Chamonix

A few days ago I noticed the odd appearance of a field off Horton Lane, as seen from the air. See reference 1.

Today I was moved to investigate and found a couple of chaps outside a van called chamonix who were only too happy to explain to me that the field had been turned into allotments for the use of the people living on the housing estate which had been built on what was West Park Hospital, presumably part of the package which the developer had signed up to with the council. He said that he thought that around 30 of the 60 plots had been taken, although he had not seen any gardening activity to date - just an older gentleman taking a couple of hours to pick himself some grass seeds. Presumably a chap with cage birds, careful enough with his money to prefer spending time picking rather than spending money in a pet shop. Unless, that is, he was a former resident of the hospital paying a sentimental visit to one of his old haunts.

He also seemed to think that not being a resident was no disqualification and that if I got in touch with the chamonix people at reference 2, maybe they would sign me up. I was rather tempted, the plots looking quite small, a lot smaller than that I used to have next to Stamford Green School. Much more suitable for the older gardener. Maybe the hour a day I try to spend walking could be spent gardening instead? Quite enthusiastic for the remainder of my walk, which I spent thinking about low maintenance gardening. Would there be rules about what could be grown? Would I, for example, be allowed to grow pampas grass, bamboos and big aloe-ish succulents - all things which I rather like, which do not need much attention once established, and which are too big for my part of our garden proper? What about trees and huts? Garden benches? Who would be responsible for dealing with the deer problem - it only being  few weeks since I last saw a couple of deer in a nearby field? Quite a lot of stuff about my previous experiences with deer at reference 3.

Calmed down a bit now - but I shall reflect further.

PS: I had thought to include this fascinating stuff in a comment to the original post at reference 1. But a couple of experiments with comments containing the search term 'beelzebub1' (of which there are now two) suggest that the blog search offered at the top of the blog does not look at comments, reducing the value of comments as text of record. Which I why I have opted, on this occasion, for a whole new post.

It is possible that it takes a while for the blog indexes to be updated with stuff from comments, but I am not sure that there are any indexes, that it would be worth indexing the blog at all. The blog is quite small by the standards of modern search engines and a scan without the support of indexes would probably be quite fast enough.

And if I get really bored I can start testing the performance, if any, of blog search on word roots, capitals and plurals, all that good stuff which google itself is quite good at. Also the supplier of the picture from chamonix included above.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/long-grove-park.html.

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

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=deer+fence.

Pills

The other day to the surgery to collect my prescription. Oh no sir, you don't collect them any more. We send the signed prescription to pharmacy A and you collect your medicines from there. I dimly recall signing some form at pharmacy A authorising this arrangement.

So off I go to pharmacy A where they say yes sir, certainly sir, we got your prescription through yesterday and we made it up last night. Thinking of some poor shop assistant toiling away on minimum wage, I hope they meant early evening. Just hang on while we get it out for you.

Maybe 15 minutes later they were still getting it out for me and I suspect that in the end they gave up and made it up again. The lady behind me was on the same case, in her case for stuff for diabetes which she had asked for about 10 days previously, and I wondered how much storage space this not very big pharmacy had for all the ladies like her. As it turned out, she got out before me, having waited for around 10 minutes - 10 minutes being about how long you walked around the block for in the olden days when you walked the prescription in yourself. No doubt it will all settle down and the new service will indeed come to serve.

While I waited for the IT pill distribution system to kick in, to distribute, I pondered about how IT might better support consumption - assuming for these purposes that I can be relied on to be near my telephone at all times. The IT pill consumption system.

First thought was that I could tell Cortana (the helpful person who lives inside my telephone) about needing to take pills each morning and evening and could she remind me please. This would take just a few seconds to set up. Second thought was that this would be rather tiresome since I usually remembered without a reminder, but might not remember and certainly would not want to bother to cancel the reminder on each occasion.

Third thought was that I needed to internet enable the little plastic box I have between the supply in the drawer and me. A little plastic box holding seven smaller boxes, one for each day, and with each smaller box having two compartments, one for morning and one for evening. (As one gets older there are more elaborate versions with more compartments, catering for more complex states of the world). The little plastic box that I use cost a couple of pounds or so from Boots and has served very well, with my only rarely missing a dose, usually much less often than once a month.

But one could do better, Firstly, rich & ostentatious people, would like something more flashy than a little plastic box. Maybe the Mick Jaggers, the Damien Hirsts and other celebrities of that sort would like to have a gold pill box, encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. Perhaps I should pop into Aspreys to make sure that they have such things. Secondly, coming back to the third thought, the box should be internet enabled.

It would know when each compartment should be emptied and whether it had been emptied. After a suitable interval it could send a message to Cortana who could make my telephone ring or vibrate or something. And she would do that every so many minutes until the compartment said that it had been emptied.

The next level would not be to bother with the little plastic box at all, rather to have a rather grander contraption simply dispense the pills needed at any particular time, directly from the main supply, into a small, jewelled container. This container would then start to send out alerts if it was not emptied at about the right time. This would eliminate the weekly ritual of box filling. But would have the disadvantage of not being so portable. Need to think a bit more about that side of things.

And then, from time to time, it could send an email to the surgery requesting further supplies. And so on and so forth.

An even further level would be pills that were IT enabled. Each pill would include a microchip which could tell the fat controller when it had been ingested and by whom. This would provide a useful extra check that a pill removed from my pill container had in fact been consumed by me.

Green planet

The other day I came across a smartly decorated white van at the end of our road - otherwise a transit-type van as used by jobbing builders - called green planet water supply division. I didn't like to take a picture of it but I did wonder what on earth it was all about. Houses in the suburbs of London mostly get their water from Thames Water, a well known outfit now headquartered in Australia and with the Macquarie Group lurking behind the throne. A group which packs a bigger punch than its fifty or so years would suggest.

Was the van into conjuring water out of the ground using solar panels or something, so that you could dispense with the chlorine & fluorine polluted stuff which you might otherwise get our of your tap?

But a short consultation with google, discarding all the eco stuff about saving the planet, reveals that this green planet outfit is really into offering household utility services of the sort that we buy from British Gas. Their core business is looking after getting utilities into and out of your house. To which end they are pretty nifty when it comes to digging large holes in your garden, particularly your front garden. See reference 1.

Essentially a bunch of navvies, Murphy's men as it were, in eco-clothes. Mystery solved.

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

A puzzle for aficionados

A selection of screen shots from a computer package with which I have a family connection. The test, for which the reward is fame rather than fortune, is to work out what that connection might be. Persons not resident in the UK are not eligible.

These particular shots caught my eye because they mention Laguna Beach, a place which I once had the opportunity to visit, in the margins of some very important meeting. See gmaps 33.545987, -117.793684. An odd place, with houses built out on wooden piles over the beach, complete with a chap going around with a special contraption, a bit like a metal detector, but for detecting whether giant ants were eating the piles. Also the place where I bought my first copy of 'Into Thin Air', a tale of strange & tragic goings-on on the top of Mount Everest. A book which, as it happened, introduced me to the rather different style of book production prevalent in the US. One very visible difference being the way the pages were cut, with the US liking ragged-cut rather than straight-cut. No idea how it is done. Another was the inclusion of a number of small wood-cuts, more or less dropped from books over here for a very long time.

Garbo

Having noticed a biography of Queen Christina of Sweden at reference 1, and following the interest in Greta Garbo noticed more generally at reference 2, I got a biography of Garbo for 50p from a lady at a Hook Road car boot sale. It was a rather a hot day and the lady, no longer young, had her head wrapped in a white towel in an effort to keep the sun off.

A 1955 biography by the late John Bainbridge of the US (not to be confused with the English writer and footpath campaigner of the same name), which while a little superficial at times, eschewed probing the more private parts of this rather private lady's life. A star who contrived to make a virtue out of not behaving like your regular star and a writer with old-fashioned manners.

I share just one snippet. In reference 1 I talk of early retirement. This turns out to be not quite right. She might have packed up early, but this was the result of a mauling over a bad film called 'Two-face Woman', released & censored in 1941. She retired hurt from the scene, but continued to look at and think over projects for films for years to come, sometimes coming close to action but not, in the event, making it. The project coming closest being perhaps that to have her star in a film of the life of George Sand, yet another strange bird, who as well as having an affair with Chopin, liked to wear male attire instead of the complicated female attire of her day.

Anyone wishing to share the experience can do so for 1p plus £2.67 postage, rather more if you want a dust jacket (which I did not get), from amazon. I continue to puzzle about why people would bother to sell a book for this price - a practice which seems to be quite common on booky web sites. Wanting to find a good home for your old books is all very well, but it is a lot of bother.

The illustration, from google, illustrates the sort of thing she had to put up from studio publicity departments before she had became famous enough to put a stop to it.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/christina.html.

Reference 2: or for the whole lot, http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=garbo&max-results=20&by-date=true.

Leaves

A small tree, which I took for some kind of eucalyptus. Snapped near the northern exit of Long Grove Park.

The point of interest being that there seemed to be two sorts of leaves on the one tree, with one sort being the ordinary sort, top right, and the other sort being rather odd. Roughly circular leaves growing around the stem, rather than from the stem on a stalk, and which can be seen in the lower part of the picture.

Circular leaves some of which also seem to be host to some kind of small, central flower.

What would the leaf identifier I came across the other day have made of it all? See reference 1. I remember being irritated that the identifier did not work on Lumia telephones, but now I am irritated by not being able to recover the context in which I found out about the identifier in the first place, beyond it being via Professor Jacobs of Maryland University. There seems to be no record, here or anywhere else, despite my being sure that there is a record somewhere. Maybe it will come back to me over breakfast.

Reference 1: http://leafsnap.com/.

Long Grove Park

Certainly on or near the site of Long Grove Hospital but also known as Southfield Park, from the school at the top of it. In any event, I took a turn around it the other day to find the skate park looking a bit bare.

The banks were turfed getting on for two years ago (see reference 1) and have looked OK, but they were not looking OK on this occasion. Now I have never seen people running up and down the banks, even when the place is busy, so I don't put their condition down to that. Rather that, if you turf steep banks like these, then strim them down close in dry weather, the grass is going to snuff it. Maybe the grass never put much of the way of roots down into the clay under the turfs. Perhaps the skate park contractors knew all about the slide & ramp side of things but were not so hot when it came to grass. Will the grass come back or will the banks just gradually wash away?

Maybe they should have got a grass consultant in from Wisley who could have told them about what grass to use. Rather harder would be trying to tell the grass mowing contractor to calm his strimmers down a bit. I associated to the prophecies of doom of my childhood to the effect that if you strip all the decent people out of the working class with education & opportunities, what is left is going to be rather a rough lot, unconstrained by the presence of decent & intelligent elders. The sort of elders who were still around in my days on building sites; they might have been labourers, classified as unskilled by the Ministry of Labour of the time, but they were decent, highly skilled, hard working and they knew a lot about the world and the people in it. A problem which the Indians used to avoid with their caste system: it didn't matter how good you were, if you were born into a bricklaying family or a grave digging family that is what you did. And a problem to which I do not see any easy solution - beyond the process and procedure which dominate many once pleasant walks of life.

I also associated to the gang of strimmers I saw working on the anti-gypsy banks on the other side of Horton Lane, around gmaps 51.338134, -0.293141. The banks were overgrown with tall, rank weeds and I am sure that it was taking a lot longer to strim them down than it would have taken with a scythe, or even a sickle. But maybe, brought up on Xbox rather the physical jerks, the strimmer operators would not be able to swing a scythe for more than a few minutes at a time, assuming, that is, that one cared to trust them with such things at all.

Exiting the park, I came across some strange leaves, but I shall leave them for the next post.

And then, back in Manor Green Road there was more grass. Grass which had been sown a couple of weeks or so ago in the front garden of a house which has just been more or less rebuilt. Sown when it was hot & dry and which has done well, despite my dismal expectations. A bit thin yet and with something of a bare patch in the middle, but doing pretty well, maybe a couple of inches high now. They have been lucky with the weather as it turned out and they have helped their luck along with regular watering. Hopefully the Poles on this case do not know about strimmers and it will look like a lawn by the autumn.

PS: the google maps satellite picture at 51.338134, -0.293141 shows a lot of rectangles rather than a banked field. Are these rectangles the traces of allotments of former times, perhaps war time endeavours to grow more grub? Occupational therapy for mental patients? Or is it something much more recent and banal like land drains? Or are they laying out some new allotments for the inhabitants of the new estates? Now I come to think about it, they have been doing something with lots of little marker posts in the field in question. When did google take their picture? A closer look is clearly called for in the margins of the next blackberry hunt.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/inspection-day.html.