From senior to elephantine moments

A new sort of senior moment has been arriving over the past few weeks, a senior moment which seems to affect the timing of my fingers when I type.

I used to be a roughly four finger typist who did not generally look at the keyboard. Of late, I have been finding that the letters are arriving on the page in the wrong order. The bit of the brain, possibly the rather large chunk of the brain, responsible for turning words into firing commands for the muscles of the fingers seems to have lost its grip. The good news is that if I make an effort to slow down, things seem to get better.

From there, the brain, for some reason and along some chain of association which I now forget, wandered off to the trunks of elephants, which I now know to be unusual in that they are a large prehensile organ without skeletal support. Perhaps not the largest as octopuses and squids also have such things and squids can come quite big too. The tongue is another, rather smaller but rather complicated example.

A quick poke around the net, and I find that the trunk might have as many as 40,000 muscles - with the catch being that  I am not very clear what a muscle might be in this context, with there being 150,000 of something else and talk somewhere else again of 8 major muscles. A skeletal muscle seems to be a well defined entity with a start point at one bone attachment and and end point at another, with less than 1,000 of them in the average human body. Not so clear what goes on in a trunk where there are no points of attachment of that sort, although it does seem that there is a mixture, with some muscles going up and down the trunk, some being arranged radially and some spirally, it being these last which gives the trunk its considerable strength on the twist. Another angle was that these muscles could be considered to be packets which did not change their volume but which did change their shape, perhaps from short and fat to long and thin. Join enough such packets together and you have a working trunk. That being as it may be and assuming that it is some large number, the point of interest here is that the elephant brain has to organise the coordinated firing of 40,000 muscles, it has to translate the thought (in elephantese) 'pick up the peanut' into a very large number of firing commands. Perhaps older elephants lose their touch in these matters.

Sadly, I failed to get a proper story about all this as all the proper stories were lurking behind paywalls and I was not sufficiently interested in trunks to stump up the $30 a pop asked for papers which might easily turn out to be unhelpful.

But I did learn that elephants have a very good sense of smell, much stronger than that, for example, of bloodhounds. At which point one has the splendid vision of po-faced officers from the drugs squad leading their sniffer elephants around some drug lord's pad in some tower block in some dodgy part of London. How many can they get in the lift at once? Who gets to clear up any mess? Another story was that male elephants could smell water - or females - at fifty miles, which I found a bit odd. Just about plausible that water molecules could diffuse through the air that sort of distance and remain detectable from the background noise, but what about direction? Is the elephant nose - not actually in the trunk as it happens - so sensitive that it can detect a gradient in a smell from fifty miles away in fifty centimetres? I think I suspend judgement on that one.

Closing factlet, the olefactory bulbs, the business bits of vertebrate noses, come in pairs, like eyes. Why was evolution so keen on pairs? Is it all down to direction finding?

On which note, back to bed to dream of elephants snuffling out their straying wives from miles & miles across the jungle wastes.

Coronation cod

On Friday we paid a rather long overdue return visit to Bachmans for a linzatorte (see references 1 and 2). We called on spec and as luck would have it they had two in, of which we took one. As it turned out, a good cake but with rather more red jam inside and rather more sugar glaze on top than we were expecting. We thought that maybe their recipe had moved on a tad since 2012.

From there onto the French Tarte in Maple Road, in Surbiton proper (see reference 3). An area full of very full on housing, looking rather like the stuff you might get in a posh area much nearer London and fairly full of rather full on ladies who lunch. Full on in the sense of rather loud and rather full of themselves. We took a fine slice of apple tart outside on one of the sunny pavement tables. We read the notice which explained that they would shortly be taking bitcoins. A little early and we decided against lunch at the next door French Table, and wandered off, back towards town.

Past some interesting raised beds in the front garden of a large town house, full of orderly lines of truncated stalks. Small boys nearby told us enough about the flowers that had been there to think that they had probably been sunflowers. We must try to go back when they might be in season again. They must have been a rather splendid & unusual display.

Past the rather grand St. Andrew's church, the sign board for which positively invited us in. But both entrances were blocked by locked glass doors and the cleaner within, who did see us, was not into letting us in. Clearly thought that on her wages (she did not look like a volunteer) she was not going to mess about with customers. We could see enough through the glass doors to be reminded of St. James the Less on Vauxhall Bridge Road (see reference 4) and it would have been interesting had we been able to see a little more. Perhaps a letter to the diocesan authorities is indicated. That is to say to the bishop of Kingston, area bishop of the diocese of Southwark, in the Province of Canterbury. Based in Raynes Park of all places. Or should I go straight to the top, with the present primate being a former incumbent of the Kingston see?

And so onto the Coronation Hall to partake of the Friday Club fish and chips on offer there. Two meals and two drinks for around £11, probably about what a couple of bowls of soup would have cost at the French Table. Fish surprisingly good for a pub but the chips were a bit feeble, tasting more of mashed potato than chip. Presumably oven chips. Nevertheless, very good value, value which must make life a bit difficult for other places in their segment of the market.

The Hall itself, apparently once an early cinema, built just before the first war, had been rather splendidly restored and decorated by the Wetherspoon's team. Clever use of the space, not unlike that of the rather similarly shaped George's Meeting House in Exeter (the place with the lovingly restored pulpit). The illustration offered above, gives some idea, but the colour seems to have gone a bit off and I dare say the telephone was confused by the medley of interior lighting. But good enough to see that it was a rather more cheerful place than Common Club of Stamford Green where they have, as I recollect, a not that dissimilar roof.

PS: perusal of the various bitcoin websites was interesting. A gang which seems to be torn between the need to be open and transparent and the need to be private, the latter need appearing to introduce all kinds of unwelcome complications into the use of bitcoins. Which makes one suspect one part of the idea is to avoid paying taxes and another is to be suitable for transactions that banks might be a bit stuffy about. Not sure what they have to offer me, a happy & contented user of a visa card.

Reference 1: http://www.bachmanns.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=linzatorte.

Reference 3: http://www.thefrenchtable.co.uk/.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Time+to+move+from+the+bubble+men.

Flowering pea

Readers who already know this plant, the great flowering pea (aka mimosa), will understand that this shot, from Surbiton, was of a rather glorious specimen. Readers who do not may get some idea of what they are missing.

Violins

On Thursday to the QEH to hear Christian Tetzlaff play Bach & Bartók, in place of Midori who had called in sick (see reference 1). A replacement which led us to wonder how such things worked. How many violinists were there likely to be around and available who could do anything like the advertised programme? Would the promoters be prepared to pay top dollar to make sure the show went on? Would that run to first class air fare for the performer from his home on the other side of the world?

All we learn from Midori's web site is that all her concerts in March had been cancelled (including one in Belgrade. Pleased to see that they do culture there as well as blood sports), but she still has a string of concerts in Aachen and Hamburg in April.

I had thought not to buy a programme, as the SBC is apt to sell you a portmanteau, series programme, programmes which seem poor value for money if you are only attending one or two of the series. So I printed off a clip from the SBC web site,  added a piece from wikipedia about the Bartók and thought that would do. Maybe the confusion about Bartók version and Menuhin amendments would be sorted out on the day. In the event, I think because of the replacement, the concert got its own programme, cut price, so we got one: the confusion was not resolved but we did read that Menuhin had commissioned the work as a way of getting some money to the composer, too proud for charity.

Tetzlaff turned out to be an entirely satisfactory replacement, with a quiet platform style, and leaving version aside, the Bartók turned out to be an excellent foil to the otherwise Bach programme. Altogether a splendid concert. Only slightly marred by a confusion about clapping in the first half, with clapping half way through both pieces. Tetzlaff got the hang of it in the second half, turning towards the back of the stage when he paused, thus keeping the clapping at bay.

Played without score on a modern German violin made by Stefan-Peter Greiner, born shortly before I left secondary school.

Irritating powerpoint reinstated at the back of the stage.

Closed the evening with some toasted hot cross buns from Gillespie's on West Hill. Not bad, and BH liked them, while I thought that they lacked the fluffiness appropriate to such buns. Not enough like bread, a bit flat. At least there were no cranberries, peel or other alien elements, such as have been introduced by some of the box stores.

Reference 1: http://www.gotomidori.com/.

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

Moving home

This camelia, a gift from a friend, had been living on the patio for some years, where it did reasonably well and usually flowered. It also blew over from time to time, often enough that I thought of tethering it to the garage wall, but never got around to it. As a result, the containing pot eventually broke and has been tied up with twine for the last few months. The plan was removal after flowering rather than repotting.

However, it is now the end of March, the flower buds are only just starting to open and so we decided that we had better move it now. Camelias do not move well and we thought that it should be moved now while it was damp and mild, rather than later on when it would be dry and hot - and our clay soil would be very hard.

Yesterday was removal day, with the result illustrated. You would not know from this picture but it looks well between the yellow buddleia left (grown from a cutting abstracted from a holiday cottage near the headwaters of the River Severn) and the rather larger nut tree right (the one that the grey squirrels strip every year before there are any nuts in the shells. Rather dim & annoying animals). We shall see how it gets on; the last camelia we moved took several years to recover its nursery vigour.

A five implement job: mattock, small spade, garden trowel, the 'Wolf' grubber and an oak batten for tamping down the earth around the root ball. Plus wheelbarrow and gloves. Plus half a sack of camelia flavoured compost, 100g of camelia pellets and two two gallon cans of water to get it started. Several buckets of displaced yellow clay now scattered along the base of the fence.

PS: as an afterthought, the newly moved camelia was tethered with three guy ropes, Baden Powell style, using some more of the twine mentioned above, The idea being to stop rock during re-establishment.

Reference 1: http://www.worldofwolf.co.uk/multichange/allotment.

Romeo beta

Following our visit to the bowdlerisation of Romeo and Juliet earlier in the month, time for a further report.

Our copy - we once had more than one of the things - of the collected works remaining missing, I went on a hunt for one in Epsom. Oxfam, which I thought the most likely place to get one, was shut for the morning. Four other charity shops had no Shakespeare at all, never mind this particular one. Then the library managed four or five paperback Ardens, including this one.

To round out the experience, and having no Waterstone's in Epsom at the moment, I thought I would try Smith's, quite strong in the educational department, to find that they also had four or five paperback Penguins, including this one. Given that I was already in possession of the library Arden, I restrained myself from parting with the tenner or so required.

But restraint had vanished by the time that I got home and I tried Amazon for a hardback, one of the trusty blue cloth ones. No luck there. Try Abebooks, which could do lots of paperbacks - identical to the library one - from England, or a hardback from Germany, from Herner Straße in Recklinghausen to be precise. To the east of the Rhine and the northwest of Dortmund. Gmaps 51.582273, 7.15076 to be even more precise. Oddly, no Streetview available in these parts, but I did find my way to an outpost of the Google empire called Panoramio, from which I borrowed the illustration, possibly of somewhere near the Resser Bach, just to the east of the bookshop. All rather countryfied which I did not expect at all. But then, I may have made a mistake.

The book, which has now turned up, turns out to be a cast off from the Library of the University of Düsseldorf, blue cloth bound hardback, more or less in mint condition, paperwork complete with two brass paper clips, a relative of the sort which used to be common in this country. No masses of pencil marginalia from some eager student, such as one is apt to get from such books when procured from the UK. Further inspection revealed that the paperback version, which looked much smaller, was actually in the same sized print, but reproduced photographically on smaller pages in Singapore, from the properly typeset originals. Hence the slightly muzzy appearance of the paperback words, most unattractive to the knowing eye.

I have now turned the pages a little, to find out various things which I did not know. For example, Romeo is an early play, roughly contemporary with Richard II (which I did not know for an early play either, despite it being a set book at some point in my school career). The story was rooted in folklore and had been done by various writers of romances before Shakespeare got to it. I close with a quote from Tybalt.

'Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt'rest gall' (Act I, Scene V, line 91).

So just as in all the best murder mysteries on ITV3, Shakespeare drops hints of tragedy to come, hints which one is apt to miss first time around.

And just as the bowdlerisation of Gawain (vide supra), this bowdlerisation has served to lead me back to the original. To the point where I thought it might be good to go to a proper performance, to which end I turned up reference 2. Sadly, the only convenient production of Romeo is another bowdlerisation from the Globe, a production cut down to a travelling size. Pass.

PS: a good picture of the brass paper clips is to be had at ID 27520744 © Mobi68 @ Dreamstime.com. A little trickery is needed to get from the home page to the image in question, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/romeo-alpha.html.

Reference 2: http://www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk/performance/shakespeare%20productions.html.

Trolley 30

Captured outside Wetherspoon's on my way to buy some pudding wine from Waitrose, having learned over the years that Waitrose is a bit stronger than M&S when it comes to wine in the £10-20 bracket.

Which I still find a bit of a surprise, having since a child viewed M&S as a place which sold rather expensive food and drink. I remember a time when they did more money on food than Sainsbury's, while doing a fraction of the volume. Also that as a child, our M&S was remarkable for selling clean salad stuff, stuff which some housewives preferred to that covered with organic goodness from the fens. I suppose that the marketing chaps had not, at that time, invented the idea that organic was good.

Carrots which were particularly clean as they had been grown in sand in the Netherlands (Holland, as we called in then), more or less hydroponically, with the result that they had poor texture and little taste. But they were clean and reliable.

Presumably the person or persons who left the trolley there were then taking refreshment in the Wetherspoon's, surrounded by a sea of plastic bags. Proper bag people, people who were, perhaps, going to be a bit annoyed to find their transport missing when they emerged.

But I had no thought for them, being on a mission to return trolleys, in this case to aforementioned M&S. At the stand at the back of the shop there were, on this occasion, two eager senior partners on their own missions, disappointed that I was not bringing two in.

One that got away

This one was snapped from the passage running between the back of the High Street and the railway, with views of the service entrances to High Street shops and the Ebbisham Centre.

Gmaps 51.334458, -0.265825, so quite close to the meridian.

The trolley, M&S by the colour of the trim, was actually behind the chain link fence at the bottom of the railway embankment. It must have taken a bit of a push to get it there, and I was not going to get it back. Two or three man job to get over the fence and back with a trolley. Plus at least one lightweight step ladder, preferably two.

There were also quite a number of trolleys, at least one from Wilko, which was a first, hanging around the service entrances, perhaps purloined with some back stairs purpose in mind, rather than just devilment. But purloining just the same.

I drew the line at trespassing to recover them.

Perhaps I should commission one of the grandchildren to write a report on the trolley scene in Epsom, using this blog as his source, complete with spreadsheet, maps and charts. Excellent training activity for a wannabee geek - but a bit of a bore for an older one - not quite old enough for that sort of thing yet - maybe in four or five years time.

Close-up

Close up of the wheels noticed in the previous post. What is the thing between the two tyrelets for? Looks like the sort of thing you get between the rails at the end of station platforms.

Trolley 29

After the dearth of more than a month noticed the day before yesterday, this one yesterday from the Longmead Road, from Sainsbury's too, for a change. Apart from the litter, in mint condition.

On return to the Sainsbury's Cuddles in Ewell Village, the chap there said that it was not one of his rather larger regular ones, but that it was probably one from round the back, loaned out to people who could not raise the £1 coin needed to use one of the regulars out front. It was a long enough walk with such a thing to Ewell Village, so otherwise it would have been a very long walk to Kiln Lane.

I couldn't interest him in the wheels, just about visible in this shot, which were new to me. Two hard rubber rings, one on each side of the wheel, rather than a regular tyre spanning the whole of the wheel. First thought was new model tyres. Second thought was that whoever had walked off with the trolley for some obscure reason - or perhaps just because he thought it clever - had taken the tyres off. But second thought washed away by observing that it would take such a person far too long to get them off, given the configuration of the wheel assembly. He would have lost interest long before lift off.

Rhapsody in blue

From time to time one wonders whether one's own experience of blue is the same as another's, and this morning was an occasion for such a wonder.

First thought, taken from one Michael Gazzaniga (a famous split brain man), was that brain structures and functions are in very large part determined by our genes and more or less in place at the time of our birth. To that extent, we are all more or less the same and so we should see things in much the same way.

Second thought, was that colour does have a basis in physics and biology. There is a real sense in which one colour is near another colour, and my perception of that nearness ought to be much the same as that of another. So while my perception of blue may not be the same as yours, my perception that dark blue is like light blue maybe is the same as yours. And then there is the natural sequence of colours of the spectrum. Perception of those colours cannot be completely arbitrary. Returning to another thought of Gazzaniga, I am sure it would not take much to build a story according to which a sensible view of colour was adaptive and was, in consequence, what evolved.

I then think that my experience of blue arises from some pattern of firing of neurons, albeit rather a large number of neurons and rather a lot of firing. In principle, if one was able to capture that pattern on a number of occasions, there would be some invariance. There would be some part of that pattern which expressed the blue, in much the same way on each occasion.

Part of detecting which part might be experiencing other colours. It seems likely that the experience of colour is a module of brain, in some sense or other, and that there is some invariance in the way that colour is coded. It is not impossible, but it seems unlikely, that different colours are coded in entirely different ways. So if I do lots of trials with lots of colours, I should be able to work out where and how the firing pattern codes for colour.

Further, the module of brain which does colour is probably determined genetically, so my module is much the same as yours. One allows a certain amount of fine tuning as part of growing up from an egg, but essentially one colour module is much the same as another.

From which I deduce that your experience of blue is much the same as mine and that this much the same is more than just our agreeing on the names of things. But I allow that your emotional tone for blue might well be different from mine; blue might well have behaved in your formative years in a way that it did not for me. Perhaps you had a disastrous birthday cake when you were very young which was blue, a trauma which has hung around your blue ever since, blissful childhood holidays with sunny blue skies notwithstanding.

So a nice project for some bright young chap with access to lots of expensive machinery might be to do all this for lots of colours and for lots of people and to establish that you and I really do code for blue, that is to say to see blue, in much the same way.

Trolley 28

I had been wondering about the absence of trolleys in my walking life, when this one turned up in a sort of alcove on the northeastern side of the A24, where I was heading southwest on Epsom Road, just about where it turns into East Street and certainly before Kiln Lane, as I remember that walking the thing across that junction was a bit of a pain, with wheels going everywhere. Brown bumps for the blind being especially tiresome in that regard.

Inspection of the blog this morning (search for trolley then sort by date) reveals that the last trolley was more than a month ago, when I bagged four in one day. Odd that it has been so long. Is there another senior creeping about at night, sweeping them all up before I am up and about?

Getting this not very good shot was tricky, with the bright morning sunlight behind me, making it more or less impossible to see anything on the telephone's screen.

Marks & Spencer, yet again. Their High Street frontage seems to mean that their trolleys get out to see the town in the way that Waitrose trolleys do not. Odd that position should make so much difference.

Dent to the front just about visible, as if whoever it was that took the thing thought that it would be clever to ram it into the corner of a building. I don't think a lamppost would leave such a mark.

Fish stew

Yesterday's lunch involved baked cod and boiled potatoes, these last having been the sort which are quite small, light brown and can be cooked in their skins.

Set left over code aside, in its liquor. Then later, warm up the left over potatoes in a little water. Add some finely sliced celery and a finely chopped winter tomato. Simmer for a few minutes. Add the fish and its liquor. Add a few finely chopped mushroom stalks and their quartered caps. Simmer for a few more minutes and serve.

Very good it was too. Replicators note that it is best with champignons de Paris, aka agaricus bisporus. Sold in the better class of box store.

Compost clearance

Compost bin clearance day yesterday, with the result illustrated, after the first half dustbin of the new season had been tipped in. Stray honeysuckle box (see reference 2) visible top right, with the rest of it making access a bit tricky.

I was able to take out about a dozen barrows of good brown compost, half of which is now feeding the back of the new daffodil bed, with the other half on the adjacent (peace) roses.

Compost about a foot thick. Top third recent and needed to be scraped aside. Middle third live and reasonably well stocked with worms. Bottom third well rotted down and apart from fibrous roots from neighbouring bushes and trees, sterile. With the further exception of the odd bone and the odd cork, neither of which seem to be in the rotting down business. But the bones will diminish as such bones as we now generate on our senior diet go to the council digester (see reference 1).

Clearance required five implements: wheelbarrow, shovel, small spade, small fork and a chillington hoe. This last I think from the good old style hardware store which used to be at the corner of Haycroft and Hook Road (gmaps 51.375822, -0.303683) and which is now a double glazing shop. Good for dragging the compost with the right hand onto the shovel in the left when one is an otherwise awkward position. Nothing quite like having the right tools for the job. Plus gloves for my now soft hands, not to mention the warfarin which can make small cuts a bit messy.

The back seems to have survived the effort, but forearms a bit stiff.

PS: sharp frost this morning, although perhaps not much by Ottawa standards, where it looks to be around -10C as I type. Around 0230 there.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/digesters.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=lonicera.

Life on the Longmead

The tree illustrated caught my eye on the way back from the first car booter of the season. This tree was certainly not of the giving up kind, despite the no doubt dubious goings on on the path to the left after dark, despite recent improvement works by the council. The path on the left being the boundary between the former council estate on the right and the new houses on mental hospital land to the left.

A cynic might say that the rich customers lived on the left while the poor dealers lived on the right, making the path a convenient place to do business. Bring on legalisation! And let the people who used to live in the hospital fend for themselves. Learn to stand on their own two feet.

Car booter quiet, with both customers and sellers caught out by it not being the first bank holiday of the year, the traditional day for the opening of the season and perhaps put off by the cold and the cloud. But I managed a couple of DVDs, one for the good price of 50p and one for £1, one of those 2 disc presentation efforts, chock full of all those extra features which we never watch. Interviews with the second gaffer about the camera angles and all that sort of thing. I shall return to these DVDs in due course.

Carpet seller from last year was there again but I was in too much of a hurry to ask his prices - his stuff looking a little tired, but decent enough. A man to keep an eye on.

An outing for Puccini

On Saturday back to Dorking for the last of the Dante Quartet's three concerts there.

The programme claims that they are known for their innovative programming, a claim that has indeed been borne out by their offerings, which on this occasion included the one and only Sibelius quartet (Op.56) between one from Haydn (Op.64 No.5, aka Lark) and one from Beethoven (Op.127), with both these last being staples of the repertoire while the Sibelius does not get out very often, with the story being that despite being a quartet it was all about a symphonic sound trying to get out. In any event, after making the switch from Haydn, which took a few bars, the Sibelius was good. But then, after making the second switch to Beethoven, it all seemed a bit crude in recollection. I shall have to give it another go on YouTube.

Being their last concert we also got an encore, a never heard of piece from Puccini, illustrated above and called Crisantemi or, in English, Chrysanthemums. The start of the encore was disturbed by first the first violin having to run upstairs for her music and then the cellist, but whatever the reason, the piece did not work for me at the time. Not right after the Beethoven. While playing a performance by the Enso Quartet this morning from YouTube really did the business - and so I am pleased to have made its acquaintance.

On the first of these concerts I was bothered by the sound, perhaps the accoustics of the Martineau Hall, a bother which vanished for the second concert. On this third occasion the sound was different again. We were sitting in the same place, maybe four or five feet above the quartet, perhaps twenty feet away, with a clear view of all of them - but on this occasion, I had the sense of being in the sound, with the four strands of music coming from all around me - and very effective it was too.

We were also sitting more or less directly in line with the cellist's bow. Which got me pondering in the interval about how much bother they take about whether they play on one of the two edges of the bow or on the flat. And where on the string they play. Near the bridge? Somewhere up the fingerboard or somewhere in between? I remember someone from the Takács String Quartet - who should know - saying something about playing nearer to or further from the bridge according to what they were playing, although I can't now remember which was when. See reference 1.

The Dantes come out again for a festival which they run in and around the Tamar Valley, an area which we do have occasion to visit from time to time. Sadly, these particular dates do not work for us.

PS: the Dantes being part of the Cambridge music scene and some of them being the right sort of age, it is possible that my brother knew them. Unfortunately, we did not find an occasion to find out.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/tuition.html.

Thick sliced

Got to see the Endellions again, last week at St. Luke's, standing in for the advertised quartet who had called in sick.

Cold, rather overcast day and I had forgotten to take my older person's rail pass out with me. So not a good start. Broke the journey at Clapham Junction where a young mum almost came a cropper, thinking she could just push her (occupied) baby buggy out of the train and that it would land the right way up, despite the gap between the train and the platform. As it turned out the buggy made rather a bad landing but she managed to recover both herself and buggy without further mishap. Sundry ladies standing around looked rather shocked. Whereas I proceeded in an orderly fashion to the Red Cross charity shop near Grant Road to see what they had in the way of DVDs, this despite their having sold me a Region 2 DVD in the recent past. Frustrating at the time as it was the incomparable Zeta-Jones doing the equally if rather differently incomparable Catherine the Great which might have been fun. On this occasion I left with Eddie Murphy doing himself; that is to say his major role was an African prince in Brooklyn but he took on sundry other roles as well, just to show off. I seem to recall there are English actors who have done the same sort  of stunt. Entertaining film, more or less zero content, so suitable for us seniors and exhibiting once again the engaging talent of the people of the US for making fun of themselves.

And so to Waterloo 2 where I pulled a blue Bullingdon (odd how I have only seen just the one red one) and pedaled off to Roscoe Street. Uneventful journey but I did spot the top of the Shard just emerging from a light mist and I did spot a traditional Turkish hairdresser at the junction  of St. John Street and the Clerkenwell Road. Apart from being a rather odd spelling of traditional, what was such a hairdresser? Would he have served hashish with his haircuts? Finest Turkish?

Took my usual bacon sandwich at Whitecross Street, making the change on this occasion to thick sliced, having spotted some of the same at my last visit. A slightly confused discussion with the waitress who thought that what I wanted was crusty bread. I was slightly alarmed as I certainly did not want a bacon baguette, but took a chance on crusty, which turned out to come out of a plastic bag, just like the thin sliced - and to be entirely satisfactory. A better ratio of carbohydrate to fat and protein. The slightly worried waitress hovered until she was satisfied that all was well.

The Endellions were on their usual good form, offering Haydn Op.20 No.5 and Shostakovich Op.73. For once, they were wearing lounge suits rather than their trademark penguin suits with cummerbands, each to his own colour. As it has turned out, I have heard quite a lot of Haydn quartets this Spring and they are rather growing on me. Maybe I need to buy the collected edition, all ninety of them or something; he must have been a fast writer, the Simenon of the classical music world. BBC managed on this occasion with just four microphones, hanging about 10 feet above and a little in front of the quartet. Sometimes they seem to need rather more and sometimes a rather fat one (rather then usual round, thin job, rather like a fountain pen in shape, if a little larger) gets placed very close to an instrument. I also learned that the birthday of the centre manager who introduced the concert was just one day before that of BH, so I shall have to remind myself what it is BBC are going to do for us at lunch time on that day.

Out into Old Street to be passed by two police tricycles, that is to say the sort of small motor bikes which have two front wheels close together. Rather odd things for police men; they would have looked more impressive on bicycles.

On to sample the mix at the Tooting Wetherspoon's, which I have probably been patronising for even longer than I have been patronising the Endellions. Certainly clocked up rather more visits.

The discussion there centred on the question of whether barristers of the criminal bar were tainted by long association with their customers, most of whom are rather unsavoury petty and not so petty criminals. I was in the lead for the yeas, maintaining that you could not be associated with the same kind of people for years without picking up some of their ways. Without coming to think that, behind their knives and iron bars, they were actually quite decent chaps, uniformly kind to their gold fish. Interesting chaps to chat to at the other bar. The barrier of being wigged and gowned might slow the process down, but does not stop it altogether, and the luckless barristers are going to wind up with some of the mindset of their customers. Not for nothing do the Indians go in for castes to contain such problems.

Further entertained on the bus back to Earlsfield by three lightly hooded young Muslim girls chattering away for all they were worth. They were clearly having a good time. a time which could not have been had had they been properly hooded,  à la ISIS. Made one think of all the simple and more or less innocent pleasures these last would deny the world. I suppose the Salafists are the sociological, doctrinal & developmental equivalent of our own Puritans of yesteryear - the people that hung and burned witches in New England - and I can only hope that the former do not take as long as the latter to work their way out of the system.

Crime

I was moved this morning to look up the penalties associated with making a false declaration regarding the register of electors. Google, with his usual efficiency comes up with the goods after a few clicks, yielding the user friendly summary at reference 1 (illustrated) and the lawyer friendly recipe at reference 2.

As I thought, the law take such false declaration seriously with a penalty of a fine (presumably substantial) or six months imprisonment (but not both) available to the courts. Part of this is, I think, the need to impose fierce penalties for offences which are easy to commit and hard to detect. Offences because the electoral register is the foundation of our democratic life and it is important that we take it seriously and that it is accurate. It should not be brought into disrepute; we are not the Balkans or Central Africa.

That said, it seems that the consolidation illustrated above was motivated more by the current interest in identity theft for the purposes of monetary gain rather than for the purposes of electoral gain. Maybe the state of the nation is such that, the inhabitants of a few rotten apples among inner city wards apart, not enough people care seriously enough about elections to deliberately go about corrupting the process. Politicians are far too corrupt anyway for us to bother about corrupting the process by which they get to be elected. A caricature of our politicians perhaps, but a common enough sentiment at the bar of TB.

Other angles might be the desire to avoid jury service or a more general desire to be invisible to the authorities. Who knows what one branch of government might say to another branch of government, despite all those protestations to the contrary.

Reference 1: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/d_to_g/election_offences/#a04.

Reference 2: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/2.

Correction

I may sometimes give the impression that it is only Epsom & Ewell Borough Council who are keen on chain saw action in what was our green and pleasant borough.

But I read in this week's Guardian that the City of London Corporation, who own all or part of Ashstead Common, have had the chain saws out all winter - and I am clearly not the only person who wishes that they hadn't.

I suppose that having chosen the Corporation as fit guardians for our commons and handed them over, we are now lumbered with whatever herito-eco-fad they decide to inflict on our long suffering land.

Perhaps I am right to stick to Horton Lane which is largely left alone - apart from the irritating habit of our grass cutting contractors of strimming away the bark from around the bases of the young trees in the verges there.

Parasites

Last week our first visit to Clandon, a National Trust place on the way to Guildford, since September 2008. A place notable as a good example of a Palladian house and as having a good field of daffodils in the spring. A first in that I do not remember when we last visited two stately homes in two days, this being the second.

Get there to find Palladio alive and well, but the daffodils not doing very well. A couple of weeks or so from being full out and, according to one of the gardeners, it being neither good ground for daffodils nor a good year. Lots of them coming up without flower buds, or blind in his jargon.

There had been a mature avenue running up more or less to the front door, but this was knocked over by the hurricane of the late eighties, and there is nothing much left of it now beyond a picture of glories past.

But the main hall, a double decker affair occupying the whole of the front middle of the house, survives with its extraordinary ceiling. A cut down version of those at the Norfolk palaces of the same era, Holkham and Houghton. Very grand rooms downstairs, not so grand rooms upstairs, with these last being home to an important collection of porcelain, including the monkeys mentioned at reference 1. I suppose part of the point of this kind of porcelain is that, like jewellery, it was an island of stability in a transient world full of death and decay. If you didn't drop it, it would last more or less for ever. But, as I explained to a shocked trusty, if it were mine I would flog it for the dosh.

I managed to shock another trusty by saying, when proudly told that they had spent £80,000 on restoring the curtains for a four poster bed, that had I known I would have cancelled my subscription (which is actually BH's). Far from clear to me that this was a good use of resources: would it not have been better spent on restoring the lost avenue? It certainly would have been for me. Back home we read in the book that the money (amount unspecified) had been supplied by (I think) the Wolfson Trust - which I suppose makes it OK. If the Wolfson Trust want to throw money at curtains, that is up to them. Perhaps their trust deeds say something about providing support to distressed seamstresses.

A well stocked library, including one of those doors built out of fake book backs. I suppose that in the days before the invention of television and tiring of endless, daughter-played sonatas (there was a old Broadwood in one of the rooms), one might have made real use of such a place. To the extent of dipping into the collected Goethe? Or was that just for show? Or perhaps bought up by the yard at a fire sale at some neighbouring pile.

Some very elaborate & very heavy furniture, including some from Gillow of Lancaster, a precursor of our own Waring & Gillow. And including a handsome mahogany sideboard with fine avian or perhaps reptilian feet, much like (in shape at least) those of our cast iron bath, now consigned to the back of the back garden and full of nettles & worse. Lots of pictures, including lots of portraits of ancestors. Some of which were interesting.

Some of the trustees were a bit loud and needed little or any poking to set them off. But one did feel a bit sorry for them: they were not in the first flush of youth and had to stand around in a cold building for hours at a time - and no trust-issue greatcoats like the trustees were given to wear at Hampton Court.

Quite a decent snack lunch in the rather handsome undercroft, mainly filled with massively arched brick piers holding the building up. Much like the crypt of a large church.

Good example of a Wellingtonia in the back garden, together with a Maori log cabin from New Zealand. I wondered, given all the fuss about a residential log cabin being erected in a back garden near us, how much fuss there would be if we tried for one of these. Would heritage trump change of use?

There was also a great deal of mistletoe and I was puzzled about its manner of propagation and growth, with the main stem of the mistletoe appearing to spring, fully formed, from its host branch. Back home, I read all about it in wikipedia. It seems the seeds of the mistletoe are sticky and if they are lucky they land on a branch of a suitable host. Then, if their luck holds and they are not eaten, they germinate, striking roots into the host branch. Slow growing at first, but after some years you might have a sphere of mistletoe going for it big time. We read also about the haustorium, through which the growing mistletoe is able to invade the tissue of the host, a rather more serious business than that of invading soft, inert soil. BH pointed out that our fascination with how this strange plant grew was clearly the same fascination which had resulted, over the millennia, with the plant's extensive folklore and more or less magical standing.

Getting home had been something of a trial in the afternoon rush hour and we learnt first hand of all the disruption being caused by the upgrading of the Malden Rushett junction. Going  home via Chessington North was somewhat tedious, nose to tail all the way to Hook Road Arena. But at least we learned of a car booter on Sunday, the first of the season.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=barley+stop+press.

But he that hath the steerage of my course

Today's text is taken from Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene IV, line 112. But the motivation is reading that the brain decides what to do before it get around to telling us. That is to say, lots of experiments have shown that the brain starts to do something, say shoot the lion, maybe half a second before it bothers to notify consciousness. So while we might think that we decide to shoot the lion and then pull the trigger, that is not really the way that the thing is.

I move onto free will, which I sometimes think of as the occasional opportunity to do something, unconstrained by person, circumstance or anything else. The set up might be that one is sitting in front of a chess board, a board on which there are a small number of coloured markers, perhaps the sort of thing that one uses for tiddlywinks, each one on one of the black squares. One then just sits there, from time to time moving one of the markers from one square to a new vacant square. One makes the effort not to have any plan or design. The thought just comes to one that one should move the blue marker from e5 to a3 and so one does. The point being that the actual decision is made and execution commenced before the thought just comes to mind.

A slightly different example involves tossing a coin. I am so free to act, I am so little constrained, that I can decide whether to turn left or right at the T-junction by the toss of a coin. This sequence can be expounded in the sense of the previous paragraph, but does not make the present point quite so neatly.

So where does this leave free will? If the brain is buzzing away under the covers and only gets around to telling the conscious self what it is up to as something of an afterthought, where does that leave the conscious self? At first blush, scarcely in charge - although it may well be true enough that no-one else is in charge, that I am free to that extent.

At which point I happened upon the phrase used at the title of this post in 'Romeo and Juliet'. Perhaps in 1600 or so when the play was written, self consciousness was not developed to the pitch that it is now, and people were accustomed, perhaps content, just to get occasional glimpses of themselves from within. An analogy might be riding a horse: one is intimately connected to the horse and to some extent directing it, but one is, nevertheless, more of an observer than a participant in the action.

Perhaps, a few thousand years before that, when Homeric heroes went into battle they were largely unconscious of what they were doing and if they survived they had to rely, to some extent at least, on the testimony of others for the tale of what they had done.

Going back to the chess board, suppose I allow myself to plan, suppose I have a design or pattern in mind. Perhaps I want to arrange things so that the blue markers are in a line across the middle of the board. Then, at least some of the thought process which leads up to deciding to move this or that marker in this or that way is brought into consciousness. But in this particular example, there is likely to be choice, there are likely to be many ways of accomplishing the task, and the business of choosing the one from among the many is probably still unconscious and still the subject of the timing difficulty.

Perhaps the conscious focusing on the chess board, or on the diagram on the white board, is sort of prop. A prop which makes it easier for the subconscious processing systems to stick to the point in question, and not to go wandering off somewhere else.

Further thought needed, out in the clear air of the Horton Clockwise.

PS: note that in 'at first blush' is nothing to do with the flushing sort of blushing. An adjacent rather than a coincident meaning.

Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby

A tough lady from the end of our wars of the roses, the folded lady of the previous post.

This portrait was taken from the picture at Hampton Court Palace, while google offers lots more looking roughly, but not quite the same. One, for example, by one Maynard Waynwyk, of whom I had not previously heard. Perhaps she was the Madonna of her day, the subject of lots of pictures, both proper and pirated. Maybe even scurrilous woodcuts.

The search term 'hampton court palace margaret beaufort' gives plenty of pickings about her colourful life, but not anything that I could find about this particular picture. Must try harder.

Folding 2

Moving on from the last post, we came across a fine display of a different sort of folding, baroque rather than romantic if you will. The sort of linen folding illustrated left was, we were told, all the thing at the courts of German princes at the time of our early Hanoverian kings. But we were not told whether it was all the thing for the pfalzgräfin to do it herself or whether she got her maids to do it while she dallied.

I think the dresses are modern mock-ups in white of court dresses of the same time.

There was a complementary portrait of Margaret Beaufort, complementary in the sense that it exhibited a rather different sort of folding in her headdress. A picture which rather reminded me of one from the northern beauty exhibition at the National Gallery, despite the rather different again sort of folding. Thinking about it now, the Beaufort picture, or one very like it, may have also been included. See reference 3.

Somewhere along the way were some fancy card tables, about the size of our own, which included the rules for the then current version of three card brag. A bit more complicated than the version which I used to play, but the same general idea. The tables included nice little bowl shaped depressions to put your money in while you were waiting to lose it.

On to the kitchens where one of the large fireplaces had a fire, a handsome pyramid of glowing logs, one fairly fresh as its pipes were fizzing. They must have got through a huge amount of firewood in Wolsey's day, with wagon loads of the stuff pulling in more or less all the time in the winter.

Snack in kitchen café nearby in the form of tomato soup followed by chicken pie. The tomato soup, not usually a favourite, was rather better than I expected, while the pie was rather worse. Not up to the standard of pukka at all. I think the mushrooms in it, flat and chewy, may have been the mistake.

Chapel and Great Hall as good as ever and I had a good look at the ceiling of the latter. See reference 1 for the previous occasion. We also took a look at the replica of Henry VIII's crown, oddly tacky at close quarters: a chassis made out of thin plates of gold studded with all kinds of coloured stones - the replica, while rating a serious glass security box, not quite running to the opulence of the original.

A fine grand staircase, with a fascinating mixture of paintings, plaster work and trompe-l'œil, including a very flashy oval ceiling plate. Even in a place like this they could not afford to do it for real all the way through. Or perhaps they just did not think doing it for real all the way through was good value for money, especially in the feeble lighting available at the time. Rather spend the dough on clothes and skittles.

Fine, slightly misty, views of the Long Water and the pudding trees from the Fountain Court exit, from where we wandered down to the wilderness to see how the spring flowers were getting on. Snowdrop and winter aconites more or less over while the daffodils were coming on, not yet in full flood. All kinds of buds starting to swell.

On to the Tilt Yard café where they managed to rustle up Maids of Honour tarts for the whole party. The whole party was very impressed with them, although I thought that that sugar glazing on top had been slightly overcooked. BH explained that it only took seconds and was, in consequence, hard to get exactly right every time. See reference 2 for another occasion. We finished our tarts as the staff were piling up chairs and tables around us, so we thought it time to head back to the station, missing out on the royal cabbage patch on this occasion.

All in all, a good day out, especially on the southwest trains facilitated bogoff. The Palace people have laid on plenty of stuff to pad out the cold old building with - and while I am not that keen on loud luvvies strutting around in period costume, I dare say there are plenty who are.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/cumberland-treat.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/herald-tilt.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-day-of-bullingdon.html.

Folding 1

A not very good illustration of some Hanoverian, not to say, Royal, painted folding to compare with DT's real folding of the previous post. Taken in one of the state rooms in Hampton Court Palace.

It seems to be a feature of the telephone that, however you hold it, a picture like this never comes out as a rectangle, always a trapezium or worse. I wondered whether it was all down to the eye of the camera being maybe a metre below the centre of the picture. Perhaps I should have asked a trustee for a chair to stand on, or perhaps asked to borrow one of those selfie poles that far eastern tourists are fond of. Not that I saw one on this particular occasion.

I wondered also about the evolution of a rich cloak to keep a rich man warm, the Palace being quite cold on this bright spring day (cold enough that the trustees were glad of their red greatcoats), to this item of display which must have been pretty useless for anything other than coronations.

It also had the effect, on me, of making the small man inside the large cloak, look rather ridiculous. Perhaps it worked better in real life with train bearers, trumpets and all the full performance.

Detritus 3

For reasons which I am about to explain, I think it time to introduce a new two letter abbreviation: 'DT', to stand for our Trace. Short for Dame Trace, which moniker seems appropriate now that she has been promoted to the higher reaches of the Royal Academy. Not to mention CBE. Perhaps her ashes will, in due course, be stored next to those of that equally eminent fellow (if former) academician, Lord Leighton (see, for example, reference 2).

Some years ago, in May 2010, we were privileged to see one of DT's early 'Thames Detritus' works (see reference 1), so we were pleased yesterday to have the opportunity to see the latest addition to that collection at Hampton Court Bridge.

Notice especially the beautifully soft texture that she has managed to impart to the books by leaving them out in the rain. I suppose she must have hidden a cover somewhere, as one would not want them to get too soft, which would rather spoil the overall effect. Maybe she has done a deal with the trustees in the Palace over the River. There must be someone looking after the thing as the collecting tin (to the left of the work as illustrated) was empty. Note also the masterly way that she has managed to fold the grey blanket into the composition; far more difficult, I might say, than the straightforward replication of such folds in paint, as is to be found in the Renaissance masters. Or indeed in Hanoverian ones, to which I shall return in the next post.

Sadly, the mobile studio that she had been using for some little while while working on these works, sank during work on this one and the remains can be seen to the left of the detritus. We can only hope that, in due course, DT will be able to salvage another masterpiece for us from them. Perhaps it could become a floating feature underneath the proposed garden bridge, a few miles downstream. Lord Bullingdon, aka Bender Boris, to take note.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Couper+Collection.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/st-volodymyr.html.

Litter

This aerial litter from the council caught my eye outside Hook Road Arena the other day. Someone from the council seems to think that they can hang up any old rubbish on this particular corner. Much worse than the very modest bit of public litter which can be seen at the bottom left of the council effort.

Almost as annoying as their fondness for chain saw action on the nearby common.

There is a another large sign of the same sort along the Longmead Road, advertising the Epsom Motor Academy (which appears to be a scheme offering apprenticeships for wannabe motor mechanics) and fixed to the side of a car dealer's shed. Somehow not as irritating, perhaps because it is at least partially masked by trees. Perhaps also because it is an industrial estate on that side of the road and one does not expect them to be pretty. Not as bad as on green space.

More Windows 8

I had not moved on the adapter mentioned at the end of reference 1, but all of a sudden the newly upgraded (HP Pavilion) PC, not connected to the Internet, announced that it would like to be updated. All a bit of a puzzle. How did it know?

So I thought I better had move, although, as it happened, Staples had something which looked suitable from Belkin (a solid looking brand from which I buy four way surge protectors) for £25 or so, so I did not get as far as Maplin. The young lady on the till at Staples hadn't got a clue, although she was able to read the box to me. But she was backed up by a chap who was very confident that it would all work as intended. But he then weakened slightly by saying that these sorts of things were always a bit of a gamble, you could never be sure. Buy.

Get the thing home to read that while it is good for Windows XP and Windows 7, it says nothing about Windows 8. Furthermore, when I put the installation disc in the disc which had only recently been used for the Windows 8 upgrade, I find that Windows could no longer see the disc. Poked around a bit in control panel to no avail.

So today, humped the thing downstairs to connect it to the router again with the trusty yellow cable.

Step 1, check that the Belkin installation disc is readable on the other Windows 8 PC.

Step 2, plug the subject PC back into the Internet. Restart it to see if it was in an update mood, which it wasn't. But it was pretty busy in the background, none the less.

Step 3, phone up the helpful people at BT and see what they can do. They poke around a bit, then put me on hold and then, after a while, return to announce that there is quite a lot of stuff on the Microsoft site that they use about this very problem. A popular number. He has three possible fixes, he does the first and then we sit back and wait while the PC installs the thing. Maybe 5 minutes later the missing disc drive has sprung back into life.

Step 4, put in the Belkin disc and get on with installing its software. The PC being Windows 8 does not seem to be an issue. Wait for half an hour or so while 78 or so Windows updates which have now caught the PC up are installed. That all goes smoothly and the little widget, sticking maybe an inch out of its USB port, is now delivering the Internet.

Step 5, having come across all sorts of MS malware protection stuff sitting around in Task Manager in the course of step 2, confirm earlier decision not to install Norton. We shall see what we shall see.

In the meantime, here endeth the experiment in offline Windows 8.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/windows-8-resumed.html.

Creative juices

Interested to read this morning that our University of Creation (see reference 1) had so little confidence in the power of their own creative juices that they hired an image building partnership to knock up their new logo.

The old, part of which is still visible in this shot from their web site (lower right), was a bit dull, but it was decent enough, while I thought, at first take anyway, that the new (upper left) was a bit naff.

But I have now taken a peek at how it is used in the website, and I was rather taken with the video they have created. The new logo works well as part of an animated presentation. Pity it does not do so well on a letter head, but perhaps nobody much in the arty world writes letters these days. Pity also that the whizzy technology underpinning the video seems to have broken my Window 8, sold as unbreakable.

Judging by the article, there seems to be plenty of dissent about the new logo on the Epsom Campus, so maybe the whole new logo saga will be built into a fine new course unit about building & selling brands, with particular focus on the need to sell new brands to the workers in the enterprises being so branded. A course which could be very self-referential, very up itself and very much in the fashion of all that is best in contemporary art.

Read all about it on the web site or, if you prefer paper, in this week's free Guardian.

Reference 1: http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/.

Romeo alpha

On Saturday to a matineé of 'Romeo and Juliet' at Kingston's Rose theatre, billed as a 'bold and dynamic re-imagining of [a] timeless classic'. So timeless in fact, that we will more or less rewrite it. Jumping ahead, with a result which bears a similar relation to the original as the Armitage version of Gawain did to that original (see reference 1). Perhaps best described as a taster.

The stage side of the theatre had been stripped back to the concrete for the occasion, which made me realise, possibly for the first time, how like the 'Globe' this theatre is. The same sort of high, circular space, perhaps a little bigger than the Globe, with different seating arrangements, including a pit (for sitting rather than standing) in the middle but excluding the canopied stage thrust into that pit. In place of such a stage we had a large piece of playground equipment, cunningly wrought out of rough timber to look very like the concrete of the theatre's shell. A piece of equipment about which the cast, young and old, could climb and scamper as the action proceeded. The young half of the cast had clearly been trained in music & movement and were quite happy swinging from the bars. Somewhat above the action we had a platform for the musicians and their mixture of instrumental and electronic music - which I found both visually and aurally intrusive.

The set was visually very striking, but my take is that it was far too big. The play should be performed in a confined rather than an open space.

A fairly thin audience with a lot of quite young children, some French. Well under half full.

The production was somewhere in the triangle formed by the play at one corner, a children's story at another and a musical at the third. Guessing, I should think we got well under half the words of the play. There was also a slimming down of the dramatis personae, with, for example, conflation of the Duke of Verona with the Count of Paris (which I felt upset the dynamics of the play) and the conflation of Mr. with Mrs. Capulet. Perhaps to be truly contemporary the result should have been transgender. But we did have a young lady doing Mercutio, and she got physical aspects of the role off quite well. A smoker. I would only fault the director's seeming obsession with getting dying tremors in outstretched legs; all very realistic I dare say, but that is not what theatre should be about.

Given that the action ranged far and wide, I found I was sitting too close (in row DD) and I needed to keep moving my head to keep track of what was going on. With the result in the first half that I nodded off a bit. Second half rather better, with less running about and seeming to keep a rather higher proportion of the words.

Doing the play in modern dress without swords rather made nonsense of the fights to my mind. A quarrel between young people with swords is a quite different business to one between people with guns. And the fights in this play were quite important. I don't think knives would be quite right either, although Latins, then and now, are fond of such things.

We also had a signer standing to the left. Easy enough to shut out, but would, in another context, have been interesting in her own right. It would have been interesting to have had a talk with her, but she counted as a member of the cast and vanished after the performance.

At which point we decided to give the nearby Stein's a try, a not very long opened Bavarian restaurant. Traditional in the sense that you could eat a great deal of meat and dairy in the place. Our meal was very good. Chicken in white sauce with boiled rice and green salad followed by an excellent rhubard tart, a sort of cross between a French tart and an English crumble. Respectable riesling, brandy and coffee to go along with it all. In a previous life we would have gone for steins of beer and one of the full on sausage dishes, but we decided on this occasion to leave that sort of thing to youth. Good service. Reference 2. We shall be back.

Romeo beta may follow in due course, when I have got back hold of the words, presently awol.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sir-gawain.html. And a search for 'gawain' will return further pearls of blogdom.

Reference 2: http://www.stein-s.com/kingston/.

Grave error

Made our first visit to Wisley of the year on Friday - having been deterred by the continuing closure of Fairoak Lane, a key element of our our normal route. Blog search claims that we had not been since last August, a long time indeed.

Started off in the café, the décor person of which had clearly been studying the form in the trendy places around the Tate Modern, with the contribution from Wisley being the addition of a lot of pot plants to the mix. Rock cake looked a bit dodgy, as if the mix had been a little too wet, but tasted fine. Tea rather strong.

Outside, it was the day of the hellebores, which were looking very well. All different colours, with variety provided by some large euphorbias, the flowers of which were not that unlike those of the helebores, the petals of both being rather leaf like, with tendencies towards green. There were also some cyclamen, daffodils and other spring bulbs, but not in full flood. Also some full on red camelias.

A notice at the entrance had warned us that much of the big hot house would be shut, but in practice most of it was open. The star attraction of the day was a display of trial plantings of hippeastrums, very showy flowers indeed, although they did not photograph particularly well. A sign explained that many people got into a muddle between amaryllis and hippeastrum, calling specimens of the latter the former. Wikipedia explains that the former are South African while the latter are South American and that it is the latter which are widely grown as the winter flowering house plants wrongly called amaryllis. Otherwise, reminded once again of the extraordinary profusion of the world of plants.

There were also a few flashy butterflies left over from their exhibition. One of which had very striking electric blue patches on the upper surface of its wings. Producing the blue was clearly too much of a strain on the metabolism of this small animal to make it blue all over.

The two alpine houses were doing well, as usual, with the saxifrages and primulas earning an honourable mention. We were also reminded that the rock was tufa from Wales - not an area I associate with volcanoes at all. I consult wikipedia this morning to find that one sort of tufa is an odd sort of limestone (a relation of the travertine sometimes used by Henry Moore) but another is indeed volcanic. On balance I go with limestone, with UEA talking of 'deposits [in Wales] thought to represent carbonate precipitation during the late-glacial interstadial'. What sort the tufo of greco di tufo, of which I am fond, Italian despite appearances?

Ultima thule

Slightly circuitous route to St. Luke's this week, needing to sort out a booking snafu at the Wigmore Hall - where I arrived to find the place full of mums and babies with some sort of entertainment for same about to start.

Business there completed, picked up the first Bullingdon of the day at Broadcasting House and worked my way through a crowded Oxford Street to pull up at Theobalds Road and take a peek at the library there, not used for many years. I am pleased to report that it is alive and well, although a fair bit of space has been given over to computers - on which aliens such as myself were allowed. Did not seem to be as slick an operation as that operated by Surrey Libraries, but it served.

Pushed onto Roscoe Street for the customary bacon sandwich at Whitecross Street, forgetting to ask for the thicker sliced bread which seems to come with some dishes. A bit more bread to the bacon would be good, although for bacon sandwich purposes I do prefer factory sliced to baguettes, these last being inappropriately crunchy for the purpose. Better luck next week.

On into St. Luke's to hear Ronald Brautigam give us Haydn's Fantasia in C Major, Piano Sonata in G Major, an early Beethoven Piano Sonata in F minor Op.2 No.1 and Haydn's Piano Sonata in C Major. The Haydns came with hob numbers which I had not come across before. The pianist, from the Netherlands, came on looking very like the gardener in the previous evening's episode of Morse - the one involving a very dodgy Master of Beaufort College. Trousers, patterned shirt not tucked in but rolled up to the elbows and waistcoat, the ensemble topped off with long white hair. A newish fortepiano said to be a replica of one made in 1805 or so, especially wide to cope with the music around at that time. But it still looked very narrow to me compared with a modern concert grand. And it sounded like a cross between a modern piano and a harpsicord. I had thought that the difference between the two was that one bashed the strings and the other plucked, so not clear how you can be in between: clearly need to do some revision on the actions of these two instruments. But then again, I have had strings sounding like trumpets and strings sounding like oboes recently, so should I be bothered by this latest twist?

Music very good. I liked the fortepiano and I liked the pianist's unobtrusive way of playing it.

For a change, round the back to Finsbury Leisure Centre from where I pedaled to the ultimate slot on the top of the ramp at Waterloo, aka Waterloo Station 3. So I made the goal set the previous week rather quicker than I had expected.

Also for a change, someone on the Waterloo roundabout saw fit to comment on my bicycle clips (actually the foldback variety of bulldog clips), something which has not happened for a while. This chap seemed to think that I had pinched them from the stationary cupboard, when, as it happens, I had bought them from Rymans. Clearly a civil servant to know so much about raiding stationary cupboards.

PS: I see that TFL have started to rebadge their Bullingdon site in red for Santander from the blue for Barclays. Quite a way to go yet and and I have not seen a red Bullingdon since the one I rode last week (see reference 1).

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/finns-at-old-street.html.

Digesters

About nine months ago we came across our first digester, in the grounds of the East Cowes Waitrose (reference 1). Since then there has been talk of Sainsbury's putting such a thing into their Kiln Lane car park.

And now, yesterday, I find that the Borough of Islington has joined the fun with the Bunhill energy centre and heat network located behind Old Street's St. Luke's church. Not quite the same thing, as it is into heat pumps, waste heat capture (from, for example, near by tube lines) and local heat networks rather than digesting, but it all sounds very up-to-date and very ecological.

Note the environmentally sourced green oak cladding to the chimney.

Presumably the Borough of Epsom and Ewell is into something of the sort with its collection of food waste, although I imagine in their case the serious work is done by a contractor. A modest amount of poking around does not come up with a clear answer, but the company at reference 2 may be part of the answer. Maybe their Chertsey facility, a little to the southwest of the M3/M25 interchange. With the tricky question being whether a big solution of this sort is better for the environment that the little solution at Bunhill. For a start, I don't suppose that Agrivert, sited well out of sight of any marauding ecotwits, is into environmentally sourced green oak cladding.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/osborne-revisited.html.

Reference 2: http://www.agrivert.co.uk/.

Crane on consciousness

Or to be more precise, Tim Crane on unconscious belief and conscious thought. Where Crane is Knightbridge professor of philosophy in the University of Cambridge and a professorial fellow of Peterhouse. And Knightbridge was another fellow of Peterhouse, who gave money for the chair's foundation on his death in 1677. I already forget what put me on his case.

In the past, my very limited exposure to modern philosophers in the pages of the likes of the TLS has not encouraged me. It all seemed terribly difficult and of very little bearing on the real world. And the present paper dives in with the word 'intentionality', a word which meant nothing to me but which I soon learn is of medieval scholastic origin. Soon learn that is from a handy open-access web site operated by Stanford (see reference 1) and found by google. Good for them - and I now know that 'intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language'.

There seems, in this paper, to be a fog of terms derived from any two of intentionality, phenomenon and consciousness. I was reminded of the buzz word generators that used to be used as office ornaments by IT consultants. The fog is further compounded by stuff like 'a relational conception R is that of belief only if the following condition is met: (F) The thinker finds the first-person content that he stands in R to the content p primitively compelling whenever he has the conscious belief that p, and he finds it compelling because he has that conscious belief. (Peacocke 1993: 163)'.

The paper then moves onto classifying things, so perhaps a chap after my own heart after all. A colleague has identified seven different sorts of consciousness. Another does six and yet another does eight. Still others get excited about the recursion involved in thinking about thinking about things and go in for first order, second order and so on and so forth. Then, getting more interesting, the author settles down to the question of, given that one can be conscious of the red of a real pillar box (or of the real pain in one's big toe) and that one can also have the rather different conscious thought that pillar boxes are nearly all red, whether having the single label 'conscious' to attach to both phenomena is helpful.

There is discussion of P-consciousness, with P for phenomenon, and A-consciousness, with A for access. Where pain is a good example of the first sort, and the thought about the pillar box is a good example of the second. I start to fret a bit when it is suggested that the access means that I can, in some sense, choose to access the thought which is lurking somewhere in the unconscious. To my mind, while some of the time one can access knowledge by thinking thoughts like 'the chap I bumped into at TB last night and who talked a lot about concrete' and coming up with, a few seconds later 'Elias Sandberg', most of the time one does not do this. Most of the time thoughts pop into consciousness for reasons which are unknown. Generally, I thought the tone was too consciousness-centric, too much of a sense that our conscious self was in charge. I prefer a view where consciousness is just a froth on the surface, on the surface of some dark, swirling and largely unknown process. Unknown, that is, for the present.

But Crane does reasonably point out that it is hard to separate out different sorts of conscious events (and I agree with him that consciousness can usefully be thought of as a stream of discrete events, with sometimes large gaps between them) into well defined boxes. Things always seem to be slipping from one box into another at the edges.

There is discussion of conscious beliefs which the author dislikes, consciousness being a transient business while beliefs persist. I am with him on that.

There is discussion of whether events and states are different in kind. Where events occur in time and states persist through time. An inconclusive discussion of an interesting question.

All in all an interesting foray, but in the end I continue to prefer the engineering and scientific approaches. Where engineers try to build replicas of minds and scientists study them using the considerable armoury of modern science. This seems to me to be more likely to be fruitful than sitting on an ivory tower and just thinking out the answers in one's head. Rather in the way that the Christian monks did seven hundred years ago. (Given the the Muslims were rather ahead in those days, perhaps the Muslim monks did rather better).

PS: with thanks, once again, to wikipedia for the picture. Wikipedia seems to be a good source of high definition pictures, while a lot of the other freebies turned up by google are rather low definition, not much use for illustrative purposes.

Reference 1: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/.

Reference 2: http://www.timcrane.com/. Not all of his stuff hides behind a pay wall! And the paper in question was a nicely produced bit of typescript with not a statistic, chart, diagram or any other sort of illustration in sight.