To the Wigmore Hall on Tuesday to hear the new to us Pavel Haas quartet. Schnittke Quartet No. 3, Shostakovitch Quartet No. 8 Op. 110 and Beethoven Quartet Op. 120 with Grosse Fuge Op. 133 as its finale. This last seeming to be more or less mandatory these days, fair enough as the Grosse Fuge is quite something. But the other finale is not too bad either, is nothing like so large and grand and would sometimes fit in better - though not particularly this time. First outing for us of the Grosse Fuge for nearly three years, since May 2010 when we heard the Takács Quartet do it (see May 15th in the other place. I see that I was not so precious about putting in the accents in those days).
I think my father used to claim that the Grosse Fuge was the most important single work in the classical canon. I have no idea how many times he heard it live; it cannot have been many during my time. But he did have a good gramophone, at least it was good in its day, the predecessor of which was a wind up affair in a oak veneer box about two feet square and nine inches high, with a socking great papier-mâché horn sticking out of the back. Shaped a bit like a buffalo horn, maybe four or five feet of it. A horn which had, in its day, entertained entertainment starved servicemen during the second world war. The needles were a bit of a palaver as they were supposed to be made from thorns taken from particular kinds of trees: it was much easier to get stainless steel needles but they were frowned on as they did so much damage to the discs (don't suppose they were made of vinyl at that time). There was also a pencil sharpener like thing to go with the needles. Whole shebang shipped off to a connaisseur in Belfast at some point.
Back at the Wigmore, apart from the music there were three points worth a mention. First, the sitting order was first violin, second violin, cello, viola rather than the far more usual first violin, second violin, viola, cello. Didn't make any difference to me. Second, the first violin lost her E strung during the third movement of the Schnittke. The quartet retired back stage while she fixed it, fixing presumably being followed by tuning everything back into line. Do you have to play a string for a bit to break it in, like a horse or a car? Third, the chap behind us was commenting to his partner about the age of the audience. Average must have been more than 50, which is a lot better than the Dorking Halls where it must be touching 70, but it is still a reasonable worry. There seem to be plenty of young musicians out there but for how long will there be the audiences to support them? The Wigmore is still going strong, but the classical output of the South Bank has massively reduced over recent years.
The programme notes suggested that the Schnittke was a musicians' piece. Full of quotations and twiddles which only a musician would notice, let alone appreciate. But rather to our surprise we rather liked it. Shostakovitch and Beethoven as good as expected, although I have to confess to flagging a little during the middle of the Grosse Fuge, despite having taken a siesta in the afternoon. Nor was I convinced by the way that the programme notes tried to force political content into the Shostakovivh; OK there might be a bit of that but the thing is music not propaganda.
I liked the quartet's sound. They did not play noisily when this was not called for - a common fault of young players - and they played with plenty of control. I would only quarrel with the occasional harsh, coarse sounding notes from the viola and from the cello.
Thursday, 28 February 2013
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Sloe gin
Decanter games continue, following my post of 27th January.
The sugared blackberry whisky was drinkable, and has been drunk, but was not that hot. Tasted of blackberry OK, but the foretaste was rather sweet and the aftertaste, presumably from the pips, was rather bitter. Don't think I shall bother with this one again.
But then moved onto a decanted bottle number 1 of sloe gin which was good, with a very attractive colour, a sort of translucent red, and entirely acceptable taste.
Then yesterday decanted bottle number 2 of sloe gin, which was rather sweet and not so good. The label stuck onto the bottle says that it was made with Gordon's Gin and with 100g of sugar to the litre bottle of sloes. Originally bottled on 31st August 2011 and decanted into a fresh bottle on 17th January 2012. So maybe a little too much sugar.
But maybe also part of the answer is that this hedgerow wine game is for specialists. As a dilettante, one is not going to get the sort of reliable product that the palette craves. The sort of reliability that McDonald's do so well. So will I be picking sloes down Horton Lane this autumn? I am saving up the jars, bottles and flagons just in case. The shelf at the back of the garage - made from a scaffold board as it happens - will be able to take the strain for a few months.
The sugared blackberry whisky was drinkable, and has been drunk, but was not that hot. Tasted of blackberry OK, but the foretaste was rather sweet and the aftertaste, presumably from the pips, was rather bitter. Don't think I shall bother with this one again.
But then moved onto a decanted bottle number 1 of sloe gin which was good, with a very attractive colour, a sort of translucent red, and entirely acceptable taste.
Then yesterday decanted bottle number 2 of sloe gin, which was rather sweet and not so good. The label stuck onto the bottle says that it was made with Gordon's Gin and with 100g of sugar to the litre bottle of sloes. Originally bottled on 31st August 2011 and decanted into a fresh bottle on 17th January 2012. So maybe a little too much sugar.
But maybe also part of the answer is that this hedgerow wine game is for specialists. As a dilettante, one is not going to get the sort of reliable product that the palette craves. The sort of reliability that McDonald's do so well. So will I be picking sloes down Horton Lane this autumn? I am saving up the jars, bottles and flagons just in case. The shelf at the back of the garage - made from a scaffold board as it happens - will be able to take the strain for a few months.
Bullingdon
Started off with a short run from Vauxhall Bridge to the Queen Mother Sports Centre, the idea being that there might be a hardware shop in the vicinity of Warwick Way which could sell me a new lamp holder, preferably a brass one, for the bedside lamp mentioned on 25th February. No joy there, so then thought to try the electrical shop on the Palace side of Victoria Street to find that it was probably lost inside a redevelopment. Next thought to try Strutton Ground, first stop there being the Robert Dyas in Artillery Row where I was able to buy the sort of white plastic lamp holder with a switch which I did not want. Looks far too large and clumsy on a lamp designed for the much more compact brass lamp holders - the same sort of problem one has when replacing old windows with new white plastic double glazing.
Furthermore, the white plastic jobs include what I think is a fairly serious design error in that you can not do the thing up after fixing the ends of the flex into it without a fair bit of twisting up of the electrical flex leading down and away from the lamp holder to the supply. Which is fine in the case that the flex is free enough to untwist, unlikely in the case that the flex emerges from the shaft of a table lamp.
But second stop was a hardware shop at the bottom of Strutton Ground itself, which did not look very likely but where the manager, probably a Pakistani, suggested that I try their other shop around the corner, which I would have missed had he not told me about it. And the other shop turned out to be more the nuts and bolts end of hardware, rather than household goods, and the manager there knew exactly what I was talking about and yes he did have just the thing I wanted, brass without switch. I was sufficiently pleased that, without thinking, I bought two of them. And impressed that Asians seem to be able to run small shops with a depth of stock that our aborignal shops no longer seem to be able to match. The third occasion that I can remember noticing this. But I can also remember reading that it is, in part, a cultural thing, this is how shops in south eastern Asia are. The catch being that you are carrying and have to maintain a large number of lines relative to one's turnover - maybe an easier trick to pull off these days of computers.
Jumping ahead, I got home to mend the broken lamp in short order and was very pleased with the result. Brass lamp holder without switch looked much better than the white plastic one with switch which it replaced. But the next day I thought of a use for the second brass lamp holder - in the table lamp which adorns our dining room, a rather florid china affair which had once been an oil lamp and which we had acquired from some junk shop on the Isle of Wight. I had replaced the lamp holder it came with years ago and in the course of fiddling with what had been the (ceramic) oil reservoir yesterday, managed to knock the bottom out of it, with the result that my replacement lamp holder no longer worked. Too late I remembered the old adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Recovering, reached down some rather lumpy cement based stuff from Polyfilla from the cupboard and proceeded to fill the broken reservoir with a grey grouty stuff. It did not go off in anything like the 10 minutes claimed on the box, but it is going off and I shall complete the replacement of the white plastic lamp holder, hopefully to everyone's satisfaction, in a day or so.
However, back at Strutton Ground, the next stop was the Wallace Collection to peek at Poussin's 'A Dance to the Music of Time' which had cropped up in something I have been reading (of which more in due course), so take a Bullingdon from Rochester Row to St. George's Mews, this last because the stand next to the Wallace Collection was full up. And not only was it full up, its computer failed to recognise my key and gave me neither the extra 15 free minutes needed to find a stand with a vacancy nor knowledge of where that stand might be, as a result of which this leg of the days proceedings cost me an unwarranted £1.
Into the Wallace Collection to find that the big gallery running along the back of the first floor was being refurbished and that the Poussin had been moved, temporarily, to what was called the Smoking Room, presumably what the room had been when Manchester House was a house rather than a museum. The Smoking Room was shut because of a shortage of staff, but a helpful trustee did allow me to take a peek while he hovered, it not being allowed to leave me there alone, which was fair enough. Odd how the picture being hung in rather a dark room gave the thing a quite different aura to that it has in a light room.
From there wandered in a room containing 16th century arms and armour, mainly from Germany and Italy. I was very struck at how much money nobles must have spent on this sort of thing - and the labels claimed that they were not just fashion items, stuff like this was really used. Now I sort of understood the sort of dreadful carnage celebrated in the 'Neibelungenlied' (see July 25th 2010 in the other place) which went on in the 12th century, but this was 300 years later. I found it deeply shocking that the same people who were commissioning Sistine Chapels and wondering whether the earth moved around the sun, were also busy dealing out frightful wounds to each other with this expensive ironmongery: smashing someone over the head with a spiked cosh or shoving some great sword into someone's guts. And some of this was done in the name of sport, in tourneys. Or in small vendettas & wars which were not that far removed. Or in the name of Jesus.
I was also struck by label referring to a contemporary view of European heavy cavalry of the Turks, presumably at that time trying to get at Vienna. They thought this cavalry to be an almost impregnable wall of iron, dealing out death and destruction. Perhaps the Turks were better at fancy metal work, rather than the sort of stuff that did well on the battlefield.
Third and last leg from Hinde Street to Concert Hall Approach Number 1. No penalty.
Christie factlet
A few weeks ago, as followers of ITV3 will be aware, there was a screening of an adaptation of 'Sad Cypresses', a screening which moved me to read the original text, luckily included in our near complete edition of Agatha Christie from Heron Books (see 24th November last).
A reading which turned up some interesting gen on morphine and I was prompted today to inquire further of Professor Google.
It turns out that the formula for morphine makes it look like a cross between petrol and sugar with a small dose of nitrogen thrown in to make up the mix: C17H19NO3. Or maybe petrol nitrate would be nearer the mark. If we then subtract one molecule of water we get C17H17NO2, something called apomorphine. Apomorphine has various uses, one seemingly being as a primitive version of viagra. Contrariwise, another arises from its powerful emetic effect, which means that if you take a lethal dose of morphine plus an appropriate dose of apomorphine a little later, perhaps during an innocent looking call to nature, the overall effect is that you vomit but that is about all. This wheeze providing a way for a murderer to share the morphine poisoned meal with his or her intended victim, thus escaping the hangman. Until, that is, that Poirot's grey cells kick in.
Fiddle around a bit more and you get diamorphine or C21H23NO5, known to doctors and druggies alike.
So many interesting effects from juggling around with carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It all goes to show that the formula alone is likely to mislead. Or that a little knowledge is dangerous.
But oddly, Professor Google is very wobbly on where the 'gen' used above might come from. He is clear enough about what the word is usually used to mean and suggests that it might be second world war RAF slang, but with nothing like the aplomb he brings to heroin.
A reading which turned up some interesting gen on morphine and I was prompted today to inquire further of Professor Google.
It turns out that the formula for morphine makes it look like a cross between petrol and sugar with a small dose of nitrogen thrown in to make up the mix: C17H19NO3. Or maybe petrol nitrate would be nearer the mark. If we then subtract one molecule of water we get C17H17NO2, something called apomorphine. Apomorphine has various uses, one seemingly being as a primitive version of viagra. Contrariwise, another arises from its powerful emetic effect, which means that if you take a lethal dose of morphine plus an appropriate dose of apomorphine a little later, perhaps during an innocent looking call to nature, the overall effect is that you vomit but that is about all. This wheeze providing a way for a murderer to share the morphine poisoned meal with his or her intended victim, thus escaping the hangman. Until, that is, that Poirot's grey cells kick in.
Fiddle around a bit more and you get diamorphine or C21H23NO5, known to doctors and druggies alike.
So many interesting effects from juggling around with carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It all goes to show that the formula alone is likely to mislead. Or that a little knowledge is dangerous.
But oddly, Professor Google is very wobbly on where the 'gen' used above might come from. He is clear enough about what the word is usually used to mean and suggests that it might be second world war RAF slang, but with nothing like the aplomb he brings to heroin.
Monday, 25 February 2013
If at first you don't succeed...
A week or so ago, it being a fine mild afternoon we thought we might visit Hampton Court, but get there to find that the main gates were being refurbished and were shut to traffic. The new exit for vehicular traffic - more or less on the roundabout - did not appear to open for new entrants, so we carried on to Bushy park, past the Diana fountain who continues to bend slightly over to the right from whichever angle you look at her, and on into the full car park. Back up and out, and onto the Woodland Garden where the car park was also fairly full but we managed a slot. Very pleasant stroll around both halves of the garden, second half pleasantly wild, discovering a new batch of ancient ant hills on the way out.
On the way home I was driving and managed to take the wrong exit out of Kingston which meant that we were locked onto the New Malden road for what seemed like miles and miles. Eventually made it through to Worcester Park which was more familiar territory.
Then Sunday just past we tried again and to be on the safe side parked in the station car park, cheaper on a Sunday than Hampton Court Palace itself. Investigations on foot revealed that the main gates were still being refurbished but that a temporary vehicular entrance had been punched through the iron railings facing the river, complete with sentry box for the trustees and a generator on wheels to provide power (heat, kettles, cigarette lighters and so on for the probably rather cold trustees). The show must go on! Never mind the expense!
The grass which had been under the mandatory winter ice rink was recovering nicely. They must do something cunning to let the air in while the rink is on top.
The bulbs in the wilderness were also coming up nicely. Snowdrops were fully out. Some winter aconites were up and in flower, but looked as if they had been rather badly bashed by the recent frosts. A few daffodils were in flower. Need to get back in a few weeks time when they will be in full swing.
Onto to the privy garden to count the fish in the round pond. Rather cold there, but also rather handsome under the heavy winter sky, a heaviness which gave the usually green garden more than a hint of brown. Forgot to count the fish, but they were there, alive and well. Probably a dozen of so of them with the largest perhaps two feet long, fat in proportion.
Sunken gardens looking well, the simpler one, the one nearer the vine, looking particularly well in its winter format. Fine bit of bush clipping, topiary even.
Back over the river and it seemed far too cold to do tea and cake in one of the Bridge Road cafés. Far too much bother to get all the coats, scarves & gloves off, sit down, thaw out, drink tea, eat cake and then go through the whole business in reverse. Much easier to climb into the car and head off home for the same at home. Must be getting old.
To close I notice the brother blogger at http://rchaimqoton.blogspot.co.uk/. An intriguing blog, delivered by the next blog button, which for once did not pull out one of the many family blogs from the heap.
On the way home I was driving and managed to take the wrong exit out of Kingston which meant that we were locked onto the New Malden road for what seemed like miles and miles. Eventually made it through to Worcester Park which was more familiar territory.
Then Sunday just past we tried again and to be on the safe side parked in the station car park, cheaper on a Sunday than Hampton Court Palace itself. Investigations on foot revealed that the main gates were still being refurbished but that a temporary vehicular entrance had been punched through the iron railings facing the river, complete with sentry box for the trustees and a generator on wheels to provide power (heat, kettles, cigarette lighters and so on for the probably rather cold trustees). The show must go on! Never mind the expense!
The grass which had been under the mandatory winter ice rink was recovering nicely. They must do something cunning to let the air in while the rink is on top.
The bulbs in the wilderness were also coming up nicely. Snowdrops were fully out. Some winter aconites were up and in flower, but looked as if they had been rather badly bashed by the recent frosts. A few daffodils were in flower. Need to get back in a few weeks time when they will be in full swing.
Onto to the privy garden to count the fish in the round pond. Rather cold there, but also rather handsome under the heavy winter sky, a heaviness which gave the usually green garden more than a hint of brown. Forgot to count the fish, but they were there, alive and well. Probably a dozen of so of them with the largest perhaps two feet long, fat in proportion.
Sunken gardens looking well, the simpler one, the one nearer the vine, looking particularly well in its winter format. Fine bit of bush clipping, topiary even.
Back over the river and it seemed far too cold to do tea and cake in one of the Bridge Road cafés. Far too much bother to get all the coats, scarves & gloves off, sit down, thaw out, drink tea, eat cake and then go through the whole business in reverse. Much easier to climb into the car and head off home for the same at home. Must be getting old.
To close I notice the brother blogger at http://rchaimqoton.blogspot.co.uk/. An intriguing blog, delivered by the next blog button, which for once did not pull out one of the many family blogs from the heap.
More worried of Epsom
A fine tree, if rather carelessly photographed, rather badly infested with ivy. Oddly, the ivy on a couple of similar trees nearby had been sectioned some time ago and was dying off nicely. So why did this tree get left? Was it the last remaining habitat in northern Surrey for the great leaf cutting newt? One must die in order that the others may live?
First thought was to approach the Residents' Association to get something done. Second thought was to take a saw along and do it myself. But third thought was that either thing was much too bizzy. The health or otherwise of the tree is a matter for the people who live near it: not for me to bizzy myself with it on their behalf.
But if any reader is moved to act he or she can try http://www.epsom-ewell.co.uk/stamford.php - assuming, that is, that the tree is indeed in Stamford Ward. Google has not yet gotten around to ward boundaries.
To close, I note in passing that the nearby memorial to the lost water tower which occasioned my visit to the area (ask in the other place about wartocracy) is still looking a bit unloved. A look which was not improved by the disturbances arising from the new brick walls in the vicinity - 5 or 6 feet high, looking a bit large and presumably replacing softwood fencing which did not stand the test of time. Perhaps a more serious cause for concern than ivy: the whole estate is riddled with softwood fencing of one sort or another which is already starting to look very tatty. Who has to pay to get it fixed? Or replaced with something with a bit more life in it?
Tatty fence, tatty mind as they used to say in ancient Rome. Or so it was claimed when I was little.
The aboriginal jigsaw
The puzzle was a birthday present for FIL, a jigsaw made from an aerial photograph centered on the house in Exminster where he lived for near 50 years. Sufficiently artisanale to have several very non standard pieces in the middle, in particular the one containing the house.
As befits a jigsaw first assembled by an elderly gentleman, one piece is missing and shows up nearly yellow just below the centre of the puzzle. And four or five pieces from the left hand end of the top edge are somewhat the worse for wear as a result of a coffee flood plain, having separated out into two or three layers each. We are considering whether to repair them or whether to store the damaged pieces in a separate bag as a memento.
Started with the edge in the usual way. Then the motorway, which was easy. The motorway for which FIL was nicknamed 'Motorway Dick' as a result of his leading the campaign to stop the then thriving asylum being chopped in half by the motorway - with his own home finishing up underneath. Hence the hump in the motorway as it passes to the north of the village - a hump for which there was a considerable bill but which has served to contain northern expansion. Then the railway cutting across the top right hand corner of the puzzle, with Exeter above and Dawlish below and to the right. Then the by-pass running just to the west of the railway. Then the lane - Days-Pottles Lane - running along the bottom of the puzzle
The village itself looked a bit daunting, so did the various brown fields next. (One can understand how black and white photographs taken in tricky circumstances during the last war might have been quite difficult to interpret). Then the asylum - now housing for people who work in Exeter, very much in the way of the Epsom asylums. Then the border between village and field. By this time there were few enough pieces left in the heap and enough pieces in the assembling puzzle just to pluck out likely looking pieces from the heap and place them.
Not being my village, I did not have much momentum on this one, except towards the end when I thought I was slacking a bit too much and wellied it a bit.
Regression
Most of my dreams involve my time at the Treasury, a grand institution even if my stay there was not particularly grand. But last night there was regression and I found myself back at what was then the Department of Employment (complete with Regional Controllers and a Regional Controllers' Room in the St. James's Square office, complete with lockers for their overnight bags).
At a meeting in what had more the flavour of a school room than a meeting room. The chap in the chair being a 67:33 blend of the then Deputy Director of Statistics at the Department and the Deputy Head at my old school.
The meeting opened with my trying to punt some scheme or other, a scheme which the other people at the meeting found both tedious and implausible, not least because of my spotty track record in such matters. The trying seemed to involve my trying to attach a shaft of wood (modelled on the shaft of the bedside lamp which had caused me a little grief the day before) to a desk using some kind of G-cramp, but failing because the edge of the desk top was too fat to take the jaws of the G. I then suddenly realised that the whole problem could be avoided by installing a much larger screen for the PC involved. A much larger screen which would hugely facilitate the display of materials from ICL's DDS (ICL now being part of Fujitsu and the Data Dictionary System probably being extinct). Were application generators still the way forward? Did ICL's Application Master still exist? Complete nonsense, the parts of which I cannot now link together.
The meeting then moved onto the formal approval of various strange pro-forma requests from local authorities.
The meeting also included one of those old style, older civil servants who had fallen into one of those bureaucratic jobs which gave him considerable bureaucratic powers over the progress of affairs. A sort of superior parking attendant who got a great kick about being obstructive at all points. Who could certainly punch well above his weight. Grade A pain in the behind for pretty much everybody else. (This being the third real person in the dream. Even more unusual for me to have dreams involving real people than it is to have dreams which are not set in the Treasury. Not that I am having that many dreams at all just presently, at least not ones that I know about).
But I woke up to realise that there was a design fault in the lamp holder attached to the top of the shaft of the bedside lamp which was the root cause of the problem. Or which at very least made the lamp holder unsuitable for this particular task. So despite all the nonsense, some part of the brain had been doing something useful.
Rounded off the proceedings with another touch of regression, putting my hand to the spot in the kitchen where we kept the house keys some years ago, rather than to the spot where we keep them now. House keys needed so that I could get through the garage into the shed to search for a better class of lamp holder. A search which, in the event, failed.
At a meeting in what had more the flavour of a school room than a meeting room. The chap in the chair being a 67:33 blend of the then Deputy Director of Statistics at the Department and the Deputy Head at my old school.
The meeting opened with my trying to punt some scheme or other, a scheme which the other people at the meeting found both tedious and implausible, not least because of my spotty track record in such matters. The trying seemed to involve my trying to attach a shaft of wood (modelled on the shaft of the bedside lamp which had caused me a little grief the day before) to a desk using some kind of G-cramp, but failing because the edge of the desk top was too fat to take the jaws of the G. I then suddenly realised that the whole problem could be avoided by installing a much larger screen for the PC involved. A much larger screen which would hugely facilitate the display of materials from ICL's DDS (ICL now being part of Fujitsu and the Data Dictionary System probably being extinct). Were application generators still the way forward? Did ICL's Application Master still exist? Complete nonsense, the parts of which I cannot now link together.
The meeting then moved onto the formal approval of various strange pro-forma requests from local authorities.
The meeting also included one of those old style, older civil servants who had fallen into one of those bureaucratic jobs which gave him considerable bureaucratic powers over the progress of affairs. A sort of superior parking attendant who got a great kick about being obstructive at all points. Who could certainly punch well above his weight. Grade A pain in the behind for pretty much everybody else. (This being the third real person in the dream. Even more unusual for me to have dreams involving real people than it is to have dreams which are not set in the Treasury. Not that I am having that many dreams at all just presently, at least not ones that I know about).
But I woke up to realise that there was a design fault in the lamp holder attached to the top of the shaft of the bedside lamp which was the root cause of the problem. Or which at very least made the lamp holder unsuitable for this particular task. So despite all the nonsense, some part of the brain had been doing something useful.
Rounded off the proceedings with another touch of regression, putting my hand to the spot in the kitchen where we kept the house keys some years ago, rather than to the spot where we keep them now. House keys needed so that I could get through the garage into the shed to search for a better class of lamp holder. A search which, in the event, failed.
Saturday, 23 February 2013
The 161st Light Browns
Not a regimental history at all, of any colour. Rather, I had just put my 161st batch of bread dough into the airing cupboard for its first rise and was enjoying the first caffeine of the day (taken with tea) when I got to pondering about the difference between white and brown flour, the difference between white and brown bread being large.
I remember that my father used to have what my mother regarded as an affectation rather than an affection for brown bread, she being rather impatient of any sort of fussing in that department, preferring to keep us on a steady diet of Mother's Pride sliced white from the milkman. But father did go so far as to say that white and brown bread were pretty much identical from a nutritional point of view and that any preference was no more than that. This was before, you will understand, either organic or ecological had been invented, let alone anthropological. Bread was strictly inorganic in those days. But he did point out, in the context of the desirability of adding fluorine to our drinking water, that white flour was bleached with neat chlorine and that chlorine was just one of the strange chemicals added to the mix to make the attractive and reliable product we know as white flour.
With all this in mind, I got down to browsing the packets. I am told that 100g of white flour contains 4.4g of fibre while the same amount of brown flour contains 6.5g. Both contain 6g of salt. So even the hard core, very strong Canadian wholemeal flour contains almost as much salt as fibre. Given the big difference in white and brown bread, a difference I had believed was all down to the fibre, one can only suppose that fibre is very light and you get a lot of it for your gram.
There is a much bigger difference in carbohydrate content with white at 71.7g and brown at 59.3g. On the other hand, the brown has more fat (bad for the elderly heart) and protein (bad for the elderly kidney) - so we have a couple of offsets to the modest amount of additional healthiness arising from the modest amount of additional fibre.
And then for obscure marketing reasons, the white comes in a paper bag with a white core, while the brown comes with a stripey brown core. Very much the sort of brown paper that one used to call kraft and which was used to make the stout brown paper bags which grocers in the US used to use to pack your groceries before the invention of plastic bags. Maybe the idea of the chaps from Waitrose is is that we associate brown paper with home baking, the WI and all that sort of thing? This idea comes to me, so there must be some chain of association somewhere, but I can't put my finger on the links.
Furthermore, the white paper that Waitrose use is not stout at all. I poked a hole in a white bag last week by little more than brushing against something and had to patch it with plastic tape (courtesy of Learning Tree PLC for some reason which I forget). I think the brown would have held up under the same treatment.
PS: good old Wikipedia scores again with a very accessible explanation of what the (originally German) kraft process for making paper does.
I remember that my father used to have what my mother regarded as an affectation rather than an affection for brown bread, she being rather impatient of any sort of fussing in that department, preferring to keep us on a steady diet of Mother's Pride sliced white from the milkman. But father did go so far as to say that white and brown bread were pretty much identical from a nutritional point of view and that any preference was no more than that. This was before, you will understand, either organic or ecological had been invented, let alone anthropological. Bread was strictly inorganic in those days. But he did point out, in the context of the desirability of adding fluorine to our drinking water, that white flour was bleached with neat chlorine and that chlorine was just one of the strange chemicals added to the mix to make the attractive and reliable product we know as white flour.
With all this in mind, I got down to browsing the packets. I am told that 100g of white flour contains 4.4g of fibre while the same amount of brown flour contains 6.5g. Both contain 6g of salt. So even the hard core, very strong Canadian wholemeal flour contains almost as much salt as fibre. Given the big difference in white and brown bread, a difference I had believed was all down to the fibre, one can only suppose that fibre is very light and you get a lot of it for your gram.
There is a much bigger difference in carbohydrate content with white at 71.7g and brown at 59.3g. On the other hand, the brown has more fat (bad for the elderly heart) and protein (bad for the elderly kidney) - so we have a couple of offsets to the modest amount of additional healthiness arising from the modest amount of additional fibre.
And then for obscure marketing reasons, the white comes in a paper bag with a white core, while the brown comes with a stripey brown core. Very much the sort of brown paper that one used to call kraft and which was used to make the stout brown paper bags which grocers in the US used to use to pack your groceries before the invention of plastic bags. Maybe the idea of the chaps from Waitrose is is that we associate brown paper with home baking, the WI and all that sort of thing? This idea comes to me, so there must be some chain of association somewhere, but I can't put my finger on the links.
Furthermore, the white paper that Waitrose use is not stout at all. I poked a hole in a white bag last week by little more than brushing against something and had to patch it with plastic tape (courtesy of Learning Tree PLC for some reason which I forget). I think the brown would have held up under the same treatment.
PS: good old Wikipedia scores again with a very accessible explanation of what the (originally German) kraft process for making paper does.
Falun Gong
On this occasion there was an exhibition of Chinese paintings so we thought 10 minutes of free entry was better than standing in the cold. The exhibition turned out to be a collection of maybe thirty rather odd pictures, mostly if not all to do with the Falun Gong (http://www.falundafa.org/). That illustrated gives the general idea, although one of them did offer a fair amount of thigh. And another one appeared to be claiming that body parts are harvested from adherents without bothering with anaesthetics. No idea if this is true, but such harvesting would be a lot more bother than doing it having killed the donor first. So if true, it would suggest a scary degree of hate and a scary lack of ordinary human decency on the part of the harvesters.
Turning to their web site I learn that, for example, 'when a practitioners Xinxing and the strength of his Gong reach a certain height, he or she can attain an imperishable, adamantine body while still in the secular world. A person can also achieve the “unlocking of Gong,” enlightenment, and ascension of the whole person to higher planes. Those with great determination should study this upright teaching, strive to achieve their ultimate rank, elevate their Xinxing, and forsake their attachments. Only then is spiritual perfection possible'.
So, maybe not the sort of outfit that I would want to give quality time to, but one which appears to be trying to make better people of us and I do not understand why the Chinese authorities should have the hates for it, which they clearly do, even if they do not go in for that much harvesting. Don't they have more important things to do? Was it thought to be a cover for subversion? Or perhaps simply to be subversive?
I notice in the Wikipedia article that older women were heavily represented among Chinese adherents. Not the sort of new age, long hair, marugwana snuffling types which might be attracted here at all.
PS: well worth a look, but due to end in a week or so. Very keen attendants.
Friday, 22 February 2013
Newts
I noticed equine activity in a field near me on the 7th and 15th January. One hopes that horse rescue was not a cover for the operations of an eastern European horse meat mafia.
But today I notice that the field has been designated a PSSSI (preserving site of special scientific interest) and is about to be prepared for the reception and subsequent preservation of some very important newts. Thinking of horse meat, I suppose it is just possible that the eggs of this particular sort of newt are transported in the alimentary canal of this particular sort of horse, thus accounting for the transient presence of the horse. There is precedent in the rather smaller animal Toxoplasma Gondii, the eggs of which are transported in the alimentary canal of cats before going on to infect rats, for whom the infection is dangerous because it blocks the ratty aversion to the smell of cats. Furthermore, around 10% of the human population of the US is similarly affected and there is a positive correlation between this infection and schizophrenia (see C. Koch of 10th February for a light version and http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/ for a more scary version). The things we spend our money on.
Slightly nearer home, and sticking with alimentary canals, we have finally made it to the 'Canopy' in Epsom High Street, the place with a handsome Victorian canopy shading part of its frontage, the 'Canopy' which was formerly a bath shop and before that the late night greaseburger outlet of choice for lubricated teenagers. I had managed a bacon sandwich there (good, but not as good as that from Los Amigos (see 2nd January)) but not taken lunch, an omission which we put right last week.
Good service and good presentation. A nice bottle of wine and reasonable prices. Lunchtime clientele nearly all senior ladies lunching. Restaurant a little too small and cozy for me; I prefer a bit more space.
My starter was described as homemade fish cakes with a terminal 's'. This turned out to be one fish cake containing, inter alia, quite a lot of spice and some prawn. OK, but not great, not as good as we could do at home. My main course was a Torbay sole, first tried in a pub in Devon, the Drewe Arms, and reported on June 25th 2011 in the other place. On that occasion I was very impressed. On this occasion, I suspect that the fish might have arrived fresh but had been frozen at some point as the fish was a touch soggy. Bread crumbed with something gluten free which was OK. Vegetables a bit feeble and hidden under the fish. Overall, also OK, but not great. They had run out of puddings which were probably good, but they did manage to do bread and cheese instead of the cheese platter on the menu. So good marks for trying and good marks for the white bread which was, for a restaurant, very good. But they were let down by their cheddar which was very ordinary and was probably intended to be cooked with rather than to be served in all its lack of glory.
A pleasant meal. It will be interesting to see if we go back, perhaps for their evening offering.
But today I notice that the field has been designated a PSSSI (preserving site of special scientific interest) and is about to be prepared for the reception and subsequent preservation of some very important newts. Thinking of horse meat, I suppose it is just possible that the eggs of this particular sort of newt are transported in the alimentary canal of this particular sort of horse, thus accounting for the transient presence of the horse. There is precedent in the rather smaller animal Toxoplasma Gondii, the eggs of which are transported in the alimentary canal of cats before going on to infect rats, for whom the infection is dangerous because it blocks the ratty aversion to the smell of cats. Furthermore, around 10% of the human population of the US is similarly affected and there is a positive correlation between this infection and schizophrenia (see C. Koch of 10th February for a light version and http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/ for a more scary version). The things we spend our money on.
Slightly nearer home, and sticking with alimentary canals, we have finally made it to the 'Canopy' in Epsom High Street, the place with a handsome Victorian canopy shading part of its frontage, the 'Canopy' which was formerly a bath shop and before that the late night greaseburger outlet of choice for lubricated teenagers. I had managed a bacon sandwich there (good, but not as good as that from Los Amigos (see 2nd January)) but not taken lunch, an omission which we put right last week.
Good service and good presentation. A nice bottle of wine and reasonable prices. Lunchtime clientele nearly all senior ladies lunching. Restaurant a little too small and cozy for me; I prefer a bit more space.
My starter was described as homemade fish cakes with a terminal 's'. This turned out to be one fish cake containing, inter alia, quite a lot of spice and some prawn. OK, but not great, not as good as we could do at home. My main course was a Torbay sole, first tried in a pub in Devon, the Drewe Arms, and reported on June 25th 2011 in the other place. On that occasion I was very impressed. On this occasion, I suspect that the fish might have arrived fresh but had been frozen at some point as the fish was a touch soggy. Bread crumbed with something gluten free which was OK. Vegetables a bit feeble and hidden under the fish. Overall, also OK, but not great. They had run out of puddings which were probably good, but they did manage to do bread and cheese instead of the cheese platter on the menu. So good marks for trying and good marks for the white bread which was, for a restaurant, very good. But they were let down by their cheddar which was very ordinary and was probably intended to be cooked with rather than to be served in all its lack of glory.
A pleasant meal. It will be interesting to see if we go back, perhaps for their evening offering.
Thursday, 21 February 2013
Waking wonder
Having picked up the first 37% of a film about Jack Nicholson turning into a were wolf last night, this morning I had a film flavoured wonder on waking.
The wonder was about the possibility of making a film which tried to get you inside the main character, rather than portraying several characters from the outside. So the seeing part of the film would be just what that one main character saw, with perhaps just a short orientation scene at the beginning in which you were shown what that character looked like. Mug shots and so on and so forth. This seeing might be augmented by seeing things in the mind, perhaps when in bed or day dreaming, perhaps done in soft focus with soft colours to make it clear that these were not retinal images. Hearing would be just what was heard, including here what the character said. Thoughts might be done as sub-titles at the bottom of the screen, or perhaps as an audible & distinctive whisper, whichever worked better.
One catch would be that such a film would force identification with just one character, which might bother some of the audience. Perhaps because the sex was wrong, perhaps simply because the film had chosen to portray a character whom you did not like or whom you did not find interesting.
Another catch would be that one might find it rather disturbing - very frightening even - to be locked inside this one character in this way. Locked in for the duration of the film with no way of escape.
And it may be that in conventional films our identification shifts about or is multifaceted. We don't just lock onto the character which suits best and would not want to; our focus moves about. A high tech film could perhaps get around this by offering a choice of character, and you could choose, choose not to choose and vary your choice through the film - with a down side here being the need to wear some kind of a head set. It would not be much like a conventional cinema at all. A possible compromise would be to show the film in a group of rooms at the same time and you choose which room, that is to say which character, you are going to watch. But a compromise which would not be too hot for courting couples.
I wonder if there are films out there which go down this road at all? I can't think of one which maintains such a first person view for more than a short take at a time. On the other hand, it seems a reasonably obvious ploy for some avant-garde type, perhaps fresh out of cinema school, to try.
I do remember reading a science fiction story - possibly Lessing's Shikasta - in which worlds at war would resolve their differences with a very economical fight to the death between two champions. For the duration of the fight the populations of the two worlds would be plugged into the mind of their champion, rather in the way I am suggesting above.
The wonder was about the possibility of making a film which tried to get you inside the main character, rather than portraying several characters from the outside. So the seeing part of the film would be just what that one main character saw, with perhaps just a short orientation scene at the beginning in which you were shown what that character looked like. Mug shots and so on and so forth. This seeing might be augmented by seeing things in the mind, perhaps when in bed or day dreaming, perhaps done in soft focus with soft colours to make it clear that these were not retinal images. Hearing would be just what was heard, including here what the character said. Thoughts might be done as sub-titles at the bottom of the screen, or perhaps as an audible & distinctive whisper, whichever worked better.
One catch would be that such a film would force identification with just one character, which might bother some of the audience. Perhaps because the sex was wrong, perhaps simply because the film had chosen to portray a character whom you did not like or whom you did not find interesting.
Another catch would be that one might find it rather disturbing - very frightening even - to be locked inside this one character in this way. Locked in for the duration of the film with no way of escape.
And it may be that in conventional films our identification shifts about or is multifaceted. We don't just lock onto the character which suits best and would not want to; our focus moves about. A high tech film could perhaps get around this by offering a choice of character, and you could choose, choose not to choose and vary your choice through the film - with a down side here being the need to wear some kind of a head set. It would not be much like a conventional cinema at all. A possible compromise would be to show the film in a group of rooms at the same time and you choose which room, that is to say which character, you are going to watch. But a compromise which would not be too hot for courting couples.
I wonder if there are films out there which go down this road at all? I can't think of one which maintains such a first person view for more than a short take at a time. On the other hand, it seems a reasonably obvious ploy for some avant-garde type, perhaps fresh out of cinema school, to try.
I do remember reading a science fiction story - possibly Lessing's Shikasta - in which worlds at war would resolve their differences with a very economical fight to the death between two champions. For the duration of the fight the populations of the two worlds would be plugged into the mind of their champion, rather in the way I am suggesting above.
Wednesday, 20 February 2013
Fonts
Which is what whoever did this flier has done, achieving a count of 12 in this small compass. With an attractive result that I have more or less read.
Thinking about it though, I don't suppose completely free license, perhaps using some of the more exotic typefaces which come with Word, would work. One needs variation within a theme, not just variation; or in wordspeak itself, variation in font size, font style and underline style, but not in font itself.
All of which reminds me of another bugbear of mine. We in the western world spent centuries designing fonts which were both attractive and legible - this last perhaps more important in the days before electric lights and decent spectacles than it is now. Nevertheless, in many contexts, all this is being thrown away in favour of fonts which imitate the illegibility of the handwriting of a child (or mine for that matter) or are otherwise intended to be novel & amusing rather than attractive & legible. I blame it all on Word.
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Three events
First, we have finally got to the end of the 1972 (or so) adaptation of 'War & Peace' by the BBC, first noticed here on the 25th January. Very good it was too, despite neither the Borodino episode nor Natasha working very well. Plus, BH thought that the closing scene of connubial bliss with Pierre & Natasha was all wrong. She couldn't see how the Pierre portrayed could possibly go for someone like the Natasha portrayed. Then this morning we read in the Guardian that the BBC are going to have another crack at it, this time in 6 episodes rather than 20, 6 hours rather than 15. I suppose one can't expect the BBC to put on something as lavish as it could manage back in the bad old days of lefties and extravagance in Bush House.
But I was puzzled by the Guardian talking of focus on the affairs of four families. I make it two and a half: the Rostovs, the Bolkonskies (one each) and the Bezuhovs (half). Maybe I will work my way to what they were on about over a good night's sleep.
Second, a session with the helpful BT help people. A pleasant and efficient operator got rid of the unwanted toolbar from my Chrome window very quickly. The trick turned out to be to uninstall it plus fiddle with a few settings. And despite spending a couple of hours faffing around the problem, it had never occurred to me to take a peek in the uninstall window of control panel to see if there was anything one might uninstall. A bonus was the reappearance of the search button in the other place (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/).
Third, a viewing of the new 'Great Expectations'. Despite setting off from home with a positive outlook, by about half an hour in I was wondering how I was going to sit through it all. All far to fast, flashy and noisy. Painted far too loudly: Miss Haversham in a house the size of Buckingham Palace for one and London knee deep in pigs' heads and garbage for two. For me the story - about the only Dickens which I have read all the way through - see March 17th 2012 in the other place - is just a vehicle for a lot of generally gentle humour and human insight; all we have left here is a high speed version of the bones of the story. It leaves me wondering what today's BBC are going to make of a rather more serious book.
There was one odd thing about the audience at the Epsom Playhouse (how long will the cash strapped council be able to keep such a thing going? Will it be converted into some kind of a night space for youth, as so many cinemas have been already? Not least the once grand cinema in St Andrew's Street in Cambridge, now a Wetherspoons) and that was its domination by women with expensive looking hair dos, some of whom were dressed up too. The audience looked to be pretty much all pensioners like ourselves, which was fair enough for an early afternoon screening. But out of the thirty or so present - more than we often get - maybe five were men. Why do men shun Dickens? Or is it a golf time of day?
PS: we were rather put off by the notices of the recent 'Anna Karenina'. Something about the book being presented as if it was a play, inside the arch of a theatre. Wikipedia talks about somebody talking about there being 'no obvious method behind this production design madness'. I think I am inclined to let this film rest there until it appears on ITV3 - or surfaces in some car booter as a DVD. That way one is not trapped in front of the thing for how ever many hours it runs.
But I was puzzled by the Guardian talking of focus on the affairs of four families. I make it two and a half: the Rostovs, the Bolkonskies (one each) and the Bezuhovs (half). Maybe I will work my way to what they were on about over a good night's sleep.
Second, a session with the helpful BT help people. A pleasant and efficient operator got rid of the unwanted toolbar from my Chrome window very quickly. The trick turned out to be to uninstall it plus fiddle with a few settings. And despite spending a couple of hours faffing around the problem, it had never occurred to me to take a peek in the uninstall window of control panel to see if there was anything one might uninstall. A bonus was the reappearance of the search button in the other place (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/).
Third, a viewing of the new 'Great Expectations'. Despite setting off from home with a positive outlook, by about half an hour in I was wondering how I was going to sit through it all. All far to fast, flashy and noisy. Painted far too loudly: Miss Haversham in a house the size of Buckingham Palace for one and London knee deep in pigs' heads and garbage for two. For me the story - about the only Dickens which I have read all the way through - see March 17th 2012 in the other place - is just a vehicle for a lot of generally gentle humour and human insight; all we have left here is a high speed version of the bones of the story. It leaves me wondering what today's BBC are going to make of a rather more serious book.
There was one odd thing about the audience at the Epsom Playhouse (how long will the cash strapped council be able to keep such a thing going? Will it be converted into some kind of a night space for youth, as so many cinemas have been already? Not least the once grand cinema in St Andrew's Street in Cambridge, now a Wetherspoons) and that was its domination by women with expensive looking hair dos, some of whom were dressed up too. The audience looked to be pretty much all pensioners like ourselves, which was fair enough for an early afternoon screening. But out of the thirty or so present - more than we often get - maybe five were men. Why do men shun Dickens? Or is it a golf time of day?
PS: we were rather put off by the notices of the recent 'Anna Karenina'. Something about the book being presented as if it was a play, inside the arch of a theatre. Wikipedia talks about somebody talking about there being 'no obvious method behind this production design madness'. I think I am inclined to let this film rest there until it appears on ITV3 - or surfaces in some car booter as a DVD. That way one is not trapped in front of the thing for how ever many hours it runs.
Monday, 18 February 2013
Compost time again
Took off the front panels - there being no lid these days - to reveal maybe 8 inches of well rotted compost below the top 8 inches of rotting compost. Virtually no red worms in the lower layer; presumably they have done their stuff there and have moved on up to the upper layer where there were plenty of them.
Three barrow loads behind the accessible wing of the new daffodil bed, where there are daffodils in bud and where, hopefully, there are to be rather more of them before the daffodil season is over. Just think of all the compost and TLC which was poured into their planting.
One barrow load of sieved compost for BH purposes, sieved using what must be the fairly ancient paternal sieve, at least sixty years old anyway - an ancient sieve which I am sure I have mentioned before, but it is lost in all the chatter about sieving bread flour. Cylindrical wooden rim with sturdy wire mesh, maybe 18 inches across, same sort of general idea as the much smaller (although both relatively and absolutely deeper) maternal flour sieve, but this last is long gone. It is a bit of a mystery why the rim has not got woodworm over the years, being stored untreated in a garage where we do get the odd woodworm. That aside, the thing is very like the illustration, courtesy of http://www.notonthehighstreet.com.
Sieved compost looked very nice, but it is probably the last compost to get the benefit of full on kitchen waste. Current practice is that anything meaty or fishy goes into the council bin, and from there hopefully onto and into a council fermentor, mainly because meat and fish in the compost attracts rats and foxes. Make up the weight with confidential paper from our one way shredder (we take our privacy very seriously, but not seriously enough to get a hard core two way shredder) and with dead leaves. But I suspect that the compost-lite will not push up the daisies as well as the full strength stuff. Will the red worms be as busy and grow as fat?
Replaced the front panels, hoping that they will last for another year. Half inch chipboard faced with some hard white stuff, presumably originally intended for kitchen or bedroom furniture, but with exposed cut edges the stuff starts to swell and break up fairly quickly.
Sunday, 17 February 2013
The book depository
Some months ago there was a glowing two page spread in the TLS about a new translation of a book called 'Nils Holgersson's wonderful journey through Sweden' from the Norvik Press, which I assumed to be some Scandanavian, if not Swedish outfit. The book itself started life as a childrens' book but ended up as something more, not least because of its length of around 700 paperback pages. But I thought it might be interesting so got onto Amazon.
Where one finds that there are lots of books of roughly this name, many of them in foreign languages and most of them appearing to be heavily cut and heavily illustrated versions for children, one of which I bought and very nice it was too. But the Norvik Press one was missing, which was unusual for a book reviewed in the TLS. So off to the publisher where I find that the book in question comes in 2 volumes, for which the ISBNs are given. Ask Amazon about that to find that it knows about volume 2, but that it has attached the ISBN for volume 1 to the wrong book by the right person. First time that I have caught Amazon out in such a way.
But all is not lost. The Norvik Press site mentions an outfit called 'The Book Depository' (http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/) of which I had not previously heard. Ask them about it all, to find that they know about both volumes, with the first volume being unavailable (this being some weeks ago). Perhaps the puff in the TLS had exhausted stocks of the first printing. However, they allow pre-ordering so I ordered them both up, and along they came, volume 2 first and volume 1, a week or so later. Nicely produced books and the first volume is going well, much better than the childrens' version. (I notice along the way that the Norvik Press is actually a department of University College London and not Scandinavian at all).
I then start to wonder whether the Book Depository would be a more ethical place to buy my books from than the tax avoiding Amazon. Good start in that their web site talks of doing stuff for those with Down's Syndrome, so at the very least they have heard of community affairs. But who are they? Are they just some subsidiary of some other gang, some other gang which is avasive as Amazon? Off to Companies House, flash the Book Depository company number helpfully included on the bottom of their home page to find that Companies House people do indeed know all about the Book Depository people and offer all kinds of documents at a flat rate of £1 a pop.
In this case, most of the documents are about the comings and goings of directors, and from the list of documents alone I am none the wiser about who owns this company and what their tax morals might be, although I have learned that their business is the 'retail sale of newspapers and stationery in specialised stores'. But this lack of wisdom is not the fault of the Companies House web site which looks to be well organised, even if some of their trade descriptions are a bit wide of the mark.
Watch this space.
Where one finds that there are lots of books of roughly this name, many of them in foreign languages and most of them appearing to be heavily cut and heavily illustrated versions for children, one of which I bought and very nice it was too. But the Norvik Press one was missing, which was unusual for a book reviewed in the TLS. So off to the publisher where I find that the book in question comes in 2 volumes, for which the ISBNs are given. Ask Amazon about that to find that it knows about volume 2, but that it has attached the ISBN for volume 1 to the wrong book by the right person. First time that I have caught Amazon out in such a way.
But all is not lost. The Norvik Press site mentions an outfit called 'The Book Depository' (http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/) of which I had not previously heard. Ask them about it all, to find that they know about both volumes, with the first volume being unavailable (this being some weeks ago). Perhaps the puff in the TLS had exhausted stocks of the first printing. However, they allow pre-ordering so I ordered them both up, and along they came, volume 2 first and volume 1, a week or so later. Nicely produced books and the first volume is going well, much better than the childrens' version. (I notice along the way that the Norvik Press is actually a department of University College London and not Scandinavian at all).
I then start to wonder whether the Book Depository would be a more ethical place to buy my books from than the tax avoiding Amazon. Good start in that their web site talks of doing stuff for those with Down's Syndrome, so at the very least they have heard of community affairs. But who are they? Are they just some subsidiary of some other gang, some other gang which is avasive as Amazon? Off to Companies House, flash the Book Depository company number helpfully included on the bottom of their home page to find that Companies House people do indeed know all about the Book Depository people and offer all kinds of documents at a flat rate of £1 a pop.
In this case, most of the documents are about the comings and goings of directors, and from the list of documents alone I am none the wiser about who owns this company and what their tax morals might be, although I have learned that their business is the 'retail sale of newspapers and stationery in specialised stores'. But this lack of wisdom is not the fault of the Companies House web site which looks to be well organised, even if some of their trade descriptions are a bit wide of the mark.
Watch this space.
Saturday, 16 February 2013
Endellion
Heard the Endellion String Quartet again on Tuesday, the first time since on or around May 18, 2011. This most recent occasion was, according to my records anyway, the fourth time that we have heard them at the Wigmore Hall, having heard them many times at Dorking, a venue for which they are probably now too expensive.
We must have heard this quartet more often than any other act - a word which does not sound quite right in this context but I cannot think of a better, which encompasses the various shapes and sizes that musical acts come in. Perhaps there is a right word and it will come back to me over breakfast. But perhaps not: yesterday evening the word that went missing was the name of the recently departed Archbishop of Canterbury. This word did not come to me overnight and I was reduced to enquiring at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org this morning. Coming back to the quartet, we have probably heard them between twenty and thirty times - regular groupies - and we have probably not heard any other act more than five times. I would guess that it is a pianist which comes in a poor second.
By way of contrast, while we have probably been to the Wigmore Hall more than to any other venue, its lead it not so great. The QEH was in the running when they still did plenty of chamber music and St. Lukes is still in the running, with a strong performance last year.
By way of preparation, on or around March 10, 2010 the first violin had explained that Hadyn, Bartók and Beethoven were the masters of the quartet genre. He clearly remembered about this when planning this concert and on this occasion we had the 'Frog' from Haydn, quartet No. 2 from Bartók and the 'Harp' from Beethoven. I thought, rightly as it turned out, that the Haydn would not need preparation. But that the Bartók would. So out with the collected quartets, a purchase from what had been the fine collection sold off by Oxfam at Tavistock (in Devon). A collected quartets which came from Qualiton, a Hungarian outfit who did not think to print the labels in English, which were, in consequence, pretty incomprehensible. Luckily, the original collector had written up a translation of the labels of all the records on the sleeve of one of them and I was able to track down the right one, a right one which turned out to contain plenty of traditional crackling. It must have been quite an old record, perhaps from the dawn of the long playing era. And then, having done the Bartók, I did not prepare the Beethoven, thinking that I wuold get away with it with a middle period quartet.
In the event, the Haydn and the Bartók came off really well, making a fine contrasting pair. But perhaps I was tired after the interval and it took a while to adjust to the rather different Beethoven. And listening to it back home yesterday, I find that I must have missed a great deal from what is a great quartet. Hopefully I will get another opportunity to hear it live before too long.
We must have heard this quartet more often than any other act - a word which does not sound quite right in this context but I cannot think of a better, which encompasses the various shapes and sizes that musical acts come in. Perhaps there is a right word and it will come back to me over breakfast. But perhaps not: yesterday evening the word that went missing was the name of the recently departed Archbishop of Canterbury. This word did not come to me overnight and I was reduced to enquiring at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org this morning. Coming back to the quartet, we have probably heard them between twenty and thirty times - regular groupies - and we have probably not heard any other act more than five times. I would guess that it is a pianist which comes in a poor second.
By way of contrast, while we have probably been to the Wigmore Hall more than to any other venue, its lead it not so great. The QEH was in the running when they still did plenty of chamber music and St. Lukes is still in the running, with a strong performance last year.
By way of preparation, on or around March 10, 2010 the first violin had explained that Hadyn, Bartók and Beethoven were the masters of the quartet genre. He clearly remembered about this when planning this concert and on this occasion we had the 'Frog' from Haydn, quartet No. 2 from Bartók and the 'Harp' from Beethoven. I thought, rightly as it turned out, that the Haydn would not need preparation. But that the Bartók would. So out with the collected quartets, a purchase from what had been the fine collection sold off by Oxfam at Tavistock (in Devon). A collected quartets which came from Qualiton, a Hungarian outfit who did not think to print the labels in English, which were, in consequence, pretty incomprehensible. Luckily, the original collector had written up a translation of the labels of all the records on the sleeve of one of them and I was able to track down the right one, a right one which turned out to contain plenty of traditional crackling. It must have been quite an old record, perhaps from the dawn of the long playing era. And then, having done the Bartók, I did not prepare the Beethoven, thinking that I wuold get away with it with a middle period quartet.
In the event, the Haydn and the Bartók came off really well, making a fine contrasting pair. But perhaps I was tired after the interval and it took a while to adjust to the rather different Beethoven. And listening to it back home yesterday, I find that I must have missed a great deal from what is a great quartet. Hopefully I will get another opportunity to hear it live before too long.
Friday, 15 February 2013
Browser pains
For some weeks recently Chrome was frequently freezing. I had thought to spend a happy hour with the helpful people from the BT help service but never got around to it, and now the freezing seems to have gone away. Presumably, one of the many background updates has fixed it.
On the other hand the blog search box seems to have vanished from http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/ while an irritating new toolbar carrying links to all kinds of stuff I don't want to use is being displayed on line 4 of the Chrome window, most but not all of the time. I am sure that I have turned the thing off once before but I cannot for the life of me find the place where one does this today. Furthermore, the new toolbar is not quite right and sometimes overlays some of the part of the screen that you do want to see. Thinking of BT again and in the meantime reduced to using the Windows search facility from Microsoft on my backup copies of the blog in Word.
And to add to the irritation, the Oracle people seem to be updating Java every day, a product which I do not consciously use at all but which presumably powers some feature of something or other which I do use. Which I would not mind, but my PC likes to ask me if it is OK on each and every occasion. Very proper of it too, I dare say.
On the other hand the blog search box seems to have vanished from http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/ while an irritating new toolbar carrying links to all kinds of stuff I don't want to use is being displayed on line 4 of the Chrome window, most but not all of the time. I am sure that I have turned the thing off once before but I cannot for the life of me find the place where one does this today. Furthermore, the new toolbar is not quite right and sometimes overlays some of the part of the screen that you do want to see. Thinking of BT again and in the meantime reduced to using the Windows search facility from Microsoft on my backup copies of the blog in Word.
And to add to the irritation, the Oracle people seem to be updating Java every day, a product which I do not consciously use at all but which presumably powers some feature of something or other which I do use. Which I would not mind, but my PC likes to ask me if it is OK on each and every occasion. Very proper of it too, I dare say.
Thursday, 14 February 2013
Jigsaw 9, Series 2
Another Ravensburger Premium, with the same good feel to the pieces as the last. Not quite such a snug fit, but snug enough that one was never in doubt about whether two pieces had been correctly fitted together or not.
An interesting painting and an interesting jigsaw, the first that I have done without any clear strategy or direction about the solution. Did the edge in the usual way and then thought that the landscape top right was the place to go and managed a bit of that. Then did most of the yellow robe of the kneeling figure front centre. Then dotted about, gradually getting through the puzzle but without doing one thing, then another. Just sort of muddled through; all very odd. And then there were plenty of pieces which looked as if they ought to be easy to find but proved difficult - and then when one found them it turned out one was looking for the wrong thing. That one thought one was looking for the last piece of yellow robe when more careful inspection revealed that one should have been looking for a mostly blue piece. Very easy to jump to the wrong conclusions in this business.
Yesterday off to inspect the real thing at the National Gallery.
Started at the station a lucky find of 300g of every day value bacon which had found its way onto the pavement opposite the new Tesco's being fitted out next to the new booking hall for Epsom Station. The packet appeared to be entire and is now in our fridge awaiting further action. The slices might possibly come from more than one pig, although that would depend on exactly how the presumably automated slicer coped with end of pig. But I think we can be reasonably sure that slices of bacon, even every day value bacon, do not involve horse.
Then onto an easier Bullingdon than on the last occasion, picking one up at Vauxhall and being able to drop it off behind the National Gallery, Cockspur Street being full again - but behind the National Gallery even better. A journey which took 18 minutes and which demonstrated that the Bullingdon people are still putting up journey details for inspection, despite my suspicions last time around.
Got into the Gallery and selected just the right trustess to tell me where Foppa lived. She sank into deep thought and then announced that he was in the Sainsbury Wing. More deep thought and then announced that he was in Room 55. Still more deep thought and his first name was probably Vincenzo. And she was right on all three counts.
A large and impressive picture, if a little shabby. Interested to find that the golden crowns and such like were some sort of appliqué. Very thick gold stuff; maybe it really was gold. But I was annoyed to find that the jigsaw has chopped off the top foot or so of the picture, a top foot which made clear that the stable was a ruin, a symbol of the ruin of classical civilisation in the face of the advance of the Christians, or so I was informed by the label. Rather less trimming on the other three sides, but the overall effect was that the composition of the jigsaw was badly damaged. One might have thought that the National Custodian of such matters would enforce a bit more accuracy in jigsaws sold under its banner.
I am not sure if Foppa counted as a Pre-Raphaelite, with Raphael being a contempory, but he seemed to share the Pre-Raphaelite love of naturalistic details. For example, the large number of animals and birds scattered about the odd corners of this picture. But it was quite startling to move to the 'Virgin of the Rocks' in a nearby room, where the treatment of the Virgin's face by Leonardo is in a different league to that of Foppa, his near contemporary. On the way, I was rather taken with an Annunciation by Crivelli, another picture with some odd details, for example what looks like a short fat cucumber sitting on the ledge at the front of the picture. I decided that a lot of these chaps might have been painting religious subjects for religious patrons but were perhaps not terribly solemn about it themselves. But then, that might be the lack of solemnity that true believers and papists allow themselves, unlike us atheists. I think George Eliot may have done a cameo on the subject. All that being as it may, I did like the Annunciation.
A good light lunch at the nearby Terroirs (http://terroirswinebar.com/).Posh sardines on toast. Generous supply of good bread. Good house red and an even better pudding wine (a 2009 Jurançon) to go with the lady of uncertain morals from Chile (a rather fine pudding).
PS: checking up on Saint Valentine today, I find that he is not a proper saint at all, having been demoted in the Holy Cull of the sixties of the last century. This on the authority of Google because he is mentioned in neither our Chambers Encylcopedia nor my fine, 12 volume 'New Library of Catholic Knowledge' from Burns & Oates. But I was pleased to see that the front and end pieces of all 12 volumes of the Library are reproductions of the Christmas Special jigsaw, as recorded on 1st January. Oddly, Valentine has survived in the calendar of our Book of Common Prayer, perhaps because this last is still in its original form, untouched by aforementioned Cull.
Stop press
Following my post of 10th February I now have some hot news from a source close to government.
The Marquis of Blair has indicated that he would be pleased to accept the presidency of the proposed Equine Meat Safety Council (EMSC), a new quango, the creation of which is due to be announced this coming Tuesday.
I also understand that senior permanent secretaries are drawing lots for the post of Director General and that food interests in Eire are lobbying hard for the new quango to be based in the south of Northern Ireland, close, as it were, to the horse's mouth. As part of the deal the Eire authorities are prepared to issue a waiver to allow the Marquis and his family to worship in one of the many facilities south of the border, a privilege only rarely accorded to people from the larger island.
The Marquis of Blair has indicated that he would be pleased to accept the presidency of the proposed Equine Meat Safety Council (EMSC), a new quango, the creation of which is due to be announced this coming Tuesday.
I also understand that senior permanent secretaries are drawing lots for the post of Director General and that food interests in Eire are lobbying hard for the new quango to be based in the south of Northern Ireland, close, as it were, to the horse's mouth. As part of the deal the Eire authorities are prepared to issue a waiver to allow the Marquis and his family to worship in one of the many facilities south of the border, a privilege only rarely accorded to people from the larger island.
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Business systems in the Vatican
Interested to see a picture of something called an ordinary consistory in the Guardian yesterday. Which appeared to consist of a large number of cardinals sitting in an open horseshoe, dressed in fancy red robes plus their red hats and their natty little white aprons, holding their papers, with the Pope and his chaps in the opening of the horseshoe. What struck me was that one could not do any real business in such a fashion; there were too many people and a table or board is generally considered a useful accessory. Not least to hold ash trays, coke bottles and such like. Parenthetic wonder: is the Vatican a smoke free working environment? Do the inhabitants have to leave the Holy City for a quick drag?
Maybe the real business is done in extraordinary consistories, run on more conventional lines.
Somewhere else in the Guardian there was a lament for all those people who might have to pay for their own care when they get old. Yet another usually sensible organ which loses its marbles when it comes to national arithmetic: the governors cannot spend what the governed will not give them in tax. Printing or borrowing money does not get around this basic difficulty.
I wonder about a fair mechanism for providing for people who do not have the money to pay for their care. Common decency says that one should make provision from central funds, but what about sturdy beggars? What about people who quite deliberately get rid of all their money - at the betting shop or elsewhere - before their time for care comes, to make sure that someone else gets to pick up the tab?
A simple answer is two tiers of care. The affordable tier gets just basic care, while the posh tier gets the sort of thing one would probably want for oneself. Anyone being funded from central funds gets the affordable tier. No choice of meals. No toe nail clipping on Tuesdays. No perms. on Thursdays. All that sort of thing; a sort of higher grade workhouse. This provides some incentive for people to keep back enough money to pay their own way, but does not deal with the problem of people who cannot pay their own way for no fault of their own. What about, for example, all those people who are disabled?
And then, I am only broke because my bad upbringing by a violent single mother left me a psychotic gamblaholic. Is that my fault? Why should I suffer at the end of my life because of my dodgy parents?
Maybe the real business is done in extraordinary consistories, run on more conventional lines.
Somewhere else in the Guardian there was a lament for all those people who might have to pay for their own care when they get old. Yet another usually sensible organ which loses its marbles when it comes to national arithmetic: the governors cannot spend what the governed will not give them in tax. Printing or borrowing money does not get around this basic difficulty.
I wonder about a fair mechanism for providing for people who do not have the money to pay for their care. Common decency says that one should make provision from central funds, but what about sturdy beggars? What about people who quite deliberately get rid of all their money - at the betting shop or elsewhere - before their time for care comes, to make sure that someone else gets to pick up the tab?
A simple answer is two tiers of care. The affordable tier gets just basic care, while the posh tier gets the sort of thing one would probably want for oneself. Anyone being funded from central funds gets the affordable tier. No choice of meals. No toe nail clipping on Tuesdays. No perms. on Thursdays. All that sort of thing; a sort of higher grade workhouse. This provides some incentive for people to keep back enough money to pay their own way, but does not deal with the problem of people who cannot pay their own way for no fault of their own. What about, for example, all those people who are disabled?
And then, I am only broke because my bad upbringing by a violent single mother left me a psychotic gamblaholic. Is that my fault? Why should I suffer at the end of my life because of my dodgy parents?
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
Puffing Poirot
So I am reminded by the puffing Poirot of yesterday's post of the large amount of puffing that there is in the television dramatisations of the works of A. Christie generally. Presumably luvvies have the same dispensation to smoke on sets as they do on stages, which last dispensation they seem to take great delight in flaunting.
But the film in the box (reverse) illustrated is a first for me. A film with a warning that it contains images of smoking. Perhaps that is why the film is a PG. How long will it be before there is legislation about warnings back and front of A. Christie dramatisations on telly? Was she a puffer herself? G. Simenon certainly was.
A film which had been remaindered by Surrey Libraries and which turned out rather well, despite my being rather dubious once I had found at that it was a cartoon. But a cartoon - 'The Illusionist' from a screen play by Jacques Tati - which got various things absolutely spot on, in particular rooms in cheap hotels. Whoever made the thing must have spent quality time in such places.
There was also lots of puffing. The story was partly about the decline of a variety artist during the death throes of the variety industry - a story which reminded me of D. H. Lawrence's story about same, 'The Lost Girl'. And which reminded me that I do not see why variety should not work now. Why should a music hall not work now? A salle polyvalente where you can eat, drink and socialise and be entertained at the same time. Has television spoiled us for the real thing? While there might initially be trouble getting enough artistes to make a go of it, there are an awful lot of dance & drama schools out there which could start repurposing their output for variety. And at the other end of the business, pubs are already moving in this direction: not enough to have food any more, with quite a lot of them are adding entertainment of one sort or another.
Monday, 11 February 2013
Japanese style Jaffa cake
As luck would had it a young girl noticed a Poirot as we pulled into Victoria Station and drew our carriage's attention to it. Obviously a Poirot as it was puffing smoke, and probably an important Poirot both because the tender seemed to be very intimately connected to the locomotive rather than just tagging along behind and because there was smoke puffing out of the very back of the tender as well of out of the very front of the locomotive. Not sure why the tender should puff but it surely makes the tender a very important tender.
Locomotive pulling a lot of Pullmans, possibly replicas, on some sort of an excursion. Quite reasonable showing of train spotters, mostly with cameras rather more elaborate than my mobile phone.
Pushed onto the Bbar for lunch, a place (see http://www.bbarlondon.com/) where I have previously had a Christmas Lunch, a lunch at which the chap in the chair tried to enliven the proceedings with a complicated tapping game, a game at which he excelled and the rest of us struggled with. Good ambience, good service and good lunch, at reasonable prices. In our case, a spicy parsnip soup followed by salt beef sandwich, which left us feeling very full. The sandwiches might not have been up to those of yesteryear from Great Windmill Street (where they boiled up the salt ribs on the premises and did an excellent chicken soup), but were a good deal better than others which we have had over the past few years, including some from Stamford Hill & Golders Green where one might think they ought to have known better.
Past the Palace (Queen not at home) where I was not sure about the plastic sheets wrapping the buildings being renovated at the top of Buckingham Palace Road, plastic sheets which had been printed up to make the whole thing look a bit like a building, rather than a building site. An arrangement which meant that rather than just strapping the plastic sheets to the scaffold, the luckless scaffolders had to bother about which sheet went where and which way around it went. All in all, both fake and wasteful without being particularly amusing or handsome: I think I would have preferred the wrapping plain.
Then through Green Park and into Piccadilly. Past the whisky shop and into the Japanese cake shop where there were lots of interesting cakes, very prettily presented, this last including the appearance and manners of the staff. We took a couple of what were described as their most popular items, red bean cakes, which turned out to be very like a soft Jaffa cake. But at £2 each rather dearer than the ones which I can buy in our Costcutter.
Onto St James, where I was interested to see an outdoor pulpit, something I do not recall seeing before, there or elsewhere. When was the thing last used for real? Inside there were some winos dozing on the pews of the northern aisle. Inoffensive but presumably sometimes smelly.
Onto Notre Dame de France, a church which we visit from time to time when in the area, which we found to have opened their doors to winos too. We also found that the art by Cocteau was complemented by mosaic by Anrep (see 6th February). I don't particularly care for either, but I was impressed by the way that Anrep had made his mosaic fit in with the tone of the Cocteau, and it was in consequence quite unlike those of the National Gallery.
Last stop Lisle Street, the street which no longer contains the Poons of the wind dried meats, a restaurant which we used to frequent maybe 20 years ago, to see the day before the New Year in. Greeted by an energetic dragon who seemed to be able to keep it up for an impressively long time. Stood by a posh bike which had a posh lock draped over the chain, but which completely failed to attach itself either to the bike or the stand. One could have walked away with it. Perhaps it was safe being a ladies' bike and with most bikes' thieves being gents..
Sunday, 10 February 2013
Koch consciousness
Just finished reading an interesting book by Christof Koch called 'Consciousness'. An engaging and accessible canter through the fields of consciousness research, fields which are only now becoming a respectable place for respectable (and career conscious) scientists to do their ploughing.
Koch does some if not most of his work for the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle (http://www.alleninstitute.org/), a not-for-profit medical research institute funded in some large part by Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft. An institute which makes all of its product publically available on the internet, including, for example, far more than most of us want to know about the inner workings of a mousy brain.
Not aware that any UK businessmen fund public works in this way, let alone on this scale. What do Richard Branson or James Dyson do in this line? But it was not always thus: once upon time we had Mr Tate the Sugar who gave us the Tate Gallery (the Millbank one that is) and a chain of London Libraries, one of which can be observed from the terrace outside the Estrela Bar in Vauxhall. Perhaps we have declined to the point where we just don't have people rich enough to make a difference at this sort of thing? Perhaps we have declined to a nation of benefit junkies who expect all that sort of thing to be done by government?
But no immediate need to tap into the Allen Insitute as there is lots of good stuff in this book, from which I share a few snippets.
First, the human brain contains a lot of neurons, maybe 75 billion of them, coming in maybe 1,000 rather than 57 varieties. So there is no way that a computer built the way that computers are built now is going to be able to match these numbers. But it does not follow that a computer cannot model interesting aspects of the brains behaviour - although many people think that such modelling will never include all aspects. Human brains are special.
By way of comparison, the human gut contains just a few hundred million neurons. But there seems to be a consensus that there is not a rival, parallel consciousness banging away, unbeknown to us, in the abdomen.
One way in which computers are not like neurons is the environment, in particular the electrical and chemical environments, in which neurons live. Transistors do their stuff, we want them to do their stuff, quite unaffected by their environment. They just respond in a reliable way to signals from other transistors. Certainly one might model the behaviour of neurons in a computer, plenty of people do, but the foundations are fundamentally different: neurons are a lot more complicated than transistors.
Second, the human brain includes proper nouns. If I know of, for example, Gordon Brown, my brain will contain a small cluster of neurons from among all the billions which respond specifically to the mention of Gordon Brown. Show me a picture of the man and you can watch the neurons fire.
Third, all kinds of bizarre complaints are caused by damage to very specific and very small parts of the brain, perhaps the result of a stroke. For example, the ability to distinguish one human face from another. An ability which can, in effect, be switched off, leaving the rest of one pretty much intact. (One can, it seems, get along with such a disability. There are workarounds).
Fourth, while we do not yet know how the brain makes the mind, we do know that, at least in a limited way, the mind can prevail over the matter of the brain. If you wire someone up in the right sort of way, they are able to control some of their brain waves.
Fifth and last, one seems to be unconscious when the various areas of the brain stop talking to each other. All kinds of stuff - like the liver and the legs - can be looked after without such talking. But no such talking and no consciousness - talking which can be turned off with remarkable speed by modern anaesthetics. Consciousness seems to require a degree of integration - even if it needs neither spinal cord nor cerebellum.
Thoroughly recommended to anyone with an interest in the subject.
Koch does some if not most of his work for the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle (http://www.alleninstitute.org/), a not-for-profit medical research institute funded in some large part by Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft. An institute which makes all of its product publically available on the internet, including, for example, far more than most of us want to know about the inner workings of a mousy brain.
Not aware that any UK businessmen fund public works in this way, let alone on this scale. What do Richard Branson or James Dyson do in this line? But it was not always thus: once upon time we had Mr Tate the Sugar who gave us the Tate Gallery (the Millbank one that is) and a chain of London Libraries, one of which can be observed from the terrace outside the Estrela Bar in Vauxhall. Perhaps we have declined to the point where we just don't have people rich enough to make a difference at this sort of thing? Perhaps we have declined to a nation of benefit junkies who expect all that sort of thing to be done by government?
But no immediate need to tap into the Allen Insitute as there is lots of good stuff in this book, from which I share a few snippets.
First, the human brain contains a lot of neurons, maybe 75 billion of them, coming in maybe 1,000 rather than 57 varieties. So there is no way that a computer built the way that computers are built now is going to be able to match these numbers. But it does not follow that a computer cannot model interesting aspects of the brains behaviour - although many people think that such modelling will never include all aspects. Human brains are special.
By way of comparison, the human gut contains just a few hundred million neurons. But there seems to be a consensus that there is not a rival, parallel consciousness banging away, unbeknown to us, in the abdomen.
One way in which computers are not like neurons is the environment, in particular the electrical and chemical environments, in which neurons live. Transistors do their stuff, we want them to do their stuff, quite unaffected by their environment. They just respond in a reliable way to signals from other transistors. Certainly one might model the behaviour of neurons in a computer, plenty of people do, but the foundations are fundamentally different: neurons are a lot more complicated than transistors.
Second, the human brain includes proper nouns. If I know of, for example, Gordon Brown, my brain will contain a small cluster of neurons from among all the billions which respond specifically to the mention of Gordon Brown. Show me a picture of the man and you can watch the neurons fire.
Third, all kinds of bizarre complaints are caused by damage to very specific and very small parts of the brain, perhaps the result of a stroke. For example, the ability to distinguish one human face from another. An ability which can, in effect, be switched off, leaving the rest of one pretty much intact. (One can, it seems, get along with such a disability. There are workarounds).
Fourth, while we do not yet know how the brain makes the mind, we do know that, at least in a limited way, the mind can prevail over the matter of the brain. If you wire someone up in the right sort of way, they are able to control some of their brain waves.
Fifth and last, one seems to be unconscious when the various areas of the brain stop talking to each other. All kinds of stuff - like the liver and the legs - can be looked after without such talking. But no such talking and no consciousness - talking which can be turned off with remarkable speed by modern anaesthetics. Consciousness seems to require a degree of integration - even if it needs neither spinal cord nor cerebellum.
Thoroughly recommended to anyone with an interest in the subject.
Horse stress
I am pleased to announce that a consortium of psychiatric social workers based in Epsom & Ewell have obtained permission from the council to offer a service to people suffering from PEBSD during their off-duty hours. The rates they propose to charge compare very favorably with those charged by plumbers and car mechanics, that is to say £35 an hour with a 25% discount for concessions.
Text 'PEBSD' to get full details by return.
PS: for those who have not been following the news, PEBSD is post equine burger stress disorder, an unpleasant (although rarely fatal) complaint which can, in the present climate, be triggered by the ingestion of the equine DNA in otherwise beefy burgers.
Text 'PEBSD' to get full details by return.
PS: for those who have not been following the news, PEBSD is post equine burger stress disorder, an unpleasant (although rarely fatal) complaint which can, in the present climate, be triggered by the ingestion of the equine DNA in otherwise beefy burgers.
Friday, 8 February 2013
New hobby
Bryan is clearly the man I will have to chase if I want to make my mark on the card stacking scene when I get tired of jigsaws.
Maybe I could take one of the empty shops on Epsom High Street and do it for charity? Perhaps something for a consortium of retired boozers? An alternative to ProBus?
Schubert
On the way we were interested to be sitting opposite a young lady, petite and unassuming in appearance, who quite quite openly reading ladyporn - that is to say the very fat paperback concerned with the special interest paint chart, a fat paperback which the NYRB claims is fairly badly written, about on a par with most of the porn written for men, but which has pulled off the trick of making it something that decent ladies can read without shame or even embarrassment. I suppose part of the trick is no pictures, pictures which are apt to get shocked reactions (if not actual shock) from people reading over the shoulder. Pictures which are also apt, I imagine, to detract from the interest of the porn, which I would have thought was much more fun consumed with the aid of the imagination rather than that of the photographer.
Arrived at the Wigmore Hall, where I. Cooper got off to a flying start with all four impromptus of D899. Terrific stuff, plenty of chiaroscuro. But last time, which I think must have been the Festival Hall, the things had a religious, sacred quality. In the rather smaller and more brightly lit Wigmore Hall, they had lost that; impressive, but no longer sacred or sublime. Was this a function of the space or the playing? Or both? I read in the NYRB (where else) that, according to the late Charles Rosen, a good pianist will adapt his or her playing to the acoustics of the space. A reason, inter alia, why a recording in the home will never be as good as good live.
Then into the A minor sonata D784, where, I am sorry to say, despite the thing getting off to another flying start with the first allegro and despite the revision of the previous few days, I got a bit lost in the middle.
Then after the break we got the twelve écossaises of D781 (12 écossaises which google seems quite certain is actually 11 écossaises). Played without any perceptible break, at least to me, then into the main course, the D850 sonata, again without any perceptible break. I think that this was a mistake. If she did not want applause after the 3 or 4 minutes of écossaises, fine. All she has to do, assuming that she does not want to do it herself, is to get the MC to say so at the same time as he is reminding us about mobile phones (I wonder why he does not have to go into the fire exit drill which usually precedes commercial training courses, where fire drill would be far less important than it would be in a crowded concert hall? Full in this case). But not pausing to make sure we had no time to clap was not the way forward.
I think the best thing to have done would have been to omit the écossaises; the program was quite full enough without them. But if they were to be kept, there should have been a short pause between each and a much longer pause before launching into the sonata. The sonata needs to be framed in silence; expectant silence at the beginning and appreciative silence at the end. Just as a picture should be framed by its frame or a film should framed by the opening and closing sequences. It took me quite a while to adjust after the rushed start, again despite the homework of the previous few days.
PS 1: one could get into discussion at this point about the way that much of what passes for art these days does not bother with frames, despite the whopperormous price tags. But I resist.
PS 2: the écossaises are rather jolly but very short. The illustration is the score for pretty much the whole of the first one. Might have been better played a little quieter.
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
An outing in three parts
The light show was entertaining, and quite suitable for the various children who leavened the usual diet of pensioners at such places during the working week. Some of the exhibits were fun, some were clever, some were banal and some were null. Some of them were a bit bright for my eyes. If one was really taken, one could buy the book of the show, the sort of fat flexible paperback at around £24.99 which is more or less de rigueur at a show of this sort. I usually buy such books, but not on this occasion: the lights might have been fun but I did not fancy a lot of waffle about them, particularly as it was hard to see how a paperback of this size was going to be filled up without getting pretty pretentious.
But I was really taken with the gallery. A very handsome interior, very well suited to a show of this sort. The concrete wears its fifty or so years very well.
Over Waterloo Bridge, past the dragon tree made out of what looked like quilts shaped into tyres, making it look a bit like an arboreal Michelin Man, and onto the Strand Palace Hotel for their carvery lunch. Not in an ancient & grand dining room with chandeliers & flunkeys, but nevertheless a very decent dining room and a very decent lunch at reasonable prices. Good hors d'oeuvres. Only let down by the vegetables which came with the roast beef which did not include cabbage, crinkly or otherwise. But the carver did let me have a bone from the rib of beef - which had been very nicely cooked - by way of compensation.
After which we finally made it to the mosaics, which looked much better than they had the previous week, probably because it was a brighter day, possibly because we had taken a peek at the accompanying booklet. Visiting the various mosaics by the same mosaist - Boris Anrep - scattered around London will keep us busy for the rest of the year.
Closed the outing by a visit to Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne', a picture which, like the 'Ambassadors', is much improved by being seen full size in a better setting than our sitting room. Or a jigsaw.
PS: thinking of the Dame Emin, I am reminded that this week's NYRB contains an advertisement for a very fancy looking three volume catalogue raisonné for one Robert Motherwell. Sufficiently eminent to warrant such treatment, but not so eminent that I had ever previously heard of him. I think the shop at the Hayward had a rather less grand offering about the chap but I shall, nevertheless, make do with Google.
A curious fact
I learn, rather to my surprise and quite by accident, that my old school, the Perse at Cambridge, had a Jewish boarding house, Hillel House, for the first half or so of the last century.
A fact which is confirmed by the Google public access copy of the Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History. Google also tells me that purchase from the book depository would be £1.10 cheaper than purchase from amazon. But I don't suppose Google have taken delivery into account, the pricing of which is subject to marketing games at amazon.
A fact which is confirmed by the Google public access copy of the Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History. Google also tells me that purchase from the book depository would be £1.10 cheaper than purchase from amazon. But I don't suppose Google have taken delivery into account, the pricing of which is subject to marketing games at amazon.
Bean bread
The graphic shows wholemeal flour content by bake. Date of bake does not confuse the graphic as baking has been pretty steady since starting in January 2011, this despite a couple of short breaks in March and October 2012, but total amount of flour does as this was mainly 2lb 4oz at the start but has been a fairly steady 2lb 8oz recently.
The first flurry of beans was caused by buying some flour from Sidbury Mill (which doesn't seem to exist in google) while visiting the area around Romney Marsh in the early summer of 2011, followed up by buying some flour from Calbourne Watermill (http://www.calbournewatermill.co.uk/) later that summer.
The second, flat topped, flurry was caused by buying some spelt flour towards the end of 2011, then switching to Waitrose wholemeal.
The third, last and current flurry started with Waitrose own brand wholemeal then moved onto their red bagged, very strong, Canadian wholemeal. And after a sequence of bakes with increasing wholemeal content, I think I have decided that half is slightly too much. But I also think that I have got the manufacture about right: the stuff tastes better than what I can buy.
But this is not true of the intervening white bread. Never achieved good baker bread quality there. Maybe another try at it when the weather gets a bit warmer and I can raise the stuff in the sun, which I am sure is a lot more healthy & organic than the airing cupboard I use in the winter, with all its aromas of laundry which do not go that well with those of baking.
A different sort of worry
Prompted by the disgrace of one of our political eminences, we pondered over breakfast how likely it was that we would have done such a thing.
The offence of lying about who was driving a car when it was caught by a traffic camera is easy enough to commit and one on which the police are unlikely to go to the sort of trouble needed to get a conviction unless provoked. Which is perhaps at least partly why the offence attracts the rather grand title of perverting the course of justice and correspondingly severe penalties: the severity might offset the ease and deter.
BH is clear that she would not do such a thing, but I am not so clear, particularly if we were only to think about the matter some weeks after the event. We commonly share the driving on the sort of trips on which we would be likely to attract the attention of a traffic camera and I am not at all sure that I would be able to remember who was driving on this or that stretch of the trip.
Nor am I sure that the memory would not play tricks if there was something serious at stake, like my needing to be able to drive for work, a need which, as it happens, I never had. But I think that if there were such a need and there were reasonable doubt, my unconscious mind might well tip the balance in favour of a sincere, conscious belief that I was not driving at the time of the alleged offence. Maybe one would end up tossing for it - an activity with which I think a magistrate or even a judge would be OK with - provided that he or she believed that there was indeed reasonable doubt.
On the other hand, I think I would back down quite quickly if confronted by evidence to the contrary, unlike, in this respect anyway, the customer of TB who could maintain an obvious untruth against all comers for hours. Rather entertaining it was too.
And I am fairly sure that I would never try and get off on some technicality. Never hire some smart lawyer who would burrow away and dig up some procedural or technical irregularity. The sort of lawyer who would discover that the street lights in place at the time and place of the alleged offence were 5.2 yards further apart than the 26.4 yards recommended, that, in consequence, I could not reasonably be expected to read the speed limit signs and that, in further consequence, I could not reasonably be charged with speeding. And I am fairly sure that I once read of such a case.
The offence of lying about who was driving a car when it was caught by a traffic camera is easy enough to commit and one on which the police are unlikely to go to the sort of trouble needed to get a conviction unless provoked. Which is perhaps at least partly why the offence attracts the rather grand title of perverting the course of justice and correspondingly severe penalties: the severity might offset the ease and deter.
BH is clear that she would not do such a thing, but I am not so clear, particularly if we were only to think about the matter some weeks after the event. We commonly share the driving on the sort of trips on which we would be likely to attract the attention of a traffic camera and I am not at all sure that I would be able to remember who was driving on this or that stretch of the trip.
Nor am I sure that the memory would not play tricks if there was something serious at stake, like my needing to be able to drive for work, a need which, as it happens, I never had. But I think that if there were such a need and there were reasonable doubt, my unconscious mind might well tip the balance in favour of a sincere, conscious belief that I was not driving at the time of the alleged offence. Maybe one would end up tossing for it - an activity with which I think a magistrate or even a judge would be OK with - provided that he or she believed that there was indeed reasonable doubt.
On the other hand, I think I would back down quite quickly if confronted by evidence to the contrary, unlike, in this respect anyway, the customer of TB who could maintain an obvious untruth against all comers for hours. Rather entertaining it was too.
And I am fairly sure that I would never try and get off on some technicality. Never hire some smart lawyer who would burrow away and dig up some procedural or technical irregularity. The sort of lawyer who would discover that the street lights in place at the time and place of the alleged offence were 5.2 yards further apart than the 26.4 yards recommended, that, in consequence, I could not reasonably be expected to read the speed limit signs and that, in further consequence, I could not reasonably be charged with speeding. And I am fairly sure that I once read of such a case.
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
Worried of Epsom
Over the last few days I have noticed that conservators from the Epsom Tree Conservatory, working in high visibility vests on behalf of Epsom Council, have been trimming the suckers off the bases of some of the trees, possibly lime trees, along the west side of Horton Lane. So far so good. But the conservators in their wisdom have been leaving the sometimes extensive ivy intact, rather than taking a lethal foot out of their stems. Not sure if stems is the right word, but trunks certainly isn't. Is there some country word for taking out the ivy from around a one foot segment of the trunk of a tree? Graunkling or something like that?
I even thought to approach some of the conservators yesterday, but decided against on the grounds that I might have been mistaken for a bizzy. And then, continuing long Horton Lane (clockwise) came across a tree from which the ivy had been taken out from around a one foot segment of the trunk. But why just one? It was not as if this particular tree was particularly infested. Had the Council given the Conservatory discretion as to which trees needed this particular attention? Perhaps I need to have a word with the powers that be (see http://www.epsom-ewell.co.uk/) about exactly what direction has been given to the Conservatory.
Nearer home I have a worry about earth bonding. I think I have mentioned that we have been installing new lights from Homebase in the ground floor of our house, new lights with bulbs and shades on the end of curved branches, the substance of which is painted steel. Now I had thought that the electrical connecting block came ready earth bonded to the appliance. But now I am not so sure because the three way connecting block (a white plastic gizmo about the size of a Knorr stock cube. Cubes which are not, confusingly, cubical) of the fourth appliance was only stuck on to the earthing prong with a bit of sticky paper. The prong had not been inserted and fixed into its connector hole along with live and neutral wires going on up the branches into the bulbs. So the fourth appliance is OK because I noticed, but what about the other three? Was the fourth appliance faulty and the other three OK?
I don't want to take them down to check as fixing them was a bit of fiddle, given the circumstances of the fixing. Is the answer an earth bond tester? A quick look at Google suggests that such a contraption might cost several hundreds of pounds, far more than this particular job is worth. Can I hire one? I shall ponder.
In the meantime, BH is under strict instructions not to change bulbs. Which hopefully will not arise as they were sold on the basis of being more or less everlasting.
I even thought to approach some of the conservators yesterday, but decided against on the grounds that I might have been mistaken for a bizzy. And then, continuing long Horton Lane (clockwise) came across a tree from which the ivy had been taken out from around a one foot segment of the trunk. But why just one? It was not as if this particular tree was particularly infested. Had the Council given the Conservatory discretion as to which trees needed this particular attention? Perhaps I need to have a word with the powers that be (see http://www.epsom-ewell.co.uk/) about exactly what direction has been given to the Conservatory.
Nearer home I have a worry about earth bonding. I think I have mentioned that we have been installing new lights from Homebase in the ground floor of our house, new lights with bulbs and shades on the end of curved branches, the substance of which is painted steel. Now I had thought that the electrical connecting block came ready earth bonded to the appliance. But now I am not so sure because the three way connecting block (a white plastic gizmo about the size of a Knorr stock cube. Cubes which are not, confusingly, cubical) of the fourth appliance was only stuck on to the earthing prong with a bit of sticky paper. The prong had not been inserted and fixed into its connector hole along with live and neutral wires going on up the branches into the bulbs. So the fourth appliance is OK because I noticed, but what about the other three? Was the fourth appliance faulty and the other three OK?
I don't want to take them down to check as fixing them was a bit of fiddle, given the circumstances of the fixing. Is the answer an earth bond tester? A quick look at Google suggests that such a contraption might cost several hundreds of pounds, far more than this particular job is worth. Can I hire one? I shall ponder.
In the meantime, BH is under strict instructions not to change bulbs. Which hopefully will not arise as they were sold on the basis of being more or less everlasting.
Monday, 4 February 2013
Jigsaw 8, Series 2
A picture, as it happens, which was the subject of an hour's art lesson back at the time of my O levels.
On the grounds that the money would be going to a good cause, that is to say the National Gallery, I did think of buying a proper digital image from them. An alternative to dropping tenners in one of their collecting boxes. It would have been fun to have a proper image to examine on screen, but given that I described the use as Internet the price was £250 or so which I though was a bit rich. Especially as one could not be altogether sure that the money was going to go to the National Gallery itself, rather than some outfit it has sold the franchise to. Maybe I would be able to examine a digital image before buying at one of the public access terminals at the gallery?
A good quality, 500 piece jigsaw from Ravensburger. Nice positive feel to the pieces when they are clicked together - with the exception of just one piece which felt a bit loose for some reason.
Edge first, then the mosaic floor with its skull. Then the carpet on the table then the various objects on the carpet and on the lower shelf of the table.
Then the faces, then the other easy bits of the two figures. Then the green backdrop. Then filled in the odd holes leaving the dark elements of the two figures, dark elements which played the role in this puzzle more usually played by the sky.
Luckily, although piece size did not vary very much, there was a good mixture of prong configurations and a good mixture of prong and piece shapes, all of which made scanning the heap for a particular piece a lot easier than it would otherwise have been.
Followed completion of the jigsaw by visiting the jigsaw, taking in the Garafalo (see 16th November) while I was about it. This provided an opportunity to ride a Bullingdon again, the first time since October 21st last (see the other place). Bad start at the Vauxhall stand which could only manage 3 broken bikes, but at least they had been clearly marked by lowering and reversing the saddles. Walked across the bridge to find that the north side stand had 3 serviceable bikes. Grabbed one and headed up Vauxhall Bridge Road to get thoroughly ensnared in traffic and roadworks in and around Victoria Station. Would probably have been a lot quicker to do that bit on foot, but eventually found myself in Victoria Street and so on to Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square. To find that the stand at Cockspur Street was full, then the one at King William IV was full and I finally found a space half way up the Strand at Southampton Street. I had put my key into the hole at Cockspur Street which I thought gave me an extra 15 minutes to find a stand with a space - but the Bullingdon Bike people seem to have changed their website and it no longer gives you details of individual journeys, so I don't know. Maybe the individual journeys will come back if I become a regular user again. So, eventually got back to the National gallery where I was able to inspect the two jigsaws.
Easy enough to find the Holbein, which did seem much more impressive now that I knew it a bit better. But finding the Garafalo was more of a challenge, so I thought I would test the trusties. First older trusty suggested I try a couple of younger trusties chatting nearby. First younger trusty thought the best plan was to ask the older trusty, but disabused of that thought, she went off to some other source. Second younger trusty thought hard and came up with room 9. At which point younger trusty came back with the nearby room 6, which turned out to be the right answer. But ten out of ten to the three of them for helpfulness. Room 6 turned out to be mostly Garafalo, with several large pictures, including a cleaned version of the jigsaw and several small pictures. He seemed to be into a lot of detail, landscape and drapery. One might say that he loved painting intricate and beautiful (if unlikely) drapery.
I particularly liked the expression on the face of the St. Augustine (not quite the same on the image you get on their website) and I was intrigued by the painting of a pagan sacrifice, which seemed an odd subject at a time when I thought the church was still the main customer for paintings and when church subjects were still the only respectable subjects.
We also spent time on the mosaics in the entry hall, but more on that in a future post.
Bought another jigsaw, from the same family, on exit.
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