Trust Tadworth, an enterprising outfit running to an online shop at http://www.thechildrenstrust.org.uk/. An art book which was published in 1956 and which is indeed handsome, with pictures of lots of handsome churches dating from the 12th century (which I had not expected), but a book in which the Jewish population of Poland in the period in question is very nearly invisible. I grant that much of their built heritage may have been destroyed, but it is still a poor reflection on the Polish nationalist mood of the time. Maybe it will get better on closer inspection.

I close with two Churchill anecdotes from a long standing customer of TB, whose father was in the Navy during the war. He hated Churchill on two counts. First, in the early stages of the war, he ordered the bombing of a U-boat towing boated survivors of one of its attacks to safety, held by the customer to be an unwarranted breach of the conventions and customs of sea warfare. I am not so sure. Second, in the later stages of the war, he appeared at a naval parade at Gibraltar visibly drunk. The assembled men, grizzled long service veterans all, were not impressed that this was the best that he could do, given what they had to put up with. I imagine they all voted Labour in the subsequent election.

Brading Roman Villa

The only record I can find of this place (http://www.bradingromanvilla.org.uk/) at the other place is from July 28th 2008, but I feel sure that we must have been since then.

If not, we have certainly made up in the last couple of weeks, making no less than three visits. The first visit to look at the villa, which I must say was a little dissappointing on this occasion, despite the interesting mosaics. Not too keen on the rather Osborne/Brain Surgery for Dummies style of presentation, but BH assures me that it is just the ticket for young children.

They had an interesting line in books for sale, including among the sort of National Trust and light archaeology stuff that you might expect, a number of oddities, perhaps sourced from some specialist remainder operation. For example, a fattish paperback providing a cross reference between the common and scientific name for the mammals of the land. Nothing else, no pictures or narrative, just the cross reference, about one inch of it.

The second and third visits were to their café, a fine place on a fine day. Cool and spacious, with fine views over the downs down to the sea. There is a terrace for sun-lovers and smokers. There are excellent cakes, said to be made on the premises. Only marred by Classical FM being piped in, without charge and which may be classical, but which was just as irritating as piped music anywhere else, not least because of the frequent and breathless advertisements. One can only suppose that the staff get fed up with the conversations of the customers with their predictable comments about the villa and its facilities and drown them out with the radio.

An excellent place for tea and cake, but a place which was probably the death knell of any attempt to provide such a thing in Brading proper, rather as Exminster Golf Club is killing off the food & drink trade in the village proper.

They also offer fine films of an evening and car boot sales of a Sunday: they are clearly making full use of the planning dispensations granted to diversifications at rural operations (our nearest operation of the same kind being Chessington Garden Centre, once a nursery, now more or less a lower grade department store). To which comment their response would no doubt be 'no diversification, no villa'. I just hope that the tail does not end up wagging the dog.

Scientologists

Interested to read the other day that the Registrar General - whose department, having shortly beforehand been rebranded OPCS, was my first civil service posting - is spending what must be a lot of good money to get our Supreme Court no less to forbid scientologists from getting married in their own churches. I wonder why he cares: is he a religious person who deprecates the continuing erosion of the sacrament of marriage, once limited to those marrying, in this country at least, to Church of England churches?

For myself, I might not care for scientologists, but if they want to be allowed to marry in their own churches, I would let them get on with it. They might be a bit odd, but I dare say that their marriages work as well, or as badly, as those of the rest of us.

I wonder if they have it in mind to include gay scientologists in any dispensation that there might be? On which subject, Wikipedia tells me that The Founder was very conservative in matters of sex, this despite his own, second begotten son being a gay.

Noises off

A few days ago we were very puzzled by the silence of the downs. A day and a down which should have been crawling with grasshoppers. Which it may have been but if it was they were completely silent, which seemed a bit odd. Surely they are not advanced enough to need siestas?

But yesterday the world righted itself and we were able to hear grasshoppers, at two similar, though different, locations. We even got to see one small one, maybe an inch long, excluding nasal antennae.

Then the righting was marred by spotting another odd noise, rather like an occasional drip. We were standing underneath an oak tree and the first thought was that something sticky was oozing out of aphids on the oak leaves and dripping to ground. One certainly sees cars in towns covered in all sorts of stuff when parked underneath the trees in squares and such like. But thought refuted by the odd noise, on closer inspection, not being confined to the tree. Second thought was that it was some sort of small male beetle clicking its wings to attract a mate. Sadly, unable to confirm or refute in the time available.

And then last night, happening to wake around 0300 for some reason (the nearby church bell conveniently telling me the time), heard some more clicking from the back garden. A group of clicks, then silence, then another group and so on. First thought was that it was a blind bat clicking its way around the garden in its search for spiders for supper. No seconds thoughts on this occasion as I fell asleep again before I could muster the energy to peer out of the window.

Liverpool pathway

The DT is crowing about having put a spoke in the wheels of the people who are promoting the use of the Liverpool Pathway. Which annoys firstly because it is scarcely something to be crowing about (to take a leaf out of their own book) and secondly because they do not seem to be able to see that the overall effect of their interventions in the matter is likely to be more miserable deaths than there might otherwise have been.

On the same subject the Guardian was going pompous about how the business of dying must never be reduced to a tick box exercise. They don't seem to understand that tick boxes are the best way known to man (or for that matter woman) of reducing things which are difficult to processes which can be managed and which can deliver reasonable results, at least more often than not. Tick boxes rule the developed world, not least in the private sector, so well known for being so good at everything.

All along much the same lines as people who get pompous about how something or other which is very important has been reduced to a matter of money. That we have given something which ought to be kind & cuddly over to the accountants & bean counters. People who don't seem to understand that very few important public decisions are public money neutral, public money which does not grow on trees and is unlikely so to do any time soon.

It's that hardy again

Still at it despite the post of 5th July, having taken a copy of 'Two on a Tower' out of the library, completely overlooking the fact that I already had a copy on the Kindle, which perhaps confirms that I am not a proper convert to the Kindle world. Perhaps a little too old for such a big change, a thought which leads to my wondering how many older converts the Christians got during the mega growth period of the second and third centuries. Or was it all younger misfits of one sort or another?

In any event, this is a nicely produced Penguin Classic in traditional black clothes and complete with map, chronology, introduction, notes and glossary, a glossary which, inter alia, tells me what probate is. All in all, it would be an excellent edition to use for a school set book and, jumping ahead, I think the novel would be quite good for that purpose too.

A novel from roughly the middle of Hardy's novel writing career. A marriage between persons of different classes & stations. A marriage between persons of different ages. A big part for a young man of mixed birth trying to better himself. A walk on part for a young lady trying to do the same. Plenty of comic yokels to provide relief, not altogether light relief, in much the same way as Shakespeare's yokels do. Plenty of melodramatic ups and downs - a word which my Kindle tells me is derived from France where it meant musical drama, from the Greek melos, meaning music or some such. The last such up and down being the appearance of what appears to be a love child of the almost second husband, passed off on the actual second husband (deceased). Plenty of gentle humour about all kinds of odds and ends.

But some new things, for example the interest in matters astronomical. One get the feeling that Hardy did his homework here. A very phallic tower. Also the first mention in a novel that I have come across which discusses the way in which people of a scientific bent are often not too clever at some aspects of interpersonal relations.

According to the late preface included at the end of the book, Hardy got a lot of stick for getting a bishop mixed up in all this. Lack of reverence for the cloth. Which goes to show how much things have gone on since then, with a former (French if you please) oil man with a paltry 20 years ordination under his belt as Arch Bish..

As noted above, maybe good for a set book. Lots of accessible issues which are still issues today, issues which one might reasonably discuss in a class. I must try and find a teacher of English who might know about such things: is my take on what might be suitable meat for a bunch of adolescents the right take?

Designers

For some time now I have been irritated by the handles which stick out of the side of the steering columns of cars. Handles which are intended to control all kinds of functions and which I can very rarely instruct to do what I want with the windscreen wipers. I always seen to end up with the back windscreen being sprayed with soapy water. A problem which arises from trying to compress too much function into the wrong sort of control device.

I find the same sort of problem with other peoples' bath taps. At one time a bath had two large taps and a plug. When you wanted water in the bath you turned one or both of the taps and when you had finished you pulled out the plug. So far so good. Then the first well intentioned change was to have taps with the sort of handles that you find in hospitals, things that a surgeon can turn on and off with his elbows while scrubbing up, with the point here being that you can turn them on and off with you feet without needing to heave yourself up into within reach. Maybe they did not catch on because a tap which can be turned on or off by a 90 degree turn requires a much fancier washer than one which requires a 720 degree turn or more. But this was not the end of the world. Much more serious was the second change which modified the central control unit of the bath tap assembly to control the shower, the bath, the water temperature, the water pressure & style and the plug hole, a change which can often result in one getting a cold shower when the plan was to have a hot bath. And then you can't get the water out of the bath once you have extricated yourself. Once again, too much function in the wrong sort of control device.

And now I have stumbled across other peoples' front door locks. This particular one having a handle and a key hole on one side and a handle and a knob on the other. The lock assembly is controlled by cunning manipulation of all three and among the functions offered is dead lock which should mean that from the outside you can effect entry neither by unlocking the door nor by means of a piece of flexible plastic; the sort of thing you want when retiring inside for the night. I have retired from this particular fray, leaving the manipulations to BH. Quite enough manipulation for one family.

Another offender is the little box with buttons on it which control the central heating.

Which leads to the question, who designs these dreadful contraptions? Are they the work of otherwise respectable engineers whose love of ingenuity outstrips their common sense? Are they the work of graduates of the University of Creation (Epsom campus) (http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/) who know nothing about anything except the vagaries of fashion?

Which reminds me of a related beef about the design of kitchen implements, for example potato peelers and tin openers. Once again, the design has lost touch with the function and me, the customer, is left with a contraption which is either impossible to use, impossible to clean or both. Perhaps there is a hierarchy. The three star graduates of creation get to design the ridiculous clothes which appear in fashion shows. The two star graduates get to design kitchen implements. Any other kind of graduates and the failures get to stack shelves or flip burgers.

Post

Foreshore fishermen often have winches at the top of the foreshore to haul their boats up the shingle and there were some rusting specimens of same at Budleigh. But there were also some more rustic versions, things you could probably knock up yourself, without having to give up hard earned cash to the blacksmith or the nautical ironmonger.

A capstan rather than a winch, with the hauling rope winding around the central pole. Slots in the central pole to take miniature capstan bars. Not sure why the pole is as tall as it is, as the winding seemed to take place down below. So that one could rig retaining guys from the top on days when the haul was particularly hard?

PS: I learn from the book from Topsham (vide infra) that the word miniature is derived from minium, the late Latin for the red lead paint used to colour initial letters in the books which eventually evolved into illuminated books with miniatures in the initial letters. Medieval coffee table books as it were, rather than practical prayer books and with that commissioned by the Duc de Berry being the starting point for the book from Topsham. A derivation which is more or less confirmed by OED, via the word 'rubricate', to make red. There is also an elaborate & informative discussion of the whole business at http://metmuseum.org/.

Fine dining in East Devon

Started out at the chipper in Budleigh Salterton. A busy place with the cod & chips very fresh and nicely presented. Benches available nearby with a fine, summer evening's view of Lyme Bay. Only marred by the cod being a bit damp and mushy to my taste: I like it a bit drier and firmer.

Second stop the Fox Tor Café in Princetown, a place we visit from time to time. Biker and hiker ambience, complete with bunks out the back and also complete with washing machine instructions which had been washed, a process which had made a right mess of the inside of the machine. About on a par with my having once cooked a whole of lot expensive woollen sweaters by turning the washing machine on when they were still wrapped around the drum for the purposes of removal. Service friendly. Rock cakes good if not of the freshest. My pasty a bit dry and overcooked - perhaps reflecting the surprisingly veggie. orientation of the menu; one might have thought that the exercise people would be more into meat.

Then to the Salutation Inn, having returned to Topsham to inspect the 'Invincible' (not much progress visible to my untutored eye, beyond a drape advertising the Otter Brewery) and the second hand bookshop (still there and I was able to make an interesting purchase, of which more in due course. Management desk equipped with the largest Apple screen I have ever seen in such a place). The Salutation Inn really is a fine dining place and were able to offer us the finest egg sandwiches we had ever seen. Light on the crisps which was good, and a touch heavy on the mayo. which was not so good. But overall effect very good and the staff quite happy to serve a sandwich rather than lunch. Perhaps they have learnt the hard way not to be sniffy about any kind of revenue. See http://www.salutationtopsham.co.uk/. Maybe we will get to stay or to fine dine one day.

Lastly to the rather different Salterton Arms back at Budleigh, a pub which serves food, mainly in a pleasant upstairs dining room, while managing to retain a proper pub atmosphere around the bar downstairs, complete with decorative bar maid and with most of the drinkers sounding as if they lived there, that is to say in Budleigh, rather than being holiday makers such as ourselves. Warm beer looked OK even though we were on the wine. It was also OK for us to take the remains of our wine away with us - a necessary proceeding in these days of drinking lite. A rather odd soup - described as leek and potato and which I like when it is made by BH, but tasting here rather of tin - followed by a rather good lasagne - described as beef, belly pork and bacon. Not altogether clear where or how the thing had been made but it was served in little white boats so I suspect the pub keeper's wife of knocking out batches of boats for the freezer. Not the sort of thing you can cook to order, nor, to my eye, the sort of thing you could buy in, ready boated.

In the round, a very satisfactory establishment, with the only pity being my present inability to make proper use of it. Doesn't appear to run to a web site; clearly too busy with the lasagne for that sort of thing.

Matters hardy

A recapitulation of my recent wanderings in the Hardy world, quite a lot of which have already appeared here and which can be found by searching for the hardy word.

It all started some months ago with DVDs of  ‘Wessex Tales’ and ‘Jude the Obscure’, BBC adaptations both.

Moved onto a collected edition on the Kindle from Amazon for £1.99 or some such and read ‘Wessex Tales’ and ‘Jude the Obscure’. The first for the first time. I rather liked them.

Onto a biography from the library by Claire Tomalin. Interesting, but irritated on the first reading by the sense that Tomalin liked neither Hardy nor his wives, irritation from thinking that one ought to like someone that one is going to spend serious time with. A sense which faded on a second reading.

Hardy an interesting chap. Physically small and initially thought weak – though strong enough to walk or cycle long distances well into old age – and from a modest background – a similar standing in social terms to that of my father, also a child of someone in business in a modest way in a country village – who married (rather late at thirty or so) someone of rather higher standing – something which clearly mattered in those days – and who became very famous. Writers, I think, being more famous in those days of circulating libraries and no television than would be likely now, the large flash in the pan of Harry Potter aside. Then, like many before him, marrying his young secretary as an old widower. Rather keen on gentry in his old age, having been excluded in his young age, and contemporaries noticed his enthusiasm for taking tea with them.

At this point someone pointed out that Hardy was rather obsessed with hangings. An observation which did indeed seem to be true. There was some of it in his life and a lot of it in his novels. Given which, perhaps not so inappropriate after all that at death his heart was cut out of his body by his GP for burial in his birth village, while his ashes went onto burial at Westminster Abbey (not enough room for a body), otherwise an extraordinary proceeding, less than a hundred years ago. He also had the rather morbid, if striking, thought that it was just as well one did not know the day of the week on which one was to die, as otherwise that day would be rather marked for ever more.

Then pulled the article about his reputed syphillis down from the TLS archive, in which the retired Doctor Frizzell made what I thought was a convincing case for Hardy having contracted a benign form of the disease as a young man, something which was common at the time, to have passed on a malignant version to his wife, who learned the truth somewhere along the way and eventually died of it. Thus accounting for her removal to the attic and for the outpouring of poems about her after her death, rather to the dismay of  his second wife. A theory not mentioned by Tomalin and which appears to have been put aside by others: is this because it is not believed or because people want neither to know nor to believe?

Went to see his house in Tooting (illustrated). A substantial town house with blue plaque in what is now a rather mixed area, on a road running between Tooting Bec tube station and Wandsworth Common. A road which included a church which, rather surprisingly, was open and included decent public toilets. Very public spirited of them. I learn also that Lloyd George used to have a house in the area.

Went to see his house in Dorchester. An odd looking place outside and very ordinary inside. Very struck by the smallness of the attic to which his first wife more or less confined herself for the last ten years or so. Interesting to be able to see a copy of the sort of magazine which published his novels in serial form, with the one that I picked up having a couple of chapters of ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ printed very small and with a half page illustration, occupying maybe a couple of pages in all, in amongst all the other stuff. Was able to get a Wentworth jigsaw (see 17th June) of the place as a souvenir. Why had Wentworth seen fit to do such a thing? Was one of the directors a fan?

Which leads onto the thought that Hardy attracts the same sort of attention as Jane Austen or Conan Doyle. With people, like us, making the pilgrimage to his house. Perhaps dressing up in the costumes of his day. Having readings in upstairs rooms in public houses. In a way that D. H. Lawrence and Conrad do not. Is part of the answer the fact that we know so much about Hardy’s tangled if respectable life? We can really get into it.

Interesting also that I have started to take an interest in authors, perhaps more interest in the authors than in their books. Something I used to be rather sniffy about in the past when I used to think that the books were the thing and one had no business poking around in the lives of their writers.

Happening to be in Cambridge while all this was going on, took the opportunity to wander around the colleges and to actually go into St. John’s, which was open for a fee. And as a failed scholarship boy, albeit a long time ago, I still felt something of the exclusion which Hardy and his creation Jude felt in vaguely similar situations. Which leads me to wonder as I type whether my own father had feelings of the same sort, having had to settle for a Cambridge dentist, despite his academic & intellectual leanings. Something I had never thought of before.

Also took in the original of the portrait of Hardy reproduced in the Tomalin book which hangs in the Fitzwilliam.

And now, having finished the second pass of Tomalin, I am winding up the whole business with a further, rather desultory reading of Jude. And a rather quicker, at least so far, reading of ‘Cakes and Ale’, thought by some to be a rather cruel take on Hardy. It is certainly a take on his kind. For once, a book bought for the Kindle, in the interests of speed. A few seconds and one has the thing, rather than waiting the 48 hours or so it might take in the post.

Maybe I will give his poetry a go, said by some authorities, including the author, to be more important than his novels. With poetry being something which I rarely have a go at.

Qat

I had thought that the tide was at last flowing in favour of decriminalising recreational drugs, with the great and the good regularly popping up in the media to explain why management rather than incarceration was the answer, so I was rather depressed to read over the morning half-rye that we are to add qat, a mild narcotic, to the list of things which are illegal.

I suppose the driver is that most of the other prots. in the world have made it illegal and we do not want to become the hub for a multi-billion pound traffic in leaves which might be mistaken for spinach and which might attract shady - if not worse - types from the former Soviet Union. Which is understandable, but I am sure we could come up with a better answer than a criminal sanction on personal consumption.

Sadly, the stuff does not keep so there is not much point in rushing out and buying up a supply. But then again, maybe it freezes OK. I shall check with the booklet that came with our freezer.

Othello

On Wednesday to the National to see their Othello.

Previous outings being to the Rose at Kingston (with Lenny Henry) on or about April 23rd 2009 and to the Globe on or about August 15th 2007. Reports from both occasions at the other place (http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/).

After I had bought the tickets, and having seen a not very kind review, a bit alarmed by the prospect of modern dress, which can be tiresome. In the event it worked well with a nice evocation of a portable office filled army base and with soldiers running around in sand coloured camouflage - maybe battledress is the technical term. The staging was elaborate, rather clever and rather fetching, but by the end I felt it had become a distraction; the producer had forgotten he was producing drama for the stage rather than a costume drama for television.

But the production was believable and accessible. One had a real sense of both the possibility and the foolishness of a young girl from a posh family being captivated by the tales of a rough and ready - but successful - soldier. Desdemona was nicely weak and flirtatious; good body language. Othello was good. Emelia satisfactory but not as good as either of those of the other two productions. Roderigo, as is the current and tiresome fashion, played for laughs. Rory Kinnear grappled manfully with the problem of being a good non-com., rather ordinary and very evil all at the same time, without quite pulling it off. But, to be fair, I don't think I have ever seen it quite pulled off.

Audience tittered at some of the wrong places, sometimes because Othello's decent & honourable trust in Iago, a man with whom he had stood in the line of battle many a time and oft, seemed ridiculous to them. Perhaps because honour is a quality no longer much in evidence among those who used to be called the great and the good.

Another part of the audience appeared to come from some mixed race London comprehensive, with the only comment that I heard being boredom. We wondered how much preparation would have gone into their visit - my mother would have built a term's English lessons around any such visit which she organised - and whether the play would have got lost in virtuous breast beating about race relations.

And then wondered how many plays in the oeuvre deal with the proper relations of daughters to their fathers after their marriage. See Act I, Sc. III, line 180.

Running time seemed OK at around 3 hours, exclusive of interval. This despite quite a lot of cutting and despite omitting all the song and dance which the Globe likes to inject into the proceedings. The drinking song, for example, was dealt with very briskly.

I note in passing that the National put up a black on the feeding front. Perhaps it was because it was a mid week, early matinée, the catering arrangements failed. We had allowed about half an hour for feeding, but the National was unable to provide a sandwich, or at least we failed to find one, so we had to hoof it over to the BFI where they did sell sandwiches, rather fat and soft affairs which were intended to be livened up by toasting. But in view of the time we took them at room temperature, learning along the way that a sandwich described as Parisian involved both Brie and chutney. I had not known that the Parisians ate chutney at all - although I did know that I did not, the strong flavours of chutney being destructive for me of those of whatever you have plastered the stuff onto. But they were elaborately wrapped and they did keep us going until the tea time mince, which was a stronger attraction than anything offered in the vicinity of Waterloo Station, at least on this occasion.

Affair with Brahms concluded

On the 9th May I went to Cambridge to hear an Endellion flavoured version of the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1.

On Sunday to St. John's Smith Square to hear the London Soloists Ensemble do it, together with a Mozart trio for clarinet, viola & piano (K498) and a Vaughan Willams piano quartet in C minor. Mozart good, Vaughan Williams interesting. Memory faulty in that I thought that the ceiling of this baroque church, restored in the sixties after bomb damage in the forties, had been picked out in blue and gold paint. In the event, a handsome church, but no blue or gold paint whatsoever, and the church seemed oddly dated compared with the much more recently converted St. Luke's, although the two places function in much the same way, complete with restaurants in both crypts.

Brahms good, with the Ensemble giving it a different flavour than that of the Endellions. A more relaxed rendering, loose even, perhaps reflecting their being more used to ensemble playing in varying ensembles than to quartet playing. An up side was that the piano fitted in rather than dominated, although this may have been more to do with sitting in the middle of the hall rather than right at the front than with the piano playing. A down side was that the triumph of the opening of the fourth movement was still missing.

Thought to try the cake shop (the former burlesque house) somewhere near Glasshouse Street in Vauxhall but found that the cake shop was full of the mayor in full fig and the whole area full of gay picnic. Tried the Madeira Café round the corner and that was full of people in traditional costume. So settled for getting the train home.

I think I can say that the affair with this particular piece of music is concluded, although I dare say I will go again if I should happen to notice one.

And this morning concluded my touching base with Evelyn Waugh, an author I have not read for many years. Not even watched an adaptation on telly. The occasion was BH reading about a travel book called 'Labels' in a travel book by Paul Theroux, a travel writer of whom she is fond. I read once that Evelyn was so disliked by the other ranks when he was in the army that he had to have a guard posted outside his tent and reading this book I think I can see why. That said, the chap must have been able to be good company when he chose as he seems to be able to pick up with people on his travels readily enough. And that said, I dare say a writer could fake well enough to pad out his solo wanderings for the purposes of his travelogue.

I suspect that whoever does the stage management for the Poirot adaptations involving cruise ships must have read it and I offer one snippet. That there was a giant exhibition in the early part of the 20th century in Seville, complete with fun fair, the buildings for which were destined to be a university and almost deserted on the day that Evelyn visited. Still there and looks well worth a visit to judge from Wikipedia.

Bicton reprised

A snap of me not on the train at Bicton taken by someone who was using a rather grander camera than that which comes with my antique Nokia.

Good view of the new braces if you click to enlarge.

Embankment for the train - my snoozing spot being in a loop in the track - can be seen running behind me.

Dead fly alert!

Noticing a lot of roses up about - for example in the front garden of one of the newer houses on the left when coming into West Ewell from Chessington - thought we had better go to Hampton Court to catch the roses there. They were indeed in very fine fettle and I particularly liked one of the species roses, of which they had several, maybe three feet high and spreading, with a lot of pink and white flowers something less than two inches across. There were also some very good, florid & floppy floribundas, perhaps a little past their best, but they must have been spiffing a few days ago.

Onto the formal gardens beyond the first checkpoint, where the beds were all up and running for the forthcoming flower show: the gardeners had put on their consistently good show. Nice variety of design with some bright and formal, others more subdued and with a sort of studied informality. Informality peaking beyond the second checkpoint in the small knot garden of which BH did not approve. Contrary, I rather liked it. We wondered how many of the plants were bought in from the Netherlands; I dare say in the olden days they used to grow their own but I would be surprised if the accountants would wear that these days. There was also quite a herd of volunteer gardeners dead-heading the roses, something else which would not have happened in the olden days: a job for the apprentices (the lack of which is held by the Guardian to account to our poor performance relative to the Germans).

Back home to an interesting article in NYRB about guns in the US. Point 1: a great many people own guns in the US and most of them are normal. It is probably unhelpful for liberal papers to talk about them all of them, without much distinction, as gun nuts. They need to show a bit of respect and to engage, not confront. Point 2: a great many guns are already in circulation and driving their number down is going to be a long haul. Point 3: all the blather about assault rifles is a bit off target. The great majority of guns in the US are handguns, the ownership of which has recently been confirmed to be a constitutional right. This is not going to change any time soon. Point 4: the great majority of gun deaths are in rough inner city suburbs, many of them involving black people. Numbers pushed up by poverty in general and by the illegality of recreational drugs in particular. And this is not going to change any time soon either. But there are some things that one can do at the margin, for example tightening up the checks on people buying guns. A bit of education about responsible gun ownership. All a bit depressing really; they have got themselves into a bad hole without a ladder in sight.

Onto to the dead flies, not seen for some months, maybe not since the post of 21st September 2012 in the other place. Making chicken soup as usual, from the remains of a coppice reared and beetle fed chicken from Waitrose. About half way through the proceedings added a couple of ounces of red lentils to the stock. Probably been in the jar for a while and no idea no which of the big three they came from - but at least that jar is now empty. Simmer stock for a while then move onto the white cabbage, the soft noodles, the chicken and the mushrooms. Serve and notice a modest number of dead flies floating on the surface, luckily not so many as to put us off our strokes.

I have tried raising this with customer service points at least twice without getting any response beyond the 'thank you so much for your enquiry, your views are really important to us and we will get back to you just as soon as we can' sort of thing. Nothing helpful or honest, like 'yes you are going to get bugs in grains and pulses if you store them too long. Nothing much to be done about it other than turn them over. Quite harmless when cooked'. Don't think I can be bothered to try them again.

Foyles used to carry books about this sort of thing but no longer, so maybe I shall just have to wait until I bump into a food storage specialist. . Or maybe I will have to work on Google: there is, for example, a good if unsuccessful effort at http://www.daff.qld.gov.au/26_5990.htm.

A botanical gem

Last week to Bicton park Botanical Gardens, not having been put off by learning that there was a miniature railway which could take one on an inspection of their scenic beauty.

The gardens have been made out of the orangery and half the gardens of Bicton House, this last now being Bicton College, an establishment with a predominantly countryside and agricultural bent but with trimmings. One can, for example, do an 'Edexcel BTEC Extended Certificate in Uniformed Public Services', presumably the result of the proximity of Lympstone Barracks - which we thought also explained the various helicopters gracing our visit.

The orangery and its terrace have been made into a fine place for taking tea, with views down the lawn, across the (rectangular & apparently fish free) lake and into the trees beyond. While taking my tea with some rather odd soup, spotted a crow buzzing a buzzard overhead - having previously seen one crow buzzing a heron and another buzzing a seagull in Epsom. Crows must be very aggressive birds. And while I am in tweet mode, I should also record two sightings of gold finches in urban hedges near Bicton. Not a bird I recall seeing at all in Epsom.

Gardens were really good, in a slightly low-key sort of way. It was a botanical garden, but did not make too much of a parade of it. Some interesting peonies, the like of which we had never seen before.

Fine collection of trees, mature and not so mature, including a lot of pines and including a number of record holders. Tallest four leaved red cypress in the west of England sort of thing. There was also a clump of araucaria araucana, such a thing last having been seen maybe fifty miles to the north at Arlington Court (see August 26th 2012 in the other place). Perhaps the western climate suits.

Interesting glass houses, including a record holding palm house, this time for the oldest palm house in England. Not a large palm house by the standards of the RHS or Kew gardens, but a handsome specimen, inside and out, for all that. We admired the work and workmanship that had gone into the thing with, for example, its very large number of rather small panes of glass, puttied into place onto a light iron frame, a rather more delicate design than that of the much larger Crystal Palace thirty years later and which would cost a fortune to replicate. We wondered how the curved doors were made - and how did they stay the right shape for so long? Did the apparently wooden frames conceal a heart of steel?

The miniature train was complemented by a Pugin arranged ruin of the original church and a Hayward designed replacement (1850, listed grade II*), a bit austere but which included some good stained glass, not by Pugin. But he did do the stained glass in the ruin, part of which still serves as the family mausoleum and which we were not able to see, about which he writes 'I found Lady Rolle a very cheerful happy sort of woman but with dreadful ideas on architecture. She actually suggested a sort of Turkish morgue ...  however I managed so well that in half an hour she consented to my plan ...'. Clearly knew a thing or two about client management. We will do the steam museum next time, not being at all averse to a bit of traction engine. Not to mention the Rollin' Clones (http://www.rollin-clones.com/) who will appear on the 8th August next.

For once, the place is neither RHS, RSPB, National Trust nor English Heritage, so presumably a bit of enterprise with much the same standing in the world as the Chessington World of Adventures, although I did not spot anything on http://www.bictongardens.co.uk/ about ownership. Surely the place is not still run by Mr. & Mrs. Bicton?

The revolution continued

The bread revolution first noticed on 2nd May continues.

First step was to explore our local Lakeland where I was able to buy two ceramic dishes for baking pizzas. A rather coarser and lighter material than that of which the BH pizza baking stone was made and with rims. I thought that these last might be a good thing, the dough otherwise having a tendency to flow over the edge of the stone, which could be a bit messy. The other good thing was that they were £10 or so a pop, which is a lot less than BH paid for her stone.

Second step was to try them out. All went well until it came to getting the hot loaves out of the hot dishes, which resulted in rather a mess. The bread looked OK, with a Greek rather than an English shape, but the hot, fragile bread was rather broken up getting it out of the dishes and dried out rather more quickly than was desirable.

So what to do? Third step was to try oiling the dishes. This went rather better, although with the dough rising outwards rather than upwards, there was still a tendency to stick to the insides of the rims. But at least this could be dealt with with a palette knife without doing serious damage.

Fourth step was introduced by BH, who bought me some sort of teflon coated baking sheet, the idea being to cut it into the bottom of the dishes. This I promptly did and the teflon worked, at the cost of giving the bottom of the bread a rather different texture, rather in the way that frying an egg in oil rather than lard does something unpleasant to the appearance and texture of their bottoms; all crackle and crunch vanishing from around the edges.

Fifth step, was to continue to oil the rims of the dishes. This seems to work OK and we now have rather good, low rise wholemeal bread. Usually, but not always, best eaten three or four hours out of the oven. Freshest is not bestest.

And today I take the sixth step, substituting some rye flour from the windmill at Swaffham Prior for some of the Waitrose organic wholemeal. Flour which has everything: stone ground by renewable energy. We await the results as I type.

For all the gory details see, as ever, https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls.

PS: and while we are on the flat, an honourable mention for a flat pork pie from BH. A sausage meat pie, sausage meat cut with a little onion and a few herbs, pastry top and bottom. Tasted good, and surprisingly like a proper pork pie. With eyes shut and mouth full, the only give away would have been the lack of the spices and other stuff put into the pork of a pork pie.