Boxed sets

The need for boxed sets seems to be drifting from the television into the concert hall where cycles of concerts which might make up a boxed set - say the complete Beethoven string quartets - are getting performed very quickly, perhaps on consecutive or alternate days, rather than doing a concert a week or a concert a month. With the result that we only make it to first of the concerts of the cycle advertised left.

But off to a good start, getting on the train at Epsom to take two of the seats for which cycles have priority, to be gently moved on by a prettily apologetic young lady and then being given a group four seats by a group of four young ladies who were getting off at Ewell West, this despite their carrying rather a lot of shopping bagged luggage. But this impression of youthful good manners was rather dissipated by a young cyclist, all togged up, who plonked himself down in front of us and proceeded to stuff his face two handed, the right hand stuffing in a rather messy sandwich and the left stuffing in the Walkers. He compounded his sin by thinking to leave his rubbish behind when he got off at Clapham Junction, but at least he had to grace to look a bit sheepish and pick it up when invited so to do.

Good mood returned when we found a steady Victoria Line service at Vauxhall: clearly not all the tube train drivers share the grab what you can get mentality of their late leader (which one could get crosser about if they had not been set such a bad example by so many bankers, chief executives and other white collar types who ought to know better). Off at Green Park to stroll up to Wigmore Hall, taking in an apéritif - in the form of a light white, a Tuffolo Cortese Piemonte from 2012 - at the 'Running Horse' in Davies Street where we puzzled about the reason for four middle aged gents being done up so early in penguin suits. Were they valets from the nearby Clariges? Or croupiers from some nearby casino? Their accents, without being posh, suggested something grander but they were not the sort of people whom one would ask.

And so to the Wigmore Hall for a nearly full house, with most of the vacancies being excused by people being put off at the last minute by the tube strike. Excellent performance, only slightly marred by the first occurrence at this venue of telephone interruptions in the first half: I counted three, with one of them being near at hand and noisy. Then there was a troublesome sweet wrapper and a programme page turner in the second half. Even at the Wigmore. But the performance of the very Russian looking young players was really very good and it was enthusiastically received.

Not sure about the next quartets in the series which we are not going to, for which Shostakovich is said to have really come off the leash of Stalin's day. In arty matters I am all for leashes: I think arty types need a straight jacket supplied by custom or by their managers or patrons to keep them on the straight and narrow; I am not keen on the florid and incomprehensible self-expressionism which is apt to result from its absence. But maybe I shall fall for a boxed set from Amazon and find out.

Lucky with tubes and trains home, making it with the help of a terminal taxi by around 2230. A reasonably clear night when we got home, with plenty of stars and other astral objects visible, something we have had quite a lot of this spring for some reason. All in all, a good evening out.

Pots

What propelled Wisley into planting out all these potted trees so late in the spring? My understanding was that one tries to do such planting over the winter, when plants are more or less dormant - although potted trees such as these will no doubt survive and eventually thrive if the warm damp weather continues.

Duckweed

The duckweed mentioned in the previous post.

Surprised at how good a job the telephone did in the uncertain light, down among the lilies.

Wisley

Yesterday to Wisley to see their fine display of rhododendrons on Battleston Hill. And when the rain came on, to see the displays in the large hot house, including on this occasion a lot of orchids.

Added to which, in a lily pond in the same hot house, they had a large tropical version of our own duckweed: under control at the moment, but does it take over from time to time, as it does in our ponds at home?

There was also a very fine display of a huge variety of tulips, a little past their best, complete with a couple of foreign sounding gents. having a very technical discussion about same. Maybe experts visiting from the Netherlands? But I associated to the clever-clogs singing of King's College Chapel and amongst the tulips on display here, thought that I preferred the simpler to the rather clever & unusual. There was another display of alpines and yet another of small flowers on small cacti & succulents; a day for miniatures.

Overall, impressed as ever by the huge variety of plant life on display. And fretted as ever by the difficulty of getting the right balance between a fancy garden and a visitor attraction. I continue to suspect the RHS of having been captured by the maximise visitor numbers approach to gardening. Rock cakes rather good, despite being rather browner than usual.

Defence spending

The US often complains that the rest of the western world does not pay its fair share of defence spending, with the US running at around 4% of GDP and the rest of us at around 2%. Their spell checkers also complain about our spelling of defence.

There is something in the first point, although it does beg the question of what we should all be spending, but it is hard to see how the rest of us are ever going to field anything like what they manage, with their single, very large country spending around one third of the total and I don't think we are quite ready to simply subscribe cash on a pro-rata basis to their defence umbrella, and leave all the dirty detail to them.

But maybe they have found a way round. À propos of the present difficulties in the Ukraine, they are proposing all kinds of soft restraints & sanctions; freezing of assets, putting logs in the way of normal trade & travel and so on and so forth. But it strikes me this morning that such restraints & sanctions are going to cost us in Europe with our much stronger links with Russia a lot more than they are going to cost the US, particularly given their newly recovered energy independence. It is also a way to have another poke at BP, still a bête noire in the US following the 2010 disaster in the Gulf. They always seem to be much happier having a pop at one of someone else's corporations, rather than one of their own, but that may just be how it seems from over here.

PS 1: struck by the amount spent by the Saudis. Perhaps a convenient way of recycling all their windfall gains from happening to be sitting on a lot of oil, but I wonder how much bang they get for their buck. Are all the air filters of all those swanky jets just full up with sand?

PS 2: I imagine that the production of comparative figures of this sort is beset with all kinds of difficulties. What counts as defence spending? How do you score large capital spends? Are some countries trying to hide what they spend in other budgets? Are the statistics of some countries more accurate than those of others?

PS 3: I got the illustration from Wikipedia and thought to check with the IISS, which turns out to have a very solemn & serious website (http://www.iiss.org/en), with a tone which reminds me of the 'Economist'. But while there are freebies, a lot of them in the form of videos, a lot of what looks like useful information is guarded by invitations to flash the plastic, which I didn't. Not a very philanthropic lot at all.

St. Sepulchre without

Some months ago, perhaps in the course of the outing reported on 20th February, a lady told us about the freebies to be had from Gresham College and since then we have been on the lookout for something suitable in their extensive programme of same, in part because of being freebies and in part because of the connection with Pepys, who records several Gresham flavoured outings. See, for example, his entry for 5th May 1699.

And so, last week we lighted on what was advertised as a lecture about Schubert's string quintet (D956), supported by a string quintet drawn from the RAM.

Reminded at Epsom Station that the laburnam was out and that it was time to visit the arch at Hampton Court, some months earlier than the visit recorded on 7th June last year. Off the train at Clapham Junction to take a bullingdon from Grant Road to Millbank House (via Battersea Park where it looked as if they had had a good show of tulips) and then from Smith Square to Bride Street, stopping rather short of the stand at Stonecutter Street at which I had been aiming. But once I was in Bride Street it seemed a bit of a palaver to get back into Farringdon Road to continue a bit further north. Up the viaduct and east to the church of St. Sepulchre without, past an oldish looking building called Gresham College, to find that I was indeed at the right place but I was a little early so had time to investigate the rather quaint Snow Hill Court left over behind the church and the rather quaint Snow Hill station of the City of London Constabulary (illustrated).

The grey hairs started to herd outside the church well before the off and we finished up with a fairly full church. Mostly grey hairs like myself but with a sprinkling of younger people and of more serious music people. The church itself, once grand, was in need of redecoration.

As it turned out the lecturer was indisposed and it had been decided to simply perform the quintet, rather than have a talk about it interspersed with musical illustrations. Although the performance was not great, I think it worked better for me than the lecture would have - but I was not sure about the old lady next to me who was clearly bored and having exhausted the slender resources of the programme provided, turned to the Holy Bible for sustenance. I associate to the old lady elector whom Prime Minister Brown had the misfortune to make a candid remark about while forgetting to turn off his microphone.

The quintet seemed to me to be rather underpowered for the rather large church, despite my sitting around 10 rows from the front and the first violin seemed to have trouble getting heard against the cellos. But it did get better as we went on and there were good passages, when the music seemed to just hang in the air, with the individual parts standing out loud and clear, while still being part of the whole. What chamber music is all about, at least for me.

Took a lunch time pause at the nearby El Vino, past another show of tulips at Rennie Garden and then took a third bullingdon from Poured Lines to South Lambeth Road. Reduced to snacking it on a sausage roll from Vauxhall Station, but at least I had the decency to stop off at Earlsfield to eat it in the privacy of the platform. Not keen on appearing in anyone's collections of people snapped eating on the train, a practice my late mother would have, in any event, deplored. And so home to be puzzled by the photo pass hanging around the neck of a young lady which proclaimed itself to be both permanent and  'AAA+'. Sadly there was no occasion to ask her what this meant: access to all areas of the building, including all those interesting place denied to the rank and file? Like getting onto the roof on the Treasury building after they realised that one could.

PS: I learn today that St. Sepulchre is one of the twelve churches whose bells used to toll you from Newgate to the gallows. Furthermore, the St. Sepulchre bellringer used to attend Newgate prison on the eve of your execution to treat you to a special hand bell concert. See http://www.st-sepulchre.org.uk/.

New livery for the Bullingdons

Spotted in London last week.

Has our mayor been quick off the mark to instruct the suppliers of his bicycles about the new livery to replace that of Barclays Bank, or is this just the result of some long planned celebration of the Tour de France visiting London?

A quick investigation reveals that something called the 'Grand Départ of the 2014 Tour de France' will start somewhere up north and finish in London, taking in Cambridge on the way. Depending where you look, the first three stages of the Tour are, contrary to what it says on the tin, taking place in England, or, alternatively, the Grand Départ is some kind of marketing wheeze stuck on the front of the Tour proper. Not interested enough to run the difference to ground.

But some of the web sites involved are quite flashy. See, for example, http://letour.yorkshire.com/.

Dead fly soup

Also known as left over soup.

4 hours BE, add 6 ounces of red lentils to four pints of water. Bring to boil and remove from heat.

Go to Waitrose to buy 8 ounces of pork tenderloin. On this occasion, very prettily wrapped by the Sunday girl, probably a pupil at Rosebery.

1 hour BE, bring the lentils back to the boil, adjust heat to simmer.

Slice the pork into 1cm cubes and add to the lentils.

Chop two medium onions and add to the growing soup. Keep an eye on the heat to keep the soup on the simmer rather than on the boil.

Chop the stalks from half a dozen button mushrooms. Halve the caps.

Take one elderly leek, remove ends and slice crosswise into four two inch cylinders. Slice the cylinders in half lengthwise.

Take a dozen large left over prawns, once frozen. Cut in half.

Take half a score of small left over boiled potatoes. Remove skins.

15 minutes BE, add the potatoes and chopped mushroom stalks to the soup.

7.5 minutes BE, add the leeks. halved mushroom caps and prawns to the soup. Continue to simmer.

At zero hour, the soup should be thin, rather more see through than translucent. Nearly a clear soup in texture if not in appearance. The potatoes and pork lumps should be soft but entire. The pork lumps and the prawn pieces should have retained their respective textures.

In the absence of white bread, we serve it with brown. But very good soup just the same. The lentils were soft but entire, with the swelling buds showing a nice yellow against the orange of the body of the lentil and with the dead flies just starting to emerge. In the illustration, 'A'  marks the place under the lentil bud from where they emerge while 'B' marks an impression of an emerged fly. in real life about 1.5mm long.

Soup followed up with a dream involving pork pies, from a place which associates vaguely to my secondary school. Episode 1 involves a pile of kindle like objects which I try to pack two to a bag, rather than having them lying around loose. In the course of packing, the kindle like objects become more laptop like. All kinds of complicated cables and connections to be undone. I am not sure if I am going to be able to wire them up again. Episode 2 involves getting something for lunch and I elect to use the kiosk for a snack rather than the canteen  for a meal. Kiosk has a large range of pork pies, the selling of which seems to involve both measuring the circumference and weighing. Rather thick, bright orange/brown pastry, not like the stuff round the pies from the butcher at Ashburton at all (see 25th April). I select one and make off with it, wondering how I am going to cut it up in the absence of my shut knife, presently in the pocket of the absent picnic bag. Episode 3 involves someone cutting up a pork pie, very neatly, using a mounted cheese wire, rather like the ones they use in Waitrose on the cheese.

On waking, I remember that while the knife had been in said pocket, it was no longer, having been returned to its usual lodging in the study.

PS 1: in Borough Market, in one of the cheese shops there, they use a free cheese wire rather than a mounted one. They also score the rind of the cheese before pulling the wire through, making a rather quicker and neater job of it than the people at the Epsom Waitrose. But then these last, comparatively speaking, are amateurs, or perhaps amatresses.

PS 2: in my inbox this morning there is a missive from the Guardian inviting me to spend several thousand pounds on a creative writing course, which come in half a dozen varieties. Why ever do they think that I need one? How have they got my address? Is there some link up with the fact that I flash my 'My Waitrose' card to get my copy of the Guardian free, rather than paying with anonymous cash? From which transaction, Waitrose could sell my address on to the Guardian? I dare say I have ticked some box saying that they are allowed.

A senior moment

A slightly scary senior moment half an hour or so ago.

I was reading away and started to have some difficulty. After a little while it seemed that the difficulty consisted in the centimeter square of page which I was trying to focus on getting scrambled, with neighbouring squares of page unaffected. One could make some progress by pretending to focus on one square but actually reading from another, but this was not really satisfactory. The difficulty appeared to be the same when reading with one eye at a time. Feeling a little tired I took a break, after which the difficulty failed to reappear.

Let's hope it stays away.

PS: the offending typeface was set in 11 on 12 monotype garamond and the subject matter was light opera. I have not been able to find out what the 11 on 12 bit of the colophon means.

Hawthorn

Earlier in the week we saw the hawthorn blooming in Horton Lane, at which time ours was a few days behindhand. It has now caught up and is passably illustrated left.

The Lumia did not seem to be able to decide which bit to focus on, and with a rather lumpy object of this sort does not seem to be able to focus on all of it at once. The eye does rather better with its virtual image, a dynamic construct of tricky software if you like, with the real thing, as produced by the Lumia, not up to snuff at all. So what is the reality?

PS: a few days ago I showed solidarity with one Wendy Doniger over book burning in India (see 17th April), this showing taking the form of having a pop at kindle over its inadequacies as a vehicle for encyclopedias. Then yesterday I came across an interesting article by her in the NYRB, interesting but depressing in her depiction of the power of the religious right in India, religious of the Hindu religion that is, represented on this occasion by a retired school teacher with a taste for litigation. Also in the echoes from the comparable Christian groupings of the US. I learn that, inter alia, the antique Hindus managed an accurate computation of the speed of light. For those interested, I believe that the basement of the Hindu temple in Neasden (http://londonmandir.baps.org/) includes various materials about this and other computations. At least it did when we visited.

But I continue to think that one should not expect a true believer from any religion to take kindly to religious studies of the sort practiced by Ms. Doniger. Comparative studies, or even studies of one religion by a believer in another, require all the religions to be on a roughly equal footing and few of today's true believers believe that the world is big enough to accommodate more than one family of gods. Not to mention the even more exclusive monotheists who allow just the one god, with even our own three in one (see http://www.3-in-one.co.uk/ and http://carm.org/trinity for two contrasting views) scarcely amounting to a family. In the olden days things were a bit better with the ancients cheerfully admitting that everyone was entitled to their own gods, although in the case of the Aztecs they did claim that their gods were bigger and better than yours.

Trolleys

My acquaintance with modern philosophy is very limited, with what little I have gleaned from the likes of the TLS not encouraging me to do more - and it is just as well for the modern philosophers that I don't sit on their funding committees.

However, on this occasion the NYRB (of April 24th) has come up with something more than usually interesting, to wit trollology, an ology which it seems was invented in Oxford after the dreadful experiences of the second world war by a clutch of lady philosophers, one of whom was Iris Murdoch, better known for dense novels.

I won't rehearse two of the core problems of trollology as they are nicely summarised in the illustration (click for legibility). But the answer of the philosophers seems to be that it is OK to pull the lever but that it is not OK to push the fat man and much of the meat on trollology is trying to explain why this is so. I learn that, once again, the Catholics were there first with their doctrine of double effect, which very roughly speaking says that it is sometimes OK to do things which have bad effects provided that those bad effects were not the purpose of the action, a doctrine which clearly bears on the trolleys.

The article then goes on to say that while we might want to put a lot of weight on our intuitions in such matters, rather than on learned debate, intuition is very unreliable in that what it tells us to do is apt to vary in an alarming way as the starting conditions, the context if you will, are varied in a minor way.

It also says that we need to have simple moral rules, rules which with training, perhaps in a school or in a church, might become embodied in intuition, because we do not always have time or inclination to think about a problem. We just have to get on and do whatever seems best at the time. The point being that simple rules are not going to cope with everything because the world is not simple. However cleverly we draw up the simple rules we will always be able to come up with a reasonably realistic scenario which breaks them. So what is to be done?

Another aspect of the problem is that pushing fat men off bridges is bad for our moral health. It is not healthy to be contemplating doing such things, let alone doing them. We could so easily become hardened to what we were doing, to become blind to the pain of the other, an other whom we have, in effect, cast out into the outer darkness, along with all the pigs which we kill for our pies. Which is all very well, but in a time of war, for example, the case for pushing the fat man might become compelling. Losing five battle groups (the things which include huge aircraft carriers) is a hugely bigger disaster than losing one, a disaster which is apt to be fatal. Can we afford to be moral in such circumstances? I think that the case for not pushing might be compelling but it is not of universal application. I am reminded of the grim business of battlefield triage.

I also think that my answer more generally is the same as that for the sometimes unsavoury activities of the securocrats. We have to allow the activities, but we must insist on some kind of trusted and independent oversight of same, which can all too easily get out of hand.

Ashburton highlights

Item one, the town still runs to a butcher, a butcher who, inter alia, makes & sells his own pork pies in little foil tubs, a sort of piggy cup cake. He sells them hot or cold. Rather less spice and stuff than is the norm with the Tesco's or the Sainbury's product, which was a good thing.

Item two, the town now runs again to a baker, with a small bakery opened in the front of a shop by three young ladies. Storage, preparation, cooking and selling all done from the one room, which must get very hot in the summer. White bread good, in the form of small tin loaves, hot cross buns were whole meal, which were acceptable, but I do prefer my buns white. I also bought some of the flour on offer, yet to be tried out.

Item three, there was an off-licence carrying a decent good range of beer, cider, wine and spirits.

Item four, the book shop near the main car park was still there, a book shop which we have been visiting for perhaps 20 years. The place from which I had obtained such gems as Julian Jaynes on the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind (see http://www.julianjaynes.org/ for the fan club), the first volume of the minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and two volumes of Oscar Lewis on life in the slums of Mexico City in the first half of the last century. Sadly there was a 'For Sale' sign outside; it was not clear how much longer the shop would last and I didn't like to ask. But just in case, I picked up a couple of scores and a history of the Old Vic. One of the scores caught my interest as it appeared to have been printed photographically in Italy from a very neat but nevertheless manuscript copy - while I had always assumed that movable type ruled the world of music in the same way that it ruled the world of letters. 'Alissa' with music by Raphael Douglas, the baron von Banfield Tripcovich, words by Richard Miller and printed by Ricordi of Milan. Transcribed for voice and piano, which gives me some excuse for not being able to follow it at all in the orchestral version offered by YouTube. Did slightly better with the free sample offered at http://www.operapassion.com/cdbaalpa19.html.

There was an imposing church, but I did not visit it properly as the first opportunity arose just before divine service and the second on Good Friday, which last I did not think was a proper day to be a tourist in a Christian church - even though pretty much all the shops in town were open. But I did get as far as being told that one of the aisle pillars was a monolith, made out of a cylinder of stone cut in one piece from the living rock. Not something I recall seeing before.

An interesting collection of old buildings, as befits a once thriving mining, sheep and market town. From which I share Fish Tail House (illustrated), remarkable for the odd shape of the slates hung from the top half of the front wall. Looking at them from below I did think that the slates were actually composite, with a very thin slate bedded on a layer of mortar, but looking at the picture now, maybe they are just slates.

Gravediggers

Woke up this morning thinking of the 'Gravediggers' pub in Dublin, probably because of the company kept yesterday. Turning up my entry for 2nd June 2009 in the other place (http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/), I find that what I might have said about the place this morning was said there, more or less word for word.

So in this case there must be a cluster of brain cells dealing with the Gravediggers which might become inaccessible, that is to say I forget all about the place, but if poked replay the same story, time after time. A slightly more complex scenario than the clusters of brain cells said to be associated with proper names, one cluster for each name. So if you say 'Kate Moss' to me at 33 day intervals - the interval allowing any activity from the previous test to have died down - it is always the same cluster of brain cells which fire up in response, at least in so far as the resolution of the relevant brain scanner goes; maybe they really can get down to individual neurons these days. I wonder if anyone has studied whether the clusters are organised tidily in the brain, perhaps hierarchically with all the Irish places in one super-cluster and all the Cornish places in another? And all the places in one super-super-cluster. And so on and so forth. Maybe there are possibilities in a three dimensional hierarchy in a brain not available to the two dimensional one in a powerpoint ©.

Kate Moss © springs to mind because a not particularly good looking young lady was talking about her near me on the train to Waterloo yesterday, claiming, inter alia, that she was very beautiful and that she had met her in the flesh at some function or other. Maybe even talked with the great lady. But she is not very beautiful to me and I suspect that in the flesh she might be an ineffective for me as the young lady mentioned on 4th April. Not that I would not name drop energetically about her for ever more afterwards, no doubt citing her alleged habit of wrecking holiday homes in the course of substance fueled parties, allegations in which I dare say there is little or no substance, white powdery or otherwise. See also April 25th 2013.

Plenty of pictures of the place on Google, but the two that I tried to copy were too small to be worth including here. So I didn't.

Tweetree-3

Our third was the largest tree of the holiday, a eucalyptus in Haldon Forest, this last being a mixed but mainly pine forest owned by the Forestry Commission.

Unusually, £3 to park rather than free, and largely given over to the needs of children on mountain bikes although there were said to be walks more suitable for pensioners like ourselves, featuring interesting trees and birds. This tree was in the car park, from which we did not stray very far on this occasion.

Not clear how much money, if any, the Commission was still making from selling trees to chip board manufacturers. All the paths and people on them must have complicated the deployment of the necessary machinery.

Tweetree-2

Our second was a slightly older tree in the church yard of Stoke Gabriel, a yew tree said to be around 1,000 years old. In keeping with tradition I walked backwards around it seven times, making a wish on completion. Surprisingly tiring as the ground was sloping slightly. The tradition may well have been connected with the nearby clump of shamrock.

The first patron of the church was a chap called Pomeroy, another of the Conqueror's companions, the second was called Churchward, whose family controlled the nearby tide mill, now the site of the café, while the third was the chap called Pontin, of holiday camp fame. Things not looking good: start off OK with a knight in armour, then someone in trade, then down to entertainment.

The church had an unusual tapered tower, some unusual stone carving, a rather fancy painted wood pulpit and a rood screen with old paintings of saints and suchlike. There was also a small organ open to view, which was handy given the interest in such things sparked by going to hear the one at the Festival Hall.

Tweetree-1

May not have done very well on birds but we did quite well on trees.

Our first was a near 1,000 year old oak from Meavy, dating from about the time that the Conqueror made a present of the place to one of his companions. For some reason the trunk had split out into three legs, making the thing into a sort of vegetable tripod.

Quite a handsome church for such a small place, sporting some interesting carving on the pews. The barrel vaults were like miniature versions of the crooked ones at St. Eustace of Jägermeister at Tavistock.

There was also an old pub, said to be a gem and for some reason in the ownership of the local council, and an old school, sporting for some other reason a replica of Drake's drum.

Natural selection

Been thinking on the points of contact between the evolution of an animal (or any other life form for that matter) and that of a large computer program.

The program has to sell and to earn money if it is going to survive: I don't suppose the likes of Microsoft get terribly sentimental about programs which do not generate revenue, perhaps because some better game has arrived on the block. So not selling is the program's form of natural selection.

Maybe the many copies of a program relate to the many individuals which make up a species. But the dynamics are rather different: individual copies of the program might be adapted to their environment, to their use, a bit, but for a new copy you have, or at least you are supposed to go back to the mother ship, back to Microsoft or whoever and take whatever their master copy of the program has become since you last bought a copy - hopefully not incompatible, but certainly minus all the local, environmental changes that might have been made. Evolution is confined to base camp with none of that kind of messing about out on the mountain, or out on the moor, as the case may be.

One upon a time, the program was designed to do some particular task, to meet some particular market need, possibly even some user need. At this stage one might have a reasonably clean design, with a nice hierarchical structure and with a nice carving up of the large number of jobs to be done into a rather smaller number of functions (is VB speak packages?), rather in the way that a mammal might assign all kinds of jobs to the liver. But then the program, few programs being built for one-time user, will evolve over time. There will be maintenance work and construction work. There will be major releases and minor releases.

So there will be programmers beavering away down at the coal face, inventing features for the program which are interesting or elegant from their point of view. All this beavering is quite hard for the marketing chaps to control and it probably best if they do not squeeze all the free-lancing out of the system; you need a bit of random activity down below to make up for the mistakes and oversights up above. Of course, in the case of the animal, the random activity down below is all you have to go on, unless you admit the deity up above. And even if you do, he has good days and bad days too, with some of his design work being pretty sloppy.

Sometimes these features make it to the published product but do not really catch on. But perhaps they linger and perhaps one day that rather dormant feature suddenly acquires a new lease of life as part of something else which really does catch on.

Sometimes they linger more or less dormant but get inadvertently trashed by some other unrelated change, so when you do come to use it is no longer in working order.

At other times again their vestiges linger on, with no-one empowered or bothered enough to excise them like an appendix, in our case another vestige of times past. Other traces of the past can be found in the names of variables in the program, the schemes for which tend to evolve over time. I don't think that serious companies allow their programmers to do things like name their variables after roses or the tunes of the Rolling Stones any more, but whatever naming scheme the guys at the center try to impose, there will always be wriggle room. You will usually be able to tell who did the work by the way that the variables are named.

All this change can also result in rather a tangle. That this or that feature in the program, say feature A, is used, perhaps in rather different ways, by various other features of the program, say the features B. This can result in feature A getting rather messy, with all kinds of bits and bobs getting added in to it to meet the various needs of all the B features. You end up with a feature A which you would never have designed, had you designed the thing from scratch to meet the requirement you are now meeting. But the cost of getting out of A might be prohibitive. Very much a local rather than a global maximum.

At so it can go on. But I think I have burned enough time on this one now to feed quite a few serious, saloon bar discussions.

PS: you might think that all those right thinking marketing chaps in the US, who used to hate the Soviet Union, would know all about the difficulties & weaknesses inherent in the central planning of large & complex operations - or computer programs. But that does not always seem to inhibit their own version of central planning.

Jigsaw 6, Series 3

Garafolo for the fourth time of asking, and still going strong as far as I am concerned, but the jigsaw itself is getting a little tired, with some of the pieces a little the worse for wear. About a month in solution, including a week away. Very much the same order as last time, but this time with the irregular pieces ten in from the right and three & more down being the very last. This was a change from last time when I am sure that these particular pieces were near last, but not actually last.

I am tempted to go for the fifth solution but I must resist and get on with the 'Ambassadors', presently coming in second with just two outings to date. Decided against retiring the Garafolo to the compost bin as a rather drastic way to resist temptation and I might manage to fit in a visit to the real thing, probably still in the basement, in the near future.

Searcher Bacon

Yesterday's Poirot included, both in story and in episode, female searchers, so I was amused on return this morning from a Ewell Village Clockwise (with the Cheam turning extension) to read in Bacon Volume II (see 18th April) of his adventures with same. See the large middle paragraph in the illustration left. One suspects that the officers' wives involved might have been a bit brusque and boarding school about the whole business.

My nearest contact with such people was when on a visit to an establishment near Feltham (not the young offenders institution, at least not when I was there), where the brick built guard room included one room labelled male search and another labelled female search. Probably more brusque than boarding school.

Poirot investigates

Back on ITV3 last night with Poirot investigates, a perfectly satisfactory episode concerning the theft of a monster chain of pearls from a bedroom in the Imperial Hotel at Brighton. But somehow it seemed a bit unfinished and I was moved to check.

I did not know the name of the source book so I tried the name index supplied with our Heron edition, being convinced that the husband of the owner of the pearls had a surname beginning with 'B', the index being organised by surnames rather than Christian names. Went through all the B's and failed to find anyone suitable. I then thought that maybe the chauffeur was called Laycock or perhaps Leycock but there were none of those listed. I was then reduced to checking the 30 odd volumes for a suitable title and failed there. Then thought to try the short stories, at which point I struck gold with a story called 'The jewel robbery at the Grand Metropolitan', part of a collection first published in 1925 entitled 'Poirot investigates'. Just over 18 pages of it spun out into about an hour, less 20 minutes advertisement time, or a little over 2 minutes to the page.

I also check the IMDb entry for this episode to find that the husband was called Opalsen with no B's at all and that the chauffeur was called Saunders with no cocks at all. So much for short term memory.

Turning to the short story, I find that the whole theatrical mise-en-scène had been parachuted into the episode, providing quite a lot of minutes in what was screened. The racing sub-plot involving wayward authors and Brighton gangsters another bit of parachuting. The actual modus operandi of the crime was preserved intact, only varied by the metamorphosis of the valet of the hotel into the chauffeur of the husband, this last being fitted neatly into the theatrical business. But Miss. Lemon had been inserted and Inspector Japp had been enlarged to provide continuity with other episodes, we punters liking to have a steady core to latch onto - something that Trollope knew all about a long time ago.

Three aperçus onto 1920's life struck me from the story. First, the Brighton hotels of the day were infested with people who had made a lot of money out of the first world war and liked to flaunt their trophy wives with their trophy jewellery. Second, Mr. and Mrs. Opalsen took adjoining bedrooms in the hotel, this not being a matter needing any comment from Agatha, so presumably fairly normal for people of the class portrayed. Third, it was not necessary in the story to provide any names for either the chambermaid or her husband the valet as they were only servants.

Clearly back home again with a bang.

Tweetlite

Just back from a rather feeble week's tweeting in parts west.

Started off with the sight of three birds circling high over the country to the south of Ashburton, very much in the way of buzzards but with the long crook wings of seagulls. Some of the pictures offered by Google show peregrine falcons with such wings and you do get them in Devon, but maybe seagull is more likely. The nearest we got to a confirmed raptor was hearing owls a couple of times in the night.

Then there was a pair of suburban goldfinches, several sparrows, male & female, house & tree, and one woodland chaffinch. None of which are very common in Epsom. Plus the usual crows, magpies and pigeons.

We closed the outing with a buzzard and a second unidentified hawk over Fleet Services, but that was not parts west. Unusually, no kestrels at all.

PS: the scene illustrated shows that Epsom Council is not the only lot to go in for free range cows, with those in this picture only being prevented from visiting the nearby pub by strategically placed cattle grids in the road. At least Devon County Council can point to the grazing rights on Dartmoor, rights which have been continuously exercised since before the time of the Conqueror. And feeling obliged to let other people graze is far less blameworthy than going in for it oneself, gratuitously.

Youth

There is a tunnel under the railway line to Waterloo which connects East Street to our branch of Screwfix, not many months refurbished, after many complaints & reminders from residents of the surrounding area. Also near the field of the horselet noticed on January 2nd 2013. Refurbishment included provision of lighting, set into the walls, lighting which, I must say, I felt from the outset was a bit vulnerable.

The tunnel attracted its fair share of graffiti and the council pushed back with regular repainting. They must have been quick off the mark as I rarely came across any which had not been painted out.

But this week the youth of the surrounding area have upped their game and smashed most of the lights; perhaps they have the not very good excuse that they were brain dead at the time. Given that some sort of toughened glass was involved they must have gone to the bother of bringing out a sledgehammer or some such to do the job - and I had not thought that such people were so organised. Hopefully the council will decide to fill the holes and let the residents make do with street lights, which do not seem to attract the same sort of attention.

Morning musings

Some people have morning sickness while I have morning musings and this morning I have been musing about the rights and perquisites of people with special needs, in particular people with challenges in the mental ability department.

So most of us come into the world with nothing, make our eventually independent way, often acquiring property of one sort or another, and settle our account on the way out, often having some positive amount to dispose of. Some of us breed and help others onto their eventually independent way.

But some of us don't make it all the way and are never independent. We will always need the support of others in order to survive. In primitive societies one suspects that we would not have survived; in such societies life is too hard to be able to accommodate people who cannot pull their weight and obviously incompetent infants are apt to be exposed and incompetent seniors might chose to expose themselves - such practises have been alleged in more than one film that I have seen about North American aboriginals. I have also heard of aboriginal tribes in somewhere like Outer Borneo in which seniors who can no longer pull their weight are quietly knocked on the head as they go about their daily business.

However, a mark of more civilised societies is the way in which we give house room to the less fortunate amongst us.We include people who do not or cannot pull their weight and we do not exclude people who have stopped pulling their weight through age or infirmity. So the muse is how does one judge how far to go?

Or to be more specific, what right does a person with a severe mental handicap have to a home of their own? Or put another way, when is putting such a person in a home of their own the right thing to do? Is it right when such provision is considerably more expensive than some kind of communal provision, of the sort which used to be provided in our asylums?

An even harder question, at least for me, is what right does such a person have to a family of their own? Assuming competence in that department, when is it right to allow such people to exercise that competence? When is it right to take active steps to stop such a thing happening, quite possibly against the will of the person concerned?

Maybe the answer to the first question is to try it, as indeed we are, and see. It seems fairly clear that many handicapped people would much prefer to live in their own home than to live in a communal home, however nicely this last might be appointed. I would sooner have my own muddle than somebody else's niceness. So it seems right to give it a go, to test the boundaries and feel our way to some workable and affordable new customs, to replace those of the lost asylums.

And perhaps there would be something to be learned from analogy with triage; the response of medical services to demands which are threatening to overwhelm them. As practised by field hospitals and A&E departments.

But I do not have an answer to the second question. Perhaps the cop-out is that it does not arise very often in practise and that we can get by on a case-by-case basis. But I do worry about the fate of a normal child born into a very abnormal family as I suspect that an otherwise normal child of physically abnormal parents is apt to have problems on that account and I also suspect that this is going to be worse in the case of mentally abnormal parents. Is it fair to take the risk of allowing such a child to be born in the first place? Don't the rights of the unborn child trump those of the abnormal adults?

A third question is about property. When and to what extent do we allow someone with a mental handicap to own property? Do we let such a person have their own bank card and PIN number? Does the bank respect their autonomy & privacy and refuse to talk to a support worker about such a person's banking affairs? Are we in danger of disappearing up ourselves in red tape in such cases? This is left for another occasion.

The Dover Patrol

The Dover Patrol was a game which used, as I recall, a squared board to represent the English Channel on which the German High Seas Fleet (of the first world war) provided the baddies and the Royal Navy provided the goodies, represented by cardboard markers placed on the board in such a way that your opponent knew you had a piece at a particular place but did not know what it was. You got to know if you moved one of your markers to the same place, so challenging the opposing marker.

Having now finished the first volume of the two volume work by Admiral Sir Reginald Hugh Spencer Bacon mentioned on 7th April, I now know that the Dover Patrol was the name for the naval command responsible for keeping the English Channel British (there being plenty of Welsh, Scots and Irish in the navy, not to mention the Cornish). A heavy responsibility given the huge amount of traffic entering London Docks from the Channel, needed to service the population at large, and the huge amount of cross Channel traffic, needed to service the allied armies in France and Belgium. Hundreds of ships a day, ships which were all too vulnerable to attack by mine, torpedo & gun fire from submarine, motor launch & destroyers.

Not only is the story now largely forgotten, its success sometimes meant that the army command of the day forget the difficulties and risks involved in their clamour for more cross Channel traffic. It took, for example, six transports doing two return trips every day, day in day out, to support the requirement that every British soldier in France and Belgium should have one home leave a year, something regarded as very important for morale; a number which had to be maintained in the face of all  kinds of other requirements.

The admiral, according to Wikipedia, was very good at the technical side of his work but was not very good with people, with the result that he was rather abruptly relieved of his command towards the end of 1917. Perhaps Volume II will throw a bit more light on that; Volume I just lets some of his understandable bitterness show through. The upside is a lot of fascinating stuff about, for example, long range gunfire and the construction of twenty mile long barrages made of mine festooned nets. Firing large guns from a moving platform at small targets - like lock gates or gun emplacements - from a range of perhaps 20,000 yards was a tricky business, depending inter alia on pressure changes in the upper atmosphere en-route, at a time when there was no sat-nav to tell you from exactly where your guns were firing from. There was the complication that some of the German coastal batteries had the rather greater range of 30,000 yards and the amusement of planting large tripods in the sea, from which spotters reported the fall of shells from much further out.

A rather different sort of technical tit-bit was the fact that slack water is not the same thing as low tide. A tide might well still be running when the sea is at its lowest point. It took me a while to work out why this might be so. A royal tit-bit were the special arrangements made for the safe carriage of royal and other important persons across the channel.

Different again, was the difficulty we had in providing the Dover Patrol with enough ships and men. We were stretched to breaking point by the twin requirements of keeping a massive fleet at Scapa Flow in case the Germans wanted to have a proper battle and of keeping a massive number of ships scattered around the globe to make sure that Britannia continued to rule those waves, as well as those of the Channel.

The admiral makes the interesting point early on in the book that command of the seas depends crucially on being prepared to lose ships. You had to be prepared to fight to maintain command and the Germans did not win this particular battle because they were too protective of their ships and lacked proper aggressive spirit. He put this down to the German navy being rather young and dominated by army instinct & habit. He seems fairly sure that a talented and aggressive admiral on the German side could have done massive damage to our traffic - but, luckily for us, such an admiral did not appear.

This particular example of the book appears to have been presented in 1919 by a friend or relation to someone who had served in the Patrol. A book which comes with a lot of photographs, diagrams and (fold out) maps, and which must have been, I imagine, an expensive production in its time. Even if the producers missed the trick of having the maps fold out far enough that you can read the text and the map at the same time.

It would be interesting to read an account of how all this translated into the rather different circumstances of the second world war. Guessing first that by the time of that war a lot more of our regular merchant traffic had been routed away from London into Liverpool & Glasgow and second that for most of that war we did not have a field army to support on the Continent. On the other hand, the Germans had the whole of the east coast, rather than just the northern part of it. There must be some interest as Amazon sell the original book, various reprints and the board game. Plus some other books with the same sort of title. Maybe I will start perusing the usually large military history sections in second hand and remainder shops. In any event, I shall report on Volume II in due course.

Burning books

A little while ago I read somewhere of the books of one Wendy Doniger being burnt in India, having offended one or other of the more rabid Hindu outfits there. Not much caring for either the burnings or the outfits, I thought I ought to show a bit of solidarity with her by spending some money at the Doniger shop. So I turned to Amazon to find that there anyway she appeared to concentrate on the sex end of Hindu studies, which did not particularly appeal. Furthermore, most of the prices were a bit outside my solidarity budget and in the end I settled on a Kindle version of the 'Britannica Encyclopedia of World Religions', for which she acted as consulting editor, whatever that might mean. Was she just lending her name to the endeavour or was she adding some more substantial value?

I have been dipping into the encyclopedia ever since. The first and most lasting impression is that this book was designed to be printed and the translation to Kindle does it no favours.

The encyclopedia is organised into an introductory section, a number of major articles - topics like 'African Religions - and several thousand minor articles, for example there is one about a chap called Haldi, the national god of the kingdom of Urartu, now part of Turkey East. But I can neither find a list of major articles, nor can I find a satisfactory way to browse among the minor articles, which last is good and instructive entertainment in our Chambers.

I suspect that the coverage is a bit uneven, and what little browsing I have done suggests that Judaism and the Old Testament punch above their weight.

The compilers make an effort with words which originate in funny alphabets or worse, which may be OK in the OED or in the printed version of this book, but in this Kindle version they just clutter. See for example the entry for Abd al-Ghan.

They include the pictures, which arrive on the Kindle in back & white half tone. Visually unattractive and a bit intrusive. They might have done better to leave them out, except perhaps in places (I have yet to find one) where the text would be incomprehensible without its illustration.

I have not found the index, if there is one. An important adjunct to a work of reference of this sort, because however cleverly the thing is organised one is always going to want something which is not going to spring out of that particular organisation. In database terms, if the thing is to be really useful, one needs more than one index and in terms of this book, just one index would do, although to be fair I am not completely clear how such a thing might best be presented on a Kindle.

I find the Kindle interface for anything other than reading simple text rather hard work. Maybe it would get better if I had more practise, but it is still going to be streets behind the sort of thing that Samsung offer, or could offer.

But I remain sure that, given a notebook computer on which to read the result, one could produce an electric encyclopedia which was much more competitive with a paper one, such as our Chambers, than this one is. But would it add enough value over Google and Wikipedia, would the considerable effort needed be justified? Thinking aloud, what it might offer is a homogeneous collection of material about the selected topic, homogeneous in the sense that there was some structure, that there were organising principles which one could get to know and that a reasonable standard of scholarship had been maintained throughout. There had been some editing and review of the outpourings of the hired help. Then if one was interested in the topic, which I am, I could spend profitable time with the thing and learn more than I might by just poking around with Google and Wikipedia. It might be a useful work of reference. It would be a lot more portable than Chambers.

In the meantime I offer the Kindle translators one suggestion. They should add to the start of each article a special character, for example '#'. The idea being that if I use the standard Kindle text search feature for '#aaron' I get the article about Aaron, if there is one, rather than a list of all the places that the strings 'Aaron', 'AAron' etc appear in the text, a list which is quite long and from which it can take quite some time to extract something which is really useful. A competent clerk should be able to do this by hand in a few days and a competent programmer in a few hours. Just think of all the user satisfaction that such a modest investment in staff time would generate.

PS: before starting this post this morning I turn to Wikipedia to find that she is nine years older than I am and is or at least was the elaborately titled 'Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago', and has taught there since 1978. A professor who is a Sankritist by trade, but one who dabbles in psychoanalysis and who has a taste for some of the more exotic - not to say erotic - Hindu texts. She appears to have stirred up plenty of controversy in India, where they cannot sort out between themselves whether she is a good thing to be lauded or a bad thing to be burnt. For myself, while being an atheist, I can see that as a hard core Hindu one might be a bit put out to have one's religion listed as number 13 (or whatever) in a list of World Heritage Religions. My religion is the one and only True Faith, not just number 13 of 33 and once you admit the other 32 as being of comparable status, you are well on the road to being an atheist, you might as well give up.

A dream

On Monday night, we watched our first episode of 'Breaking Bad' which had been told is the next thing after 'Game of Thrones', the next small screen blockbuster. Rather to our surprise, we were entertained by this first episode, despite our advancing years and despite the rather high level of violence. And strange to the extent that it came across, to me anyway, as a glorification of recreational drugs, this set in, if not from, the country very much in the lead, for now anyway, in the war on such. I associate to westerns, with the Apaches having become Mexicans and the cowboys having become the drug traders. Perhaps the inhabitants of the media world take a different line to that of the inhabitants of the beltway: in any event, it was responsible for some of the content of the interesting dream during the night that followed.

The location of the dream was a place in dream world which I visit from time to time, this being the first visit for some months. A house which associates to west London, perhaps Hammersmith (of Palais fame) or Chiswick, and in which I have rented a front downstairs flatlet for some time, convenient because of my living somewhere else while working in London. The landlady lives at the back and the rest of the house is rented out to DSS types, who like to use the common room behind my flatlet, between it and the landlady's domain. A new feature is that the landlady, who is rather older than me, has now acquired a son who is rather younger and a good looking daughter who is a lot younger.

My tenancy had been terminated, not because I was not paying the rent nor because I was rarely there, but rather because the landlady preferred to rent to the DSS types. But I had forgotten about this and being in London on some business or other on a bicycle, thought to leave the bicycle in the bicycle rack in the upstairs hall. Don't know why the rack was upstairs, but it was - and it was even more awkward getting the bicycle to the rack as the builders were in and who were, inter alia, redecorating the stairs. But I got there in the end, racked the bicycle and locked it with the red plastic covered lock which I really have used on my bicycle for many years. Locked the bicycle but worry about the small contraption attached to the pannier rack; a complicated bit of metalwork, a sort of doodle in metal. Maybe the sort of thing that one would make for one's O-level metalwork project, the sort of thing that one finds at Hook Road car booters from time to time. But a very important contraption and I wonder whether one of the DSS types will pinch it.

After a while I come back to find the builders are still there but the bicycle is missing, at which point I remember that I am no longer a tenant and have no right to use the bicycle rack any more. I have a row about it with the rather unpleasant son; I am sure he has got the bicycle. I hit him, rather hard, not something that I do in real life. He falls down and I fall asleep, waking some time later to find my keys missing from my pocket. I am sure that it is the son who has got them them but I can't understand why he is being such a pain.

Enter sister, with whom I remonstrate, but then one thing leads to another. Eventually I calm down.

Re-enter the now recovered brother, whom I find to be keeping a complicated scrapbook record of my blog, including a lot of original materials like tickets for concerts, programmes and leaflets from visitor attractions like Westminster Abbey. All stuff which I use and discard, usually through the shredder, so he should not have been able to get hold of it. Why is he doing this?

He then offers to return my keys against my signing an elaborate receipt to which are appended several pages of small print, which on the basis of a small sample look rather tricky. I really want my keys back, but is signing up to all this small print really a good idea? Will he copy all the keys before giving them back? Will I need to change all my locks? I think about going to law but then remember that he and his family have the law in their pocket and there is no way that I will get the lawyers to find for me.

At which point I wake up.

With thanks to Google for the image, said to be of the Palais in the 70's. Looks about right.

An older trace

Off to Tate Britain on Friday to see the installations in what used to be the Duveen Sculpture Gallery.

Bad start in that something was wrong at Clapham Junction and I had to get a Victoria flavoured train, rather than the usual Waterloo flavoured one, but made it in the end, albeit rather later than I had intended or hoped. Picked up a Bullingdon at Grant Road East, without any difficulty on this occasion, and opted for the Wandsworth Road route into town which gave me the opportunity to be reminded about the flashy new paving in the immediate vicinity of the junction (see 20th August 2013). Rather well it looked too, although as with the Bullingdons, I continue to wonder about the cost justification.

Dropped the Bullingdon at Vauxhall Cross, picking up another at Albert Embankment, and on over Lambeth Bridge, to be rather irritated by a smartly turned out middle aged gent. cycling south across the bridge on the upstream pavement, despite there being perfectly good bicycle lanes on both sides of the road. He looked as if he might well have emerged from the nearby HQ of the security service and if you can't trust them to stick to the rules who can you trust?

Dropped this second Bullingdon at Millbank House to make my way into the exhibition put on by Phyllida Barlow, a descendant of Charles Darwin no less and slightly older than I am. It turns out that she was a pre-cursor of Dame Trace (see, for example, May 12th 2010 in the other place) in that she started making sculptures out of rubbish first. Rather better at it, I might say, than her more famous successor, making the sort of stuff out of junk timber that I might make myself, but I am not sure it ought to be given house room in a sculpture gallery, being nothing more than a junk timber version of doodling on paper, which I do do (see, for example, 6th April). But I chatted to a lady from Jamaica, who did not particularly like the stuff, but who had a far more imaginative response to it than I did, associating in a fascinating way to all the junk that gets thrown up on the beaches back home, in particular treasure chests.

Took a quick peek at Holman Hunt's strayed sheep, which still seems very bright compared to our reproduction behind the PC and which must have been made before the picture was cleaned, before catching the third Bullingdon to the Oval. Once again I managed to get off at the wrong stand, that is to say Kennington Cross, leaving me rather further to walk to the Oval than I had intended. But I did catch a very fine wisteria, west facing and in full flower across the front of a house in Lambeth Road. Not sure why this particular wisteria was so much earlier than those elsewhere; that in our own garden, for example, only just coming into bud. There was also a live OddBins at Kennington, one of what must be just a few survivors: I still miss the one I used to have on the way home from Epsom station, Waitrose not nearly so convenient and with neither Tesco nor Co-op being up to much.

On to the Tooting Wetherspoon's, where selecting the most expensive white wine in the house worked for me, with the resultant Sauv. Blanc being entirely acceptable. Started to speculate about which planets were in which house at the time of my birth (Libra), speculations which my interlocutor, another Libran, thought was a fairly crude way of poking fun at her, so she left. But it is true that the skies have been clear this spring and there are planets to be seen, even if I am not very good at sorting out which is which. Too busy trying to sort out the horns of the moon (see 8th April. Which makes me wonder how Pepys would have got on with a searchable diary, rather than a ciphered one).

Home via Earlsfield where I had time to admire the deep ruts worn in the road surface by passing buses and where I was able to score several of twos at the aeroplane game while waiting for the train home. One of the aeroplanes had four engines and seemed rather large, leading to further speculations about whether the interval between aeroplanes was in any way related to the number of engines. It seemed quite likely. I also decided that what I needed to up my game was a couple of poles on stands which I could use to mark the position at which aeroplanes came into view and went out of view. One could do it by mentally marking the right bits of tree, but with there being quite a lot of trees, that was too much for the wine washed brain. Poles would be easy enough to carry about - but what about the stands?

Back at Epsom I noticed that the field which had contained the horselet (search for horselet or see, for example, 2nd January 2013) also contained a small pond, or perhaps a large puddle. So all the fussing about water for the horselet may have been misplaced. We may even have made quite unwarranted remarks about the horse keeping arrangements of the travelling community. On the other hand, the small pond may have been the result of the abnormal amount of rain over the winter just past.

The illustrated love magazine

Some time ago I bought a copy of Wodehouse's 'A Prince for Hire' from one of the stalls which live under Waterloo Bridge, Wodehouse being a chap whom I only knew as the inventor of Wooster of the small screen and as the chap who misbehaved (or worse) when caught by the Germans during the second world war. Never read him before, although the house does now run to the Penguin boxed set of the Blandings Books, courtesy of a recent Surrey Libraries' sale of collectibles.

This book turns out to be a collector's edition put together by a serious Wodehouse man, Tony Ring, who has managed to track down the complicated history of this particular short story and put it together in this handsome paperback, published by Galahad Books of 25 Cecil Court, from where all kinds of Wodehouse memorabilia are to be had. Or perhaps were to be had, because while Professor Google records that the book was kindly reviewed by the Observer on 23rd May 2003, he also records a quite different occupant for this bit of Cecil Court now. Perhaps there was a glut in the Wodehouse market.

I now know that Wodehouse did more than write funny stories about the decline and fall of the posh of England between the two world wars. He also wrote for the likes of the magazine illustrated, mainly sold through the shops of the late F. W. Woolworth. Some of the covers are funny indeed, this one being relatively tame, well worth collecting in their own right - and I dare say there are people out there who do. He may even have written for the house of Mills & Boon.

I now also know that a large chunk of the Wodehouse income from writing stories came from serialisations in magazines of one sort or another and that the magazines in question were not too fussy; it was quite OK to recycle a story which had been previously published somewhere else, maybe just doing a bit of retouching to make it fit the new environment. So in this case a story which started out as 'The Prince and Betty' was reworked into the era of gangsters, operators and prohibition in New York. I find, incidentally, that long suffering male private secretaries of bad mouthed big businessmen are not just the preserve of Agatha Christie; Wodehouse does them too. Perhaps they were a well known breed at the time.

All good fun, but a rather slight story. I shall find the book a good home, but not on our own august shelves.

Broad beans

Bought the first broad beans of the season on Friday. Two bowls at £1 each, not particularly good looking beans, and hardly English so early in the year, but then, we have not had any for a while.

The first lot went in a new version of pork soup. Peel half a kilo of potatoes and cut them into roughly 3cm cubes. Cook gently for 15 minutes in a couple of pints of water. Add a coffee jar lid of red lentils. Peel two medium sized onions, chop fine and add to the lentils and potatoes. Take half a pork tenderloin and cut it into roughly 1cm cubes. Add to the potatoes, lentils and onions. Simmer for a further 30 minutes. Shell the broad beans, discarding any loose stalks. Add them and simmer for a further 5 minutes, by which time the potatoes should be starting to disintegrate, but there should still be lumps. Serve with brown bread, without butter. Good gear.

The second and last lot went with cold boiled gammon, boiled potatoes and boiled carrots. More good gear, washed down with a Jamaican (?) version of a Chelsea Bun, involving coconut rather than currents and rolled swiss roll wise, horizontally rather than vertically. From 'Mixed Blessings' of 118 Mitcham Road, Tooting.

It seems a long time since I used to pinch out the tips of my broad bean crop (to keep the black fly down) on Derby Day morning before setting off for the pub. Which means, inter alia, that I would not be eating my broad beans until late June, rather than early April.

Return visit

Having visited Holy Trinity at Sloane Square getting on for four years ago (see August 25th and September 15th 2010 in the other place, http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/), another visit, more or less by chance, last week to hear Pergolesi's 'Stabat Mater'. A chance driven by there being a gap in the schedule, the continuing interest in choral music and by browsing the calendar for Cadogan Hall, a place which I am sure we have visited at least once, but for which there is no record, so it must have been before October 2006. A calendar which claimed that this piece included 'the most perfect and touching duets to come from the pen of any composer', so tickets were bought there and then.

Took a while to decide on how to get there, but we eventually settled for train to Vauxhall then tube, which worked fine. Get to the church to find that the concert was really a fund raising event for the attached school. We take our seats (plenty of leg room for once) to admire the fine east window, nicely illuminated despite it facing east in the fading light and to listen to a smooth introduction by the curate (don't think this is the right word these days, but he was a priest, not the priest-in-charge) - a lot longer and a lot smoother than that offered a few days ago at the South Bank (see 9th April).

Music appropriate to both place and season, being a lament by Mary for her crucified son, with the words being taken from a medieval Latin text. A soprano and a counter-tenor, accompanied by two violins, a cello and a small organ, musicians in full period dress - mid 18th century that is - and real candles for good measure to augment the electrics. Impressive and moving.

The church was fairly full and the people seemed a bit more substantial than those whom one might expect at a fund raiser at our own Stamford Green School. They managed not to clap between the numbers of the lament which I was pleased about, finding such clapping very intrusive. But insubstantial, or at least bad mannered, to the extent that somebody known to the soprano saw fit to take pictures a couple of times during the performance with her telephone, holding it up above her head for the purpose. I thought at the time I would have tapped her on the shoulder had I been sitting immediately behind, rather than a couple of rows behind her; now I am not so sure whether that would have been the right thing to do. But I still think it a bit poor. White wine offered for afters not up to much either.

On the way home, our taxi driver did not sound very Epsom and turned out to have come from a very long standing print family in Bermondsey, a family which never had it so good again after Murdoch smashed the print unions, with this member reduced to driving night taxis out in the sticks. We learned that the real villain of the piece was Eddie Shah, the man who brought printing technology up to date, but who also, as far as I recall, went bust in the process.

Mérimée

Lermontov on Pechorin on Thursday (see 10th April), Mérimée on Carmen on Saturday. On this occasion my eye was caught by a reference to the communal bath of the working women of Cordova, said to be the subject of a famous engraving by Baléchou, after Vernet. Never heard of either, but Professor Google turns it up after a few clicks, to tempt me to buy one from ebay, €20 plus €7 postage, illustration left lifted from ebay.

An impressive feat of image recovery, even if the image in question turns out to be a touch fanciful, not what I would expect to see at Cordova at all. Has it been attributed to the right artists? Temptation resisted.

But in the course of being impressed, I did wonder what the Professor's search algorithm makes of accents. I had thought that it would just strip them out, but a search for 'Baléchou' does not seem to give the same results as one for 'Balechou', so he must do something else, maybe just treating them as two quite different words. Maybe that is what works best in French. Or maybe the geeks involved are strictly anglophone. Or maybe Californian Latinos who do not care for the French.

Animals

Starting to make some progress with the new toy first reported on 7th April. It has still not clogged and I feel I am starting to get the feel of the thing. But I miss the simple power of the biro on the long line.

Turning from the horse's head on paper to the cows in the park, I was not impressed to read that our council is devoting time and resources to introducing cows into another of our parks. Is it not enough to have the things messing up the common? Do we really have to have them messing up Nork Park too? Why do our council, said to so desperately short of money, think it cool to squander what little they have on projects of this sort?

We have thousands and thousands of real farmers living on benefit (aka subsidies. See https://www.gov.uk/the-single-payment-scheme) who ought to be delighted to have the hand that feeds them come and visit. To have townies come and play with their cows; townies who might even pay for the privilege of playing with cows, with making hay and other rustic pursuits. Which being so, why mess up our own backyard to do the same thing rather badly? Why can't the council leave our parks for the people who like to walk in them without being intimidated by large & smelly animals whose proper place is in the country or in a burger?

Razumovsky

On Tuesday to hear the Emerson's do all three Razumovsky quartets.

A little early, so off the tube at Green park to stroll up through Berkeley Square, not to buy a rollers from the big shop there. But there was rather a jolly bit of public art in the square, a sort of small plastic tree. Not too big and a bit of fun rather than designed to shock or irritate.

There were poles to charge your electric car at - and one such was being charged - and if you did not want to buy a rollers there was an interesting looking rug shop, Nain Carpets, possibly a touch out of our league. But, oddly for a shop in Berkeley Street, no web site and having forgotten the name I was reduced to finding it in StreetView.

Then passing by Debenhams, I discovering the source of the shimmering walls, which we had noticed from a distance several times in the past. Made by tiling the walls with what were probably metal tiles, maybe 4 inches square and each loosely hung from two pegs on the top edge, with the result that they shimmered with the passing breeze. An engagingly low-tech bit of public art - a grander version of the bit noticed at Wisley on 15th January.

Arrive at the Wigmore and thinking to take a glass of red joined the queue for same to find, after a few seconds, a rather pushy middle aged lady pretending that there was no queue, agitating at the counter. We all, including the bar tender, studiously ignored her. You get them even in the best places.

And so to the Emersons, whom I do not recall having seen for a long time, and as far as I do recall, last having seen them at one of a series of Beethoven concerts which they gave at the QEH, maybe 20 years ago. But it had been reported that they stood to play, which was not the case on this occasion. Furthermore, the first and second violins sat on identical piano stools and changed places at the end of each quartet, the exception which proves the rule that some people are born to be first violin and some people are born to be second violin. There was a Morse connection in that the first violinist seen from the side reminded me of Daniel Massey and seen from the front of Geoffrey Palmer, both Morse occasionals. And the new cellist seemed to be fitting in well, indulging in a lot more facial communication than the rest of them. Sitting second right rather than the more usual first right meant that we heard a bit more of the viola, not a bad arrangement since the rather stronger cello does not have any trouble getting heard. All together, they produced a very fine sound, rich and smooth, and they could play both soft and high without breaking up, unlike some of the less experienced quartets which we have been hearing recently.

After exchanging a few banalities about the interesting inter-personal dynamics of a long standing group taking in a new member, the chap sitting next to me thought that I needed to know the Chelsea score at half time. He also got quite excitable on the subject of people who ride Bullingdons in Hyde Park, which was interesting. And then he moved onto the difficulty that London schools and clubs had in getting access to playing fields for football and rugby, this line of thought being prompted by my mentioning the Chelsea training ground at Cobham which was once, I now know, playing fields for sundry schools and clubs. Another member of the audience, a young man, had hair down to his waist, reminding me of the young lady mentioned on 4th April.

But we were all very taken with the music. Including, in my case, being reminded at times of both the 18.4 quartet, often mentioned here and in the other place, and the concertos of (Giuseppe) Tartini, probably one of the flute ones. It also struck me as being nicely positioned mid-way between the early and the late quartets, neither too light nor too heavy. And having all three at a sitting, I did not have the problem of changing gear, of losing the first part of one quartet while I adjusted from the tone & mood of the one before. Reception of these matters must all depend on mood: sometimes one likes to span the whole lot, to get the whole gamut of feel & emotion, sometimes one likes a sharper focus.

On the way home I thought a further glass was in order, and having a little time to wait for the Epsom train, thought to nip off a Hampton Court train at Earlsfield. For once I decided against the 'Half Way House' and settled for a bottle from Sainsbury's Little for about the same price that a glass would have cost in the pub. Followed by furtive swigs from the brown paper bag on the platform. Possibly even on the train. Punished by observing the lunar blunder mentioned on 8th April on arrival at Epsom.

Online billing information

The other day we were invited by call center - an invitation which usually arrives by email - to send in a gas meter reading, which we dutifully did. Then this morning I get an email telling me that my online bill is available for my consideration.

Which turns out to be even more incomprehensible than usual, with a sample being illustrated left. The good thing was that it was easy enough to copy and paste this chunk into Excel, the bad news was that it came with formatting which hard wired it to the GasCo HQ, which took a little fiddling about to strip out.

As I have said here before, con the customer with numbers overload. Numbers not information, as this last would be far too grand a word to describe what I was looking at.