Irritations

I have noticed that in posting I use some words - like presumably - too much and that some words come in waves - like irritation. At the moment we are in an irritation wave and I have yet another to report, this one from a recent Guardian. This may be more a reflection of the fact that we buy the Guardian more than any other newspaper rather than the Guardian being particularly prone to triggering the 'I' word.

That being as it may, the article in question was a celebration of the marriage of two people with learning disabilities, or mentally handicapped to use the euphemism of my youth, not to mention the more readily understood, if coarse and wounding, labels of the vernacular. The irritation arose from the tone of the article being very much that such people had every right to enjoy the state of marriage, along with the rest of us, and that interfering busy bodies, aka bizzies, should back off.

The piece, by-lined Frances Ryan, told us nothing about her, but google comes up, pretty much instantly, with the news from the Guardian web site that Frances Ryan is a freelance writer, writing predominantly on disability, feminism and LGBT rights and that she is currently completing a doctorate on equality of opportunity. She blogs at http://differentprinciples.co.uk/.

My irritation stems from the fact that such marriages can give rise to children, a problem which gets no space in her piece. I have no idea how common this is or would be without the interference of the bizzies, but I do have the idea that having children in these circumstances might well be a very bad idea. Leaving aside the prior possibility that the disabilities in question might be hereditary, how is such a pregnancy going to go and how is the raising of such children going to go? What happens when the presently loving parents (of the disabled couple that is) get old and tired? Who, in their absence, is going to provide the help with child rearing that the disabled couple are quite probably going to need? Certainly going to need if they already need help themselves. Who is going to pay for it? Is it a good use of scarce support money? Supposing such children not to have any particular learning difficulties themselves, how are they going to feel about their parents when they are old enough to know? Most of us get embarrassed about our parents as adolescents, but most of us grow out of it. How is this going to play here? How do the human rights of a yet-to-be-conceived child weigh against those of the couple in question?

I recognise that all of this is tricky and that providing the right sort of support on the ground is tricky. Getting the right sort of people to provide that support is tricky, never mind finding the money to pay them. But I do like my pieces in newspapers to be a bit more even handed. Perhaps the pendulum does need to swing towards support and away from prohibition, but it is not helpful for the pendulum to go off the other side of the scale.

Perhaps also the olden days when people with learning disabilities lived in leafy suburban asylums and all the females took a contraceptive pill every morning along with their porridge did have something going for them.

Memory lane job

Earlier in the week the first visit to Exhibition Road for some, possibly many, years. Started off by Bullingdon from Grant Road East to the Natural History Museum where I asked about exhibits about brains but where they thought that the Science Museum was the place for that sort of thing. So off there to find that they have no such thing, nor do they have anything on the LHC (see 28th June) because the exhibit in question had moved to Manchester. But they did offer a display of psychiatric equipment, including lots of gadgets for giving people - or oneself - various kinds of electric shocks. Lots of mahogany boxes and brass knobs. There was also an intriguing thing, in a box maybe 9 inches by 9 inches by 45 inches and called a glass harmonica, set up to play Mozart's Adagio in C Major for same, possibly K356, certainly known to YouTube.

Wandering on up the building, the next intriguing thing was the exponential horn, a loudspeaker from the 30's recently reconstructed. I caught a bit of electronic music but I think I have missed this boat and am not going to hear it play any chamber music, which is a pity as the claim was that the horn gives a sense of presence, a sense of being with the instruments that you do not get with the rather smaller loudspeakers we usually use these days.

From there onto an impressive display, with plenty of brown wood and glass display cases, about early aeroplanes. Lots of interesting stuff for someone interested in that sort of thing and not bad for someone who was not. But overall, the museum, while the fabric, infrastructure and paintwork were being kept in good order, seemed sadly empty. Enough money to keep the place ticking over but not enough money to put on the kind of displays which might pull people in. A sense perhaps that the science museum industry is not quite sure what its place in the world is, given that television and the internet have cut a lot of the older ground from under their feet.

And so to the Natural History museum which did not seem to be suffering quite so badly. People did still like to look at the skeletons of dinosaurs and stuffed birds. And there was some impressive fishy fossil stuff from Lyme Regis to provide a bit of balance. I was especially struck by the slice of giant redwood which had been given a shrine at the very top of the building - the shrine like format being entirely appropriate in this building which reminded me both of cathedrals - and Victorian railway stations. With the giant redwood in question having been born around the time that our King Alfred was burning the cakes.

There was a modest brain display, a bit elementary, but it did include some neat exhibits, including what looked like a gray oven cloth, about 33 by 66cm, and which was said to approximate to what a human cortex would look like if you flattened it out, flattening out all the wrinkles in the process. There were plenty of eateries scattered about the place and I took a ham and cheese baguette from one of them, entirely satisfactory, for around £4.50.

Round the back I stumbled upon the cocoon, a large gherkin shaped and white coloured building within a building which looked as if it might have been designed by a lady Iraqi but was, I was told by the helpful pair of entymologists outside, actually the work of a Danish gentleman. I think that they rather liked the original building and would have been a bit happier if the money had been spent on bugs rather than bricks.

And so from Exhibition Road Museums to Sedding Street for the second half of the day's activities. Waiting in Sloane Square I was able to eyeball all the ladies coming back from their shopping expeditions with lots of expensive looking carrier bags and one lady heading into the tube with a full set of golf clubs. From which we deduce that while in Epsom ladies generally take their Chelsea tractors to golf, in Chelsea they generally take the tube.

First beverage from the Antelope, which seemed more or less unchanged from when I used to use it more than forty years ago. Décor unchanged and clientèle largely unchanged, my once favourite table at the back was still there, although blazers and such like were not quite as much in evidence as they would have been in the olden days. Second beverage from the Wellington where the décor was largely unchanged but the clientèle and the ambience had. Not the place it used to be at all. Amongst other things, the place had been a food pub before food pubs had been invented, with a large Spanish gentleman dispensing food from various hot tubs mounted in a dispensary across the Eaton Terrace end of the bar while mine host (a lady with a pound note accent) dispensed wisdom from her place at the other end. They could manage, nonetheless, a reasonable sausage sandwich. They managed soft white bread and managed to omit external trimmings - but could not bear to omit internal lashings of some white goo or other, although I expect I would be able to get them to omit it if I asked nicely another time.

Outside we were very impressed by a cavalcade of black cars: led by a black open topped sports car, a Lamborghini or some such, then a couple of rollers and wound up with a couple of Range Rovers with smoked glass windows, the sort of thing one imagines is chock full of SAS types with all their latest toys. No flags or other insignia that I saw, so perhaps an oligarch. Odd to lead with the sports car though.

Then to visit the front door of what had been my bedsit for a while and I was pleased to find that the ground floor was still a dentist (see illustration). Some things don't change. While the rather ordinary newsagent at which I had found the bedsit, and where I probably bought the tobacco I used to smoke at that time, had turned into a rather expensive looking wedding dress shop (http://www.le-spose-di-gio.it/).

Third and last beverage from the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel, the once fancy hotel next to Victoria Station and which is not fancy at all once you get above the first floor, at least it was not on the one occasion that I stayed there, some years ago now. But the bar was decent enough, if rather quiet, with very obsequious service. Very decent plumbing too. Now part of the Guoman Family, described on their web site as an exclusive collection of deluxe London Hotels.

Closed the outing with an event which was a first for me. A train to Epsom made up of just three coaches.

National roof terrace

In the course of Learing again (see 27th June), I took a walk on the roof terrace. Lots of it, lots of ongoing building work and some interesting views, of, for example, the Shard.

There was also this view of what looked like some technical department of the theatre. I was not sure whether they were into sets, props or clothes and there was no-one about to ask as all work was clearly finished by 1900. No last minute repairs needed for Lear's flick knife (standing in for the falchion called for by the text).

And on to physics

Physics in the form of a chance pick me up from the new acquisitions shelves of Epsom Library: 'Smashing Physics' by Jon Butterworth.

He turns out to be something of an amphibian, lurking between the worlds of the media and physics, and writes in this book mainly of his time as a large cog in the huge machine known as the LHC - the large hadron collider - at the time of the hunt for the Higg's boson. A chatty sort of book, a chatiness which irritates at times, but one which does give one something of the flavour of this sort of science, a collaborative endeavour involving thousands of scientists, some of them actually at CERN, underneath the borderlands of France and Switzerland.

An endeavour which involves a lot of very expensive & glamorous machinery, a lot of computers and a lot of statistics. A long grind to run down the elusive Higg's boson, lurking somewhere in the huge heap of statistics, the volume of which is measured in somethings called femtobarns - and one gets one insight into the size and sophistication of the CERN operation from http://writing-guidelines.web.cern.ch/entries/inverse-femtobarn.

One supposes that there is still a need for scientists to burn the midnight oil in lonely garrets, to pore over long pages of equations or statistics, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, but this book paints the bigger picture, a picture of a peripatetic bureaucrat of science keeping his show on the road while managing to retain his enthusiasm for his subject.

On the down side, while I learned a few words like supersymmetry, muon and gluon, as with most of the books of this sort that I have tried, I do not feel at the end that my grip of the science involved has been much strengthened. I guess I have unrealistic ambitions in that department. But I do learn this morning, from their website which, for some geeky reason, I am unable to paste into this post in working order (but google, luckily knows all), that CERN is a broad church with Romania a candidate member and Serbia an associate member, both on the way to full membership. The same Serbia whose ruritanian and sanguinary political culture has moved on so little from the end of the 19th century that they today unveil a statue to celebrate the murderer whose murders (of a relatively clean and decent archduke and his innocent bystander archduchess) triggered the first world war. More usefully, if I ever need to know what a muon is again, this web site also includes handy summaries of the physics, nicely pitched to my needs and aptitudes.

PS: was the failure to paste in any way related to Chrome, Google and some internet being up, while HSBC, Amazon and Ebay were down? A down which lasted, on this PC at least, for more than an hour. {Later still: BH heard on the news that this was a BT problem. I guess that the symptoms I saw arose from certain big sites having special arrangements made for them, arrangements which went wrong}.

Botany Bay

Playing with the breakfast orange yesterday, having been taught that morello cherries should be picked with nail scissors, I got to wondering about whether one need to cut the orange from the tree or whether a twist would get it off without damage. In this particular case about an eighth of an inch of stalk had been left on the orange, but the stalk came away from the orange easily enough to reveal a micro structure I had never noticed before, with the circle of dots perhaps corresponding to the segments inside the orange, with one feeding tube for each segment.

Thinking to share this interesting observation, whipped out the (bottom of the range) Lumia telephone to find out that it coped surprisingly well, provided that one used the half press the button to focus feature. This shot was taken from about two inches (with the Lumia giving up if you got any closer than that), and cropped using Paint from Microsoft, with Paint actually doing the job for once, it not being a product well suited to cropping. What you see is the orange end of the stalk, the convex surface which bonds to the pale concave depression in the top of the orange. Shadow of the parent orange just visible top right.

I did get around to loading the gimp mentioned on 18th June, and it would no doubt do the job properly, but it is a rather sophisticated product and it is going to take quality time to learn even how to do something simple. I have only got as far as finding out that it is apt to store its pictures in some proprietary format which nothing else understands, a tribute to the sophistication of its approach to the photographic art. Maybe I will get there one day.

Leared again

Following the visit to Lear reported on 9th June, back earlier in the week for a second helping.

In the meantime, I had learned that they play was derived from an old Italian fairy story about another king with three daughters, with the favourite getting into trouble for offering her father water and salt, rather than something a bit fancier. Type 923 in the Aarne-Thomson classification. Shakespeare varied the original by making the two elder sisters bad rather than good and by considerable elaboration of the plot.

I started the proceedings by visiting the photographic exhibition in the Lyttelton foyer which had been puffed in the Guardian. Very arty landscape photographs by one Charlie Waite (see http://www.charliewaite.com/, individual tuition available), some of which were inaccessible inside some private function or other, some of which looked to have been extensively touched up in photoshop (see http://www.photoshop.com/ to find that the idea that the camera never lies is some way off the unvarnished truth) or some such and all of which were very artily printed & framed. I did not like many of them and I certainly did not like the price, maybe £750 for number 45 of a limited edition of 50. But I did get to see the conical reed huts in the Libyan desert which had featured in the Guardian.

And so into the Olivier, where I had a theatre buff from Cheltenham on my left and two ladies who did not go the distance, leaving at half-time, on my right, and one of whom was making herself a nuisance with her smart phone until just before the off. And then we had one quiet but persistent ring from behind me and one very loud musical ring in front of me during the proceedings. The lady owning the loud musical ring left the auditorium to answer it and then had the sauce to come back in - if it had been up to me she would have been denied re-entry.

In sum, the second visit was well worth it. This second, evening performance seemed sharper than the first, afternoon performance. Edmund, for example, seemed more convincing. Stronger sense of Lear, Kent and Gloucester being yesterday's men. That said, the second half sagged a bit, which it had not on the first occasion and the tragic ending was neither as gripping nor as shocking.

One oddity towards the end was that the bit when the repentant, dying Edmund tells Edgar to send to stop the murder of Cordelia seemed to go missing. Perhaps I missed it; it seems to be a rather important bit to go missing. Checking the script, I find that a good chunk of the Edmund-Edgar part of Act V, Sc. III seemed to have gone missing. I missed the sense of it being a knightly challenge, a cut down version of the knightly challenge between Bolingbroke and Mowbray in Richard II. With Edmund graciously waving his right to know who his challenger is. I then wondered how much one performance of a play of this sort might differ from another from the same production. Do bits just get missed out sometimes?

But maybe the play is too long to be performed without some serious surgery, so the director is free to do a bit of pick-and-mix to get the play that he or she thinks that it should be. Rather different in that respect from music from the classical repertoire, with performers there being expected to respect the score, to stick to the score. No pick-and-mix for them.

Maybe also this brain is too old to process Shakespearean sentences in real time. A lot of it only works when I have done some preparation, certainly that was the drill when my mother used to take school parties to Stratford. It seems unlikely that I am alone in this and maybe that is part of why, for example, the wicked sisters sometimes seemed to put more effort into their hips than their tongues. In any event, a little late in the day, I shall now put some quality time into my Arden (illustrated above), an Arden which had once belonged to a young lady who was promoted from VIB in Room 9 to VIA in Room 2 during her term of ownership. Did she forget to return it to their school library?

Home to be irritated by a piece in the paper about the shocking state of child care services. What on earth do people expect to get when they don't pay the sort of taxes needed to provide proper public services? Let them look forward to what they will get when said services have been flogged off to the private sector and they get even less bang for their buck. Or are these expectations merely the product of journalists in search of copy? Have the public actually made a choice; they would rather have the pound in their pocket than in that of some poor sod of a social worker trying to sort out some drink & drug fuelled mess on some bog standard estate? And then irritated by another which tells me that a slice of our presumably badly stretched police budget is to be spent on banning kat (and upsetting another minority), at a time when plenty of civilised people think that we should make such stuff legal, and some civilised states actually are. See http://www.legalhighsforum.com/. Followed in the morning by yet another piece about Boris backing some ridiculous garden bridge. Is there no end to which the vanity of politicians cannot be turned?

PS: only a modest amount of smoking in this show. Didn't feel that they were really putting their hearts into it, just going through the motions to preserve the privilege.

Rites of winter (2)

Following last year's post of a man toy from Ottawa's Rideau River (22nd March 2013), this year's man toy is a little more modest, if equally engaging.

Nearer home, I ponder on why we are spending £100m on chewing over the phone hacking business, and maybe putting one of the several defendants into jail. All very sordid, unpleasant and probably illegal, but is it a good use of public resources? Is the spend proportionate to the crime?

Presumably the lawyers concerned have done very well out of it all, so well perhaps that they will not need to join their hard pressed colleagues on the picket line protesting against cuts in legal aid. Presumably said lawyers concerned already had well filled coffers, fat cats who are a long way away from the grubby and not terribly well-paid business of defending affordables who get into fights in Tooting.

Not to mention all the police overtime.

It all reminds me of how the Maddie tragedy has managed to sweep up rather a lot of police and other resources. Is the spend proportionate and appropriate here?

How could we better manage such matters, without getting swept along on waves of media hysteria?

Ripieno

On Saturday we went to the summer concert of the Ripieno Choir (last mentioned on 17th March), held at the Menuhin Hall of the Yehudi Menuin School at Cobham, half way between the local crem. and the Chelsea Football Club training ground. We did wonder whether the school was one of the good causes on which the Club spread a bit of soothing dosh, but there was no evidence of anything of the kind in the course of the concert.; no footballers swanning around with their WAGs on complementary tickets.

The hall turned out to be just the place for this sort of light, summer concert. The hall itself quite small, rather like an upside down wooden boat (reminding us of the nautical origin of the word 'nave') and surrounded by a light, open space well suited to the provision of a light meal and the whole surrounded by park land. Light meal was very good, and good value at £10 or so each, produced by the house chef and served by very pleasant young occasionals.

The choral part of the concert was supported by an engaging accordionist, one Howard Skempton. He also wrote the music for some of the songs but nothing like the illustration is to be found at http://www.composerhome.com/Academic_files/skempton%20diss.pdf.

We were sat next to the grandson of the composer of another part of the concert, one Cyril Rootham, perhaps the Dan Rootham who looks to be responsible for http://www.rootham.org/, from which I learn that we missed a related organ recital at St George's cathedral at Southwark (see July 14th 2009 in the other place). Perhaps the grandson was there to make sure that the choir kept to the script. Not often that one sees people following the music on a score now; I am sure it was much more common when I was little. And I dare say there might be some tutting these days by those near one, distracted or irritated by the turning of the pages. Perhaps there is some flashy concert hall in California where you can have the score displayed on a little screen in the back of the seat in front of you, rather like you get maps in an aeroplane - but thinking about it, maybe the flickering screens would occasion some tutting too.

The concert closed with a piece which was not sung at all, rather chanted, a geographical fugue by Ernst Toch which reminded me of the stuff we heard at Tate Britain in January (see 25th January). Available on YouTube, but with the complicated caveat: 'Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue” was conceived of as a work for technological media, designed as a recording to be performed by a gramophone set to a faster speed. Perhaps uniquely in music history, this electronic work has had an almost exclusively acoustic performance history of more than eight decades. Premiered in 1930 at a Berlin-based festival dedicated to the incorporation of technology in music, a few years later the piece was transformed into a humorous showpiece spoken live by a-cappella choirs. However, these renditions represent a substantial deviation from the composer’s intention'.

In the margins

I have mentioned the shimmering walls at Debenhams of Oxford Street on several occasions, for example on 11th April. It happened that in the margins of the visit to Bridport, I met someone who worked for Debenhams who was able to tell me that what I had thought was an engagingly low-tech bit of modern art actually cost in the region of £12m, with the dosh having been stumped up by the landlord, Land Securities. However, this is not confirmed by http://www.landsecurities.com/ which admits to knowing about Debenhams, but says nothing about the Oxford Street store.

The next thought was that perhaps one could persuade the owner of the very tall round tower block near Vauxhall Cross to build a spiral model railway going up the outside, with maybe one turn to every two floors. One could then have a range of model trains going up and down the spiral - which would need to be a two track affair to do the job properly - with carriages illuminated in various interesting ways yet to be devised. Ought to be quite fun at night. Or maybe a double helix, working in some genomic angle.

Back in the margins of Bridport, we stopped off on the way home to take tea at a Costa, where the tea was fine but for some reason came in very heavy, white hemispherical cups. We could only think that the cups needed to be so heavy to reduce breakages. We also noticed three rather dirty APCs on entire transporters and two Sunseeker motor boats on transporters which had lost their tractor units. One of the boats looked brand new, the other needed a bit of a clean underneath. APC being, I think, the technical term, for something which looks rather like a tank but which has no gun and which is used for carrying a small number of troops around a battlefield, a sort of military version of a golf buggy. The Sunseeker motor boats looked very expensive, but a quick peek at http://www.sunseeker.com/en failed to do more than establish that the boats that we saw, flashy as they seemed, were probably near the bottom of the range. Prices on application.

The veranda on which we took our tea was protected from the wind by a bank of the plants illustrated, perhaps native to the Canary Islands, but doing rather well in this service area.

Bridport

Last week a visit to Bridport, a town we have not been to for a while and a town which turned out to be rather like King's Lynn (see 12th August 2013). That is to say a place which was a middle sized working town near the seaside and which is now struggling to come to terms with the new world, struggling to get as many holiday makers in as possible. A town which included a good mixture of residents, from county types in green wellies, through arties in elderly long hair, to affordables in tattoos, although it was not altogether clear whether Snook the hatter, established 1896, catered for the county types or the bucket & spade types or both.

The big industry of yesteryear was rope and net for the Newfoundland trade (not clear why a rope town would specialise in a particular fish place in that way) and the once imposing building illustrated was the Edward's Building from the 1890's, when it produced nets for fish and footballs. Now broken into small units doing various more or less exotic business.

And behind the Edward's Building we had the Palmer's Brewery Complex, still up and running, including a disused water wheel in the west river designed by a French general and still running to a decent tied estate. I think I once came across a stray Palmer's house behind Heathrow's Bath Road, in the margins of some very important conference.

So we had the old town a couple of miles inland, between the east and west rivers. Lots of old buildings, with lots of holes in them to let the horses and carts through to their yards. Then to the south, in what one supposes was marsh land, the industrial area above, then West Bay. West Bay was home to a handsome, steep shingle beach which looked good for swimming although the undertow was said to be a bit strong. Interesting sandstone cliffs to the east. Accommodation included old cottages, smart new flats, a trailer park and a large old pub, the Bridport Arms Hotel. But, as it happened, we had opted to stay in the Bridge House Hotel in Bridport proper, hard by the bridge over the east river. A hotel which among other virtues was able to offer a proper kipper for breakfast, locally smoked by http://www.chesilsmokery.com/ although not locally caught. A large kipper which had been simmered rather than grilled, only marred by being buttered, a pity as I prefer my kippers dry: the idea is to draw the fat with simmering and not then to add cow fat to replace the fish fat. I think they took their cooking seriously, so I could probably get it done right on another occasion.

PS: illustration courtesy of http://www.enterprisestmichaels.org.uk/heritage/.

Jigsaw 8, Series 3

Another go at the jigsaw last seen here on 14th May, having taken something over five weeks to solve on this occasion. Perhaps jigsaw life really is wearing thin.

For variety, solved the easy bits in a different order but ended up with most of the velvet robe of the right hand figure and the lower black of the left hand figures, as last time.

During this time we came across a computer image of the painting at the 'Colour' exhibition at the National Gallery (see 20th June), possibly in connection with the green curtain, possibly on account of Holbein's use of exciting new green paints, of a quality not previously available. I shall check when we revisit the exhibition.

The picture is also included in the collection of the Google Cultural Institute (http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/home?view=grid), where the zooming in capability is rather better than that offered by the owner, that is to say the National Gallery. A fine teaching or study aid, presumably the product of some fancy photographic work commissioned especially for the Cultural Institute. I wonder if one can organise things so that it displays a full size version on the computer screen on your wall? How close to the experience of the original would this come? Or has that been blocked on the grounds that that is tantamount to giving you the image, presumably not allowed.

From what I remember of Harald Küppers, it should be better than a printed copy. That is to say, a computer screen, being light emitting rather than light reflecting, should be far less sensitive to the vicissitudes of the ambient lighting.

Mrs Conrad

I mentioned the fact that Orwell did not care for the memoir of Conrad written after his death by his wife on 16th June, subsequently acquired a copy of its November 1926 impression, old enough for the paper to bear the marks of the mesh on which it was laid, and now read.

Conrad married in middle life, roughly at the time he gave up the sea for the life of a landlubbing writer, a girl much younger than himself, described in his Wikipedia entry as an 'unsophisticated, working-class girl, 16 years younger than Conrad'. Their marriage seems to have been happy enough, producing, inter alia, two sons, but I dare say his literary friends rather looked down on her and were probably rather condescending to her face. She also, like others before her, served as secretary before her husband could afford to employ one, serving some of her time with a typewriter sufficiently old & primitive that the letters would fall out of it if you tipped it over. Not individually mounted on cunning bars activated by keys. I imagine that she wanted to assert herself a bit after his death, to get some recognition for her rôle in his oeuvre. She wanted more than the scant recognition afforded, for example, in my otherwise excellent Everyman edition of 'Heart of Darkness', which survived the cull in favour of Amazon and where she rates just two short lines in the chronology, one for when she met and one for when she married him.

The book serves well enough as a peep into Conrad's family life. I learn, for example, that Conrad could be difficult and was not very well a lot of the time. Decent in the sense that it tells no tales and there are no lurid secrets, this is no kiss-and-tell. But I can see why it might have irritated Orwell; he did not want to be portrayed in such a wifely way, to be seen in the way that a wife sees her man, warts, foibles, sickness and all. With her man and his work being very much, in some sense at least, her work. Which was perhaps a bit off the mark seeing that he had only married Sonia on his deathbed and she never served as a wifely wife and would not have had the sort of knowledge of him which would have come from such service. And also because the wife has a point; the husband writer did not and does not stand alone. His work, to some extent at least, is a joint product.

One result of all this is that I think I am shifting my ground a bit. While I still don't care for, for example, the collecting and publishing of letters never intended for public consumption, I think I now allow that the public, having paid for an author to live well, might reasonably take an interest in the life behind the letters. A writer cannot expect to be known by his works alone, still less by the works that he (or she) marks as fit to stand monument. {Perhaps lady writers are not so monument inclined}. This new ground has the merit of being more consistent with my position on, for example, the royals whom I hold to be disqualified from having much of a private life having been well paid, as it were, to be public. But is also true that my own interest in the lives of writers is of relatively recent date; for much the larger part of my reading life I took little interest in the lives behind what I was reading. Is the shift a product of age? A shift into a life of gossip & tittle-tattle, no longer wanting anything of greater substance?

All that aside, there are some engaging anecdotes from their times. From the time, for example, when the Conrads were caught in what I suppose was the Austrian bit of Poland at the start of the First World War and how they were able to escape via Vienna and Italy back to England. I imagine that by the time of the Second World War they would have been interned for the duration, on the spot.

There is also quite a lot more on the ford mentioned on September 25th 2012 in the other place.

Learning to be a luvvie

I thought that this advertisement from a recent Guardian nicely exemplified the way we do higher education these days.

Plenty of jargon and plenty of framework, but I was left unsure how a graduate of the BA (Hons) Acting programme would get on in the real world. What proportion of them wind up teaching in other programmes? What proportion wind up in unrelated occupations, like flipping burgers or stacking shelves? If we knew, should we care?

I decided quite early on that HE was higher education, and so applicants might either be flexible practitioners or higher education professionals, professionals for whom the lime lights had long faded. But what does flexible mean in this context? Willing to turn one's hand to all kinds of peripheral matters, willing to teach courses in CV construction (the sort of CV which will catch a bored & lazy agent's eye) or in catering management (theatre)? Then there was the need for a sensitive awareness of something. All this for a modest £35,000 or so.

While I never got to the bottom of what the phrase 'context and the bard' was driving at, I did eventually work out that an HEI was a higher education institute and that maybe HEA was some kind of professional organisation. And I was quite right, because when I asked google what an hea was, http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ was top of the list. Was google aware of my interest in these matters and so adjusted the list accordingly, or is this lot so well known that it floated to the top without assistance? Whatever the reason, the first two pages of the list were all to do with the academy, with one of the exceptions being (appropriately) an actor called Brendan O'Hea, who confusingly trained at Bristol rather than Liverpool and is sufficiently important to have once worked with the Dame Judi, and another (inappropriately) being something called an HEA panel, a wire mesh panel used for stabilising the faces of cuttings and embankments, made somewhere near Dublin (see http://www.maccaferri.co.uk/home/13900.html. If you get the address slightly wrong, Chrome breaks into Italian, quite wrongly thinking that this obviously Irish name is Italian).

Having worked my way through all this, it turned out that the HEA was an outfit which, inter alia, dished out accreditations to worthy HEI's. It all smelled a bit like the quality accreditation which was all the rage in the IT world, or at least the government part of that world, around the turn of the millennium. The HEA also got itself involved in the Islamic scene, more specifically in a 'learned society and professional organisation focused on enhancing research and teaching about Islam and Muslim cultures and societies in UK higher education'. I wonder if devout Muslims are allowed to act? Given that pictorial images of people are forbidden, at least in mosques, it would seem a bit inconsistent to allow theatrical images.

All good fun, I dare say. But I am very glad not to be mixed up in it all.

Mrs Seacole

Following the post of 20th February, I did, in the event, get around to buying the adventures of Mrs Seacole, in the Penguin edition, from Amazon and I have now got around to reading it, and rather interesting it was too.

A creole from Jamaica, she starts out by nursing British troops stationed in Jamaica, becoming something of an expert in dealing with bowel problems, then moves on to keeping a store for the gold diggers crossing the Panama isthmus on their way to California. When the Crimean war gets under way she goes to London to offer her services as a nurse, but spurned there despite her experience, she pushes onto the Crimea where she keeps another store, just behind the front lines, while freelancing as a battlefield nurse. She was clearly quite something, and justly popular with the troops with which she came into contact, to the point where there were plenty with title or rank or both who were prepared to write testimonials for her. But not Florence Nightingale, who seemed to think that she was rather a nuisance, keeping what more or less amounted to a disorderly house. I suspect that Mrs. Seacole was a bit too full of fun and zest for life for her - but she must also been tough, as life for a women more or less in the line with the troops cannot have been easy. Interesting that such a woman also had the skills needed to get the right sort of memoir out onto streets while the public were still interested. I seem to recall Stendhal has one in 'Le Rouge et Le Noir', one of a caste called a vivandière in the French army of the time, kindly but tough, probably not usually given to memoirs.

The penguin includes full apparatus; that is to say an introduction from an associate professor at Toronto University, 40 pages of notes and a glossary. An introduction which seems to think that it was just as well that she went bust at the end of the Crimean War, having mistimed a major stock building exercise, as rich she might have been seen as a profiteer, rather than as the heroine she was. All in all a very good read.

Given Mrs. Seacole's comments on the way people of colour were treated by Yankees, I thought I would ask http://www.dp.la/ about her, to find no knowledge there of 'mrs seacole', 'mary seacole' or even 'seacole'. The search term 'nurse jamaica' turned up 11 hits, all from the State University of Montana at Billings (on the Yellowstone River), all from the student rag there 'The Retort'. I got the hits because the university has a school of nursing and the rag sometimes had an advertisement for holidays in Jamaica. And I can download, for free, a good quality .pdf file, all 15Mb of it.

But then, using my knowledge that there is a portrait bust in the J. Paul Getty museum, I go to http://www.getty.edu/ where I rapidly turn the bust up. And I can download a good quality picture of it for free, against a simple declaration that it is for personal use rather than commercial gain. The version they sent me was 18Mb, so the version above has been chopped down to a decency preserving 200Kb. Not like our National Gallery, sufficiently poverty stricken that they make a substantial charge for their digital images.

A handsome bust, but one which the catalog entry says has been taken from a picture, rather than from life, so who is to say whether it is any nearer the real thing than the image on the front of the penguin, taken from the original book, back in 1860 or so.

PS: poking the Getty a bit harder I turn up 'the Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required'. They are quite happy for me to make money out of the thing. Perhaps only fitting considering how much money Mr. Getty must have made in his day.

Colour

Following the brush with Harald Küppers on 7th February, the colour exhibition at the National Gallery caught my eye, so off I went.

Pulled my first Bullingdon of the day at Grant Road East, to find it usable but with gears that need adjusting, so, for I think the second time ever, press the red button on arrival at Vauxhall Cross. A guessing game for the mechanics to work out why the button had been pressed; presumably a game which they fail a proportion of the time. Passing, at the Vauxhall end of the Wandsworth Road, the crane of the previous post.

Another guessing game arose from the Chinook (see 28th March) which appeared to be circling Westminster. Was it stuffed to the gunnels with SAS troopers, tooled up to respond to anything? Ready to abseil down from 100 metres up if there was nowhere convenient to park? With the troopers able to be on the ground and ready to go anywhere in the central area within 10 minutes of getting the call?

Pick up the next Bullingdon at the Albert Embankment, better but not great, and off over Lambeth Bridge and round Parliament Square, with the rounding being enlivened by a underdressed young lady riding her own bicycle. Perfectly decent looking young lady, but her turnout on this occasion did her no favours. Probably a civil servant as she turned into King Charles Street - I think a special advisor would have had more dress sense, more sense of her own importance & dignity. Parked up at Pall Mall East and so into the exhibition, pleasantly uncrowded. I really liked it, a well mounted educational exhibition with a nice balance between paintings, things, captions and other educational materials. I thought the idea of arranging the exhibition by colour, with one room for blue, another for red and so on, worked well. I was reminded, for example, that good quality blue paint came, until relatively recently, from a particular mine in the wilds of Afghanistan, via Bagdad & Damascus, was very expensive and was thus suitable for the decoration of the Virgin, despite its infidelity. I was also struck by how important luxury cloth was in the conspicuous consumption of the time of the Renaissance, which might be one factor accounting for the amount of cunningly painted cloth you get in the paintings of that time, the painting illustrated being just one among a number in the exhibition. Not the sort of picture I usually respond to, but I did respond to this one, finding it, in the flesh at least, oddly impressive.

I shall be back, but in the meantime it was time for a Duncannon Street tea and bacon sandwich. From there I picked up the next Bullingdon from the west end of St. Martin's Street and on through the arch into the Mall. On the way, a bright yellow taxi sporting the registration mark 'A1 CAB' caught my eye in Trafalgar Square, causing me to wonder what such a thing might cost, but also to think that it was a pity that it was not on a proper, traditional black cab. Across the front of the Victoria Memorial, as gross as ever in the bright sunlight, and into Constitution Hill, through the next arch into Hyde Park where there was lots of other Bullingdons and the rose gardens were looking very well. They also smelt very well, unlike the ornamental trees planted along the south side of the Serpentine which smelt rather badly.  Dismounted at Palace Gate, Kensington Gardens, to continue on foot into the wilds of Kensington, to get slightly lost as I had fallen off the western edge of my CLBM (central London Bullingdon map) but with the upside that I came across some very handsome dull yellow hollyhocks, flowers which I like almost as much as foxgloves (see, for example, the first post assigned to 18th June). Found an English speaking builder who was able to send me back onto the map, to Gloucester Road (Central), where I picked up my fourth and last Bullingdon of the day, on which I managed to get back to Falcon Road without getting lost, although I did have to dismount at the Latchmere theatre pub, to avoid the pull up Latchmere Road. Slightly disconcerted on Battersea Bridge by a van which would not overtake me, despite my hugging the kerb, to be warned by the passenger when it did eventually pass me not to wobble under their trailer, rather wider than the van and the sort of trailer it would be quite easy to get tangled into. Another considerate driver.

Attempted to reprise the Turkish Delight at one of the convenience stores on Falcon Road (see 4th June), to find that while they had 20 or more different sorts they did not have the one I had last time. Nor, among the four people working there, was there much English. So I had to settle for something else, which turned out to be soft fruit sweets dusted with coconut, quite acceptable, and some more than acceptable figs. I shall be back there too.

PS: home to find a very gushing review of the very same exhibition in the Guardian. So while it may continue to be a cheap exhibition, it may not continue to be so pleasantly uncrowded. I think an empty exhibition would seem a bit odd, a bit sterile, one wants to be part of a collective experience, but one can easily have too much of a good thing in that department.

Baldwins

Passed one of these the other day, somewhere near Vauxhall Cross. Don't recall seeing such a thing before, particularly the stabilising cross trees, for all the world like an over-sailed dingy, but in any case very impressive for a lorry mounted mobile crane.

Turning to http://www.baldwinscranehire.co.uk/, I find that cranes like this are an important part of the Baldwin fleet, or at least in the handsome publicity pictures they take of it. Mainly, if not entirely, engineered by a company headquartered at Biberach an der Riss, near the Ulm of battle fame. They also make domestic appliances. But the crane could be yours for perhaps £10,000 a day?

Bloomsday lite

We used to celebrate Bloomsday with a licensed stroll around the centre of London, attempting to capture some of the flavour of the great book known as 'Ulysses Revisited'. Given that it was first published in serial form, in much the same way as our own great authors of yesteryear, we sometimes added a bit of spice to the proceedings by trying to pick up relevant copies of 'The Little Review' from the secondhand bookshops at that time scattered around Charing Cross Road and neighbouring streets. We got to 5 out of the 18 parts before the fun got taken out of it by the arrival of ebay, where today, for example, you can get a perfectly good example of one of the parts for a little over £100.

Nowadays we have to settle for something a little lighter on the stomach, in fact not a stroll at all, just a sedentary glass or two.

On this occasion I got off to a bad start by forgetting to take either my free bus pass or my older persons' rail card, which fact I did not realise until I had already bought my discounted rail ticket. I decided to risk the penalty fare payable for not being able to present one's rail card to an authorised representative of SouthWest Trains, rather than buy the proper ticket. I then wondered what would happen if the buses around Tooting had stopped taking payment in cash, but this turned out to be just a touch of older persons' paranoia as the buses will be taking cash for another few weeks yet and I was, later in the day, £2.40 out of pocket, this being the fare from Tooting Broadway to Earlsfield.

But I get ahead of myself. The first stop was a new bookshop, just down from Earlsfield Station, which claimed to be a descendant, in some sense at least, of both the bookshop which used to be under Earlsfield Station and the rather larger one which used to be under Balham Station. The first of these was the source of the various copies of books about boats from Janes, with which I used to entertain sprog 2, when of a naval age, so it seemed appropriate, not finding anything Joycean apart from a rather battered paperback copy of 'Ulysses Revisited', to buy a battered paperback copy of the Navy List from 1966 in which I was later able to look up my naval uncle, to find that at that time he was serving on H.M.S. Triumph, a ship which must have been rather a dangerous place in which to work as it ran to no less than three surgeon commanders. Oddly, the naval uncle was not listed amongst its senior officers in the ship part of the List, perhaps an example of the sort of inconsistency which can creep in when one's book is not underpinned by a proper database on a proper computer. One can only suppose that an MoD publication of this vintage was driven by index cards rather than chips. Or perhaps, I have missed some important part of List etiquette and the omission was not a mistake at all. On the other hand, I was able to confirm that the senior naval dentist held the rank of Rear Admiral and that the senior naval parson did not hold a naval rank at all, being an archdeacon of the Church of England. The Catholics and the Wee Frees got a look in, but the Jews did not, at least not in the List; they may well have appeared on the ground.

And so onto Wetherspoons, where we moved on from the sort of discussion which might have been appropriate to the topers of ante-bellum Dublin, for example on the sourcing of the ostrich feathers which graced the Viceroy's hat, to something a little more up to date, to wit the products Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) and Armadillorun (http://www.armadillorun.com/). I was pleased to learn that the former would solve my continuing difficulties with cropping images while I was impressed to learn that the latter, while being classed as a computer game, appeared to be genuinely instructional, a sort of construction toy, a bit like Meccano (see illustration above), but simulated on a computer rather than coming in the form of bits and bobs in a box. Google has lots of stuff about it. Further evidence that while the young may not read too much these days, they are not completely wasting their time.

We moved onto the important question of why Google do not vet the applications being sold to run on Android telephones, while the likes of Apple and Microsoft do vet the applications being sold to run on their devices. A question both important and interesting, whether or not the allegation is true, to which I ought to return on another occasion. And we closed with consideration of the price of a fancy electric guitar, which turned out to be very much the same as that of, for example, of a trumpet or a clarinet. Another interesting question, but one to which I shall probably not be returning.

Well, not quite closed. Before we broke up, we were treated to a short reading from the great book of the day, which one of our number had had the foresight to add to his trusty Kindle for the consideration of 36p, the first Kindle edition coming in rather cheaper than the first Book edition.

Twice tweeted

I have commented more than once this year on the return of the starlings.

So tweet 1 is a line of them, just visible if you click to enlarge, perched on top of the roof on top of the flats on top of the new fish shop in the Horton Precinct. One of those occasions when once needs a camera with zoom to do justice to this late afternoon scene. Maybe one day I will discover not only that my telephone can in principle be software persuaded to do zoom, but also how to do said persuasion.

Tweet 2 was the other day, coming back down Longmead Road towards the end of a Horton Clockwise. There were a couple of crows on the grass, looking much the same, in particular much the same size, but with the first one pecking around on the ground and with the second cawing at the first. Then it turned out that the second one was a chick wanting to be fed and from time to time the first stuffed something down the open throat of the second. Maybe when Mum and Dad get fed up with it, they just hoof it one dark night when baby is taking a well earned snooze.

Foxgloves again

On the 29th May I came across a very fine foxglove in some Epsom brownfield. We have now, finally, got around to checking them out at Hampton Court, as it happened, in the margins of the visit noticed on 14th June.

A few days late, but there were still some very nice foxgloves to be seen, of which that illustrated left is one.

Jamming

On 13th September last I reported making pineapple jam, most of which ended up in the compost heap, a waste of food which would have rather shocked my parents, whose food was rationed during their young married life.

Then last week we acquired two pounds of Grade II strawberries and I decided that the second pound would best be made into jam. So I add a little water, maybe a quarter of a pint, to a saucepan and add a pound of sugar. Bring to boil and dissolve the sugar. Add the strawberries, having removed the green garland to the hull which does not come out, unlike those of the strawberries of my childhood.

Simmer for some hours, the nascent jam being a beautiful dark red syrup with the shrunken strawberries floating around in it, entire. The syrup was quite clear, not the cloudy stuff that I remember at all. Perhaps if I had halved the strawberries, which I think now was the childhood form, they would have disintegrated, providing some cloudiness. The syrup also had an odd tendency to forth up pinkly if disturbed.

When I tired of the frothing, I poured the mixture into a shallow pyrex bowl to cool and, in the event, thicken rather than set, with the exception of some pink froth which rose to set on the surface. The body of the resulting confection retained its dark red clarity, jewel like, if tasting a little sickly sweet. The appearance of the jam was somewhat marred by the froth breaking up into it as one poked around with the jam spoon.

Being too sweet to eat much with bread, we tried another portion with steamed jam sponge, aka canary sponge, which was rather better. Better still when the jam was diluted with water and a little lemon juice. Reading our 'Radiation New World Cookery Book' (a book with a considerable google presence) recipe after the event, I find lemons but no water, the wheeze being to steep the berries in sugar overnight, a process which left a mixture which one could safely cook without the addition of any water. I don't think that that is what we did when I was little, but I don't fully trust my memory in such matters any more. But I do think that the cooking which was done was done on a Radiation New World gas cooker, the hob part of which was ceremoniously stripped down and cleaned after every Saturday Roast - the form being Saturday Roast followed by Sunday Cold - or perhaps minced, a form which has left me with a fondness for the sort of mince you get by mincing cooked rather than raw meat.

All in all, an interesting experience, a feast for the eyes if not the palette, albeit once again rather wasteful.

The strange antics of the very rich

Moved by a piece in yesterday's 'Evening Standard' on the fate of the late Baroness Thatcher's house in Belgravia to put the new Pentel ink brush to work (see 7th April) to produce this sketch of a very rich person's town house in a street of same somewhere near Sloane Square. Only one house shown for clarity.

So we have the original house upper left and the original shed for the outdoor servants upper right, with a garden in between. Mews access road behind the shed not shown.

Then, with scene so set, the must-do scheme is to burrow down from both original buildings to create a large underground bunker, a smaller version of the much larger bunker built under MoD Main Building in Whitehall. The two shafts will mainly contain things like security doors, services, lifts and stairs, while the bunker proper, over several floors, contains things like library, smoking room, gym, games room, bar and discothèque. One only hopes that the rich person concerned has enough friends, flunkies and other hangers-on to populate all these wonderful facilities.

And then at the very bottom there is what purports to be a swimming pool but is actually a warm boson detector built to the specifications of said MoD. Apparently they are very concerned about what might happen to the warm boson population should it come to pass that we invite the Chinese to build our nuclear power stations for us as we are too disorganised to build our own. The prongs at the bottom are the piles needed to stop the whole edifice moving about and perhaps collapsing, but I am not sure how you get the pile driver down there without making a huge hole in the street, which even a Tory council might get upset about. Left to the reader as an exercise.

Be that as it may, given that most of the neighbours are at much the same thing, one does not need to feel too sorry for them on account of all the disruption, noise and dust. I just wonder why such people, if they want such a big house with all the trimmings, don't just move out to, for example, leafy Surrey. They could come to Epsom, not bother with an underground bar and slum it with the rest of us in the Assembly Rooms, a sound historic operation now run under the benign management of J. D. Wetherspoon.

The bottom line is that the Pentel is coming on. Not much cop yet but I think there are signs of life there; it might even end up better for a quick sketch than a biro.

Sonia O.

At a recent Epsom Library sale I picked up Hilary Spurling's biography of Sonia Orwell, which, not knowing anything about either, I thought might be good for a quick read. And as it turned out it was good for quite a long read; excellent value from the £1 that I paid for the 200 small pages.

The publisher's puff is that Sonia was rubbished after her death by the literary establishment (in this country anyway) and Hilary sets out to set the record straight. Which she does to the extent of showing what a substantial and interesting person Sonia was, but not to the extent of accounting for the spending of the Orwell inheritance, which became large in the year's after George's death and the squandering of which is one of the main planks of the establishment's rubbishing.

Her early life was hard. She was born in Bengal in 1918 where her father died, possibly suicide, when she was a few months old {and I wonder in passing whether conscription reached out as far as English men of military age in India}. Her mother remarried, to a man who turned out to be a violent drunk who had to be divorced, this at a time when divorced women were made to suffer, whatever the story. But before that Sonia was shipped back, at the advanced age of 6, to a Catholic girls' boarding school at Roehampton, a school which scarred her for life and which was the subject of her approximate contemporary's 'Frost in May'. {One wonders about the fate of all those other children from the colonies who must have gone through much the same mill}. Her family could not afford to send her to university, so she was packed off to school in Switzerland, the scene of the next tragedy, the death of her landlady's daughter and two lads in a boating accident in a lake. She probably carried the memory of the desperate clutches of a drowning man to the end of her own life. But somehow she got through all of this to become loved by so many people for 'her gaiety, her generosity and her radiant vitality'; swinging London was up and running well before the swinging sixties. And like Osbert before her (see 25th May), she seems to have known everyone who was anyone in the arty worlds of London and, in her case, of Paris. To the point of having a sketch of her by Picasso included as the frontispiece of the present book; the sort of thing he probably knocked out on the back of the menu after someone had bought him a meal, but a Picasso none the less. She modeled (though not in the nude) for both her painter friends and her writer friends, appearing in a number of the books of these last, not least as Julia in 1984, perhaps her most well known appearance. She was also, it seems, one of the subjects of some rough trade from Arthur Koestler, rough trade which resulted in an abortion, presumably of the variety which was then more or less illegal.

Her closer friends included the likes of Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Marguerite Duras and Wystan Auden. While not particularly creative herself and perhaps because she was herself denied a proper education, she worshipped at the altar of arty and intellectual types and was also a very efficient literary editor. But these friends mostly knew that under the surface things were not quite right; she drank a good deal and was given to savage, public outbursts at men friends. She was something of an angel of death, easing the passing of a number of important people, including Orwell himself and Auden. But she was very good at that too, with one result being that she was made Orwell's sole heir in his death bed will.

And then, after an interval, she married a rich man with an estate in Dorset, a man with a distinguished (second world) war record with the Welsh Guards and one the defendants in a large and lurid trial of homosexuals in 1954, a trial which at least served to push forward the campaign for change. But a marriage which failed and which, in Hilary's story, ultimately led to Sonia's death (from a brain tumour), more or less in penury.

It turns out that the same reading from Ecclesiastes was used both at Sonia's funeral and at George's, thirty years before. Being somewhat alert to this particular bit of the Bible (I am sure there are more mentions here and in the other place than those turned up by 'Ecclesiastes' as a search term), I look up the bit about the golden bowl (reproduced above), to find that while it is oddly chilling, it is more or less incomprehensible. I turn to the 'Good News Bible' where the same passage is comprehensible, but scarcely seems to be derived from the same text. Perhaps the 'Good News' translators, with access to modern scholarship and machinery, felt able to make a freer translation of the Ancient Hebrew than King James' committee. But at least I was amused to find that this particularly miserable bit of the Bible was immediately followed by the 'Song of Solomon' and I now know where the title of the Henry James story comes from.

I also know that Orwell died disappointed that he dissipated much of his life in journalism, rather than in heavier fare, and very concerned that the literary vultures should not pick over his corpse when he was gone, a sentiment with which I have much sympathy. He wanted his monument to be his proper books, not all the trivia and worse blowing around it. His (brand new) wife was given very clear instructions on this point, which included blocking biography and had originally included destruction of lesser works and ephemera, instructions which she tried to honour, attracting much opprobrium from the aforementioned literary establishment in the process. But despite the sympathy, I shall now read Conrad's widow's reminiscences about her husband, said to have been fuel for some of this. Perhaps Orwell was also mindful of Hardy's widow.

PS: I continued with Osbert in parallel, coming to the bit this morning where, in the context of the General Strike, he has dealings with the Marquess of Reading mentioned on 15th March.

Snips from the free Guardian

Two items caught my eye in the June 12th number.

First, we have Lidl offering some people adjoining the derelict Organ Inn 10% over the market price to move, thus making the Organ Inn site a better proposition as a shop. Which, if true, strikes me as a bit mean. There will not be a lot of change out of 10% after removal expenses, including stamp duty at 3 or 4%, and I think Lidl ought to be a bit more generous. As it is they are, in effect saying, take our offer or be stuck with a socking great shop peering over your back fence. Too bad if it knocks the value of your house.

Second, we have the headmaster of a school in Ruxley Lane in the county of Surrey wanting to sell off one of his playing fields to pay for upgrading another. So far, so good. Rules require there to be a consultation and if we have views we are invited to write to someone working for the Mitie property maintenance company (http://www.mitie.com/) out of offices in the county hall of the county of Essex, on the other side of the Thames. I wonder what convoluted chain of privatisation gives this result. Do important Mitie-funded fact finding missions in interesting locations in the sun get into the story somewhere? For example, to recently upgraded Brazilian football fields?

Bouches-du-Môle

Following the visit to the Mole at Leatherhead reported in the previous post (also 14th June), we thought it time to visit the Bouches-du-Môle at Hampton Court, mysteriously renamed by that point for a small chain of eating pubs, the Ember Inns, itself now broken up and renamed. One of them was our very own Cricketers Inn on Stamford Green Pond, where, according to http://www.stonegatepubs.com/, you will find 'you’ll find friendly people and a fun atmosphere'. As it happens, not a place I have ever used much. But the renaming was rather an odd thing to do as the area, East Molesey, remains named for the Mole.

Started off at the station car park, deemed to be cheaper for a day than the car park at the Palace itself. From there to inspect the landing with its attendant geese, young and old, at the south eastern end of the bridge. From there to inspect the landing with its attendant rowing boats at the south western end of the bridge, starting with a lounging young lady who rapidly stopped rolling her fag to explain the renting régime for rowing boats to us, which turned out to be rather like that for punts in another place: substantial deposit followed by so much per hour, one hour payable in advance. We wondered whether, on another quiet weekday, she would have given us a better rate for the day - picnic and all that sort of thing - but on this occasion we settled for an hour.

Proper skiff shaped boat, if made of fibre glass rather than wood, with provision for up to four oars and including a rudder at the back. We opted to have one lady pulling the port steering rope and another the starboard, an arrangement which worked quite well once we had got over the initial confusion. And so for a gentle row down to the nearby island and back, passing said Bouches-du-Môle on the way. Back at the bridge, we wondered how the Cigarette Island Park came to be so named: there would have been plenty of day-tripping smokers around on summer Sunday afternoons in the olden days, but in the olden days they would have been able to smoke in one of the various pubs serving the area. So why the large smoking outdoor smoking den? Excellent echo to be had under Hampton Court Bridge, rather like that to be had under the rather lower and narrower Silver Street Bridge at said other place (see gref 52.201910, 0.115395).

And so onto the rose garden which was looking well, if a touch battered by the recent rain, with some truly excellent floribunda roses under the walls. Them, by then feeling hungry, we moved onto the Tilt Yard Café where, it being warm but overcast, eating outside was an option. I opted for a Greek style sheep sausage which looked well enough but which turned out to be rather dry, as was the flat bread on which it came. And the lumpy green goo was a little warmer than it should have been. Teaching point: do not buy this sort of thing at the end of the lunch period as they knock it all up at the beginning of the lunch period. But quite eatable, and otherwise well suited to the warm weather.

And so onto to the paying gardens where we learned from one of the (no less than 40) gardeners that they grew most of their own plants in their acre or so of glass houses, only buying in the more common items as plugs. And I had thought that, these days, they would have bought most of their stuff in, ready to be planted out. But whatever the source, the beds and the long border were looking good. As was the privy garden, quite different in tone in the bright summer light than the spring light in which we had last seen it. A garden which works well, without all that much flower and being more a symphony of green, all year round (see March 12th 2012, in the other place). A rather pretentious sounding phrase but one which, for me, captures what the designer was trying to do.

We wound up with the two sunken gardens, one mainly floral and one mainly green, with the former being the subject of Jigsaw 16, Series 1, noticed on July 7th 2012.

Mole

A rather more benign view of the Mole that that posted on 14th January, the time of the floods. But no kingfisher and no fish on this occasion.

On the other hand a good crawl through the many charity shops in what is left of Leatherhead High Street and refreshments at the 'Running Horse'. A pleasant establishment, the like of which we could with more of on this side of Epsom.

Not to be confused with http://www.therunninghorses.co.uk/, more gastro than pub.

Waste water

A small piece about cocaine in the Evening Standard caught my eye the other day, a small piece which was spun off a report about waste water from an organisation called the EU drugs monitoring agency (EMCDDA) which has been beavering away in Lisbon for near 20 years, ironically in the EU country which has gone furthest for toleration & decriminalisation, if not legalistion.

This got the statistical antennae twitching. How on earth can you possibly measure drug use by taking samples of waste water? How on earth can you possibly make allowance for the different ways that water gets into the waste water system, the different waste water systems and all the rest of it? Bearing in mind that I would have first come across the piece in the evening, it being the Evening Standard, a time of day when the brain cells may have been given their regular alcohol bath and are in any case getting a bit tired. I note in passing that the EMCDDA does, very properly, include both nicotine and alcohol as being within its brief.

Then today, I get around to looking these people up, to find that they have a well organised web site at http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/ with lots of good stuff available for download, including the report on waste water which started this particular hare running. And so on to find the diagram included above which makes, as it intends, the whole business look much more reasonable.

But I still wonder about the first step, which appears to mean that you measure the concentration of stuff in samples taken from various sewers at various times of day and then gross them up to a population total by applying the total amount of waste water entering the various waste water facilities in the target area during the target period. All of which sounds a bit tricky, but following the references given in the report quickly results in Elsevier asking you to flash the plastic, a business which is presently attracting a lot of adverse comment in the likes of the NYRB. Not right that the public should have to pay to see the results of research which it paid for in the first place, not when the cost of putting those results onto the internet is close to zero. In any event, the hare died before I could get to the plastic and I went back to the matinal tea.

DIY

Might be failing the geek test these days (see, for example, 7th June) but a DIY result this morning.

Yesterday evening the downstairs toilet started being a bit temperamental about flushing, so I took a look in the cistern. Couldn't see a problem so went to bed. Problem reappeared in the morning, but the bright light of morning had clearly poked enough brain cells into life, as I remembered about the oblong plastic washers inside the siphon inside the cistern which perish from time to time. The last time being quite a few years ago, maybe as many as five.

Open the thing up to find that the washer, made that last time from a fertilizer bag, had broken in half. So initiate a search for something suitable with which to make a new one, with all the recyclable plastic we could find being either too thin or too thick. Settled for the lid of the plastic tub that our cheaper ice cream comes in (lids for dearer ice cream are much too thick); a bit stiff and brittle but maybe it will do. Cut something out and fit it and we seem, once again, to have a working flush. It was also an opportunity too good to miss to exercise my one and only 3/8 inch gouge (a sort of chisel, see http://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/dept/TBMS/item/EE-SG500.XX) in the kitchen. A bit blunt, having slacked off enough to put the thing away blunt, but it did.

However, despite this success, I was not altogether convinced that the new washer was going to last, so set of for the Wolseley down the Longmead, braving all the traffic piled up around the schools and around the road works in Temple and Hook Roads, to make it to the Wolseley where I was impressed to find that they did indeed sell spare washers and I could have 5 of them for £2.09p. With the added touch of being offered a cup of tea, for all the world as if I was a proper customer rather than an occasional. Perhaps they were impressed by my cycle helmet - unlike the neuro-surgeon who was knocking them in the DT last week.

I will report in due course whether siphon washers are indeed one size fits all.

In the mean time, so many brownie points that I am allowed a morning snooze in the garden.

Apprentice research

A bit of original research caught my eye the other day, in a book of papers which constituted the proceedings of a conference in Vienna. The conference took place in March of this year and the book of the conference appears to have been produced more or less immediately, with my having a copy in my hand, via Amazon, by May. So that part of the machinery was efficient enough.

The authors of the papers all appear to have read the notes for authors and the papers all come with the apparatus which one expects from a serious research person, with sections like affiliation, abstract, introduction, results, discussion, conclusion, acknowledgements and last but not least, references. And since the rule is that you can only have a reference in the reference section if you also include it in the text, the texts are well larded with references; it all going to help along the important business of you cite my paper then I'll cite yours, of keeping my citation rates up, without which I might have the faculty police breathing down my neck about my research performance. On the other hand, there is not much in the way of footnotes.

The particular bit of research in question occupied 11 pages of book, with just about 2 of the 11 given over to the references section, and was a look at the question of whether playing a computer game alleviated pain. To this end the researchers recruited 40 experimental subjects, half men and half women, and after various experimental and statistical shenanigans the upshot was that men reported less pain when they were playing the game while the women did not. Which might be loosely translated as men are more easily distracted by computer games than women, a conclusion which one might have come to otherwise.

I was fairly baffled by the statistics, of which there were a lot, despite their not being particularly heavy weight and not going much beyond standard deviations, but I was reminded of once reading about the poor standard of statistics in many papers on psychological and sociological subjects. On the other hand, google was quite helpful in plugging other gaps, telling me in very short order, for example, what a Likert scale was, opening up to my view a whole field of research into the behaviour of such things. A splendid opportunity to chase a whole new hare.

But overall, despite my interest in the subject matter, I found the whole business a little depressing. All this care, attention, collaboration and machinery spent in this way, giving the appearance of a colony of ants busy about their common task. I guess I would never have been much good at being a worker ant - and so would never have progressed to working foreman ant, never mind chief ant.

Stable block

Ewell Village clockwise today, which means I passed the house, the garage of which is illustrated.

A house which has always intrigued me. Maybe as much as 150 years old, more or less standard suburban villa, rendered brick with stone trim, recently thoroughly refurbished.

But what is not so standard is the hay loft above the garage, a hay loft which looks like an original feature. Was the garage once home to pony, trap or both? The sort of thing that features in the heritage Marple from Margaret Rutherford (noticed on 31st May) from the days when people could actually remember seeing ponies and traps on the streets, before they became the full-on heritage items they are now. Was having a horse stabled next to your own house, rather than in livery up the road, the decking or the island kitchen of its day? And if it was, why do so few houses sport such a thing?

QEH

Some more Endellion at the Queen Elizabeth Hall yesterday evening, where they were assisted by Benjamin Grosvenor, whom we have not come across before, for the last number. I don't know know if this was their first appearance at one of the concerts of one of the international chamber seasons put on by the South Bank Centre, but they didn't have quite as much pull as they do at the Wigmore Hall as here they did not get to do the programme, which was instead of the regular South Bank variety (see 2nd June). For once, we did not buy the programme having been irritated by being given a plastic cup to drink the rather expensive wine from, and made do with a print I happened to have taken from the web site: Haydn Op. 76 No.1, Britten Op. 25 (String quartet No.1) and Brahms Op. 34 (Piano Quintet).

They use pale wooden screens behind the playing position for chamber concerts, which provide a frame for the performers, but which on this occasion were illuminated rather loudly while we were waiting for the off. Fortunately this illumination was turned off at the off. There was also a much larger screen behind and above the wooden screens containing a rather loud advertisement for this international chamber season. That also was turned off at the off, but despite being dark in colour the large screen continued to detract from the framing provided by the wooden screen below. Visually irritating. And then, at the end of the concert, there was some finger trouble and we had displayed the right click menu the presenter sometimes ask for when lost in his Powerpoint. Also irritating. Perhaps all part of the drive to make the venue more accessible to the ordinary Londoner, more like the sort of thing they are supposed to be used to.

But the seats, row G were good, affording a good view of the performers, much better than that from row G in the Wigmore Hall; raking seats do have their points. Sets were also bigger and better than those in the other place. But the audience was not and there was quite a lot of sprawling, shuffling and coughing. Furthermore, a chap to my right was wearing a show-off watch which, from where I was sat, caught the light in an irritating way from time to time.

However, I must not go on about the irritations. The Haydn was previously unheard of and excellent. The Britten was previously unheard of and good, reminding me rather of the contemporary Shostakovich. But I think I may have heard the Brahms too often: it was good but a bit muted, with less emotional impact than it used to have. On the up side, the balance between the piano and the strings was very good, with the young pianist not seeming to need to do the young thing of outplaying the strings. Proper ensemble playing. Also sufficiently young that the page turner was old enough to be his father. Also an Essex boy. See http://www.benjamingrosvenor.co.uk/.