Facts on the ground

Brain was waving good and proper when I woke up this morning. Why don't the Argies take a leaf out of the Zionist book and create some facts on the ground? Simply buy up whatever chunks of land that they can get their hands on. The value of land must be fairly low out in the Malvinas, being only good for penguin farming and such like, and, as the Zionists found in the thirties of the last century, you can always find people willing to sell out, even if they didn't like to tell their neighbours about it.

Then, once you have a toehold, being a catholic people, breeding will do the rest. In not very many generations they will be in the majority and in a position to vote for union with the mother country. Job done without fuss.

But then, waking up a bit more, I started to wonder about the land tenure arrangements in the Malvinas. Maybe all the land is held on leases from the Crown? Are there rules about alien leases?

A quick google suggests that while until fairly recently, say until the 1970's, most of the land was held by absentee landlords with a firm grip on the poor peasants who actually lived in the place and worked the penguin farms, with far and away the biggest landlord being the Falkland Islands Company, there are now rather more middle sized farms, although currently poor prices for penguin pelts (too much competition from fakes from China) mean that most of them are struggling. Probably subsidy junkies like so many of the farmers in the motherland. There was also a suggestion that land tenure in the Malvinas was a bit odd: maybe there were no proper surveys or land registries or that sort of thing.

Digging a bit deeper we get to http://www.the-falkland-islands-co.com where it says that 'The Falkland Islands Company still retains its Royal Charter, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Falkland Islands Holdings PLC, a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange'. So maybe the Argies don't need to bother with actually going to the Malvinas - after all, why on earth would one want to? - they can just get their agent in London to buy up all the shares and they will be almost home and dry.

But that may not suit their real agenda. What they really want is a great old fuss, not a solution; very latin of them.

More travel variations

Yesterday off to St. Luke's to hear Schubert's Octet again, time from the Nash Ensemble. The fourth time in living (that is to say blog) memory, the previous occasions being 11th April 2010 (Conchord, Dorking), 28th March 2011 (Bavaria Radio, QEH) and 6th December 2012 (Spira Mirabilis, QEH). The first of the three being the most memorable and the second the least.

But being Good Friday, a day on which the Christian world used to slow to a halt, big time Sunday observance on a Friday, I thought I would check with the Network Rail journey planner which assured me that all was well and suggesting a change at Euston rather than the change at Stockwell that I had been thinking of. So not too pleased to get to Kings Cross to be told that the Northern Line (City Branch) had been turned off for planned maintenance and that maybe passengers would like to catch the replacement bus service. I am fairly sure that Network Rail didn't say anything about that. Anyway, took the long march out to the front of the station where we caught a bus to Old Street, a bus which dropped us very near the Istanbul Supermarket where we were able to top up our supplies of flat bread. On the other hand 'The Shepherdess' next to the Eagle was closed so we were not able to tick that box.

Onto St. Luke's where we were able to listen to the gent. in the seat behind us extolling the acoustics of the hall, particularly the bit of it where we were sitting. And he was quite right: the Octet sounded much better in St. Luke's than it had done in the QEH on the two previous occasions. Partly because one is nearer the players and partly because the smaller hall suits the music better: it really is chamber music not a symphony. Only marred by the couple in front of us, probably pensioners like ourselves, chewing gum throughout the proceedings and one had to angle one's head so as not to be distracted by the chomping jaws. And then by a couple of delinquents behind us who opened up some very noisy sweets. Clearly not everybody our age was brought up proper.

Lunch at the local Wetherspoons, 'The Masque Haunt', named for an Elizabethan official who was billeted nearby. How did their publicity people light on this particular name: there are plenty of better known characters tombed up in the nearby Bunhill Fields for whom the place might have been more conventionally named? But a very reasonable lunch at just over £10 for two meals and two drinks: café prices in more comfort than in the average café, not to mention the availability of alcohol if not fags.

Strolled back down to Bank through all the flashy new buildings in that part of the city. And building sites promising more of the same. Who said we were in a triple dip recession, a phrase which is clearly an abuse of language in this context. Rather puzzled to find a semi serious police checkpoint (illustrated) guarding what looked like a south entrance to the Barbican Centre, presumably a hang over from the bad old days of the Irish troubles, but what is there in the Barbican Centre that we don't know about that needs the special treatment?

Inside we find that the Waterloo & City Line is working, presumably to make up for the absence of the City Branch of the Northern Line. The Network Rail people have clearly missed a few beats here.

PS: in the course of the day came across a number of small Tescos, of which I read this morning there are around 2,000, leading one to think that it will be a shame when all the Istanbul Supermarkets have been swept away by the chain stores. And a shame that big companies like Tescos can't stand still; they have, it seems, to be forever on the grab for another slice of business. Can't rest until they own the whole world, just like Napoleon. Even more like him if I could think of a retail analogy for exile to St. Helena. Condemn Tescos to build a 100 checkout store in the Falkland islands and then to run a shopping airbus service from nearby Argentina so that the Argies can do a bit of decent shopping for once?

Housing benefit

A couple of weeks or so ago there was another how awful piece in the Guardian about how awful the proposed changes to housing benefit were, that is to say the changes sparked off by tales of the families of terrorists living in seven bedroom houses in St. John's Wood at taxpayer expense.

This against a background where, according to page 6 of the budget report, social spending is around one third of government expenditure and government expenditure is around £100 billion more than government receipts. Debt repayment is heading for 10% of government spending. So our books are way off balance. Unsustainable. And it is hard to see how we can get back into balance without hitting social expenditure. Even if we put the imbalance down to cyclical effects, which to my mind while part of the story, is not the whole story, there is still an awful lot of debt to pay off before we can afford whizzy new submarines, never mind more civilised treatment of the needy.

To be fair, the article does recognise that the housing benefit bill is very large and is growing, but does not think that tinkering with the rules is the way forward. It looks forward to a brave new world where there are pots of housing available at the sort of rents that the increasingly poor poor people will be able to afford.

The tinkering in question is the reducing benefit paid to people living in publicly funded social housing which is too big for them, too big in the sense of too many bedrooms according to some formula or other. Proper number of bedrooms equals the number of pairs (of any orientation) plus half the number of grandparents plus two thirds the number of children over 13 less one fifth of the number of other children sort of thing. The idea being that if you depend on the public purse for your housing you are jolly well going to have to move around a bit as your circumstances changes. No more house for life; that is a privilege for those who can afford to buy their own housing.

One catch seems to be that we have a lot of three bedroom houses and a lot of people on housing benefit are in them. (And there are even more old people living by themselves in such houses - but that is another story). But there is a dearth of smaller accommodation for the needy to move into. Not only is there not enough housing to meet the present demand, the mix of housing is all wrong. Furthermore, a less bedroom house in the private sector is apt to cost more than a more bedroom house in the public sector, so it is not clear that we save much by pushing families from one to the other. Plus, by so doing, we are lining the pockets of greedy private landlords which is a bit like bailing out Russian gangsters from the consequences of their careless banking habits.

The Guardian also highlights all the unpleasantness and anomalies implicit or in the new rules. Their application to those with households including people with special needs - either because they are very old or otherwise - may well be rather harsh.

At this point I turn to the case for the government and in reasonably short order turn up an unnumbered impact assessment with the title 'Housing Benefit: Under occupation of social housing'. The assessment, 21 pages worth, appears to be some kind of pro-forma which departments have to fill out for the Treasury or No. 10 if they want legislative action. Lots of boxes, some of which, inevitably, are not terribly relevant to this particular bit of business. Lots of management speak like 'evidence base'. All very calm and sober; no tales of wailing and gnashing of teeth at all.

I was not very impressed by the annual profile of costs and benefits, with benefits (to the general public) said to be £1 billion over two years, defined to be equal to costs (to benefit scroungers). I couldn't find another table which explained exactly where these benefits came from, although to be fair I did not read the assessment with any care. Perhaps it was designed for people with more time to spare or with speed reading skills.

An important element of the government case seems to be that all it is doing is bringing the rules for housing benefit in public sector housing into line with those in private sector housing. Which does not seem that unreasonable - although this simple assertion of equality before the benefit may be disturbed by large differences between the two sectors.

I guess the trouble is that in any change of this sort some people are going to be hit harder than others - and it is these last which the Guardian focuses on, while the assessment is much more soft focus. So at the end of the my short time on this long problem, I am not very convinced of the government case. Full marks for making the background to the policy freely available. Full marks for promising to do a post implementation review in due course (providing they remember to do it). But not so many marks for the policy itself.

PS 1: or maybe it is rather that our housing ambitions have swollen beyond our means. My wife and I spent the first year of our married life in a bed-sit, something which was not unusual at the time. And people on the continent are far less ambitious in the matter of housing than we are.

PS 2: it is well to remember that there is unlikely to be an easy solution. Big people with big brains have been working away on this with perfectly good intentions for a long time. It is reasonably unlikely that they have overlooked any easy policy options. There is no magic bullet or someone would have found it before now.

Hook line and sinker

Some weeks ago I read somewhere that the new Windows 8 from Microsoft was one of their better upgrades. Then yesterday, on the way back from Epsom, I passed a large and tasteful advertising hoarding on the subject and suddenly thought that perhaps I ought to have some of that. Upgrade PC No. 1 before I get into forced upgrade land because something has broken. Blaze the trail and all that.

Get home to inspect PC No. 1 to find that it is running Window 7 Home Premium and Office 2010. Then off to the Microsoft site where, after a not too many minutes, I decide that maybe what I want is Windows 8 and Office Home & Student 2013. Then run something which checks out the PC and the report seems fairly relaxed. A few things which I don't use won't work in the new world, one or two things in the new world won't work on this PC.

So off we go. Flash the plastic at some place in Germany and down comes Windows 8. After a couple of hours or so all done. User files seem to be present and correct. After a bit of fiddling about I work out how to log in and to get around the system. Not too impressed with the rather loud start screen which seems to have taken its cue from the sort of telephones that young people use on trains. On the other hand, the search indexes which I broke a couple of months ago by renaming some folders might have been mended, so that is a plus. At which point I try to fire up the all important bread spreadsheet to find that Office has vanished. Along with various other bits and bobs which I do use - unlike a lot of HP flavoured junk (at least as far as I was concerned) which came with the PC which I don't.

Reload Dropbox, a product which has served me well, but which might be made redundant by new features in Windows 8 if I ever get around to learning how to use them. In the meantime, it looked as if the new Dropbox client just needed to do a bit of twiddling; no need to upload all the data that it knew about before because it still knew about it - thank goodness. All the little lights have gone from blue to green this morning, which is promising, and all that remains is a remote test.

Reload Chrome and get into my email OK. To find a nice letter from Microsoft containing, inter alia, the key to authenticate my purchase of Windows.

Now as it happens, I was planning to buy a new Office anyway, although it had not occurred to me (as it should have done) that new operating system is apt to require new application software, or at least a reload. Flash the plastic at Germany again and after a few false starts, down comes Office. The only problem being that I couldn't find it for a while. After which I work out that maybe I need to do something to the task bar, a something which the help (getting better all the time) helps me do. At this point, take another look in email, not finding another nice letter from Microsoft, so I don't have an authentication key to authenticate this second purchase. But will I ever need to use such a thing? Will it give me a bit of a free trial before it wants sight of the key? In the meantime, now able to update the bread spreadsheet with more details concerning the 166th batch of the brown stuff.

Try talking to the bank this morning and that seems OK - although, oddly, the German people have not hit my plastic account. I thought that such things were more or less instant.

With the only other niggle so far being that I can't put a password into the thing to control access on wake up. Maybe I shall have to talk to the nice people at BT. But so far so good: a reasonably painless upgrade, perhaps more by luck than judgement, and I expect that I will find enough that I like in the new versions to make me feel good about the £200 and the 200 quality time minutes expended.

Dream time

Another dream to report, from the world of work as nearly always, after a relatively dream free few weeks, last reports being from the 14th and 17th January. A rather tired dream, recycling old material.

I was an IT project manager, trying to hold a meeting of the team in a rather cluttered room which associates to an upstairs classroom at my secondary school, wooden desks and all. The classroom of one Mr. Billingshurst perhaps, a French teacher with an interest in the RAF segment of the CCF; my form teacher when I was 13 or 14 or so. A rather tatty project with an uncertain divide between the in-house team and the out-house team and with the leaders of both sub-teams being rather pale versions of real people - from work that is, not from school. I was finding it rather difficult to conduct the meeting as most of the time my nose seemed to be about level with the top of the table I was supposed to be conducting from. Not a very commanding position at all. Far too many conversations going on on the side.

The project seemed to be about printers and printing - the sort of printers you have in offices that is, not newspapers, books or print shops - but it was not clear what exactly it was that was to be done.

I got into a muddle between the sort of printer that one hangs off a common or garden PC and the sort of large printer which needs special arrangements, called Vienna Printing in the dream, 'Vienna' being a fragment which had strayed in from somewhere quite different and which did not belong in this dream at all. The in-house team was rather cross that I had thought that the out-house team was worrying about these common or garden printers when they had thought that they were their job.

And that was about it. Presumably all the more interesting bits got suppressed as I was waking up.

Hunt the swede

Following my post of 17th February I have now fiinished Nil's Holgersson's wonderful journey through Sweden, and while I would not go so far as to call it wonderful, it was a very good read, all 700 pages of it, despite not being very keen on the pictures. Like all the best childrens' books it appeals to adults too, with plenty of wry and dry humour about the rum ways of the world. All very Northern Europe. Very pleased that the TLS noticed the book in a big enough way for me to take notice.

The educational objectives of the people who commissioned the book in the first place, back in 1901, were certainly met in my case, finding plenty of interest in the tutorials on matters Swedish, leaving me with an urge to visit the place. As an interim measure I thought it would be good to have some documentary material, perhaps a map or perhaps a coffee table history book, the sort of thing that Thames & Hudson are rather good at. So off to London Town to see what I could do.

First leg of 15 minutes Albert Embankment to Rochester Row, via Big Ben. Despite the cold, two huge queues outside Westminster Abbey, one for cash and one for cards, so I settled for the queue free St. Margaret's instead. An interesting church of the 16th century - which I have probably visited before but so long ago that I remembered nothing of it - with rather a mixed bag of stained glass, mostly modern, so they presumably lost most of what they had during the second war. A rather blue east window which failed the Pugin test in that the composition did not show proper respect for the tracery in which it was embedded, but which was not, nonetheless, a complete failure. An interesting tablet which appeared to commemorate the life of somebody who was MP for somewhere called Wootton Bassett Lostwithiel and also, in the words of the tablet, for the very important place called Westminster. It took BH to wise me up after the event to the fact that these were consecutive rather than concurrent sittings, a fact which was confirmed by Professor Google.

Second leg of 14 minutes from Embankment (Horse Guards) to Bruton Street. Third leg of 8 minutes from Woodstock Street to Soho Square and so to Foyles where I found the Scandinavian history shelf. Sadly there was much more stuff about Iceland and sagas than there was about the historically and economically far more important Sweden. I was offered a second hand biography of Marshal Bernadotte, late king of Sweden, and one short general history, very dry. No picture books, history or otherwise.

Across the road to Blackwells to find the entrance area full of postcards, birthday wrapping paper and other trivia. For all the world like a Waterstones. And even less on Sweden than Foyles. Perhaps a travel book would be the thing, so pushed onto Stanfords, also lapsed from its glory of former years. They sold postcards and birthday wrapping paper too. They did have a selection of maps of Sweden, but nothing that appealed. And no travel books apart from the usual Lonely Planet stuff, which was not quite what I was after either. So failure. I will have to ask Amazon after all.

Pleased to find that the Marquess of Anglesey was still a Young's pub. But I suppose it was only to be expected that they no longer did the excellent bread and cheese which they did 40 years ago. Just the usual sort of pub fare which Wetherspoons does so much better, without all the celebrity chef stuff. And the once grand Bow Street Magistrates' Court still stands empty, waiting for a new tenant: perhaps said Wetherspoons will take it when the price has fallen enough for them to be able to make a go of it. They usually do such buildings very well.

Fourth leg of 10 minutes from Tavistock Street to Waterloo Bridge. Didn't fancy a posh sandwich from Kronditor & Crook so was pleased to find an old style sandwich bar - DG Sandwiches - in nearby Alaska Street. Two old style ham rolls for next to nothing by the standards of Kronditor etc. Wound up the expedition by a visit to the underground bar in what used to be the gentlemens' toilet opposite Platform 1 at Waterloo (and which had also been a rather good if rather dear piano bar at one point) and a rather longer visit to the TB, now selling warm beer again after a lapse of maybe 10 years.

PS: it seems that Thames & Hudson might still be an independent. Not been gobbled up by Pearson or one of the other biggies. I have also learned that the Hudson in question is the Hudson River of New York. Never really thought about it before, and certainly had not thought of that.

Nannies

Long review in a recent NYRB of a book by one Sarah Conly (a philosopher at the ancient (by US standards) Bowdoin College in Maine) about when governments should interfere with what might have been thought to be the private affairs of their citizens. A hot topic with an edict from Mayor Bloomberg (illustrated) of New York about fizzy drink portion sizes having recently been struck down by the courts. And a topic on which Ms. Conly appears to be lined up with the nannies.

The starting point is John Stewart Mill who wrote a long time ago that governments can only interfere with the affairs of a citizen when that citizen is interfering with the affairs of others - with it being understood that those others are complaining. That the citizen might be doing himself harm in some sense or other is no business of the government.

So stretching the point, the government can ban smoking in public places on the grounds that passive smoking is dangerous and smokers have no right to deny health conscious non-smokers access to public spaces. Motor cyclists have no right to inflict the additional costs of fixing their broken heads arising from their not wearing their helmets on the rest of us. Maybe champion rock climbers ought to be made illegal on account of the high proportion who wind up damaged or dead.

One might also argue that the poor health of smokers is draining health resources away from the health of non-smokers. But this argument falls because premature death of smokers saves a lot of money which might otherwise have had to be spent on care for the elderly. At least I would guess is that how the figures would pan out, even allowing for the considerable cost of cancer treatment. Arguments of this sort are even weaker in the case of other recreational drugs, where most of the harm is a consequence of the illegality of the drugs, rather than of the drugs themselves.

But Conly is said to make a different argument, that government is allowed to make us do things which we don't want to do now but which most of us will recognise to have been a good thing in due course. Part of her thinking being that most of us are wrong about the proper balance between short term gain and long term gain and that most of our governments are right. Not very happy about this at all.

Rather happier about her preference for nudging rather than coercing, holding coercion in reserve for when nudging does not work. It seems that our very own Prime Minister has set up an Office for Nudging  (to be privatised in due course) so that civil servants can dream up things about which we ought to be nudged, for example, about eating less sugar. Which brings us back to Mayor Bloomberg, who tried to go straight for the jugular.

On the other hand, thinking of lead paint (see March 19th), I am quite happy for lead paint in homes to be made illegal. It may be OK for someone to chose to poison him or herself in this way, but it is very hard to contain the damage. Other people are apt to be harmed during the lifetime of the paint and so a ban on selling if not manufacturing the paint seems to be justified.

So where I think I get to is this. The apparently private areas in which government can interfere and the sort of grounds on which they might so interfere should be laid down in some kind of law which is debated, and perhaps passed, in the usual sort of way. If such a law is written and passed so as to include making cigarettes illegal, so be it. As things stand, at least in this country, provided the government is not deemed to have interfered with our human rights, they can legislate about more or less anything. Fizzy drinks today, oranges (horrible amount of sugar in this so-called health food) tomorrow. Recreational drugs no chance at all. All modern governments seem to be programmed to interfere by default and we need something to control them.

And let those who want to get rid of cigarettes remember that they might have some minority taste - like hunting foxes with toothed dogs - which some other gang might think ought to be done away with. Let's have a bit of live and let live.

In any event, a topic on which a bit of public debate might be a good idea. So full marks to Ms. Conly for her efforts to stimulate same.

Cypriot puzzle

In all the stuff about Cyprus in the papers over the last few days, I was unable to find an explanation of why there is a problem in amongst all the coverage of why the various proposed solutions are really problems. So ask Professor Google 'cause cyprus crisis' and the second hit at http://www.abc.net.au tells me what I wanted to know in short order. Grossly over-sized and under-regulated banking sector making dodgy loans, many of them to troubled Greece, plus dodgy government finances. One might quibble about there not being much about dodgy Russian money, but faith in the media is restored.

I also learn that this ABC is the Australian version of the BBC. Not a Murdoch job at all.

A tale of two charities

Or to be more precise, two new to me books bought from two different charity shops.

Book one I mentioned yesterday, 'Dead Heat', by Dick Francis, assisted by his son Felix Francis. The impression given in the shop, which had a number of volumes from the same series, was that the Francis team produces books to order, all of the same length. Very 19th century of them.

ITV3 failing us for once, I had a good go at it last night, and failed, perhaps along with the previous owner, the book feeling fairly new. Failed partly because it was not so much a crime thriller as a vehicle for a series of lectures on the running of a moderately posh provincial restaurant. With occasional diversions, for example to the sport of polo. I am used to thriller writers doing this sort of thing - one of the Bond books, for example, includes tutorials on the diamond trade - but one does like the story to figure larger in the text than the tutorials. Perhaps the apprentice - that is to say Felix - has not yet reached the standard of the father Dick. Interested to read in Wikipedia that Francis (Richard Stanley "Dick" Francis CBE FRSL (31 October 1920 – 14 February 2010)) was a first rate hunt jockey before becoming a writer; I had always assumed that he had been a second rate jockey before chucking that in for something which paid better.

Interested also to learn that the current president of the rather grand sounding Royal Society of Literature (http://www.rslit.org/) is one Colin Thubron, a literary eminence who has hitherto escaped my notice, despite his illustrious ancestry. But BH says that she has heard of him, and not in the role of talking beard either.

Book 2 is 'Zuleika Dobson' by Max Beerbohm, a book of which I had not previously heard and an author of whom I was only dimly aware. But at least I finished this book, enjoyed it even.

A slightly odd production in that it has the Folio Society logo embossed on the base of the spine while the book itself claims to have come from Yale University Press, via a printer in Milan, in 1985. There is a mention of a previous edition from the Folio Society in 1966, but that is it. Silence otherwise. But the main point of this edition is that it includes reproductions of the large number of illustrations from the brush of the author himself; a small number of full page illustrations and a large number of marginalia and such like, many if not all of them taken from the author's own copy of the book, where they started life. Plus a reproduction of the bit of Bradshaw pasted into the back of same book. The introduction includes a discussion of the merits or otherwise of illustrating fiction, a practice which is generally not approved of by serious readers. The introduction admits this point while claiming this book as one of the few exceptions to the rule; and, having read the book, I agree.

An engaging tale, full of a rather gentle humour of a sort not much seen nowadays, an evocation of an Oxford world of more than a hundred years ago which I imagine is now largely lost, except perhaps in rather self conscious revival. With Morse & Lewis being the closest that most of us will ever get. And a heroine (the Zuleika of the title) who manages to enslave pretty much all the young men she meets, despite being vain, lazy, dim and not beautiful in the ordinary way. But she has the necessary something to score heavily in the man department.

I must find someone who reads (there are 350 pages of it) and who also knows Oxford, either town or gown, for a second opinion. Or maybe Cambridge would do, which would widen the field a bit.

One oddment. The Bullingdon club of Barclay Bike fame (see, for example, 15th March) gets a mention, but only by way of contrast to a far older and more select club called 'The Junta'. Presumably fictional.

Pop goes the weasel

Yesterday, back to St. Luke's for some more of the Vienna Piano Trio (see 15th March).

But a better managed excursion on this occasion and we had time for one of the fine bacon sandwiches to be had from the Market Café in the oddly quiet Whitecross Street. Fortified, onto the charity shop where we bought a DVD which we failed to finish and two books by Dick Francis (in one of which his son had a supporting role). My first experience of Mr. Francis and I am not sure that I will manage to finish them either, but we have a little time yet. I shall report further in due course.

Then onto St. Lukes for a Schubert concert: Trio Movement in B-flat major (D28), Notturno in E-flat major and the Trout Quintet (D667), the trio being supported by Rachel Roberts (viola) and Chi-chi Nwanoku (double bass) for this last. All good, very moving in parts; audience, not all of pensionable age by any means, enthusiastic.

Ms. Nwanoku (see http://www.chi-chinwanoku.com) was something of a surprise, not least because I have only very occasionally come across either African or South Asian people at classical concerts, never mind on the stage. Don't know why this should be so, but it has been. Notwithstanding, she has a tremendous stage presence and her playing was a credit to the Trout. Don't often hear a double bass, but I was reminded on this occasion of the drone of a bag pipe - with the double bass being a rather more sophisticated version. We get to hear another one the same time next week, so we shall see if the reminding persists.

For lunch, we finally made it to the 'Eagle' of pop goes the weasel fame, where we took one of their gastro lunches - two courses for £10 - in my case a light caesar salad followed by sausage and mash. Good ambience, food nicely presented and served, food adequate. Salad was overdressed to my taste and neither sausages nor mash were of the best. Perfectly good value but one might get better value from the regular rather than the budget menu. Obscure but entirely satisfactory bitter.

Thinking ahead to tea and the lack of thawed bread, bought a couple of Turkish flat breads from the Istanbul Supermarket, very cheap at 70p each. They were quite soft, possibly as a result of having been in a plastic for half a day, but they turned out to make spiffing toast. Open then up as if they were pitta bread, lightly toast on the white side and lightly butter. Excellent. Best white toast I have had for a while, making up for my belief that pop goes the weasel was translated as pawning my bowler hat turning out to be untrue. Or in the rather deflating words of http://www.phrases.org.uk, 'there's no real evidence to suggest that 'Pop goes the weasel' was anything other than the nonsense name of a dance or that the meaning of 'pop' and 'weasel' merit any further investigation'. I shall have to dig deeper and see if I can find support for my theory. Must have come from somewhere.

Managed to get home without going to Surbiton.

Rites of winter

A new toy for middle aged men who fancy driving a fancy machine at weekends. During the week used for clearing ice on the Rideau River in Ottawa. Is the idea that the black jobs on each side stop the machine from turning over while the spiky thing on the front bashes the ice about? Or perhaps they are paddles?

Or, if you don't fancy one of these or don't have access to suitable ice, you can have get a top of the range snow blower for $(CAD)185,000. The only snag being that there is a tricky legal problem being chewed over by the Federal Buying Lawyers Cooperative (FBLC): is it fair to specify a component in a public procurement tender document for snow blowers knowing that only some of the suppliers of snow blowers fit a component - a maintenance free, sealed clutch - of this particular type? A snag that should keep FBLC in tea and biscuits for months, if not years, to come.

PS: I feel the urge to mention that I was once given lunch in the Rideau Club (see http://www.rideauclub.ca/), an establishment named for the river in question. Appropriately, on a public procurement driven visit to town.

Rites of spring

Horton Lane clockwise yesterday, the first time for a few days, to be rewarded by getting up close and personal with a small white egret on Longmead Road. It was just hopping out of the stream and I wondered whether it was the same one spotted on 28th November last: do such birds migrate? Do they return to the same spot each year? Is the Longmead its winter home and it is about to fly off to the far north?

Back home to notice activity in the top of the ash tree over the hedge at the back of our garden. An ash tree with a large nest at the very top, a large nest in which I have seen magpies in weeks past. But on this occasion crow one was sitting in the nest and crow two was systematically chasing a magpie out of the tree. The magpie was not keen to go and was only retreating a branch at a time, but crow two was determined and eventually the magpie chucked in the towel. We now await baby crows.

After that it was clearly my turn and I decided to do something about the water lily in the small pond under the small oak tree, the lily the leaves of which are growing too big. Furthermore, the whole plant has become bouyant and it, together with its roots and pot have floated to the surface. Only just bouyant but that is enough - but why? Is the rhizome bouyant and as it grows it eventually overcomes the weight of the rest of the plant and its pot? Whatever the reason, entirely unsatisfactory; one does not get a pretty water lily from a floating rhizome. One gets a right mess.

Heaved the thing out of the pond, dripping with all kinds of gunk (just as well it was cool and so not as stinky as it might otherwise have been) to find that the plant and its roots had completely smothered the holey (by design) plastic pot, so putting a few stones into the top of the pot to weigh it down was not an option. Decided that the way forward was one of the blocks of fake stonework which used to edge a neighbouring flower bed. Blocks made out of some hard yellow, cement based stuff, tricked out on one face to look like stone work. Found one which was maybe 15 inches by 5 inches by 2 inches. Found some 2mm gauge new-to-me mild steel wire (from Exminster) and used it to tie the plant to the block, more or less the right way up, and dropped the whole back into the pond, now very murky. It sank, as intended, and after a while a newt popped up, presumably disturbed from its winter slumbers in the slime. Hopefully he or she will survive. Hopefully I have not damaged the crown of the rhizome too much and it is still pointing vaguely up. Hopefully also the crown is in the middle of the pond so that the leaves to come will float in the middle of the pond. The plant is not which means that we are in with a chance.

We shall see. In the meantime I wonder how nature handles this problem in the wild. What stops the rhizome of a wild lily floating to the surface? It is not as if the roots curl around things, they are fleshy and straight. Perhaps it is just a matter of luck. Some rhizomes stay down, lodged under a dead root or a stone, and prosper. Others float, drift away and get lost somewhere in the shallows where they are overcome by reeds.

Its that Earnest time again

Off to Epsom Playhouse last night to see a touring version of 'The Importance of Being Earnest', a play which we seem to have last seen at the Rose at Kingston on or about by birthday in 2011 - see September 29th in the other place.

As it turned out, the experience was similar, a little flat and tired, the play needed a bit more sparkle and brio than it got. There were differences though. This production made much more of a feature of the butler, with the same person doing the town butler and the country butler, a nice trick but a little overdone and not quite pulled off. It also made a game of people being of very different heights. But it made much less of a feature of smoking, with none on stage on this second occasion; perhaps the luvvy fad of indulging their stage smoking privileges for all they are worth is wearing off. The staging was much less elaborate, as befits a touring production, but they did well with not much more than a horseshoe arrangement of mixed chairs and the odd tea trolley. But I think that the more elaborate staging at the Rose does help to bring the thing to life; the rather thin dialog needs a bit of help.

We were impressed by the impressive schedule illustrated, a not very orderly progression around the four kingdoms. I suppose the agents just have to do the best they can, with the result that the cast have a punishing first half of 2013. Do they still stay in theatrical digs? Do they still stay up half the night drinking, smoking and carrying on with each others' partners after the show?

On their travels, the cast will get to see the Hirst monstress at Ilfracombe (see, for example, August 30th 2012) when they play the Landmark Theatre there. Then there is the oddly named Wyllyotts Theatre of Potters Bar, the railway station where I had the misfortune to drop my toolbox. A misfortune which the rather heavy box (of my own construction) survived, albeit a bit dented, with the dents being visible to this day. A station also notable for my having cycled there after work at Watford one day, consuming a giant Mars Bar, or perhaps two regular Mars Bars, to keep me going on the way. I remember that I was almost overcome by the sugar hit and have not attempted such a thing since. I may possibly not have consumed any Mars Bars since, certainly not recently anyway, our favoured snack of that sort being the heritage version of the Bounty Bar.

Returning to the odd name, Professor Google turns up a Richard Wyllyot with the claim to fame that the inventory made on his death in 1559 has survived at http://www.winslow-history.org.uk/, where we can read about his various carpets, candlesticks and ploughs. But Winslow is a long way from Potters bar so I am left wondering what the connection is? It seems probable that I have got the right Wyllyot.

The martyrdom of SS Perpetua & Felicitas

SS Perpetua & Felicitas were nursing mothers who were put to death in the Carthage Amphitheatre back in 203CE, getting on for 2,000 years ago. As with S Margaret Clitheroe (see July 20th 2011 in the other place), I find it very strange indeed that apparently healthy young women would choose to suffer in this way for love of their Lord Jesus. I know that such things were still happening as recently as 500 years ago, but I can't imagine it happening now. I also imagine that denying the Lord under mortal threat is not even counted a mortal sin any more.

A particularly unusual aspect of this particular martyrdom is that S Perpetua left a short account of her time in prison immediately before her execution, an account which consists in large part of an account of a strange dream. Her account was embedded in a rather larger account by a contempory and the whole has come down to us, to be chewed over by generations of ecclesiastical and classical historians. The only thing of its kind extant; there is nothing else like it.

A translation of the text itself can be had from http://www.pbs.org and a rather lurid adaptation can be had from http://www.catholicheroesofthefaith.com/. Now, for their pains, SS Perpetua & Felicitas are further celebrated by 1,088 pages from the Oxford University Press, in two books, coming in at around 10p the page. The review in a recent TLS does nothing to address what I found strange, but rather offers an account and interpretation of the dream. I don't think that I will be buying the books, not unless I come across them at an advantageous price in some remainder shop.

But I did do a bit of browsing and found out that deaths of this sort in Carthage were indeed barbarous. It would be bad enough to have a lion jump on your back and bite through your neck, more or less in one go, rather as if you were a wildebeest. But it seems that the Carthaginians got rather more for their money, with the martyrs being knocked about by a series of wild animals before having their throats cut by a gladiator. And this is what SS Perpetua & Felicitas signed up for: they did what they did knowing the law and they paid the penalty prescribed. Bit of a puzzle how you can have a non-fatal encounter with a leopard in such circumstances, but perhaps all would become clear if one bought the DVD of the adaptation mentioned above.

At least Margaret Clitheroe was executed more or less in private, under the supervision of the authorities - although the actual dirty work was subcontracted to tramps and such like. I imagine most people looked the other way.

St Lawrence

Yesterday to the Wigmore Hall to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet play Haydn Op. 71 No. 2 and Beethoven Op. 59 No. 3. Very good they were too, playing with engaging verve, even if the first violin did sometimes look as if he thought the rest of the quartet only existed to provide his entries and a bit of background. He also wore a tie with a rather seventies air about it, for which he looked a little young.

The quartet is also one of the few where first and second violin take turn and turn about, a proceeding which some believe is all wrong with some people being born first violinists and some people being born second violinists. I don't think I would go any further than it all depends.

My mother being Canadian, I did once sail up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, where, amongst other things, we were taken to see the St. Lawrence Seaway, which I recall at that time to be a rather new and impressive feat of engineering.

Home to dig further into the same issue of the NYRB noticed yesterday, to read all about the great lead scandal. I learn that lead in domestic paint was known to be a serious hazard as long ago as the 1920's, at which time most proper countries in Europe (the UK not being among those mentioned - while Tunisia of all places is) made the sale of the stuff illegal, but in the land of the free, sale was not made illegal until the late 70's.

It seems that the lead industry in the US fought a strong campaign to keep the health, safety and other busy people at bay, perhaps teaching the tobacco people a thing or two along the way. While according to the reviewer in the NYRB, only a small exposure to lead paint as a child is needed to cause a significant fall in IQ, and given the widespread use of lead paint until quite recently, the overall effect was probably significantly lower average IQ across the country than there should be. More dumb people than there should be. With the average disguising the fact that most of the offending paint is in what are now slums and most of the people who live in them are black. The Black Panthers knew all about it back in the sixties, but their approach to this particular problem did not, sadly for their children, result in effective action.

Not to mention all the other evil things that exposure to lead paint can do, some of them fatal.

Numbers are said to be large, with 30 million houses still having some lead paint in them, often on windows, presumably expensive to strip or replace, more so than other parts of a house. According to the reviewer, the large costs of doing something about all these houses would easily be recovered by the health gains accruing. The sort of big infrastructure project ($33 billion's worth) which might help a struggling economy along - but she holds out little hope of action any time soon.

Vulgarity

Yesterday's lonicera pileata brought to mind, and lovers of Švejk will recall, the splendid story about the editor of 'Animal World' and his difficulties with garrulus glandarius (around page 327 of the Heinemann edition of 1973). Hitherto I had thought that the sort of invective deployed here between respected  students of avian life was restricted to the pages of fiction but this week I find its equal in the letters pages of the NYRB.

A short while ago the NYRB published a review of 'The Untold History of the United States', the book and television series by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, not particularly for or against. The main charge against appeared to be that it was no more than a rehash of familiar lefty stuff about how the US started the cold war. Plus there was a lot of material about how things would not have turned out much better had one Wallace (of whom I had not previously heard) become president after FDR, rather than Truman.

Then in the latest issue to reach me there is a bad tempered exchange in the letters page. The reviewed bat first and open with 'In his error-riddled review ...' and then going on to talk about the reviewer's ignorant trumpeting and about the reviewer's talk of Obama's outrageous deployment of racial politics. One presumes that this is a fairly outrageous talk by the reviewer. Then the reviewer 'can be forgiven for getting so much wrong' as the aftermath of the second world war is not his period. 'However ...' and so it goes merrily on. The reviewer writes in his reply that the reviewed 'display the same degree of intellectual integrity and historical accuracy as their disgraceful book and television show.' Then '... their shifty reply [to my review] , compounding their initial distortions ...'. And 'Stone and Kuznick's mangled accounts ...'.

In very broad terms, lefties versus righties, with the NYRB generally being aligned with the lefties, rather as the similarly named LRB. A simple analysis, slightly complicated by the reviewer being a big fan of the Clintons and a big enemy of the Bushes.

On a point of substance, Stone and Kuznick believe that the two-time atomic bombing of Japan was wrong. I might be a long serving ban the bomber (near fifty years now), but I am not sure that they are right about this. And even if the decision to bomb can be argued to be wrong with hindsight, I would still need to be convinced that the perpetrators did not make a reasonable decision on the day.

By way of contrast, in the much shorter exchange which follows, Oliver Sacks is a model of academic courtesy, despite being caught out. But I like the spirit which animates these exchanges in the letters pages following reviews; you get the same sort of thing in the TLS, but in a rather muted form. Perhaps the TLS stands aloof from such grubby goings on - all far too brash and transpondic (transpondine?) - and does not stoop to encouragement.

Compost bin

I am beginning to think that we own the most coddled compost bin in this part of Epsom.

Following, for example the activities recorded on 20th July 2009 and 14th October 2010 in the other place, I decided yesterday to do something proper about the lonicera pileata starting to get in the way of putting compost in the compost bin. I had tried holding it up with a length of old washing line but this was both unsatisfactory and unsightly.

Yesterday's efforts go some way to addressing both defects. One four feet post of four by two and one three feet, both possibly from stud work from a partition wall. One cross beam of three by two, that rounded edge green treated stuff that today's timber yards are so keen on. Cross beam held onto posts by a couple of six inch nails from north London, drilled rather than nailed in for ease of maintenance. We now have an embryo compost arbour, with the lonicera growing over the cross beam in summers to come, for occasional trimming. Notice the relic of washing line acting as a stay for the left hand post.

It took a little while to find out what the bush I am calling lonicera was called and I still don't have a common name. I tried Google, who turned out to be weak on bush identification and I was unable to find the sort of decision tree needed for such a task, only turning up the very inferior substitutes being offered by people who sell plants. RHS site unhelpful, not even up to the poor standard of bird identification on the RSPB site. Couldn't spot anything likely in our bush book by Dr. Hessayon, so we were reduced to going to Chessington Garden Centre, the place which does the fine Christmas Grotto (see 30th December last). It turns out that, at this time of year at least, they have a fine display of shrubs, bushes and trees, including quite a lot of exotics likes palms and olives, not to mention the odd araucaria. I also lighted upon a member of staff who knew all about plants and who was able to tell me that there were three bushes along the general lines of the sample we had taken in, members of the box, holly and honeysuckle families, incidentally a fine example of convergent evolution. Our sample was a honeysuckle and the Garden Centre offered half a dozen or more honeysuckle bushes, none of them, as it happened, being our particular one. The staffer also observed that our particular one was often called box in error, an error into which I used to fall until I got to know boxes better at Box Hill. But armed with the family name for honeysuckles, Google was able to do the business and we now find that the bush growing over the compost bin is actually lonicera pileata.

We paid our way by buying a few plants to bring on against the summer.

A foodie in Topsham

The first task was to secure bread supplies and we found that there were two options at our end of town. On the right we had a branch of a small chain of bakers with the bread being baked in a shed at Exeter Airport and with the branch probably making more out of snacks than bread. Bread not great. And on the left we had a place which called itself a 'deli' but was actually a small shop selling snacks, a variety of cakes and tarts of their own confection and a variety of bread bought in from another wholesale baker, probably the Teign Valley Bakery. This bread was much better. Interesting how in Devon we find two middle sized commercial bakers but no artisan bakers; one can only suppose that the margins in artisan baking are too small to make a living, even in a foodie place like Topsham. One has to do bread as a side line in a snack bar instead. While in Epsom we have one snack baker making and selling bread (up north variety) which I do not care for and the only middle size commercial bakery we have access to is an Italian baker through Alio's, most of the market having been eaten up by the so-called in store bakeries, the bakeries which take a lot of their stuff in half cooked and optionally frozen.

Next task was cheese supplies and here we were well served by a specialist cheese shop. On the day I visited it was carrying perhaps 40 cheeses, a lot of which were local and all of which were English. None of this foreign stuff here thank you. I settled for three hard yellow cheeses, one of which was a cheddar (Montgomery) and all of which were very good. Not particularly dear either - must have been a lot cheaper than Rippon Cheese in Pimlico - although these last have the excuse of a much bigger range and much higher business rates. The cheese was topped up with a small cube of artisan butter, that is to say butter which did not look as if it had been cut and wrapped by a machine and which probably came from a dairy in Devon. Still eating the butter, which is fine, although while I have not tested whether I can distinguish it from the higher grade butter we usually have from Sainsburys, I rather doubt it.

Third and last task was the booze. So off to the local offy where I selected a bottle of 2001 Chateau Musar from Gaston Hochar, that well known grower from the Bekaa Valley in the Lebanon. You don't want that said the chap behind the jump - the proprietor I should imagine - dreadful stuff. Can't stand it although some people seem to think it is great. Buy it at your peril! Which I thought was rather an odd line to take, but intrigued I bought a bottle and we got around to drinking it yesterday evening. We decided that what we had previously thought of as a rather pretentious epithet - amusing - was actually right on this occasion. Not a fancy wine, but we liked it. It was, indeed, amusing. The offy also sold a small selection of decent looking cigars and I strongly suspect the imagined proprietor of being a puffer himself.

Despite checking with Professor Google I am not much the wiser about Gaston. Easy enough to buy the what I bought at Topsham online, for, as it happens, much the same price, but all I have learned about Gaston is that he, or his forbears, have been doing it since around 1930 using a variety of grape of which I have never heard before.

The importance of being thick

BH took on the cooking of yesterday's oxtail, with water, onion and carrot being the only ingredients apart from the tail. Simmered for about two hours, left in the cooling water. Maybe two tablespoons of fat taken off in the morning. Reheated, a very thin stock but a very satisfactory stew, with the oxtail itself spot on. Served with boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage.

I then take over to make soup out of what was left of the stock, maybe a litre of the stuff. Pass it and a sprinkling of carrot and onion, plus three or four modest chunks of potato through the blender and was surprised at how thick the product was. Does the fat still in the stock combine with the starch in the potato in some complicated way? About an hour and a half before consumption added 3 ounces of pearl barley and put on a very low heat. Brought to the boil around three quarters of an hour before consumption and simmered for the remainder of the time. Soup now surprisingly thick given the watery start and the modest additions. Very good it was too. Taken with own brown bread in my own case, while BH took hers with Vogel's soya and linseed, ready made and ready sliced.

But be warned: oxtail is not cheap. The oxtail for two meals and two snacks weighed in at around £8.50, the price of two fish suppers at the Pound Lane chipper.

High Finance

I read somewhere recently that hedge funds buy things up, load them with debt and then do a runner from the failed shell. I have been trying to puzzle out what this might mean.

So I am a hedge fund acting on behalf of some oil or gas rich billionaire who is feeling a bit needy and needs to make some more millions. I spot a company (A) with a good business but sleepy management. I buy up all the shares, but I don't use many of the billionaire millions, a better wheeze being to borrow most of the money needed from the bank (or perhaps some other kind of sucker). I set up a shell company (B) which now owns A and to which all the new debt is assigned. While I own B. As owner of B which owns A, I can instruct A to service the debt incurred in buying A (which sounds a bit unfair, a bit circular, put like that. Doesn't Companies House have something to say about transactions of this sort? Where is nanny?). So A, instead of just paying discretionary dividends when times are good, is now locked into servicing the debt come rain or shine. My idea is that the sleepy management will now wake up and generate a lot more cash than they were, so they will not only be able to service the debt but will also generate a surplus for me and my billionaire. However, they don't quite manage to pull it off and come heavy rain company A goes bust as it can't service the debt and the banks have called it in.

According to this scenario, the original shareholders are OK, they have got their dosh. The banks are not OK as they have got a lot of bad debt. The company and all its stakeholders are not OK as they no longer have anything into which to stick a stake. So we need another winner to balance the books, presumably me as Mr. Hedge Fund. But how have I pulled the trick off?

There seems to be something missing here. More thought needed.

In the meantime I am reminded about the asset strippers of the sixties of the last century. People like Slater Walker (the Walker who subsequently became a cabinet minister (under Mrs. Thatcher) and privy councillor) made a good living out of spotting companies which were sitting on realisable assets worth far more than the dividends being paid. So you buy the company up, close it down, sell the assets and Bob's your uncle. Trouser the dosh. Avert eyes from all the people chucked out of gainful employment.

They were playing a bit rough - but they did have a point. The company was not making good use of its resources. Rather as on a smaller scale, many small companies in the provinces sat on parcels of land and buildings the value of which had grown out of all proportion to the value of their businesses. Proprietors hanging on for reasons of sentiment until their sons and heirs sold up and moved to sunny Spain.

St. Luke's

Back to St. Luke's yesterday after what turns out to be getting on for 18 months, the last recorded visit proper seeming to be November 18th 2011 (in the other place). It is true that I paid a visit to the area in February and October of last year but did not actually get inside St. Luke's on either occasion.

Having got myself to Waterloo, took the last remaining Bullingdon from the stand at Waterloo Roundabout for a 21 minute journey to Finsbury Leisure Centre, the stand on Clerkenwell Road being full. The Bullingdon worked, but did not feel quite right, feeling as if a brake was not clearing the rim when it was off, this working despite my forgetting to take my helmet with me. The first mistake of this day (see Wednesday). The second was not leaving enough time for the now traditional bacon sandwich in Whitecross Street (not to be confused with http://www.whitecrossstreet.co.uk/), the result of which was that I had to settle for bread and cheese, the consolation being that it was a rather successful loaf of my own confection.

The concert was given by a trio who turned out to be rather good - the Vienna Piano Trio. I liked both their sound and their stage manners, neither flamboyant nor noisy but effective. They gave us the Mozart Piano Trio in G major, the Fuchs Tox and the Dvořák Piano Trio No. 2 in G minor. Mozart good although I was rather disconcerted to read afterwards that it was written when he was all of 8 years old, an age when I was still learning to read, never mind writing down music of my own invention. The Fuchs was interesting and necessitated some fiddling around in the insides of the Steinway, probably thereby invalidating the warranty, but I was left thinking that Herr Fuchs ought to be able to make a lot of money writing atmosphere music for horror movies, a context in which the movie carries the music along and it does not need to carry itself along. Dvořák good. A pity that I have neither the Mozart nor the Dvořák at home for a reprise.

Took a little refreshment in the neighbourhood Wetherspoons and then took the tube to Stockwell, thence to  Vauxhall. At which point the mistakes started again. It all looked promising enough with a train to Guildford due in a few minutes, following a train to Hampton Court. I had thought it likely that the Guildford train went to Surbiton rather than Epsom, but checking, found that I had been mistaken - but at least this was a benign mistake. I was so pleased with myself that I then managed to make a malign mistake and get on the first train rather than the second. Shortly thereafter, I was so busy reading the latest news in the Guardian that I made my next mistake, failing to notice that we were at the wrong platform at Raynes Park, the last place at which I could easily recover myself. So I got to go to Surbiton after all, from where I needed to get a taxi to get home in time for my next appointment with the District Nurse. A taxi in which I made my last mistake of the day, getting into a muddle about the nature of the junction of Victoria Road and Brighton Road, a junction which I have cycled through on many occasions. For a few seconds I was completely convinced that there should have been traffic lights there, traffic lights which were in fact missing. The taxi driver put me right and so on home, sufficiently put out to pass up the opportunity to revisit TB.

Attraction

We were entertained on our recent visit to Topsham by a Thames barge being restored in one of the docks - Topsham having been a quite serious boat building town until fairly recently.

We were told that this particular barge had been motored around from Essex under its own steam, although to judge by the frames now visible, hard to see how the thing was coast worthy never mind sea worthy. Also told that the barge cost the present owner around £8,000, caveat emptor naturally.

Barge now firmly aground on the Topsham mud. Rudder, main mast and top mast all present. Top mast lowered. Mizzen mast absent. Lee board absent, although the reinforced mounting hole on the starboard side was visible. From which we deduce that the steerboard and leeboard were mounted on the same side in the case that a boat had both. But why is it called a leeboard? I have always thought that a barge had just one but did it have two, lowering the one on the lee side and raising that on the weather side - which would have made tacking a bit of a palaver, but something that you would have to do when navigating in a river. Rigging mostly absent. Deck and cargo hatch present, although somewhat stressed.

Hull present, although also somewhat stressed.  A good part of the starboard planking had been stripped and the exposed frames, some of which were in poor condition, were being reinforced or replaced. Some of the planking had been replaced. Replacement from timber taken from the oak trees which had been delivered to the dockside, sawn up in-situ and stacked in the old way. Our informant alleged that locals declined to bid against the barge when the trees were auctioned once they knew about the barge, deemed to be a good cause. Don't know whether the trees were auctioned upright or horizontal, but I rather like the idea of the auctioneer tramping about damp fields followed by a motley crew of tree dealers, auctioning off the standing trees.

Presumably the plan is to get the barge back into sailing trim and then to take people for rides on it. But I imagine it will remain an expensive hobby even with rides. £100,000 to get the thing into trim? Then 10% a year to keep it in trim? About the same price as a small roller.

Our plan is to try to remember to visit the thing from time to time to see how it gets on.

And if you want to know more, the barge has an extensive web presence, although not, as far as I could see, its own web site. Maybe the owner ought to get the nipper onto the case.

PS 1: the DT clearly agrees about the importance of this attraction to the wealth and health of Topsham, giving it a mention on a recent property page. Or perhaps a holiday destination page.

PS 2: picture taken from Wikipedia on lee boards. The right sort of barge if not the barge in question.

Groaning Grauniad

Simon Jenkins is a columnist (as well has being chief trusty for the National Trust) whose pieces I usually like, that is to say they usually pander to pre-existing views.

Today however, for the second time, he devotes his column to the plight of the Huhne-Pryce's, his strongly held view being that the whole sorry saga is out of all proportion to the offence, that their treatment is unjust and that the acres of drooling coverage reflect poorly on all of us. He closes with the observation that given that neither did well in their public offices, failings for which we cannot punish them in the regular way, so perhaps we have done the best we can, busting them for the best charge to hand. For once I mostly disagree.

My line is that the first offence of speeding was minor. The second offence of passing the points on was rather less minor, and usually undetected. As Jenkins says, hundreds of thousands of us get away with it every year. But it is precisely because we have to trust people in this matter, that breach of that trust has to be taken seriously on the rare occasions when it comes to light. False declarations on important government forms - declaring, for example, that one is a spinster on a certificate of marriage when one is not - are in the same sort of space. And then, the third offence of continuing to deny the second offence when you have been caught out is even less minor, serious even. Pleading guilty at the eleventh hour not much of an improvement and pleading not guilty before a jury on some ancient matrimonial defense not very clever at all. Have these people never heard of equal opportunities or sex discrimination? Did they never read the Guardian?

So as far as I am concerned, exemplary punishment is what they deserve and exemplary punishment is what they got. On the second point, I agree that the drooling coverage is not very seemly, but entirely normal. Public figures have always been fair game for this sort of thing and one might argue that it is a 'if you don't like the heat get out of the kitchen' sort of issue. On the other hand, it might also be that too many decent people don't care to work in hot kitchens, a loss to us all. On the third point, I don't think that the lacklustre performance of the Huhne-Pryce's in office had anything to do with it all. What makes their crimes interesting is the fact that they were in office, not how they did there. Furthermore, if we start sticking public people in the stocks because we disagree with them or because they have made a mistake, our public life will become even worse than it is now.

And what is more, I have my problems too because today seems to be the day for making mistakes. So, for example, I chose to make lentil stew for lunch, the one involving bacon and cabanos. Mistake 1, used the every day value bacon from Tesco which I found in the road a couple of weeks ago (see 14th February). Not a very nice flavour at all, despite the bacon having been in the fridge in the interval. Mistake 2, turned the wrong hot plate up to high and singed the stew. Mistake 3, failed to realise that the singe was serious and tried to stir it in, resulting in a yellowish stew with black speckles. I should have decanted to a clean saucepan the moment I clocked the singe. And that's just lunch.

RAMM

We paid our first visit to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Gallery (http://www.rammuseum.org.uk/) last week, the first for many years and certainly the first since its extensive refurbishment. A refurbishment which has struck a generally good balance between the Victorian museum it once was and the sort of museum which people might visit today - a good balance considering that it was also teetering on the uncomfortable edge of the precipice of being a museum about museums, rather than a museum about shells, birds, aboriginals and all the rest of it. The second time I have come across such a thing, the first being the Enlightenment Room at the British Museum (see March 6th 2012 at the other place). The British Museum pulled the trick off rather better, the Enlightenment Room only being a couple of large rooms among a lot of other large rooms, other rooms which had retained the traditional museum format: I guess they have size and money going for them. That said, the refurbishment at Exeter must have cost a lot more than Exeter City Council could have afforded; they had clearly tapped central funds. Perhaps Lottery Funds, those funds mainly drawn from the pockets of the lower orders to pay for the entertainments of the higher orders, or so it sometimes seems.

One got the impression that the museum is only displaying a small fraction of all the fascinating stuff that they have got, a rather smaller fraction than was the case before. Not clear where all the space has gone. So the once proud collections of stuffed birds and of small sea animals were represented by remnants. But I was interested by the old-style display of small sea animals that there was - shells, starfish and the like - presumably the work of one of the many Victorian naturalists who paved the way for Darwin - in part because I had recently picked up a couple of second hand nature books, one of which was by a Victorian biologist all about the evolution of the hand, evolution which I suspect he is going to claim as evidence of a divine hand in the erection of all these natural wonders. But more of that on another occasion. Meantime, I am impressed by the amount of time that these people must have given to nature: they knew their bit of it in a way not now given to many of us; tasteful moving pictures of lions smashing into a herd of wildebeest with voice of attabore over not being quite the same thing.

Artefacts which were both interesting and impressive from around what used to be our empire. A surprisingly small collection of pictures: places of this sort usually have more. But there was a nice water colour of the Turf Hotel, a useful terminal for a walk from Exminster. And one of our number was pleased to find that Gerald the Giraffe was still present and correct, even if he had been moved out of his proper home, now a café. A fond memory from childhood.

I was pleased with the attempt to display the geological history of Devon, a display illustrated by a nice range of geological specimens, but which they only partly pulled off. Also a display which included a large screen - actually four screens, maybe 12 feet by 3 feet overall - which displayed a reconstruction of that history. A valiant attempt, but I didn't think they had got it quite right; maybe version 2 will be better. My advice, for what it might be worth, would be to try to make more of the pictures of the globe showing the place of Devon in the evolution of the continents. Maybe one could turn that evolution into a short cartoon film showing the continents, Devon highlighted, on the move. Maybe small pop-up windows overlaying some of the main window and containing pictures of relevant bits of Devon now, probably mainly coastal cliffs and such like. Hopefully beauty spots which visitors are going to know and love. Maybe some sections showing the sequences of strata. But for all that I guess they would need an imaginative sponsor with a long pocket.

All in all a much happier place than Ipswich Museum, a place which might once have been in much the same league, but which looked a bit tired and short of money when we visited it a couple of years ago. See September 23rd 2010. Let's hope that Ipswich has managed to tap some central funds since then.

PS: an added bit of fun was going by train, more or less door to door. They still have local trains with two carriages in this part of the world, local trains which offer an entirely satisfactory half hour service through the day. And we found that Exeter Central was not quite the den of iniquity it used to be.

Jigsaw 10, Series 2

My first jigsaw from an outfit called 'Puzzle World', 500 pieces of quality heritage at £2.99 from the Epsom branch of 'The Works', an outfit which I gather started out up north and is now franchised all over the UK. For me, a useful occasional source of quality books and jigsaws at quality prices.

Not sure about 'Puzzle World; though. The box is completely uninformative about who they might be, only going so far as to say that the jigsaw was imported by 'The Works' into their Sutton Coalfield hub. Even Professor Google fails on this occasion: he comes up with 92 million hits in a third of a second, but nothing on the first couple of pages looks right.

The puzzle was a bit different from my usual. The pieces were cut from thick, quality cardboard, but in such a way that you were not always sure whether you had a fit or not. All the interior pieces were of prong-hole-prong-hole formation. All very much of a size and no exotics. Four pieces always met at a corner. But after a while one tuned into the subtle variations of prong shape, orientation and position, important when I came to the swathe of unhelpfully clouded sky. Strong colour and content coding in the rest of the image so one could get on, not needing to wait to be tuned in. Apart from the sky, one almost always knew which way up a piece went, something one could not say when doing, for example, the fabric part of a quattrocento annunciation.

Started with the edge in the usual way. Then the sky line. Then most of the Victoria Memorial on the left. Then the railing line, spreading out into the people and the top line of red tulips. Then the bed of strong yellows (tulips). So far a very horizontal puzzle, working with the strong horizontals of the image.

Then the palace itself, again working horizontally on the various layers. Then the bottom line of red tulips, then pushing down into the pale yellows (daffodils).

Lastly, ground through the sky. The handholds afforded by the subtle variations mentioned above mostly enough, only have to resort to trial and error occasionally. Plus, I admit to a very modest amount of sorting. There were also a couple of errors, luckily of a one piece variety, soon sorted out.

A more interesting puzzle than I had first thought. Some evidence of the sort of interaction between unconscious and conscious processing discussed by Koch (see 10th February). For example, the hand moving to place a piece in the right place before the conscious part of the brain had signaled that it had found the right piece for that right place.

NHS

Just back from my second visit to an endoscopy unit, this one at Epsom Hospital. The first was at Frimley Park Hospital and was noticed on February 16th 2012 at the other place.

I should like to record that both places are a credit to the NHS. The staff were all very kind and supportive and Epsom had the added advantage of a recent refurbishment - to the extent of there being a phone in one of the holding rooms on which I was able to leave BH an important message about where to find the keys needed to access the freezer when she came back from Tesco's. Both places managed to get me through what can be an anxious and uncomfortable time with remarkably little of either.

While at Epsom Hospital today, I had the time to examine the large pot plant in the discharge waiting room; a very plant like affair standing maybe four feet high in its plant pot. Quite handsome looking and something to rest the eyes on if you did not fancy the house makeover program offered by the telly. The trick seems to be to have real woody stems, complete with enough knobbly bits to trick the brain into thinking that the whole thing is real, into which you stick plastic leafy branches, the thick leaves of warm country evergreens being a lot easier to fake that the knobbly bits of the stems or the usually thin and fragile leaves of our own deciduous trees and bushes. The only giveaway was the fact that some of the leafy branches had been stuck all the way through the woody stems, with the pointy bit sticking out the other side; otherwise I might have been wondering about fake or not fake for a little longer than I in fact was. All in all a rather fancy version of a plastic Christmas tree, the one we had for many years being made in much the same way, albeit with a plastic but largely invisible trunk.

One wonders how the things get cleaned? Do you just stand them outside in the rain for a bit or do you mist them with dilute detergent? Does the hospital employ a indoor garden contractor to look after them? I remember that in one of the buildings in which I used to work back in the early eighties, the pot plants which broke up the open plan areas were looked after by a contractor at so much a foot a month. I don't think plastic was as good then as it is now and the plants actually were plants which needed watering. Maybe even a bit of TLC from time to time.

Porn

I read of two porn attacks in Saturday's DT.

The first concerned a councillor in Cambridgeshire. His story was that he was innocently browsing away on Google at home, using his shiny new council laptop. When all of a sudden all this porn got downloaded. So at the first opportunity, he took the laptop back to the council IT people to find out what was going on. Following standing orders about porned laptops, the IT people reported him to the HR people, who followed their standing orders and got into a lather. The Chief Executive went so far as to suggest that the offending councillor ought to resign. In the end, he was cleared, but he has lost rank in the council pecking order.

All of which strikes me as a bit OTT. Either he was not guilty of the charge and the HR people could have let it go at that. Or he had been peeking at a bit of porn, got the guilts and cooked up this story for the IT people. But is that really so awful? There is an awful lot of porn out there and an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time looking at it. So he was a bit dumb to have used his work laptop for such a purpose, but scarcely a mortal sin. I might also add that in my very limited knowledge of such matters, the sort of porn that young adult males might gloat over while waiting for a girl friend to turn up seems to have got a lot more tacky over the past 50 years or so. Maybe the young males of today need a lot more stimulation to get them going? I blame all those E-numbers in everything we eat.

The second concerned the European Parliament which is considering banning porn throughout the European Community, rather in the way that they banned smoking and are thinking about banning fatness. Is it all a conspiracy to occupy the European Parliament with worthy causes of the kind about which everyone can have an opinion, sufficiently occupied that they have no time to worry about real policy? Like policy about banks & bankers, the decline of manufacturing or aging populations. Is it all a conspiracy to make large quantities of hay for the legal and enforcement professions? Is it all a conspiracy to put in place the sort of machinery needed for serious political censorship of internet content? The sort of thing that we complain about very noisily when other governments do it.

Snowdrops

The snowdrops were absolutely spot on at Herald Copse in Nonsuch Park today. Snowdrops full on, crocuses and daffodils not far behind. Worth another visit next week, although it is also time that we checked out the wilderness at Hampton Court.

Refreshed with toasted muffins in the park café. Something we have only had once in the recent past, on which occasion I recall them being disappointing. Today they were good.

On the way we noticed that the expensive model of the former palace is now on permanent if infrequent display at the current palace. See October 15th, 2011  in the other place. So it remains a mystery who stumped up the tens of thousands of pounds and for what. Just a bit of fun?

But one can do some sums. They are mostly open on Sundays and charge £2.50. Suppose they have forty visitors on an average Sunday and take £100. This would make around £5,000 in a year, quite a decent return on the original £40,000, providing one can neglect the costs of exhibition: equipping and staffing a room to take £100 a day would not work commercially. Is the take taxable? If the model is owned by some charity, does that make it exempt? Assuming that is that building expensive models for fun counts as a charitable purpose.

Last recorded visit to these snowdrops was on February 26th 2009. We must have been since, but maybe not so spot on. BH tells me that when it is warmer they only last for a week or so and it is quite easy to miss them.

Dalek attack!

I am a moderate and moderately incompetent user of Facebook. So I am not sure whether I ever created an account for BH, memory not that good, although good enough to know that if it does exist, it is not active.

But BH's email account is accessible even it is inactive, at least as far as she is concerned. But it is active because it takes a steady stream of what appear to be friend requests in Italian from Italians we have never heard of. We presume that the possibility of Facebook friends only arises if one has a Facebook account, so off to Facebook, which admits to a user with the right sort of name and so off into the forgotten password routine where I find that the BH in question has an email account with Yahoo. Not guilty to the charge. But then how has Facebook gotten hold of BH's real email address?

In parallel with all this, I recently received what appeared to be an email from a friend and notwithstanding various warning signs about the thing, I rather stupidly clicked on the link supplied - 'http://www.lexingtonlasik.com/bhezk...ueqcwqg2r' - and after rather more clickings and whirrings than one would have expected got taken to a page which offered me lots of dosh from some undemanding and unskilled home activity on the PC. At this point I started to smell a rat and went to the site at the beginning of the link which turned out to be some kind of superior and entirely respectable looking optician in Lexington, Kentucky (see http://www.lexingtonlasik.com/). Has his online operation been compromised? Feeling busy I thought I ought to contact them, using the contact form helpfully included on their site. Will they respond? The National Gallery never got back to me on my complaint about the lopping of the pictures on their jigsaws. See 14th February.

Next stop was my fully up to date because direct debited Norton which told me of three medium grade attacks on my PC about the time that I opened the email. So I am assuming that Norton has done its stuff and that all is well, although I may get around to asking the BT help line about it. At least I am reasonably sure that the two episodes are unconnected; the timing is all wrong.

All of which does not encourage BH to brush up on her computer literacy.

Elephantine paving slabs

We paid one of what have become our rare visits to the Western Regional Capital this week (see, for example, April 14th, 2009 in the other place) and were pleased to find that the number, size and configuration of the traffic lights guarding the eastern exits were fully up to the standard expected of a regional capital.

Notwithstanding, we made it home in what for me is the record time of 3 hours and 25 minutes, this including a short break for coffee or tea according to taste.

The return trip was also notable for the unusually large number of bad tempered or aggressive drivers encountered, maybe as many as five. Not all young men. Perhaps it was the rain wot dun it.

During our visit (on which more to follow) we discovered that the regional capital also boasts unusual paving slabs, at least in Queen Street. Whacking great granite things of all shapes and sizes: it seems unlikely that the weights & measures people were ever allowed anywhere near their installation, never mind their colleagues from Brussels. One of the the stones must have been six feet by one foot, and maybe of a corresponding thickness. We wondered where the stones came from and where they were cut up. Were they Dartmoor granite? Were they shipped to Exeter as lumps and sawn up into manageable sizes on site? Did they come in on barges up the ship canal, to be hauled up the hill to Queen Street by a large gang of convicts, whipped on by local ne'er-do-wells?

An elephantine moan

Breakfast entertainment was provided today by a page heading piece in the Guardian about how awful the elephant situation was.

It seems that while there might be half a million of the beasts wandering around east Africa, smashing down farms, crops and trees both left and right, an unsustainable number are being taken out for their ivory, in gross contravention of some international convention regulating elephantine affairs. It seems also that the Mr. Bigs in this sorry affair are mostly to be found in Thailand or China. And, furthermore, Thailand is sufficiently backward to have legalised the ivory trade. I expect I will be reading next that one is still allowed to smoke in their girlie bars, with the girlies contracting goodness knows what occupational diseases in consequence.

First, this is yet another case of the developed world, having slaughtered all their large wild animals and felled all their forests, telling the undeveloped world what it ought to be doing with all their large wild animals and and all their forests. All a bit of a cheek really.

Second, why do we fuss so much about the fate of a few elephants when we slaughter untold numbers of cows, pigs, goats and sheep, not to mention a few horses, in the name of The Lord Pie. Why don't we erect yet another monument in Park Lane to all those sacrificed on his altar, rather than fussing about somebody else's animals in somebody else's part of the world?

Third, why do we fuss about the existential threat to the whole race of elephants, when millions and millions of other species have hit the buffers since they first escaped from Noah's Ark? Hitting the buffers is entirely natural, not to say organic, part of life on earth. Particularly for large animals, the average size of which has declined steadily since that first escape. How many brontosaurii do you see in Hyde Park?

Fourth, why don't we deal with the whole problem by legalisation, much the same arguments applying as in the case of recreational drugs? We could encourage the unemployed of east Africa to set up elephant farms for the production of ivory for the thriving markets in the far East. We could contribute by sharing our considerable quangertise, by advising on the setting up an OffQual(Ivory) to supervise the farms, keeping a beady eye both on the treatment of the elephants and the quality of the ivory. Perhaps the post of chairman or women of this office could be a modern version of the Chiltern Hundreds, a sinecure for politicians leaving our political scene. More seriously, perhaps the office could actually run the market in ivory, a sort of miniature version of the market in Chicago (http://www.cmegroup.com/) which worries about things like hogs and cows. No need to let the mid westerns get all the action.

In this way we would be safeguarding the future of the elephants, we would be creating much needed jobs in east Africa and we would be promoting a valuble export trade, both a source of foreign currency and a useful diversification. A useful by-product would be the large amount of first class protein available for conversion into east African pies.

PS: the only puzzle was why on the day that the Guardian should choose to highlight the scandalous state of the elephant, the main picture - a two page spread - should be of an elephant seal. Seals are not elephants however misleading the name might be.

A moan

Once upon a time knives were made out of a sort of steel which it was possible to sharpen in a satisfactoy way at the carving table.

Then they invented hollow ground and scallops, my first experience of this being on a bread knife. Vicious things when new and impossible to sharpen once they lost their edge. Never much good for close work with vegetables. Plus the built in obsolescence.

Now this week I have come across a one piece stainless steel knife from some cook shop which has hollow ground and scallops on just one edge out of the two available. The result of which is that the knife cuts very skew unless you hold it very firmly. Obvious when you come to think of it that a knife bevelled on just one side is not going to cut even, it is going to slide away. Perhaps take the end of a careless finger off.

Real pain. Perhaps I should write to the makers and complain.

Calling all shooters and bounty hunters

I read in yesterday's DT that our cash strapped government is to spend approximately £1,000 a head to kill approximately 5,000 badgers. Given that there is supposed to be a plague of the things in some parts of the country, I feel sure I can put together an enterprising team of poachers, gun nuts, lamplighters and such like prepared to do the job for a lot less than that.

I therefore propose to put together a cooperative with me in charge. I will pay members of the cooperative a flat fee (to be determined) for each badger's tail that they turn in. I will, in turn, recover the money from the government, including, as is only fair, a percentage to cover my time and expenses.

If I get a sufficiently encouraging response, I will take the next step and approach DEFRA. I don't see how, in the present climate, they can decently refuse such an offer. Unless, of course, it is all a misunderstanding and I and/or the DT have got it wrong.

PS: note that members of the cooperative will need to present online documentation of their address in or near one of the designated areas of cull, details of which are to be found at http://www.defra.gov.uk/.