Two months

It took me two months to get back to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate, our first visit having been logged on 30th July.

Since then I have come across two reviews. The first, in the TLS, by one Frank Whitford I remember as being very condescending in tone. Jogging my memory at the TLS archive today I find that it indeed was, also that Lowry was the most popular artist in the UK after Rolf Harris, the review presumably having been written before Harris was charged with offences against children. The second is in the latest number of the NYRB by Sanford Schwartz who appears to be an arty journalist of the same cut as Whitford, albeit a US citizen. He is much more respectful about Lowry, to the extent of including him in the same sentence as Damien Hirst, but his main concern is to have a pop at the curator of the show, Tomothy Clark, a lefty looking arty historian rather than an arty journalist. It all reads rather like a rather bitchy pillow fight, staged for I am not quite sure whose entertainment.

Exhibition rather more crowded on this Friday lunchtime than on our last visit, a rather older audience than last time, just leavened with a well behaved school party, scattered around, making sketches and notes. Luckily teacher did not see fit to lecture them in open exhibition, although we still had the musak, musak which Mr. Schwartz thoroughly disapproved of, a point in his favour.

I continue to like a lot of Lowry's pictures, with the only addition to the comments I made last time around being that I do not think that he did big very well and I was not that keen on the five big pictures in the last room. I wonder if his restricted palette was something of the same sort; a restricted palette on a restricted canvas was what suited him.

Out to inspect the Morpeth Arms, once the favoured haunt of the long service men at Riverwalk House, a gang to which I was never elected and on from there to inspect the hole that was Riverwalk House. Having talked, quite recently with a chap in demolition who told me that when one took a tower block down one had to dig out the foundations too, back to clean clay, I was interested to see that they did indeed seem to be doing just that. With two large, rusting steel cylinders propping up the hole. I hadn't thought to clarify about the piles, but I assume that taking out the foundation does include the pile caps but does not include drilling out the piles themselves - which I would have thought would have done more harm than good to the structure of the ground under the proposed new tower. Quite apart from what I would have thought to be the considerable expense.

A short and hopeless game of aeroplanes at Clapham Junction, without a single sighting. What are all these people who bang on about more capacity at Heathrow on?

As luck would have it, browsing among the art books being remaindered by Surrey Libraries the day after, I came across a handy biography of Lowry by a Shelley Rodhe, a snip at £3, less than half the new price way back in 1979. So far I have learned that he was indeed a rather odd chap, but rather likeable too. I will try to get through it before my next visit to the pictures.

Foyle's

Doing a bit of preparation today against the imminent arrival of decorators, preparation which involved moving a lot of books around.

In the course of which we came across this receipt from the glory days of Foyle's, the days when having selected one's book one first queued at the floor desk to obtain a bill. You then left the book behind and queued at the wooden cash kiosk in the middle of the shop, a small kiosk manned by a large fierce lady of uncertain origin, probably somewhere in central Europe, to pay the bill (cash or cheque only) and to get it stamped. You then queued for the second time at the floor desk to get your book back.

Arrangements which were relics of a more leisurely age, relics kept in place long after other large bookshops had moved to more modern ones. Other relics of this more leisurely age included the terms and conditions of employment for the often bad tempered and sometimes knowledgeable staff, terms and conditions which included being hired, paid & fired by the day. Zero hours contracts before their time.

But it was a very good bookshop. Not quite as good now, they are trying to make a profit, but it has held its place in the rankings and it is the best bookshop in town by some considerable margin - certainly for my purposes - although what is left of Dillon's might be better for some university purposes.

Pork technology

Time to report more fully on the pork adventures advertised on 26th September.

Do enough potatoes on day minus one that there are around four ounces of left over mashed potato for day zero.

Buy a lump of pork belly, the fat (sense 1) sort, about two inches thick and from which most of the fat (sense 2) has been stripped off. Bone the pork and put the bones, cartilage and so on on to simmer gently. Dice the meat down to around cubic centimetres.

Add small knob of lard (the best sort is imported from Indonesia) to a thick bottomed pan and melt. Add the pork and let it simmer for a bit. Meanwhile finely chop a couple of medium sized onions. Add them to the mix, topping up with enough water to just about cover. Add lid and continue to simmer.

Finely chop a green pepper and a red pepper and add them to the mix. Continue to simmer.

When the meat is cooked, stir in the cold mashed potato, adding a little stock from the simmering bone pan. Five minutes before eating, add six ounces of small button mushrooms; stalks thinly sliced, caps halved. The resulting stew should be damp but not wet. Serve next to two day cut brown bread, dry but not too hard. Very good it was too.

For day two we move from stew to soup, starting by draining the stock from the bone pan into the blender jug. Strip the meat and other eatables from the bones and add to the jug. Blend vigorously and add the resultant mix to what is left of the stew. Bring back to the boil and simmer for a bit longer, taking care not to catch it: the mashed potato tends to sink and stick so occasional stirring is advised. Five minutes before eating, add the remaining four ounces of mushrooms, as before. Serve next to three day cut brown bread, dry to hard. Very good it was too.

Having bought most of the ingredients from Waitrose, the topic of conversation was the pink lady apples from Tesco's, first mentioned on 17th September and following which I sent an email to the customer service people at the Tesco HQ. In fairly short order I get a return email (from their computer) telling me that my communication is so important to them that it has been allocated a reference number which I should quote in any further communications. A day or so after that I get a signed email, from a person, asking me to supply all kinds of details, including, quite reasonably, the batch number, eat by date and such like. I should have realised that such like was essential to any decent quality control process, but instead the packaging was on its way to the waste transfer station, the timing of all this, relative to the waste transfer weekly cycle, having been unfortunate. But I was able to dig up the till receipt (see above) and one of the labels on the offending apples, so scanned that in and sent it off.

Followed the next day by a call to my shiny new mobile phone by a heavily accented gentleman who may have been based in Dundee rather than Madras (to judge by markings on the subsequent letter). He explained that he would send me three pounds (decent of them to round the amount up) and asked whether there was anything else he could help me with before wishing me a nice day.

Followed a few days later by a letter enclosing a blue plastic Tesco money card, good for £3. Vouchers out and money cards in. They might even be quite useful; a card onto one can put money for subsequent spending at a Tesco. A card which one can lose without getting into as much of a lather as one does if one loses serious plastic; the same sort of advantage as having a pay as you go mobile phone. No deep pocket for the finder to tap into.

A satisfactory result. One could not expect Tesco to do more, leaving aside getting the quality of the apples right - but that is much harder than running a quality control call centre.

More Agatha

Following the report of the 16th September, I continue to patrol the agnathan world in search of the ideal biography, so passing the biography shelf at Epsom Library the other day, picked up two more candidates.

First, 'The Grand Tour' edited by Mathew Prichard, one of her grandsons. A  book which turned out to be mainly a photographic and epistolary record of the ten month 'British Empire Expedition', a jolly around the empire in 1922, a jolly including Agatha and her first husband. Interesting in part because of the tone of the many letters Agatha wrote home and in part because of the hospitality which an expedition of this sort attracted, an expedition which was a warm up act for the subsequent 'Brisith Empire Exhibition', a grand affair at Wembley - presumably on what is now the football pitch - in 1924. Many visits to pineapple farms and sheep shearing stations. Many G&T's on verandas. The odd person of colour looming into view. So interesting for dipping & skimming but not a biography to read.

Second, 'The Finished Portrait' (a take on the title of one of the autobiographical Mary Westmacott  novels) by Dr. Andrew Norman, a retired GP with an interest in matters psychological (one Sigmund Freud gets the odd mention). An assortment of material, loosely assembled around the famous Christie runaway in 1926, on the occasion of her separation and divorce from her first husband. I am sure that Dr. Norman would be a fascinating person to talk to, with an encyclopedic knowledge of matters agnathan. Just the person to be next to at a dinner party or a sherry party (a class of event at which I do not shine. I need to find a suitable interlocutor to keep me off the sauce). We could talk Christie, Marple and Poirot for the duration. But I was not able to read the book, which was too much of a patchwork, another need being a reasonably clear narrative thread. Had to settle for a bit of dipping. But I was interested to see the collection of 20 or so front covers, from first or at least early editions of the oeuvre. Sadly not in lurid colour.

Now off to the library to return them. Perhaps I shall light upon something more biographical.

PS: for readers who might be wondering, the agnatha are a class - or perhaps a family - of ancient fish like creatures without jaws. Without gnashers. Ask the Professor all about them.

Mozart

Lunchtime at St. Luke's yesterday, the opening concert of their season for us.

Off to flying start, neatly catching a suitable train from Epom. But then it started to go pear shaped when we changed at Vauxhall, with the plan of cutting back south to Stockwell to pick up a Bank branch Northern Line train to Old Street. Got on a train of that sort at Stockwell to be greeted with a long and cheerful announcement about how all the Bank branch trains were being diverted onto the Charing Cross branch and so going nowhere near Old Street. But we persisted while we thought about alternatives, and the cheerful announcer persisted in telling us variations on the story about the signal difficulties at Moorgate at every possible opportunity. Got off at Waterloo to catch the Waterloo & City line, having now lost around 20 minutes. Got to the Bank and picked up a bus to Old Street to find ourselves sitting in traffic, traffic which only cleared when we got off at Old Street, having lost another 20 minutes. With the result that we arrived at St. Luke's without time to eat our tuna fish sandwiches, never mind take a refreshing beverage. Never mind, onto our seats, getting a couple of good ones at the front of the second block of seats, with unlimited leg room. Where we sat and counted an unusual number of very thin people.

After a little while Christian Blackshaw turned up (our second concert with him, the first being as recently as on 17th September) to do some Mozart: piano sonata in B-flat major (K281), fantasy in C minor (K475) and sonata in F major (K533 and K494), the first of which being knocked out before he was twenty. But for some reason I cannot put my finger on, none of it really took off, perhaps because I was expecting something with more of the serene tone of the sonatas for violin and piano. Perhaps because we do not get on with this particular pianist: other people do have their likes and dislikes in that department, although not something which has ever troubled me before. Perhaps because I had failed to do any preparation, with all three works being new to me.

After our late lunch in the pleasant garden at the back of the church, I thought to do better than the café downstairs for coffee, so out onto old street and on into the new-to-us Timberyard café (http://www.timberyardlondon.com/), a place which turned out to take itself and its web site very seriously indeed. I didn't like the look of their cakes very much so we settled for just tea and coffee, for the not unreasonable sum of £4.60. Took a window seat where we were entertained by both the rather too loud background music & the street life of Old Street and maybe five minutes later our hand made wooden tray of tea and coffee turned up, the elaborate performance illustrated. A bottle of water - flat and room temperature, how I like it - and two glasses. A pot of hot water. A contraption containing tea leaves and another (copper) contraption to rest it in. A miniature milk bottle containing milk, just visible behind the teapot. A miniature kilner jar containing sugar. A cup of power coffee (rather than the weaker variety BH had hoped for). A cup and saucer for me. The whole arrangement being rounded out by a little electronic timer so that I could brew my tea for just the right number of minutes and seconds. Which I duly did, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the tea was very good - far superior to the rather more expensive brew at the Spa Hotel the previous weekend, a place which did not seem to understand tea at all.

Home via the No. 43 bus which we last used in our days north of Muswell Hill, maybe 40 years ago. Home to inspect the library, to find that I have a boxed set of 14 discs of Mozart piano works, formerly the property of Putney Library, mainly played by one Ingrid Haebler, sold to me for £14 (presumably reflecting a pound a disc policy from the library downsizers) and never, to my knowledge, played by me. Complemented by the Theodore Presser edition of the score from Bryn Mawr (of all places) in Pennsylvania. Price $6.00 in 1960 or so. No idea where I got it from and, never to my knowledge, opened by me. But the one will be played and the other will be opened before we next go to hear Mozart piano sonatas and I am confident that such an investment will be repaid.

Supper a pork confection on which I will report further in due course.

The Searchers

Some months ago now, an article in the NYRB caught my attention, an article written around the publication of a learned tome about a film I had not previously heard of called 'The Searchers'. 405 pages of learned tome at a modest $28.00, which I was tempted to buy, but decided not to on the grounds that the article had given me enough of the gist. Plus there were quite enough unread books lying about the house as it was.

The core of the gist being two fold. First, that the Comanches of the south west were pretty much as bad as the Texans and others who made it their business to exterminate them. Reasonably well behaved towards their own, but reasonably savage when it came to anybody else. Second, that despite said savagery there was a fair bit of population exchange, in the time honoured way of pinching the other lot's women for breeding and other purposes. One of the various exogenous marriage arrangements which anthropologists tell us about. The film is built around the dubious business of pinching them - what is left of them, what they have become - back.

So off to Amazon to get the film, which turned up after a while, a little slower than usual, in a box labelled 'WESTERNS - THE CLASSIC COLLECTION'. The CD inside did not have the usual label stuck onto one side so deciding which way up was a bit tricky. But we got there after a few attempts, to find that the CD itself was flawed, certainly too much for the DVD player in our holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight, although we did get through most of it in the end.

Tried again yesterday and noticed that instead of the usual label, the CD did have some description on a narrow, annular band around each side of the hole, some description which included the rubrics 'Side A' and 'Side B'. Experiment revealed that the trick was to have side A up and then the DVD player happily played from side B; I have now added a piece of paper to the box reminding me of this fact against an future viewing. Coming to the quality of the playing, a lot better than the Isle of Wight with just the one stutter, near the beginning of the film.

A film which turns out to have worn remarkably well for something which is near 60 years old, although I dare say one could pick plenty of holes in the period detail (something our own costume dramas take a lot of trouble with nowadays). A result as I don't usually get on with films of this vintage. A film which takes considerable liberties with the story from which it is mainly drawn, but not necessarily much the worse for that. A film which is both serious and popular - a trick which is not often pulled off.

One shudders to think what a modern film maker - Mel Gibson for example - might make of the same material. Blood, guts, rape and pillage all over the place, nearly all of which the old film managed without, while still making its points. It was also good to have an old fashioned, orchestral sound track, which also managed to make its points without the insistence, loudness and intrusiveness of many modern film sound tracks.

Grauniords

A couple of observations prompted by yesterday's Guardian.

Given that the paper contains quite a lot of good content, why is it that their cartoons are so incomprehensible and so fecalentric? I thought the idea of a cartoon was to make an easily digestible point about the current scene, livened up with a bit of caricature or a bit of fun. But easily digestible does not mean make the same point day after day or mean make a point too obscure to be grasped over the matinal toast. And the preoccupation with bottoms and feces is not my idea of fun, rather rather infantile.

But I was interested to read that the Russians have taken a rather robust approach to the dangerous doings of Greenpeace on the high seas. About time that someone pulled them up. Perhaps the activists involved will now spend many happy months documenting the iniquities of the Russian prison scene, against their transferring to Amnesty International on release. I wonder what we would do if a bunch of dodgy looking long hairs tried to scale the perimeter fence of Drax B? Or a bunch of Muslims?

The Dream of the Celt

I reported a rubber factlet from this fictionalised biography of Roger Casement (don't recall whether we got around to stripping him of his 'sir', awarded for services to humanity or some such) by Mario Vargas Llosa on 16th September and I have now finished reading it.

As I have explained previously (see, for example, October 19th 2009), I do not approve of mixing fact with fiction, although when I come to think about it, perhaps it is not so bad after all: it does bring things to life in a way that a non-fiction account does not often manage. But one is putting a lot of trust in the author: are the impressions that one comes away with the right ones? Has far too much which is actually missing been guessed? What about some references so that one can check things which seem a bit odd or improbable? In this case, I am sure that I now know a lot more about Roger Casement and his various causes than I did before, but I still worry about how much of it has been made up.

For example, I did not know that some of the warders in English prisons in 1915 or so were called sheriffs. Nor did I think that people were executed on a scaffold which the victim had to climb up onto, erected in the courtyard of Pentonville Prison. I thought that we had indoor execution chambers adjoining condemned cells, as short a walk as could be managed.

Certainly an easy enough read. Casement's doings in the Congo, in the Amazon and in the Irish movement in the run up to independence make a good story and it is good to be reminded of the bad things which were being done in his day. Not least of the blocking of Irish independence by a bunch of Tory peers, at a time when the Commons and I would think the country at large were for it. A bunch of Tory peers who have given us all a bad name; all Brits are bad to the hard core Irish nationalist - who is apt to forget that most of us started out on his side, before he took to terrorism.

Good also to be told about how some indiginents got squashed in the squabbles between Columbia and Peru over who owned what bit of the Amazon basin. How easily apparently civilised Europeans can slip into condoning dreadful treatment of indiginents, if not worse. How the Irish Nationalists got a bit silly about the ancient Irish. And how some of them thought at the time of the first war that they might have got a better deal from the Kaiser than from Lloyd George - as at the time of the second some of them thought that they might have got a better deal from Hitler than from Churchill. A naivety they shared with sundry peoples in east Asia who thought that the Japanese might give them a better deal than the Europeans. How much suffering might have been avoided if we had moved a bit faster on giving all these people their independence.

Lastly, I was rather taken with the theory Llosa advances that the famous Casement diaries, diaries which perhaps cost him his clemency, were in part, if not largely, made up. Fantasies which were written down rather than acted out. Trivial and largely innocent encounters puffed up into major athletic events.

Not so taken with the bit where Casement's body was subject, after his execution, to the indignity of an intimate examination to ascertain the extent of his unnatural activities. I wonder if we really were up to that sort of thing?

PS: glad I don't live in a seriously hot country. Living in our cool wet one might have its downsides, but reading about the Congo and the Amazon there are clearly a lot of upsides. Plus I do not care for hot; give me cool every time.

Dental factlet

As part of the measuring up for my new falsies, the dentist shaved a bit off my lower right first pre-molar. Right from my point of view that is. A very ordinary proceeding. But what was new to me was the time it took for my tongue to adjust to the very slight change in shape, with the tooth feeling odd for a week or so.

One can only suppose that in the fifty or more years that the tooth has been there, using signals from the tongue, my brain has slowly built up its map of the tooth, its shape and texture, a small but clearly important part of the brain's image of my body & soul, and it takes a little while for it to be reprogrammed to take account the altered shape, perhaps deciding on the way that the change is not life threatening.

I remember something of the same sort happening when I last had a tooth out, although that seemed to be a day or so of adjustment rather than a week or so.

Media factlet

Not impressed by the much larger amount of coverage accorded to the terrorist attach in Kenya to that in Pakistan, despite the similar numbers of dead and injured.

I don't quite see quite why Kenya should be so much more newsworthy than Pakistan. Both of them are former British colonies, both have troubled pasts. Pakistan is a lot more Muslim than Kenya but I do not think that is the difference. One hopes, probably vainly, that it is something more edifying than some fraction of the Kenyan victims being white.

Heat

A picture of a fine piece of weather art, that is to say a work of art which is made by carving out a interesting lump of tree with a chain saw and then leaving the lump to weather to something even more interesting. One can then dilate, Guardian fashion, on the various beauties of the grains and textures so exposed. Perhaps project all kinds of fancies onto the thing, rather in the way that one does with clouds.

The connection with heat being that the picture was taken in the garden during a stay in the Spa Hotel at Tunbridge Wells (http://www.spahotel.co.uk/), a stay which reminded us of the difficulty that hotels seem to have with temperature control in their bedrooms.

We start with a bedroom with a very high ceiling (high enough for a chandelier to look good) and windows which opened, which together provided some compensation for the fact that the air conditioning control unit did not appear to allow one to allow the temperature to fall below 18C. Not that we got so far as to find the explanatory leaflet for the control unit, let alone read and absorb it. We only got as far as thinking that 18C is several degrees above the setting on our own control unit at home - and, as the climate changesayers keep telling us, several degrees can make a whole world of difference.

Then the bed was equipped with a duvet which did not look too thick for the start of autumn and, in practise, the duvet was just about OK provided one was not running hot. The fine control of sticking an arm or a leg out from under in order to lower the temperature inside was enough. But when one was running hot, perhaps because one was over tired or had taken on too much freight in the preceding twelve hours, the duvet was too hot. Asleep, the only answer was to chuck the thing off altogether and after a while one woke up too cold. A cycle which was apt to repeat through the night.

For some reason, we did not attempt to take the duvet out of its bag and use the bag as a blanket, a device to which we have had successful recourse in the past.

Nor did we attempt to extract top sheet and thin blanket from the hotel housekeepers, there being nothing of that sort in the room. Nor did we have the coats or dressing gowns to hand with which we might have achieved the same end, albeit in a rather untidy way.

Perhaps with more practise we would have got there; got the amount of window opening and curtain drawing adjusted so that the resultant temperature in the bedroom suited the thickness - or perhaps togness - of the duvet. But in the time available we did not. Perhaps, given that the temperature outside tends to fall during the course of the night, we never would have. And it remains a puzzle why so many otherwise satisfactory hotels fail on this score.

Are we all victims of some drive to save on the energy costs involved in air conditioning that works?

PS: there was, to be fair, a plus in all this. We were not lying awake listening to the noise of the air conditioning, something which one can do quite a lot of in quite a lot of the newer hotels. And, in most other respects, an entirely satisfactory stay, including one rather good dinner in their rather grand dining room - not yet swept away in some hotel adviser driven makeover.

Relevant authorities

Another branch of the authorities is at it again.

According to the Observer, some bright spark, or perhaps some dim spark, thinks that it would be a good idea to ban fags in prisons, to the point of not even allowing them in the exercise yard, never mind in the privacy of their own cells.

What on earth do they think they are playing at? Prisons are bursting at the seams with all kinds of drug offenders and here we are stirring up trouble, wasting time and resources on trying to eradicate a legal drug of known soothing effect, something which one can well do with in a place like a prison. If nicotine goes the way of bromide, what price a prison officer?

Souvenir of Tunbridge Wells

One of the many good things about Tunbridge Wells is the common adjacent to the town centre, a mainly wooded area with all kinds of interesting odds and ends, including some very fancily priced housing.

This morning I came across a handy little car park there, just up from the Pantiles, not full at around 0930 so presumably too far for the commuters from the surrounding area to walk to the railway station. But there were some rather flashy cars, presumably the property of similarly flashy wives, one of whom was to be seen climbing out of her very natty looking BMW convertible. Very gracious she was to the attendant too.

Wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to which of the various BMW convertibles it was, but even if it was bottom of the range at £25,000, a lot more than we paid for our stretched Ford Focus. And top of the range comes in at near £100,000.

Venturing north from the common the evening before we had found a very pleasant restaurant in Lime Hill Road, 'Dame Tartine' (http://www.dametartine.co.uk/), run by a very pleasant young French couple (maybe their first venture on their own account?), but no relation of the various dames tartine Google turns up in Metropolitan France. We thought it proper to have tartines, a variety of open sandwich, and with the usual trimmings a very good light supper they made too. Lime Hill Road itself offered an interesting variety of housing, maybe 100 or more years old, with unusual three story terraced town houses on one side and with the more usual two storey variety - such as you might see in Sheen or Kew - on the other. These last mostly trimmed with coloured stained glass to the hallway, a rather posher version of the stained glass in the slightly younger houses in our own road in Epsom.

All of which brought to mind an architectural thought from last week, to the effect that suburban housing in this country went through two good patches, roughly the 20's and 30's and then the 50's of the last century, when lots of mainly three bedroom houses were built (the job creation schemes of their day, as I recall, something we could do with now), detached and semi-detached, but which, while decent and substantial, were all to built to much the same tried & tested design and were largely free of the pretentious trimmings which usually adorn such housing. So none of the stone trimming which adorns much upper artisan housing from the decades around the turn of the 19th century, such as is to be seen in many London Boroughs, for example Clapham or Harringey. No fancy plasterwork to fall off the interior ceilings. Pointed roofs with cement tiles. Functional. None of the faux muddled village/old town affectations which you get in housing estates being built now. Maybe a bit of faux timbering to the first floor, but on the whole decent and substantial housing which has stood the test of time well. I wonder if an architectural historian would agree with me.

Billy Budd

Having first noticed Billy Budd on 20th August, I have now got around to reading the book.

The first attempt at the library was not very successful. Into the catalogue in the usual way, pleased to find a number of copies of the required book. Chose one and some weeks later the book found its way into the reserved cupboard at Epsom Library, where quite by chance I happened to notice it, the usual email reminder having gone awol. A bit surprised at this point to find myself holding a rather thin red paperback. Well, I think to myself, I suppose the thing is a short story. Get home to find that I have a version of the original story adapted for adults who are learning to read, not quite what I was looking for at all. I suppose, to be fair to the library, they had to list the book somewhere and under Melville was perhaps as good as anywhere else.

The second attempt went rather better and took some seconds at Amazon rather than some weeks at the library. Book now read and all things considered the opera was not a bad take on it; it was indeed a meditation on the workings of the articles of war at a rather tricky time for the Royal Navy, with mutineers behind and the French in front. Mayhem and regicide on the Continent. And then there was the innocent, handsome and popular Billy Budd, one of a type Melville thought cropped up from time to time - and one which I think I dimly recognise from one or two examples from school. I also got a sense of the sort of life that might be had by the rank and file (not quite the right simile but never mind) on an all too crowded man of war at that time, the end of the eighteenth century, something which I had never got from my extensive childhood readings of C. S. Forester. Including here the social life, the interactions between the various groups. The foretopmen, the afterguard, the tradesmen, the marines and the ship's police, all with their own places in this highly organised and highly stressed world.

The introduction suggested that Melville himself was a rather odd cove, an oddness perhaps consistent with his heavy and unusual prose - not at all suitable for an adult learner in its raw form. But I suppose I should have stuck with learner version to see how much of the original was left; presumably the core issue of what to do with someone who strikes a superior officer in the face of the enemy survives in one way or another. The answer in the book seems to be that the captain jumped the wrong way; it would have been enough to clap Budd in irons for the time being and dump the problem in slow time on the admiral - who could then quietly reprieve the chap at some suitable point in the future. No real need for instant action at all. But there was justice of a sort - omitted in the opera - as the captain died of battle wounds not long after the execution.

PS: to be tidied up when I get to crack the system on this municipal gateway computer.

Paranoia

I am getting a bit concerned about some of the wheezes circulating on the internet these days. The one that triggered this post being a circle of rotating purple blobs embedded in an otherwise ordinary looking email, which if looked at in the right way turn green or vanish altogether, a wheeze which presumably exploits some tricky timing feature of one's vision machinery, perhaps akin to that whereby the wheels of cars in films always seem to be going backwards. My concern is that such a wheeze is interfering with the workings of one's brain in an intimate way. Is doing damage? Could it trigger an epileptic fit? Is it planting some kind of a time bomb? Are the relevant authorities on the case?

The relevant authorities do seem to have been asleep on the job with a former press aide to a former prime minister. It seems that this gent. was sufficiently on the sauce, when he was near thirty mind you, not some wet behind the ears at university, that he was hallucinating on the morning after, before he started again. To the point where he was behaving oddly near a very important person, was scooped up by Special Branch and carted off to the nearest mental hospital. At which point one might have thought that said relevant authorities would have put a blot on his record, but no. He goes onto greater glory and the rest is history. And if the event did find its way to the blotting department, odd that booze is OK but youthful membership, say, of a fairly lawful hunt protest group is a killer blow. Then what about the youthful snuffling of white powders? What about the potentially dangerous harassment of badger cullers going about their lawful business?

PS: I would not usually identify a real person in this way, but as he chooses to top up his already fat pension by kiss-and-tell, I think he forfeits the usual courtesies.

An unexpected visitor

We had an unexpected visitor this morning, as a result of which the standard of breakfast conversation was rather higher than it might otherwise have been.

Our text was a piece from yesterday's Guardian telling us that the tree-huggers had blocked a plot to dig a whole lot of fertilizer out of the North Yorkshire Moors. We got the impression that it was a very good plot, a plot which would have meant that we could have exported vast quantities of fertilizer to Brazil, India and China, thus raising the folding stuff needed to pay for the tree-huggers' consumer gadgets, for example their all important mobile phones.

But as things stand, our current account deficit will just keep on growing, with the result that the Chinese will, one fine day, simply buy the North Yorkshire Moors, after which they will be able to do what they like with them, without further payment. Maybe some of the tree-huggers will wind up slaving away, deep underground in the fertilizer mines, with the slave drivers imported, like their mobile phones are now, from China. With the finest hippopotamus hide whips made from sustainably harvested African hippopotami.

Read all about it at http://siriusminerals.com/.

D784

On Monday lunchtime we went off to the Wigmore Hall to hear Christian Blackshaw do Schubert's piano sonata in A minor (D784) and Schumann's fantasy in C (Op. 17). I did not know this last but I did have a YouTube preview, a place which I am finding seems to offer free performances of a lot of the classical repertoire. I am not that keen on the headphones which this entails but it is an easy way to get acquainted with something when the home library fails. And there is often a button to click on to skip the advertisements.

The Schubert turned out to be an even more powerful piece live than it was on the home library CD, with the power kicking in from bar 1. A piece which made me wonder how much popular music misses by making no use of the interval, the pause or even the gap. It also left me rather drained and while I could hear the power of the Schumann, it did not get under the skin in the way of the Schubert; I failed to connect with it in the same way at all. I wonder, perhaps, whether I would have got on better with the Schumann first and the Schubert second. No idea how the pianist - almost the same age as me - managed to keep it up for an hour or what he had to do to wind down after. Maybe pianists go in for a very careful lifestyle and diet.

Something of a cloudburst as well left so we ducked into 2 Veneti (http://www.2veneti.com/) (see 1st May for our first visit), rather than, as we had intended, pushing onto Ponti's (http://www.pontisitaliankitchen.co.uk/). But Veneti's did us very well, with my lunch consisting of, inter alia, a fine pasta dish involving small pieces of smoked cheek of pork. And a fine pudding wine with biscuits, a Venetian version of the vino santo from the other side of the mountains. Generous with the mixed breads, although the rolls had probably been frozen at some point in their lives.

Just caught a train at Vauxhall, so neither excuse nor opportunity to play the aeroplanes game (see 1st September) at either Clapham Junction or Wimbledon, although waiting at Clapham Junction no fewer than three planes flew over. But sitting in the train this was a serial rather than a simultaneous experience.

A pink lady

On the 16th May I noticed an oddly good apple from Sainsbury's, a Cox 4105.

Today I notice an irritatingly bad one from the Tesco Express, recently opened just off Horton Lane. An operation which I have been told is a franchise, something which I had not known Tesco's were into. Anyway, they sold us 4 Pink Ladies from New Zealand for the premium price of £2.99 or 75p each. Large shiny looking affairs. Looked very good. But cut them into quarters to core them - don't like risking the elderly gnashers on entire applies these days - to find that the very centre of the apple had gone a rather odd grey brown colour, and they tasted even odder. Rotten maybe, but rotting from the inside out, something which does happen with these artfully stored, out of season apples. Which given that it is presently the spring in New Zealand, these must certainly be.

A 'Pink Lady 4128' with the little sticky label carrying the web address http://www.produceofnewzealand.org/, a site with a head line about 100% pure apples. Wherever do their advertising chaps learn their English from? What does a 97% pure apple look like at home? Does it count if you inject them with 7cc each of 100% inorganic xenon for their better preservation? They also headline a very glossy brochure about apples and colorectal cancer (a matter in which I take a personal interest) which claims that 'phytonutrients in apples inhibited the growth of colon and liver cancer cells in laboratory conditions'. Do they know something that we have missed out on in the home country? Or do the NZ Bayer people talk to the UK ones? See the engaging truck driving across your screen when you visit http://www.bayer.com/.

But I have not learned anything about how they get their 100% pure apples from the tree in NZ to the shop in Horton Lane.

Rubber factlet

I am presently reading a fictionalised account of the life of Roger Casement by Mario Vargas Llosa, on which I will report further in due course, but a taster in the meantime.

Reading all about the horrors perpetrated in the Congo by the Belgians at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, I was moved to look up rubber in Chambers, where I found no mention of the Congo at all, although it seems that traditional rubber trees mainly flourish in the tropical belt, including, one might think, the Congo. Perhaps as colonialists with a spotted record of our own, the (1950's) editors of Chambers thought it better to omit the spots of others, even large ones.

But I do find mention of the Soviet dandelion and turning to Wikipedia I find that there is indeed a plant looking very like the dandelion, grown in the former Soviet republics of central Asia and from the root of which you can indeed extract rubber. A tad dearer than the stuff from the tropics, but it was all the thing in the heyday of the Soviets.

There is also a brief discussion of the chemistry of rubber from which I learn that man made fibres emulate in a clean and tidy way what happens in a naturally messy way in the various rubber yielding plants from around the world. Obvious once you have been told.

Agatha

Came across a biography of Agatha Christie in the library the other day. By one Laura Thompson who claimed support of the family trust, access to letters and such like. Well worn despite the near blank lending slip in the front - made obsolete by the self checkout arrangements, in place for as long as I can remember. So all in all, I thought lots of people have taken it out, so must be worth a borrow.

As it turned out, rather a rambling sort of book, wandering backwards, forwards and around the life of Agatha's life and works, with quite a lot of space given to quotes from the latter. Not a book for someone who has not read and enjoyed a lot of the books, although it is an interesting life, which would make a good subject for a more regular biography - but perhaps the family were not having that, blocking access to everyone except someone prepared to do it their way. Part of the interest being seeing how some of the features of her upbringing reverberate through her marriages and the lives of her descendants.

We learn also how much of Agatha's own life finds its way into the books, rather flat and one dimensional though they are, leaving aside the more obviously autobiographical books written under the Westmacott flag, of which I have no direct experience. All kinds of agnathan life, times and thoughts find their way into the mouths of Miss. Marple, Poirot and the all the rest of them.

I share one snippet. I cannot presently find the quote, from  Miss. Marple, but it goes along the lines of don't knock gossip. Ladies are interested in the social and family doings of humans and make a life time study of them. Old ladies have all the time in the world to mull them over, sometimes out loud in company. As a result they know a lot about people and one can learn a lot from them. Provided, I think to myself, that you make proper allowance for motive, cattiness and spite.

And one factlet. Agatha wrote a mystery set in ancient Egypt, drawing on what she learned from her second husband and his archaeological doings. I find the book beyond me, but I was interested to read in the author's note at the front about the Egyptian calendar. So the Egyptian year was made up of three seasons, with each season made up of four months of thirty days, all geared to the annual cycle of the Nile. Plus five intercalary days at the end to make up numbers. Perhaps these days were given over to holidays and bacchanalia. But they did not do anything about the odd quarter day, so after a while - quite a lot of centuries that is - the month which was supposed to mark the flood was a long way off target. I found it very odd that with all their calendrical sophistication they did not get around to leap years, that they did not find it a bit odd that the month of the flood fell in the month of the drought. Perhaps this was a mystery which helped keep the priests in business.

Which reminds me of some law of history which I once came across, a law which states that the established church will usually manage to get its paws on one third of the wealth of a country. Churches tend to grow until the forces for growth are balanced by the push back from the rest of the population, leading one to the magic number of three.

Nulla dies sine linea

The artefact illustrated turned up during a clearing out session, being the badge removed from a school blazer and then preserved, in fact the blazer which BH wore to Teignmouth Grammar School more than forty years ago.

Once again impressed by the camera in the new mobile phone, perhaps helped along by reading the instructions and discovering that half pressing the button tells the thing to try a bit of focusing after which you fully press the button. It must also fiddle with exposure, this snap being taken in a poor, unnatural light. Certainly not organic.

The scroll at the bottom contains the motto, scarcely legible in the flesh (perhaps one should say in the cloth), so not a surprise that it is not legible here. But it is, it seems from Wikipedia, a quote from a painter called Apelles via a chap called Pliny and originally meant never a day without a line drawn - that is to say, an exhortation to practise one's drawing. I suppose now that line means a line of text in a book and it is an exhortation to learn. Having got this far I then wondered whether line and learn had the same root, but if they do it must be a good way back as line is Latin while learn is Old English. A line in Latin the sense of a piece of string, then a line in the sense of geometry, then a line in the sense of a line of type. By extension a line of poetry. So what with one thing and another, back to the mental doodlings of 12th September.

We then took an interest in the black cloth which appeared to be some kind of knitted material rather than woven, backed with what looked like a bit of fine linen to provide a proper foundation for the embroidered coat of arms. We think that the body of the jacket must have been made of something else but is no longer available for inspection.

Calling all boozers!

To a plug for Luzo Trading, who must, in their shop on the South Lambeth Road, carry the finest range of Portuguese wine available in this country.

This includes a good number of mid range wines but with prices up to £100 a bottle or down to £5 a bottle if you want that. I made a start with three different mid rangers from Casa Ferreirinha, an outfit which Professor Google seems to know a good deal about, even if they do not sport their own web site. Clearly a bit old-fashioned. I shall report further in due course.

A proper wine shop which wraps any individuals bottles you may have bought in black tissue paper so that you do not clank on the train - although quite a lot of their wine comes in rather smart looking boxes of three. Something which the very nearly extinct Odd Bins used to do - and they were rather a good booze shop too, albeit in a rather different way. As well as their idiosyncratic range, I also liked the way that they encouraged their staff to be knowledgeable about, even to try out the stuff they sold in a serious way; not quite the same at all as the chaps in a Tesco Express. Still, not a business model which seems to work any more as Tesco is up and they are down - but hopefully there is still room for a speciality outfit such as Luzo.

See http://www.lusotrading.co.uk/.

Dancing water

The dancing water bowl had an outing today, the first since January last year (see 1st January 2012 in the other place).

Maybe 3cm of warm water in bowl, bowl on cloth, on tile, on slab, on custom wooden tray in vice seemed to do the trick, with best results with the bowl perched on the end of the tile. Didn't get the water dancing over the whole surface, but maybe as much as half, with drops dancing up to about an inch. One day I will trust BH to take a picture of me and the bowl with the new phone, which will probably be able to catch the water dancing.

The Rowse-Ball Prize for the best newcomer was taken by Miss. S. Montgomery.

For newcomers to this place, the other place is at http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/, the predecessor of the present blog. Searching for 'dancing water' will find the relevant entries. Alternatively, asking Google for 'dancing water bowl' will give more results than you are likely to need.

Legalities

Yesterday evening, a quick read of 'The Collini Case' by Ferdinand von Shirach, an international bestseller from Penguin and a courtroom drama from Germany. It is not a coincidence that the book is about old Nazis and the author is called von Shirach, the name of one of the first round war criminals at Nuremberg, as the first round war criminal was the grandfather of the author. You can read all about it at the Guardian web site.

A easy read, although the pivot of the story - the discovery of the past of the victim of the murder half way through the trial, months after the murder - seemed improbable. The connection would, one would have thought, have been made rather quicker, despite the taciturnity of the murderer.

But the story contains interesting material on the laws around reprisals for resistance attacks and war crimes more generally.

First, it seems that such reprisals, provided that they are proportionate and decent, are not war crimes. Which does not seem unreasonable to me. As it happens, on the way to the Wigmore Hall earlier in the week, we had seen posters advertising a book or something about resistance to the Germans after an (imagined) English surrender in 1940, posters which made me wonder about the propriety of blowing up the canteens (say) of the army to which one's properly constituted and empowered government had surrendered. Surrender means that you have given up, that you are no longer resisting, and to go on resisting is breaking the rules: the line between resistance and terrorism is a thin one.

Then there is a law which says that all crimes, other than murder, lapse after a certain period.

Then there is a law which says that once a crime has lapsed it cannot be revived. A version, perhaps, of the near universal rule against double jeopardy.

Then there is a law which says that one's crime is mitigated if one was acting under orders. Mitigation which applies to the vast majority of German war criminals from the second world war.

Then there is a law which says that when several people commit a crime, all are individually guilty, just as if they had acted alone. On the other hand if one was just accessory, the crime is mitigated as above.

Into all this, in the late sixties, one Dr. Eduard Dreher, a lawyer who had done bad but possibly not criminal things during the war and who went on to a successful career after the war, stirred an innocuous seeming tweak, an innocuous tweak which by making them accessories to murders rather than murderers, amnestied virtually all the then remaining war criminals.

All of which reminds one that it is not surprising that the German student generation of the sixties of the last century had problems with the past, with the role of their own parents in that past and with the role of those parents in covering up that past.

Pineapples

Got home yesterday to face up to the problem of what to do with the three pineapples (see 12th September), the smell of which was starting to accumulate in the garage.

Remembering the tinned pineapple jam which was an occasional treat of my childhood, I decided that the answer was to make them into a sort of jam which could be served with ice cream instead of maple syrup.

First step, prepare your pineapples. Chop off top and bottom, taking care not to chop off any finger ends. Good idea to use a serious kitchen knife, not some flimsy flexible affair. Then place pineapple upright on chopping board and peel by taking off vertical slices. Slice into around 5 slices one inch thick. Remove the eyes from the edges of the slices using a very short bladed kitchen knife (in my case a Kitchen Devils model number 602000 - Kitchen Devils being the only people who seem to offer such a thing. See http://kitchendevils.net/). This part of the operation is a bit time consuming and a bit messy. The pineapples were much better, much riper, than I had expected. Furthermore, the core seemed soft rather than woody. Dice the cleaned slices.

Second step, prepare some fallen cooking apples. Remove gunge, rot and peel. Chop into the pineapple. The unripe cooking apples should contain enough pectin to make the pineapples set, at least a bit.

Third step, place fruit, maybe a pint of water and a pound of granulated sugar (pineapples might be sweet, but one always adds lots of sugar to the rather less sweet fruits we grow for jam in England. So sugar, but rather, here) to a large saucepan. Bring to boil and simmer down to a jam consistency.

All went swimmingly until I got diverted and forgot about the simmering jam, left on rather a high heat, with the result that it caught. Foolishly, stirred most of the black stuff in, rather than just pouring the relatively untainted bulk into a clean saucepan. Wound up with a brown, jammy mixture in a flat pyrex dish. Tasted unpleasantly sweet hot, not too bad cold. Not too much burnt taste at all; maybe the same principle as toffee which is, after all, heading towards burnt. The brown of the toffee is presumably carbon, just like like the black on the bottom of the saucepan. On the other hand, a reasonable proportion of the surviving pineapple dice are a bit crunchy, so maybe the cores were not as soft as the knife had suggested.

We will see how much of the brown jam makes it to stomachs rather than compost heaps. Current thought is that the general idea was sound, just that the execution was a bit careless.

Temperament

Following yesterday's thoughts, or lack of them, about temperament, came to the digestible summary illustrated. Maybe I am starting to grasp why the classical scales of the west work in the way that they do.

With the raw data coming from the article in Chambers.

Back to the Wiggers

It was the start of the 2013-2014 season at the Wigmore Hall for us yesterday evening, with a Vivaldi concert given to us by the Europa Galante (http://www.europagalante.com/), a mainly string ensemble, with us getting 14 of the 15 musicians logged on the web site.

Started the proceedings by catching the maestro, Fabio Biondo, catching a quick fag outside the front door with one of his colleagues; clearly the Wigmore does not run to a servants' entrance for such purposes. We learned later that one of the marks of the maestro was a special bow, rather more bowed than those of his colleagues and held well away from the end, maybe six inches. Furthermore, the direction of bow was out, away from the hair, rather than the more usual (to me anyway) in, towards the hair.

Each half was a sinfonia followed by three concerti, the 6 concerti being said to be the publishing collection known as 'La Stravaganza'. Mainly cheerful, playful stuff, very easy listening compared with that of a 100 years or so later to which we are far more accustomed. I was reminded of a point made by Fred Hoyle in one of his science fiction books about how we have forgotten the beauty of pure sound in our enthusiasm for complexity - despite some of what we were hearing, particularly the solo parts, being quite tricky. In any event, I was impressed by the range of sound that the ensemble, with the help of Vivaldi but without the help of wind, brass or percussion could conjure up. With a jolly little dance by Gluck, played entirely in pizzicato, for an encore. We shall be back if the ensemble come back.

Dimly remembering a past interest in the tricky business of temperament, I asked the girl on the door how the harpsichord had been tuned, a query which she treated with admirable seriousness and found me someone who knew someone who knew the answer - which was 40-40 equal temperament, a  modern tuning with which the tuner did not agree.

Home on the 2148 or so from Vauxhall, strangely empty with us being the only occupants bar one in our carriage by the time we got to Epsom.

This morning start to poke around in Chambers on violins and temperament, to realise how much there is to know about both topics, far too much for me to come to a nice digestible summary before breakfast. But maybe I will try to find out how the violin family came to splat the viol family (with the exception of the double bass, a large viol rather than a large violin). Maybe also I will open up some of my 'Edizione Vivaldi' - of which I have volumes 5, 8 and 10. Had them for more than thirty years and possibly never opened them, never mind played any of the many discs. Sadly the 'La Stavaganza', here 12 concerti rather than the 6 claimed by the maestro, is in the absent volume 3.

Waste not want not

It has been a half day of waste so far.

Started off at the tip where we were reminded as we disposed of an unwanted piece of furniture how much furniture gets chucked away - although I dare say a lot of it was damaged in some way and like so much modern stuff, more or less impossible to mend, or at least impractical. Not like the days when you could simply cut a new bit of wood from the garage into where somebody had thought to carve their initials with their pocket knife - or whatever.

Then through the small Thursday market to buy three pineapples for £1. To think that someone has tended the things for months somewhere out in the tropics and then shipped, probably thousands of miles, to me to buy at this knock-down price. Hard to see much profit in all this. And equally hard to know what to do with them now I have got them home, with the Boston Cook Book reminding us that for most purposes tinned pineapples work better than fresh ones. On the up side it did offer a dozen or more different things to do with pineapples.

On up East Street where I came across a heap of green plastic twine, most of which I was able to recover, only leaving a few yards on the spool which had got inside the hedge somehow. The garage padlock key proved able to sever the twine where the back door key was not, being rather older with the points a little worn. Back home to wind it into a hank, observing the maxim learned from a professional yachtsman one day on the Solent that rope just chucked down does not tangle. What might look like a tangle will tease apart - provided you do not try to help the process along by threading the free end through all kinds of loops and crannies. The maxim worked and a few minutes after the snap the hanking up was completed and the completed hank was hanging from the garage roof awaiting a use. Something will turn up one day.

Odd how I like string, something I have noticed before (see 20th February 2011 in the other place) and an oddness which at least one other person I know shares. Perhaps it is the original artefact, the making of an ideal object - a uniform and flexible line of arbitrary length - out of raw nature where such things do not exist. Once you have the line, the way is open to think of circles, triangles and squares. Of space. You also have knots and tangles (with the green twine having just one small knot which I came across at the very end of the hanking. Yachtsman wrong to that extent). And so science is born.

And, back in the real world, onto spinning thread,  twisting yarn and walking ropes.

And, back at home, there is clearly a lot more to learn about the camera bit of the new mobile phone. Why, for example, has it only stored one picture when I thought that I had snapped three? At least they are much bigger and better than those from the old phone.

Newspeak

This morning my eye was caught by the label on the bottle of milk from Yeo Valley Farm, all mountains and daisies, complete with fake informal layout and fonts. All of which I found rather tiresome, thinking that the actual place was probably something like that illustrated, as it happens a Yeo Valley Farm production facility, somewhere near Bristol. A facility which looks even larger in Google Maps, a little to east of Blagdon, while the corporate HQ is a slightly smaller collection of sheds on the southern perimeter of the village proper. Not a mountain or a daisy in sight, although there must be some hills as Cheddar Gorge is not far away.

Not satisfied with this, went off to Wikipedia, which explained that, as large scale dairy product producers go, this one was actually fairly cuddly, a model of entrepreneurial  innovation with a co-operative flavour. So probably quite a good thing; pity about the faux cuddly packaging.

Then moved onto the packet of xylitol and got to wondering about how this ever so natural stuff managed to taste like sugar without clocking up the calories therein. How did it manage to trick the taste buds or whatever part of us is responsible for the taste of sweet? One can see that liking sweet is adaptive for sub-humans, hungry a lot of the time and well up for high calorie snacks. But only highly adaptive if the taste of sweet is only triggered by things which really do pack a lot of calories. And the fact that it is no longer adaptive more or less irrelevant on the time line of evolution, with obesity only checking in for the last 50 of a 50 million year trajectory.

A few minutes with the Professor reveal that xylitol is one of a family of chemicals called sugar alcohols, of which sorbitol is another, so presumably the answer is that xylitol works because it is very close to being a sugar while only carrying half the calorific punch, and the mix-up over tastes was not a problem for evolution as xylitol while ever so natural, was not so natural as to crop up in a sub-human diet. It also seems that xylitol is widely included in various food products and widely enough used to warrant an elaborate web site, rather smelling of Big Pharma but also explaining what a good thing it is. See http://www.xylitol.org/.

Closed the session on newspeak with a glimpse of the Guardian's headline explaining that the government's bedroom tax is, according to some inspector from the UN, a shocking erosion of human rights. Which to my mind just brings the UN into disrepute. One might think that trying to reduce the number of families living in subsidised housing which is rather larger than they need in this particular way is wrong, very wrong even, but to lump it in with human rights violations is an abuse of the term. All rather odd given that the inspector concerned has spent a lot of time in countries where there are far more serious rights issues: why does she feel the need to have a pop at us in this way? Is the UK a tad late with its subs. this year?

Pretentious conceptuals

In the course of visiting the Lowry exhibition on or about the 31st July, we also took in a display of what appeared to be fetishes and such like, perhaps from islands in the Pacific Ocean or perhaps from darkest Africa. All very artily displayed, each on its own plinth in a darkened room. We wandered around making hard core comments about all the fascinating material until, after a bit, BH smelt a rat. All the confections which we had thought were genuine native artefacts were built on a McDonald's theme; big macs, chips, coke and so on. Had McDonald's penetrated the Pacific Islands so long ago and to the point where the natives had incorporated them into their fetishes? Cargo cults? Further hard core comments. But we did not find any explanatory labels to help us, so left and thought no more about it.

Until yesterday, when I thought to take a peek at the Tate web site to find that the whole thing is an elaborate spoof. A deliberately confrontational bit of conceptual art. They may have taken the spoof as far as the original exhibition in 2002 being dressed up in anthropological clothes in which case I dare say the organisers had some fun at the expense of the media and the chattering classes - but I find the continuing joke rather offensive and a poor use of prime gallery space in central London.

There is nothing very profound about tricking people into thinking that buns built into artefacts are the real thing. And I do not need to be shown how ‘ethnographic art was both reconciled and fused with Modernism, creating timeless forms and enabling Global culture to harmonise in a single poetic language’. Why should they think that we are going to pay them good money for such nonsense? Notwithstanding, they clearly do and someone is stumping up the dosh, but I wish we didn't: it gives art a bad name. And I don't suppose that the natives are that pleased to be the unwitting butts of a bunch of rich westerners.

But read about it for yourself at http://whitecube.com/. Pick a time when you are not in a hurry as the site is rather slow. Or, at least, it is this morning.

Bicentenary

Time to record the proud bicentenary of my bread making. That is to say I have nearly finished eating the first loaf of the 200th batch of bread baked since I started back in 2010.

The chart reveals a regular and sustained habit if not hobby, with the two slight blips in 2012 reflecting my two visits to hospital in that year. Pity I could not get the axis labels to end at 200 rather than 199: there are 200 bakes recorded.

The  main event of recent bakes has been the move from loaf tins coated in dark grey teflon which flakes from the House of Fraser to ceramic pizza plates from Lakeland. See 1st July and 24th August. A moves from loaf shaped loaves to low rise round loaves, rather like, in shape that is, the loaves we used to buy from a Cypriot baker at the top of Green Lanes, hard by the North Circular. Possibly but probably not the Lefteris bakery at No. 23; I don't recognise the picture.

The full story continues to reside at bread.

PS: now finished eating this first loaf over Saturday's Guardian, in which I was depressed to read of the shabby treatment of many if not most of the foot soldiers of the care worker industry. Not to mention the shabby treatment of the people that said industry is supposed to be serving. Depressed that, 40 years or more after we got rid of the antiquated & unpleasant hump system of hire by the day in the docks and in the building industry, such large chunks of the population are back on hire by the hour - while the rich carry on getting richer. Depressed even more by the thought that, despite all this, the conservatives will probably get back in again at the next election. Bring back the dignity of labour! Keep the red flag flying!

Guard terminal

I was interested to read of the recent death, at the grand old age of 96, one of Hitler's two personal guards, drawn from the SS, a guard who spent quality time more or less sleeping across the Führer's bedroom threshold, rather in the manner of the guards of kings of old. It seems that after 9 years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp - presumably pretty grim - he was reunited with his wife in Germany, bought a shop and, it seems, lived happily ever after, unrepentant. Hitler, it also seems, was kind to both his dogs and his servants.

All of which I find rather puzzling. How can such a person just quietly pick up and get on with his life - which is what one supposes he must have done, making it all the way to 96? How could he have shut out all the hate focused on his former master? One is not necessarily a war criminal for having served closely with one who clearly was, but one is equally clearly tainted by association. Surely there needs to be more to it than saying to oneself - and anyone else who cares to ask - that 'I was following orders. What Hitler might or might not have done as a public person was no concern of mine'?

And then there is Burkhard Nachtigall, the (ghost) biographer of the guard and publicist, named for the nightingale of all things. A chap born in 1968 - a time when many young people in Germany were in revolt, in part about the veil which had been drawn over the past of their parents - who went on to what looks like a successful career in sports media rights. What is he doing spending quality time with such a person? Does there need to be more to it than a desire to make a few bob out of an old man with a dodgy but salable past? His company's web site at http://www.teleonemedia.com was far too slow to bother with so I did not learn much there.

But some months ago I read a book called 'The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind', written by a psychoanalyst called Daniel Pick and puffed in one of the occasional newsletters of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, although I must have picked it up from the TLS or the NYRB. As far as I can recall, I found it interesting mainly for its description of the way in which psychoanalysts made headway during the second world war, headway towards their pre-eminence in the fifties. But it was primarily about the efforts during that war of psychologists in general and psychoanalysts in particular to understand the Nazi mind, in particular that of Rudolf Hess, who had fallen into their hands. I must take another look to see if it throws any light on the present question.

Technology terminal

A more complete report following the summary notice of 6th September.

First stop was the kiosk in the Costcutter which houses our Post Office to see about the cable. The chap there plugs the Samsung into his computer. The Samsung - if not the computer - responds and we are both fairly sure that there is nothing wrong with the cable. Nevertheless he, quite decently, suggests that I return in the afternoon when his tame geek will be there and who will, no doubt, be able to elucidate the mystery. Which was, I thought, entirely fair enough - but impatient, I move onto Carphone Warehouse. The young lady I had seen the day previous was still there but I get to see a young gentleman, to whom I explain my problem. Well he says, you can hardly expect a phone which was certainly designed and probably built before Windows 8 was invented to work with Windows 8.

But what you can do is buy a memory chip for the Samsung, with the help of which you will be able to move pictures from your phone to your PC. Fine, let's do that I say. But then it transpires that in, order to effect the transfer, I have to take the battery out of the phone, extract the chip, do the business on the PC and then put the phone back together again, a trick I was never able to master on the Nokia. And anyway it all seemed far too clunky for something that I was doing several times a week.

What about a different sort of phone? What about my money back on the Samsung? Young gentleman rapidly steers me to something called a Nokia Lumia 520 which he tells me was built on Windows 8 and will be able to talk to my PC without needing any new software at all, rather in the way of the Kindle. Without giving the matter much more thought, beyond thinking that the now Microsoft owned phone ought to be able to talk to a Microsoft powered PC, I say buy and shortly afterwards I am out in the street clutching a nice blue box containing my second new phone of the week. Young lady looking slightly sheepish.

Some time later, on completion of my morning constitutional, I get home and open the thing up - and a very tastefully got up thing it was too. Someone had put a fair bit of effort into the styling of the packaging, effort which I thought was a good sign; the product ought to match. Started off by putting a few numbers into the address book and then tried a couple of calls, one inbound and one outbound. Talkmobile alive and well, to the extent of both preserving and exhibiting my (small) balance. So, so far so good, the only missing link so far being the very discrete ring tone of the old Nokia. But then comes the acid test: can I take a picture and get it onto the PC? Answer, yes, with the evidence being posted the day before yesterday.

Familiarisation continues, and while I am still very much a novice, I can see why people fall for these things. They really are very nicely put together and do all kinds of things in a very neat & clever way - including, I think, all kinds of ways to spend money, so I must be careful. It was clever enough, for example, to recover and file some ancient text messages from my PC without my prompting. I can only suppose that the phone scanned the PC for Nokia flavoured backups and extracted what it could. With what it could, oddly, not seeming to include my address book, which I have now reconstituted by hand, no doubt with sundry spelling mistakes which will catch me out in the future.

All in all a satisfactory conclusion to the affair and I can continue to shop at Carphone Warehouse.

PS 1: I was very impressed by the quality of the illustration. That a scanner (an HP Deskjet 2050) bundled into the price of the PC should be able to do such things. The original is less than two inches square and the type is pretty small, now more legible here (after you click to enlarge) than it is in the original.

PS 2: I also take a peek at what Google has to say about the phone, to find a vast amount of stuff out there on the subject, some helpful and some rather loud & lurid, and I gather that what I have bought is OK, even entirely suitable for a user of my sort. I suppose someone more careful than I might have done a bit of research - perhaps the pub would have been a good place - first, but I was far too impatient for that. I was in go mode. Plus, I was wary of getting locked onto a phone bore, a species quite common. Perhaps I will become one!

Happy days

BH was having a bit of a clear out yesterday, the watchword being 'declutter', and passed me an oldish copy of the 'Observer's Book of Ships' in case I wanted to stop it carrying on to the recycling station, which, as it happens, I did.

This particular copy came to us via Norfolk County Library, sold off in some long ago cull, but it is very like a treasure of my boyhood, or at least that part of it when I was keen on boats. Observer's Books were treasured because they were at the top end of what could be saved up for from pocket money, were collectible, were small and were lavishly - by the standards of the day - illustrated. With colour illustrations - eight pages of flags & funnels - being separately bound into the middle of the book. There was a time when I knew the alphabet in flags and could have spelled out the famous Trafalgar message, although I did not know then and do not know now, whether they would have spelled it out longhand, as it were, at the time. Was there some sort of naval shorthand to cut the thing down a bit, to cut the cackle?

My fascination with boats was indulged on two occasions by stays in the former frigate 'Foudroyant', then anchored in Portsmouth harbour, stays which included a visit to an 'O' class submarine (then the last word in submarines) and a row past of the Vanguard (the last battleship of a long line in our Royal Navy), both a which earn a mention in Observer's. Not to mention the rows past line after line of warships which had been mothballed and which were headed for behind the shed, to take a phrase from the tank engine - the room 101 of the tank engine world. There was also divine service in the paneled chapel of HMS Dolphin, the once proud HQ of the submarine service, where we were treated to a very fire & brimstone sermon (nuclear bombs and nuclear wars being a bit of a thing at the time) from the padre. Memory says the text was from some apocalyptic bit of Isaiah with rivers of burning oil and suchlike.

An Observer's which even today is a rather cosy recapitulation of matters shippy (particularly, if not quite exclusively, our own) over the last century or so. A reminder of the days when we had a serious merchant marine and a serious navy. Not to mention the fishing fleet and the dying days of sail. I learn, for example, that the barque rig became popular mainly because it needed fewer men to drive it. I shall hang onto it for a bit longer.

But I let its geology brother go as a quid pro quo. A little book, rather spoiled for me by being taller relative to its width than the original version which would have been the same shape as that illustrated, but still providing a nicely potted introduction to matters geological, nicely potted in the sense that, while similar in coverage to an article in 'Chambers', is much more accessible and has far more pictures. I learned quite a bit from it during its six month sojourn in the study.

Justly popular books in their heyday and I can entirely see why one might collect the things and why they pop up so much in car boot sales and second hand book shops. Often at rather steep prices, many times the 5s., the price at which I last bought one new and the price at which I it sticks in my mind that they stuck for many years - although it also sticks in my mind that my memory is no where near as reliable as it used to be.

PS 1: I remember being quite shocked the first time I caught myself remembering a fact which turned out to be false. A shippy fact as it happens, in the Mitre (the one at the end of the 88 bus route), maybe 15 years ago.

PS 2: and I am quite shocked today to learn from Wikipedia that the Foudroyant was a third rate and was built in Plymouth, whereas memory said that it was a captured French frigate. But Wikipedia does admit both to a French ship of the name being captured 1758 and to a frigate being renamed the Foudroyant after the original had succumbed in Blackpool at the turn of the last century. I shall delve further.

Technology day 2

Having chucked a bit more money at the problem, the afternoon of day 2 has gone rather better than the afternoon of day 1 and we can now, once again, upload pictures from the mobile phone. Verification in the form of the usual green check table cloth behind the computer, which would be hard to capture in any other way.

All the indications are that this phone, from Nokia once again, is streets ahead of both what I have been used to and yesterday's Samsung. Full report to follow in due course.

Philanthropy

I noticed a bit of entrepreneurial philanthropy on 10th February and this morning came across another. This time from a Norwegian engineer who arrived in the US a year or so after the end of the second world war, did very well for himself and now uses some, or perhaps, much of his money to promote various branches of science.

One of which is neuroscience, and one of the products is an interesting educational site called http://www.brainfacts.org/. The full story is to be found at http://www.kavlifoundation.org/.

The background to the illustration is the Carina Nebula and the bright blue blob is a positron emission tomographic image of a slice through a 20 year old human brain.

A technology day

Started the day sufficiently bored and idle to think that perhaps I ought to check the state of affairs with my Virgin Money account, the sad remnant of my Northern Rock account. Down to the PC, fire everything up, enter my user name and press the large red button. Nothing happens. Close Chrome and try again. Still nothing happens and I get into the very long list of contact numbers. By the time that most of them start up - 0800 - I had lighted on one that looks reasonably likely and try it, and, to be fair, in fairly short order I get through to a pleasant young lady. I explain my problem, she thinks for a bit, then 'is it OK if I call you by your first name', then 'can you see the large green start button at the bottom left of your screen'. No, I say, wondering what she is on. What has that got to do with the price of fish? After some seconds of mutual bewilderment, it finally dawns on me that there used to be a small black button called start at the bottom left of the screen which popped up if you waved the mouse at it. But this PC is Windows 8 and does not have anything so old speak as a start button, or at least, if it does, I don't know where it lives. More mutual bewilderment and after a while the pleasant young lady goes offline to consult her colleagues, returning in a few minutes to announce that there is indeed a problem with the system and that she will ring me back when it is fixed, offering as excuse the fact that she had only just come on duty. She did phone back after not very many minutes and I did the business, not terribly impressed that the Virgin Money Command Bunker did not hang out a big sign when their system went down so that everybody knew.

Then I moved onto mobile phone, the presenting symptom being the sporadic tendency of the battery to move from apparently fully charged to actually flat. Into Carphone Warehouse, where I do all of my modest mobile phone business, having had satisfactory service hitherto. Oh sir, your battery is swelling is about to explode. Like pretty much everybody else you have been charging it overnight which after a few months is apt to do it in. Overcharging very bad. Oh no sir, we don't sell batteries for such an antique as that. And furthermore, be careful where you do buy one as lots of people rip you off on batteries. No I don't know where around here you ought to go. OK, what about if you sell me a new (pay as you go) phone instead. Yes sir, three bags full sir, what about this nice Samsung for nearly £30. Pretty much the same as what you have got now, only updated. Yes, you can walk out of the shop with it up and running, less your address book as there is no way for me to get if off such an ancient phone as your Nokia. Furthermore, I can't sell you a cable to connect your new phone to your PC. Try Maplins across the road. Which I do, without success. Try another phone shop a bit further along, also without success. But at least the pleasant young lady there suggests that I try the mobile phone kiosk in the Costcutter Post Office which used to be the Post Office Post Office a bit further along. Success; a further £7 and I am fully tooled up.

Some hours later, fortified by lunch, I then set about completing the installation of my shiny new phone. Type in a chunk of my address book printed off the Nokia by the PC. Pleased that I can still do this, despite the phone now having no chip. But now I try to connect the Samsung to the PC and the real troubles start.

Start off by downloading something called Samsung New PC Studio from the Samsung site. All goes well until the very end when it announces that it has failed to make a registry entry. Try again with the same result. Time to phone up the BT help service to which I subscribe. Pleasant young man from Newcastle this time. He takes over my PC OK, but does not seem to be an expert on this particular sort of problem, which I suppose is fair enough; they must get an awful lot of stuff thrown at them. After some palaver we decide that maybe this product does not work with Windows 8. We break off and I get onto Carphone Warehouse who pass me onto some Geek Team who promptly ask me to flash the plastic. I get a bit cross at this point: I have to pay some more money to Carphone Warehouse to get my shiny new mobile phone to actually work? The geek explains that he is not Carphone Warehouse and maybe I should not have been passed to him. But he relents and takes a bit of interest, suggesting that maybe I should be using something called Samsung Kies rather than New PC Studio. So, a little carelessly, I attempt to load it from one of the many download sites offered by Google. It appears to load OK but no icons appear on the desktop and all kinds of rubbish seems to have infested my PC.

Back to the BT help desk, who gently suggest that maybe sir would have done better to download the thing from the Samsung site rather than from goodness knows where. Which we then do. All loads up OK and we now get no less than two desktop icons, but we can't see the mobile phone from the PC, despite the mobile phone being able to see it. Neither through Kies nor through anything else. Dark talk of drivers and we try loading the little disc which came with the cable - which involves lying the PC on its side so that the little disc does not fall out of the large hole - but BT rule that the contents of the little disc are not relevant. Maybe sir ought to go back to the kiosk to complain about the cable. At this point, having spent more or less the whole afternoon on a mobile phone that I might use once a day when it is up and running, I give up, pausing only to uninstall everything that has arrived on the PC that day. A little bit of fiddling with the damaged Chrome settings and all seems to be well again. But rather frayed in temper and in need of something stronger than the cup that cheers.

Up this morning to return to the attack. Not exactly full of beans, but full enough. Not that any of this is really anyone's fault, just the product of a world with too many toys and too much change. But all rather tiresome for someone for whom a mobile phone is not the biggest toy in the world but who can't afford to have someone else sort it all out.

PS: interested to read that the Home Secretary has decreed that every infraction of some particular sort by any one of her many border guards must be reported to her in person that very same day. Which suggests to me a complete breakdown of management and trust in the upper reaches of the Home Office. What sort of an organisation requires the chief officer to meddle in affairs of the front line like this? Have they never heard of management? Presumably, after a while, she will become bored with the reports, which will be come to be processed, increasingly laconically, by her outer office on her behalf. But an awful lot of management time will have been expended before the furore completely dies down. One wonders where she learned her management style, as to judge from her potted biog. she is no slouch; a geographer at Oxford who progressed - or perhaps processed - through the Bank of England, through Merton Council and so into national politics. A professional politician rather than a professional anything else, but at least she has been anything else. But perhaps she has never had anything much to do with managing large number of grunts, preferring to stick with the more amenable matters of policy. But why are her advisers not telling her? What is puss up to? Sulking?