We celebrate this week the passing of the last flickering of our great power past, a flickering which managed in its time to power the great adventure in the South Atlantic, a great adventure which has and which looks to continue to cost us a great deal.
Perhaps appropriate that the Guardian should have majored in recent weeks on another vestige of our past, the havens we operate, or at least allow to operate, for the criminal and greedy of the world, most notably the British Virgin Islands. As with arms, we no doubt mount the morally feeble defense that if we did not do it there are plenty out there who would. But I would prefer to live in a poorer country with cleaner hands.
Not that one should overdo the poorer country business. According the OECD website, we are still very firmly in the top ten in so far as GDP is concerned and we are still very average as far as GDP per head in proper countries is concerned. We are not doing that badly, even if our financial and tourist services sectors account for a bigger share of the total than one might think prudent: the coalition is right in that we need to get away from virtual production and to put more time into more real production, even if they are not having too much success in making the move.
And thinking of our wonderful financial services sector, the Guardian also spilled much ink on the incompetence of the banking knights who ran HBOS. Not only did these chaps get paid indecent amounts of money, they were not even any good at what they were supposed to be doing. Which brings me back to one of my hobby horses, the moral decline of the once proud and mutual Halifax Building Society on their watch. A moral decline which allows them to rack up the housing insurance premiums of their regular customers on the basis that most of them are too idle or too ignorant to do anything about it. I mourn the passing of the days when one could trust one's building society to treat one decently without having to bother about it. Without having to wade through the thickets of so called information published far and wide for our convenience, for our customers whose experience matters o so much to us.
Not to mention the thickets of information in the various online bills I now get from the various utilities. Not quite impenetrable, but a lot less easy to understand than the much simpler bills which used to come through the letter box. All part of the same tendency to keep the man in the street firmly in his (or her) place with information overload masquerading as customer service. Capitalists and computers have a lot to answer for.
PS: in the interests of fairness, I suppose I ought to acknowledge the growing number of insurance scroungers (that is to say people who make false or at least dubious claims), many of whom read the 'Daily Mail' and get very excited about benefit scroungers.
Wednesday, 10 April 2013
Lichtenstein, take 2
Following the first visit to the Lichtenstein exhibition on or about 6th April, back for a second bite yesterday, feeling the need to maximise the value from my shiny new membership.
As a result of which the view remains unchanged: interesting but a bit of a puzzle why the chap is such an eminence. Although a bit content lite, compared, for example with Canaletto, I was attracted by his sense of humour and by his craft and certainly at the time he did them, the works on show must have involved a lot of craft work, not for the faint hearted, although even he wobbled a bit around the edges, with quite a bit of sloppy brush work visible up close. One positive dislike was the late nudes which I thought ugly - and if they were ugly what on earth was the point? And I found the mirrors and entablatures unsettling, unsettling not in their content (not that I care for that either) but in the way that they seemed to interfere with my sight. All the cunningly placed dots and lines interfered with the way that my brain worked, which may well have been the intention, but I did not care for it.
Then down into the tanks below, with their strong smell of fresh concrete. An interesting space, full on this occasion with screens screening throbby music and low grade ballet. One wonders what they will do with them during the advertised closure for fitting out: will they do as well as they have done with the turbine hall?
Followed by a careful inspection of the members bar, particularly the two verandas, the larger one with a splendid modernist outlook, big chimney, big glass and all, but we decided not to partake and wandered down to the street to sample the new to us 'Vapiano' instead - see http://www.vapiano.com/ to see how many of the places there are, scattered across the globe Lots in Germany and places nearby. A restaurant with a new take on canteen, in that you queue up with a tray at one of a number of hatches while your meal is thrown together and cooked while you watch (mine involving a small packet of frozen ravioli among the fresher ingredients). But instead of the 'common table' format of some other chains, at this one you can have your own table. Visually both the food and the place were attractive. Reasonably priced with reasonable, sensible bread supplied free, including seconds. Sensible in the sense that it was just warm white bread, none of this complicated stuff with nuts, lumps and what have you favoured by other establishments, for example 'The (nearby) Refinery' of the week before. So a big plus for their bread arrangements. Food fine, if mine was a little cream full, but that could be avoided on another occasion. We speculate on whether there will be one, given the number of decent restaurants in the vicinity of Big Tate, but we do think that we would avoid busy times when the queueing at the hatches might turn into a bit of a pain.
Back home to wonder why one pays a premium for stone ground flour. What has it got, apart from enhanced price and stone dust, that steel milled flour hasn't got? How have stones managed to work their way into the organic, natural slot, to the exclusion of steels?
As a result of which the view remains unchanged: interesting but a bit of a puzzle why the chap is such an eminence. Although a bit content lite, compared, for example with Canaletto, I was attracted by his sense of humour and by his craft and certainly at the time he did them, the works on show must have involved a lot of craft work, not for the faint hearted, although even he wobbled a bit around the edges, with quite a bit of sloppy brush work visible up close. One positive dislike was the late nudes which I thought ugly - and if they were ugly what on earth was the point? And I found the mirrors and entablatures unsettling, unsettling not in their content (not that I care for that either) but in the way that they seemed to interfere with my sight. All the cunningly placed dots and lines interfered with the way that my brain worked, which may well have been the intention, but I did not care for it.
Then down into the tanks below, with their strong smell of fresh concrete. An interesting space, full on this occasion with screens screening throbby music and low grade ballet. One wonders what they will do with them during the advertised closure for fitting out: will they do as well as they have done with the turbine hall?
Followed by a careful inspection of the members bar, particularly the two verandas, the larger one with a splendid modernist outlook, big chimney, big glass and all, but we decided not to partake and wandered down to the street to sample the new to us 'Vapiano' instead - see http://www.vapiano.com/ to see how many of the places there are, scattered across the globe Lots in Germany and places nearby. A restaurant with a new take on canteen, in that you queue up with a tray at one of a number of hatches while your meal is thrown together and cooked while you watch (mine involving a small packet of frozen ravioli among the fresher ingredients). But instead of the 'common table' format of some other chains, at this one you can have your own table. Visually both the food and the place were attractive. Reasonably priced with reasonable, sensible bread supplied free, including seconds. Sensible in the sense that it was just warm white bread, none of this complicated stuff with nuts, lumps and what have you favoured by other establishments, for example 'The (nearby) Refinery' of the week before. So a big plus for their bread arrangements. Food fine, if mine was a little cream full, but that could be avoided on another occasion. We speculate on whether there will be one, given the number of decent restaurants in the vicinity of Big Tate, but we do think that we would avoid busy times when the queueing at the hatches might turn into a bit of a pain.
Back home to wonder why one pays a premium for stone ground flour. What has it got, apart from enhanced price and stone dust, that steel milled flour hasn't got? How have stones managed to work their way into the organic, natural slot, to the exclusion of steels?
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Bottom of the class
Since taking the class test the other day, I have been wondering what the point of it all was. I suppose that if I bothered to read the stuff which came with the test I could find out, but it is much more educational to try and work it out for oneself first.
A prior wonder is about what sort of a classification we have here. Some things come in a small number of natural categories, so sex is male, female, other, refused and not known, with other being a very small category indeed, usually omitted. Other things come in numbers, so age is anything from nothing to more than a hundred, with anything in between being allowed, including fractions, and if one were numerological or perhaps whimsical, one might celebrate a person achieving the age of pi or e and light a candle at just the right moment. But statisticians (of which I used to be one) and sociologists (of which I once aspired to be one) like to classify people, so we have to chop the number age into a small number of fairly arbitrary groups: under one, one to under 5, 5 to under 15 and so on. We can then tabulate people by sex and age. But what sort of a classification is class? Is it sex-like or age-like? Do people fall into well-defined, well-separated groups like sex, or is it all rather arbitrary like age, with one group drifting into another, more or less imperceptibly?
No doubt, if I were to read the forthcoming article in 'Sociology' I would get to find out.
But coming back to the point, what it is all for? Is it more than a device for the upper classes to put the lower classes in their place? Is it very polite for the upper classes to spill so much ink explaining why the lower classes are lower? Would it not be better and less divisive to preserve a decent silence, to draw a veil over the whole matter? Not to draw attention to the uncomfortable fact that the upper classes are getting more upper, more different from the lower classes as time goes on, certainly in this country? That some people are very much more equal than others.
I can see that if we were to record class, postcode and email address on our census form and this information was made available to retailers, those retailers could better target their advertisements than would otherwise be the case. We would gain because more of the advertisements arriving in our letter boxes, be those boxes bricks or clicks, would be for things that we might actually be interested in and they would gain because they would sell more stuff.
In the same way, civil servants could target their efforts. Statisticians might have worked out that people in Class VIIa were much more likely than those in other classes to be underweight and to eventually peg out of streptomianasis, costing the health service untold billions. So then the civil servants could target Class VIIa for action. All members of the class to be visited by action teams carrying weighing machines and packets of pasta, the latter for stuffing into the people who fail the former. Or the sociologists might have worked out that Class XXXIIIc was bottom of the class and ought to be eliminated, by fair means rather than foul. Nobody in the New Labour world is allowed to be bottom of the class, so let the civil servants chew on that one.
And journalists could fill up their pages with think pieces on days when news was a bit slow.
I suppose it does all add up to a reasonable case for class analysis. But I do fret about the divisiveness, the existence of top and bottom classes. It would be so much simpler if classes were more like occupations, just different, rather than arranged on a ladder from top to bottom. Which reminds me of the stage hand who comes on the very last page of the very long CODOT classification of occupation (see February 15th 2010) with the code 991.30: I wonder how he (or she) feels about ladders and rankings? Although there is always comfort in that coming last does have some distinction, much more so than coming in a few pages from the end.
PS: having some white bread for once, thought to celebrate with a fried egg sandwich for breakfast this morning. We also had lard and egg, so all systems go. Produced a perfectly decent fried egg sandwich but did not enjoy it as much as I had expected. Seemed to have lost the taste for the things. Noticed the lardy taste from the lard. And we are left wondering what to do with a tablespoon of liquid lard, no longer running the fat bowl of our more lardy years.
A prior wonder is about what sort of a classification we have here. Some things come in a small number of natural categories, so sex is male, female, other, refused and not known, with other being a very small category indeed, usually omitted. Other things come in numbers, so age is anything from nothing to more than a hundred, with anything in between being allowed, including fractions, and if one were numerological or perhaps whimsical, one might celebrate a person achieving the age of pi or e and light a candle at just the right moment. But statisticians (of which I used to be one) and sociologists (of which I once aspired to be one) like to classify people, so we have to chop the number age into a small number of fairly arbitrary groups: under one, one to under 5, 5 to under 15 and so on. We can then tabulate people by sex and age. But what sort of a classification is class? Is it sex-like or age-like? Do people fall into well-defined, well-separated groups like sex, or is it all rather arbitrary like age, with one group drifting into another, more or less imperceptibly?
No doubt, if I were to read the forthcoming article in 'Sociology' I would get to find out.
But coming back to the point, what it is all for? Is it more than a device for the upper classes to put the lower classes in their place? Is it very polite for the upper classes to spill so much ink explaining why the lower classes are lower? Would it not be better and less divisive to preserve a decent silence, to draw a veil over the whole matter? Not to draw attention to the uncomfortable fact that the upper classes are getting more upper, more different from the lower classes as time goes on, certainly in this country? That some people are very much more equal than others.
I can see that if we were to record class, postcode and email address on our census form and this information was made available to retailers, those retailers could better target their advertisements than would otherwise be the case. We would gain because more of the advertisements arriving in our letter boxes, be those boxes bricks or clicks, would be for things that we might actually be interested in and they would gain because they would sell more stuff.
In the same way, civil servants could target their efforts. Statisticians might have worked out that people in Class VIIa were much more likely than those in other classes to be underweight and to eventually peg out of streptomianasis, costing the health service untold billions. So then the civil servants could target Class VIIa for action. All members of the class to be visited by action teams carrying weighing machines and packets of pasta, the latter for stuffing into the people who fail the former. Or the sociologists might have worked out that Class XXXIIIc was bottom of the class and ought to be eliminated, by fair means rather than foul. Nobody in the New Labour world is allowed to be bottom of the class, so let the civil servants chew on that one.
And journalists could fill up their pages with think pieces on days when news was a bit slow.
I suppose it does all add up to a reasonable case for class analysis. But I do fret about the divisiveness, the existence of top and bottom classes. It would be so much simpler if classes were more like occupations, just different, rather than arranged on a ladder from top to bottom. Which reminds me of the stage hand who comes on the very last page of the very long CODOT classification of occupation (see February 15th 2010) with the code 991.30: I wonder how he (or she) feels about ladders and rankings? Although there is always comfort in that coming last does have some distinction, much more so than coming in a few pages from the end.
PS: having some white bread for once, thought to celebrate with a fried egg sandwich for breakfast this morning. We also had lard and egg, so all systems go. Produced a perfectly decent fried egg sandwich but did not enjoy it as much as I had expected. Seemed to have lost the taste for the things. Noticed the lardy taste from the lard. And we are left wondering what to do with a tablespoon of liquid lard, no longer running the fat bowl of our more lardy years.
Monday, 8 April 2013
Jigsaw 12, Series 2
The most regular puzzle which I have done for a while with four pieces meeting at every interior vertex and with every interior piece being of prong-hole-prong-hole configuration. Pieces were all very much of a size. But simplicity at these levels was compensated for by an interesting take on piece shape, both the shape of the piece overall and the shapes of the four corners, with lots of scimitar or oriental dagger shapes (see 5th April). One could sometimes pick the right piece out of the heap on the basis of corner shape. One even starts to develop a special vocabulary to describe shape, rather as one does with Lego if one does enough of it.
Started with the edge. Then the skyline, the pieces of which were harder than usual to pick out. Then built on the skyline a bit, doing the buildings and the ship. Then the dark cloud running right from the lighthouse, above the ship. Then the sky below the dark cloud. Very unusual to hit on the sky at this early stage.
But then at a bit of a loss. What to do next? Eventually settled on the lower rock-water boundary. Then the white water above, then most of the rock below.
Then at a bit of a loss again, eventually settling of the upper rock-water boundary. Then finished the sea and the sky.
Then finished the lower rocks and finished by finishing the upper rocks. More psycho puzzling in that I often picked out the right piece from the heap for the position under consideration, thought that it looked wrong, then found that it was right. More disconnect between conscious and unconscious processing.
All in all an unusual and unexpectedly satisfying puzzle. Perhaps I shall visit the horse's mouth, that is to say our very own branch of Wilkinsons, for another one.
Sunday, 7 April 2013
Top of the class
I was also interested enough to ask Professor Google about it all this morning and found that most of the first few pages of hits were mixed up with the BBC, who seem to be intimately involved with the survey which has resulted in the new structure. At least I assume that it is that way around.
Next step was to complete the BBC questionnaire, interested in such things as my ethnic orientation to restaurants and the brand of popular music which I favour. Got through this in around 10 minutes and was rather cross not to be assigned to one of the seven classes at the end. All I seemed to get was scores for my economic, social and cultural capital and there was nothing about whether I was to be assigned to the securiat or to the precariat. But I did get to wonder about the value of a computerised survey which appears to be restricted to self selecting people who like playing with their computers. I suppose I should read all about it in an upcoming issue of 'Sociology' - although there seem to an awful lot of magazines with titles along these lines.
Not to put too fine a point on it, more than somewhat cross not to be assigned to the elite, in which my blogging skills clearly place me. But then, quite by chance I found a much shorter questionnaire to fill in which quite happily popped me into the right box (see above) although I don't recall telling it about my elite education. Not sure what it would have based its guess on. But content and so happily off on the Horton Clockwise, where I came across plenty of celandines in flower, glowing yellow in the morning sun, and some early dandelions. The celandines in our own garden seem to have been rather bashed about by something, perhaps by a fox rolling in them, and are barely flowering at all, while dandelions nowhere to be seen at all.
I notice in closing that the small flock of thrushes which had been grazing down Longmead Road for the past week or so seems to have moved on.
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Inspection time again
Off to London earlier in the week to inspect the picture inspired by my last jigsaw (see 2nd April). It being a filthy day there were a few Bullingdons left at Vauxhall, saving me the walk across the bridge or up the embankment. Filthy enough that it took some minutes to warm up, despite being fully rigged out in gloves, wool sweater, wool scarf (from the street market near San Lorenzo in Florence, a tribute to their ancient wool industry) and duffle coat. And this time I remembered my smart new helmet. Along the embankment, across Lambeth Bridge, along the other side of the embankment, round Parliament Square, up Whitehall and onto the stand at Cockspur Street which was, as usual, full, Pushed onto St. Martin's Street behind the National Gallery where there were vacancies, clocking just 17 minutes for the whole.
Into the Canaletto Room at the National Gallery where I was able to examine 'Venice: The Grand Canal with S. Simeone Piccolo' at my leisure, the gallery being crowded but this particular picture not being particularly popular. It was a much better picture than I was expecting, amongst other things being a picture which worked close up, from across the gallery and at distances in-between. Also, as it happens, next to 'Venice: The Feast Day of Saint Roch', the subject of jigsaw 3. I report just one feature of interest, the horizontal striping of the sky, visible at close quarters. Not clear (to me anyway) whether the stripes were the result of application of paint in long strokes or of the grain of the underlying wooden panel showing through, rather in the way that joists show through the plaster of ceilings. But, in summary, the two liner at their web site gets it about right with 'impressive for the control of lighting and perspectival effects, and also for the lively representation of incidental details'.
Having decided that it was a double culture day, took my Bullingdon back from its stand out the back and made my way to Poured Lines, Bankside, this being Bullingdon speak for a stand on Southwark Street, but a name which they did not bother to tell Google about. Coincidentally, just 17 minutes again.
Into the Tate Modern, where I was pleased to find the main hall empty of art and, in consequence, very impressive. A handsomely converted space, big enough for parties to picnic on the floor without getting in anybody's way. Finding the second class saloon rather crowded decided to bite the bullet and go for annual membership which gave one access to the first class saloon where there was slightly less choice but much faster service. Decorated by smart ladies from Chicago in expensive looking fur coats. Membership also gave one access to the Lichtenstein retrospective without needing a timed ticket, a retrospective which turned out to be more interesting than I was expecting - there was content as well as dots and primary colours. But still hard to see why the chap commands such enormous prices; he must have had commercial mouth & brio of even greater size than those of our own Hirst.
Lunch at the 'Refinery' in Southwark Street (http://www.therefinerybar.co.uk/), the weather still being too foul to stray far. One of those large open plan spaces with open plan kitchen, high ceilings with pipes and miscellaneous furniture down below. Very hot on presentation and interesting ways of serving things - so, for example, the bread came in a brown paper bag rather than in the basket or bowl one might have expected. The sort of place which is just the thing just now and which, as it happens, I rather like. A good lunch, with good wine, even if the sausages in my sausages and mash were very ordinary, this despite my being spared lumps of apple and excess herbs à la Sainsbury. Mash served in an identical dish to that Wisley served their pie in (see 4th April). Like bread, we might live in the midst of great wealth and much foodie flannel, but it is still hard to get hold of a decent English sausage. Have not had anything as good as the late Porky White's (late of Chessington Road, West Ewell) for ages.
Into the Canaletto Room at the National Gallery where I was able to examine 'Venice: The Grand Canal with S. Simeone Piccolo' at my leisure, the gallery being crowded but this particular picture not being particularly popular. It was a much better picture than I was expecting, amongst other things being a picture which worked close up, from across the gallery and at distances in-between. Also, as it happens, next to 'Venice: The Feast Day of Saint Roch', the subject of jigsaw 3. I report just one feature of interest, the horizontal striping of the sky, visible at close quarters. Not clear (to me anyway) whether the stripes were the result of application of paint in long strokes or of the grain of the underlying wooden panel showing through, rather in the way that joists show through the plaster of ceilings. But, in summary, the two liner at their web site gets it about right with 'impressive for the control of lighting and perspectival effects, and also for the lively representation of incidental details'.
Having decided that it was a double culture day, took my Bullingdon back from its stand out the back and made my way to Poured Lines, Bankside, this being Bullingdon speak for a stand on Southwark Street, but a name which they did not bother to tell Google about. Coincidentally, just 17 minutes again.
Into the Tate Modern, where I was pleased to find the main hall empty of art and, in consequence, very impressive. A handsomely converted space, big enough for parties to picnic on the floor without getting in anybody's way. Finding the second class saloon rather crowded decided to bite the bullet and go for annual membership which gave one access to the first class saloon where there was slightly less choice but much faster service. Decorated by smart ladies from Chicago in expensive looking fur coats. Membership also gave one access to the Lichtenstein retrospective without needing a timed ticket, a retrospective which turned out to be more interesting than I was expecting - there was content as well as dots and primary colours. But still hard to see why the chap commands such enormous prices; he must have had commercial mouth & brio of even greater size than those of our own Hirst.
Lunch at the 'Refinery' in Southwark Street (http://www.therefinerybar.co.uk/), the weather still being too foul to stray far. One of those large open plan spaces with open plan kitchen, high ceilings with pipes and miscellaneous furniture down below. Very hot on presentation and interesting ways of serving things - so, for example, the bread came in a brown paper bag rather than in the basket or bowl one might have expected. The sort of place which is just the thing just now and which, as it happens, I rather like. A good lunch, with good wine, even if the sausages in my sausages and mash were very ordinary, this despite my being spared lumps of apple and excess herbs à la Sainsbury. Mash served in an identical dish to that Wisley served their pie in (see 4th April). Like bread, we might live in the midst of great wealth and much foodie flannel, but it is still hard to get hold of a decent English sausage. Have not had anything as good as the late Porky White's (late of Chessington Road, West Ewell) for ages.
Friday, 5 April 2013
Barge life
The illustration gives a good idea of the amount of work to be done, even if the words are barely legible, with the bonus that scanning it taught me that my recent Windows 8 upgrade had trashed the desktop software for my printer (all £30 worth of it. I must have spent many times that on genuine & original HP ink over the small number of years that I have had it. Presumably the printer itself is sold at a loss with an eye to the gains to follow). Luckily for me, HP have a well organised site which enabled me to download the new software now needed. Took all of ten minutes or so and it seems to be OK, even to the extent of not trying to print to One Note or some such thing by default from Word, with the only problem being that I have got to get used to a whole new user interface. Happy days.
I also remember the happy days of forty five years ago when the 'Express & Echo' was a broadside and included listings of all the evening entertainments suitable for young people. Dances in far off Whimple and that sort of thing.
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