Black pudding

Had our first black pudding for a while for lunch today. Peeled, sliced into wedges (hard not to given the horseshoe shape) and grilled. There was very little fat in it, so served with grilled tomatoes (enhanced with a touch of Irish lard and a pinch of freshly pummeled black pepper) and mashed potatoes (enhanced with a substantial knob of butter). The tomatoes and potatoes served well to moisten the rather dry pudding. A fine mixture which went down very well. Overall colour mix very good and had I gone as far as some brown goo or other delicately striped over the whole - there must be a fancier word for this part of the operation - I would have been a credit to a TV chef.

Only marred by a strange smell during the proceedings in the kitchen, a not very healthful smell. Flourophosphines or some such at the very least. It turned out to be caused by the top of the black plastic handle of the grill overheating, despite, in so far as I could tell, the grill being in the right place underneath the element. Poor design sezzeye. Odd that it had not happened before though.

The white puddings from Manor Green Road come from Slomers, the same gang as supplied the butcher in Cheam, at least when I was last using it. But their black puddings come from Newsholme Food Group, very properly from Huddersfield, proper black pudding country. The company looks to be run by one John Newsholme, having grown from humble beginnings after the war; maybe the current incumbent is John Newsholme II or even III. Web site, confusingly is at http://www.countryparkfoods.co.uk/ - but do see the Weber slicing machine which looks as if it could take an entire cow, although I don't suppose that it ever does.

Further confusion caused by black pudding being part of what they call their continental range. I wonder if they are one of the English black pudding makers who try it on in French black pudding shows? I recall one such carrying off the Challenge Cup one year, to the chagrin of the locals who had thought that their boudin noir was the business.

As far as I can make out from my records, while there is a trickle of mentions of black puddings in hotels and white puddings in purchases, there have been very few purchases of black puddings. But with today's success, perhaps we will relax the ban on northern cholesterol to the extent of buying one maybe once a month. Time will tell.

More irritation

And while we are on the subject of irritation, the Guardian managed to score again yesterday.

First, it treats the recent vote on matters Syrian in the House of Commons as if it was a personal humiliation for the Prime Minister. Now while I dare say it is a bit of a blow and it will take a day or so for him to recover his full authority over his colleagues, I think it is wrong to treat the result of this vote in this way. The PM had a view and he put it to the House which, after due consideration, disagreed with him: we should be thankful that we have a house which does occasionally discuss matters of substance and does occasionally make a difference, despite the rigours of our party system and its whips, rather than using the opportunity to have a pop at him, that is to say at our PM. Talk of humiliation will hardly encourage him to public debate, rather to stifle debate and to make all the real decisions in the private comfort of his coterie.

I should add that, on this matter, I agree with the House. Intervention in affairs of this sort, tragic though they are, has a poor track record.

Second, it drags out the word 'appalling' for yet another facet of the Mid Staffordshire Health saga. OK, so the health people there have a poor track record and something needs to be done, not least about the senior managers who pay themselves so well while things go a bit wrong down at the mill. But let's keep a sense of proportion and reserve appalling for things which really are. The people more closely involved might go pale and feel weak (the original meaning of the word) at the failure of their colleagues, but it is not going to affect the rest of us in quite that way.

Call centres

One irritating feature of life as a retired person is the regular intrusions of calls, often of a subcontinental flavour, offering some improbable service. Calls which have caused us to abandon a lifetime of telephonic politeness and to put the phone down without any speech or ceremony at all. One only hopes that the poor sods who have to do this sort of work are used to it and don't take it too personally.

But there is an up side. The same sort of factories which make the calls to potential customers also process the emails from actual and potential customers. And the processes work; on the whole one gets replies in fairly short order.

So a couple of days ago, I had little enough to do that I found the time to send an email to our local council. To which I got a perfectly sensible reply within a few hours.

Then a few weeks ago I had occasion to email a company selling gas fires about ventilation. I got a reply more or less immediately telling me that my email was very important to them and that they would reply, business (in the sense of being busy) permitting withing three working days. I got the substantive, quite satisfactory reply, a few hours later. And while one might smirk at the 'email is very important to us' bit, the instant reply does serve to confirm that your email is in their system and does provide a reference number should it subsequently go missing. The processes do work.

And at about the same time, I had been so impressed by the freshness & niceness of an entirely out of season apple from Sainsbury's that I emailed them to say so and to ask them how they did it. As with the gas fire people, a more or less instant reply to say that they had got my email. Rather more gushing about how important I was to them. Then two days later the substantive reply, which went to far as to admit that they sometimes sourced their apples from South Africa and yes they were probably moved in climate controlled conditions. But they did not go so far as to explain how exactly the trick was done; how they could deliver apples from the other end of the world which tasted to me as if they had been freshly picked. I suppose I fail on two counts. First I not so important to them, gushing notwithstanding, that they were going to spend serious time on answering the question. Second, they might regard the details of exactly how they achieved this miracle of food science as commercially sensitive, not things to be dished out to all comers over the ether. So I can't really complain. But the applies were good and I remain curious about how they do it.

I might add in passing, that they do a similar thing with apples at Tesco's. But in their case the fresh effect wears off much faster once you get the things home. Good the same day, not so good the next.

PS: it took a Clockwise Horton to come up with Toller's law of call centres, which states: "the helpfulness of the person generated substantive reply is inversely proportional to the the gushingness of the computer generated holding reply".

A Norfolk village (2)

Another village visited in the margins of Houghton was Castle Rising, a famous rotten borough, variously home to Nicholas L'Estrange, Samuel Pepys and Robert Walpole, the first mentioned of whom I manged to confuse with Lestrade - but I at least I am not the first so to do. See if you can spot the connection to http://www.bucpower.com/.

We went there to see the famous castle, built by one D'Albini who got rich by marrying the widow of Henry I - a widow who eventually got so fed up with his parvenu ways that she retired to a continental nunnery. His father had been butler to either the Conqueror or his son Rufus, a reminder of the days when personal service of this sort was regarded as honourable; a far cry from the sort of people who wind up as palace servants these days. A castle which we had last seen in 2009 - see August 26th of that year in the other place. A castle which was impressive in rather the same way as that at Rochester (see April 28th) but which, we were reminded, was actually based on the roughly contemporary Norwich castle. A castle, furthermore, which having fallen into the clutches of the Howard family, wealthy or entrepreneurial enough to hang on to their built heritage, has not fallen into the clutches of either the National Trust or English Heritage. Part of the Howard Heritage Family, along with Arundel Castle and Howard's End.

On to the noted hat shop to see what they could do against an uncoming wedding, part of the Unique Family (see http://www.uniquegiftsandinteriors.co.uk/), a place which not only had a fine selection of hats, but which also had staff who took time to show them off to you. With the result that, after a proper amount of toing & froing, we bought one. We decided against visiting the impressive looking tea rooms which were also part of the same Family.

From there to the church, apparently built at about the same time as the castle, but sympathetically restored in the 19th century. Interesting tower with a pitched roof over the crossing. Interesting stone detailing inside and out. Very impressive west front.

We had opened the day by a visit to Congham Hall Hotel, which, amongst other attractions had a tractor in a shed from before the days when Mr. Massey met Mr. Fergusson, very possibly of the kind known as little grey fergies. And we closed the day with a visit to a farm shop where, for once in a while, we purchased some double lamb chops to be grilled for tea. There were also some good looking pork pies which we turned up on this occasion and, sadly, never got back to.

Nymphaea

Today to Wisley to join the hordes of grey hairs and Surrey mums herding there. Arriving late at around 1130, we were consigned to the depths of Car Park 3, but, as usual, the place managed to soak us all up with seeming unpleasantly crowded.

The large water lily pond behind the main house was in terrific form, with the illustration left not doing it justice at all - but at least if you have been there yourself you will know the pond I mean. As well as being in terrific form it gave the lie to my theory that the leaves of any water lily will grow big, given the right circumstances. The dozen or more clumps in this pond, with oodles of space around them, had leaves of generally small size, whereas the one in our pond at home - maybe as much as three feet in diameter - has large leaves, with the leaves having grown steadily larger over the years, although the lily was sold to us as a small leaved variety. With the result that the leaves are sticking up all over the place, generally hiding the rather splendid dark red flowers from view.

I had the idea that there are large tanks of water with lilies in northern India, rather like this one but even more terrific, but a quick twirl with google fails to reveal much more than that there are plenty of water lilies in southern Asia generally. But it did suggest that the delicate blue lilies we came across a bit later in the hot house may well have been nymphaea nouchali, said by wikipedia to have been 'long valued as a garden flower in Thailand and Myanmar to decorate ponds and gardens'.

Tea with something described as almond slice, which last was dear (one needed two of them to make a decent cake) and rather sugary; no where near as good as the same sort of thing from, for example, Patisserie Valerie.

Succulents and cacti in the hot house in their usual splendid form.

Back home to second picking of blackberries from the clump at the bottom of our very own road. I had thought I was the only one at it, but it turns out that a neighbour has been having a go too, albeit on a more modest scale. Over to BH for tray freezing against blackberry and apple to liven up the winter desert menu.

Wimmin

Very struck this morning by a passage in 'The Mill on the Floss' on the Kindle.

Not the for the first time, I felt the frustration that must have been felt by women of a certain bent who were kept to the house and its duties by the conventions of their time. I don't think that George Eliot is the only writer to write of this, although I cannot name any such male writer. See first paragraph of the illustration - and click to enlarge.

The illustration comes here from Gutenburg, via Chrome, Notepad and Paint. First thought was to try scanning the Kindle image direct, but then I worried about what the rays of the scanner might do to the rays of the Kindle. But then I thought let's give it a go anyway - to find that there was indeed something odd going on. I could scan the image OK, but the image never seemed to be that of the page I intended. The rays of the scanner (or something) seemed to be interacting with the turn page function on the Kindle and going to Gutenburg was quicker than working this out well enough to get the right page on the scanned image. And not altogether inappropriate as that is probably where the Kindle text came from in the first place - thus avoiding popping any more money into the Amazon coffers in the BVI (see 26th November last).

Reading this book, I been very struck altogether by the power of George Eliot as a writer, whom I have not read for a while (and prompted on this occasion by a tasteful BBC DVD from Amazon). She is a bit into long sentences with complex construction but she knows her stuff. She also knows, or guesses, an awful lot more about life than might be expected from her relatively sheltered life as a jobbing lady writer.

A treat

A treat in the form of an illustration from a real camera, rather than that inside my not very flashy mobile phone. Lots and lots of pixels and a lens which can focus them.

And with the illustration being of the pressed flowers found inside the biography of Siegfried mentioned yesterday. Flower pressing being something which I think had more or less died out by the time I was a child but which BH thinks that it might still figure as an activity which qualifies for a badge in the Girl Guides. Is it an alternative activity for all those mid-western housewives who might otherwise be making arty cup cakes?

The rather rapid perusal involved in finding and removing the dried flowers did yield some points of contact with the Siegfried I know from the Nibelungenlied. So he is a knights-in-armour sort of hero from the Rhineland of the middle ages. He has adventures, some of them involving maidens with pigtails and some of them involving monsters, human or otherwise. And at the end of the book he gets carried away and carries off the ring of the Nibelungen, marries his princess and comes to a sticky end. Which sounds to me more like Wagner than Nibelungenlied, so there must be various strands to the story of Siegfried. Maybe it is all rather like Robin Hood or King Arthur over here.

Big daddy

For the first time ever, two visits in one day to the big daddy of car boot sales, Hook Road Arena on August Bank Holiday Monday. With thanks for the illustration to Google Maps, only let down by their having taken the picture on what looks like a family fun day rather than a car boot day.

Waking up bright and early to a rather gray day, decided to Horton Lane Clockwise it to the Arena to take a peek at the car booter at opening time. We get there at about 0715 find that the main selling area (blue) to had been filled up and that they were starting on the subsidiary area (green). We learned later that to get a middle slot in the main area one needed to be at the gates at around 0600.

Paying 50p each, we were let in to the main area to start inspecting the goods, with the chap who sells popular & more exotic vinyl occupying, as usual, the pole position. We wondered whether he was the management or, at least, had some deal with the management. Either that or he was a consistently early riser. Got off to an early start, buying myself the collected works of Inspector Morse in the DVD edition, apprently the product of more than one boxed set. The seller had even gone to the bother to complete the set by buying the missing disc 29 from Ebay, albeit a DVD from a different edition. Between a third and a half of them were still unplayed in their plastic - not unlike boxed sets of vinyl in that regard - and I thought I had done quite well at 45p a disc. We were also intrigued how we got to 33 discs, given that the paperback of one of them which we had recently been given talked of around 15. Perhaps some of the 15 were collections of short stories, puffed up into full length stories with the addition of stock local colour. See 30th June for the last report here on the subject.

At this point we thought it only fair to break off to go through the south eastern exit and tell the ladies of the party that a car booter was available, to find that, following my report of 7th May, the council had sent in the diggers and were doing something about the path there. This was good news, although we were unsure about the wisdom of planting young broadleaf trees on the top of a new embankment, the sort of thing intended around here to stop the ingress and setting up camp of unwanted caravans. Clearly need to keep an eye on progress.

Duly returned after breakfast, parking in the now more or less full red area. Paid our 50p's again to gain access to the green area, now up and running, and off we went to do the thing properly. There followed a leisurely stroll around maybe half of the stalls available, it now having by now become a rather hot morning. Plenty of interesting sights both on, and on both sides of the stalls. I managed one further purchase of note, to wit, a different version of the Siegfried story to that offered by Mr. Hatto (see, for example, June 29th 2010 in the other place). This one was offered by Dora Ford Madeley in an illustrated edition published by Harrap in 1910, complete with sundry wild flowers pressed into it by a previous owner. Clearly a brilliant spot as Abebooks would have sold me one from the very same edition in a similar condition for £19, 19 times what I actually paid, or another in good condition for £39.67p (plus P&P). Alternatively, Rooke Books offer one from the rather superior edition of 1848, for which they want £99.99p.

I shall report further in due course.

On second exit, spotted two cars of interest. First, a police car, presumably there on some kind of business. Second, a Version 8 Mustang with the number plate 'V8 MUS'. How much for the two?

The curse of the teflons

A long time ago it was quite hard to get saucepans which were not coated with the black stuff which flakes off.

Then things got better and it was only hard to get frying pans without the black stuff. The black stuff being additionally bad in this case because it changed the nature of fying, fried eggs in particular coming out all wrong.

Then the black stuff retreated from frying pans but made a stand on bakeware. As far as I can see, so far anyway, one cannot get bakeware without the black stuff.

Now, I presently use two loaf tins, both carrying the Linea name from the House of Fraser. The black stuff has been flaking off them for months, going I knew not where, but yesterday, for the first time, one of the two loaves I had baked got stuck inside its non-stick tin. After various bashings and pokings, bashings and pokings which might easily have resulted in the fragmentation of the still fragile, hot loaf, the thing came out. But with a liberal dose of the black stuff stuck to it. Most unsightly.

Then I start to worry about the healthiness or otherwise of eating the black stuff and a quick pass over Google reveals that I am by no means the first person to worry so. Much talk of volatile ingredients of the black stuff doing nasty things to the respiratory tract. What about the perfluorooctanoic acid used in its fabrication? The flouro bit sounds a bit dodgy. Much worried talk altogether. But there is also talk of the black stuff, once fabricated, being more or less inert and unlikely to do anything untoward to a human. But no reputable talk from reputable sites at all. No seals of good housekeeping from the Health people or even the Health and Safety people, in fact silence. Is this silence a good thing or is it the result of government having been bought off by the Teflon Manufacturers Lobby (see TML)?

Having slept on this important matter, I think I settle for the black flakes being unsightly but harmless. I shall not chuck the offending bread but I shall chuck the offending loaf tins. Next project: to buy some new ones, with search for black stuff free bakeware being written large into the project initiation document.

Jigsaw 20, Series 2

Back to the Falcon de luxe brand of puzzle, this one a very modest 75p from a charity shop in King's Lynn, I think a charity to do with hospices.

A rather ugly painting but an easy going and pleasant jigsaw. Perhaps the artist can be excused on the grounds that he paints for the jigsaw market, making sure that his pictures have an appropriate density of jigsaw solving cues and features, be they of shape, colour or texture. Or whatever. With the added bonus that the completed puzzle photographs with less reflection than usual.

Started with the edge, as almost always. Then the skyline.

The colour of the lifeboat made that the next target, it being quite easy to pull most of the pieces out of the heap. As it was for the sign of gifts to its right. Then the Christmas tree, its lights and nearby lights.

Then onto the windows, gradually spreading out to do the buildings and the people to the left of the lifeboat. Then left hand snow, then the smaller boats. Knocked off some lower sky.

This left the water which was of modest size and quite easy.

And the balance of the sky which was rather larger. After doing the easy smoke, I resorted to sorting the pieces for this last lap. Interesting how it helps having the pieces in orderly rows; I guess it means that the brain has a lot less work to do in deciding whether a piece fits a hole or not. Just one of a small number of possible rotations to worry about, rather than an infinite - or at least large - number.

I made just one mistake, which only came to light when placing the very last piece, which fitted the very last hole but did not quite match the picture. But having identified the problem, identifying the piece with which to swap, maybe 10 pieces away to the right, was a matter of seconds.

A very regular puzzle with the great majority of pieces being of the prong-hole-prong-hole configuration, but I did notice a bit of slackness about the cutting in the sky. While four pieces did meet at each vertex, some of the corners were slightly out, maybe by as much as half a millimetre.

All in all, all very satisfactory.

PS: is it worth asking the blogger people how I get English English spell checking rather than US English? Such a switch would helpfully reduce my confusion in such matters.

Regression

Some part of me has clearly regressed to my undergraduate days, as following yesterday's post about DVD pricing, I woke this morning to a dream about photo copier pricing.

Back in the Treasury, the locale for so many of the dreams which I remember, where, unlikely though it would have been, I had been commissioned to organise a paper for a very important person, organise in this case meaning getting something from a slightly less important person to process and pass onto the first important person. The something which turned out to be a lengthy pencil note on one side of a rather large and awkwardly shaped piece of paper which I thought prudent to copy for the record before moving onto the next step. But while it would not fit conveniently into the copier to which I had access, the first very important person had a special copier in his outer office into which it would fit. Had to talk very nicely to the man (as it happens, of dark colour and little hair) who was guarding the thing to get him to let me use it.

At which point I woke up to wonder about the rules appropriate to the management of expensive resources such as fancy photocopiers.

First thought was that since one had bought the thing, one might as well maximise the value to be got from it by allowing all comers. A thought which is slightly dented by at least two considerations. First, I think that photocopiers are usually brought in on a rental basis, not bought (without the 'r') and with the rental agreement including a duration element, a number of copies element, maintenance cover and penalties for lack of service, this last on a complicated and graduated basis in order to keep the chaps from purchasing happy. So one does not necessarily maximise value to one's own company by allowing all comers, although one might maximise that to the owner of the photocopier. And seen from a long way up, it is still wasteful to have the things sitting there doing nothing. Market forces failing again. Second, in the case of the very important person, part of what he is paying for is exclusive access. The things is always charged up and ready to go whenever he (or his secretary) might want to use the thing, unobstructed by the smelly public.

Then one needs to keep the accountants happy. Current fashion is to apportion the costs of vaguely central resources to the people that use them, rather than simply charge them to some central fund. So this might mean that everyone is issued with a photocopier card which is stuck in the photocopier every time you want to use it so that your budget can be charged with your copy. This way the cost of the photocopier gets allocated fairly among the fee earners (to borrow a term from law firms) - but at the cost of restricting use. Not clear that this is maximising value either. And what about the transaction costs of all these cards and copies?

Clearly time for breakfast.

Horton Lane

Horton Lane clockwise this morning, and at the half way point, at the Horton Golf Club, I was interested to come across the newly completed Jungle Island, a posh version of what used, at the seaside, to be called crazy golf.  At least it looked completed from the car park, but there may still be a bit of snagging to do to judge from the picture at http://hortonparkgolf.com/.

All looks rather swish, and might become more so as the jungle gardens mature a bit. Quite an impressive venture for a place which struggled a bit under its previous ownership. Just the place to park the wife and kids while one has a decent round of golf, all nineteen holes of it, with the chaps.

So Horton Lane is becoming quite a venue, with something for everybody. Starting from the southern end one has the Old Moat Garden Centre (http://www.theoldmoatgardencentre.org.uk), Horton Country Park, Epsom Equestrian (http://www.epsomridingschool.co.uk/), Horton Retail Park (only part occupied but boasting a small Tesco's), Hobbledown (http://www.hobbledown.com/), Horton Golf Club (including jungle) and finally Hook Road Arena for special attractions all year round - see especially http://www.hookcarbootsale.com/.

Epsom Equestrian is particularly good for those who want to learn to shout like a banker without, necessarily, having banker substance to back it up. You should hear them on the polo field. They even had a bar at one point but I think that got closed down by vandals. But the golf club does have one and I don't think that they fuss about membership; all money over the bar is good.

Mostly carved out from what was one of the Epsom asylums, from the days when their customers were encouraged to help with their keep by working on the farm, the central buildings of which now house the Hobbledown people. Deemed in the 70's to be tantamount to slavery by the unions of the day.

DVD pricing

The pricing of DVD's is an continuing interest, with the prices of new DVD's (new in the sense of not charity shop or car boot sale) varying hugely, reflecting, one might think, the demand.

So harking back to foundation economics, if we assume that the production & distribution cost of a DVD can be treated as zero, the seller of DVD's will set a price which maximises revenue. So assuming that the relevant demand curve (one of the red one's on the illustration, the blue one has been air brushed out by our assumption) is nice and smooth and that there is just one solution, at what point does the marginal gain of a slightly higher price balance the marginal loss of a customer? A bit of work on the back of an envelope reveals that point to be the place which delivers the rectangle on the origin of the largest area, so the answer is that it all depends on the shape & position of the curve - unless the shape is a positive hyperbola in which case it does not matter what the price is: all give the same result to the producer of DVD's, so he might as well settle for a high price and low bother.

Intuition says that if demand for a DVD is strong, then the producer does best by setting a high price. But all the diagram says to me is that if demand gets stronger, that is to say the red curve moves to the right, the producer can now get a better result with a higher price. But that is not to say where the best result lies, so I must be missing something important. Does the answer lie in the steepness of the curve: if quantity holds up well against an increase in price, then increase it? Maybe I will continue with the envelope offline and report back.

All this being triggered by reading this morning in a book by Antonio Damasio an anecdote concerning the play 'Happy Days', a Samuel Beckett play which, as it happens, we have seen and reported (see February 23rd 2007 in the other place). But a report which bears in no way on the anecdote. so I want to see the thing again, to better understand the point Damasio made this morning. Turn up Google and Amazon to find that I can indeed have a DVD of the play, but instead of the £5-10 I usually pay for such things, I am expected to fork out £50 or more for the collected works - or rather less for the wrong work - unless I want a DVD that only works in the US. I shall just have to wait until the thing turns up again, on the stage or on a table in Hook Road Arena. Bets taken on which happens first.

Google also points me to http://www.beckett.com/ which I had thought might be helpful but turns out to be about baseball. Can't believe everything you read on Google.

PS 1: no idea why clicking on this illustration works in the way it does. Maybe Wikipedia, from whence it came, is building some kind of image protection into its stuff to protect themselves against light fingered people like me.

PS 2: maybe I am wrong to neglect the costs of production & distribution. Given a master, the cost of burning a DVD and sticking it in the post might only be a couple of pounds or so, but maybe the costs of maintaining a large online catalogue are higher than I think. Thousands of items available, most of which sell in ones and twos a week. And ones and twos a week may not generate the cash needed to pay for the master in the first place. Certainly hard to make a crust on that basis in a shop made of bricks these days: Screwfix might manage but HMV struggle.

PS 3: maybe I will settle for YouTube - where I can see a perfectly respectable Italian production in English. Not on the comfort of my sofa, but at least for free. Do the Italians mind it being there?

To Clapham

Got off the train at Clapham Junction and left by south side for the first time for a while, perhaps as long as a couple of years, although I have done north side at least once this year (see 7th June). Interested to find that Wandsworth Council felt rich enough to pave the immediate surrounds of the station with smart granite blocks from more than one country, that is to say of more than one colour. All very pretty. But but by the time one gets to Clapham Common one is in Lambeth who clearly do not feel so rich and their pavements are still rather tatty council slabs, this despite the general ambience being very cosmopolitan, not to say metropolitan. But there was an imposing water fountain made mainly of polished pink granite, not working but topped by some handsome bronze figures, perhaps including the patroness of thirsty travellers.

On and into Clapham Picturehouse to see a film of a performance of Billy Budd, a new to me way of consuming opera, not that I have done much of any other sort, and none for some years now.

Lunchtime audience much the same as one would get for a film at the Epsom Playhouse, albeit with a slightly more metropolitan tone. Maybe fifteen of us altogether.

Small auditorium with comfortable seats. Screen a sensible size and the sound not too loud. So off to a good start. But then we got some warming up stuff about Glyndebourne which was not so good. And then, after the much needed interval (100 minutes in one place is rather a lot for me these days, even in a comfortable seat, and the full 200 minutes would be out of the question), we got five or ten minutes of talking beard, a real downer. I know you have to frame the film in some way but surely somebody could come up with something better than this? I read my Guardian to show my disdain.

Opera rather good, only marred by a lot of zooming in and out, round and about. They didn't just park the cameras in the centre stalls and let the show do its stuff, they had to have close ups of sweat dripping off noses, just like they do on telly. All very distracting. And I suspect that the performance filmed was not a proper public performance, despite the impression given by the packaging and despite bits of clapping, rather a telly special with telly makeup and so on and so forth. But I was still impressed enough that I will try to go to a live performance should such a thing turn up in London. Not sure about trolling out to Glyndebourne and mixing it with the glitzy opera gang you get there.

It struck me that the opera, with its very spare & tragic plot, was very much a passion play - and one which made the recently half seen passion from Gibson seem very silly - as well as offensive. See 10th August.

There is also the question of Britten being a conshy, a scarcely respectable line to take in the second war but one which perhaps drives the choice of subject matter of this opera - the cruelty of the articles of war. But then there is the odd constrast between the solicitude for Budd and the disregard of the many casualties which will result from any clash between the 'Indomitable' and the French, a clash much desired by captain and crew alike. And mangled French corpses are invisible; the French are other, of no more consequence than cows or pigs.

Out to find the sun was still shining and lots of people sunning themselves on the common. Back up the junction, taking in an eel & pie shop on the way which was a bit nearer the mark than the various more gentrified offerings near the common. Mash, pie and gravy for £3.50, tea 90p extra. Good gear and felt very full afterwards, although not so full that I was was detered from taking home a couple of slabs of bread pudding, described as home made and which turned out to be quite good for a shop product - if no where near the fresh BH made product. Inspection of Google this morning reveals a whole resurgent pie culture in London, transcending its east end origins and I suspect that the place I visited was repro rather than original, despite the authentic sounding accents of the serving girl. Certainly the furniture was clean and modern. Must take a more careful look next time I am in the area.

Back home to find that someone is now watering the new trees outside the station, which will probably survive, albeit in a rather stunted condition. See 11th June and 1st August.

The changing face of retail

A few days ago I decided that my banker braces needed to be attached to my trousers with key rings rather than with the clips supplied, these last having acquired the habit of becoming unclipped. I had some matching key rings at home but they were not really big enough to go with the braces so key ring hunt it was.

First stop was the key kiosk by the Spread Eagle. Oh no sir, we can do a key ring attached to a large ornamental leather thing, but not a key ring by itself. Second stop Rymans, whom I had thought might have had key rings tucked in along with bull dog clips and sundry fasteners. But they didn't. Third stop Robert Dyas but ditto. I didn't think to try Wilko, who as the successor to the Woollies niche in the market might well have done the business. In desperation, I march around to ScrewFix, a place which has done me well for strange odds and ends in the past, but they did not run to key rings.

What is the problem? Surely the demand for key rings is holding up OK? I can see that such low value items would clutter shops up, but surely the all seeing and all powerful market forces would make a place for them somewhere?

Sleeping on the problem, I think I ought to try the other key kiosk, the one by the Assembly Rooms, and yes it turned out that they do carry key rings, in more than one size too. Including the size I wanted. Three for 60p which was rather less than I had been expecting to pay - but then their ends had not been shaped, just cut off straight, making it easy to catch the ends when fitting the ring onto something, like the belt loop on a pair of trousers.

So out with the metal work vice, out with the tube of fine metal files (an interesting home (not mine) made tube with a screw top and a screw bottom,  a screw at both ends) and in about 12 minutes the 6 ends had been filed down a bit. Not a great job, but it will serve. And I was pleased that the metal work gear which has been sitting in the garage for months, if not years, unused, has finally had another outing.

Electric brains

I have been reading a book by Gerald Edelman called 'Second Nature' (2006), in which he follows in the foot steps of many an eminent scientist in spreading the wings a bit and trying for a theory of everything (aka a toe) before passing on the baton.

A decent rather than good bit of book production from Yale, certainly not up to the usually much higher standard of Belknap from Harvard.

The first part of the book contains a handy summary of Edelman’s generally convincing thoughts on the neuronic basis of consciousness. It also makes quite a big issue on pages 21-22 of asserting that the brain is not a computer, an assertion mainly founded on brains being very much larger computers than any man made one.

First, one has the complexity of an individual neuron and its firing arrangements - a rather more complicated object than a transistor. And then one has a huge number of them and an even huger number of connections between them. But a quick peep at Wikipedia tells me that a modern chip might contain the equivalent of billions of transistors, so I am now unsure how the 30 billion or so neurons in the brain compares. I had not realised that chips got anything like that big.

Second, one has the distribution of processing in a brain. Every neuron is a law unto itself and they are all processing away in parallel, while a computer, roughly speaking anyway, processes exactly one instruction (from a program which has been written and fed into it) per unit time. One might argue that the effects of interest in a brain endure for hundreds of milliseconds and when we look at intervals of this sort a modern computer can be considered to be multi-threading – which is true but the multi-threading is maybe hundreds of threads – not the millions if not billions of the brain.

Third, one has the evolution of the individual brain. We might have a genetic start point, but what happens after that depends on the environment with every environment being unique –  and different environments will result in different choices being made and different wiring up. A pair of identical twins might start with the same genes, but by the time they are born their brains will be different; less different than those of other siblings, but different nonetheless and giving different answers. Whereas one computer is pretty much like another: within limits, if you run the same test on different computers you will get the same answers.

Another point here is that the evolution of the neurons of an individual’s brain during that individual’s growth and lifetime result in what amount to computer programs which would be very hard to design, top down, from scratch. A consideration which I believe is already taken into account in, for example, robots which walk; they learn to walk, they train their neural network, in rather the same way as a human.

Fourth, one has the indetirminacy of a brain. Again within limits, if you run the same test on a computer two times you will get the same answers. This is not true of a brain which is continually changing and which is hosted by, interacts with an environment which is itself continually changing; you cannot rely on getting the same answer two times running – although our language skills do make this a bit more likely than it might otherwise be.

OK, so a brain is not much like a computer. But so what?

We can certainly model the workings of brains on computers (something which Edelman’s own institute does a lot of. See http://www.nsi.edu/), although it remains to be seen how close to a brain a computer is going to get. There are certainly a lot of people out there doing their level best to get the computer to beat the brain and I for one believe that, for many purposes, the computer will win. Rather more doubtful is whether such capability will be put, at least most of the time, to benign use.

Rather more doubtful also is whether a model of a brain on a computer will ever exhibit consciousness in the way of a human. Will the different engineering mean that we are never going to get there? The robot might well come to make a nice companion but will it remain firmly on the machine side of the divide? Who knows, but that is not going to stop lots of people from trying. A toe for all seasons.

On the other hand, there is, I think, good news here for the Freudians. I think this book, and others like it, show that there is going to be both need and room for the psychoanalytic way of describing the goings on in the brain. Maybe without the structures psychoanalysts use now, for example the oedipus complex, but with their approach and their methods. Their peeling away of layers of mind to get at beginnings and the beginnings of problems. They will have another day in the sun!

More cake

Time to have another go at a date and walnut cake, following the reasonably successful effort recorded on 9th August.

This time selected something described by our trusty Whitworth's cookbook (vintage 1971) as an Alberta date cake. Same sort of thing as the M&S one, but with 4oz of walnuts rather than 2oz, 6oz of sugar rather than 4oz and two eggs rather than one.

Varied the ingredients by not soaking the dates in hot water and baking powder, just stirring them into the mix dry after the first half of the flour. Stirred about half a pint of water into the mix in dribs and drabs as I went along and ended up with what I think is called a firm dropping consistency; it came off the spoon if you jerked it.

Varied the cooking by using one of my 2lb loaf tins rather than the flat tin - the sort of thing you might use for flapjacks or brownies - specified. Greased with butter then floured before adding the cake mixture. Then just about an hour at 160fanC.

Rose OK and came out of the tin OK. Crumb yellow rather than brown which I preferred. Maybe just a touch less water next time.

The only odd thing is that for once, Google fails me, never seemingly having heard of the famous Alberta data cake. Tried one or two Albertan cake shops but they seem to be more into fancies than cakes; see for example http://www.crazycakes.ca/. Even odder when one thinks of the huge number of cake recipes floating around out here in the world of blog. Or is it that the Whitworth's people just made the name up?

PS: (20/8/2013) the cake people are very efficient at emails. So they are probably good at cakes too should you ever be in Lethbridge - where there is also a large river and some even larger bridges.

Globe revisited

Back to the Globe yesterday for the first visit since before the deluge (as it were), the last recorded visit in the other place being to 'Much Ado about Nothing' on or about the 15th July 2011. We had been getting a bit tired of the pantomime take on Shakespeare by actors without presence or gravitas, so perhaps a rest was the best thing - but yesterday was not Shakespeare at all, rather a musical show called 'Gabriel' built around the baroque trumpet (or possibly the natural trumpet).

Started off by perusing my new cycle map of central London - available free from the cycling part of the TFL web site. All fine and good but a larger scale than the original and, despite being double sided, a smaller area. And being double sided a bit more awkward to use out in the street. Then took a bullingdon from the stand outside the James Clerk Maxwell Building and after getting into a bit of a muddle about exactly where the Globe was - was it west or east of Southwark Bridge? - dropped the thing off at a stand called Bankside Mix, not a place known to Google but according to the cycle map a new building complex on Southwark Street.

Onto the Globe for the show. Music good, with much voice and trumpet, even to the point of a trio with voice, trumpet and some sort of antique cello. Framed by a new play which, apart from framing the music provided tutorial material about the later Stuarts and tiresomely coarse humour. This last may, I dare say, be in the spirit of the times depicted but it was not in my spirit. But, all in all, a useful postscript to the Walpolery reported on 12th August.

I had forgotten how narrow and hard the seats are in the Globe, with it being hard to avoid poking one's knees into the person in front - in my case a lady in one of the those portable chairs which they hire out to make the seats which are both backless and frontless bearable to the older buttock. As it was, we had seats with backs but I had to fidget a bit to stop my legs going numb (nervous about DVT these days) and I think I must have rather annoyed her - the lady in front - as she and her husband rushed out at the interval, before I could make apologetic noises, never to be seen again. During the longeurs - the show was much too long at three hours including the interval - I tried to estimate the audience size, coming to around 400 sitting and 250 standing. Not bad at all for a weekday matinée; the people at the Globe have clearly got a formula which sells.

Onto Borough Market where I bought some rather interesting emmental cheese from a young lady with very caressing & Latin manners. Not smooth and shiny like your usual emmental, rather pasty and matt. I think I like it. She certainly had a good deal of it; I have not seen so much emmental in one place since before the cheese shop in Jermyn Street became a stop on the tourist trail.

Took another bullingdon to get back to Waterloo and was entertained on the way by a sort of overgrown milk float, driven by pedalo with maybe eight sets of pedals and with the pedaling being done by eight young Muslim girls in full war paint - none of your black body bags for them - perhaps a hen party. Rather slow, despite the number of pedals. Probably more chattering than pedaling going on. Not clear whether there was an auxiliary engine lurking underneath, but there was a (male) driver to keep order.

Home to read all about trumpets in Chambers and Wikipedia, being reminded along the way of the point of an old fashioned encyclopedia with its mainly professional writers and editorial control. I learn all about the trumpet wars which peaked in the 19th century and which resulted in the complete victory of the modern valve trumpet. Well not quite complete, as the antique variety used at the Globe is now resurgent and fighting back, in the van of the early music movement.

Health yarns

There is a piece in the NYRB of August 15th about the bad state of health in the US.

One might describe it as provision by an oligarchy of self servers, with one tribe of health insurers and another tribe of health providers, with some of them described as not for profit but this does not seem to constrain behaviour very much. Then there are the customers, who with due regard for US notions of freedom, are largely free to decide for themselves whether or how to get themselves insured, or not, which complicates the model.

A lot of what is wrong with this system revolves around the practise of charging by the procedure or by the pill. Everything that is done to you or that is put into you is carefully itemised and presented as a bill to your insurance provider, giving every incentive to the health provider to do as many things as possible and to charge as much as possible for each one. The insurance providers get their rather large slice of the cake on turnover so they have little incentive to damp all this down. Another rather large slice of the cake goes on all the transaction costs of all this itemisation, although to be fair, modern computer systems should make this itemisation rather cheaper than it might otherwise have been, perhaps even integrated with the record keeping which is a properly valued part of the modern medical process. Nevertheless, no-one in the US system seems to have either the power or inclination to manage all these slices.

Bottom line being, as I have said here on more than one occasion, is that the citizens of the land of the free pay a lot for a not very good outcome, a situation which looks unlikely to change any time soon. A much worse performance than that of the rest of what used to be called the free world; an example of where the market does not come up with a good solution all by itself and where most countries have gone for something much closer to our tax model than their insurance model, a model in which it is much easier to manage both costs and outcomes.

However, all change here, with the introduction of competition among for-profit health providers, which may push us down the itemised bill road, on which subject this week's Epsom Guardian runs a not very encouraging story about a health provider terminating provision rather abruptly, amid an unseemly spat about value for money.

As readers may know, the commissioning of health care in this country has been taken out of the hands of primary care trusts, which looked and smelt far too much like a nationalised industry for the taste of Cameron and his friends, and has been placed in the hands of commissioning groups, groups which for the moment are dominated by general practitioners, although I dare say ordinarily greedy business people of the sort in the health chair in the US will get in on the act in fairly short order. Not to mention all the professional purchasing types who will weigh in with all their tiresome baggage and make as big a deal out of contracting out as they possibly can. So our shiny new commissioning group called SDCCG (so shiny new that it does not appear to have a web site, let alone one commensurate with its importance in our world) is having a public & unprofessional row with a provider called EDICS (http://www.edics.co.uk/), a company in which a sizeable chunk of the GPs in SDCCG are said to have a pecuniary interest. Conflict of interest even. All very unsatisfactory - and all rather a shame as it seems to be generally agreed that EDICS had been providing a popular local service, to be replaced by a somewhat less local hospital service.

I note in passing that my lefty dentist father avoided all these moral hazards by working as a salaried dentist for public dental services for more or less his whole career. No itemised bills for him.

PS: I see that the wrong SDCCG has a web site at http://www.southernderbyshireccg.nhs.uk/. Are they of a different breed to our one?

Relax

People that buy large houses in the country don't seem to be very relaxed about privacy at all and if they have the misfortune to have a public footpath on their boundary they will usually erect a large fence to make sure that the smelly public cannot intrude on their privacy, well earned or otherwise.

So the fences are six feet tall, close boarded or panelled and quite often topped with barbed wire. At least we have moved on from the broken glass which used to be set into the top of the brick walls which used to enclose the gardens of the rich.

Sometimes it will be a belt and braces job with a hedge being planted behind the fence - behind meaning that the owners get to see the living hedge while the smelly public get the decaying fence. Furthermore, owners are usually impatient, so the hedge will be fast growing leylandii rather than something which is both native and natural like beech or hawthorn.

All this being so, and what we are used to when we take walks in the country, it was a real pleasure to come across this fence in Norfolk. Clearly they really have chilled out this far from London.

Quarantine alert!

Had a moderate does of the DIY's today, having completed one job, started another and done one. The one being attending to the wiring of my older electric drill, the live flex being exposed just as it leaves the rubber sheath coming out of the base of the handle. At first glance I had thought that I must have caught it on something, but at second decided that it was the work of some vagrant rodent in the garage.

Having taken the thing to pieces once before, almost certainly for a similar reason, I did not today seen why I should not do the same trick again. Casing of the drill duly removed, 20cm of cable resectioned and what was left wired back in, casing replaced (admiring the quality engineering on the way. I wonder if the insides of a Black & Decker would look as good?) and tried the thing. Entirely dead.

At which point I remembered that I had removed the fuse just to make sure that neither I nor anyone else was going to try and use the thing. Put a 5 amp fuse into the plug to find that I couldn't get the top of the plug back on. Obviously the fault of the poorly designed housing for the fuse.

Go to get another plug from the electrical drawer in the shed to remember that we don't have a shed any more. Cast around in the garage for a bit and finally light on a large saucepan suspended from the roof of the garage which contained the electrical bits and pieces I had thought worth retaining. Chose a suitable new plug - I like the ones with a small piece of fibreboard being used to secure the flex in the opening to the plug - and wire the drill into it. Tried the thing again. Entirely alive.

The first catch being that the drill is old enough to involve black rubber, rubber which I think is starting to perish. Probably good for a year or two yet, notwithstanding.

The second catch is that I now living in a house containing 4lbs 1.5oz of German badged Swiss made electrical machinery for converting electricity into rotary motion which has been interfered with by someone without CORGI certification, let alone appropriate CORGI documentation. Perhaps I ought to tell the insurance company? Perhaps someone will shop me to the Health & Safety Executive? See http://www.hse.gov.uk/.

PS: I remember the days when I used to have cause to visit the building in which this lot used to be headquartered, a rather grand building called Baynards House up the not so grand Westbourne Grove and not far from the formerly dodgy Duke of Norfolk (memory says Cornwall but Google says Norfolk). I used to use the opportunity to take noodles in Queensway, this being before the days of noodle bars. Fond memories of all the white guys daintily eating their noodles with chopsticks while the locals tucked into coke & hamburgers.

A Norfolk village (1)

For the purpose of visiting Houghton we stayed in a small village nearby; a village which sported a church and a pub but no shops, although there was the odd house with a name like 'The Old Post Office'. There was also the most faded telephone box that I have ever seen, although I did not get close enough to find out whether there was still a telephone inside. (I suppose that this part of BT makes a thumping great loss these days, but I daresay that there would be great howls of disgust from the media should they suggest doing away with this bit of heritage altogether in this age of the mobile phone).

We were able to get into the (Grade II listed) church on the occasion of an adjacent open garden (http://www.ngs.org.uk/), to find that it was indeed old but not much used. But it did have a pleasingly dignified feeling and there was a fine collection of relatively recently embroidered kneelers, of which one is illustrated; somebody or somebodies had clearly been very busy. There were also some nice trees outside and the grass had recently been mown.

Strange mixture of houses. Quite a lot of old cottages, much refurbished. Rather more new housing, some of it quite grand - five bedrooms with detached double garage sitting in an acre or so sort of thing. One consequence of which was much evidence of underground water works dotted about; drains look to have been a problem in the not too distant past.

Strange pub, which looked newish and much extended, but on closer inspection the front wall of the central building was quite old. Why would one spend so much on a village pub in such a small village? It seemed odd given the rate at which village pubs are closing - but no-one was saying insurance job, with this last being my first thought. But we had a decent lunch there with me having a first ever hot pork pie, that is to say a hot meat pie of the sort that one more usually puts beef in, rather than a warmed up pork pie. It was rather good and had probably, I thought, been confected from the left overs of the Sunday roast. Decent pint (the first for a while) named for the famous Norfolk nurse, Edith Cavell.

Lots of barley in the fields. The farming scene seemed to be that most of the big fields were given over to barley, some to sugar beet and some to fodder crops. Odd corners, of which there were quite a lot, left rough or used to graze horses. Plenty of scope for the wannabee smallholder. As always, the grass in any field containing horses was very short. Why does one so rarely see a horse in a long grass field - to which the shape of their heads and the position of their eyes are so well adapted? It can't just be down to the fact that a horse gets through a lot more grass to the kilo than the more efficient cow.

Lots of footpaths through fields and woods, one of which a stray cottager (ex townie I should think) told me had once been licensed for the growth of opium, with the result for a few years of the opium flavour of poppy popping up in the hedgerows. And I had thought all the legit. stuff (of which we must get through plenty) was grown in Tasmania for some reason. Plenty of walks available without needing to get into the car - this being rather contrary to my memory of Norwich which I thought was rather impoverished in the countryside walk department.

Sadly we missed the annual snail race, a Grade II listed event in the snail racing world.

Bob of Lynn

I have now, finally, moved on: Hardy is down and Walpole is up. I start with some references, in order of acquisition.

Sir Robert Walpole by J. H. Plumb, late of the Elizabeth Gaskell Library, Manchester Polytechnic Library and Elephant & Castle (see 6th March 2007 in the other place). Substantial and readable tome in 2 volumes. The first mentioned place presumably unloading it as it now caters for Health Care Studies, Psychology, Speech Pathology and Physiotherapy rather than History, particularly of this rather old fashioned variety. As far as I can see there is no mention whatsoever of the working & living conditions of the staff in service at Walpole's houses, never mind those of his many tenants, in any of its 700 or so pages.

Houghton Revisited, ex Waterstones King's Lynn. Fat picture book, more or less the same sort of book as one would get from a special art exhibition in London.

Bob of Lynn, written and published by Chris Boxall, ex Houghton Hall, Houghton. An author who is tactful enough to place the plum at the head of his list of further reading.

Britain's Lost Treasures Returned, talking beard on BBC4, tomorrow. Unfortunately clashing with a favourite episode of Marple. Not yet clear whether I will make it.

The whole venture has been triggered by an advertisement somewhere for the temporary reinstatement of a large chunk of Walpole's art collection in Houghton Hall, much of it having started life in No. 10 and presently in the care of the Hermitage. A reinstatement which has been very shrewdly puffed, comes with timed tickets just like any other proper exhibition and is more or less sold out for its six months run, despite being located in the wilds of north west Norfolk, maybe three hours away by train and taxi from Central London. And which in our case was the trigger for our second visit to north Norfolk in as many years.

We were promised masterpieces from Rubens, Velasquez (not the one featured at http://www.mmamania.com/), Murillo, Rembrandt and Frans Hals, and there was indeed at least one painting from each. There were also a lot more paintings from other painters, mainly of the 17th century, of mixed quality. A lot of rather good Knellers. We were told that of the 200 or so paintings sold by Walpole's dissolute son George to Catherine the Great, some 70 have been loaned back to make up the present exhibition, but the book of the exhibition is a bit coy about which 70. At least I have not found any discussion of the matter, so I wonder whether there are a lot more masterpieces among the 130 left out than the 70 pulled in? Or was it that even as avid & rich a collector as Walpole was not going to get many masterpieces of the front rank, many of them still being in their founding churches?

But that is to carp. It was fascinating to see the pictures hung as they would have been in the glory days of Houghton Hall. Crammed in all over the place, as was the custom of the time, rather than tastefully & spaciously hung with natural overhead lighting, as in the better London galleries. Very few labels, presumably also the custom of the time, apart from one bilingual label on a Maratta. See the discussion of 25th April on this point.The trustees were pleasant and well briefed. The place was quite crowded, but not unpleasantly so; the system of timed tickets worked. They were not too strict about the one way system which was nice.

For the first time I saw the point of tapestries, some of those at Houghton being in unusually good condition. Hitherto they have been so threadbare and lacklustre that I could not see why one would chose to decorate one's rooms with them - but now I can.

Unlike in Plumb, the servants were visible, at least in their invisibility (Palladio did not care for servants to be seen in his houses). So we had a servants' access well intruded discretely between two of the state bedrooms, thus reducing the chance of meeting a mere servant in one of the real corridors. And there were similarly discreet arrangements for the delivery of food to the dining room.

All fed by a fake Greek temple for a water tower, rather short and stumpy. Not a patch on our Epsom Hospital water towers which are much taller, gothic and brick.

Excellent gardens. Started off with the walled garden to the south of the hall itself (down below the A in the illustration taken from Google Maps), a walled garden which included a very striking tower of flame and water, one of the modern sculptures (or perhaps performances) dotted about. Lots of impressive pleached limes, some of which reminded me of those at NIAB (http://www.niab.com/) which I used to pass on the way to school every day. Lots of impressive mature and not so mature trees, noticing that mature pines were fenced against deer while mature broad leaves were not. Perhaps the deer like pine bark better. I really liked the 'Skyspace' sculpture, visible as the small white square with a hole to the north east of the A. Part of its setting were rotundly sculpted box hedges on either side of the approach path - wonderful things. Some of the other sculptures did not work so well, but a terrific effort: the best outdoor sculpture in the best settings that I have seen, putting Hyde Park to shame. Maybe they could borrow a few Moore's; it would be a jolly good place for them.

Thinking of money, I wondered how they managed at Houghton Hall. Nearer home, we have Polesden Lacey brought up to scratch by the proceeds of selling McEwan's Heavy. Royal Holloway College was built by those of selling patent medicines. And I read in Plumb that Guy's Hospital was built by one of the winner's in the affair of the South Sea Bubble. But all is revealed by Boxall: Houghton Hall, having been rather quiet and neglected through most of the 19th century, was brought back to its original & present splendour in the 20th century with the injection of a Rothschild heiress into the line. Nice clean money, made out of money, rather than the stuff made from trade.

PS: one of our fellow visitors was an electrician and he was much more interested in how such a place would be wired up than in the pictures. He was unlucky, as the previous Sunday the electrician who had done all the restoration work in the 70’s had brought his grandchildren for a visit and he could have taken my chap into conference.

Thoughts from New York

The NYRB continues, for the present anyway, to interest me more than the TLS. I share a couple of thoughts from the former.

First, the business of sexing up photographs to make a point was well underway during the American Civil War. Sexing up, through economical with the truth to downright dishonest. From which we take away the thought that the camera started lying almost from its inception.

Second, it gives a lot of space to constitutional matters, some of which arrive here. See for example 10th October 2012 in the other place (http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/), where I report on the quaintness of the government of one's country being in the grip of a very short document written two hundred years ago. At least most of our ancient rules are not written down, which makes it a bit easier to bend them a bit when push comes to shove.

But then, contrariwise, a letter (I think) in the same mag. pointed out that while having the constitution might be a bit of a pain, it did at least give citizens some basic protection action the encroachments of the executive. Not having the thing looked a lot worse than having it. Which, as it happens, is about where I have arrived at with our monarchy, having started life as a hard core republican. Citizeness Windsor to report for latrine cleaning duties immediately.

Four odd films

The first three were recycled from Surrey Libraries, at a considerable discount on Amazon but rather more than a car boot sale. The trouble with these last being the dominance of the sort of sex & violence films favoured by the young and one has to search through a lot of stuff to stumble on the odd Poirot while Surrey Library Recycles cater for the older, more discerning audience. The £3 sticker is wrong and I am not sure why it is there as I paid a lot less, maybe £2.

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf

A bizarre tale of two young people sleeping rough on Pont-Neuf. The box thought it a uniquely unlifting story, I thought it interesting and BH thought it horrid. I can't remember exactly how it ended so I shall have to take it in again when BH is not looking.

In a Better World

Another bizarre tale of a doctor with a day job in some messed up part of Africa and a dodgy family life back in small town Denmark. Maybe not the gut wrenching masterpiece of the puff on the box but certainly worth a look.

The Passion of the Christ

A costume drama dramatising the last day or so of the life of our Lord on this earth.

Rather silly in that most of the dialogue is in some approximation to Aramaic and the rest in some approximation to Latin (medieval church variety). The first of these being what the natives spoke, the latter what the Romans spoke, although according to Wikipedia these Romans would have been more likely to speak Greek (late classical variety). Didn't really matter as there was not that much dialogue and what there was was fairly straightforward.

A lot of violence. I only managed the first half of the film but a good part of that was given over to a graphic re-enactment of a brutal flogging.

A lot of talk about Jesus being the son of God. I suppose this is fair enough if you are a certain sort of trinitarian, but my understanding is that the son of God bit was pasted onto the Jewish origins of our faith, some years after the event, by some Greek johnney-come-lately called Paul and so would not have figured in the Passion, if there ever was one, in quite this way.

Not sure whether I am going to manage the rest of the film and given Mel Gibson's record, understandable that the majors did not take it on - but, sadly, he had the last laugh, recouping his investment of $40m or so ten fold or so. At least I only added modestly to his take, buying second hand and doing no more than propping up the second hand market for the film in a miniscule way. I suppose the popularity of the film is down to all the Bible bashers in the States and all the Catholics the world over, these last being quite into gore. Think of all those flagellation flavoured crucifixes erected in mountain villages in Catholic Savoy. The bloody re-enactments of crucifixions (if not crucifictions) in Central America. Some might argue that all this gore allows us to sublimate that part of ourselves in a safe way, while I just think that it is unseemly.

Fancy web site at http://www.thepassionofchrist.com, but it is no where near as informative as Wikipedia. On the other hand there was various merchandise on offer: a passionate mouse mat perhaps, at just $4.99 a go with a generous discount for confirmation classes?

The Iron Lady

This one we paid a proper price for, King's Lynn being an old fashioned enough sort of place to have an HMV shop. Very quaint.

Meryl Streep - an actress whom I much prefer to our own, in some ways similar, Helen Mirren - doing Mrs. Thatcher's descent into Alzheimers. As a portrait of this process I thought it was very good, with biographical flashbacks providing a bit of light relief. I found the daughter spot on, the husband a bit wrong. A good effort, but not quite right.

However, while I think that much of what Mrs. Thatcher did was very wrong and that close up she may well have been a rather unpleasant person, I do not think it right to portray a person who was alive at the time in this way. A lack of respect for her and a lack of consideration for her family. Whatever we might think of her, we did elect her as our leader for ten years or so and we ought at least to show a bit of respect for the office of leader, if not for her.

Educating us about the dementia which is going to catch a third or so of us is good, but one should not use real & identifiable people for the purpose, although I grant that the message that it can happen to anyone is strengthened thereby. I was not very impressed with the film about Iris Murdoch for the same reason.

Estate agents' photographs

Or in this case, a holiday cottage agent's photograph. We had a very good holiday in this one, but we had been confused by the picture, thinking that one got the brown door and the two pairs of windows on either side of it, whereas what one actually got was the brown door and the one pair of windows to the left of it - with the pair of windows to the right going with the white building on the right.

One could have worked it all out by more careful inspection of the pictures supplied but we did not manage that. Just hit the buy button.

The gardens were quite entertaining too. So we have a terrace of four cottages plus one stuck on the end, of which you see the last two on the right in this picture. The garden of cottage 1 pushes out to the right, into what might have been thought of as the space of cottage 2. The garden of cottage 2 pushes over a bit more and the garden of cottage 3 occupies what might have been thought to be the proper place for the garden of cottage 4, the one we were in. So our garden occupies the back of the remainder of the terrace, that is to say behind the window with eight panes, and cottage 5 gets what was left. We got to our garden by a short path from our back door, cutting across the back of the first half of cottage 5.

We thought that maybe, when the village was a village rather than a retirement home for professionals from King's Lynn and IT consultants, the garden arrangements for these cottages were all a bit informal, with the result that a pushy owner of cottage 1 was able to push into the space of the old lady who didn't care in cottage 2, thus starting the cascade.

Jigsaw 19, Series 2

Following the notices of 17th June and 5th July, have now completed my second puzzle from Wentworth, which, unlike virtually every other jigsaw that I have done during the present fad, photographs OK. You can actually see thing, the thing in question being the house that Hardy built for himself on the outskirts of Dorchester.

Not much to add to the previous notice, beyond saying that despite the lack of Falcon regularity, it was not a difficult puzzle (of 250 pieces) and it was good fun. You also felt that whoever cut the puzzle had a bit of fun doing it, rather in the way of a cross word puzzle compiler. Exemplifies the difference between a craft object (albeit computer craft) and a factory object (albeit being made in one).

Starting with the edge does not work very well with these puzzles, but I was able to start with the skyline. Then the eaveline, then the windows. Then the drive. Then the remainder of the house, working out into the light greens. Then the sky. Then finished off with the odd bits of dark green outstanding.

Not yet bought my fine art puzzle from them, jibbing slightly at paying  proper price for the second time in as many months. On the other hand, there is a nice little video on their site (http://www.wentworthpuzzles.com/) which tells you something about how they are made - with laser technology making it a very different business from that of making a steel jigsaw cutter along the lines of a rather complicated pastry cutter.

Early years

From time to time I wonder why it is that central government makes such an awful fist of making provision for early years education, with total provision seeming to be well short of total need, a total need which is pretty well known: not many children do not have birth registrations and not many children come to this country in their early years. So a piece by Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian caught my eye.

It seems that an outfit called the Institute for Public Policy Research (http://www.ippr.org/), about which I know nothing, thinks that Ofsted is neither much cop at assessing the quality of early years provision nor much cop at doing anything about it, to the point where it may be that they are actually detracting from the efforts of local authorities.

Which makes me think that it is all part of the two part agenda of our central government. First, remove all serious functions from local authorities. Central nanny knows so much better than local nanny, a belief which governments of all persuasions seem to share. Heaven forbid that local authorities should actually have any authority. Second, by making inspection and quality a central function rather than a local function, one paves the way for privatisation, a favourite of the current government. Don't you worry who provides the service, we are keeping an eye on what they get up to for you.

I then wonder how many people Ofsted have to do this eye keeping and turn up their annual report, which while glossily produced and presented tells me nothing about their own staffing arrangements. But being in an inquisitive mood I keep trying and turn up a rather less glossy affair called annual report and accounts, which seems to be very preoccupied with the emoluments, perquisites etc of their senior staff, which I do not find very encouraging. Not a good sign that we feel the need to spend so much ink on such matters. But they do devote a very small amount of ink on a total of nine numbers (on page 47) about staff in general, which tell me that staff numbers have fallen quite drastically in the last couple of years, without any nearby explanation. Leaving us with around 1,500 people to keep an eye on some 25,000 schools and, I dare say, various other kinds of providers as well. Which must be hugely less than the staff in LEA's, even these days, but are they delivering the goods? Would we get better VFM if we were to leave LEA's get on with their job?

The article also mentions Gibraltar, the subject of another two glass wonder. We manged to offload Hong Kong onto the Chinese by the wheeze of Hong Kong remaining a semi-detached part of China for the time being and with a lengthy transition period. Lots of reserved rights for the Hong Kong'ers. Why on earth can't we do something similar with Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands? Why on earth should we let such small numbers of people in such unattractive parts of the world cause us so much bother?

OK, so there is the little matter of the treaty by which we borrowed Hong Kong for a while, rather than acquired the freehold, but I don't see why that accident of history should make so much difference.

Cake

Moved to bake a cake last week for the first time in some years, maybe as many as ten. At one time I used to have a soft spot for seed cakes and bake them on a regular basis, but on this occasion I favoured a date and walnut cake.

The memory was that the cake from the Boston Cook Book was better than the loaf from the English cook books, partly because it was indeed, as the name suggests, more cake like and inspection of the recipes suggested that the difference lay in the use of eggs and white sugar. But the US recipe was in cups rather than ounces which was a touch daunting when so out of practise, so settled for the M&S recipe, which involved at least one egg and I substituted granulated for the soft brown sugar specified.

The recipe said to pour the mixture into a (greased & floured) loaf tin and the mixture was of such a pouring consistency that I did wonder whether it would rise. But it did, despite my not lowering the nominal temperature a little to allow for the fan oven, at least not until the thing was nearly cooked. Product a little brown and not quite even, being more risen at one end than the other. An effect of the temperature not being as uniform as the makers of the fan oven claim?

Cooled on the maternal baking rack, which looked its age, was rather massive compared with a modern one and made out of galvanised steel, like a bucket, rather than stainless, like a cup cake rack.

Good stuff, but I must be getting old as there is still a stump left after two takes. And soaking the dates in hot water as part of the procedure is suspected of resulting in a mild laxative effect on my reduced circumstances. Syrup of figs sort of thing. Unsoaked dates don't cause any problem, despite eating a fair amount of them - stoned dates from Whitworths via Waitrose, the only people which seem to sell the things these days. When I used to make seed cakes, we would do one on a Sunday afternoon, usually after having taken in roast earlier in the day, in just the one take.

PS 1: the recipe called for a teaspoon of baking powder (this in addition to the use of self raising flour) to the hot water in which the dates were soaked while the rest of the stuff was mixed up. With the result that the water was bubbling nicely by the time it was stirred into the the rest of the mix.

PS 2: very efficient way of getting the calories in: 10oz flour, 8oz dates, 2oz walnuts (surprisingly bulky), 4oz sugar, 4oz butter. Not to mention the egg.

Dead trees

Dead trees make me quite cross.

The most cross are the generally new trees which die of thirst in the verges outside of peoples' houses. To me it is quite extraordinary that people can sit and watch trees die outside their houses without doing anything about it. Not walking out there from time to time with a bucket of water - which is all it takes. No need to water the things every day. To the shame of my own road, we have two or three of them, although I am bizzee to the extent of attending to ailing trees within about 50 yards of the house; maybe the sight of my wheelbarrow with cans will shame some others into action.

Almost as bad are the new trees in and around the refurbished Epsom railway station. There are three shops in the immediate vicinity, and none of the managers thought to do anything. There is a railway station and its manager did not think to do anything. The three blocks of flats must have maintenance people with access to decent taps and they did not think to do anything. I excuse the residents, granting that it would be a bit of a fag to water quite a lot of trees from a kitchen tap in an upstairs flat.

And then we have the newish trees in the new estates on the hospital sites and along Horton Lane, to the west of the Chase Estate where we live. Here, I imagine the responsibility lies with the council. I would guess that a man with a water bowser would take a day to water this lot, something which should perhaps have been done once a week during the recent hot spell. At a generous £1,000 a time, maybe £5,000 to save the lives of the maybe 20 trees - trees which we are told cost about £500 a time to plant - we look to be getting quite a decent return on investment. I suppose the council would say that they just don't have the dosh.

There is also the odd mature tree which has expired in the heat. Presumably they were already unwell. And then there are all the natural seeded saplings which seem to cope OK - which all goes to show that Mother Nature does a much better job than the most carefully transplanted root ball.

The council, to give them their due, have told their contracted-out strimming gangs to lay off the baby trees, already under quite enough stress from the heat. Instead, they seem to be strimming the fence posts, with the results illustrated.

Overflow heap

The overflow compost heap which runs across the back of the garden, behind a copper beech screen, to the left in this illustration. An area maybe 20 feet by 8 feet, gently domed and rising to maybe 2 feet.

The overflow was started off with the minced willow tree from next door, maybe a couple of cubic metres of the stuff. It is now used for all the prunings and such which do not rot down very well in the regular compost bin.

That said, the stuff in the overflow bin does rot down eventually and I dug some good compost out of it a couple of years ago. In the meantime I like to think of it as a sort of refuge for all kinds of invertebrates.

Furthermore, in a small way, it is also locking down some carbon, slowing it down on its reach for the sky. Terribly eco.

PS: fresh minced tree has a curious and very distinctive smell.

Piles

About twenty years ago there was a bad outbreak of hemorrhoids in the house sale industry around here, with the house sellers managing to convince themselves and then us that if you spotted the most modest bit of cracking in a house then full scale underpinning was needed. People selling mortgages were well into it and if there was a crack you had no chance unless you got the underpinners in. I don't know if the surveyors at the sharp end of all this were taking bungs or had divided loyalties, but one did wonder. And apart from the up-front costs, often but not always claimed on one's house insurance, there were the ongoing costs in the form of more expensive and harder to get insurance. To this day some insurers won't touch houses with our postcode.

And now the hemorrhoids are back. One house, being built on the plot obtained by demolishing a nearby bungalow, is going in for an elaborate confection of concrete beams sitting on concrete piles. Another house, having decided to go in for what looked like a modest and ordinary wrap around extension, now finds it necessary to put that extension on no less than 11 nine metre deep piles and maybe there are some beams to come. Note that the house itself, which has been there for fifty years or so, sits on foundations which are maybe a meter deep.

This time around, the outbreak might have been triggered by the availability of small piling machines which can get in and around houses, with the machine being used in this second case being the size of a modest sit and ride lawnmower. The driver asserted that one could not drill such a pile by hand, but I think that just reflects the feebleness of today's youth.

I remember seeing house piles being drilled out by hand with a clay auger, more or less the same design as a cheap bit for a carpenter's brace, down to maybe two metres, and with extensions I don't see why such low tech. technology should not go a lot deeper.

I also remember actually drilling holes, perhaps more accurately punching holes, of 10 metres and more deep into the London clay under west London for the purposes of taking samples. OK, so the holes were only around five inches in diameter rather than twelve, but I dare say the punch could have been scaled up. It would have just taken a bit longer.

But I forbore boring the pile driver with these gems, reserving them for here.