More arc

Following the Twain book of reference 1, it was suggested that I ought to see a film made by one Carl Dreyer. A forceful enough suggestion that I made  my first amazon purchase by telephone, something I had not previously done, being a little fearful that my telephone would remember, and then leak, my Amazon password. One never knows these days how many notes a computer is taking about what one is up to - and Amazon does not do that wheeze of asking you to supply three randomly chosen digits from your password, which I imagine makes the password thief's task rather harder than it would otherwise be.

Notwithstanding, a few days later a fat envelope lands on the map containing a small boxed set of what has turned out to be a masterpiece of world cinema, the cinematographic equivalent of one of Unesco's world heritage sites. Take a look at reference 2 to find out that the second best neolithic construction in the world is to be found in Korea.

So we get a little book full of Guardian speak to go with the boxed set and two DVDs. DVD one is a restored version of the original release of the film plus a piano score from Mie Yanashita. DVD two is a second version of the film made from camera two plus a different score from Loren Connors, with neither score being approved by Dreyer, who thought that his painstakingly constructed silent film should indeed be silent, without acoustic distraction. Regarding camera two, it seems that the way that things worked back in the twenties meant that the cheapest way to get a second copy of a film - insurance against loss of the first, which would otherwise mean total loss of the film - was to have two cameras on the go all through the shooting, getting two not quite identical versions of each take.

After due consideration, we settle for DVD one with the sound track turned on, just one of the four permutations available. We manage to fiddle with the aspect ratio on the telly so that we are seeing the real thing - unlike our usual fare which has often been stretched and cropped to get from the original aspect ratio onto our screen, which makes people like Poirot look shorter and fatter than they should, generally doing them no favours. Dreyer would not have approved.

And it was indeed a very good film. About ninety minutes long, a length which suits my pensioner's attention span, covering just the trial and execution, rather than the life and times, and consisting mainly of close up shots of Joan's face and those of her ecclesiastical judges. R. M. Falconetti, a famous actress in the Paris of the time, does very well as Joan. I was convinced by this Joan, this was something that could happen. But I was left puzzled by the humanity of the judges. Why would conscientious and essentially, mostly decent French ecclesiastics have done this thing at the bidding of the Duke of Bedford? Maybe the Twain take threw more light on that aspect of the matter.

Furthermore, Dreyer notwithstanding, I thought the piano score very good. And a snippet of the other score on YouTube this morning suggests that that one is very good too, albeit in a slightly different, less spare way.

All in all, a memorable find. But I wonder how long it will be before I try the second DVD.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/joan-of-arc.html.

Reference 2: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list.

Trolley 15a

Trolley 15 has been spotted, in the stream down Longmead Road, but has yet to be recovered. Following the precedent set by my first trolley (see reference 1), I need to remember to take a length of rope and a stick so that I can fish the thing out of the stream without getting wet - with the stick serving as support while one loops the end of the rope through the trolley.

I notice also the refusal of permission for a chemist to open in one of the vacant shops at the northern end of Manor Green Road. I wonder what business the council has to spend its valuable time on regulating such matters: is it not enough for market forces to act on all the chemists jostling for position and livelihood in the area? Why do we need the dead hand of the council in on the matter? The council may well have a point in that there are already quite a lot of chemists in the vicinity - including Horton Retail, West Ewell, Ewell Village and Epsom proper. But is it a point for them? Why should they second guess the professional judgement of a wannabee chemist? It is different with much larger and more expensive things like hospitals where a bit of central planning clearly is called for.

I associate to McDonalds. I read a story about them once which had it that they were really a real estate company. They rented out premises & branding to franchisees for a tidy sum, leaving said franchisees to make what living they could over and above that. But when renting to someone, they often made nice promises about not renting to anyone else in the vicinity, and then not keeping to the promises, leaving rather a lot of franchisees in that particular area. It occurs to me that what might be best for McDonalds in such a scenario might not be best for the franchisees: maximisation of the profits of the one might not coincide with maximising the profits of the others. To which the market forces people would presumably say caveat emptor.

I notice also the advertised arrival of a wine bar in Ewell Village, in what used to be 'Suite Deal Furnishing' (roughly gmaps 51.348283, -0.248002) and where there may also be a planning interest, but which strikes me as an entirely reasonable speculation. As someone who has been moved off beer onto wine, I have often wondered why there is no wine bar in the borough and the location, in the middle of a High Street with plenty of other bars & restaurants seems to me to be entirely reasonable. I wish them well.

PS: clearly a lot of us up and about this morning. For once in a while the internet is struggling and gmaps is really limping along.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/civics-2.html.

Benefightus spongiferus

A problem first noticed in the other place has resurfaced (see reference 1).

The story, triggered by a tale from a midlands sandwich factory, a place which makes a lot of the sandwiches which you might buy from the likes of M&S, is about benefit spongers from a place I shall call Rurimania, a vaguely central european country which includes lots of very dodgy people amongst its population. Certainly gyppoes, possibly vampires.

It seems that the salary of a brain surgeon in Rurimania is less than the minimum wage in this country. Furthermore, Rurimania is so poor that even brain surgeons have to live in shared bed-sits. Which means that they are quite happy to come here, to work at our minimum wage on our zero hours contracts and to live in our sort of shared bed-sits, or perhaps in clapped-out caravans round the back of the shed, while they work out how to get back onto the medical ladder. While our young people are too proud and too lazy: they are not going to get up early in the morning for minimum wages on zero hours contracts; they would rather scrape by on benefit, possibly supplemented by a little drug dealing on the side.

Some people think that this ought to be stopped, with one angle on enforcement (in today's DT) being to take our hard pressed police off drugs duties and to put them on foreigner registration duties. Maybe even legalise drugs to free up even more resources. Then wages would have to drift up to the point where our lads and lasses would take the jobs on offer and all would be rosy in the garden.

Another take on this, also from the DT, is that foreigners who are in work in this country are eligible for in-work benefits, without regard to how long they have been in the country. So a foreigner on minimum wages with ten children to support can claim all kinds of benefits to top up his minimum wages. The employers are getting away with minimum wages, which are often not enough to live any kind of a decent life on, because government is picking up the tab.

So going back to the sandwich factory, said to be more or less entirely staffed by Rurimanians, the boss makes lots of dosh and we get our sandwiches for less than we ought to, making up the difference in general taxation, which the boss does not pay because he has come to a cosy arrangement with those nice people in the Channel Islands.

I ought perhaps to make it clear that I am all for foreigners. We have a young people deficit here while the Rurimanias have a young people exicit, so it makes sense for them to move from there to here, a move which also helps to even up incomes & wealth across the two populations, a good thing in the long run. I only feel a touch guilty about all the Rurimanians who stay at home and who need some brain surgery.

But maybe we should stop subsidising minimum wage operators through the benefit system and start paying a more realistic price for our sandwiches. Push the minimum wage up to a living wage. Or even make our own sandwiches.

Another wheeze which I am attracted to is to make it socially unacceptable, in the way that drink driving has become socially unacceptable, for a person at the top of a workplace to earn more than five times the person at the bottom. I leave the details, which need to take account of things like office cleaning sub-contractors, share options, bonuses, part timers and other lead-swingers, as an exercise for readers.

PS: I learn later that the sandwich factory story is not very true. But I don't think that takes the moral away from my tale as I believe there to be lots of work places which are like the one in the story.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=benefightus+spongiferus.

A drop of the vinho

Earlier in the week I made a  much delayed return visit to Luso wines in South Lambeth Road (see reference 1).

Started off to find that that chipped bark noticed on the new trees at the station (see reference 2), had been trimmed back and the plots had been topped off with the same pea shingle - of a very uniform variety - does it come from a machine rather than a beach? - that they had used for the first attempt. The what might have been described as stoma finished watering pipes had also been trimmed back and capped off flush with the shingle. Was it all part of the grand plan or did some inspector not like what he found and so got the contractor back?

For once in a while the Bullingdon part of the TFL site is down, so I am unable to confirm my hiring, but it went from Grant Road East to South Lambeth Road, the first time that I have used this latter stand, clearly visible at gmaps 51.481896, -0.124609, if not at TFL. Just outside the interesting BT building, about, I believe, to be demolished on the mistaken grounds of its being a sixties eyesore. Notice also its interesting roof, to be seen in satellite view. A slightly wet journey and light not too good for cycling, being neither light nor dark, but the thin green over-jacket served well, at least to keep the wind and rain out.

The once grand Riley's Billiard Hall on Wandsworth road was looking even more forlorn than usual, it having had its fascia stripped off. I should have stopped to see what was going on.

Arrived at Luso's to realise that I had forgotten to bring my filofax, in which I had written down the name of one of the wines I had bought on the last occasion and rather liked and which I now know was Foral de Évora. A second reason to merge the heritage filofax with the shiny new telephone, the first being the calendar. But I did think that the label involved a large bird so tried to find it that way, but failed completely. There were some birds but the best fit to what I remembered was not quite right, quite apart from being on a bottle of red rather than on a bottle of white. The young lady hovered, concerned, perhaps more because I might not make a purchase at all than because of my bird. But she need not have worried as I took a bottle of João Pires Branco from Setubal Peninsula of Portugal, not a snip at £9 as the internet claims it can usually be bought for £5.

On to the Estrela to recover from the excitement, to take a bacon sandwich (satisfactory but not anything like as good as the regular, English-style one from Whitecross Street), and a half of Dão, my first knowing attempt at this particular sort of vinho. And, better than the sandwich, it was very satisfactory.

And so home, to be entertained on the way home first by a young lady, done up to the nines with a very short skirt, black tights and high heels. Not a particularly pretty girl, but certainly dressed to be noticed. Dressed well too. And second by a couple of young ladies, perhaps sisters, perhaps in their twenties, very comfortably & quietly chatting about I know not what. Presentably rather than flashily dressed; much more my sort of thing for closer acquaintance - with my interest lying in the contrast between the flashy and the comfortable. Third by a gent. who was very dressed for cycling with waterproof over trousers with hi-vis yellow straps round his ankles, waterproof jacket with hi-vis tabard - but with no helmet, which I thought odd. I could be smug, now having graduated to helmets, and I even had mine with me. Despite the rather odd comments from some neurologist recently about how they are a waste of space. A neurologist who might mend heads but I fail to see how he can contribute much to the debate about cycling helmets; his information might well be expert but it is also anecdotal. No big picture.

Them dealt with, I turned my attention to a glossy magazine called 'Loving your Home' from Haart, the front cover of which was decorated with an image of a rather odd looking chap called Llewelyn-Bowen, but who, as the BH explained when I got home, does some makeover show for ladies on the telly. Furthermore, the magazine had an unpleasant smell about it; the covers were OK, but the insides were not and it was not a good plan to get your nose too close to them, which I did as I did not have my reading glasses with me. The up-side was that I learned that for the price of our house in Epsom we could still buy something, albeit a touch smaller and with a much smaller garden (if any) in Tooting, should we want to get ourselves nearer some better class subcontinental restaurants or a bigger hospital than we can manage in Epsom. Indeed, I am told that for quite a range of medical eventualities one is carted off to St. George's right away, not even passing through A&E at Epsom. Touch wood, this will not arise.

I then got to thinking about how it would be convenient to have a map of the Bullingdon stands on my telephone. So off to the TFL site, at that time up and running, to find that while they do maps, they do nothing in the way of pdfs or anything else to put on your telephone. So I ask google and he comes up with one from some other outfit and I get that onto the phone in no time at all. But I now find that it has the same problem as Ottawa maps did on the previous phone: you can load them up OK but the Acrobat reader takes ages to zoom into the place you are interested in. It seems to have to rebuild the whole map every time you change the zoom. And unless you are very careful and stroke it in just the right way, it thinks you want to go back to the beginning again and you have to start over. While if you are in the part of the telephone called maps rather than the part called docs, the one map I have, a rather good freebie of the whole of the UK, works just fine. But this last does come at 500Mb rather than the 3Mb of the pdf, so maybe the former includes some trickery which makes it work properly.

Report on the bottle from Luso will follow in due course.

PS: the map I had thought was just of the UK now seems to do the whole world. Wonders never cease - but will there be some nasty blip on my bill from O2? The sort of thing you read about in the press, with monster teen-age generated charges arriving on the parental bill.

Reference 1: http://lusowines.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/an-italian-job.html.

Sleeping Island

I mentioned at reference 1 buying a book in Dalhousie about canoeing, a book which is called 'Sleeping Island', a place which, despite having now read the book, I cannot place. But I have some excuse in that the author did not care for the title.

That apart, a wonderful book, the tale of a canoe journey north to Nueltin Lake, more or less in the Arctic, more or less on the 60th parallel, in the summer of 1939, just about the time when war was breaking out in Europe. A time before the conveniences of modern canoeing & camping life had been invented and when the serious traveler had to be prepared for some seriously hard work and some serious discomfort, not least from the thick swarms of biting insects one attracted. To the point where Downes agreed with his companion for most of the trip that in the event of a serious accident to one the other was to abandon him. Out on the margins there was no help to be had and nothing much to be done - and no point in one taking the other down with him.

The terrain, say to the north of the splendidly named mining town of Flin Flon, was covered with lakes large and small. There were canoe routes threading their way through this lot, but on the ground they could be very hard to find. Which kink of the lake shore was the river, out of the hundreds of kinks available? One could spend a lot of time searching. And when you found the river you might be going upstream or downstream, but either way there would be plenty of rapids and worse. Sometimes you would chance it - bearing in mind that loss of canoe & stores could quite likely prove fatal - and stay on the water. Sometimes you would carry canoe & stores around the obstacle, a carry round - aka portage - which might be a mile or more long and which might be over very rough & unpleasant ground. At which point one wonders about the strength of the attraction which drew people to put up with it all, people who did not have to, unlike the indigines. Presumably not so very different from whatever it is which pulls people up high mountains and into other icy wastes.

Downes managed all this with no more than feeble maps - some hand drawn from memory - and a compass. No mention of the sextants carried by our chaps down in the Antarctic, many of whom had a naval and so sextant background. I associate to the other puzzle, of people more or less freezing to death in atrocious conditions but still managing to take and compute their star sights - this before the invention of calculators, let alone satnav.

To my surprise, it seems that a lot of the forest, up near the edge of the tree line, was burnt out, the result of summer fires set by lightning. One was, for a fair bit of the time, paddling through scorched earth.

I was rather pleased, having been bothered by the wind on our very modest little canoe journey on Simon Pond, far to the south, that canoeists up north were often wind bound and had to wait it out on the lake shore until the wind died down.

Despite the wilderness, they were not, however, completely alone. There was a sprinkling of whites, mainly traders or trappers, Crees, Chipewyans and Eskimos. Crees to the south, Eskimos to the north and the Chipewyans in between, with three languages and with none of the three groups getting on very well with the other two. Downes and his companion did not usually go many days without bumping into someone or other - but maybe they had chosen their route with that in mind. And it was long enough ago for the old customs to still be more or less intact - even if some of them had moved up from paddles to outboard motors.

One thing which all three groups really liked was gambling. To the south the Crees had learned about poker but the rest of them played an ancient version of spoof - a game I was taught maybe 20 years ago when the East Street King's Arms still had a public bar, and which I used to play intermittently for some years after. The Canadian version was usually played to the beat of a drum, with the beat picking up as the night wore on, as the excitement mounted. The stakes, I think, were sometimes large: dogs, canoes, wives, in fact, anything to hand.

A splendid book, a wonderful amalgam of travel story, nature, geology and anthropology notes. And he does not come across as being in the least condescending about the subjects of these last; he really seems to get on with, like and be liked by them. Even spoke the lingos a bit.

With the book much better than the raw diaries on which they were mainly based, if the small sample at the end is anything to go by. One needs a bit of craft to make the diaries into a story; it doesn't just happen all by itself. A worthy addition to my small collection of books about the aforementioned icy wastes.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dalhousie.html.

Reference 2: gmaps 60.185234,-99.599304 (but you might need to zoom out a bit to see anything of interest). While the mighty google does include lots of pictures of this still remote area, the map breaks down a bit in that some of the boundaries of some of the lakes are conventional, polygonal, rather than properly mapped. Maybe the story is that these lakes move around a lot as the the water level moves and it is not always clear where the lake stops and the land starts. But what the map does seem to show is the echo in the lakes of the movement, in times gone by, of the Laurentide Ice Sheet around the Hudson Bay.

Sir Gawain

Our first visit to Sam Wannamaker's Playhouse  at the Globe on Sunday to hear all about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

For the second Sunday on the trot the trains from Epsom were disturbed, but on this occasion in our favour as while the Waterloo service was interupted by buses, the Victoria service was replaced by a half hourly service to London Bridge, a lot nearer than where we wanted to be than either of the other two places.

So off at London Bridge to be told by a pair of very cheerful platform attendants that the half hourly service would continue until midnight. They adjudged, quite correctly, that this would be quite late enough for people of our age. Out of the refurbished concourse area to find ourselves underneath the shard, all very impressive - and remarking once again the slendarity of the outer columns, which one might have thought were seriously load bearing. And so on to Borough Market, which rather to my surprise, was shut - I had thought that it was something of a foodie and tourist attraction right through the weekend. However, the Nicolson's next to the Golden Hinde was open and where we were able to get a very serviceable sausage and mash for a tenner or so each. Not to mention to the very serviceable chardonney from Chile and the fact that, according to their web site, history [oozed] from the great beams and ancient brickwork of [this] old Thameside inn, once an old spice warehouse.

And so on into the playhouse, more or less full and managing to pack getting on for 500 people into this very small space, albeit well packed, sardined even. Luckily, I had remembered about seats without backs or fronts from the Globe next door and had got seats with fronts, at the front of their block in fact. The block being the upper middle block on the left of the playhouse in the illustration (taken, I think, from an architect's drawing rather than the place itself). Some of the people who had been less careful got to stand, which would not have done for us at all.

What we then got was Simon Armitage reading most of his translation of this late 14th century poem, supported by an actor and an actress, in two chunks of 40 minutes each. Plus a harpist on a period harp.

Point one, both Armitage and the young actor had poor reading voices, a failing perhaps overcompensated for by the actress.

Point two, there had not been enough rehearsal as there were a noticeable number of slips. More rehearsal needed to compensate for the dim but otherwise pleasing candlelight in which the reading was given.

Point three, I did not like the translation, described by Armitage as being living, inclusive and readable. It sounded to me like something from Roald Dahl and I would have much preferred a rendering which retained more of the flavor of the 14th century from whence the poem came. Given that the great majority of the audience was adult, a more adult rendering. A rendering which retained much more of the morality tale about honour and temptation. I was rather reminded of the vaguely contemporary Nibelungenlied, the subject of a much better translation than this one by Hatto.

Point four, rather dear, all things considered, at £45 each. But it was interesting to see the place and it will be interesting to see what they make of 'Tis pity she's a Whore' in a couple of weeks or so.

Back to London Bridge station past Brindisa (http://www.brindisa.com/), still pretty much full at 1700 or so on a Sunday afternoon.

Back home to get a much better translation off the web, by W. A. Neilson for the Middle English Series from Cambridge, Ontario. Interesting to have found out rather more about this poem than we got from Sam & Simon.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=nibelungenlied.

Reference 2: http://www.yorku.ca/index.html.

Reference 3: http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/sggk_neilson.pdf.

The Tree of Life

On the 17th November (reference 1) I mentioned a good haul of new-to-me DVDs, including 'The Body in the Library'. Another was 'The Tree of Life', now viewed and here reviewed.

The box explained that this was a stunningly original triumph starring the same Brad Pitt as the one who gave us 'Troy' and which took several prestigious & golden pancakes when it - 'The Tree of Life' that is - was first shown at a Cannes Film Festival. 'Troy' being my first and only previous exposure to Brad, a film which we have attempted but failed to finish at least twice, albeit on television. Perhaps the problem was that they did not think to show it on our favorite channel, ITV3. Also true that some films, indeed perhaps this latest one, do not scale down well: what can stun on the big screen can look plain silly on a telephone. And maybe vice-versa.

'The Tree of Life' turned out to be pretentious, self indulgent and too long, although not without merit as a portrait (given by Brad) of a dreadful father and the pain & suffering he inflicted on his family, this despite his being devout. A lot of time was given over to very arty shots of forces of nature and of beaches. Some of these were indeed stunning, and some of them just silly, as when they saw fit to show us some grazing dinosaurs, presumably the work of a computer scientist rather than of a natural scientist. Or when they showed us some of the inhabitants of heaven walking around on a beach.

I found the presentation of the story rather confusing, with a lot of jumping around in time. For me, the film would have done better to give me a few more clues as it went along, so that I could make at least some sense of it without recourse to wikipedia after the event.

But it did strike me that Brad had a very negroid profile and I was struck enough by this to ask Professor Google about the matter - and it turned out that he knew a great deal. A great many people besides me had pondered about this very matter. Giant pedigrees were available for my inspection, going back to the 17th century, but pedigrees which only revealed, European, mainly insular British (including here the Irish island) ancestry. Notwithstanding, it seems that plenty of blacks were keen to make him one of their own, an octoroon at the very least. But a more sensible solution came from someone from Scandinavia who pointed out that a noticeable number of northern Scandinavians do indeed have a negroid profile, without having anything African about their genes at all, at least not unless you go back to the last big migration out of Africa, say 100,000 years ago. Perhaps a quirk resulting from admixture with the peoples they pushed north, back into the Arctic.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-body-in-library.html.

Paint job

Very impressed last week, on a visit to Kingston's Rose Car Park, to see how much the appearance has been improved by a paint job on what was a lot of rather shabby concrete.

Coloured posts illustrated particularly effective, brightening up both the inside and the view from the outside. One colour to the floor.

We will see how well it all ages.

Dress sense

Off to St. Luke's again on Thursday for the last concert of the season.

First item of interest was the apparent closure of the taxi firm just by the West Hill railway bridge, the one which was reported to be staffed in large part by refugees from various parts of the Middle East and which gained some fame among smokers for retaining road visible ash trays in their office for some time after the introduction of the smoking ban. I am sure I blogged the matter but cannot now find the post. I think they may have now merged with Viceroy across the road, perhaps on the retirement of Mr. Viceroy I.

Second item was the sloping, diagonally mounted solar panels which have been erected on the tops of a row of small tower blocks, just north of the railway line, just to this side of Queenstown Road. I have not managed to snap them yet, the train not having stopped in a convenient way, so we have to make do with this aerial view of four of them from google sky, which does not give much idea at all of how well they look from the train. They make a handsome feature on the top of the blocks, but I usually wonder, as the train flits past them, how many decades it will take for the electricity generated from the panels to pay for their erection.

Bullingdoned without incident from Waterloo Station 1 to Finsbury Leisure Centre and so to the Market Café for the traditional bacon sandwich in the now not so traditional greasy spoon. On to St. Luke's to hear Alice Sara Ott give us the Op.31 No.2 Piano Sonata from Beethoven and the Grandes Études de Paganini from Liszt. Rather flamboyant entry in a very flamboyant dress, a long pale backless affair, very tight and covered in sequins. Very flamboyant for lunch time. The lady next to me estimated £500 for an off-the-peg job, while I thought rather more, maybe £1,000 or more. But we were both rather troubled to think that this performer was only born at about the time that we were about 40.

Beethoven very good, Liszt very much what I call show off music, although not altogether without musical merit.

Quite a lot of rather stylishly executed cross hand (over hand?) playing, with the odd stretch where both hands, at least from where I was sitting, appeared to be in action at the same place on the keyboard.

Back to Old Street Station to pick up the return Bullingdon, to be entertained by a line of three police motorcyclists coming around the roundabout, dressed all in black, a bit special forces, with their blue lights up and flashing. What were they up to? And so back to Waterloo Roundabout, having been rather stopped in my tracks on the northern approach to Blackfriars Bridge by the stunning view across the river in the late afternoon sun. The sun itself was hidden behind something, but the new block going up in the vicinity of Sea Containers House, and topped by the odd crane, was stunning against the very bright, pale blue winter sky. I thought about stopping for a picture but decided that even the new Lumia would fail to capture the moment.

For once in a while took a sandwich from Upper Crust. Fresh and serviceable, but the cheese used to make my cheese and tomato sandwich was very bland. I suspected some kind of shrink wrapped ready sliced cheese, only for sale to caterers.

Entertained on the way home by a one girl loudly recounting the traumas of shared flats, in particular shared kitchens, bathrooms and toilets, to her friend. But by the time they got off, I had had enough; I had not needed to be reminded quite so forcefully of that phase in my life.

Reference 1: gmaps 51.474115, -0.149834.

Reference 2: http://www.alicesaraott.com/.

Another worry

A recent NYRB included an article (snippet left) about how the world is about to be taken over by internet enabled objects. Objects which might have been thought of as mundane, objects like refrigerators, central heating systems, bicycles and overcoats, will now be wired up to the internet to facilitate their better use & management and, along the way, the collection of all kinds of data about you and I, data which you might have been used to thinking of as private & personal. So, for example, your bicycle will know when the batteries for its lights are getting low and will arrange for your telephone to vibrate when you happen to pass a shop from where you could buy it some new batteries.

One worry in the article was that all this internet connectivity, which will extend to lots of what the securocrats call critical national infrastructure, will be very easy to hack. Collectively, we do not do very well at securing corporate connectivity to the internet now, that is to say securing central installations which you might think, in this day and age, were big and easy enough to bother about. So how on earth are we going to manage when the internet is everywhere and is in everything?

I associate to a recent scare when some eastern europeans (naturally) were able to sit in their white vans around the corner from petrol stations and hack into the wireless interactions between the petrol pumps (with their credit card readers) and the control room in the shop. I don't recall what was done about it, but I hope it was something as it does not seem to be news any more.

I also associate to a worry of my own, that my Windows 8 telephone might be hackable. The story I grew up with was that telephones were not complicated enough to be hackable, that they did not include the sort of machinery which hackers need in order to do their hacking. Nothing there which was infectable. But if my telephone is now running an admittedly cut down version of Windows 8, which I pay Norton a lot of money to protect when it is on my PC at home, what then? I shall have to find a proper geek to ask about this.

Government goes pop

Three oddities from the corridors of power.

First, we are to make people who go and fight for the wrong side in Syria stateless. OK so these are quite possibly very unpleasant people, not just young men being a bit silly, but it does not seem right just to expel them from their native land, to make them someone else's problem. They were born in the UK, they are what we made them and they are our problem. Are we going back to the outlaws of the Middle Ages or the Wild West?

Second, some organ of government has fined RBS for messing up a software upgrade. This does not seem right either. They have made a mistake, they have already paid the customers involved compensation and they have taken the reputational damage. Maybe they have sacked their Director of Informational Services or whatever else they might have called the chap who was in charge of their computing. What business does government have to add to their pain?

The fact the government is majority stake holder is irrelevant. As such, government might chose to intervene, but to invoke the machinery of justice strikes me as an abuse of power.

Third, the hygiene arrangements of some long serving dentist have been called into question, following the recent death of a young patient. So government has instructed the recall of all 22,000 patients who ever went through his doors for testing. In the first place, it seems like rather a lot of patients, but maybe they are counting patient visits rather than patients and maybe they are counting patients of dentists at the same clinic (illustrated) in which the dentist in question worked, or perhaps owned. OK on this last, hygiene is probably a clinic bound, not a dentist bound problem. But OTT on the package. Is it really likely that some uncomplaining patient from 30 years ago has caught some frightful infection which has been lurking ever since? OK, so AIDS had been invented at the time, but it does not have an incubation period of 30 years. Maybe the Metro has just got it all wrong.

We were not told anything about the circumstances of the young woman's death, but presumably at the least accelerated by an infection picked up at this dentist.

I am reminded of the days of the late lamented Blair when they shut down the tube network over one Christmas because someone panicked over the occasional use of wooden blocks to hold rails in place. Although, on reflection, that may have been a complicated & secret bribe to the IRA, via all the Irish who would have collected on all the triple time. All part of the (ultimately successful) peace process.

I am also reminded of the rapacity of lawyers who, like vultures, have gathered around the carcass. Try googling 'dentist hygiene daybrook' to find some of them.

Crime and Punishment

There is a story in a recent NYRB which goes roughly like this.

A while ago, say twenty years ago, there was a great deal of violent crime in the US, much of it involving poor blacks.

Everybody, especially the blacks, got rather fed up with this and so the government needed to do something.

The something was to set ferocious & mandatory custodial sentences for all kinds of crimes, and this worked out roughly like this.

Someone gets picked up, possibly because there has been a crime with a victim or possibly because the someone looks like a druggie. The someone is told by a civil servant that they have a choice between going to trial on charge A which will probably earn them 15 years in jail or pleading guilty to the lesser charge B which will certainly earn them 3 years in jail.

The someone in question is quite possibly a villain of some sort, but is also quite possibly dim, illiterate, socially isolated, mentally handicapped or mentally ill. Or some combination of same. He (or much less often she) gets frightened at the thought of 15 years in jail and settles for 3. The trial is a formality, costs very little and does wonders for the clear up rate. So far so splendid.

Furthermore, it comes to pass that there is a lot less violent crime.

There are three catches. First, the justice of a sort is being done behind closed doors, it is not being seen to be done in open court, with a jury. Plenty of scope for error or abuse among the civil servants in question. Second, the prison population is huge, far larger per-capita than anywhere else in the free world. Third, there are a lot of false positives. Maybe 5% of the people pleading guilty are not guilty of anything at all, at least not of the charges in question. So do we have a result?

In the olden days it used to be said that if an innocent person was hung by mistake he was fast-tracked to heaven and got his reward that way. But I am not sure that many of us would put much store by this line of argument now. So what proportion of false positives is acceptable? Unrealistic to go for zero.

Another angle is that I did not notice, on a quick & careless read, anything about demographics. My understanding is that a big determinant of crime is the size of the male 15-24 cohort. When you have lots of young men coming through the system, you get lots of crime. Does this provide the explanation in the fall in violent crime in question, rather than all the prisons?

PS: I don't know whether Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' would have thrown any light on my difficulty here. I rather doubt it, but in any event, I seem to have retired my copy, which I recall as having been old, battered and unlooked at for many years. But I do have a nice copy of 'The Idiot', in an edition reset or reprinted eight times since its original publication in 1913 and said to be a monument of post-war publishing. Sadly, while Constance Garnett was a very busy & able translator, I never managed to read this one all the way through.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Dostoevsky. No reading action recorded.

Joan of Arc

Now finished the Mark Twain fictionalisation of the life of Joan of Arc.

Altogether a very rum story. A young & illiterate peasant girl has visions. She somehow pushes through to an audience with the Dauphin. She somehow persuades him to give her command of an army. She raises the siege of Orleans, wins sundry other battles on and around the Loire and gets the Dauphin crowned at Reims, in the heart of what had been Anglo-Burgundian territory. French ardour then cools off, she goes into a decline and gets herself captured by the Burgundians who for want of a better offer sell her to the English. The English get a French bishop to condemn her for a witch and then burn her at Rouen. Her life of action had lasted just a couple of years. Twenty years later, the French king, now secure on his throne, decides that having got there with the help of a condemned witch is not good cheese and gets the Pope to make her into a saint after all.

Rum in part because she is only a national hero because her Dauphin then King was hopeless. So hopeless that he did not even ransom her when she was captured - something which Twain is very sure that would have been a recognised usage of warfare at the time and was well within his power. He chose not to do it.

Twain is also very keen on soldiers and battles. His story is full of martial glory, flashing armour and tales of heroic deeds. He talks a lot of morions, which I know as a sort of helmet worn in the late sixteenth century, rather than the early fifteenth. Generally endows the story with the sort of pomp & pageantry which we only really got the hang of by the nineteenth century. Couldn't afford it until the industrial revolution got the prices of all those swords and banners down a bit.

He also makes Joan into a beauty, which Sackville-West, writing forty years later, is rather firm that she was not.

Along with the French King, the French Church comes out of it rather badly, getting itself tied up in knots in order to get Joan convicted of sorcery. One of the knots in question being the knotty question of whether angels spoke French or English.

But a good story. One comes away feeling that one has a bit more understanding of how such a thing could came to pass. That a leader with charisma really could turn things around and carry strong places by storm - something that professional soldiers were not that keen on, given the risks and casualties involved. Also how the professionals might get fed up with her impetuous ways and quietly, if ignominiously, allow the English to burn her when she had outlived her usefulness.

A worthy addition to my stock of arcery, started many years ago with the purchase of another fictionalised account, that of one Lord Gilles de Rais, by Robert Nye. Rais being a very high ranking French lord, a companion of the arc, who was also a murderer of small children. A murderous pedophile, the original bluebeard. Coincidentally, once the owner of the Talmont Castle which we visited many years ago when camping. A castle where the lady keeper grew her vegetables in the bailey; not very English Heritage at all. Otherwise the Château de Talmont, the tourist puff for which does not appear to go into the Rais angle. See gmaps 46.4670498,-1.6186266.

PS: Twain reminds me of the Battle of Patay, the culmination of the French campaign to regain the Loire, a victory for the French (and for Joan of Arc) comparable to that for the English & Welsh at Agincourt, 15 years previously. A battle which was omitted from the history that I learned and which rates only an inch in our Chambers Encylopedia compared to the three inches for Agincourt. Wikipedia includes rather more detailed accounts of both battles, but sticks up for us Anglophones and retains the three to one ratio. It also includes the rather striking illustration of the field of Agincourt, reproduced here.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dalhousie.html.

What is going on?

This operation appeared on the edge of the Common recently, roughly gmaps 51.335292, -0.290566. There is little going on inside and there are no nearby construction sites.

Have a rival troop of Chainsaw Volunteers established a bridge head on the Common? Rival that is to our own, all too well established troop. Is it an outpost of the operations at Malden Rushett, a mile to the west? Is it some organ of the secret state keeping an eye on dodgy goings on?

I then carried on down Horton Lane to find that the Horton Retail Unit, with its 7 units, completed in 2009 or so, is now about to be filled up, with the last three units being taken by a baker, a dry cleaner and a vet. The bakery is not yet up and running but there are some sacks of superfine white in the window, so maybe it is going to be the sort of baker that bakes. Maybe they will sell decent white bread. Maybe I could go and work there for free in return for being taught how to bake decent white bread?

I have been bleating (see, for example, reference 2) about how awful it is that the council insisted on there being shops in the middle of this new housing estate for some time now. Left to me, they would have just used the space for housing and not tried to flog the dead horse of corner shops. But after five years, the place is filled up: grocer, a charity (maybe service delivery as well as shop), a chemist, a chipper, a vet, a dry cleaners and a baker. To think that my bet was on a hairdresser and a bookie. Was the five year wait to let, without rent, worth it? What is a reasonably time, if the market is in reasonable condition, not too hot and not too cold, to wait? At least a quick peek at the internet reveals that the council is on the case. See reference 1.

A little later I came back to the rather smaller retail development, the replacement of the between wars parade at the northern end of Manor Green Road, roughly gmaps 51.339743, -0.277348, half of which is occupied by what appears to be a thriving Costcutter and one of the four remaining units of which is occupied by the butcher who has been on the site, if not in that particular shop, for ever. Not only are three commercial units still empty, after more than a year or so, but some of the flats above are empty too. So much for the chronic and disgraceful shortage of affordable housing - which would suggest that the time to let a flat ought to be a matter of weeks rather than months.

Bottom line, who knows. I certainly don't!

Reference 1: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/LocalShoppingCentreStudyFinalVersionJuly2012.pdf.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=We+want+small+shops.

Epsom fall

We went to Canada, inter alia, to see the fall of the leaves. Which, with the bright sunlight we had for most of the time, was quite something.

But we do do fall back here in Epsom, as this shot from an upstairs bedroom window shows. No bright sunlight and the picture was taken from behind a window, but not too bad nevertheless.

The small yellow tree, about to fall, middle left, is a hazel nut tree. A hazel nut tree from which we rarely get any hazels because the grey squirrels strip the immature nuts, with the result that neither they nor we ever get any. One would not mind quite so much if they got anything out of it - and to think that these dim animals have displaced the native red. There is talk in TB of catapults, with the sort of thing you can get from Amazon being well up to the job.

Not sure about the bare tree, upper middle right, probably actually two trees, maybe one ash and one willow. Somewhere in there there is a small walnut tree, probably hidden in this shot. No idea if the owners get any walnuts off it.

The three larger trees in the middle are from left to right, oak, oak and willow. Odd how the older oak to the left is so much darker than the rather younger oak in the middle. The bare tree between the two oaks is an ash - a tree which grows fast but which is last to come into leaf and first to fall, so the shortest growing season by a month or so. Nature moves in mysterious ways.

The copper leaves between the nut and the middle oak are the mainly obscured copper beeches.

The three ponds, the subject of various posts in the past, largely hidden between the washing line and the middle oak. See reference 1 - a time when I was still learning about how to post pictures.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Pond+life+(spot+the+newt).

Grosse Fuge

On Sunday to the QEH to hear the Emersons do three string quartets: Haydn Op.33 No.2, Ravel and Beethoven Op.130 with Op.133, aka the Grosse Fuge, with the Emersons most recently having been heard in April at the Wigmore Hall (see reference 1). On this occasion the three smaller instruments stood, rather than sat, but the violins continued to swap, with the thin violinist getting two goes at going first. Nicely turned out in smart, dark lounge suits and highly polished black shoes; a turnout I think I prefer to the tail coats affected by some, which are now sufficiently old-speak to look quaint rather than smart. They used music and they did turn the pages, but I think this was more a prop than a necessity. They could, at a pinch, have managed without, certainly for the Beethoven which I imagine they have played many times before, say twenty times in concert, which would be an average of about once every two years in their near 40 year run as a quartet. Not to mention what Amazon suggests to be a string of recordings of same, dating from the mid 1990s.

In April I thought about the difference between having a concert with three quartets from the same stable, as it were, and three from different countries, with this November concert being in the latter category. But it worked; the quartet managed to move us from one to the other without strain. Part of this, according to the interview reported in the programme, was that for the Ravel the contact point of the bow was further from the bridge, creating a different palette. I don't suppose I would have been able to tell the difference, even if I had read this bit of the programme beforehand, which I had not, but given that there were quite a lot of young people in the audience and that I thought it likely than a proportion of them were string players themselves, I wonder how many of them fully appreciated this contact point.

But the high point was the Beethoven, on this occasion well-capped by the mighty Grosse Fuge, rather than the originally published ending. The Emersons really do know their stuff.

Emerged from the full house, to find the foyer full of something for children, which did not strike quite the right note. A bit like emerging from Sunday service at the village church in Miss. Marple to find morris dancers going at it in the church yard.

The low point was getting home. We had already had the bus experience, from Epsom to Wimbledon, via all the railway stations in between, which took rather a long time (even longer than the online timetable, which we had bothered to check, had suggested) as the road network rather cuts across the rail network and which meant that we arrived at QEH with a quarter hour to spare rather than an entire hour. Which was not too bad, but arriving back at Waterloo after the mighty fugue to find no trains to Epsom on the indicator board at all, we settled for a train to Surbiton. From where we got a taxi, and being by then tired got unreasonably cross when the driver attempted to take us via Malden Rushett, which was still closed, and which we thought that, as a black cab driver with the knowledge, he ought to have known about. This netted him an extra tenner and we did wonder about whether he had done it on purpose, carrying on a long winded and very quiet conversation with us so that we focused on that rather than the route and so missed the turning which we would have usually taken, avoiding Malden Rushett altogether.

Home to pasta with onion & tomato sauce, enlivened with a portion of saucisson sec from Sainsbury's. And seasoned with a drop of Felsner Gruner Veltliner 2013 from Waitrose, this month's wine of choice.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/razumovsky.html.

Reference 2: http://www.emersonquartet.com/.

The Body in the Library

Good haul of DVDs last week from the shop run by http://www.thechildrenstrust.org.uk/ in our high street, including the Joan Hickson version of 'The Body in the Library', an Agatha Christie story, first published in the US in early 1942 and adapted by the BBC for television in 1984. My book version runs to 150 pages, making one of the shorter books in the oeuvre, if we exclude the stories. Almost exactly one minute of film to one page of book.

Now viewed and the book read, quite possibly re-read, and entertaining both. I also dimly recall the Geraldine McEwan version, brought up to date by tinkering with the plot to give it, inter alia, a gay twist not present in the original - while this Joan Hickson version sticks to the story fairly well.

However, one omission is that of Superintendent Harper who adds the bit of byplay resulting from the application of two police forces to one case. Another is the fact that his colleagues find Inspector Slack as unpleasant as we do. One extra is that the yokel who chances upon the burning car in the quarry is promoted to a full scale village lunatic with a rather larger part than that given to the yokel in the book. One confusion is about the time at which the story is set. The television version appears to be set in the late forties (of the last century), while the book was written in the early forties. The book does include talk of ARPs but this, I suspect is an anachronism and the book is really set at some fairly indeterminate time between the two world wars. It does include talk of a popular car called the 'Minoan 14', which might have been helpful, but all google can tell me about such a car is that it appears in this story. So actually, no. And to think that I had not thought that she would have made such a detail up. One self-reference in that a lad asks Miss Marple whether she is a writer of detective stories at one point.

The story is entirely satisfactory, with the mystery hanging on the identity of the two dead bodies being switched, that is to say with the body of person A being identified as being that of person B and vice-versa. With the result that one of the people whom you think as a red herring is actually one of the murderers and another is nearly one of the murderers in that he moved a body from his sitting room to someone else's library and then lied about it. Not so complicated that you lose your way half way through, as seems to be our normal form with 'Midsomer Murders' these days. And while the plot hangs on the rather chancy misidentification of one of the bodies by one of the villains, at least when you get to the end you feel the thing has been properly tidied up - a feeling we don't usually get with said midsomers.

Andrew Cruickshank was a perfectly satisfactory stand-in for Ian Richardson as Conway Jefferson, the rich & domineering old invalid who fell for a bit of fluff on the make. The bit of fluff who was initially thought to have wound up in the library.

Some old-fashioned slang. For example bottled for drunk, amid what read like authorial disapproval of the average Englishman's partiality for said bottle. More obscure, downy for a particular species of dodgy character, seemingly according to the OED, a pejorative extension of a sense of down meaning wide awake or knowing, a sense from the 19th century. Or possibly of down as in feathers, and so fluffy or all fluff and no bottom. But not quite in the sense of fluff used above.

I was also struck by what read like authorial approval at the opening of Chapter XIII of not taking too much notice of doctors' telling one to calm down and crashing on regardless instead. Better to go down fighting than rotting in a wheel chair.

The film misses the rather nice ending of the book, in which the hotel gigolo, that is to say tennis & dance professional, quietly regrets the slipping of a nice rich widow out of his clutches. But to be fair to the film, not obvious how one would capture such a private thought.

PS 1: following Timothy Spall's reflections of a dying Turner on being about to become a non-entity, I celebrated my continued entitity with a pint of Cumberland from Jennings today, my first pint of warm beer for more than a year. Not bad stuff at all and it served to remind me why I took to the stuff in the first place.

PS 2: illustration not of my copy of the book. Taken from google.

Jigsaw 9, Series 3

The first jigsaw for a while (see reference 1), cunningly playing to my blogged interest in the periodic table (see reference 2).

Nicely produced jigsaw from the Royal Society of Chemistry, but with no clue on the box as to where the image came from or who actually cut the puzzle. So I have no idea whether the little pictures which come with each element have any significance, beyond illustrating this jigsaw. Perhaps the fact that they do not appear in the book at reference 2 is a clue. I note also the slightly non-standard presentation of the lanthanoids and actinoids.

A regular puzzle, with exactly four pieces meeting at every interior vertex.

Unusually, I did not do the edge first, rather the two blocks of words, easily the easiest part of the puzzle. Easy to pick out and easy to assemble.

Then finished the edge and then a bit stuck. Not the sort of image I was used to at all. Tried arranging some of the pieces with the legible beginnings of the names of elements in alphabetic order but that did not help much, perhaps because the table I use was not quite big enough to do this particular puzzle in complete comfort.

But I then noticed that the elements were colour coded.and it then proved quite easy to pick out all the pieces of any one colour, for example yellow. And it then proved easier than I expected to pull the right little pictures out of the heap to complete the row or column in hand. Worked in from the bottom three edges, doing the chunk of blue in the middle, roughly sodium across to roentgenium, last. The heap was by then small enough that the relatively large size of the chunk was not a problem.

The sky - in this case the small areas of deep blue, helped along by pink veins - was trivial compared with the sky in the average puzzle.

All in all an entertaining resumption of puzzle activity, ending up slightly bemused that so many of the little pictures had a circular theme, bemused as I could not think of any good reason why this should be so. Does it reflect the dominance of images with circular themes in the sort of image library one would have used to make the puzzle?

Probably rather easier to find out why so many, but by no means all, of the element names end in 'ium'. One presumes that the fact that most of the elements which have been around for a long time do not so end, for example gold, is related to the fact that most of the most common verbs are very irregular. Left as an exercise for the reader.

Last but not least, where is the element to the right of roentgenium and below mercury? Is there some mathematical or physical reason why this one does not exist, or is it just that no-one has gone to the bother & expense of creating it yet?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/jigsaw-8-series-3.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-works.html.

Alma-Tadema

Aficionados of the late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, perhaps also those of the late Sir William Russell Flint, will be pleased to know that Katherine Henning, an Assistant Curator at Saatchi Art, has identified a successor, one Iva Troj. A bit less anodyne than the master himself, but I suppose we have to move with the times.

The real thing for around $8,000 or a print for one hundredth of that.

Reference 1: http://ivatrojc231.prosite.com/.

Trolley 14

Abandoned, a tad dangerously, at the entrance to the path down to the London Platform from the bridge over the railway at Ewell West. Very similar to the trolley at reference 1, although not actually the same one, as it is not the same wheel which has been replaced. Front right in this picture.

I was not sure from which Sainsbury's this trolley might have been wheeled, being nearer the small shop in Ewell Village, but being more appropriate to the large shop at Kiln Lane.

I settled for the small shop, where I found just one trolley parked outside, the next size up. But there was at least one matching my foundling inside, so I thought it reasonable to leave it outside with its larger cousin.

BH is not convinced that I am doing the community a service here. She is mindful of all those people who do not have cars and who leave trolleys at key positions for their regular use, regular use which I am disrupting by returning them to those whom I regard as their rightful owners. See, for example, the trolley at reference 2. I clearly need a policy review.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/trolley-7.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/trolley-10.html.

An Italian Job

St. Luke's again on Thursday.

Started off pleased to find that they have now gotten around to replacing the more or less dead oak trees on Epsom station approach, possibly quercus robur fastigiata, this last being gardening speak for tall thin oak trees, in fact fastigiated oak trees, with fastigiate meaning to make pointed like the top of a gable, from the Latin via the French. It is the right time of year for such an operation and this time they have finished the beds off with half rotted wood chippings, rather than with pea shingle. I suspect this will result in more mess, but we shall see. We shall see also whether anyone bothers to water them while they get established next spring. See reference 1.

Bullingdonned from Waterloo Station 3 to Finsbury Leisure Centre, with the only point of interest being a young lady on a fixed wheel bicycle, favoured by hard core gents., but not seen before under a lady. She jumped all the lights that I saw her at, so while she might have had the bike she did not have the manners.

Ruminated over my bacon sandwich at the Market Café on whether the Café was owned by the same people as had the mediterranean flavoured restaurant opposite. Had they just bought up the place from the retiring greasy spoon flavoured owner? Once again, rather quiet for a lunch time; maybe they lost clientèle during their makeover.

And so to St. Luke's to hear a young Italian pianist on an Italian flavoured piano, a Fazioli, give us the Beethoven Op. 26 piano sonata and the Schubert D935 impromptus. The pianist was properly dressed in a rather Italianate style. And as regards the piano, my comment last year that 'the Fazioli piano did very well, imparting, together with the pianist, a slightly edgy, nervous flavour to the piece, which served it well' (see reference 2) serves well on this occasion. I don't think I have ever heard better impromptus.

But was the Fazioli more like the sort of piano that Schubert would have used than a Steinway, with its full and very smooth tone? Are the Fazioli, the regular modern grand and the Schubert-times fortepiano all equidistant from each other in some sense? Could Schubert afford a decent piano at all?

As it happens we have heard the other set of impromptus on a Fazioli before (see reference 3, also http://vimeo.com/106798327. Not quite sure about performing rights at vimeo, but trying to find out did remind me that I once used to know something about what google seems to know as large cardinals).

One of the ushers told us that the piano had arrived at around 1030 that morning, just a couple of hours before the off - but they did have a Steinway in reserve. We wondered first who footed the bill and second whether one would, as a matter of course, tune the thing on arrival.

And the blog tells me that our acquaintance with the various impromptus now runs to just over five years, having been started on the road by my near contemporary, Imogen Cooper.

Back through Earlsfield, on this occasion, where I did not manage a single aeroplane in the rather cloudy sky.

PS: memory playing tricks again. On Thursday, I clearly remembered Fazioli pianos being customisations of Steinways; take a Steinway and tweak it a bit for the discerning pianist. But examination of wikipedia this morning tells me that Fazioli might be a young company, a mere thirty years old, but it does make its pianos from scratch. I wonder where the brain got hold of the Steinway story?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=bowser.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/last-evening-visit.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=fazioli.

Hidden virtue

Waiting for my train to Epsom at Earlsfield yesterday afternoon, I had time to take a look at the advertising hoarding under construction at the town end of the platform. I was struck by the sloppy appearance of the work, not very well illustrated.

We suppose that this sloppiness, which will be covered up in due course by lining paper and by advertisements, will be invisible.

We further suppose that it has no bearing on the structural integrity of the hoarding.

Does it then matter?

I associate to all kinds of hidden virtue in carpentry. For example, the oval nails used to fix architrave to a door frame are neatly placed, in pairs, at regular intervals up the door frame. One is irritated if the placement is not neat, or if one misses a nail, or hits a nail badly, and makes an unsightly dent in the architrave. This despite the fact that it will all be hidden from the eye of the proud housewife by filler and paint. One can see if one knows to look, but one usually doesn't.

Another example would be the neat placement of the pins through to the back rail which used to be used to fix the bottom of a drawer in place. Again, one was irritated if the placement & punching was not neat. This despite the fact that it might never be seen again: even proud housewives do not take their drawers out to inspect their undersides that often.

A rather different sort of example would be the care a mathematics lecturer once took with all his epsilons, to make sure that all the bits of epsilons added up to exactly one epsilon at the end of his proof. Or the care that many programmers take with the names they assign variables, most programmers being the sort of people who like to be neat and tidy about such things. Two more example of our taking the trouble to be neat in places that do not much matter for practical purposes and at which no-one much is going to look.

I associate also to the man-years of careful & neat workmanship which went into the glass house at Bicton (see reference 1).

For me, the quality of life is diminished to the extent that we do not take care in such matters. I believe that the quality of life of the carpenters at Earlsfield is diminished to the extent that they bash their nails and screws in without much care. Perhaps they are too busy listening to the radios which seem to be a mandatory accompaniment to such activities these days to have brain cycles left over for neatness. Perhaps they are too much under the whip of the driving overseer to be able to afford the luxury of neatness.

I am sure that Lévi-Strauss would have something to say about all this, being very fond of making primitives (for want of a better word) neat and tidy by imposing all kinds of vaguely mathematical structures on their affairs.

PS: image enlargement on click back to old-style again this morning for this new image. Yesterday's images still new-style so it must be a post bound problem rather than a view bound problem.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/a-botanical-gem.html.

Chips

Earlier in the week I moved up from a Lumia 520 with Carphone Warehouse to a Lumia 630 with O2. More of which in due course.

In the meantime, I exhibit an early photograph, taken in the dark & murky depths of Wetherspoons of Tooting, an establishment with pub number in the single digits, dating from the glory days of when the story began.

Very impressed with the quality of the image, with which I did not take any particular care and despite having to tap the screen to snap rather than press the button, something about which there is some moaning out on the airwaves.

Also of interest because a portion of chips at Wetherspoons came on this rather retro plate, rather than the shiny white objects in odd shapes which are de rigueur in most other establishments. The chips themselves were a little dear at £2.65 and had fallen straight out of a sack of oven ready chips; fresh, hot and eatable, but not quite the real thing. Should I try and tell them about poutine?

PS: the same display problem with click on image to enlarge as I had this morning with Turner. Is the recent windows upgrade to blame? Have the people at Microsoft, without so much as a by your leave to their many users, fiddled about with a part of windows which changes a well established and much-loved part of the user experience?

Churchill

I have not, in the past, found Churchill a very sympathetic figure, although that did not stop me once owning the monster biography by Churchill & Gilbert.

But over the past few days I have been returning the pages of the more manageable biography by Woy Jenkins and I have been very struck by how close a thing it was in 1940, from a political point of view that is, not from a military point of view. He earned his place in the history books for those few days alone.

At the time he became Prime Minister shortly after the start of the second war, he was not a favourite, having a reputation of being an adventurer and having a mixed record on lefty matters. Halifax, who might well have settled for a peace of sorts with Hitler after the fall of France, might well have got the job instead. Luckily for us he declined, making way for Churchill.

Even then, Churchill did not start that firm on the saddle and at the time of Dunkirk might well have been pushed into the peace of sorts. But he played his hand well, we stayed in the war, and as it turned out, Dunkirk came off, leaving us with an army of sorts to fight off the invasion which seemed all too likely at the time.

I associate to Hitler, another one who did not start that firm on his saddle, having got there by a rather grubby (rather than violent) intrigue, but who went on to consolidate his position in no time at all.

I notice also that, despite Churchill making a few wrong military calls in the course of the war, he made the right one about fighter support for the French during their fall at the beginning of the war. He declined to spend our fighters on them, choosing to keep them for us, for the Battle of Britain to come. Helping the French might have made a fatal difference to us without making much difference to them - but it was not such an easy decision at the time.

Turner

Yesterday to the Epsom Odeon to see Mr. Turner.

A discouraging start as we get to the cinema to find that the main ticket office to the right is shut and we were relegated to the side of the ice cream operation to the left. Perhaps it was senior time, but in any event we had to wait for any ticket action until a complicated ice cream had been assembled. We passed the time waiting eyeing up all the huge buckets and bags, sacks even, containing pop-corn, no doubt mostly coated in a great deal of sugar and which served to remind me of the way in which the Odeon people have messed up the arm rests of their seats by incorporating holders for the buckets, if not the bags. And then, when we come to be served it was more or less impossible to see what seats you are buying from the customer side of the machine, although after some fiddling about, we manage to get the back row premium seats we want, the front row ones not being so premium at all. Stumble our way - the layout being confusing in the dark and the stairs being steep - to our seats, which turn out to be capacious but not particularly comfortable. But we settle down to watch the few remaining trailers, very loud, as usual.

And so to the film, the opening of which includes some arty shots of a flat landscape and a very nifty graphic based, I think, on the picture illustrated above. The film goes on to include quite a lot of arty shots of landscape and of water, but oddly not much sea that I remember. The score is unobtrusive, and often entirely absent. So far so good.

We are dumped into more or less the middle of Turner's life, in a film which jumps around a great deal, with a lot of takes being broken off rather abruptly and which is not contrived so as to fill in much background about the missing first half of his life.

Slightly confused by Turner's father being portrayed by someone who appears to be younger than than the actor doing Mr. Turner (Mr. Spall). Turning to the women, the film did not include much in the way of young & improbably pretty women. The younger female lead was disfigured and the older female lead was older. Realism, rather than eye candy for the gents., was the order of the day.

It is always hard to made convincing films about the past and while this film tries hard, a lot of the town and interior scenes seemed very contrived to me. One almost felt the stage management people creeping around props warehouses looking out suitable bits and bobs with which to dress their sets. Nor was I very convinced about the arty bits, we being shown a Turner who spent a lot of time at his art, but who appeared to be impossibly slap-dash about it. We had, for example, his sketch pad flapping about while he sketched, which I thought most improbable.

The film is much too long at around two and a half hours and the first hour and a half drag a bit. But it comes to a fine end with Turner's aging and dying; to the extent that the film is more about that than about him as an artist or his art. Well suited to the more or less exclusively senior audience.

Home to read the short biography offered by Canaday, one of his longer, Canaday rating Turner as England's only artistic genius. Of humble oriigin, very successful during his life, dying old and rich, went out of fashion and was only canonised (as Canaday puts it) after he was made the subject of a show in New York in 1966. The start of a wave of fashion which has yet to break. But I should not knock as I do like his paintings, even if there are too many of them, and I do go and see them from time to time. See, for example, reference 3.

Canaday also observes that the only person to truly appreciate Turner during his life was Ruskin, shown in the film as a bit of a prat. Otherwise, I find that the film has been fair with Turner. The stuff portrayed did mostly happen, or at least was in the spirit of the chap and his way of life. But I think that we would have got on better with the film had we read this potted biography first, which should not have been necessary. I also think that we would get on better at a second viewing, perhaps in the comfort of our own home with a DVD from a Hook Road car booter.

Image courtesy of the Tate gallery.

PS: don't understand why click to enlarge the illustration works in the unusual way it does. Does the file include some anti-theft device? Tried converting from the png produced by snip to a jpg produced by paint but that does not seem to have made any difference.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=canaday.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/jigsaw-2-series-2.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=intimate+connections.

Nonsense

Back in April (see reference 1) I commented on the bad press that pay day lenders such as Wonga were getting, suggesting that perhaps these people did have a role to play, that they were filling a gap which neither government, church nor charity cared to address. This continues to be my position, although I do not care for some of their advertisements, advertisements which deck last resort borrowing out with pretty girls and generally trying to give the impression that all is well with the world.

So not impressed to see that government is regulating these people out of business. That is to say, by putting a ceiling on the interest rates etc that they can charge, a ceiling which means that the business does not pay, with the likely result that they will not do it, at least not on the high street. But at least the Guardian had the wisdom to suggest that this might mean that we push back to a world of illegal back street lending. That we criminalise the business of helping people who cannot help themselves. Will we never learn that criminalising activities which people are going to get into anyway is not a very clever way forward?

And while we are on the business of helping people who cannot help themselves, there was another piece in the Guardian which suggested that not only are we not building anything like enough social housing, but that such social housing as we do build is still subject to right-to-buy. So no sooner do we build a nice new social flat at, say, £250,000, than we give the incumbent the right to buy it for £125,000. The incumbent, who has not actually got the necessary, then sells it on to a private landlord who goes on to collect from the housing benefit system. I perhaps overstate the case, but that does seem to be the general idea. We cannot afford to provide social housing in this way.

On the other hand it seems that we are all set to spend getting on for £200m on a garden bridge across the Thames. To my mind, a complete nonsense, serving no other purpose that to inflate the Mayor's already inflated ego. I am reminded of the sorry business of the millennium tent, initiated by a previous Conservative administration and costing the equivalent of a small number of hospitals. We might live in a crowded island, but we are not so short of land that we cannot plant our gardens on dry land, which is where they belong. OK, so he is a clever & able man, but he should be told to manage without this particular ego fix: it would be hugely cheaper just to give him a dispensation to snuffle up the white powders, which might do just as well. How can a government which is having to trash all kinds of useful services think that this is a good use of money? Maybe it will pull in a few more tourists, but it seems most unlikely that it will pull in enough to generate this sort of money.

A story made worse by the knowledge that government is still running at a loss of say £100 billion a year and will need to make even more savage cuts in public services to balance the books in the medium term. By the end of which one wonders how much more of our green and pleasant land will belong to the Arabs and the Chinese. I draw hope from the thought that the Arabs are unlikely to be stupid enough to trash their assets here by installing Sharia law in them.

And that the electorate either is stupid enough or is thought to be stupid enough to fall for a few election carrots in the form of tax cuts before the spending cuts - or tax raises - kick in.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/how-awful.html.

TLS

More than a year ago now, tiring of the TLS, I moved to the NYRB. No doubt I will tire of it and the US political scene in time, but that time has not yet come.

My resolve had not been shaken by the tempt-me-back offer of twelve issues for a pound each and I declined the second such offer. (The way it worked was that you paid your pound each by means of a direct debit, which they hoped, quite reasonably, that you would not get around to stopping. But I did, at least on this particular occasion).

However, coming across a TLS in the newspaper stand at Waitrose the other day, I was moved to find out what I was missing. Which turned out to be not much, at least if this October 31st issue was anything to go by. But there were some bits and pieces.

A. N. Wilson had a piece keyed to a new biography of Scott Moncrieff, the original translator of Proust, a translation which, as it happens, I happen to own in its 1935 version from Random House, another nicely made book from the US. I think I got it from one of the book tables under Waterloo Bridge and while I did once read the original, I never did read this translation. Perhaps the TLS has served to poke me into action - but I am not tempted to buy the biography.

Then, following T. H White, there was a review of a book about another goshawk lover, Helen Macdonald, a book by which I am tempted, partly by the claim that dedicated falconers identify with their charges, in a way that owners of cats and dogs, at least to my knowledge, do not. I associate to my one-time neighour Derek Ratcliffe, his kind wife Jeanette and his book on the peregrine falcon.

An account of an exhibition about Constable and the way he worked, rather than of his completed work, at the V&A. Another example of our drifting away from the product, back into the process. But I am tempted, and may make it before it ends in mid January.

An article keyed to the 'The Iris Murdoch Review' from Kingston University Press. I learn that Kingston is the centre of the world of Murdoch studies, mainly, one gathers, because they hold her library and papers. Also that there may be a related exhibition at Kingston Museum (the people that did Muybridge). Perhaps we will take it in when we next go shopping, a next which has been delayed by the sad demise of the Kingston Christmas Shopping Bus, a bus which we found very convenient.

And then, to wrap things up, a splendid advertisement for the work of Bucharest University (illustrated above) on 'Finnegans Wake' and other matters Joycean, clearly grist for the mill of the study proposed at the end of reference 2. The work, coming from the far east of Europe, fits well with the suggested focus of the study on geography.

Inter alia, the people at Bucharest do a manual for the advanced study of the wake running to 111 volumes and no less than 30,000 pages. An impressive feat for people whose first language is presumably not English, let alone expatriate Irish. Who on earth is going to wade through all this stuff? Was it all generated by some computer and never touched by human hand or eye? Is the whole thing an elaborate Rumanian joke? See reference 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/falun-gong.html. I am sure we visited the Muybridge exhibition during blog life, but  I cannot now find a post for it. Maybe it slipped through the net. Rather good it was too.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/on-road.html.

Reference 3: http://editura.mttlc.ro/.