Execution dock

Following the notices of 28th April 2010 and 5th April 2012 in the other place, and interest in matters woodland & coppicing  notwithstanding, the regenerating chestnut tree has now been convicted of, and executed for, gross proximity to the compost heap. An experiment which needs to be conducted in a field rather than a suburban garden.

Haircut, as is proper in the better circles, preceded execution.

I note in passing that the trunk, which had been reported as two inches, and does indeed look to be about two in its portrait, now seems to be between three and four, an unlikely amount of growth in the period in the circumstances. But the camera never lies, so I suppose it must have done it.

Hagenned

To the Wigmore on Tuesday to hear the Hagen Quartet again, the first time, it turns out, for getting on for three years (see November 1st 2010 in the other place. My comments on that occasion stand the test of time well). The draw on this occasion was Beethoven's early quartet 18.4, which I have been fond of for some years, say between 5 and 10 years. Inspection of both this and the other place reveals that we have heard it on a number of occasions but which does not reveal the start of the interest. Which included, for example, a trip to a church in Cambridge to hear some students do it, an occasion when I had a chat to a Canadian bar owner who smoked and who was quite full of how the smoking ban would hit small bars like hers disproportionately. I forget the line of her reasoning.

My liking for 18.4 continues, despite sniffy remarks past and present. On this occasion, for example, there were two ladies in the queue down the stairs in the interval explaining how eminently forgettable the two quartets before the interval were - that is to say 18.2 and 18.4.

After the interval we had Op. 131, which did everything it says on the tin, although I failed to keep a proper count of the seven movements. Hopefully the unenthusiastic ladies got enthusiastic. An excellent concert although it left us a little drained; the quartet must have a lot more puff than us as they were doing another, similar concert the evening following.

Back home via Vauxhall, where, for once in a while, there were two scruffy if not scrofulous young males fighting, or at least appearing to be fighting, on the steps leading up to the entrance to the overground station. Sundry friends, male and female, stood around  making unintelligible comments, unintelligible at least when one was in walk past fast mode. What struck me most about them all was their smell, which was very rank. I guess that is what being homeless does for you.

It may have been the music which prompted the rather unusual anxiety dream I had last night. Unusual in the first place because I had it twice, once when waking at around 0100 and again when waking again at 0700. Unusual in the second place because of the content, nothing like any dream I remember having before.

The dream took place in St. Paul's Cathedral on the occasion of some important but unspecified occasion. All the great and the good were to be there, no doubt royalty as well although they did not get a mention in either dream. I was in some management area in the chancel, responsible for introducing and then playing (on a gramophone, if you please. Nothing like as slick as the Wesley system they have in crematoria) a movement from Schubert's Octet, this last being no more than a name with nothing of the flavour of the piece getting into the dream. This was to happen shortly after the beginning of the unspecified occasion and I was getting very anxious because I had not made time to test out the gramophone or rehearse my introductory spiel. Nor had I been able to consult with anybody about what exactly the spiel was supposed to be about. There was a double column list of names which maybe belonged in it but I was not sure. Was I suppose to be saying something about Schubert or about the Octet? Was I supposed to be saying something about the somebody for whom the unspecified occasion was being mounted? Perhaps I did not need to say hardly anything at all, which would be much better.

Eventually I was able to patch the gramophone into the cathedral sound system but then the problem was that I could not hear what the punters in the nave were going to hear while I was fiddling with knobs in the management area in the chancel.  It did not sound too clever from there but what could one do about it?

And I was not confident, partly because the management area in the chancel was rather dimly lit, that I would manage to lower the needle onto the right groove when the time came. Was there no end to my problems? Fortunately, at that point I woke up, could leave St. Paul's behind and move into the early morning tea ceremony.

Illustrators

Prompted by a rerun on ITV3 the other day to take a look at our Heron edition version of 'Sleeping Murder', a version which is bundled with 'Curtain', the book in which Poirot finally expires leaving the trusty Hastings in the chair and which is illustrated by Ettice de Loache & Galed. The illustrations in 'Sleeping Murder' are very bad in a sixties sort of way, those in 'Curtain' are fairly bad in a fifties sort of way.

Now the Heron edition is a cheap edition designed to look rather grander than it is, but one wonders why the illustrations are so bad, with the indications being that they were those which accompanied original publication.

So I ask Professor Google and he comes up with an Ettice de Loache who provides the entirely ordinary but quite serviceable illustrations to a WHO publication called 'Food, water and family health: A manual for community educators'. Lots of good stuff, for example, about not peeing in your drinking water stream if you don't want to pass worms around the village and beyond. The catch being that this publication appeared in 1994 while 'Sleeping Murder' first appeared in 1976 - but with a Swiss flavour to the illustrations which fits with the Geneva address turned up by the Professor. Perhaps Ettice turned to good works for WHO in retirement, having made quite a good thing out of her work for Acorn Productions Ltd, the outfit which appears to own the Agatha Christie literary estate.

At which point I digress to return to Companies House who run a rather natty web site where I find I can download the latest accounts for this outfit for the sum of £1, with payment conveniently allowed through PayPal, for which, as luck would have it, I can remember my password. The accounts tell me very little apart from a couple of lines towards the end which tell me that this lot are indeed mixed up with Agatha Christie with a sideline into 'Foyle's War'. As far as I could make out the Agatha Christie operation made a profit of around £2m in the year reported on - but coming across the note illustrated I was left quite unclear who this might accrue to. Must talk to an accountant.

Turning to Galed, all I can turn up is one Galed Gesner, a leading light in the Mystic Art Association, but whose light went out before either book was written. Mystic being a place in Conneticut rather than anything to do with mystery, Agatha or otherwise: maybe my Galed is this Galed's son. This information appears to have come from a Google digitisation of some huge archive of local newspapers. Very public spirited of them although a bit of visible provenance would have added value for me.

Surfing, Epsom style; not much the wiser about the originating question.

PS on 31/5/2013: further investigation into RLJ Incorporated reveals a Bethesda outfit in Maryland which appears to have bought up large swathes of our TV drama. Apparently the brainchild of one Robert L Johnson, a black entrepreneur who may have started in television. See http://www.rljcompanies.com/.

Trainers

I reported buying green Merrells trainers, from Cotswold in Kingston (upon Thames) on 26th October 2011 in the other place, having gone off the previously satisfactory Niketown.

About seven months later I reported buying brown Merrells from Millets in Epsom on 17th May 2012. Didn't like the brown as much as the green, but I got used to it.

There then appears to be a gap in the record although I know that I had tried to buy another pair in Epsom with none of our various outdoor shops having had anything suitable, even supposing I had been willing to move into more serious shoe mode and spend rather more than the £75 or so that the Merrells cost. TKMaxx did not do any better than the expiring, and now expired, Millets.

But I have now bought a pair of smart gray Merrells (11's) from Cotswold in Cambridge, much better than the brown although otherwise identical. An excellent buying experience with a first rate shop girl who as well as having good shop girl manners seemed to be a serious walker herself who could offer advice based on experience, as well as that from the training manual. We were very taken with the gaiters she had sold to her previous customer, natty looking things, but we desisted when she explained that they did not do away with the need for the waterproof over trousers which I find rather a pain. More for keeping rubbish out of one's shoes than for keeping rain off one's trousers and not to be confused with puttees (see illustration).

Judging from the picture I would think that it would be difficult to get the tension in puttees right and that it would be easy to get them far too tight. Would seem OK when first wound, but not OK at all after 10 minutes or so, by analogy with the difficulty one has judging the proper tension when winding a long Elastoplast onto the end of one's finger.

The brown Merrells were really quite tired, this, seemingly, after about a year, but a year in which I probably did less walking than usual. The lower heels were worn well down into the sponge interior and the complicated upper heels were getting very ragged. It is a wonder that the outer foam of the upper heel lasts as well as it does, although I try to save both heels and fingers by using FIL's handy horn-like shoe horn. Handy both because it is about a foot long and one does not have to bend to far to use it and because it has a handy little chain ring with which it can be hung just inside the back door, where it is most needed. Other, shorter shoe horns upstairs.

PS: revisiting the shoe horn in question I find that while of horny colour and of roughly horny shape, it is not horny at all. Rather made of an endangered species of West African hardwood. Leading to wondering whether unreliable memories worse than no memories at all. Are they just trash with the potential to confuse, or do they convey some deep meaning which might be deeply good for something?

Magic bullet 2 (addendum)

I have been thinking some more about the infrastructure needed to support the magic bullet of 26th May.

First, we have the Politburo, the working name for the United Nations Commission which will supervise the magic bullet. I propose Mr. Blair for chairman and Mr. Brown for general secretary: keeping the two of them in harness will ensure a proper degree of dialectic at meetings of the commission, will stop things from getting too cosy. Accommodation could be provided in a stately home - perhaps the French could be persuaded to vacate the palace at Versailles. I think Tony would like that. Then, given that they will be participating in the end games in various troubled parts of the world, they will need protection. Incoming chairmen will be allowed to choose whether they would like the black leather and plastic favoured by own SAS or the pageantry of yesteryear favoured by the French Republican Guard.

Second, we need to think about the procedures governing the granting of membership to the proposed gilded cage and the terms to be offered.

On the first point, we only want to let in the truly needy, There will be people out there, for example nerdy mathematicians who might think that being shut up in a gilded cage with a good supply of pencils and paper would be fine. They need to be excluded somehow. Then there are the miscellaneous middle sized criminals from troubled parts who want a bolt hole on the cheap; too mean to go through regular channels. Buying false passports, touch of plastic surgery, shipping money out to the British Virgin Islands, buying a suitable villa in some not too respectable part of the world. They also need to be excluded. And we are not running a care home for retired politicans from member countries of the OECD, however troubled they or their countries might be.

Members would normally be expected to make a substantial contribution to both administration and programme costs of the Politburo and to this end the Politburo would be empowered to take no-questions-asked transfers from dodgy banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein or elsewhere. Bullion would also be acceptable, but not other commodities. We have considered the point that this is taking money out of the mouths of the starving millions in the trouble spot in question but have decided that they have to take a bit more pain: they let the candidate member take them over after all. They have to take their share of the blame.

But we will allow the Politburo discretion. They will process all applications, with one or more sifts if numbers warrant it. They will have to make do without assessment centres, which are unlikely to be practical in these particular circumstances, and make do with the sort of psychological profiling that can be done by email, or possibly online. Drones would be made available for on-the-spot inspection of the trouble spot in question and sundry more or less furtive communications agencies would provide translated transcripts of relevant traffic. Professor Google would provide additional background material; a modest contribution to public welfare, in lieu of tax.

Duly documented decisions of the Politburo would be sent upstairs to the Secretary General for ratification and the expectation will be that ratification will usually be forthcoming, following informal soundings of the members (both permanent and rotational) of the Security Council. Probably best to avoid formal meetings of and votes in the Council, let alone the General Assembly. In the case that membership was granted, a crack team drawn from the Politburo Guard would be sent to fetch the candidate member. This would, inter alia, provide them with a break from their more ceremonial duties.

Having got this far, perhaps Sacha Baron Cohen should be invited to make it all into a film, a film by means of which the scheme can be aired to the discerning public.

New patio, phases Ia and Ib

Once the shed was out of the way, I could move on turning where the shed had been into a better place to sit in the sun than the passage between the garage and the extension.

First move, off to what was Hall's and is now Jewson's at the end of the Upper High Street. I had estimated that I would need at most 0.25 meters of concrete but found that buying that amount of aggregate in small bags would be much the same as buying 0.6 meters in one of those big carrier bags that builders' merchants use. So one of those and five bags of French flavoured cement were delivered to our door shortly after - and as it turned out my estimate of 0.25 meters was way too low, so the small bag solution would have been both tiresome and expensive.

Second move, wait for an auspicious day to start concrete operations, a wait which turned out to be quite short as a Hanson's concrete tester's van turned up to test the concrete being delivered to the foundations of the building about to go up next to the Manor Green Road Costcutter. The concrete tester was making test cubes, something I have not seen done, let alone done, for many years. So this was quite good enough a sign for me to get cracking.

So onto the third move, which was to make the shutter for the first lift of the beam to hold back the garden at the back of the illustration, this being needed as our back garden slopes up from the house and the garage is built into a hole cut out from the slope. The guts of this shutter was the upper shelf recovered from the shed, a handy piece of 8 by 1 (before finishing that is). A piece of chipboard divides the beam into two halves, to allow for a bit of movement, one undesirable side effect of which was that the two halves of the beam do not quite match. Patch the gaps with some mortar on day 1. Pour the concrete on day 2, the mixing of which in the tray bottom left vastly easier than it would have been in the bucket in the pictures offered by Professor Google and in the course of which I noticed that the leading edge of my not much used shovel is starting to fray. They couldn't last very long if you were using them all day every day.

Next move was to make the shutter for the front beam to tidy up what had been the rather rough concrete base for the shed, at the front right of the illustration, the guts of which was a plank of 12 by one quarter inch tacked onto a slightly too short and slightly too narrow plank of 8 by 2 (sawn). The former was a handsome piece of red pine recovered from the back of a piece of north London furniture, quite an antique in its way, something which would cost a lot to replace. But sadly, I had no better use for it, so better to get some value out of it rather than wait while it caught wood worm. The latter was an off-cut from the Epsom sand pit, of similar design but not nearly so successful as the Norwich sand pit, this probably being the result of aging children rather than any significant difference between the two. All propped up by some chunks of mock stone masonry which used to do service behind the pond, further up the garden. This shutter was a better fit than the first, so I was able to pour the concrete on day 1, an operation only marred by a failure to tamp the front right corner adequately, a fault which will need to be patched in due course.

Cover concrete with damp cloths once it has gone off and water regularly.

Picture snapped on the day of the second pour while I was waiting for it to go off.

PS: if you have never seen a mould for a concrete test cube, ask Professor Google about 'concrete test cube' to see more pictures of and about them than you are likely to want to look at. Cast steel to ensure the cubes are of an exact and reliable size. Must cost a fair bit to buy.

Magic bullet 2

Clearly in fine fettle this month, having come up with two magic bullets.

This one concerns exit planning for authoritarian heads of state who are reaching their sell by date. Whereas some of these people may be thoroughly unpleasant and might otherwise fall victim to atrocious retribution if left to the mercy of their subjects or perhaps to the winners in some civil war, it is clear to me that we need to offer such people safe passage to some kind of gold plated, exilic home. Without some such offer, such people are not going to go quietly, and going noisily is apt to result in a lot of excess deaths, not least of more or less innocent bystanders, women and children. What we might think of as just deserts - and in the civilised west we should not be thinking of atrocious retribution as just deserts - are not a practical or humane way forward.

So I see here an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Find some civilised island which is in a bit of a state, perhaps a financial state or perhaps a sovereignty state, and build a whole lot of compounds, one for each former head of state. Island good because it is much easier to keep out unwanted visitors, difficult in a place like Gibraltar which might otherwise have been suitable. The compounds should be comfortable, luxurious even, but residence would be supervised and would amount to house arrest. Residents would not be able to plot return or anything else. The whole operation would be funded and managed by the UN, with the funds, hopefully, sorting out the state into which the civilised island had got itself. This might, even, include ceding sovereignty to the UN. An arrangement which might suit the Falkland Islands. Another attraction of these last would be that one could have one compound per small island, of which there are plenty.

A disadvantage might be that it would be hard to attract even well paid personal service staff to such a remote place. Where on earth are they going to go on their days off? Penguin hunting not everyone's bag. Where are the fancy shops? From that point of view, British Virgin Islands, Ireland or Cyprus might suit better, in which case, part of the deal would be that they stopped providing house room for tax evaders and worse.

Runners up would get the Olympics as a consolation prize.

Fancy glazing

The circular tower with the fancy glazing of the last post, viewed from just inside the bus station like building.

Heritage

Wandering down Downing Place in Cambridge in the rain the other day, we came across this rather odd, small size bus garage, open to the public. Alternatively, a bit like one of those Victorian covered markets you still get up north.

Then out the back of it was the back of some kind of office building, graced with an equally odd circular & fancily glazed tower, the sort of tower which might have contained offices for senior officials, one on each floor, in the days when senior officials had offices, secretaries, private waste bins and so on. But not much of a view from all those windows, so did it just contain the ceremonial circular staircase, up which you had to plod in order to meet the great man who lived at the top? Have the stairs now been replaced with one of those open plan lifts that they like to put into shopping arcades?

Not many clues as to what the bus garage was for nor was there anyone fit to ask, although there was a municipal smell about the place. Checking with Professor Google, I find that it is the back entrance to the Grade 2 listed building now known as Hobson House (Mayor Hobson being the late 16th century carrier made good who invented open drains) and which used to be the Cambridge Police Station. So one presumes that the bus garage was the rather spacious accommodation needed for the rather grand police vehicles of the very early 20th century when the place was built. Did they need the height because of all the smoke & steam from the steam engines powering said vehicles?

Notes from the front line

Following my report of of 28th October 2012, I thought I should share some life style and dietary tips from a former bag man.

Regular and moderate habits good; excess of almost any variety seems to be bad.

Plenty of light exercise good.

Plenty of evening food bad.

Warm beer bad, but wine, luckily, good. Fizzy drinks in general probably bad but I was never much into them, so not tested.

Home brew wholemeal bread with hard yellow cheese (Lincolnshire Poacher from Waitrose) good. But fibre needs to be managed: too little bad, but too much bad as well.

I suspect red meat, chocolate, cream and swede of being bad. So red meat consumption well down in favour of pork and chicken. Chocolate, cream and swede avoided. But carrots, raw or cooked seem to be good. Lentil soup, again luckily, good in moderation.

TLS

I had been wondering whether the TLS would have a go at me when their computer noticed that the direct debit had been cancelled, and after a couple of months or so they did and I was phoned up by a young female person. I was an easy touch for 12 issues for £12 and the plan is that I will not get around to stopping the new direct debit. I suppose, that with a good computer system and direct debit, every little helps. Stopping and starting subscriptions is not the big deal it might have been in the olden days.

Now had my first issue after the interval, an issue which is not good enough to make me think that I will let the direct debit ride yet. But there was a review of interest for all that: 'The Mussel Feast' recently translated from the German of Birgit Vanderbeke and published here by Peirene, a publisher of whom I had not previously heard but good old Amazon knew all about them and the book was here in 24 hours or so.

They are to be found at http://www.peirenepress.com/ and do private & intimate literary suppers at http://www.thehospitalclub.com/. They also produce rather handsome, small & short paperbacks, if this one is anything to go by.

It takes the form of a monologue by the daughter of a professional couple in Germany, with a son as well as the daughter, on the occasion of the father not turning up for a family mussel feast organised for his return from a business trip. A father who is obsessed with his family being a proper family and doing proper family things, to the point where they all hate it. And they probably are all a bit wonky in consequence. But an entertaining read and it will be interesting to see what BH makes of it given her family background. According to the blurb, or perhaps the TLS review, it struck a real chord in its native Germany where is a set book for lots of older school children.

PS: I have noticed that even the Economist is into fairly aggressive loss leaders, so perhaps the periodical market is not in good shape and twits are ruling the waves.

Magic bullet

I noticed the fine new railway, aka HS2, on 12th January 2012 and 4th December 2011 in the other place and there continue to be rumbles in the Guardian about what a fearful waste of money it all is. Plus, that august outfit, the National Audit Office has got in on the act.

So it is clearly time to share my spiffing idea. If we are really determined on some large chunk of national infrastructure, why don't we build a shiny new nuclear power station or two? Government policies are far too flabby for the private sector to want to risk its dosh on such a venture, so why doesn't government build the things instead? Fill the gap left by the sometimes wonder working forces of the market?

Such a project would have some of the defects of the other one, in particular it would put a lot of money into the pockets of big contractors and big consultants. But at least there is a clear need for the product and it would divert funds from the vulgarly rich Arab & Russian owners of oil & gas reserves to the rather more respectable, largely Old Commonwealth, owners of uranium reserves. A much needed bit of energy diversification which might help stave off the impending energy crisis for a bit longer.

And if there is any money left from what we would otherwise have chucked at HS2, chuck it at fusion. We might hit that jackpot one day.

Nearly collectable

On Sunday to a small after-the-bank-holiday car booter at Hook Road Arena. A small but select affair at which I was moved to move into the collectible end of the jigsaw market.

Started off with my first framed jigsaw, an old Ordnance Survey map assembled and framed, ready for hanging on the wall, probably from a similar outfit to that which produced the Exminster jigsaw which got us started in the jigsaw scene (see 25th February).

The jigsaw covered an area perhaps of a mile by a mile and a half, with Hook Road Arena itself, very appropriately, in the middle. The chunk of map reproduced was also of an age to include the various places which gave their names to the hospitals of the Epsom cluster, not much else of them subsisting. There was also a school in what is now West Ewell quaintly described on the map as being licensed to dispense divine service. The arrangement for hanging the thing on the wall was new to me, being a stout cloth disc, maybe two inches in diameter, stuck to the backing hardboard. Given that the framed jigsaw must weigh a few pounds, I hope that the glue was good, and, to be on the safe side, the thing has been hung where it will not do much damage to anything other than itself if it falls. Which is not quite where I had wanted to hang it, but the position will do for now.

Moved on to my first antique jigsaw, illustrated, and which perusal of my jigsaw book (see 6th November 2012) suggests was from the Waddington's catalogue of 1939. The original box was complete although the lid - this being an end opening box - was in several pieces. But the puzzle, sadly, was incomplete with five pieces missing and two pieces superfluous. So a collectible manqué, but well worth the £1 I paid for it for the interest. Not sure yet whether to keep or recycle. Tastefully frame, complete with broken lid and superfluous pieces?

The puzzle was probably intended for children and was relatively easy to assemble, edge then planes first. The pieces, though large, were of more interesting shapes than is usual in a modern, mainstream puzzle, to the point where describing the puzzle as fully interlocking on the box was not entirely accurate as while the assembled puzzle interlocked plenty enough to hold together, that was by no means true of all pairs of adjacent pieces. Quality of picture and colour not what one would expect now, with the faces of the aviators and their support staffs being distinctly odd.

I was also offered a splendid plough plane for £16, more or less entirely made of some kind of pale, fine grained hardwood with brass trim. Wonderful thing probably destined, as the foreign salesman explained, for a shop window or a public house. But I was tempted: hugely better value than the £45 wanted for a solid steel 'Stanley' rebate plane, probably from the fifties and still in its original box, on offer in the adjoining aisle.

And along the way, I acquired a rather posh looking little plastic bag, for all the world the sort of thing you might get from a perfume shop in Bond Street, but actually coming with VIP electronic cigarettes, open 7 days a week for your refills. See http://www.vipelectroniccigarette.co.uk/ for everything you could possibly want in that department - except an e-cigar which did not seem to be on the menu.

The ride of the Jungiards

I picked up a biography of P. G. Wodehouse from somewhere, probably because a film about his bad war had been on the telly. For the second time in as many months, a book which I positively failed to finish. I have enjoyed the Berties' outings on ITV3, I dare say I would like the books well enough and I was once tempted to investigate another member of the pantheon, one Psmith. But I did not like this biography at all, whether because I did not care for Wodehouse the man or because I did not care for the biographer, I can't say.

But I was interested by the notion - well enough documented online once one takes a look - that English repertory companies of Wodehouse's day were organised around stock characters, for example a penguin suited butler or an insolent maid, and a repertory actor (or actress) would specialise in one such stock character and might stick to it throughout his career. Playwrights were expected to turn out repertory fodder organised around these stock characters. Audiences expected their plays to be organised around these stock characters. It all sounds like an admirable system; one could provide variety without too much strain on either the supply or the demand side of the equation. Also evidence that we can and do organise our perceptions of others into a fairly small number of types, or archtypes to use a term from the Jungian shrinks (I think).

An English version, more or less, of Commedia dell’arte. With Punch & Judy being another spin off from same. It took a few clicks to get a catalogue of such types, but I ran one down in a study guide to Frayn's 'Noises Off', a play which, as it happens we actually saw (see 13th January 2012 in the other place). So, in brief...

Zanni (the Italian nickname for Giovanni) can refer to either the character servant of the Commedia dell’arte or various stereotypical servant characters of the same genre. The character of Zanni was an older poor man who was the hired servant of another character, typically Pantalone. Later, the character fell into disuse and the word “zanni” came to encompass all comic servant characters including Harlequin or Arlecchino, Brighella, Coviello, Pedrolino, Pulcinella, Pierrot, and Trivelino.

Pantalone (Pants) is a stock character, one of the vecchi - or “old men”. He is a miserly and often lecherous character who usually hails from Venice. Traditional actions and comic pratfalls for Pantalone are commonplace, and include Pantalone has a heart attack and his servant attempts to save him by various means and Pantalone is knocked over and has to be helped up.

Il Dottore (The Doctor) is another stock character from the “vecchi” category. His function in a scenario is to be an obstacle to the young lovers. Il Dottore is usually angry and intrusive. He doesn’t listen to anyone else, and claims to know about everything about medicine and law. He is very rich, generally with “old” family money. This makes him pompous and hard to argue with. He makes many cruel jokes about the opposite sex. An obese man, he enjoys drinking and eating to excess.

Il Capitano (The Captain) uses bravado and excessive manliness to cover the fact that he is really a coward. A foreigner, he is mostly portrayed as a Spaniard, this because most of Renaissance Italy was under Spanish control. Il Capitano often makes up elaborate tales of war and bravery, that no one around him believes. He is also very greedy and would sell his loyalty to the highest bidder.

Columbina (Little Dove) is a comic servant to the young Inamorata (see below). She is dressed in rags, but looks appropriate enough to be a hired servant. Occasionally called Arlecchina, she wears heavy makeup around her eyes and carries a tambourine which she could use to fend off the amorous advances of lecherous men. She was often the smartest character on stage. Columbina would help her mistress the Inamorata win her true love by tricking her father (Pantalone). She is a flirtatious and sassy character, but never lacks good judgment.

Pulcinella, often called Punch or Punchinello in English, was well known for his long nose which looked like a beak. In Latin, the term was a pullus gallinaceus, which led to the word “Pulliciniello” and “Pulcinella”.

Scaramuccia, aka Scaramouche, is a clown character who wears a black mask and black trousers, shirt and hat. The name derives from the Italian “scaramuccia” meaning “skirmish”. Usually a boastful buffoon, Scaramouche is one of the characters in the Punch and Judy puppet shows. In some scenarios, he owns a Dog, which is another stock character. During performances, Punch usually hits Scaramouche, causing his head to come off of his shoulders. Because of this, the term “scaramouche” has become associated with a class of puppets with extendable necks.

Tartaglia is a minor character who is short sighted and with a terrible stutter. His social status varies quite often - he can be a bailiff, lawyer, notary or chemist.

The Innamorati. The young male and female lovers. These consisted of several characters: Isabella, Lelio, Flavio and Vittoria. Since there are so many more of them their characters were never fully developed, but they are typically featured in some sort of romantic entanglement, often alongside Pantalone.

Clearly not quite right as we have nine rather than the magic seven characters, a number which both brings good luck and is affordable. Need to sort that out. Then, the fit with 'Noises Off' not being that clear to me and as I don't think that the episode of 'Poirot' which uses the characters is really relevant, I think the next step should be to see how all this plays against 'Midsomer Murders', which series does, I think, use a repertoire of stock characters to go with its repertoire of stock actors and actresses. In the meantime, with thanks to Samantha Starr.

PS: a second visit to 'Los Amigos' today (see 2nd January for previous visit). Two excellent bacon sandwiches for the two of us, with one and one half falling to my share. Bread not quite packaged sliced, whatever the Guardian cookery page might say in its favour for these particular purposes. BH rather liked her banana milkshake too, something I did not care to try myself.

Borletti-Buitoni Trust

On Friday to the QEH to a concert under the auspices of this trust (see http://www.bbtrust.com/), which looks to be under the artistic direction of Mitsuko Uchida and to be financed by David Landau. This last with an interesting history as according to the Daily Telegraph web site: 'David Landau, 59, who made his fortune from the free advertising newspaper Loot, said he had left because Alistair Darling's tax raid on non-domiciled individuals had "broken" their trust. Mr Landau has returned to Italy because of the tax change, which came into force in April... Mr Landau, who has served as a trustee of the National Gallery, a governor of the Courtauld Institute and on the board of the Art Fund since coming to Britain to be an Oxford don in 1983, said of the levy: "It really broke the trust of non-domiciles'''. Not clear exactly how the Italian connection fits in or whether it includes lasagne (see http://www.buitoni.com/); in a place like Italy it might well do.

The programme was Mozart's clarinet quintet (the draw, as far as I was concerned), Britten's temporal variations for oboe and piano and Schubert's piano trio D898 (a late work).

The performers included the Elias quartet, although perusal of the printed programme did not make it clear to me in which items they were to participate. We have heard the Elias quartet on a number of occasions (see the other place) and possibly for the first time doing, guess what, the Mozart clarinet quintet with Micheal Collins (see March 11th 2011), at our first ever visit to St. Luke's. More careful perusal today suggests that the Elias might have done the quintet again without Micheal Collins, and then retired from the scene. But it does not tell us anything about the tax affairs of the trustees of the sponsoring trust, which might have made interesting reading.

Off to a bad start, arriving at the QEH where there was a tremendous racket from the stage erected in what should be the antechamber. Had to wait outside until 1900 for that to go away; all very tiresome. Must write a disgusted from Epsom to the management.

On into the chamber where we had seats in the AA row which I like for the leg room. There is also quite a good chance of a good view of the stage: on this occasion a result for BH but not for me - but on the other hand she had a fidgety and smelly neighbour on the other side from me. The Mozart was done with a light touch, which I liked; one could really hear the parts. But it was not to everybody's taste as one loud punter was complaining on exit that the strings were beautifully phrased but feeble. The Britten was interesting and the Schubert, as one might have expected, good. And, as the programme explained, surprisingly cheerful for such a late work.

Just caught a train at Waterloo which was good, sitting opposite, as it happened a lady who had been to the RFH to hear the RPO. We were entertained on arrival at Epsom by a cheerful young man who plonked down in the adjacent four seater to roll himself a joint, while explaining exactly what he was up to to someone at the other end of his mobile phone. The conductor, who happened to be nearby, turned his back. The lady opposite us, of something near our age and who should have been familiar with such things from her younger days, looked rather bemused. Joint was not lit on board, we did not notice whether it was lit on station.

PS: for once in a while the blogger software threw a bit of a wobbly today, it being unclear about whether I was logged in or not and generating lots of near open windows in Chrome. Closing Chrome did not clear, but restarting the PC did. albeit with a few traces when first back into blogger.

Jigsaw 15, Series 2

Back with Falcon de luxe, after something of a gap. This one all of a pound, rather than the 99p favoured by Oxfam, but I am not sure where this one came from. The first image from Ireland that I can recall.

Pieces cut out of good quality card and all fairly much of a size. Another very regular puzzle, with four pieces meeting at every interior vertex. Another puzzle without the prong-prong-hole-hole configuration, although there were a number of pieces with either four prongs or four holes and quite a lot with three prongs and one hole, often but not always paired with a one prong and three holes. But shape was more important in solving this puzzle than prong configuration, with one sort of piece having two flat and two convex sides while the other had two flat and two concave (usually the prong) sides.

Started with the edge, as usual, but got stuck on the bottom edge. The pebbles were too much of a muchness to make solution possible. So there was a bit of a pause while I sulked, but some days later I went back to it, to get a solution of sorts. Then went on to do the sky of the top edge, another solution of sorts.

Then the skyline, which on this puzzle with the chimneys covered a lot of ground. Then the distinctively coloured spray of the fountain. Then the strong horizontals of the red rose beds, the clumps of flowers and the parapets of ponds. Then the windows, after which filling in the castle was straightforward, made only slightly less so by the missing piece on the right hand tower, clearly visible in the illustration.

Then the rest of the gardens and the pond, this last having the second missing piece. Then the pebbles, working down so as to get the right solution, second time around, to the bottom edge. The the sky, working up, ditto top edge.

After the slow start, a perfectly satisfactory puzzle. But it will go to carboard recycling (black wheelie bin) as the lady in the Oxfam shop was clear that she did not want incomplete jigsaws, whether they came from her in the first place or not, not however clearly the missing pieces were marked on the image on the cover of the box.

Only the second or third time in the 30 or 40 new-to-me & used (these two categories not being identical) puzzles that I have now done where there was a piece anomaly.

I note in passing that we are now starting to deal with FIL's puzzles, there being little overlap between the sort of puzzles that he used to like to do and the ones that I like to do. After some experimentation, I have decided that the quickest way to count the pieces is to arrange them in rectangular blocks on a large table, each block having 5 columns and 20 rows. One can sort pieces into such blocks a lot faster than one can count them into 20's and one can watch ITV3 at the same time. Furthermore, it is much easier to check the result than is the case with piles, half of which (on average) need to be recounted in the case of parity error, not having come up with a reliable way to test the height of a pile. And even if I had, counting into piles is a lot slower than counting into heaps. But this happy arrangement breaks down with those puzzles which do not have exactly 500 pieces in a 25 by 20 array and where one has to do the edge to determine the dimensions of the array to determine the number of peices. And where the array is not rectangular at all one might be completely stuffed; one might actually have to do the puzzle to check that it is all there for disposal.

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

As noticed the same day, to the RFH on 14th May to hear Mozart's 25th piano concerto and Mahler's 1st symphony, piano by Louis Lortie and conducted by Charles Dutoit. Which made it a family occasion with my mother being largely brought up in Montreal, Lortie being born there and Dutoit, while French Swiss, put in a very successful, twenty year stint with the principal orchestra there, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM).

Opened the evening with a visit to the Hole in the Wall at Waterloo, where for the second time running, I happened to sit next to another long-service patron, from which we deduce that the place must have a significant following of same. This particular patron was attracted by its relatively low prices and appeared to be alternating rough and smooth cider, the former being the trademark tipple of the place in days of yore.

The Mozart was as good as expected, although I thought there were a number of wrong notes from the piano. The chap next to me thought that what I was hearing was the effect of excessive pedaling, resulting in the blurring of the offending notes. He may well have been right, but too deep for me to rule on.

The Mahler was something of a departure for me, having focused very much on chamber music in recent years, in part because it does not sound as silly in one's house as orchestral music: fancy electronics cannot completely overcome the lack of space for the sound to swill around in, at least not that sort of sound. But splendid stuff just the same, with the orchestration all that it had been cracked up to be - not least because the RPO deployed a big orchestra involving, for example, eight French horns and ten cellos. Plus a harp which, following the piano concerto, made oddly piano like interventions. Although perhaps not so odd, with the harp being just a thinly stringed & open plan version of the grand piano.

It had been explained that the Schoenberg heard on 12th April did what it did with the Brahms by spreading the piano part around the orchestra. A few bars here to the oboe, a few bars there to the trombones and so on. Well the Mahler struck me in rather the same way, a concerto for instrument X, where the value of X moved around during the proceedings, rather than being locked down to just one value, the piano in the case of the Mozart.

It also struck me as a piece from south central rather than north central Europe. A bit more joie de vivre than one would get from us more solemn northerners. A bit more fun, some deliberate and jolly vulgarity. More than a hint of the wedding music from Godfather One.

Third movement terrific with a terrific opener from percussion and (mainly) double bass. Maybe I should set it down for my own funeral; a good bit of tongue-in-cheek pomposity. With thanks to YouTube for a reprise from Chicago, only marred by the opening advertisement - an advertisement which pays for the piper, as it were. But a rather better rendering, with headphones on the PC, than I get from my ancient record from RCA Victor, also from Chicago as it happens, without on the hifi.

A curious tree

The base of an interesting beech tree on the edge of the Furzefield Wood of the previous post. Presumably much hacked around in its youth. Probably home to a huge range of small animals.

Chaldon

A rather older version of the woodcut posted on 14th May, this one perhaps from the 12th century.

For some reason we lighted upon an advertisement for Chaldon Church, near Caterham, a church listed in the Domesday Book and boasting this wall painting from about the same time. Very impressive (snooty remarks in Pevsner notwithstanding) and much larger than I was expecting, occupying a good chunk of the west wall of the nave. A morality tale featuring, inter alia, demons dealing with the seven deadly sins. For example, the chap sitting on the fire and being poked or prodded with large toasting forks, bottom middle right, was a usurer and he was being encouraged to cough up his money, in a literal way. Well worth the visit, but quite possibly busy and awkward on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

As it was we had the benefit of a lecture to a WEA group doing Surrey churches, members of the group being mostly rather older than we were. Outside, to inspect the churchyard which contained a surprisingly large proportion of people with foreign names. Just one of the grave boards (in the place of a grave stone)  that one comes across in the south of Surrey. Out to the bridle path across a huge field of rape - probably a number of fields rolled into one at some point - to inspect the bluebells in the fringes of Furzefield Wood. Fine views over the downs. Rape flowers quite impressive close to, although pretty much insect free. There was also a curious smell about them, possibly cabbagey, which would be reasonable with the plant both being and looking rather like a sort of cabbage. Three ridgebacks from two owners, one of which was said to be as mild as a lamb despite being trained as a pack dog to hunt lions. It certainly looked as if it would be up for that sort of thing; perhaps in east surrey they use them to help with the badger numbers. More information to be found all over the place, for example http://www.imbaliridgebacks.co.uk/ where you can find a fine shot of a ridgeback seeing how far it could open its mouth before setting out.

Retraced our steps and pushed on to a very decent lunch of lasagne at the Golden Lion of Caterham.

PS: as it happens we very nearly visited the church by chance, not knowing what it contained, on 25th May 2009 in the other place. See also 26th June. But it was getting late and we went on past its turning, to home.

Vanity of vanities

This advertisement in a recent NYRB caught my eye. A rather old fashioned sort of publication for which one wondered at the demand: is it just vanity publishing by a well endowed university? That said, it looked rather fun, the sort of thing I might pick up as a remainder for say £50.

Inspection of their web site suggested that the list price was of the order of £1,200, but I failed to get it to tell me how much all 24 volumes would be, purchased as a set. However, it did tell me about a 1,656 page synopsis, a snip at $90.95. So off to Amazon where I was able to get one for about £20 which seemed more in line with its value to me.

Maybe one day the gods will smile on me and I will come across the real thing.

A tale of two apples

Some weeks ago, on at least two separate occasions, we some apples from Sainsbury's, described as Cox number 4105. These apples were startling in their freshness - of appearance, texture and taste - at a time of year as far away from the English Cox season as one could be. So it was a mystery where these apples came from and how they had been handled and stored since they had been picked. Surely they had not been air freighted from New Zealand where such apples might be in season? Had they been cunningly packed in some climate controlled container (I believe oxygen free is a good wheeze in this connection)  and sent here by boat? Did they come from North Africa along with many of our vegetables? Which last would contravene a paternal theory according to which apples were best grown where they would only just grow. Hot country apples no good at all.

I did investigate number fruit number 4105, to discover a whole fruit label collecting world out there (see for example http://ludmilafruitlabels.com/), but without discovering anything useful about these particular apples.

Then today my eye was caught in Epsom Market by some apples described as Pink Lady, an apple I usually rather like and which were said to come from France - which was a bit odd as I would have thought it a bit early in the year for French apples, even supposing they came from the south - but maybe the man was guessing. As soon as I had got them home and handled them I knew I had been sold a pup. No sticky label, too light, the wrong smell and once inside, well past their best. Too long in the climate controlled warehouse? Too late I remembered that I had bought unsatisfactory if good looking stuff from this particular stall before.

So in this story, Sainsbury's with their mass production do a lot better than the old style fruit & veg man, who will have to do better if he is to survive: I don't mind paying a premium for heritage shopping but I do mind getting poor goods.

The power of Professor Google

He might not be very at eggs, but he is quite good at indexing. I find that a search term of 'merton public libraries outreach impeccable' gets just three hits this morning, the last of which is my own post of yesterday evening.

Perhaps not altogether a fair test, as Google might be expected to index the stuff on its own Blogger product with priority and might well remember that this particular PC is interested in that particular blog. But I like to think that I would get the same result using one of the anonymous PC's offered by Surrey Libraries.

The shorter search term of  'merton public libraries outreach' does not work so well as there is lots of interest in outreach out there: perhaps the curators of all those trenderising museums have got a point after all.

Egged off

The other day we found half an egg on the path leading up to our front door, half a blue egg. It was not clear whether the egg had hatched or whether it had been breakfast for some passing magpie, these last being one of the commoner, if not the commonest bird to be seen in our garden. The question was, from what bird did the egg come?

In the days when FIL was with us, we could have asked him, it was the sort of thing that he knew about. But in his absence we asked Professor Google who turned out not to be very good at birds' eggs at all and we failed to find a site which offered decent egg identification. The RSPB site annoyed again by not offering anything in the egg department; one suspects that they are so up themselves about not seeming to encourage human (as opposed to avian) egg collectors that they have, as a matter of policy, stripped most eggy material from their site, the just leaving such articles as 'white male drifter convicted of molesting hundreds of sparrows' nests over the past 15 years by Bodmin magistrates' to remind us of the illegality of such activities.

In desperation, we guessed robin, that being another common bird in our garden, and that worked rather better. Having decided that it was a robin's egg, the Professor could come up with lots of stuff which confirmed that guess, including dealing with the dark speckles of indeterminate colour. We also learned that robin egg blue was a popular colour, responsible for lots of stuff out there on the web. All in all, not too clever; if the egg had been something unusual one might have wasted a lot of time guessing.

To work off the annoyance, out onto the back patio to finish demolishing the shed, a project which first saw the light of blog just about a month ago on the 13th April. A project which has reminded me of the importance of the capital mentioned by K. Marx in 'Das Kapital' (see http://www.das-kapital.com): a factory with the right gear can knock out a garden shed for a fraction of what it would cost me in materials alone, never mind my labour.

We were in recovery mode, so I spent several happy hours withdrawing small nails from the matchboarding which made up most of it, nails which are now destined for the recycling bin up the road. Lots of slightly used tongue-and-groove and lots of mixed lengths of two by two now cluttering up the garage awaiting the day when we find something to use it for. Another upside was an opportunity to use the miniature stillson wrench acquired from the naval uncle and all of four inches long, rather different from the first stillson I ever knew which belonged to a farm and was four feet long. All of which has prompted me to peer at Wikipedia and learn that the stillson wrench was invented by a Mr. Stillson of Walworth of south east London, back in the days when the UK was a more serious manufacturing country than it is now. The small wrench made up well for the absence of a suitable socket wrench with which to withdraw the coach bolts which tied the panels of the shed together; much more convenient than either the adjustable spanner or the mole wrench, this last not being named for the inventor, rather the name of the company for which the inventor worked, that old established Birmingham company, M K Mole & Son. Now, presumably, late & lamented.

An opportunity which closely followed on an opportunity to use the interesting saw acquired in a car boot sale some years ago and which has been hanging up in the garage roof ever since. The occasion was the cutting up of the ornamental plum tree which had been killed by pollarding and intended as a support for certain specimens of ivy and clematis, but which rotted over before any of them really took hold, a rotting over which had taken perhaps ten years. This saw would have been a quite expensive object in its day, a rip saw with just three points to the inch, while the rip saw which I do use for carpentry has six or eight. Probably not seven, that being a magic number. The new rip saw was also a good deal sharper than the old rip saw which I have failed to sharpen for twenty years or more and made short and satisfying work of the trunk of the plum tree. It also served to cut up some of the more rotten lengths of two by two from the shed.

Concrete now calls!

PS: with thanks to Wikipedia for use of their helpful picture.

The Return of Tarzan

Merton Public Libraries were running an outreach operation from the waiting room of the southbound platform at Raynes Park the other night when we came through and I picked up a couple of books, one the Tarzan illustrated. The idea is to read and recycle at a recycling point of your choice, possibly the very same waiting room.

This Tarzan was originally published in 1913 or so and this copy was a recent reprint from Penguin Classics; it is not at all clear what if any permission was needed from http://www.tarzan.org/ - an interesting site in its own right where you can read all about the early publishing history of the Tarzan stories, which did not include Penguin. What is more, Penguin Classics was a rather highbrow operation when I was little, Russian novelists and Greek playwrights sort of thing.

An interesting light read, something of a precursor to the Bond stories of my own younger days. Particularly interesting in the way that readers are attracted to, maybe identify with, someone who is both very civilised - with, say, impeccable manners with women when in Europe - and very uncivilised - with a taste for meat so fresh that it is still warm when in the heart of darkness - at the same time. Again, rather like Commander Bond, the killer in a penguin suit, lounging around at bars and casinos in between kills.

Interesting also in its take on the inhabitants of the heart of darkness, a mixture of noble savages (untainted by love of the gold which abounded in a mountain up the road) and bad savages (very hairy and with short bandy legs). There were also noble Arabs living in the north and bad Arabs living in the south, these last being greedy & cruel slavers all. Furthermore, it is sometimes suggested that the morals of the animals were better than those of many of us humans, the savagery of their goings on, with much rending of live flesh with naked teeth, notwithstanding. Some of the animals could even talk in a limited way (and Tarzan even knew their lingo). Although, I should add, that the most evil of all were two dastardly Russians, this despite the fact Russia was about to become our ally in the forthcoming Great War.

I don't know whether ERB should get a plus mark or a minus mark for having his apes talk. A plus mark for allowing that animals are not as dumb as they look at a time when most people thought that they were very dumb, a minus mark for eventually being proved wrong, with the consensus only recently emerging that apes do not and cannot talk in any very meaningful way: possibly up to elementary sentences but probably not up to talking about things which are not present. They can, however, lie, lying having evolved earlier than one might have thought.

Nor do I know how well it would all go down now, with us all being so much more knowledgeable, with most of us, for example, knowing that sun loving & murderous ancient Mexicans probably did not live in Africa at the same time. Nothing that a bit of editorial touching up here and there would not deal with, but Penguin have chosen to reprint the integral & unabridged original text. Very proper of them too. We await the edition with scholarly apparatus - in the way of 'Les Éditions de la Pléiade' - with interest and meanwhile one wonders whether this sort of thing has found its way into the syllabi of aspirants to degrees in English Literature.

Perhaps the bit of editorial touching up is what gave us Indiana Jones.

PS: I remember that the roughly contemporary explorer Nansen said that he found the taste of very fresh flesh - in his case very young sea birds - rather odd. I think he preferred to let it go cold before eating it.

Inspiration

This evening to the RFH  to hear the Mahler Symphony No. 1, the third movement of which was tremendous and the mood of which last is well expressed by this wood cut.

Have yet to find the painting, if any, from which the wood cut was taken. But it is all to do with the Austrian artist Moritz von Schwind and the year 1850. An artist who, it seems, sometimes used to drink with Schubert.

Image from http://gustavmahler.com/. But the diagram of the orchestra therein is not quite what we had this evening.

To be continued.

A present from the 'Daily Mail'

Yesterday evening ITV3 made the mistake of rescreening a 'Miss Marple' we had seen only a few days previously, and, satisfactory as it was, we were not quite ready to see it again, perhaps for the fifth time in all. So scraping around in the bottom of the DVD box we found a gift from the 'Daily Mail' containing 'The eagle has landed' and 'To die for'. The first was a perfectly respectable film, quite possibly novel at the time it was made, in its English language portrayal of Second World War things from a German point of view, but not what we wanted yesterday. But it did provide a reference for the second, on the basis that if one was good two was probably better.

So off we went, into what turned out to be rather an odd film. A sort of black comedy on the US fascination with television and the fame & status that can come from appearing on one, with trailer trash who might be trash but still have the credentials and cash to buy guns and who go on to commit more or less pointless murders with them and lastly with oral sex (passive male variety). This side of the pond we still find it odd that a film can spend so much time on this last while being very careful that we do not catch a glimpse of a single nipple or buttock, let alone the oral in question. Although we do get to see quite a lot of Nicole Kidman's mouth, and very nice it was too. All in all a well made and watchable film, even if the plot was more than a touch unlikely and even if the film did make us feel a bit uncomfortable at times. But does Ms. Kidman do anything better with her considerable talents?

Along the way I was reminded of the rather splendid, if rather offensive, slang word 'guinea' for an Italian and I learn this morning of two possible derivations. One, from the coast of West Africa where black slaves come from. Two, from the guineas that superior Italian masons in London used to be paid in. Although learn is perhaps a bit of a strong word in this context; without a bit more evidence, of the sort one might get in the OED, I do not find either theory particularly appealing.

And so to bed, to rather an odd dream. Odd in that there appeared to be a moral and in that in addition to myself there were two other known people - BH and the Prime Minister - known people being rather unusual in my dreams. We were staying in some hotel and the Prime Minister and his family happened to be staying there too. His teenage son (I don't think he actually has one) breaks his leg and goes to the holiday GP. Prime Minister's family not very happy with the outcome and want to go private, to rather an unpleasant sounding and greedy private doctor who wants to charge £980 to repair the botched job of the GP. The Prime Minister proposes to take it out of some probate pot in which our two families have equal shares. At a meeting involving both families and the private doctor, BH gets very cross and says no way. I try to smooth things down and suggest that she will probably calm down and agree given a little time. At which point I start to wake up and think that I was a bit soft. The Prime Minister has pots of money already and can well afford to pay without dipping into the communal pot, before tax as it were. So the moral that I take away is that it is a bit stupid to be nice & soft about money. There are too many people out there who will take advantage. No idea where the rather exact and definite sum of £980 came from. We didn't get to meet Sam.

The money theme then continued over breakfast where, I was sorry to read that our last big mutual bank, the Co-op has fallen prey to the same greedy drive for expansion on the back of dodgy lending in a property bubble that sank some of their more overtly commercial compères. The troubles of the bubbles being made worse by straightforward errors of judgement.

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth

This being the translation of the popular Genesis 9.1 recently offered by Robert Alter. An injunction with which we do not lightly interfere - so some governments have taken a lot of stick for trying to reduce the rate of multiplication, for trying to do something about the undoubted fact that there are far too many of us. But my interest today is in micro rather than macro policy: when is it right for governments to stop a particular person or partnership from having children?

There are plenty of people about who do not make very good parents. There are plenty of men who are careless about fathering children for whom they make no subsequent provision. There are some women who have children for the wrong reasons. There are a small number of women who have far too many children. But on the whole, we interfere in such matters with a very light touch, certainly without coercion and probably without financial penalty, this last to avoid further punishing the child for the sins of the parents.

But what about the fortunately uncommon case of where a handicapped person, let us say a lady, wants and is able to have a child, a child which she is not going to be able to look after in the normal way of things. Does she have a human right to have a child? Even if her partner is also handicapped? Should we aid and abet this right? Do we have the right - or the duty - to prevent the lady from conceiving, or if she does to terminate? Or to put out any child there might be for adoption?

The answer used to be yes to the extent that we sometimes fed oral contraceptives to young women for whom pregnancy was thought to be inappropriate. I am not sure that we still do this.

In the case of a severe handicap, perhaps some form of mental handicap, I am reasonably sure that it would be better if the lady did not have the child. The tricky question is whether installing the kind of machinery needed to stop her having a child, at least most of the time, while solving one problem would not make another by setting an unfortunate precedent for official interference in private affairs. There are also the possibly unpleasant details of what might be involved in such stopping. When is it right to force feed someone with oral contraceptives if persuasion fails? Would forcible adoption of the child being a better solution? What if the parents of the lady in question take her side in the matter?

My solution would be to give the social workers a license to interfere in such matters. To do all they can to get the right result by persuasion, but to have the power to use compulsion at the limit, with the exercise of that power being the subject of careful and more or less open monitoring. One would also need to add enough money to the mix to ensure that the social workers in question had the necessary skills and time - at which point does my solution start to fall apart? We cannot be giving licenses of this sort if we cannot be funding them, this last even though the costs of the cure may be a lot more than the costs of the prevention.

PS: it is something of a paradox that while I am all for governments interfering in the commanding heights of the economy, to the extent of owning the likes of hospitals and railways, I am much less keen on them interfering in our more private affairs. A paradox for explanation on another day.

Gregory take 2

Following the post on 29th April, the second Julie Gregory book, that is to say the first written of the two books, has now arrived from Epsom Library and been consumed. I am pleased to record that having turned up at the library without any change, they were quite happy to trust me to bring in the 50p reservation charge at some point in the future - and they have yet to remind me about it. I must pop in to clear the debt.

The book itself is much like the first, with the same defects of writing, although I think I would have done better to have read them in the right order. There is background and explanation in this book about the mother which would have helped when reading that about the father. The father book, I suppose, being something of a sequel, written to capitalise on the success of the mother book.

So we have a daughter with a mother with the Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, a mother who needs to invent or create all kinds of problems to take her child to the doctor with, a rather unpleasant variety of attention seeking. There was also a moderate amount of moderate violence (of a non sexual variety). But I think that the syndrome, while unpleasant, is rather difficult to diagnose. The mother is all sweetness and light when it comes to talking to the many doctors that she sees about her daughter's problems and most of the time they believe her, or at least go along with her (a problem which we used to have in our own mental hospitals when dangerous & mendacious patients would sweet talk the official visitors). There is also the way of health (which we seem to be heading for in our old Etonian hands) according to which doctors are paid by the test, so they have every incentive to do lots of tests. Some of which were, in this case, unpleasantly invasive; abuse by any other name.

I am not sure what child protection departments take away from all this. Some parents do fuss a bit about the health of their children, but I am not sure how you can easily tell when they are fussing too much. Some parents buy far more clothes and shoes for themselves than they will ever use (as this mother does), but is that a reliable indicator of child abuse? Lots of people live in trailers in the States. There is also the angle that the daughter was born prematurely, weighing three and seven ounces - not a very good start in itself in my very limited experience of such things. She looks remarkably normal as an adult considering, in her photographs at least. My point being that one would expect her to be a bit sickly when young: it takes a while to catch up from such a dodgy start. So maybe some overworked and underpaid social worker missed a few beats on this one - but I am not surprised. We might have a bad outcome, but that does not mean that there is a good process to stop it happening again.

I should add that both mother and father appear to have had pretty dodgy parents themselves.

I also find that my poor short term memory is starting to get in the way of reading books like this. I forget what I have been told on page 10 by the time that I get to page 20 and I think it would help if I built a spreadsheet as I went along with key topics across the page and time down the page. Excel is really very good for this sort of thing and going its way I would keep much better track of what was going on. Such a proceeding has certainly helped me get a grip on the odd Shakespeare play in the past.  But do I really want to do my recreational reading with a computer to hand, taking notes? Do I want to spend quality time on this? Maybe I shall have to start to be a bit less eclectic in my reading to make things a bit easier for myself. Focus the fading powers a bit on the things that really matter to me.

More Cap'n Hornblower

On 3rd February I noticed a biography of one Captain Durham, an early version of Captain Hornblower. This morning, for some reason unknown, I wake up puzzling about why breaking the line was a good thing, puzzling made all the more puzzling by not having access to pencil, paper, ruler and compasses while lying in bed. Let alone a decent computer on which to model what it going on.

But I drag myself out of the sack to produce the diagram included left. We suppose that A is an English ship of the line in a line of ships moving west and that B is a French ship of the line in another line moving north, all the ships in the two lines being more or less identical. The ships themselves might be 50 yards long but I have no idea how far apart they would be, one from another in the line. The two cones are the relevant fields of fire of ships A and B and we suppose that the angle alpha is around 25 degrees and that the distance beta is around 500 yards. I dare say extreme range was rather further but I remember that the general idea was so much the closer, so much the better. Provided, that is, that you could keep up a better fire than the other chap, which I believe was generally the case for us at that time: we got all the practice in while the French were bottled up (or skulked) in port.

Another general idea was that firing a broadside into the front or back of your opponent did a lot more damage than firing it into his side. I believe that at Trafalgar a number of enemy ships surrendered in just a few minutes, having in that time taken a couple of such broadsides, more or less smashing up the whole of their insides. Shock and awe 18th century style. Subsequent broadsides might get a bit more ragged.

To try and stop this happening one arranged one's ships of the the line in a line, thus making it hard for the enemy to get at your fronts and backs without exposing himself to your fire first.

However, if you were sufficiently aggressive you sailed your line straight at the other line, taking their fire at long range but surviving to smash them up at short range, as ship A is about to do to ship B in the diagram. Nelson, being small, very aggressive and very brave, took this one step further and split his fleet into two lines so as to break the Franco-Spanish line in two places, so breaking up the enemy fleet and making it possible for the superior English gunnery to smash it up good and proper.

Which is all very well but it seems to me that the success of the breaking the line tactic depends on the directions the two lines are sailing in, their speeds, the intervals between the ships, the quality of their gunnery (and gunpowder) and the direction (and quality. As I said before, Conrad was quite full of the trickiness of the winds around Cape Trafalgar in his memoirs) of the wind. One then needs to look at the way that ships are moving in and out of the fields of fire of their opponents and the chances of taking serious damage before inflicting serious damage. Perhaps one quiet day I will knock up a bit of VB in my trusty copy of Excel to model all this. I suspect that one could do quite well without needing to actually draw maps & pictures inside the computer; messing about with arrays of ships would be quite good enough.

Quite good enough to explain why the symmetrical starting position of two identical lines of ships sailing at each other at right angles has such an asymmetrical result, this being the source of much of the waking puzzlement.

PS 1: being picky, the cones representing the fields of fire are not really cones as the ships have more than one gun, occupying more than one position. The cones are really the sums of the 15 or so cones generated by the 50 or so guns on one side of a three decker battleship.

PS 2: would there be a market for a computer game based on the foregoing? It would make a change from all the Rambo stuff which I understand to be the staple. Would our teens have any interest in 18th century gunnery, so much more feeble and so much more bulky than the sort of thing we can do now?

Donkey life

Pleased to find on my return from Cambridge that the Metro is fully on the case with this picture of juvenile Poitou donkeys, although they are nothing like as big & grand as the one noticed on 6th May at Hook Road Arena.

Pity about the rather red-top headline.

Traffic calming

Cambridge continues to live up to its reputation for unusual solutions to usual traffic problems, in this case with the sort of contraption more commonly associated with buildings belonging to the monarch - such as Buckingham Palace - or the secret service.

This contraption appeared to be protecting the inhabitants of one of the outbuildings of Newnham College from the attentions of late night joy riders from town, or possibly in town for the night from the surrounding countryside. Maybe from the attentions of the aliens who pick our fruit and vegetables in the surrounding fens.

Presumably someone saw a need for such a thing. But it is not as if the college is still the preserve of the shrinking maidens of yesteryear: it has moved on with the times a bit, even if still a ladies only place. I wonder what sort of a loop hole in the Equality Opportunities Act of 2010 (or possibly preceding acts) they live in?

Grouper

A grouper, according to the EED, not to be confused with a fish and being the male version of the groupie, this last thriving best in the musical atmosphere of the sixties and seventies of the last century of the last millennium. Not a species one hears so much of these days.

On this occasion the grouper, that is to say me, trolled off to Cambridge to hear the Endellion Quartet, more usually heard in former years in the Dorking Halls. The occasion was also a follow up from the Brahms via Schoenberg reported on 12th April, our being offered Haydn's String Quartet Op.50 No.2, Bartok's String Quartet No.1 and the Brahms Piano Quartet No.1, Op.25, this last in the format originally intended.

Warmed up with two sandwiches from the market square M&S, the site, I believe, of a former cinema (not that we from Epsom can talk, with our largest cinema having morphed into a TKMaxx). £3 for sandwiches described as ham on brown with mustard mayonnaise; quite fresh and nicely presented but tasting a lot more of mustard mayonnaise than ham, this last being that extremely thin stuff favoured by Sainsbury's, prettily folded to make it look as if there were lots of it. Which gave rise to the thought that if the pretty folding and the fancy box had been omitted one might have been allowed a bit more of the ham instead of all the mayo.. Maybe even ham hand reared and slaughtered, the traditional way, in Wiltshire.

On to the West Road concert hall, which despite being a lot newer, was not that unlike the Dorking Halls in size and in the sort of audience attracted. Perhaps a little younger, but not by all that much. The Endellion were their usual excellent selves, supported in the Brahms by a first year engineering student from Hong Kong on the piano. He was short and good, although I thought a little loud, often a failing of the younger performer. But this may have been more to do with my having, as the last seat left, a seat at the very front right, with my nose more or less resting on the front of the stage. Which was far too close and meant that I heard rather more of the cello and the piano that I perhaps ought to have: for the Brahms at least I would have done better to be a bit further back. It all seems to depend; some works are fine up front and personal, some are not - but I am not very good at saying which is which beforehand. One consequence of all this was that the opening bars of the last movement of the Brahms were not quite as gloriously triumphant as they are on my 'legendary' recording of Amadeus doing it for Deutsche Grammophon.

Back via Kings Cross where I found that technology had advanced to the point where the computerised platform announcements on the underground were actually coming from the mouth of the platform attendant via a device which looked rather like a mobile phone and might even have been one. Certainly an improvement on the computer. Topological puzzle in that the walk between the overground platform and the underground platform was hugely longer going than coming. Coming one seemed to miss out on the smart new tunnel altogether.

Onto to Waitrose Small at Vauxhall, newly opened but next to the bus station, not quite as well placed as the Sainsbury Local which was next to the train station. The Waitrose Small had clearly taken a leaf out of the Tesco Cuddly Coffee Shop wheeze in the papers recently and were trying to be very friendly, to the point where the staff would not need much prompting to start talking about your dog, your baby or the weather. They also carried expensive bread from Gail's Artisan Bakery. I bought a couple of sour dough creations for just over £6 for two 1lb loaves, so about the same price as Carluccio's at Waterloo and perhaps 5 times more than it costs me to bake 2lbs of not such posh bread (although more suitable for every day use). Perhaps further, some market research gang has been hired to find the price which generates the most revenue, getting the right balance between volume profit and unit profit, and all the multiples, being subscribers to the one gang, use the one price. First loaf involving potatoes and flavourings was very good. A little chewy, to the point where one was a little nervous about one's larger fillings, but very good just the same.

Checking with Professor Google I find that it is the proprietors at http://www.gailsbread.co.uk/ who have sold their souls to the devil. Let's hope that they have an appropriately long spoon as a small firm selling to a very big one can very easily find itself trapped in a rather unprofitable place. Worse than wage slaves in all but name. Although for the present they appear to be a middle sized chain of fancy bakers with perhaps 20 outlets across London, with the web site not very informative about the history. So one is left wondering whether Waitrose have taken a share of the equity in the same way as Tesco took a share of the equity of the cuddly coffee company. Or are they actually a cuddly brand in some large & uncuddly operation, for example Virgin Baked Products PLC? Or are they following in the footsteps of Valerie of the patisserie? Will they grow too fast and lose their grip on the quality of the product and its package?

The all important brown paper bag, for once big enough for the loaf which was in it, is illustrated. The bar coded sticker needed to make the thing fit for a small supermarket is not visible on the verso.

Car booter

The donkeys vacated at the proper time, making way for Monday to be the big day for the car booter at Hook Road Arena.

The biggest I have seen there for a while, with the field used for pitches completely full with a couple of DIY pitching areas pitching up outside. Which presumably meant that the pitchers did not have to pay for their pitches and the buyers did not have to walk so far from the car park, assuming that is, that they get into the car booter from the normal, western end, rather than from any other end. Lots of people of the usually exuberant mix: all the shapes, sizes, colours and lingos you could possibly want.

Despite the size, I did not wind up buying very much and I did overhear some sellers moaning about the lack of buying action. But then, don't they always? Picked up one handy length of three by three fencing post in the hedge outside, far too handy to pass by. Some sort of white wood which seemed rather heavy and close grained for pine but some other part of the brain said that it was unlikely to be anything else. Perhaps it would look a bit different if I planed it up. Then inside, one Miss Marple DVD against drought on ITV3, one pot of gooseberry jam and one cheerful shower curtain. There were some cheap rugs - up to £100 sort of thing - which were interesting, but in the end I passed on. Quite a lot of fishing gear. Lots of heavy black leather belts. Lots of DVDs - perhaps these last are going the way of video tapes now that downloading is an option for the connected amongst us. Which excludes us, as our television is not connected and this PC does not do sound without headphones, which I no not particularly like using and which do not work very well for two or more. Plus it - the PC that is - is no where near the sofa which is essential for comfortable viewing.

Out at the eastern end onto the bridle path which runs between what was St. Ebba's Hospital and what is still the Longmead housing estate, from Hook Road to Chessington Road. The St. Ebba's boundary was marked by several fences, including one made of concrete posts and panels, the panels being about 6 feet wide by 1 foot high and slotting into the slots on the posts. The sort of fencing which looks very solid and sturdy when new but can look very tatty when the frost starts getting into the reinforcing bars in the posts and everything starts to crumble. Plus, the panels cannot take being whacked with a sledge hammer, the sort of treatment they need to be able to stand in this particular location.

Chunks of the fence have been repaired with soft wood featherboarding, as illustrated. Small chunks have been repaired using vertical steel piles rather than horizontal concrete panels; an effective if rather ugly and expensive solution.

There is also a lot of space. The path and its borders must be five to ten yards wide, borders presently overgrown and rubbish strewn. Some middle sized trees. But with a bit of money and imagination it could be turned into a handsome green artery running between the old and new housing estates. Is the path the subject of dispute between the developers of the new housing estate and the council? Is the council prepared to spend quality time and money on a path which is going to be subject to persistent anti-social behaviour of one sort or another? Does its present dilapidated condition encourage said behaviour?