Klee

Off to Klee at the Tate Modern earlier in the week, an artist of whom I knew virtually nothing other than the name,

A large, nicely presented exhibition in large, well lit rooms, rather more than we needed in one sitting. And large enough for the quality to be uneven. Quite a crowd, but there was room for us all.

The first surprise was the small size of many of the pictures, the size and style making them very suitable for hanging on the walls of suburban houses, in a way that most old master paintings are not. Far too big and florid to look anything other than rather silly in a domestic setting, unless, that is, your domestic is Blenheim Palace or Houghton Hall.

They were also rather muted. Muted in the sense that they were subtle & quiet and it took some seconds to adjust to each picture, for one's eyes and brain to adjust to what it was doing. Maybe this reflected their variety, with Klee changing tack all the time.

As a former mathematician, I also thought that a lot of the pictures were apt for one, perhaps reflecting the painter's love of Bach and Mozart. And perhaps also his love & care of his lifetime catalog of his oeuvre.

Some of them reminded me of woodcuts from about the same time which do hang on our suburban walls. Also of a much more recent one called 'The Gallery, Level 2: Abstraction' by Lawrence: woodcuts might not do colour, but they can do some of what Klee does.

Interested to read that, like the Pre-Raphaelites a little before him, and as was fitting for a teacher at the arts & crafts flavoured Bauhaus, Klee was careful about the packaging and presentation of his pictures. And like Lowry a little after him, did not achieve recognition until middle age. And I noticed a pair of Lowry like feet in one of the pictures ('Burdened Children', 1930).

Moved to buy the souvenir book, but I was not impressed with the quality of the reproductions therein. They will, however, serve well enough for revision against a return visit.

Snacked on the outdoor terrace of the Members' Lounge. A good sandwich and a good view of the Shard, nicely set off by some grand and impressive cloud formations.

Visited Konditur & Cook (http://www.konditorandcook.com/) on the way home, picking up what turned out to be a very good small white loaf, of the hemispherical variety. Not very English but good and well worth the £2.20 we paid for it. I hope that their outpost in Stamford Street appearing to be shut up was not a bad sign.

Charity campaigns

On 21st October I pondered about whether charities ought to be allowed to campaign.

Then this morning BH receives a letter from the lady, sometime permanent secretary at the Home Office, who is now the director general of the National Trust doing, what it seems to me, is just that, campaigning.

And without getting into the morals or propriety of the matter, I am irritated. I don't particularly want the National Trust to be getting into this sort of thing, although I suppose that, as the owner, or at least trustee, of a great deal of land, it might on occasion have to either give permission or to withhold permission for the shooting of badgers or the setting off of underground explosions, in which case it cannot sit on the fence. But I would prefer them to try a bit harder than this letter suggests they are at the moment - and to leave controversies to others, to the media.

Maybe its problem is that their rank and file care strongly about these things and are strongly against both. They go to the annual general meeting to make a fuss and it is hard for the Trust staffers to just ignore them. Or maybe it is a bit like the Labour Party having to let its rank and file have a beano, let off steam, on fox hunting. Takes their eyes off more important balls.

I stopped giving money to Greenpeace because I did not care for some of their causes and I cared even less for their aggressive (and maybe not entirely legal) style of campaigning. Let's hope that the National Trust do not push their luck as we enjoy what their core business offers.

Duguid

No doubt pronounced 'dugweed', a late Middle English corruption of 'duckweed'. Following my post of 20th October, I have now procured and read another South American book by Julian Duguid, 'Green Hell', which looks to have sold rather well in its time, that is to say around 1930.

Rather liking to poke around in my second hand books for interesting annotations, dried flowers, slips of paper, newspaper clippings and so on (some of my finds have been both surprising and entertaining), I find that this one was probably first bought by one B. G. Ealand in 1937, a gentleman (I assume a gent's handwriting and it is a gent's rather than a girl's book) of florid handwriting and who is named for a Lincolnshire village. Was he one of the Lords of the Manor or was he a bastard of same who took the name? Oddly for a book of this vintage, no bookseller marks, not even one of those little green jobs you often get at the bottom left of the right hand page illustrated, alternatively in a similar position at the back, telling you in very small gold print the name of the original bookseller.

I got this one from 'World of Rare Books' (http://www.worldofrarebooks.com/) who were introduced to me by Abebooks, a rather tired little hardback from Jonathan Cape which I had preferred to the paperback reprints on offer. For which I get a book which is easy to handle and easy on the eyes, neither of which is apt to be true of a new paperback (in which the printed page of the original is often reproduced photographically and smudgilly, rather than printilly). The sort of thing one might make into a rather handsome picture book now, with plenty of maps and pictures of steaming jungle. As it is, a decent atlas is a useful aid to comprehension.

An interesting tale of four men (one of them the 'Tiger-Man' of the other book) on a jungle journey in the jungle half of Bolivia in 1929 or so, the jungle half lying to the east and below the Andean half to the west. At the time a rather unpleasant place in which to travel. Sometimes unpleasantly hot, sometimes thirsty, sometimes wet and often eaten alive by various kinds of flying insect. Legs sometimes covered in rather unpleasant, possibly dangerous sores, in consequence.

First wonder was what exactly it is which propels small groups of men into such stunts, in much the same category as going to the South Pole or climbing up Mount Everest before the proper equipment and clothes had been invented. I have a fair number of books about such things, but at least I restrict myself to doing it by proxy from my armchair, rather than attempting the real thing.

Second wonder was (or perhaps it should be were) the feats of the Jesuit missionaries who attempted and in some part succeeded in taming this land back in the 17th and 18th centuries, before the King of Spain thought that they might be usurping his authority and recalled them. Part of their legacy being large cathedrals, with bells imported at vast expense from the motherland, in the most unlikely places. In 1929 at least, the service at these cathedrals was often a little unorthodox, somewhat tainted by just the sort of pagan rites that the Jesuits had sought to displace.

PS: there was a Hollywood film made all about this back in 1946, but Amazon for once in a while, fails me.

A trout for lunch

Off to London on Sunday, having carefully prepared the way by asking Network Rail about engineering works and train times. We were told that there were indeed engineering works in parts at and west of Chessington South but our line was OK, trains were running as normal. Get to Epsom station to find that this was not quite right and that Raynes Park was connected to Clapham Junction by a bus rather than by a railway. Luckily there was a re-timed train to Victoria at the time we were to have caught a train to Vauxhall, so we were able to make our connection to the Victoria Line OK.

Arrived at Oxford Circus too early for Niketown, so proceeded to the Regent Street All Bar One for tea and coffee. Very reasonable place it was too. Spacious with few customers and would have been quiet but for the rather too loud musak. We thought there was no point us seniors suggesting to the young staff that it was turned down a bit.

And so onto the Wigmore Hall for the lunchtime trout from Schubert (D667), by way of musicians from the Scottish Ensemble. Plus a London if not world première of 'Bite' from Alasdair Spratt (http://www.alasdairspratt.co.uk/Home.html) by way of a starter, and quite acceptable it was too. The trout was as good as I remembered, although I had quite forgotten that it involved a double bass, a double bass which added body to the piece, body which seems to be largely missing from my old vinyl version. Slightly marred by a fidgeting programme rustler next to BH. House full, to the extent of a line of people seeking returns.

For lunch proper to Ponti's, where we started with mixed bread and olives (very nattily presented, and including an interesting black dip made from olives) and I followed with one of their fine Scotto-Italiano burgers. With a good caesar salad for BH. An establishment which we continue to like: nicely furnished, pleasant staff and reasonable prices. Food & drink entirely acceptable, although they claimed not to do Vino Santo & biscuits and I had to settle for an Amaretto & biscuits, which, as it turned out, made an interesting change.

PS: this morning I take a peek at the spratt site where, rather than reprising the bite ('“Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals.” (attributed to George II, on Major General James Wolfe)'), I find myself downloading something called quicktime, seemingly some media product from Apple. Not quite working yet but you never know. Maybe after the next reboot.

Balanced score card

Much discussion yesterday evening about what was best for dustbins, in the light of the dire warnings emanating from the telly. In the end, after consultation with neighbours, we decided on dustbins in. In the event, some wind during the night and a little rain. Biggest twig on the lawn maybe 2kg in weight. First dustcart in the street at 0700, as usual.

Checking Horton (clockwise), I found three trees down - Horton Lane, Longmead Road and Manor Green Road. Off road, tidied up and vanished respectively. One tree smapped in half (illustrated) and cordoned off with red and white tape. Sundry branches down, one as large as the smallest tree down, that is to say the one that was in Manor Green Road.

Various pickups running around, some council, some tree people.

Sharp shower at around noon and that, I expect, is the storm in this part of Epsom. Saved once again by our sheltered position in the lee of the North Downs.

PS: I hope that our highly paid Chief Executive Officer of Epsom & Ewell Borough Council (the chap or chappess formerly known as the Town Clerk) activated the Major Incident Control Room (buried deep under the Ashley Centre) and was in it all night, just in case. Very important to have a senior officer on the spot (or, at least, under the spot), available to take charge, should need arise. A plus that such senior staff are not allowed to claim overtime, unlike the chaps on the ground.

Eureka moment (not phone)

At around 1600 on Friday 25th, an Excel spreadsheet which I used failed to start in the usual way, a cell on one of the its larger worksheets having been corrupted. It took around 20 hours of worrying at it, off and on, before we got started again around 1200 the following day. The whole business reminding me of the occasion when a project management contractor from Pcubed expressed frustration, the same chap, as it happens, as I mentioned on 6th August 2011 in the other place (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/). The background to the frustration was the failure of a program, a failure which was ultimately caused, I believe, by giving too many different contractors fingers in this one, not very big, civil service pie. But this belief went no way towards running down this particular failure, leaving the project management consultant frustrated because we had no process to follow to sort out failure. He believed in having a process for everything; just follow the process and all will be well with the world. Now while in general terms I agree with him, processes are a good way to get wayward human activities under control, sometimes those activities are too wayward or too unusual for it to be worth while developing a process which works. Cheaper and more effective to rely on skill and experience and to hell with the process; a problem which television detectives such as Chief Inspector Morse know all about.

Coming back to my corrupt cell, I find that it is the outward expression of a property of a row in a Visual Basic (VB) table (called fred in what follows) with some 10,000 rows. The corrupt cell had acquired its value from the wrong row, a value which was inappropriate and which the program refused to accept when I next tried to start it.

First step was to look at all the places in the VB code which addressed this particular property of table fred, places of which about a dozen were suspects. I thought about and dismissed the possibility of a public variable (called cod in what follows) getting corrupted. The code only looked at cod in one or two places and looked entirely harmless. None of the other suspects yielded fruit at this point.

Second step was to correct the corruption and see what happened then. Answer nothing, which was reassuring in a way but went no way towards finding out why we had the corruption in the first place.

Third step was to peer at what I thought were the relevant places in the various logs written by the code as it goes about it lawful business. A slow process, with my having forgotten how much of the code works turning up lots of red herrings. But again, nothing which helped.

Then I thought, was it just finger trouble? The worksheets are unprotected and it would be easy enough to damage them by hitting the wrong key, dropping the newspaper on the key board or whatever.

Next, came the obscure bug in the Excel code base, which has survived despite the battalions of MS staffers assigned to the product. The obscure but hitherto unknown bug which has hit my code, a thought which usually comes to mind when I get a long-life bug. Perhaps a fantasy of fame at Microsoft HQ; the obscure geek working away in his garage who hits the pot of gold. I am sure a good psychiatrist could make something of it; perhaps the chaps at http://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/ who have paid Google to come top of the search for 'psychiatrist' intended to check my spelling and who appear to offer every sort of therapy that one has ever heard of. One can only suppose that their staffers carry multiple qualifications, which one should perhaps inspect before buying, just to be on the safe side.

Then I remembered, or at least thought I remembered, a similar incident in the past. So the fourth step was to peer at the record sheets (using the Windows search feature) and, as it happened, something similar had happened back in May. On that occasion I had just corrected the error and carried on, without bothering to run the thing down. But it did involve, as did the present error, a culling of the offending table fred.

Fifth step was to peer more closely at the corrupted property. Its corrupted value turned out to be precisely dated and so I was able to peer more closely at exactly that bit of all the logs which I had peered at more vaguely before (see step 3). Still nothing.

Getting tired of all this, I go off and do something else, during the course of which all the material I had gathered up was clearly being gone over by the good old subconscious and suddenly the answer popped into my head. The culling had corrupted cod which had resulted in the two rows of fred getting crossed over. Re-calculate cod after cull! 

The problem now solved after the aforesaid 20 hours or so, I can move into witch hunt mode. What mistakes did I make during the detective journey? Was there some better process which might have stopped me releasing the suspect cod after first picking him up?

On the whole I am content and can move on. The system of records and logs in place does provide something, enough for detection to get a grip on. There are enough integrity checks (and no need to copy the one that caught this particular bug all over the place). One does usually get there in the end. No need to add another layer of core cycle burning anything just presently. And no need to invent a new process.

But will I be eating my words after some far more damaging bug in a few days time? The unprotected worksheets?

Coupon girl

BH has been doing quite well out of all the coupons flying around these days, which must be taking quite a bite out of the bottom lines of the big grocery chains, assuming that is that they did not push their prices up by the appropriate amount before they started issuing the things. And even if they did, it still makes sense for retired folk such as ourselves with time to think about such things, to play the game.

So I decided that I ought to join in and I am now the proud holder of  a 'My Waitrose' card, which I flashed at the self checkout machine some days ago with the result illustrated: one penny discount on a bill of more than £25. BH does much better than that both at Sainsbury's and Tesco's, who between them account for most of her grocery spend. And then today the same thing. One penny discount on a Waitrose bill of nearly £20.

However, there is a possible point of interest. I mainly use Waitrose to buy whisky (blended not that malted stuff), wine (mostly European rather than colonial, ex or otherwise), bread flour (white and brown), dates (stoned. Waitrose seems to be the only place which stocks dates pressed into small bricks and sold in a clear plastic wrapping, rather than attached to a plastic stick as if they were on the vine tomatoes, dipped in fructose and sold in dinky white foam plastic boxes) and dried yeast. The point of interest being to see what sort of offers they send to my email account now that their self-checkout computer should have connected my email address to my debit card to my 'My Waitrrose' card. Will I start getting emails about their wonderful, artisanal, oak smoked flour from Craster? Or about their Pouilly-Fumé, lovingly smoked in the same Craster smoke house?

But I should not be making fun of them. They are, by today's standards, quite a decent grocer and they probably pay their permanent staff something more than the minimum wage.

Trio

Off to St. Luke's again the other day, a day on which it was not raining, so I Bullingdonned it from the Waterloo Roundabout to the Finsbury Leisure Centre behind St. Luke's. Bad start, as the first three or four Bullingdons I put my key in either flashed orange then red or did nothing at all. On the point of giving up, thinking that perhaps the computer had put me into a 10 minute end-of-access quarantine period, I tried a fifth - in appearance brand spanking new (rather an odd phrase, can't imagine where it comes from) - and I was away, down Stamford Street where I was rather held up by traffic lights then left onto Blackfriars Bridge. On the north bank, entertained by a shapely young lady wearing unusual candy stripe trousers under her short waistcoat; she certainly caught the eye, which one hopes was the idea. On up Farringdon Road to arrive at St. Luke's rather too late for the traditional bacon sandwich in Whitecross Street, so I had to settle for some miniature pork pies from the Tesco Express behind St. Lukes. Took me ages to find them amongst all the food & snacks destined for the workers round about, but I got there in the end. Luckily they were not the sort which come with built in cheese and chutney, which I abhor.

And then, this afternoon, it gave me my first opportunity of using the Tesco store locator (to establish whether it was a Tesco Express, a Tesco Central or a Tesco Lite), which took me a while to get the hang of, but it was my first experience of a Bing map from Microsoft, rather different from the Google offering which I am used to. And as one might expect from Microsoft, some interesting & natty features to make them a bit different from the opposition. At first glance, I thought the London map was rather good, rather more like the Ordnance Survey maps I know and love. It told me, for example, that the Goswell Road was the southern end of the A1. Maybe I will get to know them better. Question for 10 marks: does the spur and product of competition justify the waste involved in having two mapping systems covering much the same ground. Or are they actually the same mapping system, provided by the same mapping contractor, but dressed up in customer clothes?

Back at St. Luke's we had the Lendvai String Trio, the first such that I have heard, or at least remember. Three ladies rather nicely turned out in black outfits, all different but all the same to the extent of sequined sleeveless waistcoats. House not as full as usual for a Mozart programme: a Mozart arrangment of a Bach organ sonata (K404a) and a divertimento in E-flat major (K563). Just the thing for a light, lunchtime concert. I was reminded of my father explaining to me that the idea of a divertimento was that the composer would not mind if you had it played while you had lunch. It was not intended for intent and intense consumption, which was, however, what we accorded it on this occasion. Clearly time that I cracked out the tafelmusik (from Schola Cantorum Basiliensis via Archiv and in a very Baroque box) which has been sitting among the vinyl, unheard, for too long.

Home via the Tooting Wetherspoon's, where I have not been for a month or two, so I was pleased that the barmaid still recognised me. I also found that the fat blue book called 'Pathology' was still there, up on its top shelf, a book which had looked to be a standard medical text from the States from a long time ago. I had thought that FIL might have been entertained by the rather gruesome & grainy photographs of tumours and such like, despite the text being rather small for his older eyes, but desisted. And now, with pathology of my own, no longer interested on my own account and so left the thing on its shelf once again to concentrate on the Chardonnay from Chile, at least until they ran out of the stuff.

Tried for a quick aeroplane at Wimbledon, where the platform was pleasingly free from obstructions both to the east and to the west. But, despite it being the rush hour at Heathrow, no planes, except one which appeared to have taken off from Heathrow to fly east, which did not count at all. And, for some, reason, the northern tip of the platform had been declared out of bounds (see illustration above). At this point I had just a middle aged train spotter for company, sporting a large camera, but my train came in before I could touch base.

Secure communications

The Guardian continues to generate a large amount of copy over the phone tapping and so forth perpetrated by the US (and, I dare say, our good selves). In all of which I detect a certain amount of gamesmanship.

While it is rather bad manners to listen into the private communications of your friends, it strikes me as highly unlikely that the leader of a sophisticated place like Germany would use a bog standard mobile phone or a bog standard email account for anything that was remotely important. She will have a small army of securocrats guarding her lines of communications, which will include, I am sure, impenetrable (if a touch clumsy) mobile phones and emails. Maybe she has to use a special phone rather than the one that her hubby bought at Carphone Warehouse. Maybe she is only supposed to interact with people who also have special phones. But it can be done.

DIY time at Network Rail

Shortly after my post about my latest DIY efforts yesterday, I came across this tool box on the up platform at Epsom station, that is to say the platform from which one usually goes up to town, even though, strictly and geographically speaking, it is down hill to the Thames from Epsom.

A tool box which caught my eye because of the care with which a rough wooden box had been replicated in die stamped plastic. It looked decent enough, but somehow such a flagrant fake irritated my sense of what is proper - which is a little silly of me as many buildings, both new and old, are into fakery of much the same sort without irritating in the same way. Perhaps the difference is that the fakery in buildings tends to be ornamental, rather than the whole thing. Cannot the hordes of wannabee creative people pouring out of all our art and design places come up with something better for tool boxes?

The tool box may have been for the use of the contractors who were busily extending the already long platform a couple of yards or so in a southerly direction. Together with the rather larger scale extensions to the platforms at a number of the stations on the way into town, I was told that it was all part of a move up to a 10 coach standard for all the trains on this part of the network, so maybe a bit less involuntary standing (although I often to prefer to stand these days). The building works were running late and it was not clear whether the 10 coach trains were to be the product of strapping two extra coaches onto the existing sets, perhaps cannibalising some of them to provide the extra, or whether there was to be a new purchase.

The latter might have the plus of loosening the grip of Porterbrook Leasing (http://www.porterbrook.co.uk/) on what was our rolling stock, an operation which I understand to be headed up by a small number of chaps who made a very large amount of money out of the sell-off of British Rail assets and whose unusual property tag is to be seen on the inside of all Southwest Trains rolling stock, just above the windows at the ends of the carriages.

It's that DIY time again.

Anything rather than decorate the hall. After all, it is only twenty years or so since it was last done.

And this particular bit of DIY was in response to an allegation that the rags, towels, foam and what have you which wrap up the various pipes coming out of the side of our house to protect them from the winter frosts were unsightly.

There are quite a lot of pipes, covering both the downstairs facilities and the kitchen, including the all important mains water supply (for some reason outside rather than inside. Flagrant breach of building regulations), and wrapping them up neatly was beyond me. But a substantial house over the whole, to hide the insulating rags from tidy eyes was much more up my street.

The core of the pipe house is the front frame, two by two from the demolished garden shed (see, for example, 27th May), cunningly cross halved together for rigidity and strength, and only marred by the fact that the upper rail was quite badly twisted. But this did at least provide an opportunity to deploy one of my sash cramps to pull up a joint before screwing it into place, the first such opportunity for a while. Frame positioned on the wall by three nine by one buttresses made from the finest North London mahogany, one of which is just visible on the right of the illustration. The left and right hand buttresses fixed to the wall with brass wall plates, one of which is also just visible.

Not the right sort of wall plate, this being the slot screw variety, such as used to be used to hang my trophy ram's head on the wall of the front room, but Robert Dyas of Epsom did not have the other sort. And the Screwfix (http://www.screwfix.com/jsp/container.jsp) catalogue did not seem to understand what I meant by wall plate at all, although I dare say they do sell the things, perhaps by the hundred, which would not be much help either.

Front and top tongue and groove, also from the shed. Top two planks of the front screwed on to allow removal and entry from time to time. Hard to get light timber of this sort off in one piece when it is nailed on. Brass (or something yellow) cross head screw heads visible if you click to magnify. I discovered at this point that the concrete surround to the drain, bottom middle front, while very substantial in itself, was not very substantially fixed to its substrate. But hopefully this does not matter too much; it is not as if water stands in the thing.

Next step is to source some packing peanuts. These will be loosely packed in dustbin bags and wrapped around the pipes. Meanwhile, just stand back and admire.

Grangemouth

The Grangemouth operation up in Edinburgh has been in the news the past few days. One article explained how the man in charge, if not exactly the owner, has recently been readmitted to the billionaires' club. Another explained how the operation was losing £10m a month and that if the workers there did not do something about it in the way of cuts to their pay and pensions, they would be out of a job. A view with which I have some sympathy: if we pay ourselves far more than comparable workers get in, say, Indonesia, eventually the work will move there. In the open world economy which has made so many of us - including here the workers - rich beyond the dreams of the depressed inter war years, one lot of workers cannot sustain a huge wage differential over another lot.

On the other hand, where does the entry fee for the billionaires' club come from? That, presumably, has to come in the form of cash or near cash. Which leads to the thought that the same sort of creative accounting which generates zero pounds (or dollars) corporation tax bills for massively profitable operations has gone into the sums which result in a £10m a month loss. Maybe that takes into account the £33m a month service charge paid into the bank account of the small but select company which consists of the man in charge and his dog.

Another thought on the corporation tax front is the Australian thought that corporation tax is an alternative rather than an addition to personal tax. No double taxation here if you please. So if one gets dividends from an Australian company, the corporation tax (in effect) which that company has paid is deducted from what would otherwise be your personal tax bill. Provided, that is, that you live in Australia. All to do with something called franking. If I have got this right, it puts the aforesaid zero pounds in a slightly different light.

Eureka moment (1)

Following my Lumia post of 16th October, I have suddenly discovered a new place where the PC talks to the phone, the only place that I had found hitherto being the limited conversations permitted in Windows Explorer, albeit more than enough to move documents and the all-important pictures about.

I had noticed a small blue window which popped up at the top right hand corner of the screen when I plugged the phone in some time ago, a pop up which invited you to tap here. The PC screen not being a touch screen, I ignored it and after a while it went away. But today, for some reason, I clicked on the thing and a whole new phone flavoured world opened up on the PC. Including thumbnails for all kinds of lurid apps which someone was clearly itching for me to pay for.

But, poking around a bit, the whole new world does seem to know all about backup, backup to the cloud at least, so I will have to investigate further. Maybe in a week or so I will achieve back up of the also-all-important contacts list.

In the meantime, it thoughtfully downloaded the entire camera roll to the PC, seemingly oblivious that I had previously downloaded 99% of it by hand.

Jigsaw 21, Series 2

Almost exactly two months since I last completed a jigsaw, that is since 23rd August. A long gap, given that I usually reckon on doing about one a fortnight.

A reckoning which is confirmed by searching the blog for 'series 2' and coming up with all 20 jigsaws of series 2, starting with swans on the 30th October 2012. A rate of two every five weeks, not so far off one a fortnight.

This one, breaking with tradition on account of it being a very proper sort of picture for a jigsaw, had 750 pieces, from Arrow Puzzles. A round £1, so not the Oxfam shop in Ewell village, but apart from that rather negative fact nothing more positive. And the 750 is a touch economical with the vérité, as the puzzle is 22 pieces high by 35 across, which my calculator makes 770, not 750. Plus one piece is missing, perhaps succumbing to the vacuum cleaner during its long sojourn in the jigsaurium.

Pieces all much of a muchness from the point of view of size, and mostly of the (most common) prong-hole-prong-hole configuration, but a rather irregular fit with plenty of instances of vertices with a meeting of just three pieces rather than four.

I found it a hard puzzle to get going with. Do I have some kind of a tipping point somewhere between 500 and 750 pieces at which execution time starts to exponentiate? It is not as if there were great swathes of featureless sky or sea to cope with.

Started with the edge in the usual way. Then the skyline, which in this case is not wholly satisfactory as it gets lost in the tree on the right, rather than sweeping right across. Then I floundered a bit. I thought the two edges of the tree on the right ought to be alright, but in the event struggled. More success with the buildings. Fiddled around, pushing down from the cottage onto the lawn and pushing up from the bottom into the pond - or perhaps it is a river.

Eventually the trunk of the tree was finished. This left the far bank of the pond. A hole to the left of the church, a hole to the right of the cottage and, last but by no means least, the sky and twigs top left. All this processed in the same order, with the sky and twigs being largely done by focusing on a particular bit of twig being in a particular position on the piece one was looking for. So not colour mix and not shape, but a reasonably effective technique nonetheless.

With a piece missing the puzzle cannot be recycled in Ewell Village and for some reason I am not inclined to keep it either - oddly, as I usually do. Rather, honourable burial in the compost heap..

Lichen

A first for me; a handsome lichen growing at the base (I can't find a more botanical name for the place where the frond converges into the head of the petiole) of a dead or dying frond from an inner city palm tree. Do they have lichens like this in the sort of places where palm trees like this are supposed to grow, or are lichens something for the tundra rather than the jungle?

Charity

I was interested the other day by a piece in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee about how the lobbying bill, presently in transit through Parliament, will do nothing to restrain or even make visible the activities of professional lobbyists, but everything to restrain charities from commenting on affairs in their spheres of interest.

First stop was OED to find out what charity might once have meant. I learn that the original Latin had at least two meanings, one being about things being expensive and another being about affection or love - with both these ancient meanings subsisting in the modern French cher. But gradually, Christians shifted the meaning to Christian love and from thence to the modern English sense of the word, and an article of faith both for Christians and, to an even greater extent, for Muslims.

From there we move to charities and their place in the Anglo-Saxon world - I don't think they have a place in the Roman Law world of, for example, France. My idea of a charity is that it does obviously good works - I pop money into a tin and they look after the orphans and widows - but an idea which does not work so well in the modern world. Should Eton School count as a charity? What about a worthy cause which derives a lot of its income by providing services to or on behalf of the public sector, quite possibly in competition with the private sector? What about a charity which pays its Chief Executive Officer the rate for the job, say £300,000 a year? Or which pays its Senior Vice President (Marketing) a similar sum?

But today's issue is whether charities should be allowed to campaign. My understanding is that in general terms they are not and that otherwise charitable outfits such as http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/ are not charities for this very reason; they exist to campaign, albeit for ends which one might have thought were charitable. In general terms this seems reasonable: I want the money I drop in the tin to be spent on orphans (or whatever), not on some more or less party political campaign. Charity should be a matter of compassion and consensus, not controversy.

So next I turn to the lobbying bill, and get off to a good start with a Parliament web site which does a good job of telling me how the bill is getting on on its passage through Parliament. It also tells me that the aims of the bill are first (Part I) to regulate and make more visible the activities of professional lobbyists and second (Part II) to control the amount of money that pressure groups and others can throw at elections; both worthy sounding aims. And then in a couple of clicks I am looking at the text of the bill itself and here the trouble starts. Not only is Part II written in a language fit only for lawyers, it is also expressed as a series of amendments to some other bill, with the result that it is completely incomprehensible, at least to me. Why could we not have a parallel text version with the left hand pages for the bill itself and the right hand pages with a gloss so that we the people can have some idea what is going on without having to put our trust in our daily rag? What price participating democracy?

That aside, my daily rag suggests that the bill in its present form will have the result of gagging exactly those organisations who know what is happening at the sharp end of the spending cuts from saying anything much at all in the run up to the next election. Now while I do not want my favourite charity to get into the ring with all the policians, we do seem to have a problem here. Civil servants who might know what is happening on the ground are not allowed to participate in elections. I don't think that local government officials are allowed to either. So if we stop the charities too, who on earth is qualified to speak up for the lost souls who have been trashed by the bedroom tax?

But I don't have an answer, any more than the Guardian did. I just don't trust the present administration to work on behalf of us all. Much more likely to think that looking after its already rich friends amounts to pretty much the same thing.

PS: I had thought that the excellent Macmillan (http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Home.aspx) derived a good chunk of its income by providing services to the Health Service, but a quick perusal of their annual report suggests that I was wrong. The nearest they come is 'Macmillan develops cancer services in partnership with other organisations, particularly the NHS. Macmillan has a team of development managers who work with partner organisations in their locality to develop the requirements for the service, negotiate the funding for the service (the standard arrangement is that Macmillan funds the service for an agreed period and then the partner organisation picks up the ongoing funding), recruit the professional to deliver the service and monitor the ongoing delivery of the service'. Maybe I anticipate. Maybe the Camphill Communities would be nearer the mark, but I have yet to run down any accounts from them.

Schubertiade

That is to say we went to the Wigmore Hall yesterday evening to hear Imogen Cooper do Schubert's last three piano sonatas: D958, D959 and D960.

I think that we thought about going to the same programme at the Festival Hall early last year, perhaps Mitsuko Uchida, but what with one thing and another we decided that it was too much in one evening. This year, encouraged by there being two intervals, none of this business (moaned about previously) of running them together to forestall clapping, we decided to give it a go. And very well it turned out too.

We were quite close, close enough to see that the pianist was very properly turned out, very suitably for someone of her age and station. It also meant that she at times seemed loud, perhaps too much pedal and perhaps too much  loud for this particular space, a lot smaller than her more usual South Bank. To the point where the odd stray sound seemed to escape from the piano, as if there was the occasional internal hiccup. But that is detail; the concert as a whole was very good, very emotional, albeit a little long with three serious sonatas at one sitting. Very impressed by how different they were, one from each other, despite clearly coming from the same hand at roughly the same time. Reminded at times of an organ and at other times of a song, with a strong melody line pointed up by accompaniment. Struck once again by what can be done with pauses - something I believe that more popular music does not go in for at all: perhaps pause does not work in that context.

Checking the blog today, I find that D960 is something of a favourite, with three performances recorded in the other place, one of then by Imogen Cooper again, on or about December 9th 2009. D958 another favourite with another three performances (no overlap with the first three) and just one of D959 earlier this year, so here rather than in the other place. Clearly a lot of it about. In the course of all this, I also lighted upon a YouTube version by Sviatoslav Richter against which someone has cunningly posted the score, the only catch being that the pages don't always seem to get turned at the right place. A good wheeze though, with the next step being to add a pointer to make sure you look at the right place at the right time. Something no doubt already offered by one of those fancy electric pianos from Yamaha.

Moved then to finish off 'Tiger Man' by Julian Duguid, a book from 1932 from the excellent Hall's of Tunbridge Wells (http://www.hallsbookshop.com/). A strange tale of a Lithuanian who spent many years in the wilds of Amazonia and beyond, making his living some of the time by repairing the (usually rusty) guns which were ubiquitous and some of the time by hunting tigers (more or less solo, apart from a few dogs), some of which were up to Indian size at 300lbs or more. He had the excuse that tigers were a serious pest as far as the cattle ranchers were concerned, but I don't think that that is why he did it. Very incorrect by today's standards.

Which takes my total of books about the strange goings on in this part of the world a hundred years or so ago to three, the other two being by T. Ybarra and C. Lévi-Strauss. That by P. Fleming (the brother of J. Bond) having succumbed to one of the culls over the years. One thing in common to them all seems to be the rather odd manners of the inhabitants of the wilder parts of South America: one the one had they show a strange old world punctilio, on the other they are quite apt to kill you in some rather savage way. So according to Duguid, calling someone a nigger is much worse than killing someone. Racialism of this sort in a very mixed race society is very much frowned upon by all decent people, but murder, particularly if in revenge for some slight (the sort of thing which might just earn you a blackball in TB), is more or less OK. Might have to leave town for a bit, just for form.

Cakes

To Tooting yesterday where I was able to pay a visit to 'Mixed Blessings', a baker whose main line of business is sour dough bread, a type of bread on which I am not that keen, but who also sells cakes. Yesterday I was in luck and he had both a round fruit loaf - rather like a malt loaf in appearance - and some pastries of about the size and shape of a sausage roll but which were actually coconut turnovers.

Round loaf continued very like a malt loaf inside and tasted good, taken without butter. On closer inspection the coconut turnovers turned out to be made of a flap of white bread dough wrapped around a slightly crunchy brown goo involving sugar & coconut and then baked. The finished pastry was a like a rather dry Chelsea Bun with just a hint of ripe Bounty Bar (traditional variety). Rather good, and BH managed two of them in one sitting.

Cakes purchased, proceeded to reflect on whether an actor was a conduit in the smoking area of the Antelope - in the smoking area to escape the noise of the interior rather than to puff, although the place brought back memories of the various excellent puffs I have had there and I think I might have accepted a cigar if one had been offered. So perhaps it is just as well that it was not. Reflections on a conduit were prompted by Patrick White's 'The Eye of the Storm', a film version of which we saw recently at the Epsom Playhouse (audience of about three, minded by twice that number of attendants) and the kindle of which I am slowly reading. Film rather lush & dense, a little in the way of a Peter Greenaway film. On the kindle, an interesting read, but a writer who manages to impart a rather clammy and cold tone to everything he touches, to the world he portrays. I think my mother used to read him in the sixties of the last century but I doubt if I shall read much, although I will probably get to the end of the storm. Anyway, along the way he tells us a lot about actors and their craft and he observes that the business of an actor is to be a conduit between the play and audience. Not helpful to have a lot of personality as that is apt to block the pipe. An observation which reminds me of the saying that a good screen goddess needs to be a blank onto which each member of the audience can project whatever they want to see; actress as an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Not quite the same point, but perhaps a parallel point. What I came to was a compromise: the actor added value to the text by bringing it to life in his person, and so making the play accessible, or perhaps visible, incarnate - but the idea was to portray the person in the play, rather than himself. He should not wrap his personality around that of the person in the play to the point where this last becomes more or less invisible and the power & point of the play are lost. But it is legitimate for the actor to contribute a few crumbs to the feast. To add a few finishing touches.

Not quite the same for Catholic priests, in whose case the rite and the ceremony are all; the character and morals of the celebrant do not taint the rite, which is sufficient unto itself.

Onto Earlsfield Station where I was prompted to further musings. Having left Tooting which was throbbing with mainly black people and come through Earlsfield which was throbbing with mainly upwardly mobile white people, I climbed the long flight of stairs up to the southbound platform to find myself in another world. A parallel world floating in the dark above the streets of London. A sensation which I have had before, but not recently, although one does get something of the same sort when entering a large bus station in the middle of a busy town. For once, the shiny new Lumia camera did not do the scene justice; perhaps you need a real camera to cope with all the lights and with my shaking hands.

PS: one of the charity shops nearby had several copies of the 'Times Atlas of the World', at £7.50 a pop, nearly new by the look of them. Good value, but I thought that we did not need a fourth atlas at a time when we were supposed to be downsizing in the book department. This despite the superiority of a good atlas to Google Maps for many of the purposes for which one looks at a map. But I do wish that the producers of atlases would ease off on the Dorling Kindersley side of things; it is maps that I want to see, not an economics or a geography lesson.

Lowreed out

Third and last visit to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate yesterday, taking the scenic route from Epsom to Vauxhall by travelling via Waterloo and Bullingdon, rather than simply getting off at Vauxhall. Picked it up at the Waterloo Roundabout, after a slight pause while one Bullingdon, while apparently all up and running, declined to be hired. Crossed Waterloo Bridge, with the ramp up to the middle making me puff a bit, down the Strand & Whitehall, onto Millbank where the stand just short of the Tate was full so I had to push onto the stand at the north end of Vauxhall Bridge, almost empty as it happened.

Into the exhibition, jumping the queue altogether apart from interrupting the busy queue attendant to get my card swiped in. This no booking and no queuing making the member's ticket well worth while. But the exhibition was very crowded (this Thursday morning), including, inter alia, a bunch of quite young children from a Lycée français (according to the tops worn by the minders), presumably the Lycée français Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. Children well behaved despite their youth. Gave up on the first two rooms and wriggled through to the last room with a view to working back a bit, which worked well - while the first two rooms stayed very crowded for the duration.

For the first time, I enjoyed the large pictures in the last room, previously panned, although in the end I still liked the middle sized pictures best (other than the gloomy black ones). But I did get to musing on the purpose of the exhibition for those such as me. One can say one has been and one can perhaps make smart remarks over dinner (or to one's blog). One gets a taster of the pictures, but one is not really enjoying them in the way intended, by getting to know just one by daily visits if the thing is in one's house or weekly visits it in one's church, by getting to know it in the sort of places in mind when pictures of this sort were invented in the Renaissance. I suppose one answer harks back to the original function of an exhibition, to show pictures for sale, so that having been to the exhibition, one then picks out one that one likes and buys it (or at least buys a reproduction) to hang on the wall - an answer which does not run in our case as we have enough stuff hanging on the walls already. Do I settle for jigsaws? I did not think to look for such in the otherwise well stocked shop.

So maybe the performance artists have a point. Public art is supposed to be consumed quickly and on the spot. It is not intended for purchase and does not stand contemplation; just a quick fix. Good for a quick laugh.

Tired out by all this reflection, thoughts turned to jerk chicken and Banners of Crouch End (http://www.bannersrestaurant.com/). Fine tea (pot, leaves, sieve; the full monty) and a fine jerk chicken burger with chips and salad. Succulent spicy chicken breast in a very respectable bun. This last being so respectable that I ordered a second bun to be taken with butter, to the amusement of the waitress who wanted to gee it up a bit in a toaster or with some goo. Chicken was fairly spicy by my standards so I avoided the green sauce which came with it; chances are that that would have been a lot hotter than I was comfortable. And if one was bored by the chicken, there were plenty of advertisements for massage, yoga, donkeys, vegans etc pinned to the walls.

Sadly, not  Bullingdon in sight this far north, so I was reduced to the W7 (from which I was glad to see that Stroud Green Road (near where we used to live, many years ago) was still very much alive and well) and the tube for transport.

George Elliot

I am getting into the habit of reading biographies of people whose books I used to read. Something I did not used to do; must be advancing years, desperate to find out how they did it before it is too late. But I have learned that most famous authors are fairly odd coves, with the exception of Trollope who seems to have been fairly normal.

So today's read was Brenda Maddox on George Elliot, the third biography of hers that I have read (ask for Maddox in the other place). An easy, short read which, as I have come to expect from Brenda, is much more concerned to tell one about George's love life than her literary life. But a handy summary which might both prompt and help along a re-read of the proper biography by Gordon Haight (bought some years ago in a famous Whitehaven bookshop. Notable, inter alia, for its collection of Russian and Polish titles and as being a good source for materials about the aboriginal language of the Cumbrians).

Brenda, in this book, goes in for snappy plot summaries, which sometimes rather jar, of the books in the oeuvre. But she points out that the tragic brother and sister relationship in the Mill on the Floss was drawn, in some part, from her relationship with her own brother. That like Hardy, and with marriage problems of her own, she was very alive to the terrible damage done by the unforgiving rules on marriage in her day. Two straightforward points which I had previously overlooked.

I also got to wondering about the merits of having a professional biographer write a biography of a literary person rather than a literary academic. Or of having a professional biographer write a biography of a historical person rather than a historian. I suppose there are pros and cons. The professional writer will be able to soak up a good wadge of secondary sources and churn out a digestible summary which will reach lots of people. But will perhaps be open to error and be unlikely to add anything much that is new. Perhaps be too keen to wrap up what was really a messy business into a nice neat story, nicely livened up with more or less invented details from the private life of the subject. Perhaps be a bit too shallow for the more discerning reader. But I think I need my breakfast and carp; I do read Brenda and do find her interesting.

PS: over breakfast I read (in yesterday's Guardian, naturally) about a Chechen who was shot dead by the police in the course of a long interview in his flat in Orlando, Florida. It may well be that the Chechen had a murky background and had criminal if not worse tendencies, but to find it necessary to shoot him dead ( a shooting which involved seven bullets) in the course of an interview strikes me as incompetence if not worse. Our own record on police shootings is not that clever, the reports of the Duggan shooting in the same number of the Guardian notwithstanding, but I do not recall one quite like this.

Tea troubles

Third cuppa yesterday tasted very odd.

First thought was that the green top milk - the stuff which contains something to make it cloudy and something to make it white, but nothing nourishing at all - was responsible. But that gets slipped into my tea on occasion and I don't always notice. Didn't think that the green milk was off, only having been open a day or so.

First cuppa this morning, with proper blue milk, still a bit odd, but drinkable. Second thought was that it was the taste of fresh plastic from our brand new electric kettle, quite a problem at the time that plastic kettles first appeared. But many years have elapsed since then and anyway this kettle is mainly made of thin stainless steel.

Third thought was that person or persons unknown had been a bit too keen with the washing up liquid when getting rid of the unsightly brown gunk which our hard water tea leaves on the inside of the tea cups. Or mugs. Or maybe it was washing soda. Hate to think what that might do to one's insides.

Fourth thought was that it was not the tea bags themselves. They had been changed some weeks ago and it seems unlikely that I would only just have noticed. Unless I am incubating a cold, in which state my senses of taste and smell do funny things, usually involving fish.

In any event, subsequent cuppas have been better and I think I will let the matter rest for moment.

PS: first cuppa this morning (Thursday) bad again. Does it take the water standing in the new steelish kettle overnight to soak up the full plastic flavour?

The first six weeks or so in the world of Lumia (520)

So what have I got for my £110 or so?

I can now create and edit contacts. Much stronger feature than those on  its predecessor (also a Nokia).

I can now send and receive text messages in a reliable way. One: the feature whereby it tries to guess the word you want usefully speeds up typing with the small virtual keyboard. Two: the recovery of old text messages from the PC to which the old phone was often connected and sometimes backed up was very patchy.

I can now make telephone calls in a reliable way. Receive a bit more hit and miss as I have not quite grasped how to get from off to answer. Three: don't get any choice about ring tone out of the box. Looks as if I have to download something to get that. And probably pay for it.

I occasionally use the feature whereby you can read Office documents. Documents surprisingly visible on the small screen. Handy for reading in a hotel bed in the dark when you do not want to disturb your partner and/or when you have forgotten to bring a real computer along. It looks as if it might be update competent but that will probably remain theoretical in my case.

I frequently use the camera, with which I have been very impressed. Huge improvement on its predecessor. I have got as far as using the focus feature which comes with the half pressed snap button, but I don't suppose I will get as far as downloading soft lenses, whatever they might be.

I do have what seems to be the necessary Microsoft account, but I have not yet tried to connect the phone to the Internet, partly because I am a bit twitchy that this will suck me into spending money. For example, to put some maps underneath the presently empty map button on the phone. Then what about worms and viruses? If the phone runs on Window 8, presumably all the malware which runs on a PC will run on the phone. Whole new can of worms, so as to speak.

Added a further £10 to the £110 I paid for the thing by getting the local, ever helpful print shop on West Street (print.centre@btconnect.com) to print off a manual downloaded from the Nokia web site. Four: manual not terribly helpful,  vastly inferior to the sort of thing that the (government) tax people knock out. For example, the instructions in the manual about turning the thing on and off do not seem to correspond with what happens in the hand. But I will keep on trying from time to time.

Integration with the PC very easy, at least as far as documents and pictures are concerned, with the phone coming up in Window Explorer in the same way as a data key or my Kindle. I think I can manage the documents and pictures on the phone from the PC. But then I try for contacts, the things that really are a pain if you lose them. Five: despite giving the matter quality time, I am no where near being able to back up my contacts on my PC.

First step was to ask Google, which resulted in a completely indigestible mound of stuff. Not much help at all.

Second step was to ask the Nokia site. Not much help at all.

But while I was doing all this, up came a unsolicited pop-up in which a Microsoft Technician with an eastern European name offered to talk to me. So far so good. His first suggestion was that the Nokia software I already had on the PC ought to do the trick. Tried that once again, just to be sure, and no go. His second suggestion was ask Nokia - and at least he was confident that something is needed on the PC, rather than something - maybe an app - on the phone.

So off to Carphone Warehouse where they say, full of confidence that what I want is Zoon. They even write it down for me. Back home to find that Zoon does not exist but something called Zune does. Foolishly, forgetting what happened last time, I tried this, I downloaded Zune from some miscellaneous free download site. And down it came, complete with a whole lot of rubbish, use of a lot of which involved flashing the plastic. Even more annoying, it messed around with the display that I got from Google. This was clearly no good, so I uninstalled it all. And after a reboot or two, Google was back where I started.

Next I try downloading the same thing from the Nokia site. Which somehow got me into the Xbox part of the Microsoft world. Or perhaps that was later. Anyway, some time later, I have installed the Zune thing to find that (according to Wikipedia anyway) it has been discontinued and that it appears to be a Microsoft version of iTunes rather than a tool to back up my phone. And I can't find a sensible description of what this large product does anywhere. Even the usually helpful Wikipedia fails me.

Which is where the matter rests. I have a Zune icon on my desktop but I don't have a clue either how to use it or whether it does what I want. And I don't think that the people at Carphone Warehouse are going to be much help. They have too many different phones to keep track of and I am far too old for them to waste much of their quality time on me. Maybe I will have another go tomorrow if it is too wet to move onto the next DIY project, building a house from sundry outdoor pipe work against the coming frosts.

Grub

Being off piste yesterday morning, I happened to go past the Spring Tavern, once a haunt of thirty something lager people, now upping its game to fine dining. I was amused by the talk of rotisserie and crustacea, not to mention other culinary delights on the sign illustrated, while remembering the memorable occasion when I passed the place late one Friday night to find about a dozen assorted police vehicles parked there. Visiting the following morning to gloat, I found a barman busily sweeping up all the glass in the car park, a barman who assured me that they would be opening on time. Very commendable.

Then a lucky result. The plan had been to lunch off some confection made from the day before's left over mashed potato. However, this had been cunningly hidden in the microwave where I did not find it, so I started from scratch. Take two large red potatoes, peel and dice into 2cc chunks. Add to saucepan and just cover with water. Bring to boil and simmer. Take a few rashers of bacon and cut into 1 sq cm pieces. Add to saucepan. Take one medium onion, peel then chop finely and add that. Continue to simmer for about 10 minutes in all. Meanwhile slice the green outer leaves of a crinkly cabbage into strips maybe 1cm by 10cm. Add them and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Serve with brown bread. All went down very well, with the potatoes working particularly well. One still had lumps, but enough had disintegrated down into the water to thicken it nicely. A very good and a very quick meal, just a little salty on account of the bacon (Manor Green Road butcher at http://www.masterbutchersepsom.co.uk/), but not an e-number in sight, let alone a monosodium glutamate, assuming, that is, that the latter had not found its way into the bacon. One can't be too careful about such things.

Later in the day, off to the Shy Horse on the Leatherhead Road, a full member of the family to be found at http://www.vintageinn.co.uk/ and a place which we use from time to time with generally satisfactory results. Grub yesterday was pretty good - including in my case cod and chips, which I thought was better than might have been had at the average fish and chip shop. And the twiglet style chips might even have been cooked on the premises rather than being the rather fatty & heavy oven chips one often finds in such places. The wine we chose was cheap and palatable, a 2012 Valdivieso from Chile, with (according to the wine list) just a hint of ripening blackberry; entirely seasonable. Meal only marred by rather a long wait between first and second courses, a wait during which we wondered about the builder's van which had arrived in the road outside labelled something to do with drains.

I had originally thought to have bangers and mash, but desisted when I found that this traditional dish had been modified by including cheese and other stuff in the sausages. I like my sausages to be made with meat and rusk and don't approve of such exotica, any more than I do in cabanos, some of which come these days with both chicken and cheese. Once again, one can't be too careful. Cod and chips was the right move.

PS 1: checking the Spring Tavern this morning I find that their otherwise sophisticated web site (http://www.springtavern.co.uk/home/) does not admit to any corporate affiliation. To being in some such family as Vintage Inns. I could try asking them on the contact form but perhaps I will just drop in and ask them face to face. Will the front of house staff know? Will they be proud of their corporate affiliation or will they be ignorant of it, dreamily thinking that they are employed by an olde worlde village diner? One of that dying breed, the independent?

PS 2 (much later): now checked and a personable young front of house personess did know that her employer was the Mitchells & Butlers PLC, from whose site you can find this Spring Tavern fast enough. And also learn that this is the parent outfit of the Vintage flag under which the Shy Horse flies above.

Bread

It is intended that bread should be baked today, but I do not think that that accounts for this short bread buying dream.

The scene is a mixture of home, a baker on a corner site with large plate windows facing in both directions and a workplace. Someone, my or at least a father, is going on about there being no bread in the house for his breakfast, partly because he is very mean with the housekeeping and despite bread being very cheap.

Exasperated I go down to the baker. Nobody there and very little bread, but there is half a small white loaf on the shelf behind the right hand counter. Which I fetch out but then wonder about paying.

I decide to leave the  money with one of the young lady clerks at work, a lady clerk who is not actually there, her whole office being very thinly populated. Perhaps she is on a fag break. So I leave the 7.5p in coin and try to write her a note in pencil, a note which I have great trouble making legible. During the course of which I decide that 7.5p is not enough and change it to 10p, very slightly less in cash terms than the 1/8 (one shilling and eight old pence) which I now think to be the price of one large white loaf, entire, when I was very young and bought bread at bakers, perhaps that at the Thornton Heath Pond end of Norbury High Street (the parade at the left hand side of the middle of London Road in the illustration (click on it to enlarge it; works very nicely in Windows 8)), an excellent baker of plain white split tins but not a corner site and long gone, as you might have discovered for yourself had you caught a south bound 109 bus from the Embankment in town, had the route not been truncated during the day to its southern portion, according to TFL. Eventually get the note down as I wake up.

The legibility bit may derive from sprog 2 not being able to read I note that I had left him, but I don't see where the rest of it is from.

Bandwidth

It used to be alleged that the number of cars will always grow to fill the space available, thus reducing the incentive to meet the demand for roads but providing an incentive to charge for roads. If motorists had to pay for the road as well as the petrol they might calm down a bit. On the other hand, the costs of charging might be rather a lot, so perhaps we had better wait until the (technology rich) congestion charging scheme for London makes a profit before making a move.

But today's thoughts are not about the capacity of our roads, rather about the capacity of our broadband infrastructure. In fact, about a wheeze to burn up some of that infrastructure.

As things stand we all share a lot of pictures. Our happy snaps, often at megabytes a time, are copied and sent all over the place. But happy snaps are becoming boring and this punter wants more than just a two dimensional rendering of things. I want a three dimensional rendering, coupled with a viewer which can change the position and direction of view, a rather snappier version of what I sometimes get with Google Streetview (my experience of this product being very mixed. Haven't got the hang of it at all, partly because I can no longer reliably find where it lives).

For phase 1 of this project, we suppose that whatever it is that I want to see can be expressed in terms of a finite number of objects populating a viewing space. Leaving aside boundary issues, we suppose that we are only interested in the exterior of these objects and that these exteriors can always be mapped onto the surface of a sphere and so triangulated. That is to say that the surface can be agreeably expressed as a network of small triangles and that our new generation image stores the position and colour of each of those triangles (of which a good quality image might need millions). We then attach a bit of code to that image which constructs a flat, two dimensional image corresponding to any nominated point of view and then displays it on the screen in the ordinary way. We leave aside the interesting question of how the code knows which side of the triangle is the outside, but I imagine that most of the machinery to do all this must already exist in the context of computer games (about which, I should add, I know more or less nothing. Don't know how to play them, never mind know how they are put together). Add a joystick or some such contraption to my PC and I will be away, able to roam around my new generation image at will.

There might be efficiency gains in, rather than storing just the colour of a triangle, storing an image. So something like a patterned carpet might be stored as just a couple of triangles (need at least two to do a rectangle), rather than having to break that pattern down into triangles of a single colour.

We leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out how one generates a new generation image, perhaps starting from a small number of old generation images, taken from enough different positions and angles to capture the objects in question.

We leave aside the need for an integrity checker, something that checks that all the triangles in my new image are coherent, that they join up into something sensible.

We should probably start with a world made up of brightly coloured building bricks, the sort of thing that infants like. Having cracked that, we move onto steadily more complicated objects. A person would be reasonably testing, a tree perhaps even more so. Or perhaps a strand of DNA or a molecule of protein. No doubt, the manufacturers of pornography will follow developments with interest. The mind boggles.

For phase 2, we move onto moving images. Either images which move of themselves, as in a movie, or images which move on command, as in a computer game. Roll over please, I would now like to see the back view. But maybe that had better wait until we have got a firmer grip on phase 1.

In the meantime, I want to get onto the international standards committee which sets the standards. Must be plenty of foreign jollies to be had in that department. Not to mention all the interesting images which one would get to look at.

Strict liability

I was told a story recently about a legal concept which might have been called strict liability. The idea is that where there is strict liability for something and you have such a something in your possession, then you are liable, irrespective of how the something came into your possession or of whether you knew you had it or not.

Strict liability applies to guns, so if, for example, someone puts one in the boot of your car, where it is subsequently found by the police, then you get done. Although, I dare say your brief might be allowed to argue in mitigation of sentence that you did not know it was there. The judge might argue that you ought to be more careful about your friends.

My informant claimed that strict liability did not apply to drugs, but I am not so sure. I remember the case of a middle aged lady who owned (but did not live in) a bedsit house in Oxford getting sent to prison because one of her tenants was found to be in possession of the dreaded marijuana. There was quite a fuss at the time, with the lady in question being entirely proper & decent, probably wore Harris Tweed, and I don't think that anyone thought that she knew about the marijuana. It was just that she was held to be responsible.

More tricky, what about the marijuana plant growing in your garden, the spontaneous growth from a spot of birdseed dropped by a passing parrot? I would of thought that legally you do indeed own the thing, even if you had not noticed that it was there and even if you had you would not have known what it was. Just brought it on for a bit of horticultural interest. I would hope that the police would use their discretion in such a matter; hardly the same as hydroponicking a thousand of the things under arc lights in your attic.

Moving onto heroin, someone at TB once explained to me that it was all down to what was called in the trade 'the Afghan razor rule'. According to this rule you were entirely free to grow the sort of poppies from which you can make heroin. They have handsome flowers and add a spot of useful colour to the suburban garden. But you are not free to make shallow incisions in the poppy heads with a razor as that counts as a conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance, for which a lengthy term of imprisonment is available.

Moving onto softer ground still, there is the question of indecent pictures of children or of snuff movies. Where do you stand if you are an elderly male media person and some bright young spark thinks it would be a bit of a hoot to dump some dodgy pictures on your PC. Perhaps in the form of the sort of unsolicited email which gets filed by gmail into some trash bin. The thing is still there, it is still available to you, even if it is not actually on your PC and you don't actually know that it is there. Would that be any defence if some gold digger decided to have a pop at you? Perhaps a cousin of the bright young spark. Perhaps a gang from Romania.

Where do you stand if you are an elderly male recluse with a taste for drawing such images, rather than buying them. Drawing them without recourse to a live model, no actual people involved at all. Drawings which are kept under lock and key and which only come to light because someone with a grudge, or perhaps just for a bit of sport, makes some lurid complaint to the police. Drawings which might have been preserved by scanning them onto a hard disk on one's computer and which thus fall within the scope of rules about what one may or may not keep on one's computer.

All very tricky and I don't see how you are going to make good laws out of all this stuff. Perhaps we just have to trust the criminal justice system to be sensible - trust which is sometimes sadly misplaced. Think of the business at Bryn Estyn (my version of this story being that by Richard Webster (see 17th January 2009 in the other place), although a quick peek at Google suggests that there are plenty of others out there).

All this being triggered by pondering about the Madeleine business in the light of 'The Searchers' (see 25th September). Suppose a young person is kidnapped when under the age of (say) 3 years. Suppose further that the by then not so young person is found 6 years later, happily living in a new home, with new parents, parents who had bought her at the market, according to local custom. New parents who were perfectly decent people and had not dirtied their hands with the actual kidnapping. Suppose finally that it was clear to the professionals involved that more harm than good would be done by returning the child to his or her birth family. What is one to do?

Does the imperative of not letting kidnappers get away with it trump the imperative of doing what is best for the child? Perhaps we could settle for punishing the kidnappers while leaving the new parents alone? And treating the child in the same way as an adopted child who has a right to the truth when of an appropriate age.

Perhaps it is just as well that such a thing is reasonably unlikely in our part of the world, sufficiently unlikely that we do not need to work it all up in advance. I shudder to think of the mess that the media and political worlds would make of it all.

PS: now had a chance to consult my Archbold and I find some support for strict liability in the closing paragraph of 17-3 of the 1994 edition. It seems that strict liability does indeed exist but it is not liked and people prefer to convict when there is what the lawyers call 'mens rea', loosely translated as guilty mind. So not knowing is usually good support for not guilty.

Monkey rights

Rather surprised by the bottom of the text illustrated, from a book by one James R. Hurford. It seems that as recently as 1984 you were still allowed to cut up the brains of live monkeys in order to try and find out where certain processes were located in the brain. And maybe you still are.

I am not a very animal rights sort of person, but I did and do wonder about whether we should be allowed to do such things to somewhat sentient beings in a non-medical context, although the issue is somewhat confused by the likelihood that the research in question will lead to a medical context in due course.

A Mozart day

Off to St. Luke's yesterday for a spot of Mozart.

Made an interesting start to the proceedings at Epsom station where I bought my ticket by card, using one of their various ticket machines - of which there are around four, each one different, just to keep you on your toes. Made the purchase, collected a handful of ticket shaped objects from the rather awkward tray and moved off, inspecting the ticket shaped objects as I went. To find that I am holding half a dozen ticket receipts but no tickets. Back to the machines, past a rather grim looking young woman, not quite sure which machine I had used but the trays are all empty. Had the rather grim looking young woman taken the ticket which I had been too impatient to wait for? Couldn't be sure and couldn't be bothered to queue up at the window to try and sort it all out so simply bought another. Onto the platform, thinking that the grim looking young woman must have had it. She was sitting at the far end of the platform, hiding in a sandwich, so I walked past her, then back at her, giving her a stare, which she was able to return without flinching. But as well as looking grim, she looked rough, quite rough enough to have done such a thing. I did not have the brass to challenge her and insist on inspecting her ticket. Get a woman member of staff to search her for it? Bit like being short changed in the pub when you have had a few; you think you have been short changed but you are not sure enough or sober enought to challenge. Maybe a policeman would do better, have a better nose for when people are lying and be able to get a confession by sheer force of personality. A facet of personality which I am clearly missing out on.

And so on to Waterloo from where I walked briskly, it seeming quite cold, to the Market Café in Whitecross Street to resume my acquaintance with their bacon sandwiches after what seems like quite a while. Pleased to find that they were as good as ever. And so on to the concert given by the Aronowitz Ensemble (http://www.aronowitzensemble.co.uk/), and very good they were too. String Quartet in G Major (K80), followed by Adagio for piano in B Minor (K540), followed by Piano Quartet in E-flat major (K493). Experience enhanced by their being two premier division luvvies in the audience, although to be fair I only clocked one of them myself. Experience damaged by the chap to second right of me doing his crossword throughout the proceedings, crackling the newspaper it was on the while. Rather irritating. On to Wetherspoons to take a glass where the ensemble joined us (not personally that is) somewhat later; nice that they were normal enough to use Wetherspoons like the rest of us. The crossword crackler also joined us, but I didn't challenge him either. Altogether a day for bottling it.

On to the 493 bus where a cheerful African lady gave us her seat, either because we looked old or because one of us sported a stick. She was very pleased to have bought a couple of stock fish from somewhere in Clerkenwell, rather dear at £35 for two; maybe £15 per pound of fish flesh, the same price as a better beef steak. I wonder whether she would have paid as much at somewhere in Tooting Market? Looks interesting, but not too keen on the stuff myself, rather soggy, taste and texture free once you have soaked the salt out of the stuff. Maybe I needed her tuition in the matter.

Wound up by checking that the Ship Tavern in Holborn (http://www.theshiptavern.co.uk/) was still up and running, a pub which we used to use occasionally in my undergraduate days. I remember it as being a lawyers and doctors place, both from various parts of Lincoln's Inn Fields (where we used to watch the ladies' netball at lunchtime before the squatters moved in). Pleased to find that the pub was still there, still looking pretty much the same, and pretty much music free. They were also able to sell me rather a good pork pie off a plate behind the bar. Nice to find a pub which still sells such things. Bring back the sandwiches and the cheese & onion rolls of yesteryear!

Fine view of the city and all its tall buildings from Waterloo Bridge in the gray, late autumn afternoon.

PS: no ticket transactions at all had turned up at HSBC 21 hours later. Will I think to check again 121 hours later?

Bumps with ghosts

Following my mention of bumps on 7th October, we returned to Kingston for another round on Tuesday. I bumped first, scoring 4 on the way up. BH went down scoring a modest three. She started very well but lost it a bit after her first bump, although she held it together enough to win on points.

In the break, rather than go to lunch, we went to 'Ghosts' at the Rose. We had been prepped by the recent outing to 'The Doll's House' (see 1st September), reading this work and reading various reviews. These last were a trifle mixed, and I remember comments about the stage being too large and the break for the interval being in the wrong place.

It certainly did not go as well as the doll for some reason, and the first half seemed rather too long, but it picked up well enough in the short second half - despite this last having taken considerable liberties with the text, making much explicit which the original had left implicit and uncertain. Not an improvement to my mind. But the reviewer did have a point about the interval, albeit not quite the one that I am making. He also had a point about the stage which seemed too wide for the amount of action and the number of people involved. It all worked rather better at the rather narrower Duke of York's; maybe the play gets lost in the round and needs the confinement of the proscenium arch.

And it did not go well enough to make one forget the cheap construction of the seats, the pairing of which seemed to make for a lot of creaking. Perhaps three mobile phones went off during the performance, perhaps reflecting the number of young people - perhaps doing their A-levels - in the audience. Which about half filled the auditorium this mid-week evening.

But as with the doll, there were some real issues and some real characters. What sort of a man will take on the by-blow got by a gentleman from a servant girl? How much will he want to take the job on? How far does the duty of a wife who has failed to please her husband go? What drives people to throw tainted money away, rather than put it to some good use? Is it right to free someone from a miserable and degrading death by helping him (or her) to a touch of morphine? What sort of a person would be able to provide help of this sort? And what sort would not? What happens when you treat a servant like one of the family? Is it better to keep distinctions clear, to keep expectations under control? All kinds of interesting stuff which make the play a good one for A-level study. But somehow, it did not seem quite as relevant (to me anyway) as the doll had: servants and by-blows are things of the past for nearly all of us, as are the class conventions of the middle classes of the second half of the nineteenth century. We just have an epidemic of unmarried mothers instead.

We plan to see (with restricted view) what the Almeida make of it all in due course.

Shorter notice 3

Being an occasional consumer of bibles and books about the bible, I got myself plugged into an outfit called Eden, to be found at http://www.eden.co.uk/. No to be confused with the IT outfit also called Eden at http://www.eden.com or that at http://www.eden.org which branches to http://www.christiananswers.net/. Complicated old world out there.

Having got myself plugged into what I thought was a proper Christian site just in case they turn out something of interest, I find that they are a rather gung-ho lot. What used to be called muscular Christians, to distinguish them from their martial cousins in the Salvation Army. So gung-ho that they send me an email or so a day, promoting this or that offering, luckily spotted by the Google email scanner acting on my behalf and which consigns it to my promotions bin, thus segregating it from my more respectable emails.

I was amused by their contribution this morning headed 'NEW Thriller Fiction by Irene Hannon' - not very biblical sounding at all. Although taking a peek at http://www.irenehannon.com/ she does appear to be very Christian, albeit of the commercial variety. I quote: 'I’m delighted you came to visit. If you’re looking for edge-of-the-seat suspense or tender, heartwarming romance—without gratuitous violence, explicit love scenes or vulgar language—you’re in the right place! My books have been called clean, compelling fiction, and that sums up my style nicely'.

And while a few years ago I found the Dawkins/Hitchens assault on the Word of our Lord rather irritating, even unpleasant and bad manners at the very least, peeking at these sites one does get some feel for where they might have been coming from.

PS: these people do not send out quite as many emails as Amazon. But in defence of their marketing people, I should say that I have yet to make a purchase from Eden. Not a confirmed prospect at all.

Shorter notice 2

Took a wedding to get us to this one too, making two visits in as many days, once on foot along Cabbage Stalk Lane and once by car down Tea Garden Lane: the High Rocks Ancient National Monument.

A collection of sandstone outcrops overlooking a valley leading west out of Tunbridge Wells, the valley housing a tributary of the Medway which flows west for a bit before turning north to join the Medway proper. A collection of rocks where it is alleged the woaded aboriginals made a last stand against the Caligulan legions around 2,000 years ago. More recently the place has been an excursion destination.

So one had the rocks themselves in a wooded park and guarded by an ancient cast iron turnstile and watched over by a rather grand pub-restaurant, with the restaurant offering both banquets and cigars. There was also a railway station, possibly of the steam variety. All in all, the place would make a fine destination for a mixed herd of bright young things on a summer's evening outing.

Take a few apéritifs in the pub, take a stroll around the rocks and trees, maybe a bit of a flirtation behind the rocks. Back to the restaurant for a banquet, rounded out by cigars, brandy etc on the terrace.

Very quiet when we were there, with the park looking a little past its prime despite all the rocky attractions. Gates at the back of the park not meeting the National Trust specifications for such things at all with, for example, not a single heavy duty galvanised steel fitting in sight. But it would be interesting to visit on a summer's evening to see how it does then.

In the meantime, read all about it at http://www.highrocks.co.uk/.