CenturyLink Center Omaha

Disappointed once again this year that personal circumstances mean that I am not going to be able to make it to Omaha for Warren E. Buffett's annual bash in May.

But the good news is that he has come to Epsom, albeit in a small way, instead. Indeed, our four patio chairs purchased for £1 each were purchased from a Berkshire Hathaway company. They are back in town this morning and we might just go along to see what we can pick up.

Just for old times' sake, I took a peek at the website at http://www.berkshirehathaway.com, to be reminded that Warren hangs onto the old-world virtues of thrift and conspicuously refuses to have a website worthy of an operation of the size of his. Looks like his grandson might have knocked it up during a break in the Simpsons: I guess he would say that he his putting shareholders funds into things which make shareholder value rather than stroke their egos.

The additional good news is that Google rides to the rescue on Google Maps and there are some very impressive pictures of the CenturyLink Center to be had there (455 North 10th Street). Right on the Missouri too if you fancy a bit of kayaking.

There is also a very entertaining guide to the 2013 bash, which I have now downloaded onto my mobile phone for that odd bit of slack in my busy schedule, when I might want a bit of eye candy. Came out a treat there.

PS: the bad news is that something called 'apis.google.com' has started appearing on my PC while Google flavoured pages are taking a while to load. A quick peek with Google search suggests that this might be some kind of an interface so that people can peek at what I am doing so that they can add value to my experience. There's no escape! Add value for who?

Martin Helmchen

On Tuesday to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to hear Martin Helmchen do the programme illustrated: Bach then Schumann then interval then Webern then Schubert.

It was a rather wet evening which occasioned some discussion as to appropriate outer clothes, my having some rather odd, not to say silly, aversion to using the cloakroom. I am happy to spend two or three hours travelling to hear music for one or two hours and then fuss about waiting two or three minutes to get my coat back: all odd indeed. But, continuing odd, we settled for one rain coat, one waterproof jacket and one folding umbrella, which as it turned out, did well enough.

Entertained on the way in by a pair of 15-16 year old young ladies, one of whom scarcely drew breath between Epsom and Waterloo. They started with a survey of parental silliness on the occasion of going out, running through the gamut of things that parents worry about. Hats, scarves, sandwiches, gloves, spare stockings, emergency telephone numbers and so on. Then onto the joys of driving lessons and winding up with an extended discussion of body piercing and the various things that can go wrong. Like the navel ring which was punched through the stomach wall near the naval rather than actually through the navel, and looked, we gathered, very silly in consequence. BH thought that a lot of this entertainment had been put on for our benefit.

Arrived at the now rather cluttered ante-chamber which meant that there were few free seats, but at least we were spared some warm up act.

Wine & coffee taken, on into the chamber proper, which ended up about one half to two thirds full, with a large gap in the right hand front stalls, where we sat in rather isolated splendour and where there would have been plenty of room for more coats, bags and baggage than we actually had. We couldn't see the hands but, perhaps because of the raking seats, the sound (of the Steinway) was terrific. You really got to hear all the various threads of the music, although that may, for all I know, be as much the result of the pianist's touch as the chamber's acoustics. But I did like his stage manners - which included playing the whole lot from memory.

Bach good, Schumann would have been better had I done a bit of preparation, now in hand after the event. Webern much better than expected, and we both liked it rather better than the Kurtág reported on 22nd January, but I did wonder whether one could make rather more of a performance of it, perhaps drawing on the Spooner effort reported on 25th January. Schubert excellent; as good a Wandererfantasie as we have ever heard. The rest of the audience (average age rather less than that at a usual Wigmore, some rather sloppy dress) thought so too. And it certainly made my Richter disc sound rather dull - a fault, I am sure, of my music system rather than anything to do with Richter. Plus the very positive effect of attending a ceremony, an effect hard to reproduce in a small upstairs room of a standard three bedroom suburban house.

In the loud bits, the lid of the piano vibrated, vibrations which were magnified in the reflected image (the highly polished lid picking up the lighting somehow) on the screen behind the piano. A distraction for some seconds.

Australian travails

I read this morning a full page article in the Guardian about the way the Australians look after the boat people, that is to say to shipping them off to not very comfortable islands some way away from the mainland. It seems that they are not in the least embarrassed about this. And while it is all rather unpleasant, I am not sure what else they can do. They have a heavily populated archipelago  to the northwest - 250 million or so of them (see 1st January), a lot of them poor, not to say backward - with, inevitably, very porous borders. Lots of people, both from there and further afield, are going to gamble on getting themselves smuggled across the water in search of the streets thought to be paid with gold, and the Australians have to push back somehow: it is all very well for us to be sanctimonious about it, but we don't have the problem.

But I do wonder how many of the poor sods involved realise that they will have to do thirty years hard labour at the jobs that the people already in Australia don't want any more, after which their children might wind up as fully fledged citizens? Or, alternatively, turn their hands to crime or illegality of one sort or another. All a bit rough on their children, but I am not sure what can realistically be done about that either.

Then off on the morning ramble, to find a neighbouring chimney being taken down. The point of interest being that rather than using a club hammer and cold chisel, the chap was used a Kango (see http://www.milwaukeetool.com/. I think that this is the right place but it looks as if Kangos are now on the reserve list) or something like that to loosen the bricks, one or two at a time while I would have thought that it would be a lot harder work to hold a Kango up to brickwork like that than to wield a hammer. Rather like those chaps who use noisy blowers to move autumn leaves around in circumstances in which a broom would be quieter, quicker and generally more ecological. And if one was worried about bricks falling down inside the chimney, it would be easy enough to block the flue in some suitable, temporary way.

From where I moved on to a conceit from our last visit to Hampton Court. Let us suppose that when a molecule of water is inside a significant body of water for a significant time, its quark configuration is used to store the geographical position, depth, latitude and longitude. All something to do with the moon and the stars - an astrologer would know how it is done. Then, after the water has evaporated from its home water, floated around the world a bit, fallen as rain somewhere in the Thames valley, it finally makes it to Hampton Court Bridge. Where we have erected an MRI scanner or some such which can read the quark configuration of the water below and produce an image of the water coloured according to the place of origin of the water. A swirl of Arctic Ocean here, a dab of Malacca Straits there. One might get an interesting read out. Or would it all be terribly mixed up and one would be reduced to imaging quite small variations in the make up of the water. How might one find out? Could the weather people include such a scheme in their models?

A variation would be to colour the image according to where the rain fell instead of from where the rain came from. At least that would be entirely practical, albeit in a crude way, by adding chemical markers to all the springs which give rise to the Thames.

PS: I was told by a regular at TB some years ago that paved with gold was all a mistake. The gold in question was not the metallic sort, rather the colour of the sort of sandstone used for London pavements at one time.

Captain Mausoleum

Off on Saturday to see Captain Mausoleum (see 22nd January).

Bad start with no small birds to be seen at all in the scrub opposite Platform 4. And then when we get to Waterloo there was a mild disagreement about where the right bus stop was, but we eventually found our way to the mini bus station between the northern tip of the railway station and the roundabout. Notwithstanding, we are soon at the British Museum, being struck on this occasion by the fine appearance of the pillared main entrance and the piazza in front of it. No doubt the accountants at the Museum are eyeing said piazza with hungry eyes, itching to put income generating buildings on it. Long may they be held off! They have already roofed over what used to be the interior courtyard, with a glass roof which is striking, but I have not got used to what still looks like the outside actually being inside, although I suppose I have to allow that it does provide a lot of all-weather space for customers to mill around in, taking the heat off the museum proper.

Started off with the exhibition of Columbian gold in what used to be the reading room, and is now a rather poor exhibition space. I do hope that the present consultation about the future comes up with a more suitable use for the place (itself, I just learn, a bit of infill itself, being built in the previously empty courtyard, long after the main museum was built). But the Columbian gold was good, despite the bad lighting, the bad manners of some of the visitors and the irritating music in the background. The pots were interesting. The dates were feeble, mostly being given as ranges of the order of a thousand years, presumably reflecting both the inertia of gold and lower grade archaeology. Some of the gold was intriguing in that it looked as if it was woven out of fine wire but was actually made by the lost wax method. The Columbians clearly liked things which glittered as a lot of the body ornaments were hung with small plates of gold which quivered, and so glittered, in the breeze. They also clearly liked their coke, even in those far off days, with a lot of related artefacts being on display, notably a lot of things looking like fancy skewers, which used to be dipped into little jars of lime and then sucked, the lime being necessary to bring out the best from the coca leaves.

From where the plan was to move onto Captain Mausoleum and we asked the information desk where he was to be found. The information desk knew straightaway what I was talking about but told me that, despite all the crowds milling about, the Captain was closed due to staff shortages. They even went to the bother of writing the number to ring to check before setting out the next time we wanted to see him on a compliments slip. But BH knew better and said bother that, let's go and take a look anyway. And she was right, the relevant room was up and running. Very impressive it was too, almost on the scale of the Elgin marbles and the mausoleum must have been the same order of size as the Parthenon before being struck down by an earthquake. I continue to wonder at all the surplus labour available for the massive construction projects of the ancients; I can only think that the switch from hunting to farming must have been a very good move. The only disappointment was that the ticket on the impressive statues of the Captain and his wife suggested that the attribution was conventional but uncertain. There were large statues of the happy pair inside the mausoleum, but whether these were they, or just some rank-and-file aristos from the outside, could not now be known.

And so to lunch at a pleasant restaurant, catering mainly to tourists, across the way in Museum Street and called Amarcord.

From there we strolled down to the Adelphi Hotel which I am convinced was used as the location for lots of scenes in television Poirot and from there to the food market underneath the Festival Hall. A bit of Comté, which saved going to London Bridge for a while, and an excellent sour dough baguette. I am not keen on the sour dough bread from 'Mixed Blessings' in Tooting, but this stuff was indeed excellent.

And so to the train on which we puzzled over the two level crossings in the vicinity of Raynes Park. Hard to see how they got to open much during the rush hour, given the frequency of the trains. Must check on the map.

What is it?

A pick me up from the bottom of the hedge running around Hook Road Arena.

I think it is made of aluminium rather than steel and of bar rather than tube. Maybe a centimetre in diameter. Not very bendy as the bend at the bottom appears to have been reinforced with some kind of brazing or welding, with the joint at the top being closed in the same way. Most of the loop at the top being cased in what looks like green garden hose. The whole a bit scuffed and worn.

But what is it? A contraption for removing fish hooks from whales? For pulling high branches down far enough to grab them with the pruner? A gadget for grabbing small animals by dropping the loop over their heads?

My money is on some kind of fastener for a lorry. We may retain it to try it on the pruning application.

PS 31/1/2014: it has been suggested that this is a home made gadget for the suspension of bird feeding gadgets from trees. The home made because a professional would have worked out that the upper loop would be better open than closed for this particular application.

Morning musings

Woke up to wonder about the various ways in which things are sold or doled out.

So in the case of sweets, they are doled out in shops at so much a quarter, or perhaps the 100g these days. One would not think to make such things freely available (but see below).

In the case of the plumber, it used to be the case that one paid by the visit, with the charge being of the form A+tB+C where A is the call out charge, t is time on the job in seconds, C is the cost of parts & materials and VAT is left out of the account. But, quite commonly now, we pay on the subscription model. So here, at Epsom, we pay British Gas so much a month to look after our water taps. If there is a problem they come and do it, free at the point of service. Perhaps except for parts, the C bit of the charge. And they do reserve the right to declare plumbing events to be ultra vires, that is to say outside the package that you have bought. But we would be happy to fix it for you at £75 an hour plus parts & materials.

A lot of insurance can be thought of as buying services on the subscription model. Which is likely to be charged on the basis of need, rather than on the basis of ability to pay. Not very lefty at all.

In the case of health, we have decided to hand the whole business over to the government and pay for it through tax, which is charged on the basis of ability to pay and so is reasonably lefty. State pensions are somewhere in between, run by the government but including a large contributory chunk, a chunk which reflects the ability to pay in the past. But proper in that it encourages people to make the connection between putting in and taking out, a connection which people are all to apt to forget in the case of tax. At least two people have reported medical gossip to me about the abuse of free health services by people from bog-standard estates, annoyingly keen to prove their right of access, one of which reporters, despite being a old-fashioned lefty public servant, was an advocate of nominal charge at the point of service.

I then started to wonder about the circumstances in which goods were handed out for free. So, in the offices which I worked in, pens and paper used to be freely available from the cupboard. An arrangement which cut down on red tape but did not punish waste and abuse - taking the stuff home for private consumption or for sale in the local car booter. And what about telephones? When is it appropriate to charge staff for private calls? In Microsoft offices and Google offices now, both very rich and successful corporations, all sorts of goods are freely available to staff and visitors. Pens, paper, soft drinks, snacks, meals, pinball machines and pool tables.

In some households, certain consumables are freely available to members and their guests, but not their servants. So in 'Brideshead Revisited', drinks were always put out in the afternoon for whoever might want them. Whereas in other households, the housekeeper, who might or might not be the wife of the head of the household, kept everything - for example the tea caddy - under lock and key and had a large key ring hung with keys hanging from her waist band. I have read in novels of the ceremonial handing over of the keys from the outgoing housekeeper to the incoming one.

Access to stately homes & gardens is mostly charged, either by subscription or at the point of entry. Access to our National Parks is not charged, although one might well be encouraged to contribute, over and above whatever fraction of the tax that we pay finds its way to them. Access to the seaside is not charged, although there may well be back door charging in the form of charging to park the car without which one would be hard put to get there. No-one has yet thought of a way to charge for the air that we breathe, although we have been charged for the water that we drink for some time.

Clearly lots to chew on here. A subject for many essays. But equally clearly, it was time for morning ablutions.

After which, I was intrigued to read in yesterday's DT over breakfast that the BBC had hired a lady QC to advise it on its bullying and harassment procedures. This struck me as an odd choice: why would you hire someone to do this whose most important professional skill was to be able to turn out an entertaining, aggressive and persuasive speech in the adversarial climate of an English courtroom? No doubt such people are also quite clever, but would one not do better to hire an HR professional? Someone with prior knowledge of the problems and the various ways of dealing with them?

On the other hand it strikes me as quite likely that QCs would be well up for bullying and harassment themselves, they are likely to be that sort of person, so perhaps the point is that they bring expert knowledge from that side of the fence to the party.

Pasternak

My father used to say that everything important that had ever happened to him was foretold, in one way or another in Shakespeare. I dare say a Christian could draw the same sort of comfort from the Bible, or a Muslim from the Koran, but I have just read that young Russians of the cold war era were, it seems, more of my father's persuasion, being much drawn to Pasternak's translation of the 66th sonnet, a lament from and for someone who has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. There may also be, although I somehow doubt it, some added link to the number 66, important to some exoticeria.

The text of the sonnet follows, with thanks to http://www.shakespeare-online.com/. See particularly line 9.

Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
   Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
   Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Last night's wind

Just the one casualty on this morning's Horton Clockwise, down Longmead Road. The fallen branch looks to have been weakened by some sort of prior damage above.

Corner of bacon sandwich dispenser to be seen under the branch.

And while I am at it I can record the rather dismal result of our contribution to the Great British Bird Watch (see http://www.rspb.org.uk/), the result of 10 minutes observation this Sunday afternoon at around 1500, from an upstairs window overlooking our back garden, with a view over a lawn and taking in quite a lot of shrubs and trees, a view including one mature oak tree in one neighbour's back garden and one mature standard apple tree (the source of most of our cooking apples in recent years) in another's. Despite the use of bins, just two birds to be seen in all this lot, two jays sitting on the top of the smaller oak tree, the one above our triple pond.

PS: council contractors on the case by noon Monday. Can't complain on that score.

Martin Baker

On Thursday, another unusual for us event in the form of an organ recital, at St. John's Smith Square.

Started off with a bit of tweeting at Epsom station, tweeting a blue tit, a robin, a sparrow and a coal tit, all in the same tree to the west of platform 4. Plenty of twittering to be heard there, but tweets not so easy, usually just the resident pigeons. Coal tit should perhaps only score as half a tweet as I am not very confident that it was not its long tailed cousin.

Got to Clapham Junction where I engaged with an interesting gent. who had come up from Bognor for the day, and was finding it all a bit of a bother. I think he said something about having trouble finding somewhere to park at Worcester Park. Would I have broken such a journey at such a place? Would I have driven at all? Would I have carried on and parked nearer my destination in London proper? What allowance should I make for the fact that he probably did not know London roads and parking as well as I do, not that I am that well up on parking?

By the time I had finished with him, I was in the middle of a sharp shower and so I lurked under one of the arches, along with various rather unsavoury looking rubbish, in the hope that it would stop. Which it seemed so to do after a while so I hopped onto a Bullingdon at Grant Road East and pedalled away to find that it was a lot wetter than I had thought so dropped the thing off again at Falcon Road and walked briskly back to Clapham Junction. By the time I was back on a train it really had stopped so I tried again at Vauxhall Cross, from where it was a very short hop to Smith Square, so had time to pedal gently around the Square and its environs a few times.

And so into the (former) church to find that the seats had been left facing what used to be the chancel, where a screen had been erected for the display of an image of the keyboard, which was actually high up behind us. I found it rather odd to be looking at the keyboard and hands in this way, preferring to let the eyes un-focus gently on something else. Didn't seem quite right to actually be able to see the hands of the organist; he was supposed to be hidden away in his perch in the organ loft while one was carried away by the sound filling the church, a scheme which perhaps worked better when the church was being used in the way that the builders intended, when one was in communication with the higher authorities. Still and all, it was still quite effective with the Bach providing a good, solid introduction. Not so sure about the improvisation, but it did grow on one. Perhaps it is usual practice for such a thing to be the last number of an organ recital.

From there passed through the rather odd little streets tucked in between the Square and the Abbey, including one which claimed the residence of T. E.Lawrence, who must have made more than I had thought out of the seven pillars. Rather startled to find that the Abbey now charge seniors £15 for entrance, and that while there was no queuing outside there were an irritating number of crowd control ropes inside, their impact only slightly softened by their being fancy red ropes. One had to inspect the Abbey in the order prescribed, no free-lance wandering thank you very much.

On this occasion, the overwhelming impression was that of a better class of cemetery. The place seemed little more than an extravagant collection of funerary monuments, with the early seventeenth century grabbing a lot of the best slots. But nevertheless quite impressive that so many of our early kings wound up there. Impressed also by the amount of restoration work on the screens and woodwork, presumably an attempt to get back to the original condition. But ornate woodwork apart, the place was rather austere, with very little of the exuberant decoration to be found, for example, at Ely. But I did come across some interesting animals on the misericords in the quire and on the floor tiles in the very handsome chapter house. I also came across a memorial tablet to GCHQ, fixed to the cloister wall, for all the world like a giant ashtray. Sadly the cloister no longer contained the handy stall where I had purchased tea and hot meat pie in the past.

Very few of those present paid any attention to the call to a short prayer on the hour, carrying on regardless. Perhaps as orientals their English was not good enough to understand what was being asked of them. Or perhaps the tone of the place did not command their respect. I suppose, over time, the place is going to become more and more like a stately home, a place which has lost its intended function and is little more than an amusement for its visitors, not so very different from Wisley or Madame Tussaud's. Tone not helped by the considerable background hum from all the talking tours in peoples' ears. But still a good place for all this moaning and I shall be back.

Next item was a trial of one of the fine new London buses which are attempting to recreate the ambience of a Routemaster. Rather cramped inside, probably brought on by the thing having no less than two staircases, staircases which take up a lot of space. There was indeed a rear exit with a corner pole but it was guarded by sliding doors which were open and a young lady conductor who told me that I was allowed to jump off this way when the bus was stationary, even if it was not at a bus stop. So we had the traditional two man crew to add to the considerable expense of a faux-traditional bus. But the buses do attract a substantial article in Wikipedia, from which I learn that at £350,000 or so a pop, they didn't actually cost a lot more than any other sort of vaguely equivalent bus. At least, that is, if you look at the numbers in the right way. The cost of the things has clearly been a bit of an issue. One also wonders about the cost justification of making the things wheel-chair friendly. Would it not have been cheaper to award wheel-chairs subsisdised rides in London taxis?

And so, via the impressively eclectic sheet music department at Foyles, to the Bullingdon stand at Wardour Street from where I pedaled off to Concert Hall Approach 2, only slightly disturbed on the way by being passed far too close at the top of Whitehall  by some rather younger cyclist rushing up behind me, unheard and unbelled. No consideration at all.

On the train home, distinguished myself by being both the oldest person in the carriage and the person to stand up for the pregnant lady. Oldest person standing for the youngest, as it were, assuming that is that she was the only pregnant lady in the vicinity.

PS: correction. Gutenberg Australia tell me that 'Sir Herbert Baker let me live and work in his Westminster houses' while I wrote the thing.

Further information

Further information regarding the subject of the previous post. Click on it to get a good gander.

Cally Spooner

During the morning of 21st January I noticed live-in art from Damien Hirst. This was followed the same evening by walk-in art from Cally Spooner at the Tate Britain.

Started off by taking a snack at the Madeira Café at Vauxhall, where we took bacon sandwiches and tea. Useful place, both serving and selling all kinds of interesting things. Sometimes you get strange-to-us Portuguese television.

Out to find Vauxhall Cross - this being the time of the evening rush hour - awash with bicycles and joggers, with a high proportion of the former in bright yellow hi-vis gear. Didn't see anyone on either two or four wheels behaving badly, but I can see that a four wheeler new to it all might find all the two wheelers a bit of a pain.

Over the bridge to inspect the hole which was Riverwalk House to be puzzled again why the builder's huts and offices have been put on top of a large chunk of temporary steel work, maybe 20 feet above pavement level. And the hole was clearly on the move with concrete still being poured past six o'clock. Would that be time and a half, as it was in my day?

Get to the Tate to find the newly refurbished front door shut and we are directed to the Manton door to the side, the door named for Sir Edwin Alfred Grenville Manton and which I got to like during the closure of the front door. It has its points, with, for example, some of the art work one comes across by this route being rather fun, for example the large time line on the wall opposite the cloakroom. We also noticed that the outer door was a very serious affair, sliding back into the walls when opened: it would take something very serious to smash its way through when it was shut. We, however, were able to walk in and soon found ourselves, along with between 100 and 200 other people, wandering about the area just inside the front door. An area which also contained strategically placed members of the ladies choir who were to perform for us, a choir of maybe 20 altogether. These few were warming up with carefully scripted humming. After a while there were more of them and they moved into a mixture of speech, chant and song - with a sample of the words illustrated. All a bit pretentious, but this did not really matter - any more than the silly subject matter of a lot of perfectly good paintings from the Renaissance. All in all it was rather good, a choir which could both sing and perform, this last in a reasonably restrained way; arm movements, gestures and a certain amount of walking and wandering about, in and out of the audience, rather than anything more energetic. The ladies had clearly been drilled in basic stagecraft and did not mind being stared at at close quarters - close enough to notice that all those who came near me had very nice nail jobs. They were wearing a sort of a loose fitting, low key uniform and made good use of the interesting space underneath the dome.

Audience rather young by the standards of the sort of thing that we more usually go to, with quite a lot of young ladies. Plus a young gent. wearing a very flamboyant waistcoat, the sort of thing that one might have expected to see on Oscar Wilde.

A new experience for us, but a good one, which may be repeated. It lasted for a little over an hour, after which back along the north embankment to admire all the illuminated buildings along the south one. A quick game of aeroplanes on the bridge, making a rare four. Train journey home only marred by a nearby gent. stuffing his face with a pasty. When I grew up eating in public was generally frowned on and even now, on the rare occasions that I do it, I do try to be discrete about it. Not all of the population at large are so scrupulous.

PS: I have learned in the course of this post that blog search discriminates between 'café' and 'cafe'. Not sure that Google proper does, or that one would want it to. One of these days I will get around to posting my important thoughts on this and related subjects, it being enough for the moment to observe that search is a fascinating topic, even when one knows little or nothing about the clever wheezes used to encode search requests.

Listening banks

I was going to post something different but I have just spent an hour on the phone to my bank and need to let off the steam.

I wanted to tell my credit card people about some upcoming spending, having heard horror stories about the knots one can get into with exotic call centres when transactions get blocked because they fell well outside of one's regular spending patterns. So, to try and head the knots off, I thought I would tell them in advance.

Try the first number I come to on my statement. Would sir like to enter his 16 digit card number. Would sir like to enter his birthday. Would sir like to enter the 4th digit of his telephone security number. Not having one of these, or at least having no recollection of one, I fall at this third hurdle.

Try the second number and get the same treatment.

Try the contact number for customers on the bank's elaborate web site and get the same treatment.

Try the contact number for non-customers and get through to a person. After a little while I am told that I have passed the security exam and I am cut off.

Try the contact number for non-customers again and get through to another person, a pleasant lady sitting somewhere in Malta who must have talked to lots of irritated customers and who is trying very hard to soothe them. (She deserves to be well paid; I would not have the patience for it). After a little while I am told that I have passed the security exam and I can now proceed to set up a telephone security number. Which I do.

Perhaps sir would like to try it out. Fall at this hurdle.

Set the number up again and try it out again. This time I get over the hurdle and I am then able to do my very modest bit of business. We have a bit of chat about the weather conditions in Malta and I am done. In about the same time as it would have taken me to walk down to the branch in Epsom to be told that they are not authorised to do this sort of thing with customers in person and that I need to speak to the security centre on the phone... Would sir like me to write the number down for you?

Now I have to think where I am going to hide my record of this new number. Maybe not in the same place as any of the other numbers I am supposed to hide, on the other hand it has to be a hiding place which I am going to remember about. Should I invest in a safe deposit box with MetroBank when their branch in Epsom is up and running?

PS: I do see that banks have a bit of a problem here, and that it is not easy to be both secure and cuddly when there are so many clever villains (bang 'em up and throw away the key) out there on the ether. But hopefully we will get better at it one day.

Palestine

On 16th January I rehearsed my solution, long after the event, to the problems in Palestine, a response to which might be to question the relevance today.

To which my answer would be that recognition by the Israeli authorities of the wrongs that were done to the Arabs in and around 1948 by the Jews, might help the healing process, without seeking to turn the clock back. We have to move forward, with at least most of what we have now.

I was reminded of all this yesterday when clearing some stuff out of the bookcase, stuff which suggests that while population figures for inter-war Palestine are pretty rough, a reasonable overview is that at the end of this period, a period which saw considerable Jewish immigration, there were around a million Arabs in Palestine and around half a million Jews. Not exactly a vacant lot, waiting to be occupied.

The attached chart was taken from somewhere on http://www.mideastweb.org/, a site which could do with some technical attention, with the result that I am not now able to find out where it comes from or what it is for. But oddly, it is up and running enough to include advertisements which are clearly keyed to my own recent browsing activity. Someone out there is keeping an eye on me.

Spring is coming

On Sunday to Hampton Court Palace for our first visit of the season, where the railway station car park was around half full by late morning.

The flower buds in the magnolia clump near the car park at Google 51-24-319 0-20-382 were starting to swell. I note in passing that you get a good view of the Palace gardens on Google Earth.

The bulbs were starting to show, and we found two daffodils, some winter aconites and some clumps of snowdrops - under bushes in this last case - in flower. Some crocuses in bud. Plus a modest amount of forsythia.

Long pond looking good in the bright morning sunlight.

Fat carp all present and correct in the round pond in the privy garden, munching their way through the various gobbets of bread floating on the surface of the water. Rather scary mouth action as they grabbed the gobbets.

A good show of purple dwarf cyclamen along the fairly recently refurbished southern boundary to the eastern sunken garden.

Then yesterday a return to the Horton Clockwise for my morning constitutional. Accompanied a squirrel for about 20 yards as it ran through the western hedge of Horton Lane. I suppose he (or she) was trying to get away from me, but whatever he was up to he gave up and dropped down and away into the golf course after the 20 yards.

I then found signs of light hedge trimming, high and not the sort of mess you would get from a flail. There were deep wavering ruts in the strip of grass between the walking path and the cycling path, not the sort of ruts you would get from any council flavoured vehicle which I could bring to mind. Perhaps the people from the nearby equestrian centre had done a bit of free-lance pruning? The height of which would be consistent with wanting to keep stray bits of hedge out of the faces of riders. In any event, someone had made a right mess of the grass strip and I do not suppose that he or she will be back with a rake to tidy up.

The only tweet was a robin - far and away the most common small bird to be seen & identified hereabouts, in part because of the easy identification.

No visible action on Jungle Island (see 29th December last).

In our own garden, while the daffodils are pushing up, neither snowdrops nor winter aconites are to be seen in the new daffodil bed, but the older snowdrops on the way to the compost heap are showing through and clumps of cuckoo pint (arum maculatum) and celandine (ranunculus ficaria) are pushing up in the same general area. Couldn't at first think why the cuckoo pint should earn the descriptor maculatum, meaning stained, but I now have a dim memory of the leaves acquiring black spots as they mature. Shall have to keep an eye out.

And as thought for the day, I offer King Mausolus, a Greek flavoured king from what is now the Ionic coast of Turkey, who reigned a little before Alexander the Great got cracking, of whom there is a large statue (which I must go and see) in the British Museum and who gave his name to the mausoleums that we have now, that for himself and his widow being the very first such. Immortality of a sort in that his name is in common parlance, but with the catch that we do not often know that it is his name. I don't think Achilles would have thought this immortality of a sort worth striving for: one's name should be in peoples' mouths, but they have to know why, they have to know that one was a hero for it to count. All this from a fine pick-me-up from somewhere, an old fashioned history of Greece by one J. B. Bury. A snip at £1.50, in a handy travelling size and including fold out coloured maps.

György Kurtág

On Saturday just past, off to a cheap concert at the Wigmore Hall, cheap because the artistes were up and coming but not actually come, in this case the Cuarteto Quiroga, to be found (via Facebook on this occasion) at http://cuartetoquiroga.com/, from which I learn that they were recently appointed quartet-in-residence in charge of the Royal Collection of decorated Stradivarius at Madrid’s Royal Palace. Very much a Spanish custom, a term used at our Treasury for out of the way, antiquated or otherwise peculiar business practices in departments of which one did not approve. While Cibrán Sierra plays the Nicola Amati 'Arnold Rosé' violin (Cremona, 1682) thanks to the generous loan of Paola Modiano’s heirs. From which we deduce that Nicola is the Italian version of Nicolas, despite its apparently feminine ending.

Back on the way the Wigmore, the first item of note was the east wall of Debenhams, shimmering in the winter afternoon light as we walked along Henrietta Place. At first we thought the shimmering was the reflection of clouds being blown about in the sky, but, there being no clouds to be seen, we decided that it must be some sort of installation. Marked down for a closer inspection next time we are in the area.

Second item, a visit to Bell & Croyden in search of gadgets to deal with elderly toenails, where, in the knowledge that decent scissors and such like can cost a great deal of money, I adopted the purchasing style of explaining to various assistants that the gadgets that I could see were not expensive enough. But I ended up with some mid-range clippers, top-of-the-range being missing, which are at least rather better than the wire cutters (themselves not cheap) which I had been using. Made in Germany, another reminder of the demise of our once proud small engineering in Birmingham and elsewhere.

The quartet were very good, so not altogether clear why they needed an ECMA masterclass, although a perk of the class was an outing at the Wigmore Hall, which they told us that they regarded as a great honour. The most famous venue for chamber music in the world. The Haydn String Quartet Op. 20 No. 1 was excellent. The Kurtág was not without interest, but I rather think that he is a composer of more interest to fellow musicians than us lay people (last recorded hearing by us being provided by the Elias Quartet on or about April 21st 2011. See the other place). He certainly rated an extended note in the programme. Once again, I found it hard to get back into gear for Mozart's K428, but got there in the end. The encore was a tribute to Kurtág in the shape of a short piece by Webern. So another good concert.

I note in passing the unusually large format scores that the quartet used, presumably large to reduce the need for page turning. It was also odd how much score the Kurtág seemed to need, despite not all that much music getting out to us. I imagine it must be very hard to play well, not that we are any judge.

For supper off to the Fishcoteque (http://www.fishcotheque.co.uk/) at Waterloo Road, where we had excellent cod, chips and mushy peas, with tea and water, for around £25. Very good value. We even had a couple of properly accented Londoner ladies sitting a few places away.

Entertained on the way to the fish and chips by a young Japanese lady working away on her mobile phone, possibly a Samsung. The thing included a stylus (plus a slot to put it away in) and she was writing away freehand with it. No need to hit keys at all and very much like writing with a fine felt tip pen. The software included a rubbing out option which was rather good. Click on the eraser icon and run the stylus around the offending scrawl and away it went. Click another icon and the thing closed ranks, leaving one with just the scrawl one wanted to keep, less blanks. Very clever. Possibly better for my note taking purposes than OneNote (see 12th January) which requires relatively slow and clumsy keyboard action. Although, thinking about it, it does have the important plus of legibility after the event. Writing freehand so little these days, I often find that what is perfectly legible & sensible at the time is not so the morning after.

Entertained at home by a mixture of Jägermeister (see 2nd and 13th January) and Evening Standard. The former turned out to be a mixture of whisky, aniseed and cough medicine, surprisingly dark in colour and which tasted quite good considering. The bottle gave no indication of what it was actually made of, beyond 35% alcohol by volume. From the latter we learned of reports that there is a lady who, while taking coffee with a man she did not fancy for bedroom purposes, had her legs patted. Not sure about whether it was in a public place or not or whether the bit of leg involved was naked or not, but it was no less than 10 years ago and the lady is now getting around to complaining. The Westminster Branch of Wimmins' Lib. is making itself a bit ridiculous.

Sculpture

An important piece of live-in art from Damien Hirst (or perhaps it was Rachel Whiteread). My information is that he is negotiation with the authorities at Ilfracombe in North Devon about installing a series of them there. A caravan trail to rival the tarka trail.

Perhaps I should ask at the South Lambeth Road branch of Travis Perkins where, I believe, Ms. Whiteread is a valued customer, buying a great deal of assorted paint, mainly in the largest tins available.

With thanks to an informant on Facebook.

Has the DT got it right?

The DT ran a piece the other day about the chap parachuted in from the private sector to a fancy salary in the civil service to sort all those hopeless civil servants out. It seems that he has been claiming rather a lot of expenses and there are questions about his relationship with someone from his outer office. Along the way there is also talk of a computer system which has gone wrong and which will cost £20m to put right.

This computer system is said to be intended to help manage the MoD's 4,000 sites. Let us suppose that the cost to repair the computer system amounts to half the now projected total spend, so that the taxpayer is stumping up £40m to build a computer system which supports the management of 4,000 sites, which I make £10,000 a site, perhaps the equivalent of a quarter of an administrative officer year, and up to as much as a third if female, including here the cost of a networked PC with MS Office on it. At which point one starts to wonder what this marvellous new computer system can do in support of administration that a properly equipped administrative officer can't do over several weeks, the transition from months to weeks being intended to allow for such a system's expected working life of four or five years.

How much administration can some bit of barren marsh land on Sheppey with a few derelict buildings on it take? I do allow that an ammunition dump might be a bit more tricky - but is some general purpose computer support system going to be much help in such a place?

A cynic would say that it is the same gang which prepares the justification for such systems which stands to profit from their construction. Not necessarily the exactly same bunch of people, but these private sector contractors are all in it together. It is in their collective interest to push for as many fancy computer systems as possible: payday when pushing and paydays to follow when the push has been successful. One thing the private sector is really good at is extracting money for old rope from the public sector. No holds barred on that one.

This is not to say that civil servants are immune from the lust to build. Engineers the world over like to build things and IT flavoured civil servants are no exception. So they will push to get their latest project, system, wheeze or whatever approved so that they can get on and build it. But at the end of the day they are on salary, they have tenure (to borrow a word from academe) and their livelihoods do not depend on it in the same way, there is more room to stand back and think that this project is not going to fly, that it should not be approved. Maybe one should go off and do something else. Whereas a contractor without approval does not get paid.

Who dares wins...

Was it really a good idea to take the back door off this cold & frosty morning? The screws came out sweet enough, and the hinges came out of the frame without snagging - but would they go back again?

All prompted by the recent wet spell meaning that the angled water throw on the bottom of the outside of the door had swollen, was catching on the threshold and I was concerned that forcing the door shut many times a day might loosen its fixing. Sorting which out neatly might be a bit of a business.

So the door off, took a millimeter or so off the bottom of the swinging end of the throw, rehung the door without any problem and the door now swings free of the threshold. Helped along by the oaken wedge cut some years ago for just this sort of eventuality.

So on this occasion at least, who did dare, did win.

PS: the cat flap to the left of the illustration, towards the bottom of the door, has been fixed shut. But it could be reactivated without too much sweat by any future occupant who happened to be a cat lover.

The Hunt for Red January

On the day of the tree of the previous post, we were also looking for lobsters, having heard that large red lobsters were to be had from the Conran shop at the north end of Marylebone High Street (http://www.conranshop.co.uk/). The mission was successful in so far as we did indeed track the things down in the tastefully furnished café. Unsuccessful in that we were completely out of our depth on price. For a lobster, of which a half is pictured left, made out of a translucent red fabric stretched over a light frame, one had to pay around £2,500, knocked down from nearly £10,000. It seems that the things were not lobsters at all, rather works of art. But the café was successful with a well served tea and a pleasant ambience, pleasant enough to attract the odd nursing mother.

The shop was an interesting place, with the goods on offer being a sort of hybrid between the top floor of Dickens & Jones at Epsom with its home wares and the souvenir shop at a place like Wisley with its large range of tasteful gifts. Arty, but with an oddly sixties flavour, odd to my eye that is, but on reflection merely reflecting the glory days of the owner. One could, for example, buy a floor lamp which incorporated a couple of very visible transformers in the base, probably not doing any transforming but serving to steady the thing with their weight. Another piece of consumer art. One could buy a dining table with a top fashioned from oak maybe two inches thick, but in which the artiness consisted of leaving the quite large numbers of cracks and shakes open to the wind and to the food debris which would no doubt get there if the table was ever used. The legging arrangements of a deliberate and nicely made crudity, the idea being, presumably, to give the thing an artisanale flavour. Quite handsome and despite its not being terribly practical and its having, I imagine, an asking price of a small number of thousands, it had been reserved by someone.

No sign of butcher, baker or greengrocer, so I failed to get any of the Californian walnuts (with their clean, pale shells and distinctive red triangle stamp) I have been looking out for, much preferred to the European sort, at least in my family, but mysteriously missing this year, so pressed on the nearby telescope shop where I was tempted by their version of a pocket microscope, a roughly two inch cube, complete with screen and USB connection to a computer, coming in at around £100. But I was really after the pen shaped objects of my youth, at which time one used the things for peering at oddities found round and about in the countryside, and declined.

And so to the Nordic Bakery (http://www.nordicbakery.com/) at Dorset Street where we partook of Karelian pastries (served by a young lady from Denmark rather than Karelia), a soft brown pastry shell filled, in my case, with a savoury mix of cheese and mashed potato. Very good, despite declining something called egg butter on top, which I thought might be just a tad unhealthy and certainly a bit rich on my delicate palette. Later on, at home, I tried adding grated cheese to the supper-time bubble and squeak and it worked very well. No need to go to Karelia at all.

Two person of interest on the way home, whom I was able to stare at with impunity as I was standing above them in a crowded tube train.

The first was a gent. with a parting, something which I do not see much of these days, but a parting which had been very carefully engineered to hide the recession of the hair. Must have spent a lot on his hairdresser, not to mention matinal maintenance.

The second was a lady, probably a citizen of the USA. Quite a big girl, pleasant looking, not stunning but who appeared to be a model as she was showing her companion her portfolio, most of which appeared to be her modelling sweaters and such like, probably for clothes catalogues. But it was very striking how much better she looked in the pictures than she looked in real life. Much more flashy altogether. On the other hand, she looked normal and was certainly not unnaturally thin in the way of the sort of catwalk models who make it to pictures in the DT.

PS: we had passed two churches of interest, so will have to return. The first was a Portland Stone English Church, probably St. Marylebone Parish Church, and with, according to the pictures on Google, a rather grand interior. The second was the Red Brick Catholic Church in George Street/Spanish Place, behind the Wallace Collection, a place which I have been meaning to visit for a while, but to which we failed to find an open door on this occasion. Of the same generation as the handsome Catholic Church in West Croydon?

Treepots

Came across an unusual tree somewhere near Great Portland Street tube station the other day. The unusual was not anything to do with what sort of tree it was, which I did not notice, but in the manner of its planting (see diagram left).

The tree (B) appeared to have been planted in an oval, masonry container (A), I think brick, standing maybe two and a half feet above pavement level. The container had been entirely filled by the roots of the tree, which were also poking through the odd fissure in the masonry, fissures whose primary purpose appeared to be as containers for fag ends. The question was, what happened at (C)? Was the container open to the ground beneath or was the tree contained by the container?

Containment seemed a bit unlikely given the size of the tree, with a trunk more than a foot in diameter. On the other hand, why would you plant an open bottomed masonry container on the pavement? I shall have to return for closer inspection and photographs.

Judgement?

There was once a very English historian, a very clever chap, a pillar of the establishment, married to the daughter of an earl and sometime master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. One Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, known to most of us as the chap who took a fat fee from Murdoch to say that some diaries that Murdoch wanted to publish in that once respectable newspaper the 'Sunday Times' really were written by the hand of Hitler himself, when shortly afterwards they were shown to be forgeries, the whole business spawning a considerable and entertaining television drama fest.

He comes up today because of a short article in the NYRB about his relationship with Philby, the secret servant for Britain who turned out to be the even more secret servant for the USSR. The two of them worked together during the war, part of the influx of bright young things brought into the various secretive services to bolster up their war effort. It seems that they got on pretty well. Then, some years later, after Philby had settled down in Moscow and after both of them had gone into print about the whole sorry affair, Philby wrote a friendly letter to Trevor-Roper.

Trevor-Roper, despite having been rather fierce about Philby and his treachery in print, went so far as to compose a more or less friendly reply, and although it was never sent, he did keep it and one does wonder about his judgement. Is it right for a pillar of the establishment to be writing personal letters to a traitor? Is it prudent, given what the likes of Private Eye might have made of it had it come to light at the time?

All very odd.

PS: I recall reading the Philby version of the affair, 'My Secret War', not that long after it was published in 1968. But then I am not a pillar of the establishment and such things are permitted me - and nor do I recall the extent of the damage. I have no idea if it ran to the capture, interrogation (presumably not gentle) and execution of the hundreds of agents talked of in the le Carré novel. Or, to what extent, one could argue that the treachery was good for the world, if damaging to a narrow UK interest. And I am not sure that I am going to take the time and trouble to find out now, it was all rather a long time ago and the game has moved on.

Nuthatch

A nuthatch paid a short visit to the witch hazel just up the garden path from where the shed used to be this morning, which as far as the blog record (both here and the other place (http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/) goes is the first sighting since the morning of Walpurgisnacht 2011. The next before that being on the Common on June 18th 2008, rather than at home. This last post alleges that the demise of the home nuthatch is all to do with the demise of the bird feeder, but I now wonder whether it was not also to do with the demise of the adjacent bush magnolia (possibly a magnolia liliiflora nigra), removed because it was obstructing the path to the washing line. Maybe visiting nuthatches like to have a bush to visit, maybe containing the bugs that their long straight beak suggests to be their preferred diet. Maybe also to hide in while they keep an eye out for the main chance.

The posting also talks of playing the aeroplane game at Clapham Junction. I had completely forgotten that I had played the game all those years ago, thinking that it was an invention of and for retirement. A game for the idle poor, or at least those too poor to indulge in golf or cruising. Not the sort of thing that proper commuters did at all.

Which reminds me that I scored a three at Earlsfield yesterday, and had the passing trains been kind, that is to say had not kept getting in the way at the crucial moment, I might have made a four. My rule is that you have to take in all four (if four is the number you are going for) in a single sweep across the sky from right to left (it clearly not being possible to hold all four in view at the same time without the use of mirrors) and one needs to keep sweeping to make sure one knows where all the aeroplanes are, otherwise they are apt to get lost in all the clutter and one has to waste valuable seconds finding them again. I am getting better.

School physics

A reminder that having done physics at school may not help much with sorting out what might sound like schoolboy physics.

As readers may recall, I have been baking bread for several years now and have reached the 229th batch without succeeding in making white bread - but I can do brown bread, This brown bread is perfectly satisfactory but I do sometimes look at articles about bread baking in the papers, there being quite a lot of them these days. Great bake off on the telly or some such. Several of them have mentioned how much better it is if one puts a tray of water in the bottom of the oven while baking the bread. One even told of steam injection in the ovens of commercial bakers.

Enter the physics. At normal pressure, water boils at 100C, so if one puts a bowl of water in the bottom of an oven which is supposed to be something more than 200C, does one get an explosive boiling, with hot water being blown all over the inside of the oven, possibly triggering some kind of electrical failure? Does all this steam at 100C drain all the heat out of the oven as it is vented?

All of which left me a little nervous, but yesterday I decided to give it a try and put a large pyrex bowl with a couple of inches of cold water in it, maybe a couple of pints, in the bottom of the oven. But the oven did not then come to heat after 20 minutes when it usually takes 10. So I give up at this point, take the near boiling water out, the oven almost immediately comes to heat and I can get on with baking the bread which, as it happened, turned out very well.

BH's contribution was that I was using far too much water. Of course it would take a long time to heat up that amount of water. But she also said that when she did such things - the proper term being a bain-marie (the BBC web site knows all about such things if you don't. It is not just about the BB bit of BBC) - it was for lower temperature cooking, she did boil the water in the kettle first and yes, the bowl was empty at the end. The water all boiled off, or at least evaporated off.

But I continue to wonder about the water boiling at 100C. While the oven door has rubber seals, I am reasonably sure that the oven is vented and is at normal atmospheric pressure. It is not a pressure cooker or a steam engine with an enclosed boiler. So this being so, how can the steam from the water get to be much more than 100C?

Maybe the next step is to try again with much less water in a steel bowl rather than a pyrex bowl, this last being quite a good absorber of heat itself.

News

Perused yesterday's Guardian over breakfast, which clearly had to struggle for news fit to print.

The front page story was all about how awful it was that the Home Office was giving gift vouchers to high performing clerks working on asylum seekers. A bit tacky, but I dare say that such incentive schemes are all the rage in the private sector and certainly among the HR consultants whom government like to throw money at. And we should remember that processing asylum seekers in a messy world is always going to be a rather difficult and dirty business.

Thoughts then turned to the Lebanese with their half million Syrian refugees in a population of five million. Or something like that, a huge number relative to the numbers that we let into this country these days, particularly for a relatively poor country. But then I thought that there was something to be said for a regional containment policy, that refugees in one country should, as far as possible be dealt with or otherwise contained locally, in a country near by, rather than being shipped off to the other side of the globe, carrying their sometimes dreadful internecine disputes with them. That a region, such as the Middle East, should look after its own - in this case with the Saudis taking a considerable financial lead, maybe deferring the next tranche of golden Dreamliners until next year. To which the Lebanese might respond that you (that is to say we) exported your Jewish problem to the Middle East after the Second World War, you didn't contain that one - on which my own view remains that we missed a trick when we did not give the Jews what was until recently East Germany, with the then resident Germans being shipped west. Plenty of other population movements of comparable size at the time. A new homeland in the heart of their old - with the only snag being that I am not sure what fair compensation for the Soviets would have been, a snag not helped by their being tricky customers to deal with.

And inside a large article about whether we did or did not provide a modicum of SAS advice to the Indian government as it pondered its options for dealing with the occupation of the Golden Temple at Amritsar back in 1984. While it is not clear to me that the SAS have much track record in operations as large as this one and it is clear that the operation which eventually took place was messy and sanguinary, it does not seem unreasonable that the Indian government should cast about for a bit of advice or that we should offer some. I can see that the Indian press might make something of what is still an issue with them, but why should our own?

All this for the recently increased price of £1.60. Perhaps I had better make more excuses to pop down to Waitrose and get one free on my 'My Waitrose' card, provided that I spend more than £5 - a not inconsiderable discount, but one which does serve to get me into the habit of using the place, which is presumably the idea.

Wisley

Monday saw our first visit to Wisley of the year, the first since the end of August last year, if the blog is to be believed.

Too early for (regular outdoor, see below for irregular indoor) spring bulbs and much too early for spring leaves, but plenty to see just the same, including for example, clumps of coloured willow stems and sundry witch hazels. Not very keen on the latter, rather too feeble a plant for my taste, I like something a bit more vigorous, something which will do something in the poor brown clay of our own garden.

The usual mixed crop of outdoor sculpture, including one rather striking sculpture consisting of a heavy oval frame enclosing perhaps 50 pairs of small but otherwise matching pairs of oval mirrors, made or faced with a highly polished dark metal, something like the illustration. Suspended from A or otherwise mounted in such a way that they all shimmered & flickered in the the light breeze, in the cold winter light. A good idea and well-executed as a piece of metal work, but not quite right. The sturdy oval frame, maybe three feet across and standing on a sturdy post were far too sturdy for the delicacy of the mirrors. Perhaps this was was the test piece and the real thing, building on this experience or experiment (experience being the French for experiment), was in the garden of some neighbouring oligarch.

Pleased to see plenty of broad beans in the teaching garden adjoining the large glass house. Quite a lot of large and placid butterflies inside, placid to the point of a small girl being able to get one to perch on her finger. Few orchids on this occasion, but a lot of the cacti and succulents were in flower, making a fine display.

The second class restaurant was being made over (we hoped that the Wisley management would not sink so low as to participate in a television makeover programme) so we took lunch in the first class restaurant, pleasantly quiet (no music) and uncrowded although the sun meant that one had to be a bit careful where one sat. Good meal, in my case leek & potato soup, gnocchi and a tarte tatin. The soup was good, and they managed not to put too much milk/cream in it, a common failing, but contrariwise, the sauce in which the gnocchi came did have too much milk/cream in it. They do better at the Neapolitan Kitchen in Ewell Village. I had asked for the tarte tatin to be served without ice cream, but the thought of no trimming was clearly far too much for the kitchen, so they gave me a tastefully sculpted dollop of cream instead. At least it was to one side and could be left, the tarte being otherwise good, better than average in fact. White wine good. Service pleasant and attentive. The same gang, we were told, as have most of the franchise at the Royal Opera House.

Wound up the visit with a stroll to the two small alpine houses, where we found lots of interest and lots of flowers. The narcissii in particular were in very good form, small and delicate clumps in pots (for example, narcissus cantabricus cantabricus, var. kesticus), rather than large yellow jobs in the ground. Ask the Professor for narcissii generally and he comes up with lots of pictures of the latter sort, rather than the alpine sort, but including instead lots of snaps of chaps gazing at themselves in ponds. But ask for the specific variety and he does better. Last noticed here on 4th April 2013.

Mole

This afternoon to inspect the Mole at Leatherhead. It was still flowing fast and debris was lodged in trees and bushes maybe six feet above the current water level. It must have been a scary sight a week or two ago - despite the view left being very rural & bucolic today, this last despite it being maybe just a mile or so from the M25.

We also saw a kingfisher, the first for a while, and a heron. We were told that kingfishers were quite often sighted there.

Our last sighting was at Claremont, recorded on September 17th 2012 in the other place.

Home to a warming winter soup, loosely based on a recipe from 'The Diary Book of Family Cookery', from the Milk Marketing Board (late lamented?) and boasting a foreword by HRH The Duchess of Kent. Take one large onion and chop. Place in a large saucepan on a middling heat with a knob of butter. Simmer for a bit. Take half a dozen middling leeks and, assuming they are clean, slice them up crossways  into 3mm slices. Add the leaks to the simmering onions, replace lid and simmer the whole lot for a while. Add two or three pints of water, e-numbers in the form of a Knorr Chicken Stock Pot, bring back to the boil and simmer some more. Chop the gammon left over from the construction, earlier in the day, of the luncheon quiche lorraine and add that. Add a good whack of cold mashed potato. Simmer the whole lot for a little while longer and then serve with wholemeal bread.

Spend the evening watching 'Malwarebytes' (http://www.malwarebytes.org/), suggested as a prophylactic by the helpful BT help desk, clocking up 75 unwanted bits and bobs on the PC.

PS: 'bucolic' above sounded well, but on rereading not at all sure that I actually knew what the word meant. On checking, 'of or pertaining to herdsmen or shepherds; pastoral', from the Greek via the Latin. So not that far off, given that the green to the right of the view above is used for grazing. Not sure by whom though as there were no inhabitants to be seen yesterday, perhaps having been moved on account of the floods.

Alert!

Thought to take a stroll around the common yesterday morning, taking the all weather track which takes one wide around the large stew pond. Plenty of small birds along the northern fringe along the B280, but did not get close enough to anything except the odd robin to identify them. Path along the southern stretch, taking one across the top of the wells in a bit of a state, with chalk showing through at places.

And then, for the first time for a while, came across the chain saw volunteers, that is to say a gaggle of senior trustees playing woods, that is to say clearing and burning a section of the underbrush. At least they had left their chain saws at home, making doing with bush saws and pruners. Signs of attention to health and safety with the location of the fires clearly marked with slender posts. Once again, I ducked challenging them, which was perhaps just as well as one only gets one or two chances to make an impact before one gets written off as a bore. But I think the challenge ought to include something about the common being for all of us, not just those who like to chop things down and about how their time might be better spent patching up the all weather path. One might also point out in passing that some of the damage to said path is caused by their own support vehicles. Maybe a useful rule of self-denial would be that the volunteers are only allowed on the common with what they can carry. No support vehicles.

I might have ducked, but I was quite cross about them, only calming down when I came once again to consider the fencing along the railway track on the eastern portion of the walk. How is the stuff made? It rather looks as if it is somehow stamped out of a large sheet of 2mm galvanised steel, but one would need a very substantial stamper to do such a thing. It has been bothering me for some time, but how does one find out?

Then moved on to pondering the charge that our government for market forces is interfering with market forces to the extent of strongly suggesting to insurance companies that they do not raise the insurance premiums of people who live in houses liable to flooding, a suggestion which amounts to a covert tax as the premiums of the rest of us, living in sensible places, will have to rise up to make up. A pity that all these stretches of low lying pasture land outside our towns and villages are now such easy targets for builders. In the olden days one did not build on such places for good reason, with towns and villages perched on hills or hillsides, above neighbouring marshes, water meadows and flood plains - thinking here of Exminster in Devon and more especially of Brading on the Isle of Wight. A pity also that, collectively, we cannot bring ourselves to pay our taxes out in the open but would rather have them hidden away in this way.

Home to find that the DT had made up for the Monday dearth of news by printing a reproduction of a French skiing poster from the fifties which made Murdoch's photographic efforts on page 3 from the swinging sixties look positively coy. Second prize to a picture of a mature lady MP moonlighting as a wannabee celebrity in a swimming costume. The days when respectable employers used to have rules about second jobs look to be behind us.

Werther not Goethe

Last Thursday to hear the Werther  Ensemble do the Brahms Piano Quintet, Op. 34, at St. John's Smith Square, the first time that I have heard them.

Weather holding, off at Clapham Junction again to pick up a Bullingdon from Grant Road, from where to Battersea Park to do a circumnavigation of the Peace Pagoda there, an impressive place, not least because it is always smart and clean. I have often wondered how this can be, but reading about the Pagoda at http://www.batterseapark.org/history/peace-pagoda/, the answer appears to be that the priests and volunteers have to work at it. I liked the story about how it was inspired by something similar at Milton Keynes of all places. Also how granting permission to build it was the very last act of the GLC before it was abolished by the great thatcher, now in the sky.

On to one of the last few slots in Smith Square, nicely in time for a 1300 start. Rather more impressed by the interior than I was on my last visit (see 4th July 2013), and I liked the way the large, mainly plain pillars framed the stage. Performance good, and as on the last visit, the piano did not try to outplay the strings; a restrained rendering which I liked. The Ensemble don't appear to have a website but they do facebook and they do tweet, and from the former I found my way to what sounded like a spirited rendering of the Brahms Piano Quartet Op. 25 which kept me busy last year, and was, as it happens, the reason for my last visit to St. John's. Their next big outing looks to be a festival in and around Oswestry in early May.

Next stop the 'Marquis of Granby' in Romney Street, a decent establishment, but one which I do not remember visiting more than once or twice when I served the nearby Home Office. A fine place to ruminate on the virtues or otherwise of seeing 24 lectures by Heffernan on J. Joyce on Ulysses on DVD rather than on the flesh. I am tempted, with lectures on DVD being quite the thing these days, but the reviews are a bit mixed and the price is a bit fierce for something which might wind up getting recycled before it was watched. The matter remains under review. From there another Bullingdon to St Martin's Street, from where it was just a stroll to Old Compton Street where I could sample the sausage sandwiches, German style, at Herman's (http://www.herman-ze-german.co.uk/). Grub not bad and I liked the various mincers decorating the wall, one of them very like my own Spong No. 10. And then, it being too good an opportunity to miss, a visit to Gerry's to get a bottle of the Eustacian liqueur known as Jagermeister (see 2nd January). Yet to be sampled.

And so home to potato pie, a warming standby for a cold winter's evening.

PS: thinking of the abolition of the GLC, I imagine that the 33 London Boroughs would manfully resist giving any of their powers back to any reinvented GLC, now that they have got used to them. Although that said, I am not sure how many powers the GLC had left by the time that it was abolished. I recall talk of it being more a funny sort of bank which happened to run fire engines than a local authority.

Tweets

Horton clockwise today where I had the odd tweet.

First a chaffinch in the eastern hedge, maybe a relative of the one reported on 12th December 2012 in the same general area. I am sure that they were much more common when I was little, at least more common where I was then than where I am now.

Then a bevy of redwings moving through the western hedge, by the golf course, the course which is home to Jungle Island. They looked a lot redder here than they did in our garden (see, for example 29th December), the red seeming much more prominent when they are moving than when they are perching.

And last, the oak tree noticed on 18th December was full of starlings again.

That apart, plenty of magpies, a few crows and a few seagulls.

Having become a user in a modest way of the product OneNote which comes with my Lumia telephone, I did think about getting the thing out and logging the tweets on that. But I didn't. OneNote does seem to be quite a neat way of taking notes, rather better in some ways than the Filofax which I always used to carry at work, and which I have owned (in various incarnations) for fifty years or more. Certainly a lot less bulky. Certainly neater and better organised. But I have not yet got to the point where making notes on a telephone is anything like as comfortable as making notes on a piece of paper. Banging away with a couple of thumbs and missing a good proportion of the time does yet seem quite the thing, not much of the time anyway. Maybe the thumbs will get better over time but meanwhile, no longer having a case in which to carry the Filofax, my lunch box, my lunch knife (a quarter of an inch longer in the folding blade than was proper) and the odd important paper always to hand, I will have to trust to the fading memory to manage the tweets.

Maybe I will gradually start to use the thing on this PC, where it has been for some months now, pretty much unused. Maybe I will learn how to have just the one OneNote setup across the PC and the phone...

PS: the case used to be a small grey suitcase from Globetrotter, suitcases which were nothing like as good as they had been once, back in the days when they were a marque to reckon with. I read recently that Globetrotter are having another go, trying to crack into the luxury market again, with a shop in Bond Street or some such - so I might go and take a look for old times sake, but I doubt if I shall be tempted. See http://www.globetrotter1897.com/ to get the general idea.

PPS: just taken a proper look at the website. It seems that the nearest thing to my first Globetrotter case, for which I paid £10 or so, might cost £1,000 now, hand made to order. Not to mention the various specimens bought at Hook Road car booters for pence, usually in quite good nick too. Some of them with impressive travel stickers and labels.

The Works

I noticed the periodic table (of elements) on 23rd and 30 November 2012 and for some weeks after that I was poking around trying to find some accessible book about the periodic table, even making a special trip to Foyles for the purpose, to find that the only books that they had about the periodic table were far too technical, far too expensive or both. Then thinking that perhaps an interactive version of the table itself would have done the business I tried finding one of those online but did not come up with anything suitable. And so there the matter rested.

But then, the other day, visiting the Epsom branch of 'The Works' (http://www.theworks.co.uk/), a place from which I sometimes buy jigsaws and sometimes buy books that, oddly, have been remaindered despite favourable TLS review, I came across a popular science book all about the periodic table by one Jack Challoner, a chap with a physics background who looks to make a very decent living producing this kind of thing, including quite a lot of work with the Dorling Kindersley noticed on 3rd November last year. See also  http://explaining-science.co.uk/, where amongst other tit-bits one gets a series of pictures of a home dissection of an octopus. Strong stuff!

The book was called 'Understanding the elements: an illustrated guide' and I got it for £6.99 or some such on a ticket price of £20. For this I get around 15 pages of introductory material, then a hundred or so short sections giving short illustrated accounts of each of the hundred or so elements in the periodic table, mostly arranged by column (aka group) of the periodic table. The introduction was pitched about right for me, and although I did think it contained a few confusing misprints, I don't think I should complain for the money; proper science books from Foyles are apt to cost a good deal more than this book did. And the sections are just the ticket for a coffee table book to pick up and idle with during the all too frequent and all too long advertisement breaks on ITV3. Just as well we have a mute button on the remote.

I can't find the book on the website, so perhaps it has been superseded by 'The Elements: An Interactive Guide to the Building Blocks of our Universe' which I can find. I guess this is why my book turns up at the works, but I do wonder what 'interactive' means for the new book. How can a printed book be interactive? One interacts with it by turning the pages?

Perpetually Perpetua

I noticed SS. Perpetua & Felicitas on 20th March last year and it must have been shortly after that that I came across a near 400 page novel which had been made out of the story by Amy Rachel Peterson (left) and said to be published by the people at http://www.relevantbooks.com, a site which I cannot make must sense of. However, the Professor does rather better with the author's name, coming up with various other options. She is clearly very plugged into the airwaves.

I have now, having started and then stopped for some months, finished the book, although I have to admit to a certain amount of skimming. Not much good as a novel, but it does give one some idea of how things might have been in Carthage around 200 years after Christ.

The Christians did have a point. Slavery was bad anyway and made worse by the sexual abuse of some women slaves - of whom S. Felicitas was one. The crudity and cruelty of daily life was bad. The use of criminals - including here the Christian martyrs - in various blood sports was very bad. The various excesses of the rich were very bad.

We are shown how things might have been when, against this background, the numbers of Christians, many of them poor if not slaves, were growing, a significant minority, but also when being a Christian was a capital offence. One might be denounced by a disaffected servant or slave or by a neighbour with whom one had a boundary dispute. One might be hunted down by a zealous official or soldier either for sport or for promotion. And if one made a display of one's Christianity, one might brings one's friends and family down too, down to the same grisly death. While, at the same time, a public profession of faith was very much part of what it meant to be a Christian.

But could one be sure that one's motives for going for martyr were good ones? That one one not just showing off, albeit in a perverse way? That there were not better ways to serve the Lord? On the evidence of this book at least, the church elders were well on top of subtleties of this sort.

There is lots of sweetness and light at the Christian gatherings, a lot of them quite small and usually held in peoples' houses. Much hugging and much love, both within and going beyond the immediate group. Ecstasy even. Much belief in the heavenly life with Jesus to come - and one can see how this prospect might have attracted more then, when daily life might easily have been pretty grim, than now. I can see how, in such a charged environment, one might almost talk oneself into being a martyr and I am reminded of the cults about which there was much worrying here a few years back - and the silly scares about satanic cults, most if not all of which, as I recall, evaporated on closer inspection. On the other hand, there are clearly plenty of young people out there now who are prepared to give their life for their Lord, preferably taking plenty of others with them, which is not quite the same as what we have here, but it is evidence of what charged-up people can do.

We are also shown how, even in the early church, that it was not all sweetness and light. Even then, there were ecclesiastical squabbles between the priests and such like. I guess that as long as one admits a church with formal membership, with written doctrines and with priests, one is going to admit such squabbles. There will be office politics.

There are occasional mentions of both tea and tobacco, neither, I would have thought, available at this place at this time. But this is not a serious offence. Slightly more irritating is the sprinkling of Latin words to spice up the text  bit, although I guess the author might say that she does this when the obvious English translation does not really capture the sense of whatever it was, for example cena for a midday meal.

But, all in all, I do feel I have got a little closer to why a young mother - S. Perpetua - with a rich husband might choose to be a martyr, but perhaps I should go back to M. Visser and S. Agnes for a different take. See January 4th 2012 in the other place.