Interim report

Breaking a long standing custom, I notice a book before finishing, 'Population 10 billion' by one Danny Dorling, hitherto unknown to me. Oddly, for a chap who appears to be quite into (self) publicity - see http://www.dannydorling.org/ - and to be quite a lefty, no less than the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford - and these the people who would not make A. J. P. Taylor a prof. because he had been on the box.

The book has a rather irritating style and despite appearing to be organised into 8 straightforward chapters charting the growth of the world's population up to the 10 billion now scheduled for some time around 2100 CE, is in fact a sort of car boot sale of all sorts of stuff which might otherwise be culled over a rather longer period from the pages of the Guardian. Rather like a blog blown up to an unappetising if not unnatural size: perhaps he needed a fiercer editor to inject more discipline and to get the size down from the present 444 or so pages to 333 or so. As it is, I am finding sequential reading difficult and have resorted to dipping - which I would not have thought was the idea. Proper books, for this reader anyway, should tell a coherent story.

All of which is a pity, because the message that I get is both interesting and important: that is to say that the population of the world is not rising exponentially and will probably stabilise at or around 10 billion (up from rather more than 7 now), a level which we can probably cope with if we could only learn how to do something to curb waste & excess and something to make the distribution of food & other goodies a bit fairer than it is now. Or as the great man famously said: 'Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!'.

As a former demographer of sorts, I was amused at the amount of time & effort Dorling spends on rubbishing UN demographers, who, it seems, were foolish enough to publish projections several hundred years into the future.

He also spends a lot of time & effort on various topics peripheral to the population theme, as I said before, a regular car-boot sale of a book. But apart from finding it hard to read, I am suspicious; a book that skates over so much ground is probably skating on thin ice. The chatty style does not give one confidence that the chap has spent quality time checking all his facts; reliable enough to use in the pub, but I am not sure that they are reliable enough to use in the formulation of policy.

PS 1: while writing the foregoing I became curious about how much a Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford might earn, but I failed to find out, beyond establishing that it is probably rather less than £100,000 and a lot less than the £250,000 and more which university vice chancellors award themselves these days. On the other hand, the royalties on books are probably to be added on, with no rules about not making money out of research and writing done while on the public payroll. In any event, some way above the median wage. Maybe even what used to be called a champagne lefty.

PS 2: is he any relation of the now retired Christopher Dorling, the now retired co-founder of DK books, now swallowed up in Pearson? See 3rd November.

A tale of two billhooks

A dream about shopping for billhooks.

It seems that for some reason not included in the dream I was shopping for a couple of billhooks for my (long dead) mother, one large and one small, rather after the fashion of Elizabethan men of fighting with rapier in the right hand and dagger in the left. To this end I took myself to a department store, a store which now associates to John Lewis.

In the main part of the shop I quickly bought the large billhook from the primary gardening department, but did not find anything suitable in the way of small billhooks. After a while, someone suggested that I should go out the back, which I did, accompanied by this someone but of whom there is now no other trace than that accompaniment. We pick our way through various piles of rubbish, the sort of thing that accumulates round the back of large buildings (the sort of thing that one finds, for example, round the back of the shops in Oxford Street), to a sort of hut by the gate, a hut which now associates to a dirty & shabby shepherd's hut on wheels, the sort of thing which is now only made by self consciously crafty craftsmen to adorn the Surrey gardens of the rich and to serve as summer houses, studies and smoking dens. Nothing to do with sheep any more. Not at all dirty or shabby. Inside the hut was the rather grumpy bearded gentleman who ran the secondary gardening department, a gentleman who now associates to a bearded chap I used to work with at the building in Watford called the Orphanage which was once a Masonic Orphanage, later in the care of the Department of Employment and is now under a football pitch. I used to have a small allotment there, with a rather leaky hut made from five pallets. He used to be keen on narrow boats and used to tell us stories of the elaborately compact packing done by his wife against water borne emergencies of necessities for sewing, power cuts, mending boots and the like.

He led me through the dusty sheds, the nooks and crannies of his department, offering me all kinds of obscure and fantastic tools which he thought might do as the small billhook. Including a tool that used to belong to my parents, was called a machete (although shorter and more like a meat cleaver in shape than the sort of thing that some central Africans like to carve each other up with. And much heavier than the surprisingly light weight looking cutlasses which used to be used by some north European sailors to carve each other up with and which are now exhibited at Greenwich (see 29th November)), was used to chop kindling and which is still in our possession. Various short billhooks, the sort with an elaborately shaped wooden handle and which could be used with one hand. A small club hammer with a cubical head, maybe a two inch cube, with two pencil shaped spikes sticking out of the back of it, making the head look a bit like some kind of horned animal.

After spending some time at this, I decided that none of the tools on offer would do. The grumpy bearded gentleman became very grumpy, muttering loudly about time wasters. I wondered whether I ought to buy something to quieten him down, or perhaps simply to slip him a fiver by way of a tip. At which point the dream fizzled out.

PS: I remember now that a shepherd's hut on wheels is also the scene of adultery and of rather grim murder by runaway hut in a story by Maupassant. Perhaps 'Une Vie'. The Professor finds the illustration above which suggests that memory may be roughly on course for once. Note wheel, middle left.

Rumble in the jungle

Following the post of 22nd August and it being a bright sunny afternoon, we have finally gotten around to taking a turn around the jungle golf at Horton Lane, resulting in my victory by 1 stroke or by a rather larger margin if we do it by holes.

Good supply of jungle flavoured plants, crocodiles, crocodile music, gorillas and water. Two small boys coming up behind us were happy to explain to us how it all worked and how the crocodiles were made of metal. But not so wise that I was not able to explain to them how the man inside the scary gorilla inside the cave took it in turns with the man inside the kiosk at the entry. If the plants take and get established, it will be a handsome facility, with the plants not being so prone to the shabbiness of the seaside cousins.

Finished by around 1600 with the sun sinking down into the horizon and it starting to get quite cold. Good job we were fully coated, scarved and gloved.

There must have been at least 100 people around the thing this afternoon, so a take of £1,000 or so for the half day, not counting what they might do at the bar afterwards - which was busy with dads and their boys watching Liverpool vs. Chelsea over a jar or two. We took two reasonable teas in an annex to the bar, both newish and the former of which came complete with fancy plaster cornice around the top of the walls, fancy plaster roses around the chandeliers and a dado rail. Skirting board a bit ordinary by comparison - although I suppose that the fancy plaster might actually have been some sort of plastic foam. Does the fact that my golf ticket was sold from kiosk 'HP_ADVGLF_T01' mean that the golf club has a point of sale system built on HP hardware on which the installation engineer did not bother to change the default till naming convention?

End of phase 1

We have now reached the end of phase 1 of the festal season and it is time for a stock take.

As reported on 7th December, the festal booze campaign opened with 15 miniatures. This was later topped up with 3 more from a little Tesco and 3 more from a big Costcutter, taking the total to 21. One or two full size bottles got in through the back door which slowed consumption of the intended stuff, but we are now down to the 14 seen left. An entertaining way to do things, so next year I will have to make a special effort to source interesting miniatures. Will Vinopolis being any good at this sort of thing? Or maybe Hedonism Wines (http://hedonism.co.uk/) where, according to their web site they do do wine at under £30 a bottle (around my upper limit, and only then for very special occasions) but you can quite quickly find bottles at more than £4,000 and according to the Guardian you can spend £16,000. I am not sure that I approve of people spending that sort of money on a bottle: I dare say the money gets recycled through the lower orders at some point but it does seem to reflect a lot of capital tied up in unnecessary luxury goods, capital which might be used for something of wider application. See 23rd December for a short discussion about a related issue.

Back in the garden, sharp frost this morning with a very white extension roof. Redwings back in force, but more scattered, having more or less done the fire thorn and the large old apple trees next door are now a popular perch. Also a number of the green parakeets down from Ham which have taken to the few apples remaining on tree. Who are they competing for ecospace with?

Our off tree apples in the garage are doing well, helped along by their having been picked from the tree rather than from off the ground, with only a few getting the brown rot. But how many of them will we get through before the brown rot does get going? We are doing maybe a dozen a week but there must be several hundred of them - so we are not going to get to the end in time.

Casualty 2

Better class of casualty at Tunbridge Wells.

Also both bad news and good news from Halls.

The bad news was that the foreign language book shelf had been disbanded, reduced to a cardboard box underneath the table. No sign of either Percy or Coulevain (see yesterday's post), so I expect both will fade away; too much else going on for them to hold their place on my top table now.

The good news is that the turnover at Halls is strong enough for such a thing to happen. So many of the foreign books that were there last time I was there had been sold that their shelf was no longer viable. Perhaps the place will survive.

I paid for my entry with an autobiography of G. K. Chesterton. We shall see if his efforts in that line entertain as much as those in others.

Second childhood

Back to gainful employment yesterday. Pleased to find I had not lost the knack, even with these rather unfamiliar figures. Good on the left, bad on the right. Luckily, the good are better armed & armoured.

Casualty 1

The top end of one of Epsom's larger casualties in the recent storms. This one on the edge of Mounthill Gardens, on South Street, an older tree in rather poor condition inside.

Memorialitis

I had thought that the strange epidemic of additional world war two memorials was running down, but the other day I noticed a large new memorial to the women who lost their lives in the second world war, just up Whitehall from the Cenotaph.

A large black affair, rather ugly, but otherwise much the same shape and size as the Cenotaph, and generally rather upstaging it. To me it was entirely inappropriate that such a large memorial should be erected so close to the Cenotaph, supposedly the main memorial to the much larger number of people generally who gave their lives in the two world wars. By showing respect to the women in this way we show disrespect to the men.

Was it the brain child of the same people who infest public spaces in London with ugly, sometimes worse, contemporary sculpture? People who thought to tap into the vein & pockets of wimmins' energy.

And while I am on the subject, I find the standard of the empty plinth sculptures in Trafalgar Square very low. I had thought the idea of a rotating sculpture on the plinth a good one, a way to showcase contemporary work, but it just seems to be being used to allow sculptors to go on an ego-trip. You seem to get the prize for being the biggest, the ugliest or generally the most shocking. Where is the decorum & restraint of the people who did the admittedly dull statues of dukes on horses which occupy the other plinths? Or even of Henry Moore?

So just presently the Square is dominated by a dreadful blue chicken. All the French tourists must be greatly amused that we elect to desecrate this huge public memorial to one of the last battles at which we really wopped them in this particular way. But perhaps it is really a cunning way to let the lower order Brits feel that they are getting one over the higher order Brits. Taking the p*** out of said huge public memorial to the higher orders, a relatively harmless way for them to let off steam; much less harm than getting into property rights or anything revolutionary like that.

PS: the reason that I think the new memorial is new being that I had retired from Whitehall to Horseferry Road by the time it was put up. So I have only just got around to noticing it.

Ève Victorieuse

A chance purchase from Hall's of Tunbridge Wells. £2.49 for a pot boiler from 1900 or so, written by one Pierre de Coulevain, published by Calmann-Lévy, owned by and probably bound for Percy Ashton Jonson. And being bound to order, no dust jacket of the sort illustrated by kind permission of Amazon France - who offer various versions, including at least one new: perhaps the work having been crowned by the Académie Française really does confer longevity.

Percy's bookplate carried the motto 'fidelis ad urnam' which I had the temerity to translate to 'faithful to the half amphora', perhaps an illusion to Percy's fondness for a jar, but simply asking the Professor reveals it to be more sensibly translated as 'faithful to the end', as an urna can be a pot for a person's ashes as well as a pot for his beer.

It took a while to get into the book, but in the end an engaging tale of the adventures of two rich ladies from the US, a married aunt and an unmarried niece, both young and beautiful, with their adventures being mainly among the posh (as opposed to the parvenus) rich of Paris and Rome. A sort of Henry James job, but done from the French angle.

The male lead is one Lelo, otherwise known as the Comte Sant'Anna, a very seductive but otherwise uninteresting specimen of the Roman aristocracy of the day, this last being rather different from the Italian aristocracy generally, the story being set not that long after Rome and what was left of the Papal States got taken over by the Italians. Lelo makes a pitch for the aunt and fails but goes on to marry the niece, with whom he initially carried on with to annoy the aunt who had spurned him. The aunt then falls in love with him but restrains herself, the balance of the book being her ultimately successful effort to purge herself of love for Lelo. Lelo takes great pleasure and pride in having caused all this commotion, while Coulevain takes the line that Italians who are good at this game take a lot more pleasure in causing hurt of this sort than is proper. A lot more than an Englishman, who would not play the game at all, and rather more than a Frenchman who would play it with a more decent restraint.

Interesting sub-plots concerning the attitude of the two ladies the Catholic Church, particularly interesting for me following, as it does, the book about Archbishop Lang noticed on 14th December. The niece has acquired a cardinal, a possible Pope, for an uncle, with whom she gets on very well, but stops well short of conversion, while the aunt gets herself converted as part of her battle against her obsession with Lelo. But the coup de grâce for the obsession is actually administered by a charismatic Hindu guru. And we of the sixties thought that we invented gurus.

Along the way I find some curious snippets.

That the rather splendid word  fleuretage seems to mean flirtation. Oddly, the word attracts very few hits in Google and none of my dictionaries admit to it at all.

That our word nurse comes from the French nourrice or wet-nurse, using a completely different word for the hospital sort of nurse.

That the locution 'well I never' is properly in two parts with 'well' being a free standing exclamation and the 'I never' bit being the truncated start of a sentence about how I never saw such a thing before, or some such.

All good fun. On my next visit to Hall's I shall look to see if the others, declined first time around, are still there.

PS: the Professor knows a lot about Percy Ashton Jonsons. Bit of work needed to sort out the right one from all the dross.

True or false?

There was a proper flood in Calgary last spring, during the snow melt. This image was taken during a time out in an ice hockey match in the city's Saddledome, a timeout during which harassed officials - this is a very important game in Canada - were considering whether it would be OK for the players to use snorkels. Not surprising that the crowd is a bit thin.

PS: matches at the dome look to be a bit cheaper than at our own Emirates stadium. So tomorrow you can see the Calgary Flames vs. Edmonton Oilers match for from C$40 whereas tickets at the Emirates start at about C$45 and rise to more than C£200. See http://www.scotiabanksaddledome.com/site/saddledome/ for the full story.

Festal thoughts

Up bright and early yesterday to take a peek at Epsom before serious festivities kicked in.

First stop at the junction of West Hill and West Street, where there is a larger fire thorn than ours, a fire thorn which was the scene of much avian activity. Activity which might have included the redwings which had visited us the day before but which certainly included some tits.

Returned a stray glass to the Marquis which was just limbering up towards opening. From there past a former regular of the long closed Albion, taking a fag on the pavement outside TK Maxx, looking a bit bereft. Café Rouge and Wetherspoons were open. Viceroy open while the rather more diverse - possibly middle eastern - Surrey Cars was shut, which was unexpected.

The town centre Costcutter was still shut at 1100, despite having been open later in the day for the last two Christmases. Maybe they were due to open at noon. Had they been open I would have bought a packet of plain digestive biscuits as a small protest against seasonal excess.

Rather to my surprise, MacDonald's was shut. Rifleman open.

Not many people about, but plenty of cars and the odd RouteCall bus, presumably driven by volunteers. Good for them. And plenty of planes. I suppose the schedulers are loathe to abandon all those slots on Christmas Day, in the middle of an otherwise busy season.

I was flagged down by an older couple in a smaller car in Ewell Village, which had been heading east and wanted directions for Hampton Court, some miles to the west. It never ceases to surprise me that people travel about in areas they do not know without taking any precautions. These ones did not look as if they could not afford an AZ but maybe they had attempted, too old, to move onto new technology in the form of satnav, which they could not then get to work. Was it a Christmas present from thoughtless grandchildren?

Epsom Coaches shut. Stream running down Longmead Road doing well, although it had clearly been a foot or so higher at some point. The convenience store in Pound Lane was conveniently open, the only shop that I came across that was. TB open - in its run up to repossession in the New Year by Greene King who think to make a gastro pub out of it. Will they succeed where others have failed or is it all a plot to persuade the council to let them build flats on the site? (My own solution would to let them build their block of much-needed flats, provided only  that they stick a bar in at the bottom. A bar of a more sensible size for the neighbourhood trade they are likely to get than the one we have now).

Nearer home, made a point of checking which cars were in, which were out and which cars were visiting. Important food for gossip later.

Much later, the day closed with the BBC telling us all about the mole stream flooding through the bottom of Leatherhead, to the accompaniment of a place marked Google Map showing us the large number of electricity distribution incidents in Kent and Sussex. I thought it telling that when a big and sophisticated outfit like the BBC needed to mark up a map for transmission in a hurry, they turned to Google Maps and their place marks.

PS: just the one redwing in our fire thorn this morning, after complete absence yesterday.

Jigsaw 1, Series 3

As reported on 19th December, have now moved onto reprises of earlier jigsaws, rather than attempting new-to-me or even new ones - except perhaps for the odd large jigsaw on state occasions.

Got through the 'Ambassadors' with commendable speed, even if the Lumia clearly has difficulty with taking pictures in artificial light. Although it might have thought - not that unreasonably - that the point of the picture was to bring out the structure of the jigsaw rather than the skill of Holbein, which it has done rather well. This may also be the result of Ravensburger's 'SOFTCLICK' technology changing the profile of the cut cardboard. I certainly liked the way the pieces fitted together: a very positive fit and one never had any doubt about the rightness or wrongness of a proposed connection.

The puzzle was also completely regular with exactly four pieces meeting at every interior vertex, while at the same time there was a pleasing variety of shape and pong configuration. A fine example of the puzzle maker's art. I must check in the heap, as I recall having another from the same team.

Started with the edge then moved onto the patterned floor. Then the carpet, then the toys. This leaving the two figures, the darker part of the floor at the back and the green curtain.. Curtain first, the stripes making it easier than it might appear. Then the left hand figure, then the right hand figure, picking up the various holes in the darker part of the floor as I went along.

Having done the puzzle, I moved onto the Technical Bulletin mentioned yesterday. Interesting stuff and I learned that a painting of this age, even one which has lasted much better than many much younger, less carefully painted paintings, is something of a reconstruction, a bit in the way of H.M.S Victory at Portsmouth, of which it is said most of the timber that you can see has been replaced at least once since its presence at the famous victory (about which we make very nearly as much noise as the French make about their near contemporary victory at Austerlitz). So in the case of the painting, made up of a dozen or so oak planks from the Poland of 1515 or thereabouts, it has been taken apart several times, with much retouching of the joins needed when putting the thing back together again. Poor conditions including damp have resulted in a lot of flaking and blistering over the centuries, meaning more retouching. What we see now being a cunning compromise between having a picture which the punter - like me - can enjoy and preserving the work of the master intact and untouched.

PS: having written the foregoing, I now turn up my comments of 4th February. Intrigued to find that I said pretty much the same on that occasion as this. Liked the same features of the puzzle and solved it in much the same order. All this without any conscious memory of the first solution at all.

Makeovers

I find that Earlsfield is in the grip of its second major makeover in what seems like as many months. Network Rail must be bursting with money to spend on such stuff.

But, to be fair, it may well be that the additional costs consequent on doing the two rather different jobs consecutively rather than concurrently are small relative to the total and there may well be simple operational imperatives - like continuing to get people into the station to catch their trains - which were hard to work with.

PS: before visiting Earlsfield, we had been discussing the odd absence of Russian films from the DVD scene - apart from things like ancient Eisensteins. Messrs. Google and Amazon must have been listening as my first email of Christmas was an invitation to buy a blood and guts DVD from Russia, a blood and guts DVD which looks like a 2008 retread of the tale of St. Alexander Nevsky. I wonder what he did, apart from killing lots of people, to qualify himself as a saint? In any event I think we have already filled our quota for this sort of thing with 'Game of Thrones' , Series I.

Chicken!

Yesterday was the day for the festive visit to Borough Market, so off to Epsom Station late morning where the wind was starting to rise. There was some rather optimistic washing strung out on a line below the station, a young ecalyptus tree was waving vigorously in the wind and the first tree was down at Clandon, knocking out half the trains to Waterloo. The festive spirit was represented by a migrant worker with a stash of five red carrier bags, the sort of thing you get from expensive gift shops, filled with parcels wrapped in silver paper and red ribbon. Very energetic type.

In the circumstances I opted for the Victoria line, and getting off at Clapham Junction came across a small woman (Japanese I think) struggling up the stairs with a big suitcase, as big as she was, and which must have weighed a good deal more than she did. I got her up the stairs but did not think to get any more of her story out of her, which was a pity. I hope she made it to wherever she was going. Picked up a Bullingdon at Grant Road and pedaled off towards Battersea Park. A bit wet & windy and plenty of twigs in the park but nothing to write home about. Oddly, no great wind going across the river, where I had thought that there might be. Along the embankment and parked up in Smith Square. Footed it along to the ecclesiastical tailor in Tufton Street, a fine establishment supplying everything that a budding archbishop could possibly want. See http://www.wattsandco.com. Declined to buy, but pushed onto Westminster Abbey to find that it was shut. The needs of the people at this important moment in the ecclesiastical year had presumably been made to defer to the needs of the television producers. Or perhaps the choir just wanted a dress rehearsal in private. But I was not very impressed.

So instead of Abbey, I carried on to the National Gallery, for a further inspection of the Ambassadors (see 19th December), where a helpful trusty explained that the lute shaped object under the stand, which I had not noticed before, was actually the case for the lute that you could see. More important, I felt on this viewing that the cleaning, maybe 20 years ago now, may have made the lute case visible which was good, but had done something bad to the contrast between the brown robe of the bishop and the green curtain behind, almost as if the former was a cutout stood in front of the latter. An effect entirely missing from the Danish-Italian widow who had, perhaps, not been cleaned. Perhaps the rather substantial 'National Gallery Technical Bulletin Volume 19, 1998' will reveal all.

In the meantime, picked up a second Bullingdon at Pall Mall East and headed off east. Along the Strand, across the Aldwych (noting the stand right outside LSE. I wonder how many students use it? Presumably lots - I would have), along Fleet Street, across the Circus into a rather windy Cannon Strret, a side effect, I think, of it running under St. Paul's - which looked, incidentally as if it was open, but I was past churches at this point. Right onto London Bridge where, although it was fairly wet by this point, there was not much wind. But that really kicked in at the lights just over the bridge, this being the point where I chickened, dismounted and walked the thing most of the short distance remaining to the Hop Exchange. And so to Borough Market, which having been a vegetable market, then a foodies market, is now showing signs of being a tourist attraction, rather in the way of say, Harrods or the once excellent cheese shop in Jerymn Street. But I bought my cheese and I bought a bacon roll, in which the seller offered to put some salad. What was he on? But I did accept some onions (the sort they put in hot dogs) which was just as well as the bacon while good, was plentiful and a little dry. Soft bap entirely ordinary, but entirely adequate. There was also some very good looking beef, in particular Irish or Scottish fore rib with a proper blanket of fat - sadly off the menu these days.

Quick inspection of the Shard, just about having time to take the snap included above of the pillars holding up the south east corner. Not terribly big, so perhaps there is some bigger concrete core which you do not see. Crowded tube to Tooting where there were quite a lot of very impressive puddles, but where I managed to make it to the 'Little' wine bar in Mitcham Road in time to share a very decent bottle of Austrian white wine. Must get back to get the name of it; getting quite keen on these northern whites. Place not up to a web site yet, despite getting lots of mentions in local directories of various sorts.

Entertained on the way home by a very small person of Jamaican ancestry eating half a corn-cob lollipop fashion. At two years old, she seemed to think it was just the thing.

PS: counting the cameras in the illustration is left as an exercise for the reader. I must look to see what the London Eye does with its all important guy ropes - not ever having noticed any cameras there.

Tweet tweet

Following my post on 21st December, this morning we had maybe a dozen redwings on and about the fire thorn, perhaps blown in by yesterday's stormy weather. Active birds this morning with much fluttering, much movement to and from the fire thorn.

Then took a look at yesterday's 'Evening Standard' over breakfast, from which I share various snippets.

The pussy martyrs to Putinism in Russia apparently sang a song with obscene words in Moscow's main cathedral. I wonder what we would do if a bunch of Punk Rockers did the same sort of thing in St. Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, perhaps during the run up to some important event in the church, not to say the national, calendar? I think there would be a lot of people who would be unhappy with the answer 'nothing'. And then, what about the very grand Washington (DC) Cathedral? I imagine that the people there would be even more stuffy than we are about such things.

Westminster Council is berated for officiously applying the letter of the parking law to crank up its parking receipts a bit. Clearly awful if a council does this sort of thing, while entirely OK if our banks do much the same. I suppose the difference is partly that anything goes in the hunt for profit and partly that the banks spent a lot of money going to law to prove that it is all OK. Although I believe that the trying to take off Metro Bank (https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/) is trying to make a virtue of having a more sensible fare structure. I shall visit their soon to open Epsom Branch shortly to check out the offer, said to include one of those machines for converting the contents of one's piggy bank into money that can be spent. But it will take a lot to dig me out of the bank - presently called HSBC - that I have been with for maybe 45 years now.

The Metropolitan Police have put a team onto the Ngella business (see 19th December). Is there a case for the prosecution? First thought was what a waste of resources, but I suppose they have to be seen to be upholding the important rule - or at least ideal - that we are all equal before the law, even silly ones. A major innovation of relatively recent origin.

And turning from white powders to brown fibres, I read that there is no rest for the Tobacco Police. Not content with getting 90% of the population clear of the weed, they continue the increasingly strident hunt for the remaining 10% with warnings - if not pictures of dead and dying lungs - to be printed on each and every fag. Strangely, Professor Google fails to find the HQ of the Tobacco Police. Surely there is some committee, a council or even a quango on the case? With Mrs. Blair as patron?

Unseemly?

Once upon a time there was a small island in the South Atlantic, a one-time volcano and now home to a few settlers from Iceland and a few dodos. The populations of both settlers and dodos are small and suffer from the usual genetic difficulties of such small populations. In fact, the place is a bit of a dump and without interest to the outside world. No potential for generating money from the place at all. In the charge of the hereditary Chief Dody, who is young, fat, rather unpleasant and who spends most of his time with his racing dodos.

And then, one fine day, a small plane carrying a load of geologists on their way home from a very important conference in South Georgia (home, as it happens, to the biggest casino in the world) crash lands just off shore. Some of the geologists make it ashore and after getting through the festive preliminaries think to do a geological survey of the place, partly as a courtesy to their hosts and partly to work off their hangovers. And then, what do they find? Nothing less than vast deposits of tarantulum, a semi-precious metal, vast supplies of which are needed by the free world to empower the next generation of smart phones. Chief Dody, who is not a complete dope, realises that he has suddenly become extremely rich.

And he is right because the free world no longer simply appropriates resources which happen to be lying about on the margins. It buys them fair and square.

Months go by and Chief Dody amasses vast wealth. In keeping with the teachings of the Prophet Dodolam he gives 8% to charity, as it happens to a worthy outfit dedicated to looking after racing dodos who have fallen on bad times. He allocates a further 2% to his fellow inhabitants to keep them sweet. But what is he to do with the rest? These huge inflows of money burn a hole in his pocket. Can the financial system of the free world take the strain?

The answer that the free world comes up with is to sell the man some toys and like many young men Chief Dody's toys of choice are things that go bang. Modern fighter planes are quite good because they are not expensive to ship and they pack an awful lot of millions of pounds sterling to the imperial ton. Or trillions of euros to the metric tonne. So the small island is now awash with arms salesmen (and women?) trying sell the latest plane. Mucho bribes and corruption. Mucho clubbing in the company of scantily clad escorts brought in cheap from eastern Europe. It is even said that white powders are to be had. Certainly the unedifying spectacle of the leaders of the free world patting dodos at race meetings (and worse) in their efforts to get to the top of the shopping list. One can only hope that they wash their hands afterwards.

From an economic point of view it is not such a bad outcome. The tarantulum money is getting fed back into the system as consumption and the financial world breathes a sigh of relief. OK, so the toys in question are a waste of resources, but the Chief is never going to put the money to good use, to charitable use, and toys are probably the best we are going to do. And these particular toys do provide a lot of jobs, subsidise our own purchases of the same toys and promote useful scientific research which might otherwise not get done.

Just so long as no-one tells him that there is no habitable land within combat range of his fine new planes. And I don't suppose they are much good for dodo hunting either.

The Mayor

Some months ago now we got ourselves a DVD of the 'Mayor of Casterbridge', for once buying if from new, rather than as a hand-me-down from a charity shop or Epsom Library. And found it rather good - around 4 hours worth of television drama from an outfit called Sally Head productions, which the web site (http://sallyheadsite.wordpress.com/) tells us is headed up by a couple of ladies with strong careers in TV drama behind them - and for what appears to be a strong outfit, an oddly uncomplicated and unsophisticated web site.

Slightly puzzled that I had remembered nothing of the large Jersey strand of the plot, but perhaps I had not read the book as often as I had thought and a re-reading was clearly indicated. So out with the Kindle and its £1.39 complete edition, a bit clunky but OK if all you want to do is to read one of the books in it from one end to the other, which I did.

The first impression from the read was that Henchard, despite his temper, his various lapses and his other faults, was in many ways a decent man. He was hard working; he was, or at least he tried to be kind in his rough and ready sort of way; he behaved well at the time of his bankruptcy. He knew something of his own faults.

The second was that it was an unnecessary lie, someone else's lie which brought him down. If the wife that he had sold had not lied about the paternity of her grown-up daughter when she wanted back twenty years later, the tragedy might not have happened. He was hard done by by the Jersey lady who came to live on top of him (as it were) in Casterbridge in order to get him to marry her after all, but then married the man who had become his business rival - while withholding from this rival the Henchard part in her life before, which economy with the truth played no small part in bringing her down in her turn. And Henchard might have done better had he been more honest about the wife whom he had sold - but perhaps that is more a comment on the social climate of the times, a climate in which it was hard to move on from marital & romantic disasters. (One aspect of which was Henchard's regret that as an ambitious young man, he had saddled himself with a wife and children before he got himself established. An attitude which survived into the lunch time conversations of the tradesmen on the building sites of my youth).

But then, when he was down, he lied, on an impulse, to the daughter's real father, a lie which caused much distress. A daughter who was almost too good to be true, a daughter who reminded me of the saintly heroines of humble origin who manage to catch their men in Trollope's novels - Lucy Robarts, for example, in 'Framley Parsonage'. And in a novel which depended on all sorts of coincidences - but coincidences which did not seem to matter very much. The plot might have creaked a bit but the people in it did not.

I also noticed a look forward to Jude the Obscure in the heroic efforts of the daughter to educate herself. To pull herself up into the middling classes from the labouring classes amongst whom she had been brought up. A subject to which Hardy, to some large extent a self educated man himself, would be sensitive.

Despite Hardy's reputation as chronicler of rural Dorset, the book is not really about the country, and in so far as it is about anything other than the people in it, is much more about a market town set in the country than the country itself. But I can see how all this might attract a generation of urban readers with not too distant rural antecedents, perhaps with nostalgia for the dreamy country of their childhood, the generation caught up in the great migration from country to town during the 19th century, a migration of which Hardy was himself part, spending a good part of his life in London.

A good read.

Egretime

I last  noticed a white egret on 21st March, and before that on 28th November 2012. I am pleased to be able to report that it - or something similar - was back again earlier this morning, in very much the same spot, in a tree over the stream which runs down the Longmead Road.

Care in the community

There is a snippet of land between Chantilly Way and the back gardens of Brettgrave, snipped off from Horton Farm to the north east when Chantilly Way was laid down a few years ago. Maybe 25m by 200m, maybe about an acre.

A snippet (illustrated left) which has been the home of late for a number of horses being cared for in the community and possibly owned by members of the travelling community. As is all too common in Surrey, never mind the travellers, there have been too many horses on too little land, and the result is the mess seen. Note also the green food refuse bin, the second stray of two which I saw while out this morning. How on earth do the things stray so far from the houses to which they belong? What could some oik possibly want with such a thing? It seems rather a long winded way to cause annoyance if that was the only objective.

Horse lovers need not fret as I understand that the Care Quality Commission has been on the case. The situation is in hand, even if the only result so far is that the owners have moved their horses to a different field - this one being empty this morning - and the whole horse care order process has had to go back to the beginning again, while the horsey version of Battersea Dogs' Home remains on standby.

But I fret. Why did the roads people in their wisdom leave this bit of land to be used in this way? I can see that the Brettgrave people might not want the new road to butt onto their back gardens, but surely we could do something more slightly with the strip of land that results. Maybe plant it with brambles and  suitable small trees, the former serving to deter trespass by horses and others. Would they sell it to me for £1 on condition that I look after it?

Tweet

We had a couple of redwings on the firethorn (aka pyracanthus) in the back garden yesterday, distinguished by the yellow flashes or stripes to the throat, very conspicuous when viewed head on. The first of the year, and the first noticed since 10th December 2009 in the other place (http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/).

An oddity on the way in that while a Google search term like 'yarmouth images' usually brings up more pictures of Yarmouth (or whatever) than you could possibly want, a search term like 'thrush bird images' (you need the bird bit to exclude the unwanted disease) does no such thing, although you do get pointed to various thrush flavoured sites, including some who want to sell you pictures of same. While 'redwing images' produces more images of boots than birds. One can only suppose that http://www.redwingshoes.com/ has a higher grade of membership of the Google family than http://www.rspb.org.uk/.

Unimpressed of Epsom

While looking into the Hamlet of the previous post I chanced across the site illustrated. Not impressed at all that such a person, one who plays the public crusader and one whom one might think had quite enough money already, should go in for such stuff.

Hopefully M&S will not be too troubled by my having had to feed the thing a couple of M&S telephone numbers in order to obtain my 30 second estimate. A more cunning system would have blocked 0845 numbers.

Vandals

I mentioned strange activity on the Common on 27th July, and today, on the scenic route to the 'Cricketers', we came across it again. BH worked hard to demonstrate that it was not the forces of evil, rather the forces of good. That the council had changed its mind about the designation of this particular path. That the path had been closed to horses for the winter. And so on. But I was unconvinced, holding to the belief in the forces of evil, or at least of those of nocturnal vandals.

But it is all a bit odd. The cuts are very neat, more the work of a circular saw than a chain saw - so next time I must take a closer look at the teeth marks on the faces of the cuts. That aside, I can't see this sort of cut, in this sort of number (a lot of signs in the vicinity of the small stew pond have been attacked in the same way), being made by a handsaw (see Hamlet, Act II, Scene II) and that being so, what kind of a vandal would bother to take any kind of a mechanical saw out with him on his revels? Or her revels. How would he pack both saw and tinnies into the one hold-all?

Or is it a political rather than a common-or-garden vandal, someone who does not care for the Common Management Policy and finds it easier to protest with a chain saw than to turn up at tedious meetings? Someone who does not understand that responding to something thought to be bad with something that is bad is a dangerous path, which can very soon degenerate from bad to worse. Something which those who disrupt diurnal fox hunts and nocturnal badger hunts don't seem to understand at all.

PS: surely they are not just pinching the stuff to make kindling from it? It looks to have a straight grain and would probably make very good kindling, but there are easier, legal ways to go about it.

Hunt the jigsaw

Jigsaw 23, Series 2, reported on 11th December was an entirely successful jigsaw, but it was the last in stock, the charity shops in Epsom - and indeed 'The Works' - being more into the 1,000 piece variety which I only attempt on high days and holidays. So I opted for a repeat of Holbein's 'Ambassadors', which is going well, and on which I will report on in due course, without refreshing my memory as to what I said about it last time beforehand. But a memory refresh from the original clearly was called for, not least because it afforded an opportunity to investigate the Bullingdons of Clapham Junction, a branch of the family with which I was unacquainted (see the other post of 11th December).

So off to Clapham Junction and out onto Grant Road. Nothing in sight but head down line and no less than three stands come into view, the nearest one nicely fitted out with a proper number of what looked like new Bullingdons. Checked one out and off up Falcon Road, right at the Wetherspoons and so onto the Albert Gate to Battersea park, being defeated in my attempt at our more usual Cambridge Road entry by the one way system. But a fine ride along Carriage Drive North, over Chelsea Bridge to Sloane Square and from there to Eaton Square. I had thought to call on my good friend Ngella but while his very large Mercedes was present, quite the right size for a diplomat from Africa, his very large footman told me that he was out to lunch and therefore not at home. Disappointed, pushed on past all the other flashy cars up Grosvenor Place to Hyde Park Corner, which I had been thinking to avoid but didn't - which was good as one mustn't lose one's nerve about such places. Round to Constitution Hill, up (or perhaps down) there to the Mall and so to Green Park tube station (West End), the long way round, a run for which, annoyingly, I was charged an extra £1. Strolled down Piccadilly to find a rather tatty bicycle, absolutely covered in full plastic bags, clearly the property of some bag person, some bag person who was nowhere to be seen. What exactly was he or she doing in the area? Not quite the street for a few tinnies, but maybe the street for a spot of begging from the Christmas crowds. Some of whom had spilled into the chocolate department of Fortnum & Mason's where they were issuing queuing tickets, for all the world like the delicatessen counter at a Sainsbury's. I decided that I could do better over the road at La Maison du Chocolat, which I did. A very smooth operation led by one Aurélie Devers, although the lady who served me was Spanish. Good at her work for all that.

And so down to Eros, encased in a large plastic dome for the festive season. Sadly, it being early afternoon they had turned on neither snow storm nor lights, so a return visit to see the thing properly is clearly called for. Hung a right down the Haymarket, past the theatre where I may or may not have seen the 'Apple Cart' (see 17th December) and onto the National Gallery, to find that I had forgotten how large a picture the 'Ambassadors' was and how good a picture it was.

I was struck by how young the two men were, both in their mid twenties, and I supposed that in those days of uncertain life you needed to make it young otherwise you might miss out. And then how all their expensive toys were scattered on a rather plain wooden stand and I supposed here that the stand was actually a piece of studio furniture and the artist had simply slung a rug over the top and arranged the toys, perhaps borrowed for the week from whatever passed for a pawn shop at that time. The two young men might have been rich, expensively dressed and important, but they may not have been learned; that might simply be the image that they wanted to convey. To at least appear to be true renaissance men, up there with Erasmus (the subject of a nearby portrait. As was a Danish-Italian widow in her (expensive looking) widow's weeds, painted for Henry VIII, who was thinking of marrying her second hand. Not quite my thing, but I dare say fashions in such matters are not what they were).

I had not noticed the crucifix before, hiding behind the top left hand edge of the green curtain (illustrated). Hiding to symbolise the retreat of the Lord in the face of the new learning or there to remind one of one's mortality, of one's small place in this world, along with the perspective skull? And I did not notice the broken lute string, clearly important, before I read the label.

In some ways a rather superior version of a Pre-Raphaelite painting; sumptuous portraiture set in a nest of valuable and/or significant objects.

Having done enough of that, out of the gallery to find a return Bullingdon at Pall Mall East. First thought was that given the threatening look of the sky, I would stop at Waterloo, but in the event pushed on to Vauxhall Cross. As it turned out I would have made Clapham Junction dry, but I was not dressed or laden for rain and it did not seem worth the risk. Bought an expensive but decent roll for £2.25 and just caught a train to Epsom, an uneventful journey, but livened up at Epsom by passing a very flash looking Audi Coupé in the car park, engine running, driver a young man rolling a cigarette. For all the world like a dealer about to make his Thursday round of the nearby estate. Are the police that relaxed these days that he could be that relaxed?

Lunacy

There was a full moon, well above the western horizon at around 0715 this morning; it is clearly going to be a good day for lunatics.

For a start, I record the dismal rise of my 222nd batch of bread. The bread was made along what are now well tested lines but, for once, both first and second rise were feeble. Fortunately the bread rose well during baking and one would probably not have deduced the feebleness of the rising in the making from the final product. But odd, nevertheless. We await the 223rd batch with interest.

A tree hugger's day (2)

This oak tree was not selected for being pretty, but for being host to a small flock of starlings. A small flock which has been there for some days now, if not weeks. Not as visible, even when you click to enlarge, as they were audible. But they are, nevertheless, there if you look carefully. Some in flight, thinking better of hanging around while I take pictures of them.

From this particular oak tree, the starlings have a fine view of the jungle crazy golf which perhaps prompts ancestral memories. Click on the jungle tab at http://hortonparkgolf.com/. We will get to play one day.

Home to read about jobs in the history department at UCL. Where, if had a doctorate, at least one outstanding published publication (on the stocks or online do not count), an imaginative project on the go, university teaching experience and a passion for the promotion of history in all its aspects to the inhabitants of Gower Street, I might earn rather more than a bus driver and rather less than a train driver. Which puts history in its proper place in the world.

A tree hugger's day (1)

Quite a striking tree in the flesh, in the gray winter light of one recent morning, in West Ewell. I managed to capture something of it on the phone.

Memory trickory

Read the obituary of Peter O'Toole in the DT this morning, in accordance with the house custom of reading the daily newspaper a day late.

First thought was that 'Lawrence of Arabia' has worn very well, there not being many films of that vintage, more than 50 years old, which I would watch now with much pleasure. I vaguely remember first seeing it in a very small, shed of a cinema in Newquay while on a family holiday in the sixties and subsequently seeing a rather grand retread in then rather grand cinema at Marble Arch in the nineties. The web site for this last suggests that the once huge auditorium has now been carved up; a pity, but I suppose we have to let the world move on.

Second thought was that I had actually seen the great man in the 'Apple Cart' at the Haymarket Theatre, vaguely remembering a tall, gangling sort of chap playing the languid king. Fame at third hand. But the catch with this is that I was living in Norwich at the time, and while not impossible that I should have been to the show, it does seem a touch unlikely.

On the other hand, the memory is holding firm that I have been to the 'Apple Cart' in the West End and the Professor does not admit to any other possible production than this one - although he does allege that the play had its world première in Warsaw in Polish in 1928. I must make further enquiries, always being intrigued by the wayward ways of memory.

Nearer home, I was thinking about Brighton Mick (see 3rd April) yesterday, and I was having trouble remembering the name of the town he was brought up in, just to the west of Brighton proper, and a name with which I often have trouble. Don't know why. Yesterday I thought that it had two syllables and perhaps started with a 'b' or perhaps a 'p', getting as far as Bromsgrove. This morning, half way around the Horton Clockwise, got to Paulsgrove, and then all of a sudden the right answer popped up, Portslade. Still none the wiser as to why I have a blockage about the name; still can't think of any reason why the brain might think that repression or even suppression might be the way forward. The place itself is clearly there, so perhaps it is no more complicated than some stray alcohol having wiped the main index entry.

Soldaten

Having been kind to sociologists on 14th December I am now at it again, having finished a skim of 'Soldaten' from Neitzel & Welkzer, first published in Germany in 2011. An account drawn from extensive & covert recordings made of the conversations of  German prisoners of war both in the UK and the US, extensive transcripts of which had survived in national archives to be stumbled on by Neitzel some fifty years later.

I say skim rather than read because I did find it all rather heavy going, while not achieving the heights of death by dullness achieved by Elkins (see July 23rd). But the matter was, as was hers, important.

We start with the crude way in which airmen - perhaps fighter pilots who have smashed up columns of traffic on crowded roads - perhaps civilian traffic - talk among themselves about killing and the antics of those being killed. While unpleasant, perhaps an inevitable product of putting young men in such positions. Perhaps also a defence mechanism, a device for neutralising the experience. I was reminded of the way that soldiers talk in Švejk.

But then we move onto the way in which all kinds of German soldiers talked about the German atrocities, mainly but not all in eastern Europe or western Russia, in which many of them had been minor participants. This, to my mind, is the important part of the book, showing how young men who started out much the same as the young men you might have found, at the same time, as English prisoners of war in German camps came, not only to participate in dreadful things (which would, perhaps, have been hard for them to avoid, without peril to themselves) but also to boast about it afterwards (in a context in which it would have been easy for them to avoid. Silence, if not repentance was an option). A warning of how easily a state founded on ignorance, brutality and violence can project its values into its subjects - bearing in mind that many of these prisoners were young enough to have been raised in Nazi Germany and were not among that half of the population which voted against on the last occasion on which they were asked. I wonder how much better - if better at all - this second group behaved.

In Russia I learn that there was some mitigation. From the outset the Russians fought with a savagery which took the Germans by surprise - and they retaliated in kind, for the first year or so from a position of strength.

There is also the difficult question of the appropriate response to partisan activity by an occupying army - activity which they might not unreasonably call terrorism. As I have said here before, a country that surrenders while continuing the fight, however much it is the good fight, cannot expect to be handled too gently.

Last wonder is whether such covert recordings of the conversations of prisoners of war are allowed under the Geneva Conventions, as revised for the electronic age. And what about the use of stool pigeons?

A spot of life enhancement

To make a change, we were attracted by the life enhancement & angelic beauty offered on the left, not having been put off by the rather ugly logo about noise on the right, a logo which is presently rather freely scattered about south bank timetables.

In the event I liked the violin concerto, although the violin part of the second half was a touch fancy to my mind. But I was struck, the violinist wearing a striking off the shoulder red dress, by how much stick violinists must give their right arm and shoulder. They are presumably prey to all kinds of unpleasant occupational hazards and the careful ones presumably spend much quality time with their personal physiotherapist.

The symphony, rather different, was a kind of musical bath in which one lay back and luxuriated in the wonderful music that Mahler can draw out of an orchestra, including in this last notable contributions from both harp and triangle. But, in the main, oddly inconsequential; wonderful music which was not going anywhere, at least not anywhere with me. But while I am not sure what angels might be expected to sound like - other than having choir boys rather than sopranos in mind - the hymn was indeed rather wonderful.

The programme for the event, a rather glossy affair at £3.50 and did for all the Philharmonia concerts for this season. Which was all very economical, but meant that the page allocated to this particular event did not have room for the text of the hymn, which I had to pull down from Wikipedia after the event. Slightly perturbed to find that it was taken from a rather cod but rather popular collection of folk songs published in the early nineteenth century and called 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'. The song was called 'Das himmlische Leben' and was seemingly a child's view of a heaven involving things like St. Luke leading the ox away from the manger to provide meat for the heavenly feast. The programme does tell us that Mahler left instructions on the score that the song was to be done without parody, but I am left with the feeling that he is having a bit of sport at his customers' expense and I am not sure that I approve. He should show those who make his living more respect.

Perhaps he anticipates Prokofiev's nonsense Latin for his Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus, which I now learn are actually jumbled up phrases from the Psalms, possibly a pop at his contemporary Stravinsky rather than the audience. For myself, while the words are not very important to me, I would nevertheless prefer them to be sober and respectful, like the poetry which I understand to provide the words for Schubert's songs.

But I carp. The hall was fairly full with maybe two and a half thousand people there in all, so quite an occasion. We got our money's worth.

PS: one further carp. The couple in front of us did not seem very comfortable. The gent. in front of BH fiddled with his ears with, and bit the nails of, his left hand through most of the performance. While his lady, in front of me, lurched from a near vertical position to leaning well over to the left, and then, after a pause of a few minutes, back again, also through most of the performance.

Birthday book

Just finished an interesting book - and a book on an unusual subject for me - on Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Alterius Orbis Papa) during the 1930's. Written by Lockhart, published by Hodder & Stoughton (deceased, I think) and sourced from Oxfam, not sure which one, for the relatively large sum of £2.49. As it happens the book was printed during the month in which I was born, but I don't think that is what prompted me to buy it.

But I am glad that I did as Lang had an interesting life, starting relatively humbly in a Scottish manse, brains propelling him to Oxford, to All Souls and from thence to the church. Rapid climb through the ranks to do 20 years as Archbishop of York, getting on for 15 as Archbishop of Canterbury and still having time to retire in good order. An old fashioned clerical bachelor of huge energy with fingers in all kinds of pies, including royal ones. Sometimes thought to be a touch too keen on his friends and connections in lordly places.

On which topic there was a not very edifying anecdote about Edward VIII. His father, George V, who died just before midnight, was in the habit of keeping all the clocks in his various houses half an hour fast (not something I am aware of people still doing). A few minutes after midnight the new king, perhaps as his first act, ordered them all to be put right. Lang, being on the spot was in a position to know the story and one suspects that Lockhart was not too keen on Edward VIII either or he would not have retold it.

Lang was also a very persuasive speaker, able, perhaps without going as far as bullying, to propel people into agreeing to things that they regretted afterwards. Which I found telling: it is not enough to win on the day, of say the committee. You need your colleagues to be happy with what they have signed up to the next day, and the day after that.

One of the things on which he spent much energy was on the promotion of Christian unity, with modest progress being interrupted by the advent of the Second World War. But, as someone with both an atheist and a large organisation background, I found the whole business fascinating.

So suppose we have an idea for a club, an association or a community. Bearing in mind how many such do go in for written constitutions and management committees, if not chiefs, how and when does the need for constitutions and leaders emerge?  Should one have entry requirements and entry procedures - for example initiations or baptisms - for members? How does one manage the transition from one leader to the next? When is the gladiatorial method said  (at meetings of the Wolf Cubs) to have been used by wolf packs appropriate?

And then, suppose the idea is a strong one and takes root across a country. Is there a need for a national organisation to hold the local organisations together? Do local leaders get proposed locally and rubber stamped nationally or is it better the other way around? What happens when a local organisation wants to affiliate to the national organisation? Do all the local members and leaders need to be formally admitted into the national organisation, or can they just be rolled in without fuss or formality? Who staffs the national organisation? How do they get chosen? Where does the money come from?

Does a member of the Dundee branch have automatic rights of entry and participation in the life of the Swansea branch? Rights which certainly do exist in the case of clubs affiliated to the C&IU. Would the leader of the Dundee branch be good for leading the Swansea branch, if invited by Swansea?

I am mindful here of the natural desire of a large national organisation to maintain standards, in marketing speak to maintain the brand. If you join the Theocreationists in Epsom (a group of which Professor G., for once, does not seem to have heard) you want to be sure that they are the same sort of outfit as you used to belong to in Surbiton. That the appointed leader is generally sound and can, in particular, be trusted with your children or with the prize organ.

And then, suppose you decide that it would be a jolly good idea to merge the English organisation with the Italian one. The Italians might say fine. All you chaps are welcome to join our outfit, but you will have to start again. Members will need to be initiated again (accordng to our rites and rules) and leaders will need to be consecrated again - and we reserve the right to weed out any undesirables along the way. To which the English might say no deal.

One starts to see how the sociology of organisations gets interesting. Why sociology was for a while a very popular subject for undergraduate study, although by my time at LSE, sociologists were already starting to be regarded as a bit of a breed apart. I wonder if they still are.

And this was just one of the balls which Lang tried to keep in the air. He also had a lot of grief with something called the reserved sacrament, but I am having some difficulty in getting to the bottom of what that was all about. My prayer book, large and impressive though it is, has not yet done the business and I do not suppose the Chambers will be much help either.

PS 1: one nice feature of the book is the carefully made and matt finished black and white photographs used as illustrations. I have refrained from scanning one as I doubt if my scanner would do it justice.

PS 2: having read the Lang/Lockhart account of the 1937 coronation, it was interesting to turn up Roy Strong's account of that and the other three twentieth century coronations. I note in passing that I had forgotten that the consecration and crowning of a king, in this country anyway, is not that far removed from the consecration of, say, a bishop and includes communion. The whole business is very much bound up with the the king - or queen - being the head of our Established (Protestant) Church. A touch awkward given that, for example, some of the Dominions were either represented by Catholics or were predominantly Catholic - and as far as I can make out De Valera did not attend, busily plotting his exit from the Commonwealth at the time. There will be even more fun and games on this point - no doubt amongst others - next time around.

Progress

I am pleased to be able to report that the mess of a path from Hook Road to West Ewell reported on on 7th May is now well on the way to being sorted out. Hopefully it will be looking good by this time next year when the new banks have settled and the grass has grown.

There is hope yet

I read this morning, from an email derived from http://www.cbronline.com/ that Professor Google is working on software which will allow us to participate in electronic social activity without actually having to participate in person. We will be able to get on with our breakfasts or whatever, happy in the knowledge that the Professor is taking care of our various electrical in-boxes for us. We won't even have to turn our computers on.

On the other hand, I think I would want to know when an email or post purporting to come from a person I know, really does come from that person. Clearly time for some geek to develop a certificate of human intervention which we can add to our emails and posts and which the Professor cannot spoof. Perhaps it could build on those jazzed up pictures of letters and numbers which you have to transcribe into a little box in order to validate certain kinds of transactions. Would it need some kind of supra-national certificate authority to make it work? Under the auspices of the UN?

Sound

Gravity yesterday and sound today.

I woke up to the faint sound of a sort of rustling or fluttering outside, something which has happened at least once before. Not the sort of rustling or fluttering that you would get from a single individual, rather that you would get from a lot of somethings. I had the thought that whatever it was was high in pitch, perhaps because it was rather faint and I had been told by a free lady at Boots that my hearing of high pitches was better than my hearing of low pitches, although on reflection now the sound was too faint to have pitch in the ordinary, musical sense at all. I then had the thought that it was bats flying around early morning and that what I was hearing was their navigational squeaks, perhaps because I recently heard about a gadget which is tuned for such squeaks, to the point of telling you which sort of bat is doing the squeaking.

BH tells me that the hot water pipes driving the radiators during the day are apt to make odd noises during the night when the hot water gets cold, but I don't think that is it. Maybe I was not really awake at all and the whole thing was a dream. Certainly can't hear whatever it was any more.

For those interested in bats, there is a good range of detectors out there and you can spend more than a thousand pounds on one. I have yet to find one that one that can put them on a screen, as an air traffic controller might put aeroplanes on a screen, but I dare say they will come if they are not out there already. I would want an advanced model on which I could chose the colours used to colour the bat icons on the screen to show variety of bat. See http://www.batbox.com. For those interested in other nocturnal animals, it seems that the same technology can be used, at least to some effect. Rats, for example, make characteristic ultrasonic transmissions.

Gravity

Off for the first visit for quite a few years to the cinema at Waterloo Roundabout, better known to me for its Bullingdon stand, a stand which only rarely fails me. Off to a slightly wobbly start, finding their web site a bit of a struggle, not least because when you get to the bit where it says select your location, you fail on both W for Waterloo and L for London, having completely failed to realise that the place is filed under B for BFI IMAX. Got through that, so then for a modest premium I acquired a couple of premium seats, to find out later that, apparently unbeknown to their web site, there are two sorts of premium seat, one sort with width and another sort with width and leg room. I managed to chose the former, but hopefully I will get it right on any future occasion. And so onto the cinema itself, rather swisher than I remember but without the Virgin style hostess in smart red uniform to introduce the proceedings, having to make do with a young host in civvies, not the same thing at all. But he did claim that the screen was the largest in the UK and it was certainly very impressive, in shape more like an old-style television screen, high for its width.

The film in question was 'Gravity' which has, it seems, made a great deal of money out of a heart-warming if thin plot, livened up with shots of a middle aged film star swimming around a space station in her undies (older readers might remember Barbarella), shots of & from space and various 3D special effects. Good for people of my age and station in having very little sex or violence of the ordinary sort, the sort of thing one gets in, for example, 'Game of Thrones'.

The picture quality was indeed very good and some of the 3D effects were startling, but in the end rather disappointing. It seemed to work best with large tubular structures - in the way, for example, of an electricity pylon or a space station - perhaps because this sort of image can be worked up with the likes of the AutoCAD package mentioned on the first of yesterday's posts. But most of the time it was rather if someone had built a set in the way of an theatre set with painted flats lining both sides of the stage and then had a few people (and other objects)  flying around the stage. So most of what you saw was rather two dimensional, but arranged on several flats, rather than the one flat of regular films. In fact, a moving version of those books of hologram pictures one used to buy as Christmas presents for a while. The ones which you had to stare at for a while, until the holographic image jumped into view, perhaps of several cut out animals pasted into a cardboard box. Clever stuff but not yet worked up into cinema. For the moment, not much more than a novelty.

The sound system was very good too, but the sound track was poor, often far too loud and thumpy. Entirely missed the opportunity to point up the emptiness and silence of space with something light and ethereal. I seem to recall that the not that dissimilar '2001' did rather better in this department, but memory might be playing tricks again (see next pasragraph).

Exit to inspect the arty jigsaws being offered by the discount bookshop diagonally opposite the Old Vic, and decided, in the end, against Goya's clothed maja, being rather put out on the way by discovering that I no longer knew the difference between the clothed and unclothed version, despite having once seen them side by side (with only the Rokeby Venus in between) at some point in the past. And then that I needed a serious nudge before I remembered that it is getting on for a year since the academic German Pope had been superseded by the cuddly Argentinian one. Memory clearly getting more than a bit tacky at the edges.

On to pay a long overdue visit to the Duke of Sussex, a pub of which I have fond memories and which once hosted a fine Christmas lunch for a bunch of us from the Treasury, memorably enlivened towards the end by a bunch of Frenchies from Eurostar. But I was, I am pleased to be able to say, on parade at more or less the right time the following morning. Last night, again for the first time for a while, I took a couple of pints, a couple of pints of something called Trelawny from the St. Austell brewery, a gang I know better for something called Tribute, although this last seems to have been somewhat pushed aside by the more aggressively marketed Doombar. Very good they were too. Company interesting, as ever, despite the train drivers' corner seeming to have moved on a bit.

And so to the semi-fast train to Epsom, on which I discovered that real phone users can manage the things one handed, typing their messages with the thumb. I clearly have some way to go if I want to stay in the game.

PS: the trailer for a 3D version of the Hobbit made it look like the sort of thing that I would not enjoy at all. Perhaps more suitable for adolescent boys into dungeons and dragons (or today's equivalent).

Jigsaw 23, Series 2

A much more satisfactory puzzle, a Falcon basic from Oxfam for 99p. I should clearly stick with them and not stray; the grass on the other side of the fence is not greener, despite appearances.

There is a decent variety of shape and size of piece. The pieces fit together in a nice positive way and there is rarely any doubt about whether a piece is in the right hole or not. The picture is pleasant and easy going, with no great expanses of featureless waste. The sky, in particular, of very modest dimensions.

Edge first, then the sky line. Then, unusually, the sky. Paused a bit here but then got stuck into the water line, then the upper, shorter tree line, then the upper trees.

Paused again, then had a go at the tree trunk at the right, doing what I thought was three quarters of it. Then most of the lower trees, but remaining stuck with the tree trunk: the balance was nowhere to be seen and nothing seeming to fit around it. Eventually I realised that I had put the tree trunk in the wrong place, that what I had thought was 75% of the trunk was actually 99% of the trunk and should be connected to its base, already in place in the bottom edge.

Confirmation once again of the rule if you have looked for a piece for a while and not found it, it is probably not there. You are probably looking for the wrong piece, having got hold of the wrong idea about what sort of piece it was. Or in this case, about where it was. And while it is not easy to strike the right balance between barking up the tree for long enough to shake the partridge down and deciding that you are barking up the wrong tree, on this occasion I thought I might have sorted it out a bit faster than I actually did. Perhaps I should be doing jigsaws in quality time, rather than in the advertisement breaks on ITV3.

Then, tree trunk finally out of the way, steamed through what was left of the lower trees, the water (helped here by the diagonal scar. Some previous owner must have got cross with the thing) and finally the mountains in no time at all. Overall, an entirely satisfactory puzzle, which will be stored upstairs, rather than retired to the compost heap.

Also the end of an era as for the first time in two years of puzzling, I have no new to me puzzle ready to go, other than a couple of large deluxe puzzles being saved for the Christmas holiday. Do I venture out on this cold frosty morning to Ewell Village, or do I sink to a repeat?

The charge of the bullingdons

The Bullingdon people sent me an email yesterday telling of their charge across south and west London. The south pole has moved from somewhere near the Oval to King George's Park in Wandsworth and the west pole has moved from somewhere near Olympia to Ravenscourt Park west of Hammersmith - while Walworth, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe remain beyond the pale. Notwithstanding, clearly time for me to visit pastures old, perhaps including the Dove at Hammersmith (http://dovehammersmith.co.uk/), a very fine boozer in the late sixties. Will it have survived the inevitable makeovers since that time?

Pleased that I will now be able to cycle from Clapham Junction, which will extend me a bit. Puffing up Lavender Hill on the way to, say, Trafalgar Square, will be rather more testing than coasting along the embankment from Vauxhall. Indeed, I wonder whether I will make it the first time around.

One catch was that the email spoke with forked tongue about the effective date, with the main launch being on 13th December but with completion not scheduled for Spring 2014.

The other catch is the nice map which comes with the email. Handsome looking map, but when saved as a .pdf file it takes a while to load & display. Or zoom. The map appears to come in layers, with the layers being loaded one after the other, a way of doing things which I had thought was confined to the sort of technical drawings you produced with the likes of AutoCAD (see illustration and  http://www.autodesk.co.uk/).

Its obvious innit

A few weeks ago there was a piece in the Guardian about the decline of the teaching of languages and the need to do something about it. To which end there had been a Guardian conference, the premis of which seemed to be that there should be more language teaching. No question.

In my day, there were no foreign languages at primary school. This was followed by five lessons a week in each of French and Latin at secondary school, culminating five years later in the O level of the day. Then, for people like me doing sciencey A levels, there were one or two lessons of German a week, with the idea being, I think, to make us more rounded. As it turned out, I learned little German and that little has long gone. I learned rather more Latin, also the source of most of what I was taught about grammar. While I did once, as an adult, attempt to revive it during the then long commute, this did not come off and very little Latin is now left, apart from the grammar. French did rather better and survived, survived to the point that while my spoken French is not up to much, I can read French fiction, provided it does not contain too much modern slang. In the round, I think this amounts to a success and my life would be the poorer if what has survived had not. I faintly regret the loss of the German and rather less faintly the loss of the Latin - although I continue to carry dictionaries for both.

But where does that leave us now? Does this experience make a sufficient case for devoting what was a large amount of time to language?

My own feeling is that it does not. The first reason is that this is England and English is the top language. It is likely to remain the top language for some time, partly because it is an easy language to get along in and partly because a variant is the language of the US, which remains a top country for the time being. None of those conjugations and declensions which figure so large in Latin and in many if not most other modern languages. So lots of people are going to learn English. It might be bad manners, but we can get along without learning their languages, and being realistic, for most of us this is unlikely to be more than one or two. Too much else going on to be able to compete with the half dozen languages of Queen Elizabeth I.

The second reason is that there is so much else which we are expected to know about these days and so much more which we want our young adults to be able to do. So the squeeze is on and some things are going to have to give. Our first year undergraduate might not be able to decorate his essays with quotations from the classics in the way of a decently educated Victorian, but he can make a fair fist of a powerpoint presentation - a skill which I would argue, while dull, is a lot more use in the world of today. He does know how to pull down what he needs to know from the internet. He is likely to know more about people. If it is choice between knowing about evolution and knowing about the brothers Gracchi, evolution has it.

And to judge from the media, our young people are voting with their feet; they are not going to university to study languages in the numbers that they were. To the point that if you are a weaker candidate, language is the way to get in, rather in the way that divinity or land management used to be.

Another sort of evidence is in the books we read. A hundred years ago an author was quite likely to include small chunks of French or Latin, even of German or Italian, without offering a translation. Now that would not do at all.

But some people will continue to be multi-lingual, perhaps because more than one language is or was spoken at their home, perhaps because they were brought up in an international environment. I dare say there are more such people than there were. Perhaps because they got a Foreign Office crash course before being posted to Azerbaijan. And from little I know of them, these crash courses do work: the people doing them are able in the first place and have a strong incentive, the combination of which rolls over their advanced age. No need to devote huge chunks of school time to all this: it will all happen in some other way, sufficient for the purpose.

But then, as I type, my conviction wavers. I have, for example, often been struck at how much the later Roman republic - and, indeed the affairs of the brothers Gracchi - has or have to teach us about civics, with the added advantage that there is no Roman baggage; we don't don't have to get into a lather about how awful the Romans were (which in many ways they were), in the way which seems to be mandatory in, for example, the case of colonial administrators in India or that of owners of plantations in Jamaica. We can just study - and hopefully learn. At which point I drift off into the idea that it is the process of learning something substantial while at school which is important and that the subject of that learning is of secondary importance. At which point, maybe I had better leave the whole matter to educationalists, let them fight it out as best they can, and use the foregoing in the pub, where it belongs.