It's that cooker time again

I recorded our last adventure with the cooker door on 18th January 2013. I restrain myself from correcting the various typos in this posting; a posting is supposed to be a record of the time of the post, not the record as I see it some time later. Irritated that my proof reading was so sloppy, but feeling good that I have let the poor product stand; very virtuous of me.

But the one year maintenance agreement on the cooker has now expired and one of the two screws which hold the handle to the newish door has come adrift. A quick inspection suggested that putting the screw back was beyond me and that the way forward was to phone the call center responsible and complain about doors that last just about long enough for their maintenance agreement to expire and wouldn't they like to do something about it for free. On reflection, I thought that this was a bit lazy and that getting a man in a van to attend to such a matter was not a good use of resources, whoever paid for them. Closer inspection suggested that a bent screwdriver might be the solution, a solution which had the advantage that instead of doing something now, I could defer doing anything while I played with Amazon. Who had indeed heard of bent screwdrivers and could do a set for £4.99 including postage, a lot less than a man in a van. They turned up few days later, and very smart they looked too, despite this A.B.Tools being nothing to do with the serious looking operator at http://www.abtoolsinc.com/, one of those websites which reminds one what a serious country the US still is. They still make lots of things.

No excuse now not to do something with the door, so I get down to it, to find that the bent screwdrivers do not quite do the job: not only do they not fit in the space available, they are surprisingly awkward to use. However, the good news is that while flapping around with the awkward screwdrivers, I worked out that maybe I could take the door to pieces and screw the handle back on with a regular screwdriver. Which I then do, and by the end of the process I have worked out it what order I should have done things. Will do much better next time.

I can also add further design thoughts to those of the original post. The hinges of the door and the way that the hinges are fixed to the door are not really up to the weight of the door, quite heavy with its frontal glass slab, and the firm sprung latch. The door needs a firm push to make the latch work, a bit like an old fashioned slam carriage door on the railway in that respect, so what with that and the weight of the door, one should have a more serious hinge assembly than is in fact the case - although I do allow that the fixing of the hinge to the body of the cooker is satisfactory.

Carmen

We were attracted to a performance of Bizet's 'Carmen' offered by the rather grand sounding 'Russian State Ballet and Opera House' at the Dorking Halls the other day.

We had thought that we had bought seats rather too near the front for comfort and rather to the right, but when we got there we found we had a pair of centre stalls about five rows back from the front, with virtually no-one sitting in front of us. The raked seats behind us were clearly more popular, but as it turned out we were not too near the front for comfort at all, with a fine view of the stage, the back of the conductor and his orchestra. Seats only slightly marred by a sweet wrapper rustler to our left.

It also turned out that the orchestra numbered about thirty and the cast about twenty, say sixty people altogether with the inevitable odds and ends. If we suppose that there were about 250 people there paying an average of £25 each, we have a gross take for the evening of £6,250, perhaps £100 a head, which did not seem much at all when one thinks that the hall has to be paid, lodgings have to be paid and the bus has to be paid, not to mention the punishing schedule (the rather gentler schedule for a companion tour being illustrated) and the tip for the driver.

But then, on closer inspection the state of the State Opera turned out to be the state of Kumi rather than Russia or the Soviet Union, with Kumi being a province in the far north of Russia, just west of the Urals. One is reminded of all those dusty provincial theatres and the tired actresses in them which figure so prominently in 19th century Russian fiction. I think that most of the Russian circuses on the circuit pull the same stroke, dressing themselves up in metropolitan clothes but actually being rather provincial.

Notwithstanding, we enjoyed the show, in my case despite it not really being my kind of thing. I don't suppose it was part of the Morse canon either (see 20th February), being rather light in tone despite the tragic ending, a tragic ending illustrated by a bull on the backdrop which rather reminded me of a tricerotops - but at least a tricerotops with a pair of vicious looking horns. The orchestra did a good job on the overtures, reminding me that was the bit that I liked best from the 'Walkyries' (this being one of the two occasions on which we attempted Wagner, when very young. I don't think that the attempt is going to be renewed, Morse notwithstanding).

Back home to try to get the book of the opera from Gutenburg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) to find that while I could get some Mérimée stories in French, I could not get this one, it only being available in English - and Dutch for some reason. Perhaps the Dutch like this particular opera. In any event, I settled on the English version, which now sits on the kindle, waiting to be read.

PS: there were male and female cigars on stage but they did not bother to light them. Perhaps the Russians are more relaxed about smoking that we are and don't feel the need to exercise their theatrical privileges. No doubt they pay the price.

Faits divers

I post an illustration of Epsom and Ewell's contribution to the flood scene, taken on 20th January, left. I am pleased to report that the situation has been unchanged since with the overflow from the Bourne Hall duck pond, if anything, looking a little larger this morning than it has done recently. A duck pond most famous for being just a couple of miles upstream of the place where Millais painted Ophelia.

Second fait is my irritation at reading in the Guardian that the Chief Executive of Shelter sees fit to bang on about how awful it is that the proportion of people living in a house which they rent from a mortgage company has fallen with respect the proportion who rent from a private landlord. I thought Shelter was to do with the plight of the homeless, not the mysteries of housing finance. My own take being that in lots of countries it is still normal to live in rented accommodation, to leave much of the bother of ownership to someone else.

Third and last fait is more irritation from the Guardian in the form of an (old) story about someone whose lawyers have extracted hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Health Service because he, because of the alleged failure of the Health Service to look after his sick brother properly, was able to witness (just that; no more, no less) the tail end of his brother, who has since died, beating their father to death. A tragedy, yes; the surviving brother needs help, yes. But beating up the Health Service and paying for large amounts of expensively and privately provided help no. Short of going back to banging up a large proportion of the people with mental health problems there are going to be tragedies from time to time, but I do not believe that this is the right way to respond to them.

Navarra 2

Back to the Dorking Halls Sunday past for the second of their three concerts there. Mozart No.6, K.159, Beethoven Op.18.5 and, after the interval, Dvořák No.10, Op.51.

Don't know why, but when the Mozart started it was as if I was hearing it from some great distance, as if I was detached from the performance. Just noise rather than music. Happily things improved by the middle of the middle movement (of three). The Beethoven went reasonably well, although nothing like as well as its cousin 18.4 on the previous occasion. Took a glass of Dorking Hall white wine in the interval (nothing like as good as that to be had from the Ram at Kingston, see 24th February) after which the Dvořák went much better.

On reflection, I think the problem on both this and the previous occasion was Sunday lunch. No roast and no booze, but a substantial meal none the less, the effect of which on me these days seems to be that the life giving blood supply is diverted away from the music part of the brain to service the alimentary canal, or to put it in the vulgate, one is inclined to feel a touch sleepy for an hour or so afterwards. So no more big meals before concerts.

Bicycles

A bicycle dream the other night, a few elements of which I could pin, while still fresh (which they are no longer), to things that had happened in the previous 48 hours or so, but most of which seemed to have arrived from nowhere.

It seems that I was reprising a continental bicycle trip I had made (in the dream world that is, not in the real world), involving a large bicycle, vaguely like a rickshaw, BH and perhaps sprogs. Large amounts of luggage were included, most of it strapped to the outside. I pedaled.

In the dream I was getting ready for the reprise rather than being in the middle of it. It was the same bicycle but there were more people, at least one additional named person, and there was a lot more luggage, including tents and furniture. Things like an old fashioned bed with steel wire and springs rather than slats or elastic straps supporting the mattress. All the stuff you needed to go camping with. Quite of a lot of the dream involved trying to strap all this stuff onto the outside of the bicycle, trying to use some ancient string which had been rotting away at the bottom of some cupboard or other and which broke as soon as you put any strain on it. I didn't seen to be able to find the serious sisal twine which is kept in the garage for such purposes.

And then there was a concern that the loaded bicycle was going to be too heavy for me to pedal. There was a gloomy sequence of me having to stop while pedaling up a very gentle incline and push the thing the rest of the way up. Early evening, dull and damp. Cobbled townscape. But then a pleasanter sequence of gently rolling down some green and peaceful valley in the sun. Maybe Glen Nevis.

PS: I now remember that we did indeed go camping in France with our young family, maybe twenty years ago now, and that there was stuff strapped onto the roof, albeit of the car rather than a bicycle. Making the parcel out of the stuff and fixing it to the roof rack was a job that required some care if it was not to come unstuck in the course of a day's drive.

And another

Prior to the records scandal breaking, that of the mass fluoridisation of public water supplies had also been given a modest airing in the DT, it being alleged that the BMJ alleged that there is precious little evidence that fluoridisation does any good. This allegation in the midst of an article by one Andrew M. Brown about how awful it is for drug companies to persuade governments to feed their populations medicines, willy-nilly, without regard to the needs of individuals but with much regard to the profits of said drug companies.

It is curious that this particular issue does seem to touch such a raw nerve. We seem to be curiously sensitised to this particular addition to our diet and have been so sensitised ever since it was first mooted at least 50 years ago, despite my reading of a BMJ article with title 'Systematic review of water fluoridation', being that fluoridisation does reduce the (expensive) incidence of rotten teeth and that the only known side effect is occasional mottling. Perhaps not very desirable, but not very harmful either. Is it something to do with a deep, almost instinctive care for our water supply? That it is essential that this essential of life be as pure as it can possibly be - neglecting the regular and large shots of chlorine into the drinking water in Epsom, I am told to counter the various leakages from the waste water network. Quite often at a level which gives one's bath a smell of chlorine. Perhaps all the fuss about additives to food is powered by a similarly deep care for our food supply. A deep rooted desire to go back to the mythic purity of nature, a deep rooted desire actively promoted by the purveyors of health foods, to name just one interested party.

Dipping deeper into the article, it seems that much of the effect of fluoridisation of water is achieved by the fluoridisation of the toothpaste which most of us use. Doing the water adds more value when standards of dental hygiene are low, as they were in this country fifty years ago, and as they still are in many poorer countries. Where are all the people protesting the fluoridisation of toothpaste?

Curious also that the DT, generally regarded as the mouthpiece of the right, should be so alert to the vested interested of large companies. Perhaps it is really the mouthpiece of what we lefties used to call the petit bourgeoisie (not to say petty bourgeoisie), people who take almost as much damage from the big companies as the workers. Not that the this section of the bourgeoisie were particularly well known for the humane way that they treated their own workers or their customers. See Thyde Monnier on the subject.

A DT scandal

The DT published a scandal yesterday according to which the evil government, having promised us it would do no such thing, has sold our precious and private medical records to the insurance industry for them better to extract money out of us. It further claimed that it was possible, despite the records sold having been anonymised, to link them to credit records, making the ensemble much richer than it would otherwise be. On the face of it all very scandalous.

But further thought suggested that the records in question were probably from what I used to know as the hospital in patient enquiry (HIPE), a long standing statistical survey of all in-patient episodes and you can read all about it at http://www.hscic.gov.uk/hesdata, where I read that what I used to know as HIPE has been enlarged to something called hospital episode statistics (HES), from which a lot of stuff is published and even more of which is available on request. There are quite a lot of rules and guidelines about such requests, although I have not looked carefully enough to see whether the various episodes for one individual are or could be linked together, something which would clearly be of value to a medical researcher.

I learn in passing that the Irish government see fit to operate a survey with the same name, presumably along the same lines and I can only suppose they are being evil too.

So the the DT has conflated your medical record with a statistical summary of your stays in hospital, should you have had any. On the other hand, it does seem quite likely that someone in government has given the insurers individual episode records without names but with postcodes, which quite possibly could be, have been even, matched with other data sources. The Census of Population used to have rules about not releasing data at postcode level from which, for whatever reason, one could extract data about individuals. Perhaps the medical people have been less scrupulous.

At the very least, I think there has been carelessness somewhere in the public relations part of the national health world: given how excited people get about privacy, it was careless to be dishing out firm assurances about the safety and privacy of your data in the giant computer systems being put together, while omitting to mention the sale of this other data to the insurance industry. Perhaps all part of why there is now a pause.

I should also say that I am all in favour of giant computer systems. I think it is a jolly good idea that if I get taken ill in the wilds of Cornwall, the doctors there (if any) can get hold of my medical records from Epsom. Also a good thing that such data should be made available for medical research. The trick being to make sure that such data is not abused along the way, that my data does not wind up sculling about some landfill site because someone has been careless. (Someone once told me (in the pub) that he found his own electricity bill sculling about somewhere near the seaside. He was very angry about it and although it was rather a long shot, I did believe him, while being more amused than angry).

More donkey

Having attended the opening night of 'Donkeys' years', I thought to attend the ante-penultimate performance. The one where it is as good as it is going to get while the cast have hopefully not started the slide down to the last performance.

I also thought to go by train to Kingston on this occasion, despite having had trouble with the trains the night before, with the platform indicator system being up the spout, telling all kinds of porkies, which caused the guard on the train we did catch some consternation. Was he to believe what he was reading on the boards or what he was being told by the driver? Who was in charge of the train? On this occasion the platform indicator system was spot on, but what it was telling us was that the connecting train to Kingston from Raynes Rark had been cancelled which meant that there was a 15 minute wait on the cold and windy platform. One does not always realise how cold it is until one has to stand in it.

There was some entertainment in that there were two young men smoking on the platform. Both young, one white and one black. Both well behaved, apart from one of them having a loud conversation on his mobile phone. No aggressive bravado about it, no furtive hiding at the far end of the platform either. Just more or less normal passengers. The station attendant paid no attention at all. No one saw fit to complain. So the world was having one of its sensible evenings, not making a fuss where none was needed.

The train eventually turned up, fortunately well heated, so what with that and a brisk walk through Kingston, I was back in normal condition by the time I reached the theatre, or at least the pub next to the theatre, that is to say the Ram, mostly full of bright young things, but they were also doing a very decent New Zealand white wine.

On to the show, which had indeed improved considerably since the first performance. All much slicker with no sag in the middle. The cast had, for example, learned to smoke their cigars with a little more conviction than they had displayed previously; not exactly seasoned puffers, but they were keeping the things on the move. Now, given that cigars taste pretty foul if you relight them, the stage manager must be providing half a dozen large size cigars for each performance. Given also that they are not allowed to advertise their provenance, they are going to have to pay the full whack, say £15 a go, which one might think was a reasonable drain on a modest, provincial stage management budget. Maybe they really are relighting, and the diffident puffing is down to said foul taste! For me, the remaining weak link was Simon Coates as Tate with all his antiquated prep school slang; maybe the director should have toned down his lines a bit.

But, in the round, a good show this second time around. And I would think that the farce is quite a fair take on Oxbridge life in Frayn's day. I wonder how fair it is now? Has that world moved on that much in the fifty years since he was there?

Very slow service at the interval, so back to the Ram for more of their New Zealand, where the obliging bar maid was happy to serve me, even transferring the wine to a small tumbler for ease and safety of carriage back to the auditorium - which was, strictly speaking, out of order as it was glass. But glass returned to the door man outside the pub in due course, on the way to the conveniently waiting taxi. Oddly, none of the other punters in the theatre seemed to want it.

And so back to another wait at Raynes Park, a little warmer this time, having taken on a little wine in the interval, a wait which gave me time to check out the green alkanet there, the subject of several posts back in 2011. See for example, 24th February 2001 in the other place (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/). It was showing well in this mild if wet spring and, incidentally, provided further demonstration of the weak performance of the Lumia camera in weak light. You can just about see what is going on if you click to enlarge. How many weeks will it be before some bright spark finds it necessary to chop it all down, before it comes into flower? Pretty and blue, if rather small.

PS: I read this morning in Wikipedia that Frayn grew up in Ewell next to Epsom where we live and went to school at Kingston Grammar next to where the show was. Did he turn up at all for old times' sake?

Spring miscellany

First stop yesterday was Nonsuch Park to see how the snowdrops in Herald Copse were getting along. Which was fine, although a little past their best now with the crocuses (in flower) and the daffodils (in bud) starting to push through.

To the café for tea and chelsea bun, this last rather good. Sugary but not too much so, plenty of currants and plenty of fluffy white bun, not soaked in sweet yellow goo.

And then to the stand of conifers to the east of the mansion to find no daffodils yet but two trees down, one large and one not so large, opening up a considerable gap in the canopy. There are a lot of old trees in this park, so it is just as well that someone has been on the case and there are a lot of younger ones coming on.

In the afternoon a Horton Clockwise to come across the pretty flower illustrated, but which has so far resisted identification by either book or computer: maybe one day I will find a decent flower identification tool on the internet; odd that despite there clearly being lots of interest out there no-one has yet managed such a thing, suited to the interested amateur, somewhere between the casual enquirer and the trained botanist. The same problem manifests itself with birds, despite there being a very well funded charity on the case (RSPB). On the up side, I have learned that a high proportion of wild flowers are either yellow or blue in colour, bracketing green on the left hand part of the spectrum, to the left of red. Maybe it is harder for plants to knock up red pigments.

I also inspected the site (google reference 51.336677, -0.290019), said to be under consideration for a camp site for travelers and their fellow travelers. It was once, I think, a recreation ground belonging to one of the mental hospitals, but has now been allowed to go to waste. My take is that while it is a pity to lose another bit of green space, it is probably as suitable a spot as one is going to find: on the fringe of the town and its surrounding estates, handy to the suburban dwellers from whom the travelers extract their living, but not so close as to spoil the view from the suburbans' bedroom windows. If the travelers wind up there, let's hope they are grateful and do not make themselves too much of a nuisance, visual or otherwise. Maybe one day they will grow out of their taste for booze, aggressive displays and punch ups.

And then woke this morning to ponder about the irony that while we have closed down all the mental hospitals on the grounds that we ought to care for people for special needs in the community, we have opened up all the prisons and stuffed them full to the gunnels with another bunch of people with special needs, many of whom, in the olden days, would have been in a mental hospital. And many of whom would not be there at all if we did not have such silly laws about drugs.

PS: talking of prison, I had occasion to look up pictures of West Point (military academy) the other day and was very struck at how much like a huge Victorian prison the place looked - which I suppose is roughly what it is.

It's those elias again

To the Wigmore Hall on Thursday to hear the Elias Quartet once again, a quartet of whom we seem to have seen quite a lot since our first coming across them on or around March 11th 2011 (see the other place). (In the course of checking all this out I come across Norbert Elias, an interesting historian, but there is no connection as the quartet claims to be named for the German for Elijah).

Slightly panicky start as we were stuck in a train between Raynes Park and Wimbledon for a while, only making it to the Hall without time for a warm-up coffee, but in time for 18.4, an early quartet of which I am fond and must have heard a few times now, possibly for the first time from students in a church in Cambridge, shortly before the smoking ban came into pubs. I remember talking with a smoking, Canadian lady pub manager about it just before the concert, her take being that it would penalise small pubs like hers which did not have the space or money to go in for fancy smoking dens. This rendering from the Elias was very good, perhaps the best I have heard, with plenty of of brash and brio from this young quartet for this early quartet.

Harp good in a different way, the third hearing in not much more than that many weeks, slightly marred to my mind by the first violinist trying to play some of her quiet, contrast leads too quietly, more quietly than she or her instrument could comfortably manage, which distracted one from the intended effect. Op. 130 plus Op. 133 their usual grand selves, attracting a very enthusiastic response from the audience; a more or less full house with more people with coloured - as opposed to gray - hair colour than is often the case. Slightly marred by the fidgeting of the young man sitting next to BH who seemed unable to keep still. On the other hand, the lady sitting next to me told us all about free lectures at Gresham College (http://www.gresham.ac.uk/) which, on inspection look well worth a try. Some of them include wine: I remember the British Museum being quite generous in that way so perhaps Gresham College will be their equal.

Sitting much nearer the back than usual, row P, did not seem to matter at all. So, an excellent concert, but it was just as well I had taken a siesta or I might not have gone the distance.

PS: today I close with a puff for online forums. Experiencing some damage to my blogger user experience, I poked about in the help for a while to no avail but then tried posting a question on one of the various Google forums available for such purposes. About a day later I had the answer, very simple as it turned out, but it might have taken me a long time to work it out for myself. And given that the answer came from somewhere in Canada, more or less by return of post when allowance is made for the time difference, the forum really did work in the way intended.

DIY

Off earlier in the week to see Richard Deacon at the Tate, partly because his history in some ways echoed my own: born in the same year, maths and physics for A level, a penchant for collecting odd things (odd in the sense of it being odd to collect them, not that they were odd in themselves) and a penchant for not particularly useful DIY.

In the event, his generally large pieces had been well served by the Tate, being given plenty of space and light. Furthermore, despite it being half term the place was reasonably quiet, which was just as well as I don't think the interest would have survived a crush.

The wooden constructions were interesting and were also rather roughly finished, they did not have the sort of polish one would expect of a sculpture decorating the atrium of a large PLC. There was, for example, lots of glue oozing out of the joins of the laminations - several of the wooden constructions, although not that illustrated - being laminated, after the fashion I first saw on a DIY programme on television presented by Barry Bucknall (who, on looking him up in Wikipeda, is said to be of that odd species, a second world war conchy).

The construction illustrated was made, I think, mainly out of bent beech, in segments joined together by oddly substantial steel collars, perhaps needed to make sure that the thing held its shape. Interesting, but it the end, odd. What on earth would one do with such a thing, it being far too large for the house of anyone other than someone who was very rich? My thought was that it belonged in the garden where it could be used to grow cucumbers or nasturtiums. But even then one would need rather a large garden to show the thing off to decent effect. Perhaps a saving grace would be that it would not last all that long, being untreated and probably quite old wood. Also odd in that it takes a while to notice that the rings are actually pairs of slightly overlapping half rings; the eyes are not drawn to the overlapping at all.

I liked a rather more finished steel construction best: stainless steel and galvanised steel, a rather geometrical affair of interlocking triangular shapes, standing perhaps six or seven feet high, much better suited to a garden, albeit a reasonably large one, that that illustrated. The thought struck me that it must have cost quite a lot in workshop, tools and materials alone, and so must have been made when Deacon was quite rich himself, or getting fancy commissions. I didn't spot it among the large number of pictures offered by Google, but they did serve to show that quite a lot of his work has wound up in public spaces, clearly the right sort of space. There is also a great deal of it. Does the chap have a private income? Was he kicked off with family money?

Followed up by lunch at St. Thomas's where I had intended to show off the dispensary robot which had much intrigued me one evening while waiting there, now sadly consigned to the back of the shed where it cannot be seen, at least by the public. So instead we had our first, very reasonably priced, lunches out of brown cardboard boxes, and then off to the nearby Florence Nightingale Museum, which I had thought would be a museum of nursing generally (we have had at least four nurses in the immediate family, not to mention others on the periphery), but which turned out to be a museum about Florence (named for the town. And her sister was called  after Parthenopolis, an extinct Greek town near Naples). It was also a museum which had been converted from oldspeak brown display cases to something thought to be more suitable for children and there were certainly plenty there. But it was not more suitable for me and I would, I think, have preferred the brown display cases. But there was an interesting collection of photographs and other images with a nursing flavour, including, for example, some rather fetching recruiting posters from the second world war. There were also some devotional books involving Hebrew, although I was not able to find out whether that was among Florence's many skills.

Despite the many skills, for some reason I have a bit of a down on Florence, despite now finding her to have been something of a statistician, having picked up the idea from somewhere that she has had a rather better press than she really deserved, at the expense of others, such as Mary Seacole, a lady of whom I have only heard because one of the blocks in the Home Office building in Marsham Street is named for her. To be fair to St. Thomas's, their museum shop did carry a nice looking Penguin about her, which, on reflection, I should have bought.

PS: I close with a puff for Dropbox, a cloud file service I have used, mainly for backup rather than sharing, for some years. They have just sent out an email covering updates to their terms of service and privacy policy, which last gives fair and reasonable looking coverage of issues arising from the snowdon affair. See, for example, https://www.dropbox.com/transparency/principles.

Inspector Morsoleum

Following our visit to Captain Mausoleum on 28th January, we have now upgraded to our very own Inspector Morsoleum.

This particular saga started at a grand car booter at Hook Road on the 26th August last year when I picked up a collection of Morse DVD's for £15, a good buy but coming in two presentation cardboard boxes with which I was not very happy.

But first, before I could do anything about that, one of the DVDs went missing, perhaps falling foul of a nocturnal excursion of the vacuum cleaner. So not only was one of the DVDs a misfit, not from the uniform edition, another one was actually missing. So earlier this year I got around to ebay and was able to purchase a replacement for the sum of 99p, which was not bad as the vendor had to find some packaging and stump up £3.40p for postage.

So then I moved onto to the matter of the box and came up with that illustrated. The bottom is a substantial if rather damaged piece of an oak bookcase from north London, the two ends are rather less damaged oak from a bookcase from Cambridge and the sides started life in some flat pack or other, exactly which flat pack being lost to oblivion. My mother would not have been pleased to think that her upstairs personal bookcase (the downstairs bookcase was more or less devoted to my father's books) housing such treasures as the works of Aldous Huxley (an important person in her young woman hood) had now been dismantled to serve this present purpose.

I thought that stain & varnish were needed to make the box look a little less DIY. Turned up and applied some 'Jacobean Dark Oak' stain which I thought was very Oxford College and should do very well. Then turned to the half empty tin of diamond hard floor varnish, to find that while not diamond hard it was very sticky, pretty much the texture of a packet jelly, the sort that one used to break up and use as sweets as a child. Not at all keen on buying new varnish so, instead, I added about half a pint of white spirit and half a pint of linseed oil, gave it a stir and after a couple of days the stuff seemed fine, with the result illustrated. The only irritant being the way the camera has picked up and highlighted the flaw in the varnish upper left: not nearly as bad as it looks here in real life. Time will tell whether the lubricating additions have really worked.

Penultimate step was to put box corners on, to stop the plywood sides pulling away with time and scuffs. First stop was the generally useful hardware store at Stoneleigh Broadway, but failing there pushed onto Ace Mica hardware opposite Amen Corner in Tooting (http://www.acemica.co.uk/) where I got them last time they were wanted for trestle tables - see July 11th 2011 in the other place. As it turned out, in the interval, they had stopped selling conventional box corners but the helpful assistant rummages around and turned up with those that can be seen above. I don't think that they are intended for this purpose, but for this particular box I think that they do better; a size and shape more in keeping with the look of the thing, less fussy. So, a result, well worth the trip, even if the wine bar opposite was firmly shut and I was unable to reprise their fine Austrian white.

The ultimate step is still pending, but BH has been tasked with finding some tasteful furnishing cord or rope to replace the sisal handle. The sort of thing that can be bought in John Lewis at Kingston, or the haberdashery in Epsom High Street, but which will probably be sourced from the bottom of some cupboard or other. Maybe even the roof.

In the meantime, I shall ponder about replacing the offending misfit and at 99p it is tempting. I could then move onto a spreadsheet to track our use of  the Morsoleum and take bets on the lifetime maximum viewing of any one episode - given that, without having kept count, I should think some of them are at 5 already if we include regular freeview viewings.

Recommendation

Just come across some interesting reading at http://divinemusings.blogspot.co.uk/. A lady with an interesting play on her name, who is a serious Christian and who has as her profile picture what appears to be her with a large gun. Although it may not be, her profile revealing neither her age or her hair colour - while it does reveal that she is a Texan.

Dyrham Park

The National Trust has taken to sending us begging letters asking us to support this or that special appeal, which is fair enough. We are members and I not mind them passing the begging bowl around from time to time. But the latest one did catch my eye and not in the way intended. It was asking us to support the future of somewhere called Dyrham Park, of which I had not previously heard and a bank instruction was attached for our convenience - and it was this last which caught my eye, suggesting that we gift £95, £110, £115 or other. How did they come to think that suggesting these rather odd amounts would pull in the lucre? Was the idea to plant in our minds the idea that some amount around the £100 mark would be acceptable? Whatever, the effect on me was rather off-putting, it reading rather like an instruction to donate that sort of amount; I was not being offered a real choice in the way that such letters more usually do.

So no donation on this occasion.

I am also led to wonder about the capacity of the country for such places. Much ink is spilt on the right number of large shops - for which we may now have actually reached saturation point, with the large operators like Sainsbury's and their like, actually starting to slow down their building programmes - but not so much is spilt on the right number of stately homes, for which the National Trust is something of a monopoly provider. But I do recall a National Trust rule which says that each of their properties has to be self sustaining with no cross subsidies from the successful ones to the not so successful ones, a rule which goes some way to mitigate any untoward effects of their monopoly.

I don't know whether the rule extends to a property being allowed to go under if it does not cut the mustard; I have never heard of such a thing. And what about the deed which conveyed the thing to the Trust in the first place: does that allow of disposal to a third party (a golf course? See 6th January) or are they lumbered with it, given that they accepted it in the first place, in perpetuity? Is there any room for changing their minds? For allowing that they made a mistake?

PS: being picky, the phrase on the instruction 'vital work' also irritates. It is not as if we are erecting flood defenses at Chertsey, we are preserving just another stately pile. Just another curiously attractive relic of the unequal past as we sail into an increasingly unequal future, not exactly a vital organ.

Shurl

The book I mentioned on 13th February about Shirley Temple has now arrived and been read, being designed to be read in the course of a commute. A handy, painless way to get what you need to know about Shirley Temple, very much to my mind, a sentiment of the US, where they are always on the lookout for the golden road to learning or to riches. And to be fair to them, the thing works and you do get the basics in short order, although, in my case, I am left wanting a bit more.

An unusual book in that it appears to have been produced with a kindle in mind, with the layout and pictures well suited to that medium (of which more in a day or so). A booklet rather than a book and mine was actually printed off by Amazon at Marston Gate, a place which houses hubs for both Amazon and FedEx, a place which appears from Google to be a large collection of sheds just off Junction 13 of the M1 and which is rather improbably called 'Badger's Rise'. Perhaps someone involved in building the sheds had seen too much of 'Midsomer Murders'.

The booklet is published by 'Charles Rivers Editors', an outfit which according to their blurb is 'a digital publishing company that creates compelling, educational content. In addition to publishing original titles, we help clients create traditional and media-enhanced books'. Very thick with Amazon amongst others and named for the Charles River in  Massachusetts.

Interestingly, there are two rather different looking publishing websites which use the river name, one at http://www.charlesrivereditors.com/ and the other at http://www.charlesriverpress.com/, and while they both offer ebooks, as far as I can tell they are not connected, with the latter involving at least one attractive Ukrainian lady and being quite heavily into erotica. Furthermore, the latter is into authors, while the former is not. While the Shirley Temple book reads like something from a media studies journal, I can find no author, despite including references which do. All rather odd and one can only suppose that the author was content - perhaps even glad - to hand over all rights to his or her publisher.

But the main thing is that I do now know rather more about Shirley Temple than I did, including the fact that while any piece of classical music in the repertoire that you care to name can usually be found for free on YouTube, the same trick does not work for Shirley Temple. There seems to be the odd freebie but essentially you have to pay to view, at least unless you are a lot better versed in such matters than I am.

She was the greatest child star of all time, being succeeded but not outshone by Judy Garland, being born into the right sort of family at the right sort of time in the right sort of place - that is to say into a comfortably off family living in Santa Monica in California at the height of the Great Depression just as Hollywood, talkies and musicals were taking off. Started stage school at the age of 3, a huge star between the ages of say 6 and 12, followed by an interval at a regular (if exclusive) school and with something of a comeback as a young woman, after which her screen career dwindled to a close on television. Her films were successful but not well regarded by the high brows and beards of the industry, successful because they offered a sugary version of triumphant success against the odds. Successful also because she was indeed a very cute, bubbly and lovable person in a way which translated from life onto screen. Much of her audience was made up of adult males whose interest, subconsciously or not, was probably not all that pure. It is ironic if not that odd that the same country which produces scantily dressed female infants as film stars should also produce tidal waves of paranoia about child sex.

She was also able and energetic, being able to cope with learning lines before she could read and with twelve hour days while still a child.

I learn that she did indeed make a very successful transition to an adult, becoming wife (her second marriage working fine), mother and something of a diplomat, doing several stints as an ambassador. Not to first rank countries but not to islands you have never heard of either. But the booklet is a bit thin on the psychological details of how exactly she pulled it off. Maybe the fact that her life as a star was tidily encapsulated in her young girlhood meant that she could grow out of it. Maybe it was the fact that most of her considerable earnings evaporated while she was still young. Would her autobiography be an interesting read? Maybe I shall look out for a copy during the coming season's car booters.

PS 1: I learn also that the cinemas of the time were regarded by some as dens of ill repute, if not iniquity, mainly patronised by young people who wanted more to paw each other in the dark, away from the prying eyes of their elders and betters, than to watch the film. The family friendly films including if not starring Shirley Temple were part of a conscious effort by the industry to clean up its act and tap into more serious money.

PS 2: plus I think that the booklet was the source for the obituary in whatever paper I read on the relevant day. It includes all the material, including the natty little anecdotes and quotes.

Tweet, tweet

I may have seen a pair of goldfinches in our back garden this morning. Only a glimpse really, of one of them in flight from above. Perhaps I need to spend the rest of the day at the window, poised (or perhaps it should be posed) with bins in hand.

To judge from the reports in the other place of May 1st 2012 and April 28th 2010, a biennial event, this year more than two months early.

Fleuve

A pick-me-up from somewhere or other, I have had the thing for so long I forget where, but it does appear to have once been in the keep of one Irvine who writes in a poor hand in capitals, it was first published in 1942 during the occupation, and, although it is old enough not to contain a date of printing, I doubt whether my copy is a first edition. Unlikely to be of any real value.

It has been lying around for a long time, it taking a long time to get into. A tale of a young man from a mountain hamlet in the east of France. A tale in which the course of the river, which has its source above said hamlet down towards the sea, is woven into a few years of the life of the young man. As befits a novel from the milieux of between the wars, much talk of life forces, rising sap and such like. The first volume of four.

I was a little lazy about using the dictionary, but what we have is the first three loves of the young man. First, his childhood sweetheart, a decent but dull girl from the hamlet, whom he dumps. Second, the good looking girl whom he marries, who is everything the sweetheart is not, but at heart a nasty, selfish piece of works who divorces him in favour of someone with more money. Third, the wise older woman, who happens to have a bit of money and who makes the hero her estate manager. Then war breaks out and it all comes to an abrupt end and the scene is set for the next book in line. All in all, a bit of a pot boiler, but, I think, taking a more serious interest in relationships than an equivalent English novel from the same time.

Then I get to take a peek in Amazon to see if I can get an English version for BH, it being nice to be talking off the same page from time to time. To find that while the book is alive and well and the author gets translated into mostly German, some Spanish and some Dutch, no English - so that was no go.

Then I take a peek in Wikipedia to be surprised to find that Thyde Monnier is the nom de plume of a woman, very much a contemporary of our own Aldous Huxley, and a sometime fellow resident of the south of France, although there is no entry for her in my biography of him (the Sybille Bedford one). This may well account for the sympathetic account of the love of an older woman (50ish) for a young man (25ish).

But then I find http://thyde.monnier.pagesperso-orange.fr/ where I read in the biography section that she herself had taken a young lover, when she was past 50, some years before she wrote 'Fleuve'. I shall now have to read this latest find more carefully. Someone has taken a lot of trouble to write her up.

Hampton Court

Being the first bright sunny day for a bit, off to Hampton Court to see how the bulbs are getting on.

Snowdrops, winter aconites and crocuses out, daffodils just starting to flower with lots more to come. Tulips just starting. Fat fish all present and correct in the round pond in the privy garden. Quite a lot a bits of tree lying around after the wind, nothing very large and the gardeners were busily clearing up.

River high and fast with some minor flooding, although the Palace looked safe enough. For once, the Lumia could not cope with the bright sunlight and over compensated in the view above. Size of the river about right but it looked a lot more bright and cheerful in real life than it does here.

Off the 'Five at the Bridge' for tea and cake, in my case rock cakes, a little dry but entirely eatable. The café was doing well and was nearly full, for once with people mainly younger than ourselves. But, irritatingly, I have failed to find any clear record of our previous visits, of which there have been several, a search not helped by my usually getting muddled up between the various offerings on Bridge Street. Closed the outing with a quick visit to Lancelot's to pick up two different sorts of gewurztraminer, neither being the same, or as dear as the last one we had from him. We will see if they are as good.

Or almost closed it, as we had fun getting out of the Hampton Court Station Car Park, the far end of which has been taken over by builders, without anyone thinking to make sure that one could still get out by driving clockwise, that is to say by sticking cones in a couple of the median parking slots. Much confusion and waiting as a result. But good humoured; no-one resorted to honking let alone shouting.

PS: on reflection, maybe the size of the river was a bit OTT. Maybe the product of having a very small lens very close to whatever passes for film in a camera in a telephone. Maybe the relevant geek-speak is very short focal length,

Four films

Heat (1995)

A freeview offering, watched for Al Pacino. Managed about half of it before deciding that it was all too nihilistic. A well made affair, but far too much a glorification of cold blooded killing. Glorification of violent crime. FIL, who had spent some years in field operating theatres during the second war, used to say 'I have seen quite enough mangled bodies for real, no need to see any more on telly'. In my case it is maybe just age: old enough for real ailments to take the fun out of fake death and too old to have much aggression left to need stimulation.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Another freeview offering, watched because I had once owned and more than once enjoyed the book, ditto the television series. Managed about half before giving up. Somehow it just managed to irritate, having become more a costume drama than a thriller. While, having joined the civil service not long after the story was set, I had enjoyed the portraits of civil service life both in the book and in the series, in the film the portrait seemed to have morphed into a costume drama with too much emphasis on the costume and not enough on the drama. Another well made affair, but did nothing for me. Maybe, as with 'Heat', better suited to a younger audience than me.

Miss Congeniality (2000)

And another freeview offering, watched because we had previously seen Sandra Bullock disporting herself in 'Gravity' (see 12th December). Another take on the the love-hate relationship that the US has with beauty pageants and beauty queens. Another take on the 'Pygmalion' yarn. Entertaining twaddle and we made it all the way through. Perhaps we will get onto Morecambe and Wise yet.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

The only one of the four paid for, prompted by Amazon, the buying of Amarcord (vide supra) having made them think, rightly on this occasion, that I was a good punt for this one. Not bad for an old film which had been dubbed from the Italian. A thin plot about bicycles, providing a frame on which to hang a series of vignettes about life in Rome shortly after the second war. Moderately entertaining and we managed it all the way through, if perhaps not living up to what it said on the tin about it being the best foreign language film ever.

Nature notes

Back in the real world, the bright and breezy morning called for a Horton Clockwise, where there was one handsome heron flapping its way across the edge of the Country Park and the first few celandines in the verge along the west side of Horton Lane. What looked like one small tree down in the Longmead Road with the adjacent stream a good bit lower than it had been the previous afternoon, on the way back from the Neapolitan Kitchen (http://www.theneapolitankitchen.co.uk/), our Valentine lunch spot.

Navarra

Last Saturday off to Dorking Halls, for the first time for a while, to hear, for the first time, the Navarra String Quartet. They have, we were told, been at the Halls before but no record of it that I can find here or in the other place. But then, we did not go at all last year, the string quartet component of the programme being missing or failing to attract, and the year before that we were a bit preoccupied with other matters. But we learn now that the Navarra have been around for around a decade, like to be photographed on what looks like Dungeness and also perform, or at least are to perform tomorrow, at St. Luke's.

So on Saturday we had Mozart String Quartet No.1 in G major, K80, written at the age of 14. This went down well enough, despite the scarily early age. Must be a dangerous business being that good at that age, although we were interested to read just yesterday about how Shirley Temple survived being a child star at 6, going on to what looked like a normal and successful life as an adult. Unfortunately the obits. we saw were a bit vague about how she pulled this off, beyond marrying a successful businessman, which one assumes steadied her down a bit.

(Having thus prompted myself, I am about to be the owner of a paper book published by an outfit called http://www.charlesrivereditors.com/, better known, it seems, as a publisher of electric books. I was off the case enough to mistake the name for that of a person, with the way the thing is presented in Amazon being some excuse, but I shall report back on what I get in due course).

Rather to my surprise, rather disappointed by Borodin's second string quartet. Not sure whether I was off form or they were, but whatever it was it did not seem to hang together, to go anywhere.

But no such problem with the last piece after the interval, Beethoven String Quartet No. 10 Op. 74, known as the harp and which we last heard, almost exactly a year ago from the Endellion at the Wigmore Hall (see 16th February 2013). And as it happens, on that occasion it disappointed, but on this occasion it went down really well. Left the Borodin well down the field.

Back along the A24, through the Mole Gap, alongside the rather swollen Mole to find that the Burford Bridge Hotel was being refurbished and would be shut until the Autumn, so no toasted tea cakes for us. We learned afterwards that the place was flooded by the Mole on Christmas Eve just past. There are pictures of the scene from the BBC, but we knew nothing of it at the time.

Instead, we thought to give the rather grand looking Holiday Inn in the car park of the Chessington World of Adventures a try, last visited on or about January 9th 2009 (see the other place). Where they were unable to do tea and toasted tea cake, but the bar was able to do tea with two portions of small warm donuts served with a sort of chocolate custard. Pleasantly served and the donuts went down better than they sound; perhaps we were hungry. The clientèle on this late Saturday afternoon was thin in number and rather like that of the nearby Horton Golf Club (of Jungle Island fame, see 22nd August and 29th December). Locals, rather than guests, who find the place a handy substitute for a pub, rather as they find the nearby BP petrol station a handy substitute for a shop, and who use the place to watch the footer. We took the opportunity to inspect the Jungle Restaurant and its menu, to find it a bit thin too. More or less standard Holiday Inn fare dressed in vaguely African clothes, despite being equipped with the latest thing in island kitchens. It looked to be directed at customers for the World of Adventures rather than at people with business or at conferences (there was a conference suite), and might well be rather dull on a winter lunchtime, which was when we were thinking of giving it a go. So we sha'n't. But I still like the way the place has been dressed up, with the vaguely African clothes suiting the décor better than the menu.

An important bath

Rather a dull number of NYRB (Vol. 61 No. 3) last week, but there was a piece about a chap who spends a lot of time trying to recover the ancient journey of Heracles from Gibraltar to Turin. All rather odd, but along the way we get to know about the famous Bath of Bibracte, in the middle of the important Celtic town of the same name and quite near the site of an important battle which marked the beginning of the end of the Celts as a major power.

The bath, roughly 10m by 3m, despite being flatter at one end than the other, has been carefully constructed on Pythagorean lines, to a rather higher standard than might be expected of Celts and with the additional property that the short axis is aimed, to within a degree or so, at the Winter Solstice sunrise. It seems that the Celts got very windy about the time of Winter Solstice, windy that the sun might carry on south leaving them in an everlasting winter, a windiness no doubt exploited by the priests of the day. In any event, the turnaround was celebrated in fine style.

Sadly, we do not know exactly what part the bath played in these celebrations, although given the central heating arrangements of the time, it would have been rather a cold bath at the time of the winter solstice.

The other important event of the day is the closure of TB in Manor green Road for some kind of refurbishment, perhaps the fourth in the 25 or so years we have known the place. In that time there has been little change in the clientèle beyond the natural turnover one would expect over that sort of period and one wonders whether all the money spent on paint - it must be a million or more at today's prices - might have been better spent on keeping better beer at better prices - real ale not being one of the establishment's strong points, although, to be fair, things on that front have got better over the last year or so.

My own view, probably aired here before, is that the considerable building and site should be cleared to make way for a tasteful block of much needed flats, with a bar on the ground floor. A bar of a size better suited to the the size of any likely clientèle than the rather large building we have now, dating as it does from the long gone hey-day of suburban pubs. All of which might have been nicely incorporated into the recent redevelopment of the next door parade of shops, but with at least two and probably three players involved, that was too much to hope for. Partly also because town planners, who probably never use the places, seem to be very against the redevelopment of unprofitable pubs.

On Gerald the giraffe

There has been quite a lot of cover of the disposal of a giraffe by Copenhagen Zoo (see http://zoo.dk/BesogZoo.aspx or if you lack Danish http://uk.zoo.dk/VisitZoo.aspx), with full page coverage in both the DT and the Guardian, plus a piece by the venerable Mary Warnock in the latter. An oddly tentative piece for a newspaper, but a tentivity which catches my own feeling on the matter quite well.

My first objection is to the use of the word 'euthanase' for the slaughter of a young male animal. I grant that the OED makes no mention of age or illness in its article about the word, but in common usage the word is restricted to the old and infirm, is not used for the healthy. In this context, a euphemism for slaughter - while at the same time claiming that the slaughter helps us to a more healthy understanding of both life and death. Which it may well do, at least for the relatively small number of people present.

My second is that a giraffe is a sentient being, built on much the same lines as ourselves. It is conscious, although perhaps not in such a full blooded way as a normal human being. It can feel pain and may well feel other things like emotions. I once read a convincing account of the emotional life of cats and I see no reason why that of giraffes should be any poorer. We have no business bringing such an animal into the world, particularly such a large and beautiful animal, only to kill it. The fact that it then got fed to the lions, much as cows get fed to us, is, I think, beside the point. The feeding of the lions is secondary, what is primary is our desire to maintain a population of giraffes in zoos. Dressed up as a worthy desire to preserve diversity but really a desire to make a display for us humans. One should have a better reason for doing such a thing.

My third is that the zoo chose to make a public display of the slaughter and subsequent dissection of the giraffe. This may have made, as noted above, for the healthy understanding of the few, but did little for the dignity and comfort of the giraffe. Not so different from the circus displays of St. Perpetua's time in Carthage (see 10th January).

Mr fourth is that there is quite enough ugliness in the world without the wanton destruction of beauty. I would probably get just as steamed up about the destruction of a large and beautiful tree as that of a large and beautiful animal. In rather the same way I was saddened on our last visit to the Lake District by the extent of the spoil heaps from mines, which were spoiling indeed.

So where I end up is that if the giraffe really was surplus to requirements, it was OK to kill it, but it should have been done quietly and privately. And it would have been even better had it been aborted or killed at birth - the position on its genes being available at that point. No need to wait until the animal is alive, well and fully conscious to kill it. Better still, not conceived in the first place.

But I am not sure where all this takes me if one turns to nature reserves, where nature is encouraged to take its course as if it were the real thing and where the lions do the whole business, with no regard for giraffe welfare or dignity. So tentivity does indeed rule and one more thing to ponder about as one falls asleep on the train.

Lobster reprise

Back to Marylebone last week to try out the newly discovered Duke's Hall, having in the meantime discovered that Marylebone is named for St Mary on the burn, the burn in question being the Tyburn of execution fame.

Back at the starting line at Epsom Station, not a tweet in sight, despite there being a lot of tweeting. But we did get a very turgid message over the PA system about how the reduced track availability which had been caused by a broken down train at Balham earlier in the morning was knocking on through the rest of the morning and that all trains involving Victoria from south and south west London were apt to be delayed.

Having learned from a Bullingdon man at Waterloo that one usage had near doubled during the crow strike, taking it to the highest levels since records began and two there was a proper way to take a Bullingdon out of its stand, which might explain my wrist wrenching experiences over the months, I decided on the soft option, avoiding Hyde Park Corner, and using the route up Tottenham Court Road, contriving to get slightly lost in the vicinity of the British Museum, but making it from Waterloo Station 1 to Beaumont Street within the cheap, first half hour slot. No Market Café and no bacon sandwiches in the way of St. Luke's, so had to settle for a very natty bowl of couscous salad from the café in the Conran shop, taken right under where the red lobster had been just a few weeks before (see 20th January).

And so to the rather splendidly redecorated Duke's Hall, a bit smaller and I would think a bit older than the Wigmore Hall, including inter alia a lot of portraits and a splendid looking new organ, this last helped along by that famous RAM alumnus, one Sir Elton John. The lunch time concert was one of a series of freebies, well attended, and consisted of Mozart - Piano Quartet in G minor, K478, and Clarinet Quintet in A, K581 - given by the Eagle Trio and friends, all students at RAM (http://www.ram.ac.uk/). Very good it was too.

From there over the road to the parish church, another rather splendid place, although I did wonder what use the church got out of what must have been considerable costs and I don't think that you get a subsidy just because you own a listed building. A fine view from the porch up into Regent's Park and another fine organ inside, seemingly being used for a lesson by people from the other side of the road. There was also a memorial tablet to one Lord Teignmouth, a Persian scholar of modest origins, governor-general of India, first president of the British and Foreign Bible Society and, despite being  in the Irish peerage rather than the English peerage, there was a connection through his wife with the Teignmouth in Devon where BH went to school (when the line through Dawlish was up and running, which it was most of the time).

Home via Tooting where I learned that one of the many advantages of modern mobile phones is that they can do a decent job of displaying exotic scripts such as Persian, although I did not get as far as finding out whether support for same extended to using them for text messages. Bad game of aeroplanes at Earlsfield where the best I could manage was a couple of bad twos, despite a bright and clear, early evening sky.

Supper consisted of the lentils and rice featured on 7th February, and about which I have now logged a query with the customer service people at our local Waitrose. We shall see what, if anything, they come up with, but in the meantime I bought some more of their red lentils to show that there were no hard feelings in the matter. But no discount for my 'My Waitrose' card either.

PS: just found a new toy, possibly new with Windows 8, called 'character map', a much easier place to fetch accented letters from than doing a Google search for a suitable Wikipedia entry. The map looks to include at least some Arabic and Hebrew letters, letters which survive being copied here via Notepad, this last being my conduit for such. For example the Arabic 'ﯓ'. A surprise, as I thought the whole point of Notepad was that it stripped out anything other than the basic 256 member character set, useful for getting rid of unwanted formatting characters when moving stuff about, but which, while including the various odd characters used in western and northern Europe, does not include anything Asian or Oriental, and certainly not Persian (vide supra). Clearly my knowledge of such matters is getting a bit rusty.

Banging on

Back on 25th November I was banging on a bit about the skateboard park refurb. in Long Grove Park and all that hard earned taxpayer money being spent on it.

Today, in a pause between the showers, we thought it time for an inspection. And yes, the turfs on the new banks had slipped down a bit, although all the rain seemed to have helped push the grass up. All looking bright & bushy tailed and it looks as if the gaps will be hidden before too long.

But more important, we climbed up onto the thing to be rather impressed. No-one using it, but it looked, to the senior eye, like the cat's whiskers of the skateboard park world, with no movement to be seen after all the rain and with the top edges nicely finished off with some kind of tubing to stop the edges being chipped off, a skateboard park version of the spiky metal strips used to protect the corners of domestic plaster. Not sure how the drains worked, but they clearly did as the thing had not converted itself into a swimming pool. Not sure either that I would have had the nerve to use the thing in the way intended when I was of the right age - but very sure that I do not have now!

We shall be back to see how much use the thing gets - and to make sure that someone finishes tidying up the surrounds a bit. Maybe a few decorative plants. Maybe to the extent of giving the presently rough bits of ground around a bit of a rake in time for it all to grass over nicely in the spring. Did the council sign the thing off without getting the contractor to tidy up properly?

DIY

Somebody else's DIY in this case, 50p in some car booter or other and having done good service as a container for packets of aspirin and such like since.

Suspected of being a metalwork project at a school before DT was invented. Much TLC gone into a reasonably useless object which was then presented to doting parents and quietly disposed of after a decent interval, after the sprog in question had left home.

Made of aluminium wire, sheet and tube, with a tricky bit at the base where all the strands come together, rather in the way that they do at the toe of a sock. The sort of thing that the beards might drool over had it been pulled out of some excavation of an ancient burial. Vital evidence of the dispersion of aluminium smelting skills across the northern Europe in the second millennium before the coming of the Lord. Forces a complete rethink of all our theories to date.

As it is, about to be transmitted to the waste transfer site, for onward transmission to the smelter, where it will serve to pollute the majority steel. I can't see them sorting it all out beforehand.

The film of the restaurant

Yesterday saw the second haggis of the season, boiled rather than steamed which meant that it was a bit damper than last time, which was good, and served for lunch with mashed potato, swede and gewürztraminer from Waitrose, who have clearly worked out that I am going to buy the stuff from them anyway and give me no discount on my 'My Waitrose' card. On the other hand, I got through the self checkout with just the one assistance from an assistant, the mandatory one to do with my age.

Followed by poacher cheese, matso crackers, pink apple and whte port, this last from Luzo Wine on or around 8th November and which we have only just got around to trying. Rather like a sweet pale sherry, rather good. Perhaps it is a sweet pale sherry but they can't call it that as it does not come from Sherryland. Whatever it is, the Ferreiras have been doing in since 1751 and we read afterwards that it has an 'appealing yellow-straw hue and a fresh but intense aroma, with attractive floral and fruit tones'. I suppose we might have got there under our own steam eventually.

Having done this lot it was clearly time, just to show our age, for a bit of afternoon telly, in the form of the film of the restaurant (see 28th January), freshly wrapped from Amazon and described as the best foreign language film, presumably of the year in which it was made, 1974. And according to Wikipedia it, that is to say 'Amarcord', was the last of Fellini's films which was commercially successful, which may well be so, but it passed me by. To the point where I am not sure that I have ever seen a Fellini film before, in a cinema or anywhere else; clearly a misspent youth.

An odd film, well made and very arty, arty to the point that there is not much narrative or plot and the thing jumps about like nobody's business. On the other hand, not arty to the point that there was much naked flesh on view although there was quite a lot of the wrapped variety. And fetching as a rather sentimental portrait of a small Italian town on the seaside before the second war, in the days of the Fascists and of Mussolini. A wonderful scene involving a ridiculously giant head of the Duce. Another involving the passage of a huge lighted liner at night, the Duce's pride and joy. An odd scene in a building site on the beach, which mainly got me to wondering about foundations. But a good watch and having now read all about it in Wikipedia, we are primed to watch it again.

Or perhaps the next step should be a review of the near contemporary 'The Godfather', the accents from which seem to have informed the dubbing of the present film.

Invasion of privacy

We managed to lose our program for 'Donkeys' Years' (see previous post) but we did manage to retain this pick-me-up. Not sure what it was a relic from, given that we were at the first performance. Were we mistaken and there was a matinée first? Was the theatre used for community action rather than rehearsals in the afternoons? But closer perusal suggests it may have been the notes of someone who was watching the show, perhaps a stage management person with an interest in props.

But this morning's ponder is about the propriety of publishing someone else's scribbles. I guess a simple position is that one should not. A gentlemen does not read someone else's letter, which he comes across, open and unguarded, by accident.

On the other hand, I do not think one can work out who it was, at least in terms of name and address, from what we have got here. There were a couple of telephone numbers, and even though I think that they were probably the land-line and mobile numbers for a shop up north, I have pasted them out. Could a forensic geek recover the numbers? In any event, it is unlikely that the author or anyone who knows the author is going to come across the post. So I think it unlikely that publication in this way will cause any harm or hurt.

Which reminds me of the way in which one can have quite intimate conversations with people one bumps into on, say trains, on the basis that it is most unlikely that one will ever meet them again. Or the way in which people who you do know who have dumped on one, perhaps in the context of a bereavement, tend to avoid one afterwards. One knows too much for it to be comfortable any more. A bit too much like using the same pub as one's shrink. Maybe relaxed Californians would be up for it, but I am not.

Also of the legality that, once you put your dustbin on the pavement, everything in it becomes the property of the local council, or their agents. So if you pop the crown jewels in a dustbin to keep them safe from burglars but forget to take them out before you put the dustbins out and, then, someone rootling around in your dustbin - perhaps a sleuth in the employ of News Corporation - finds them, it is, strictly speaking, a case of finders keepers. But in the case of News Corporation one might hope that good manners would prevail. All of which reminds me that when I was at LSE, the rebel students had an ally in the form of a porter who rootled around in the waste paper bins of senior staff in search of juicy tit-bits, but that is an entirely different matter as waste paper bins and their contents are the property of whoever manages the offices, in this case LSE itself. Might have been a different matter if outsourcing had been invented at that time.

Donkey time

On Thursday to the opening night of 'Donkeys' Years' at the Rose at Kingston.

Parked in sector 9 of the Rose Car Park, remembering to buy our evening long stay ticket on the way out. Of which more in due course.

Interested to find that the Swallow Bakery have taken over the bar, although we were not moved to try their cakes on this occasion. And not so impressed by one of their advertisements which suggested that there should be music in the bar, in the form of a piano and a saxophone, with speakers, which last addition one might have thought over the top with noisy instruments of this sort in a confined space. But then, we have had our fill of this sort of thing at the QEH.

Stalls more or less full, dress and upper circle more or less empty. Good mix of ages in the audience, including some young people to leaven the grey hairs (or lack of hairs) who dominate cultural events, at least the sort that we go to. Front of house volunteers nicely done up in academic gowns with a bright blue stripe signifying a Master's degree from nearby Kingston University. Perhaps I should tell them that the colours of our Epsom University of Creation might have been more appropriate (see http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/epsom).

Show good, but I thought it should have been done a little more briskly, perhaps getting it down from 120 minutes running time to a 90 minutes. Fine performance by Keith Barron of a middle aged person with a back problem trying to get his trousers on; a performance which touched many a chord in the audience, yours truly included.

For the second scene, the cast were provided with large cigars so that they could avail themselves of the quaint exemption in the smoking regulations which permits smoking on stage when the art requires it, similar to the exemption for otherwise obscene acts. But they were very half-hearted about, just taking the odd token puff. I don't think that they could have been real smokers at all, despite the warning notices about smoke posted at the entrance to the auditorium.

Jemma Redgrave, one of the fourth generation of luvvy Redgraves, was provided with a very heritage bicycle, rather like the one I was bought as a child to cycle to school on. Saddle with springs, fully enclosed chain, wicker basket, Sturmey Archer gears (http://www.sturmey-archer.com/), hub dynamo supported by batteries in a frame mounted tube, caliper brakes, green paint, the works. I can't remember whether the batteries were rechargeable, it seems a bit unlikely all those years ago.

Back to the car park in the rain to walk nonchalantly past the long queue of theatre goers who had not bothered to buy an advance ticket and so home to a spot of Jameson's twelve year old.

PS: I have just remembered about the oddness of being obscene on stage, given that obscene means, in the original Greek, off stage.

Candid camera

From time to time I mention the dead fly problem with lentils, a problem which has been absent for a while but which surfaced again yesterday, in a packet of Ontarian red lentils from Waitrose, slightly past their sell by date. Which I know, clearly having had a premonition, because on this occasion I preserved the bag when tipping the contents into the anonymous lentil jar.

The dish illustrated was originally confected on Wednesday, mainly from red lentils and white rice, on which occasion not a dead fly to be seen. But reheating the penultimate portion in the micowave for yesterday's supper, the dead flies emerged.

Out with the Lumia, with this result. I have still to learn how to tell it to do close ups but, notwithstanding, a dead fly is caught in the act, just above the red lump (tomato). Click to enlarge for the full monty.

I have tried customer services at both Tesco's and Sainsbury's to be politely fobbed off in one way or another, only getting my 72p or whatever refunded for my trouble. So shall I trouble to trouble the large new customer service desk at Waitrose? Would a busy Saturday be a better time to try than a quiet Monday?

PS: picking up yesterday's post about colours, the confection's container was a green Berylware soup bowl, not a blue one. The other colours are better. Do not be confused by http://www.berylware.com/.

A lucky break

I happened to pick up a book about colour at an Epsom Library sale last week, a book which I imagine was intended to be used by and with art students who are not expected to be either scientific or mathematical, so from that point of view accessible. 'The Basic Law of Colour Theory' by one Harald Küppers, with the title living up to the caricature of a bossy German.

Notwithstanding, a well used book including several pages of library stamps, including one from Tower Hamlets, presumably a special request from some lonely art student there.

But I share two facts which dispel for me two misunderstandings of long standing.

First, the colours of the rainbow are not exhaustive. They include the basic blue, green & red and they include between blue & green and between green & red. But they do not include between blue & red, these two being on opposite sides of the rainbow. So to get magenta you have to do something else. A corollary being being that you cannot arrange all the colours there are in a nice neat line, at the very least you need to join the two ends up to make a loop.

Second, three colour printing is clever but is never going to be the real thing. Clever, because it uses the three colour machinery of the eye to trick it - the eye that is - into thinking that it is seeing lots of nice colours. But it is never going to be the real thing because what the eye gets is the ambient light reflected off the bit of colour in question, and so what the eye gets and what you think you are seeing is as much a function of the ambient light - which varies a good deal from time to time and from place to place - as a function of whatever it is you are looking at.

Which boils down to the fact that a reproduction of a painting in a book is only going to be colour-right when you are looking at the book in the sort of ambient light at which its reproductions were aimed. Which goes a long way towards explaining why the reproductions in the books of the shows that I buy from time to time have been so disappointing.

A variation of the problem of lighting art galleries in such a way as to bring out the pictures in the way intended by the artist.

And the next problem is to think about how all this works with televisions which work by emitting rather than by reflecting light. And what about films? Has a lot of brain power gone into designing the lamps which generate the light to be projected through film and eventually into your eyes?

Le Noël d'Hercule Poirot

A little while before Christmas we had the Christmas Poirot (one of the Christmas Poirots?) - Hercule Poirot's Christmas - on ITV3. This prompted the thought that since BH has read the original, I ought to buy myself a copy of the French translation as a Christmas present for myself, which I did. But, the French Amazon not being quite up to the standard of its British cousin, the book did not arrive until early in the New Year, by which time I had forgotten a lot of the television adaptation. But another call to Amazon and we now have all three versions: English, French and television.

The television adaptation has made some important changes to the plot, most importantly to give the villain Sugden a South African rather than a Middleshire birth. This allows the adaptation to introduce some opening scenes on the veldt, giving the thing a bit of exotic colour, promoting his father from lovable to murderous rogue, adding a vengeful, special needs mother and generally providing Sugden with a more credible motive than the one supplied by Agatha. Other changes including cutting down the number of brothers and half brothers from six to four and replacing the Chief Constable Colonel Johnson by Chief Inspector Japp, this last in deference to the rule that consumers of television series like the same core characters to appear in every episode. Lots of loving heritage detail added in the form of trains, village pubs, village tea shops, village churches, choirs and the singing of Christmas carols.

Some of the details are added to colour things up a bit in a slightly different way - for example Poirot's leaking radiator, the special delivery of the diamonds and the box for the by-then missing diamonds turning up in the luggage of a daughter-in-law - but generally speaking, the adaptation sticks to the spirit of the original.

On the debit side, the book makes much of the business of some of the brothers sharing with their father a distinctive face, a distinctive way of laughing, a tic of stroking the jaw line with an index finger and a taste for vengeance, served cold if necessary. All this is largely lost in the adaptation, but not on Poirot, who is thereby enabled to join up some of the dots.

I find it hard to keep all this stuff in the brain at the same time, and what did make it there a few weeks ago is now fading fast. So today's thought is that Agatha and others of her ilk pitch the complexity of their yarns just beyond what the average punter can grasp. So the average punter is always grasping and not quite making it, thus keeping him or her engaged.

The French version was good fun, the product of a lady - Françoise Bouillot - who is an author in her own right as well as a translator - which confirms that the Agatha label is strong enough to command quality in the translation department. Strong presence on google if not to the extent of having her own web-site. She does well for me, translating Agatha into what reads like a smooth & accessible French which includes lots of pleasant French idioms, pleasant in the sense that it is generally quite clear what they mean but quite different from the English. I offer a few examples.

'se laisser ballotter au gré d'un coup de cafard' for the English '[he was not a boy -] to be turned this way and that by the whim of the moment'. Fairly literally, 'to let himself be shaken about by the action of some sneak' and with cafard being derived from the late Latin caphardum meaning a kind of painted cotton cloth made in India. On thin ice with this one, not really sure how one gets from one from the other.

'n'avait pas les yeux dans sa poche' for the English 'observant'.

'un de ces quatre matins' for the English 'some time or another'.

'envoyer au diable Vauvert', Vauvert being the name of a grand haunted house in the Paris of the time of the saintly King Louis. Going to this devil being used to say that one is going off to the ends of the earth, off on some ridiculous or complicated expedition. Nothing of the sort present in the English, but the addition does help give the French the general colour of the English.

'tellement bonne pâte' for the English '[you are] such a gentle soul'. Pâte being the stuff of which you make pottery, pies and miscellaneous pastes, by extension the stuff  of which you make people.

'croquemitaine' for the English 'bogy'. Literally a muncher of little girls. A word to threaten little children with.

'fair sortir Lydia de ses gonds' for the English 'never get any change out of Lydia', a rather old fashioned phrase which might be out of use. Literally, knock her off her hinges. The first few results from google refer one to this very sentence in this very book.

'un acceuil du feu de Dieu' for the English 'a grand welcome'. A more literal translation of the French phrase might be 'a thundering good welcome', thunder being one of God's fires.

'le vieux sacripant' for the English 'the old sinner'. A compound of a brave knight in a poem by Ariosto and a boaster in one by Tassoni. More generally, a rogue or a scoundrel, but in the friendly sense of the English.

'm'avait tenu tête' for the English '[if only she] had stood up to me'.

'les fenêtres à guillotine' for the English 'sash windows'. Sash being the same root as chassis and not to be confused with shash, the Arabic for muslin.

'tomber dans les pommes' for the English 'faint'. Splendid phrase and my favourite but I can't find out how it came about. Fall in the potatoes is a bit nearer the mark than fall in the apples, but still not there, not for me, anyway. Fall into the potato plants, in the sense of collapsing in the middle of a field of potatoes?

And so it goes on, there are lots more of them.