Perforations

Sold this spring on the merits of spiking the back lawn and I am now going the whole hog with the pick axe; an old tool, with one arm spike ended and the rather longer arm chisel ended.

I opted for the spike end and one smart blow drives the spike into our presently soft brown clay up to the haft. As with a felling axe, one wonders what chance a head containing helmet from the middle ages would have had against such a direct blow: it might hold out a glancing blow but I doubt whether it would be much protection against a direct one - although I seem to recall that the fancier helmets were cunningly shaped so that more blows would be glancing than would otherwise be the case. But I think that the big catch would be that while you were swinging such a thing, two handed, you would be quite vulnerable to a smart poke in the ribs with a lance. The swing time of the pick of several seconds would be more than time enough to slip with in the lance.

Maybe that was the point of the various sorts of gladiators; the ones with nets and tridents, the ones with swords and shields and so on: the soldiers in the audience would be able to evaluate the performance of the various tools of the trade in something like combat conditions, but at no risk to themselves. Maybe the swords & sorcery computer games are realistic enough now to be helpful in the same way.

Back with the lawn, make the hole with the pick, trowel in the finest lawn repair sand from Chessington Garden Centre, tamping it down with the dibber. Note the line in the background, keeping me on the straight and narrow; a line which used to belong to my father and must be at least fifty years old. Not sure what the line is made of; not sisal and certainly not man-made fibre, but whatever it is it has lasted well.

In three afternoons so far, I have done maybe 10 square yards of lawn and used up two bags of lawn sand. Probably not a good idea to be doing this sort of thing between the spring and autumn solstices when the grass is supposed to be growing, I am supposed to be stretched out on it and the ground is apt to be rather hard, even for the trusty pick axe. Or in the depths of winter, which leaves just a couple of months a year. So I have clearly got a job for life here, rotating round the lawn on what is looking to be a 5 year cycle.

For the sake of completeness I have tried to get https://www.chessingtongardencentre.co.uk/ to tell me what sort of lawn sand they sold us - the last empty bag now having been removed by the council's environment engineers this morning - but I am sorry to have to report the my request falls foul of Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.5466. No no joy on that front.

Organ time

On Thursday to the second organ concert of the year to hear Latry of Notre-Dame exercise the newly refurbished organ at the Royal Festival Hall, an instrument which I assume we had heard before in the course of St. Matthew's Passion, the Easter performances of which we, for a short while back in the seventies, used to make a point of going to. I can't remember now how it was done, beyond having some solists and a large choir, but getting the organ out does sound quite likely. One such performance being the one and only occasion on which we had lunch with my mother upstairs in the Chandos at Trafalgar Square, Easter not being a very restaurant-full time in those far off days.

Evidence against organ being an upcoming performance at St George’s, Hanover Square, in modern dress German with an orchestra. And while the version offered by King's College Chapel says nothing about modern dress German, it says nothing about organ either. Evidence for, the Wikipedia entry for the Passion does talk of organ.

Back to the Festival Hall where there was a fullish house, including quite a lot of organ buffs and quite a lot of talk near us of the RCO. Organ looking very impressive, lit up in a dull, soft blue, and occupying most of the business-end wall of the hall. Seats towards the back of the front stalls, spot on, and there was no need of that irritating screen which they had at St John's to make up for facing the wrong way (see 25th January).

Lights down for Latry who has a pleasing stage presence, but to find that the two large illuminations on either side of the stage were to be left on, their position and vulgarity detracting in some large part from the fine fifties design of the hall at large. Furthermore, looking ahead, there were some distracting light effects during the performance, highlighting the deployment of this or that bank of tubes. We would have been much better off without either, despite the fairground associations of organs. A rather different sort of distraction was provided in the first half by a young lady page turner, dressed to kill and who had to lean very awkwardly over the organist's bench to do her business. It must have been very tiring, but she clearly thought it was worth it.

Florentz and Messiaen impressed in a quiet way, exhibiting the fine tone of this organ. Also reminding one of the odd nature of the organ, with the organist being able to produce sustained notes at a volume and for a duration of his choosing from lots of pipes at the same time. Quite unlike any other orchestral instrument and definitely, for me anyway, looking ahead to our days of synthesizers, keyboards and unpleasant levels of noise. We also learn that both large organs and modern organ music are rather French things.

We had the Widor, having bought tickets to hear the 'Rite of Spring' because, as Latry explained in not terribly intelligible English, there was some IPR or copyright problem with his doing the transcription for organ: one got the impression that he was rather cross about it. Perhaps it was one of his party pieces as the Professor tells me that 'titular Organist of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, Olivier Latry is one of the true pedagogues of our era. He will utilize all the colors in the powerful Walt Disney Concert Hall organ for his transcription of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for two organists', back in 2012 and apparently spurning the transcription by Stokowski.

The up side was that we had an exhibition piece for organ from Widor, which included what I now know to be the famous Toccata which BH had thought to have had at our wedding, to be put off by the church organist (St. Martin's at Exminster), who explained that his organ had a few stops missing and was not really up to it. However, the Widor was very good. Very good in its way that is, not really the same as the chamber music of which we hear a lot more at all. I wondered how much this was to do with having just one player: how ever many bells and whistles you gave him you were hearing the product of just two people, the composer and the interpreter, rather than, say, five. Maybe I would be more impressed by Bach - and certainly the 'Art of Fugue' on a small portable organ set up in the adjacent Elizabeth Hall had impressed a few years previously (see March 15th 2009 in the other place).

The encore took the form of a very flashy improvisiation on a very simple tune. Not clear at all how much notice or practice Latry had, but we were all very taken with it. Very enthusiastic applause. I associate to the banjos in 'Deliverance', as good on YouTube as I remembered.

Off to the Library to reserve what looks like the standard book for beginners on the building of organs, by one P. Williams.

Charles Schléret

Yesterday, we finished the last of the two and a half bottles bought from Hedonism, the other one and a half having been reported on 12th and 18th of March. A 2007 gewürztraminer, not bad at all, but with quite a rich flavour and which did not go down quite as well as the rather dearer wine from the Elena Walch stable.

I get into a regular tangle when I ask the Professor all about it. The first and most informative stop is the Rosenthal Wine merchant part of the Mad Rose Group at http://www.madrose.com/. Is Mr. Rosenthal a real person, a real operation or is he just a marketing concept? Trying a bit harder, I find that he is a retired corporate lawyer who now avers that 'the Mad Rose Group is a family-run organization that is composed of a close-knit group of people who understand that wine is an agricultural product and that in its best and purest form wine must reflect a specific sense of place'. He has clearly moved on a long way from corporate lawyer speak and one wonders whether this new life is profitable or whether it is mainly financed by the profits from his previous life. Did his previous life involve the snuffling of white powders to which he now prefers the snuffling of  white wines?

The Schléret operation appears to exist, although they do not seem to have a web site of their own and it seems that the most recent Schléret has retired, just before the bottling of the wine which is the subject of this post. Is it a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mad Rose Group? Do they have exclusive rights? Probably not, as plenty of other outfits appear to stock the stuff, one offering the rather fruity comment: 'this benchmark Alsace Gewürztraminer from Charles Schléret exhibits a bouquet of tropical fruit and spices, has an unctuous palate with lychee and white pepper notes and a rich, rounded finish'. Perhaps the Schléret family are good enough at making wine that they don't have to bother with all the trappings of a modern, go-ahead sort of business. They can just let the business come to them.

I then notice the name 'Prospect Marketing' at the bottom of the Mad Rose page and wonder who they are. Click there and you are back in the cool corporate speak world of http://www.prospectmarketing.com/. So Mr. Rosenthal's new skin is not completely brand new after all.

Onto PrivCo at http://www.privco.com/ which claims that the 'Prospect Marketing Group is a privately-held media and marketing firm. Prospect Marketing Group headquarters are located in Broomfield, Colorado' and that if I care to stump up $149 I can see a full report, so while it might be privately held, it is not all that private. Either that or PrivCo are making it all up. But the Broomfield web site is called http://www.businessprospects.com/, so it is not altogether clear yet whether these two prospect marketing outfits are one and the same. Work in progress...

PS: tracing all these labyrinthine connections must be a tedious and error prone business and there must be plenty of false trails out there among the PrivCo's which claim to sort it all out for you. Perhaps I should have stuck to the rather simpler world of beer.

Twin county

In the course of the morning's prowlings over the ether, I discover that there is both a Westminster and a Surrey, just south of the mouth of the Fraser River, just south of Vancouver proper. Nice touch that Surrey is south of the big river, as it should be.

Got there as I was trying to find the Chinook base thought to be somewhere in Surrey (they fly over quite often, although not as often as the fat alberts at Alvescot) and which might have been where Putin (see previous post) flew into. All this courtesy of the Bear Creek News, also known as the Surrey Leader. See http://www.surreyleader.com/.

Battleston Hill

On Monday we paid what I think is our second visit of the year to Wisley, the first being recorded at 15th January.

The mystery of the day was the police range rover, which together with a police motor cycle, suddenly whizzed out of a slip road on the southbound A3 just before the M25 interchange and nipped into a blocking position in the middle lane, holding us all down to speeds varying between nothing and 30mph. After a while they sped off again, leaving us to think that maybe the idea was to stop anybody being on the bridge over the M25 while a very important somebody was going under it. Perhaps President Putin had been paying a private visit to his mate Abromovitch at Chelsea's Cobham training ground and was on his way back to the Channel Tunnel.

Making it to an excellent position in a quiet car park at Wisley, it being only 1000 or so, the attraction of the day was Battleston Hill where we admired large numbers of magnolias and camellias in flower. Some of the former were large and I am starting to like the latter. Still not my favourite flower, but I am coming to see the point. One of them, for example, exhibited flowers in every stage of development from tight bud to floppy fall, with some handsome flowers in between, a lesson in botany if nothing else. An interesting pinky-red colour, although I am unable to find anything that suits at http://www.workwithcolor.com/; perhaps closest to but not really alizarin.

There was a stand of eucalyptus trees, from the ticket on which we were surprised to learn that the eucalyptus regnans was a very large tree indeed, growing in its native Australia to a height of more more than 100m, as tall as a mature giant redwood. The striking illustration of some of them after a forest fire is provided courtesy of http://www.humboldt.edu/ who have a fine collection of tree pictures on offer. And from the ticket under a metasequoia glyptostroboides, I learn that these trees, of which I am fond and there being good examples at Hampton Court, have been knocking around for maybe 100m years.

There were also lots of helebore. Lots of bergenia, although none as grand as that noticed on Garratt Lane (see 20th March). Lots of euphorbia (known to some of us as spurges), of interest because following a sighting of a fine specimen in East Street, I have decided that I want some. Of interest also because they had some in the dry part of the large hot house which looked nothing at all like our spurges. They also had lots of different sorts for sale in the shop, but I desisted on the grounds that it is not a good plan to move plant when they are flowering, even when they come with a root ball.

All in all, rather a botanical day. There was also a lot of spring colour in the form of massed daffodils all over the place and lots of small flowering trees, of the ornamental stone fruit sort.

Lunch at the first class restaurant, where they were doing a good trade. I find on checking that lunch was very similar to that we had last time and while I still prefer the gnocchi they do at Ewell, the waiter at Wisley did manage to process the instruction to put less cream on them. They also had a decent selection of wine served by the 500ml which suits us better for lunch than a full bottle. They failed at finding a screwdriver to screw my spectacles back together again, but as franchisees they had the excuse that they were not plugged into the maintenance men who might have had something suitable.

Not too impressed that one of the eateries is called the 'Honest Sausage', all a bit too much like a visitor attraction, reinforcing the impression given by the giant souvenir shop through which one make one's exit. They need to be careful that they don't get obsessed with visitor numbers and cross that tricky line into a theme park.

Exit from the now much fuller car park, complete with sundry coaches. Schools rather than tours.

PS: possible sighting of a nuthatch in Battleston. Did not get more than a glimpse but the shape and colour was right. Woodland habitat right?

Jigsaw 5, Series 3

Garafalo for the third time of asking. As it turned out, I was quite happy doing it for the third time, right after the second time. Much the same pleasure in solving the puzzle, if slightly reduced elapsed time. I have included the day's paper for avoidance of any doubt that I am indeed talking about a new solution.

Given that this was a 99p job from the Oxfam Shop, pretty good value at 33p a solution, much better value than Surrey Library DVD's, at least if one disregards the important point that puzzles, in our household anyway, are for one, while DVD's are for two.

Much the same order of solution as last time, although I was starting to recognise some pieces and had more things on the go at once than usual. I was also more conscious of the support provided by the vertical alignment provided by the base strips of the cutter, the base strips running up and down this puzzle. The knowledge than pieces had to align vertically, even if they did not horizontally, did enable me to avoid a number of mistakes. But I still made one or two, luckily not costing too much time.

I note in passing that the cupid is starting to be an integral part of the composition and my aversion to his ugliness is diminishing.

I shall now attempt a fourth solution, but after that I shall need to move back to the 'Ambassadors' as I am just presently reading North on the subject, a man who appears to believe that there is a lot more to the astronomical toys in the middle of the picture than just rich man's toys. I shall assess how well my thoughts of 19th December 2013 stand up to the North treatment in due course.

PS: given that this picture has a fairly high sex content, perhaps a good place to lodge a remark about Ruskin, from an article in the current number of the NYRB, the article being prompted by an exhibition in the National Gallery of Canada at Ottawa. They point out that a hundred years ago Ruskin was best known for his work in inspiring a generation of Labour politicians, a point which sets our current obsession with his rather sad sex life in a not very nice light. He was also known to many art students for his 'Elements of Drawing'. I think I have tried the odd architectural work in the past, without much success, but maybe now I shall actually get around to reading some of the 'Gems from Ruskin' (or some such), a handsomely produced book of extracts from Phaidon, picked up from somewhere or other.

Statistics

Completing my 245th batch of bread today I was moved to wonder about how steady the bake rate was, and so consulted the elaborate record, in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.

First step is to simply graph the dates in column 1 which yields a very straight looking line. One might deduce that the bake rate was steady.

But probing, I find 95 bakes in the first year (January 2011 to January 2012), 55 in the second and 76 in the third, with some over in what will be the fourth. Probing further, I find a number of small bakes in the first year and what looks like a gradual increase in the size of loaf - not that size is readily available as I do not record the weight of the finished bread and I record the weight of flour (a reasonable proxy) in text, in pounds and ounces, which Excel does not understand. It would take a few lines of VB code, a small program, to convert from that to ounces simple.

Then I need to do something about date, maybe numbering the months since January 2011 and assigning each bake to one of those sorts of months. A few more lines of VB code to get from date to month number. Or would day number be better?

And then I might be in business.

Which all goes to show, if one wants to get the statistics one wants, the spreadsheet needs to be designed with them in mind, rather than just knocking the thing up on the screen. I ought to have known better!

Spreadsheet to be found at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls.

Problems

I had a rather disturbing dream the other morning, which went roughly as follows.

I became conscious of a large presence in my head, a large round object lurking there. An object which was in some sense an adult male who nearly had a voice - one certainly knew what he was saying, but it was not quite the same as hearing voices - and who had somehow got a foothold in my brain. No other image of him, other than this vaguely sensed, large round object. No head, face, arms or legs. He had hijacked enough machinery to be such a presence, in that sense comparable perhaps to a tumor or a virus, but not enough to be a full blown walking and talking hallucination.

Which I found all rather disturbing. He was getting in the way of normal activity and showed every sign of settling in. How was I going to get rid of him? At which point he butted in with a sort of grim humor: "you might be able to push me aside for a bit, but I will be back. You won't be able to get rid of me altogether. I'll pop back just when you think you have got rid of me". I move from disturbed to alarmed, but luckily I was starting to wake up and I thought to myself that if I was to wake up properly, that would kill the chap off.

So I got up, made a cup of tea and read for a bit before going back to bed. Where I went back to a now dreamless sleep. I am pleased to say that the chap has not returned, although it seems quite possible that one day he will. There are a number of things, some quite elaborate, in my dreams which come back from time to time.

Perhaps I have had a light touch of psychosis; the sort of thing that, if the problem persists, one is prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for.

Rather less serious problem this morning, less serious but so far intractable. Some weeks ago now, I started noticing an odd taste about my tea, mildly unpleasant, to the point where one was pouring the tea away rather than drinking it. Who or what was the culprit?

Was it something in the lining of the new electric kettle to blame? It was not a particularly cheap one.

Were we using some new washing up liquid which was apt to leave this taste in one's cup if one did not rinse carefully in clean water, something we do not usually bother with?

Did the taste appear when I took my tea after some particular something else? Some tastes do clash in this way, for example some toothpastes with most oranges.

Did the taste appear when I was developing a cold, or perhaps just having a brush with a cold, not having had a proper cold for some months? I have noticed that things are apt to taste of fish when a cold is on the horizon, not that the tea taste was fishy, just unpleasant. I do associate to the smell of hot plastic, but that is not a taste.

I am not keeping records and I have failed so far to link the unpleasant taste with anything in a definitive way, although my money is on the washing up liquid, despite assurances from BH that we continue to use the same brand as we generally, but not always, use. Perhaps the brain wants energetic rinsing of the cup to be successful but cannot quite make it so; my subconscious is not as in control of my conscious world as it would perhaps like to be.

Navarra'd

On Sunday to the last concert of the Dorking Concertgoers season that we shall go to this year, to wit the third concert given by the Navarra String Quartet. Not heard the Schubert (D.112) or the Haydn (Op.77 No.2) before, but both good, in their rather different ways, the former being a young piece and the latter an old. We particularly liked the old. Beethoven (Op.130) as good as ever, but leaving one to continue to wonder about whether one preferred it with ending heavy (Grosse Fuge) or ending light. Both have their points, but ending light worked well on this occasion, BH having found the rather full programme reported on 22nd February quite a lot to take in one sitting, in the evening.

Slightly irritated to find that house management had, once again, not thought to provide the quartet with any interval refreshments, so we had the second violin coming out into the bar to wrestle with the water fountain, to be followed by the cello a few minutes later. Would it cost have them that much to provide a flask of coffee and a jug of water? The same thing happened to the Endellion's viola on one of the last occasions on which they turned up at Dorking, some years ago now, so it is more than a lapse from an inexperienced house manager.

Home to read a rather depressing article in the NYRB about life on the ocean wave, life on a large container ship to be more precise. The big issue was that most merchant ships sail under flags of convenience, a wheeze which facilitates evasion of various civic duties, like providing decent living conditions for your staff or paying taxes. Why does the world put up with it? What is to stop the world saying that ships have to be registered in some proper country? Surely it is not beyond the wit of some maritime policy wonk to come up with an algorithm which assigns all proper ships to proper countries? The little issue was lack of internet for the crew, provision of which, it was alleged, would be a big improvement for them. Maybe the excuse is that it is quite expensive to provide a decent internet link from the roaring forties, from where one would have to pay exorbitant charges to some satellite company.

I would imagine that the shipping business is rather cyclical, with regular gluts and dearths of capacity. With the gluts being common enough to put a lot of pressure on freight rates, pressure which, in turn, puts a lot of pressure on pay and conditions for the people who work the freight. Hence the petty stinginess of shipping companies.

Moved on, in a book about the 'Ambassadors' (see, for example, 25th December last), to read a tale about casting the horoscope of Our Lord to see if his crucifixion was written in the stars. Something which, it seems, Renaissance scholars were into. I might be an atheist myself, but such casting strikes me as disrespectful at best, heretical at worst.

Experiment 2

On 18th November last year I reported on a lunar experiment and pointed up the need for further research into the direction in which the horns of the moon were pointed. A topic being given further interest in that it had been a challenge issued by the naval uncle, perhaps 15 years ago, and so something which I have thought about off and on since. But we now had lift-off and a second experiment was conducted during January and the first part of February this year, so spanning an entire lunar cycle.

This second experiment took the form of observing the moon, its shape and orientation at various times of day and from various places in and round central and south west London. Shortly into the experiment I decided that it was not possible to solve the problem by cerebration alone, and that while I could cerebrate a diagram, I would get far better results if I were to commit the diagram to paper. A trick which certainly worked but which perhaps only worked because the problem was reducible to two dimensions. Maybe professional mathematicians with geometrical problems in three dimensions need to resort to the 3D representations of the sort that can be produced by engineering drawing packages and in four dimensions are stuck with cerebration, which perhaps highlights their need for a big cerebrum. I made do with Powerpoint, which, I might say, in its 2013 incarnation seems to have taken a big step forward.

Continuing the line taken in November, we assume that for present purposes we can neglect various complications. We assume that the earth and the sun are stationary. That the distances between the three bodies are large relative to their sizes. That there is a single plane with contains the three bodies and the orbit of the moon around the earth (with atmospheric distortions meaning that you would not think that this was the case by looking). That we are observing the moon from a point on the equator.

We have thus taken a position intermediate between that of the ancients and moderns. The moon and the sun are vaguely comparable heavenly objects, both a long way away. The sun and the earth might both be stationary, but we do allow that the earth rotates on its axis (perpendicular to the plane of the diagram), anti-clockwise on the diagram, and that the moon rotates around the earth, orbits the earth if you will, clockwise on the diagram.

Other points on the diagram are that the lines ab and AE are parallel and both perpendicular to the line CG. The line DH is perpendicular to the line BF. All lines pass through the centre of bodies which they touch.

The first eureka was the realisation that the moon was not something that happened at night. The sun and the moon both moved around in the sky because the earth was rotating at the rate of one rotation per day. The sun rises and then sets some 12 hours later to rise again after a further 12 hours; the moon does the same sort of thing. When there is no moon, the lunar day is the same as the solar day. When there is a full moon they are 12 hours out of phase. At other times they are just out of phase. And, if one is standing on the moon side of the earth, to the right of the line a-b, one can see the moon and if one is standing on the dark side, one can't.

But exactly what you see does depend on where the moon is in relation to the sun. The sun illuminates the half of the moon marked by the points D-F-H, whereas what you see is the half marked by the points A-C-E, of which rather less than half, the segment marked by the points D-E is illuminated.

So the moon as a whole is always seen as a circular disc while the illuminated portion is something more complicated. In the state of the moon illustrated, the right hand side of the illuminated portion is right hand side of the great circle through A and E, that is to say the circle with A and E diametrically opposite which is perpendicular to the plane of the diagram. While the left hand side is the left hand side of the great circle through D and H, viewed from the side and thus as an ellipse. So the horns, rather blunt in this case, point from right to left, away from the sun.

The moon then rotates clockwise around the earth, moving down in the diagram, and after it has crossed the line of no moon, the horns flip round, and point from left to right. What has not changed is that they are still pointing away from the sun. So the answer to the avuncular challenge is that the horns of a waning moon point left and the horns of a waxing moon point right.

And so, it is now time to consult the mullahs regarding the moons which appear on the flags of many Islamic nations.

PS: during this post I have been impressed by how difficult it is to communicate something which now seems clear to me and which, in the scheme of things, is relatively simple. To the point that I am not very satisfied with what I have done here and will have another go in due course. It would take me a long time to write a textbook.

C Major Quintet

On Thursday for what will probably be our last outing to St. Luke's of the season to hear the Signum String Quartet (http://www.signum-quartett.de/) plus Nicolas Altstaedt (duff web site despite being honoured by Credit Suisse) do Schubert's D956 quintet. A fine rendering, all the finer for being restrained; the young players did not see fit to play young and thump their way through the loud bits. One even got to hear the breathing of the entranced audience in the quiet bits, which came off on this occasion.

The day had started on a lower note, with an odd story about a care home, somewhere in the vicinity of Epsom, which expects relatives to supply incontinence pads for their nearest and dearest, until, that is, said nearest and dearest acquires a formal diagnosis of incontinence, at which point the National Health steps in and provides them free, most people with this particular complaint being old enough to qualify for free prescriptions. A very strange arrangement. One might think that the cost of such things might be included in the weekly rate, which at £1,000 or so might be thought sufficient. Or failing that, supplied from a large cupboard of the things as a chargeable item, like toe clipping and hair cutting - but to be phoning up relatives to get them to bring some in seems a very odd way of going about it. Presumably the home in question is not part of a chain with proper quality control of their procedures.

Then off to Epsom then Waterloo Station for the Bullingdon to the Finsbury Leisure Centre, taking in a ride-past of the famous Eagle public house on the way, just to check that it was still there, as I was a little early. And it was still there, albeit rather in the shade of various large new buildings. Last visited just about a year ago, on or about 23rd March, which happens to be today. The traditional pre-concert bacon sandwich not quite up to its usual standard, with the bacon being plentiful but rather thick and rather chewy and would have been better deployed in bacon and egg mode, in which one could have taken a knife to the stuff. God shop was able to provide one new-to-me DVD and one not-new-to-me DVD, this last being 'Fast Food Nation' which I am fairly sure I have seen and enjoyed before. We will see whether it stands a second outing.

Home via Garrett Lane, where for once in a while I took in the 'Leather Bottle', where as luck would have it I came across a gent. who had not only worked for the Department of Employment in the days when it was HQ'd at St. James' Square, but also played a variant of the aeroplane game from the windows of his flat, windows which took in the flights paths for City Airport, Heathrow and Gatwick. But he was impressed when I explained that from where I lived, that is to say from the top of Epsom Downs, you could, on a clear day, see the aeroplanes touching down at Heathrow, never mind the flight paths. He also told me that Watneys' Stag Brewery used to be in Palace Street in Westminster of all places, not that you could tell that from what is there now and not that I ever much used to care for the product, except the famous tinnies called 'Party Four's or 'Party Seven's, quite drinkable when one was young and when the fizz and the chill had worn off.

A touch of Google this morning confirms the Stag story and reminds me of its reincarnation as Stag Place, which I do know. Picture dated 1961, presumably just after demolition, courtesy of http://www.westminstermemories.org.uk/.

Morning glory

Bright sunny morning after a light frost.

The wood pigeons held the floor for half an hour or so. One pair prancing about on the lawn, possibly the start of a serious relationship. Another pair, more calmly, ate plum blossom, looking slightly large and silly on the swaying sprigs of the slightly small plum tree. Newly opened white flowers very pretty. Other pigeons in the background, engaged on this and that.

Followed up by a very red breasted robin among the bursting leaf buds of the nut tree, with the perch in the plum tree now taken by a small fluffy brown bird, a bit bigger than a regular sparrow, perhaps a fledgling sparrow.

Let's give history a shove

Prompted by reading an odd book about Isaac and Isaiah by Caute (of which more in due course), I was moved to buy from Surrey Libraries this new-to-me biography of Trotsky by someone who had first dibs at the newly opened, very extensive & secret archives of the former USSR. A someone who, inter alia, managed biographies of all three giants of the revolution; Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

I had previously read the famous biography of Trotsky by Deutscher, also his biography of Stalin, but the present book has pushed both into the background. They may get a second look in due course.

The publisher's puff left gives a fair idea of the book, so I only add a few personal touches.

I take away the idea that Stalin's hatred of Trotsky was partly jealousy of a more charismatic and more obviously talented politician, partly fear of the lengths which Trotsky might go to to attack him from exile (perhaps a good bit of projection going on here, with Stalin projecting onto Trotsky what he would have done in like circumstances) and partly needing a handy scapegoat for the various big & small disasters attendant on the break-neck pace of industrialisation. And it was true that Trotsky kept up the attack, albeit only in words, in increasingly vitriolic terms until the end of his life. Would Stalin have eased off had Trotsky shut up?

It remains a bit of a mystery why the Trotsky myth and the Trotskyite party have survived the death of the man himself so long. He may have been a far more attractive person than either Lenin or Trotsky, but he shared with Lenin the task of building the machine which Stalin took command of and he shared with Stalin a lot of politics. It seems unlikely that he would have been a butcher in the same league as Stalin, but he had signed plenty of death warrants in his day and he shared the same belief in the efficacy of violence. Although, oddly, despite his hatred of Stalin and all his works, he never seems to have moved on from that to the practical matter of assassinating him. I am reminded of the bit in Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon' where the old bolshevik victim of a purge comes to acquiesce in his own execution for the things he should have done given his views - but did not. I am also reminded of the various voluble but incoherent Trotskyites (one of the particularly incoherent was a heavily accented post-graduate Italian) from my own days at LSE; I never did have any idea of what they were at or on.

Would Trotsky, had he taken over at Lenin's death, have done the business? He would not have executed most of the command of the Red Army just at Hitler was cranking up to invade, but would he have been able to force through the industrialisation which built the tanks which won the war? Would the weaknesses which cost him the leadership have been fatal had he got it?

Would assassination of Stalin have done the business? It seems unlikely that anyone quite as bad would have floated to the top - but it seems a lot more likely that the resulting mess would have fallen victim to Hitler, at least west of the Urals.

There is also a still-important theoretical issue. A hundred years and more ago soft scientists were seeking iron laws which would match the so successful iron laws of physics and chemistry, Freud being one example and Marx being another. So the revolutionaries believed that it was an iron law of history that the proletariat would triumph in the struggle for a brave new world. Which being so, what need was there to exert oneself, to put oneself at risk as a revolutionary? The iron law would make it happen anyway - there being echos here of another north European problem, that of pre-destination. The answer that Lenin and then Trotsky came to was that history needed to be given a shove, to my mind, a felicitous translation of whatever it was that was said in the first place. My own view, which has been aired either here in the other place before, is that there might well be underlying drivers, economic or otherwise, for what happens in history, but a fair amount is left to chance and the right individual floating to the top of the brew can make a big difference.

To close, I note the irony that we here in the UK are about to spend billions of pounds to sort out the Scottish question, one way or another, for what will probably be very little change on the ground. What line would one J. Stalin have taken in his days as Commissar for the Nationalities, when he had to grapple with rather more tricky nationalities - nationalities which continue to vex us all to this day?

The new blen

We have now paid two visits to the newly reopened TB, a newly hatched member of the Greene King Meet & Eat family, once to Drink and once to Meet & Eat. So far so good - and not a profanity in sight this Friday lunchtime.

Menu very much along the Wetherspoon's road, we thought a bit shorter and a bit cheaper.

Never heard of Kendermann's wine before, and Professor Google suggests that it is a brand rather than a manufacturer, let alone a domaine, but we thought it was good value, a sweet white wine from Germany. And, as it happened, handily low strength at 10%. Being presently off the beer, I did not sample the bitter, but Greene King IPA used to be a favorite, even if it does not taste as good near London as it tastes near Bury St. Edmunds, and there is no reason to suppose that there will be anything wrong with it here.

We will see how short plastic grass does for the smoking den. Will a regular vacuum cleaner extract sufficient butts and ash for the thing to remain decent?

Pigsqueak

Came across a very fine stand of pigsqueak yesterday afternoon, at the Tooting end of Garratt Lane, the best I have seen for some time, rather superior to that in our own front garden. A pity about the bits of litter, but it seemed a little busy to remove them.

A plant which might be known to you as elephants' ears, bergenia crassifolia or even bergenia cordifolia. There is also an uncertain link to the family of the saxifragaceae.

Missing out

Visiting Bourne Hall library the other day to check their recycled DVD shelf, I came across half a dozen or more books from J. R. Ward on their recycled book shelf, a New York Times bestselling author of whom I had not previously heard.

It seems that there is a whole world of vampires out there which I am missing out on. According to Wikipedia, it is pretty serious stuff, at least ten volumes of it, with this one all about 'Rhage, son of Tohrture, is the strongest and most beautiful of the Brothers. Aptly nicknamed "Hollywood", he is also the most sexual because of his beast. Cursed by the Scribe Virgin, Rhage is possessed by a dark creature known only as the "Beast", making him a danger to everyone, including his Brothers. However, the beast harbors feelings for a human named Mary. Rhage falls in love with her and longs to take Mary as his shellan. Their story is told in Lover Eternal'.

On the other hand, if the library is recycling some of its holdings, perhaps the crest of the wave has passed. We wonder whether they will they appear on ITV3 or in a Hook Road car booter in DVD format any time soon.

Bottles

On my first post of 18th March I mentioned a lady who had more trust, in her case in bottles, than I did. Since then two snippets have come to mind.

The first concerned a chap from the wild fens of Lincolnshire where life, at that time, was hard. Hard enough that the life is now mainly lived by people from eastern Europe who are still used to it. So he joined the army as a long service man, ending up as a sergeant major and meeting us not long after his retirement. He told a story about his elder son which went roughly as follows. He would play with his son most evenings, play which involved a certain amount of rough and tumble. Play which sometimes involved the son, at the time an infant, jumping off the kitchen table to be caught by doting father. Then, one evening, he did not catch the jumping son, who crashed to the ground and started screaming, although probably with more hurt to mind than to body. That will teach you, said dad, never to trust anyone. Always rely on yourself, not on others. A lesson which might, for all I know, have sunk in, and which presumably reflected the wild life of the fens and the nearly as wild life of the army. A story which he subsequently told us without bravado, embarrassment or anything else. He thought that he had done the right thing.

The second concerned myself, also at the time an infant, but an infant already fond of food (oral satisfaction?) in general and sausages in particular. So my mother, who was a teacher but who was on this occasion in prank mode rather than lesson mode, thought she would play an April Fool trick on me. With much palaver she announced that it was sausages for lunch. She built up to sausages for lunch all through the morning and I drank it all up. Much pleasurable anticipation of sausages. Finally, lunch arrived. Sausages arrived in a splendid covered dish, the sort of thing which one might more usually use to serve cabbage or soup. Lid lifted off with great ceremony to reveal nothing inside; there were no sausages for lunch. I burst into tears, got into a bit of a state and generally made a great fuss. My mother's joke had been much more successful than she had expected and I was eventually soothed, I imagine, with promise of sausages to come the next day.

Thinking now of both stories together, did the second result in less trust in the world than there might otherwise have been? Did the lady who left her bottles behind the road sign have no such story in her background?

Thinking which was followed by two items from Sainsbury's. The first was some free-from yoghourt which BH included in her lunch. Said to be free from both fat and sugar but with a hint of lemon and lime. Not clear at all how you make white stuff looking a bit like whipped cream on this basis, but there you are, the trick had been pulled off. The second, rather later, over DVD, was a petit chablis, not grand enough to be a chablis pure and simple, but, instead, also coming with a hint of lemon and lime. Altogether, after account is taken of the breakfast orange, also from Sainsbury's, the day of the citrus.

The DVD was another hand-me-down from Surrey Libraries (see http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/people-and-community/libraries) called 'Salvation Boulevard', starring, amongst others, a rather podgy looking Pierce Brosnan. Rather an odd and creaky film, but quite funny and welcome relief from a near exclusive diet of ITV3 and its advertisements for denture fixatives. Then checking this morning, I find that the New York Times, according to Wikipedia, had a fit of the Guardians about it and said that 'there is the inkling of a strong, interesting idea here, about how some versions of modern religion are predicated on the systematic denial of reality, but Salvation Boulevard is itself too loosely tethered to the actual world to make the point with the necessary vigor or acuity'.

Awake in the shed

On St. Patrick's Day to a show built from Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' (no apostrophe in my copy, a nice 1968 reprint from Faber. A matter, no doubt, for much scholarship in some university in the Mid-West where such things are treated with the seriousness they deserve).

A book which I have not got further with than dipping. In small doses, engaging and sometimes very funny, but hard going and I doubt whether I shall ever read more than the odd page at a sitting.

A book which starts with a lower case 'r', which does not end with a full stop and which comes with no apparatus whatsoever. No introduction by a scholar, no preface by the author, no biography of the author, no contents page, no chapters: just in at the beginning and out at the end. Although, to be fair, there are four parts, there are page numbers and one could write the number of the first page of each part inside the cover for ease of reference.

A book which I sometimes think is a very elaborate practical joke, largely paid for by Joyce's long suffering lady backer, one Harriet Shaw Weaver (who, oddly enough, graduated to backing Commies after having had enough of backing Joyce). A huge vocabulary, a huge amount of energy and a huge amount of brain power poured into 628 pages of clever nonsense. Nonsense with very little content of the conventional boy meets girl or boy goes to battle variety; a mutant cross word puzzle.

That being as it may, one Olwen Fouéré has turned some short extracts into a one woman show (excluding, that is, the small herd of production and creative staff) of about an hour, which arrived at the Shed at the National Theatre after various outings at Irish literary & dramatic festivals. The first word of the show 'sandhyas' (see illustration above) is a fair sample: how many wannabee Inspector Morse's would know that this is a Sanskrit word about a ritual performed at dawn, noon and dusk, rather carelessly rendered in the programme as 'the twilight of dawn'?

But Olwen Fouéré (http://www.olwenfouere.com/) brings huge energy to her recital, managing a lot of tightly controlled limb, body and face movement while still getting the words out with tremendous verve; someone who appeared to have a strong mime background and who managed to bring the nonsense to life. She was able to pour the stuff out as if it meant something. She was not frightened to appear lean and old, stripped down at the end to a singlet and trousers. And, sitting where we were, facing down at her from above, she had the trick of making you think she was performing just for you, looking straight at one with her strikingly made up eyes, although I don't suppose she actually saw much of the audience at all. Altogether, rather good, a triumph of performance over text rather than a triumph over text over performance, this last being a suggestion overheard on the way out. But an hour, maybe 10 pages out of the 600, was enough.

Full house, including a lot more young people than usually attend the sort of things that I attend. Neither of the two I spoke to were there for Finnegan, they were there for the theatre. Which, as a venue, was spot on for a show of this sort.

Conservators

Having taken a mild pop at the tree conservators earlier in the day, I now offer some commiseration.

Their contractors tidied up the tree noticed on 26th January over several campaigns and the latest campaign had left three chunks of branch - something more than a foot in diameter - lying at the foot of what was left of the tree. Not clear why they had been left, but some passing youth thought it would be fun to roll the chunks down the bank into the nearby stream, from where it might well prove harder to load them onto a lorry than might otherwise have been the case. Meantime they make a partial dam, perhaps good news for the kingfishers that one occasionally sees along the stream.

And then, down the southern end of Manor Green Road there are some new trees, not long planted and I imagine replacing mature trees for some conservatory reason or other. Today, I noticed that two of them have been neatly snapped off, presumably by inebriated youth leaving either the Cricketers or the Coopers, and altogether more irritating than a bit of log rolling. Just wanton destruction.

Important fact

We used to have a pub near us called the Sefton, a pub which was trashed by its customers once too often, stood empty for a while and was then demolished, with the site now providing a small bit of green space.

The customers may be interested to know that in addition to being a race horse, a sefton is a veal custard, at least when it is not being a sort of landau. OED does not venture a recipe, but Google does. So with thanks to http://chestofbooks.com/:

'Pour boiling, a pint of rich, clear, pale veal gravy on six fresh eggs, which have been well beaten and strained: sprinkle in directly the grated rind of a fine lemon, a. little cayenne, some salt if needed, and a quarter-teaspoonful of mace. Put a paste border round a dish, pour in, first two ounces of clarified butter, and then the other ingredients; bake the Sefton in a very slow oven from twenty-five to thirty minutes, or until it is quite firm in the middle, and send it to table with a little good gravy'.

Follow up

Off to a bad start on the Horton Clockwise yesterday with signs of activity from the chain saw volunteers; that is to say the sounds of machinery and puffs of wood smoke from the interior of Epsom Common, as seen from Christchurch Road. I decided that I would only get cross if I went to investigate so I didn't.

But I did remember to inspect the twigs removed from the corpse reported on on 15th March and they were covered with swelling buds, which suggests that the tree was very much alive when it was chopped down. The stump did not look rotten either, so what did the council's tree conservators know about this tree which we did not? Given the importance of hanging onto our natural heritage would it be too much to ask the council to attach a notice to the corpse explaining why it was a corpse?

Further on down Horton Lane more innocent amusement was provided by a  lady jogger who kept her two water bottles behind a road sign, rather than carry them with her. I assume she organised her run so that she could use them half way and pick them up on her way home, but I would not leave my water bottles behind a sign like that. Who knows who might remove them, or worse, tamper with them? What does it say about our two upbringings that she has the necessary trust to leave her bottles behind whereas I do not?

And on Sunday we made it to Hampton Court to inspect the spring flowers in the wilderness, full on on this bright and sunny morning. Lots of people about by the time we left, with the Palace car park full by around 1030 and the station car park fullish by the time we got back to it, around 1130. So many people that we were reduced to our third choice of café for elevenses, a third choice which did not run to any cake that I fancied. But the tea went down well enough.

Home to finish off the second bottle of wine from Hedonism, a 2012 gewürztraminer  from the part of Italy which would still be part of Austria if it had not been for a contretemps at the time of the first world war, that is to say the Alto Adige. From the house of Elena Walch and very good it was too. Interesting that I paid significantly less for it in Mayfair than Amazon appear to want for the stuff. And looking at the web site (http://www.elenawalch.com/), this wine appears to be in the second from bottom league (out of five); perhaps I shall have to ask at Hedonism whether I can move up a league.

PS: I read this morning about a major refit of A&E at St. Thomas's and I wondered whether the management consultants trying to force down the number of A&E units take into account the need to take them out of service from time to time for refit? An outage which would make a big hole in provision if you have decided to have your units 20 miles apart (say). Do they understand the principle that one unit is operational, one is resting and one is having a fag? In the way of the management consultants who look after our underwater nuclear deterrent? Is the difference that money is no object in this latter case? Jobs for the boys at Barrow is wot counts.

Double rations

I mentioned Bach's cantatas on March 18th 2012 in the other place, the main drift being that we had little to do with them, despite owning a box full.

But this week, due to a quirk in the timetable, we have been to two cantata concerts.

The first was given by the Ripieno Choir in the handsome Weston Green church near Esher - a newish, fairly austere church which we thought well suited to this north German, Lutheran sort of music. They fielded a mixed choir of around 30 voices, backed by a small orchestra (the Chameleon Arts Baroque Ensemble) mainly playing instruments of the time of composition, including no less than three sorts of antique oboe, two of which looked like large recorders and one like the horn of a Poirot car. They offered a medley, drawing bits from from across the liturgical year, generally two or three bits  from each of the cantatas selected. All rather good, although slightly damaged by there being clapping at the end of each cantata, which made for rather more clapping than I like - or that BH thought was appropriate for church music in a church.

There was then a period of revision during which we read about the difference between a cantata and a sonata and between an aria and a recitative. I was also very impressed by the rendering the of the first aria of cantata 82 offered by Natalie Dessay and YouTube; a cantata which might also be termed a death song.

The second was given by members of the London Bach Singers in the Purcell Room, backed by another small orchestra (the Feinstein Ensemble), this last very much the same sort of thing as the first, but including more unusual violins and an antique recorder as well as an antique oboe. They offered four complete cantatas, mostly in the form of a sole singer with orchestral backing. (Cantata 82 was here given by a bass rather than a soprano - which made a lot of difference. Maybe one of the different versions referred to in the programme notes). So a quite different format from that offered by the Ripieno Choir, and for us, a far more impressive experience. A properly sacred rendering of sacred music, albeit in a secular space, from a time which I now suspect to be the tipping point between the time when serious music (in the west of Europe) was mainly sacred to that when serious music was mainly secular, a tipping comparable to the similar, rather earlier, shift in painting.

On the way home, the thoughtful off license near platform 1 at Waterloo gave me a plastic glass with which to drink my 2 for £5.50 quarter bottles of red, despite consumption being illegal and we were further entertained by conversation with a visually handicapped inhabitant of Swail House who was happy to tell us about some of the minutiae of blind life and blind dogs.

Home, to find a large frog on our front verge. We decided to leave it to its own devices, to let nature take its course, be that to the stomach of a passing fox or to tadpoles.

Doric String Quartet

Back to St. Luke's on Thursday to hear the Doric Quartet do Schubert: a trio fragment D471 and a complete string quartet D887.

Started off in the usual way via Bullingdon and bacon sandwich, the only news item on that front being a number of men in and around the Market Café having elaborately combed hair, mostly of the frontal rather than the side parting variety, in any event something I have not noticed for a while - this being something I need to keep an eye on if I am to fend off suggestions that I might perhaps purchase a comb for myself.

Trio fragment good, but the complete quartet seemed to sag a bit - the first movement seemed rather long and the seats seemed rather hard; not sure why this was. Maybe the first violin was too relaxed, having given place to the second violin for the trio and not bothering to tie his tie vary carefully for the quartet, giving him a slightly sloppy appearance. But the quartet got better as it progressed, with the whole taking a little longer than the allotted hour, something which the radio people will have to deal with in due course. The quartet did rather better at the quiet bits than the Elias had been on the occasion reported on 22nd February, but I do wonder whether violinists do not make a bit of a challenge of it: how quiet can they play while still playing music, with a result which is not always very musical. I think I would prefer them not to try quite so hard.

Afterwards, off to Tooting to a debate about enlistment. If you are a famous person (in this example, Lawrence Olivier) and you happen to be in New York when the second world war starts, what should you do? If you appear to be doing nothing at a time when other young men are being conscripted, is if fair for the newspapers to have a pop at you? I argue that the answer is 'yes'. If you have made your living by being a public person, you should set a good example, you should do your duty and join up. Otherwise name and shame. The argument for 'no' was that this famous person had been told by the consulate in New York to sit tight while they dreamed up a safe billet for him, a wheeze commonly adopted by the relevant authorities the world over; you don't want a valuable member of society going west as common or garden cannon fodder. In the end, so this story ran, he was found a job ferrying aeroplanes around England, duties which he could presumably combine with acting assignments. But I still argue that, as no public statement had been forthcoming, he was fair game.

And then I noticed that the fat blue book called 'Pathology', noticed on 26th October last, was still there, a book which continues to intrigue me despite its gruesome contents. A book written by one William Boyd, an eminent Canadian from Scotland, running to some 1,378 pages, in the writing of which he acknowledges no help. These days such a book would be a team effort. It also looked to have become a standard text, running to seven editions, spanning thirty years or more and including translations into Spanish and Portuguese. The cost to Henry Kimpton of Great Portland Street (never before heard of) in setting the thing up in movable type must have been prodigious, enough to deter anyone else from having a go for a good long while, which was, I suppose, part of what enable it to become a standard text. A punt by the publisher which came off.

I learn from Google, that the book was still going in 1990, by then into its ninth edition and a new author, but with its review in no less an organ than the 'New England Journal of Medicine' suggesting that it was starting to run out of puff. The time was ripe for it to be pushed off the shelves in favour of something new. One could write an interesting story about the life history of such a work and about how the coming of computers and the internet has changed this particular game - although for myself, despite some reliance on Wikipedia, I still make use of a paper encyclopedia, a Chambers from more than sixty years ago. Still fine for old knowledge, with the articles properly written by proper people with proper editorial control. Chambers is still a brand one can trust.

Not clear if Henry Kimpton is still a brand one can trust. Google comes up with signs of life from the mid seventies, but I suspect he may have been swept away.

I hesitated, but in the end decided that ignorance was bliss and the thing was best put back on its shelf with the entries for various ailments which I now recognise unread and the probably accompanying pictures unseen.

Poor showing of aeroplanes at Earlsfield.

Habitat destruction

Some time ago I noticed a fine fungus hosted by a tree on the eastern side of Horton Lane.

This tree has now been demolished and the death of the fine fungus will surely follow. I must check next time I am there how dead all the twigs are, presently piled up to the right of the picture. Was there just cause for this destruction?

I had also thought to check the original posting, but strenuous efforts at searching both the blogs themselves and their word copies has failed to turn the thing up. All very frustrating as I thought it had been clearly marked 'spongiferous benefitus' or perhaps 'benefitus spongiferous', which one might have thought was a clear enough marker, but it isn't.

Some time later

The offending post has now been tracked down using the search term 'massif' in the other place, that is to say http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/. Success was due to consulting an atlas about Rumania, which country, I was sure, rightly as it turned out, was connected to the post in question. Gazing at the loop of the Carpathians running around Transylvania associated to massif (probably not the correct term from a geographical point of view) and there we were.

A post from 2nd September 2011, which does not appear if you ask to see that month and which did not, in consequence make it to the word copy where my searching was industrious and ought, otherwise, to have worked. I think it fell off the end: that month is too long to be displayed on one page but the template, unlike that here, does not include a 'older posts' click, with the result that the beginnings of months are apt to be inaccessible, except to search. And then you are subject to the vagaries of search: I am sure, for example, that I did ask for spongiferus (neither Blogger nor Windows search recognise italics) (amongst other spellings) before and failed to get anything, whereas now it produces the required result.

Furthermore, now I have the date, I can find my original copy of the picture of the fungus, one among four, from the old camera. Not practical to search for them before as each batch is in a separate (dated) folder and it would take far to long to eyeball them. Might have been successful had all the pictures been in the one folder, as they are with the new camera with its 'Camera roll' folder. Although, in this case, finding the picture would not have helped as the blog for the date in question was inaccessible, as explained above.

The target text which you cannot reach in the ordinary way reads 'A fine specimen of benefightus spongiferus snapped on an old oak tree at the Horton Arboretum. Thought to be native to the western foothills of the Transylvanian Massif. Rare otherwise' and search terms drawn from that text do now seem to work.

So still slightly frustrated. Moral: good testers keep good records.

Wooden boxes

To the Wigmore Hall on Monday to hear the Brentano String Quartet - never previously heard of - do Shostakovich No.11 Op.122 and Beethoven Op.59 No.2. For once, we were sitting near the back and the music was very good; a tribute to the composer, the performers and the hall's acoustics. I was struck by two thoughts. First, that it was unusual for me to like a piece of music written as recently at 1966, about the time that I was doing A-levels. Second, that I really was listening to noises coming out of wooden boxes, cunningly wrought but wooden boxes just the same. What was it about their tone that brought this on? Not that the thought detracted from the music, it just described part of the experience.

Afterwards off to Benugo's at Brown Hart Gardens for some more of their hot meat sandwiches (see 2nd March for the first occasion). Sandwiches done, the Ukrainian Cathedral was still shut, so off down to Mount Street Gardens to visit the Farm Street Church of the Immaculate Conception, entering through the Mount Street entrance unusually contrived behind the altar, to find a very elaborate church, with lots of crucified Christ, painted sculpture and side chapels, all in very good order. Much lighter and brighter than Brompton Oratory (of the immaculate heart rather than the immaculate conception) or Westminster Cathedral. Perhaps being rather smaller makes this rather easier to pull off.

We then wandered south, taking in Grosvenor Square - to which our last joint visit may have been at the time of the demonstration against the war in Vietnam maybe forty years ago, an occasion on which some of the demonstrators, as I recall, saw fit to throw marbles under the hooves of the police horse sent to clear us out. On through Green Park and St. James' Park, both looking a touch shabby on this rather dull afternoon, despite the large numbers of daffodils, and so to County Hall, where I had the third thought of the day. Given that we now manage without a County Council for London, what on earth were all the people in this huge complex engaged at? Most of the serious business was done, even then, by the individual boroughs, so what happened here? It surely can't have been right that Thatcher abolished them? Everybody knows that that was just a bit of spite against Red Ken, nothing to do with the facts on the ground at all.

And so through the handsomely refurbished concourse at Waterloo and home to chicken soup for tea. There was a time when I used to pride myself on making soup without such aids, but lately we have taken to using Knorr Chicken Noodle soup powder as a base for a quick soup. The stuff is a bit strong taken neat, as per the instructions on the packet, but used as a starter for left over vegetables and the like, fine. In this case the left over vegetables were augmented by a couple of rashers of left over everyday streaky bacon, which may have been a mistake, not only because there was a touch of mould about them but also because they were too salty given the amount of salt already provided by Knorr. Must be more careful next time. Maybe we should start a campaign for real bacon (CARB), the sort of bacon that really is preserved meat rather than a spongy vehicle for salty water.

Soup dealt with, I went online to check out the Marquess of Reading, for whom we had passed a blue plaque in Mayfair, to find that he was Rufus Daniel Isaacs from Spitalfields, then a fruit and vegetable market, 1st Marquess of Reading, GCB GCSI GCIE GCVO PC KC, Viceroy of India, barrister, jurist and the last Liberal Foreign Secretary. He must have been a very good barrister as he was averaging some £30,000 a year at it around 1900 - a time when £30,000 meant a lot more than it does now. Illustration from Vanity Fair, via Wikipedia.

A tale of country folk

The second book I have read by Thyde Monnier (see 16rh February), but a bit more torrid than our own 'the Archers'. A story pulsing with life, love and money, in roughly equal parts. Very much a book of its time and place.

An interesting bit of book production with my copy being from the Toulouse of 1943 and printed on the cheapest brown paper that I have ever come across, much browner than that in any English book that I have come across from that time. Furthermore, despite the cheap paper, and the paper covers, the thing has a sewn binding. It might even be a first edition, including as it does a bit in the front about how the first so many copies were numbered and the next so many more were printed on the finest parchment. Would the parchment have been allowed in war-time England?

I resorted to a diagram to keep the story in mind as I went along. We start with Albin and Pascaline, brother and sister from a Savoyard mountain village. Albin dies in an accident up a mountain and Albin's intended then marries Pascaline's intended. Pascaline legs it down to Provence to get away from it all.

Where, after various adventures, she is picked up by Laurent who has just got engaged to Thérèse whose main virtue is a rich daddy who can provide the necessary to build up Laurent's holding, big but derelict. She and Laurent have Pascal on the side, Pascal being the 'Nans le Berger' of the title. Laurent goes on to have Firmin on the right side of the blanket, his official son and heir. Some time later, Pascal should have married Félicie (also with rich daddy) but as it turns out (the now thriving) Firmin does. Then she gives herself to Pascal one night when hubby has gone to the fair and Antoine (the second first born son of the story from the wrong side of the blanket) is the result. Some time later, Antoine wants to marry a travelling & penniless Italian girl (not a Gypsy) and is expelled from hearth and home to be looked after by Pascal. They all live happily ever after with Pascal being the doting but unrecognised grandfather. Pascal, following his Savoyard uncle, eventually dies in an accident up a mountain.

Important in all this is that Pascaline, on her death bed, tells all to Pascal. But he sticks to being Firman's shepherd and bottles up both his paternity, his birthright and the fact that Antoine is his son, only breaking down when he is on his death bed and Antoine can't hear what he is saying.

Lazy once again with the dictionary, so a fair bit passed me by. But I think I have now worked Thyde Monnier out of the system, not least because any follow up is going to be expensive. French telly made the book into a television series but Amazon want forty euros for that and Thyde Monnier wrote a four volume autobiography, a tell all job along the lines of the one that Simenon wrote, but Amazon want no less than two hundred euros for that if I want a proper set or maybe a hundred if I take it in bits. So I shall pass on both - and handy that someone has taken the trouble to provide the free & nicely illustrated summary of 'Moi' mentioned last time (http://thyde.monnier.pagesperso-orange.fr/).

PS: poking Amazon a little harder I find a second hand copy of the television series for less than ten euros. But on arriving at the checkout, they tell me that there is a little problem with my order, that is to say that the vendor declines to send the thing over here. So I shall continue to make do without, at least for the moment.

Thames

Early morning Thames at Lechlade.

Thames Valley

Last weekend, family business to us to the very heart of the Thames Valley Police Force and we found time to visit Burford and Lechlade on Thames. Much more Morse than Midsomer.

Aerial objects included one buzzard, one kite, several kestrels and a lot of fat alberts. These last flying out of Brize Norton and taking me back to my days with the Home Office when I used to spend quality time in Wootton Bassett, near its Lyneham cousin. The place having acquired its 'Royal' handle since in recognition of its role in the repatriation of the casualties of our liberation of Iraq.

Burford church was a rather extravagant affair, not very holy, rather a testament to the past wealth of the town. There were lots of memorials, a lot of them to various members of the Sylvester family, including one to one Edmund Harman, Henry VIII's hairdresser and privy councillor, a throwback to the days when the body servants of monarchs were important people. It seems that he had a sideline as a pioneer of the South American trade and his memorial includes the earliest depictions in stone of South American aboriginals known to the UK, possibly copied from an original in a Flemish book. Looks a bit Mexican flavoured to me. Does Harriet have hairdressers in her family?

The rest of the town included lots of Cotswold stone, lots of old buildings, lots of antique shops, pubs and tea shops. Not much in the way of regular shops at all and, in the round, not the sort of place I would care to live in at all. Better suited to the manufacture of jigsaw puzzles, biscuit tins and chocolate boxes. We did try for a ham sandwich, which turned out to be substantial but inferior, not a patch on the offering from El Vino reported on 9th March. But it did come with plenty of regionally accented chat.

And so onto Lechlade where we stayed in the Old Swan Inn, said to be the oldest pub in town and boasting at least three large fireplaces, one of them in our bedroom, sadly converted to coal effect gas. But the two downstairs were of impressive size and looked to have been in recent use. Good atmosphere, good black pudding starter and some work in progress. So, for example, the antique oil lamp on my side of the bed still sported a torn mantle rather than a light bulb. Over our bottle of white called Percheron, we started to speculate about the source of the brown goo used to decorate the salad under the black pudding. Could you make the stuff by stirring a little vinegar into a jar of Branstons' and straining the result through a medium sieve? Rather in the way that you could make the finest pâté by taking the meat paste out of jars of Shippam's and pasting it into a more pâté formatted receptacle. Bit of jelly and trimming on the top and Bob's your uncle.

In the morning we were interested by the large supply of damp wood chippings spread around the Inn's back yard. First thought was that they were flood related, but not convinced as the pub must have been quite a lot of feet above the Thames down the road. Unfortunately there was no-one around to ask.

Then a quick turn around town to find more more old stone buildings and more antique shops, but also a very decent wine shop, selling said Percheron for about one third of what we had paid for it in the Old Swan, about par for that particular course. I got some Alsatian white, to be reported on in due course. Wound up with a very pleasant walk east from the old stone bridge over the Thames, across a short grass field, presumably once a water meadow with plenty of space for flood water to flood out in. Not clear how the grass got to be short as it was: can you run sheep in a field next to a river without fencing them in? Were the rather sparse posts in the next post anything to do with it?

God shop DVD's

We have now consumed the two DVD's bought blind from the god shop mentioned on 9th March.

The first, a subtitled French effort called 'Little White Lies'. French froth, moderately amusing and, on the evidence of this film, we decided that we would not be much good at being French, their social lives being far too complicated. The film also shared some of the features of a country house murder from Agatha in that you have a dozen or so rather odd people shut up for a few days, away from it all, in a house in the country, in this case by the seaside. Plenty of time for interactions; all the permutations.

The second, a rather more substantial affair from New York called 'Doubt' with Meryl Streep, she being the reason for my buying it. I won't share as the film might not watch too well if you knew what was going to happen. I go no further than to say that it is a rather different take on the immigrant New York of yesteryear from that of Alfred Kazin mentioned on January 17th 2010 in the other place (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/). Thoroughly recommended, a must for all Guardian readers, wannabee social workers and educationalists.

So it was a good haul, well up to standard. There are often interesting books to be had as well.

Cutting down to size

 Peering out of the study window yesterday, I decided that one of our shrubs needed pruning. A vigorous thing which would soon, unattended, be beyond my reach. Might even need to employ a gardener.

I then thought that with the danger of frost near past, it might be a good time to prune an evergreen, with the new shoots so stimulated into action not getting frosted and getting a good period of growth before the frosts set in again.

So, as befits a former Boy Scout, out this morning with two ladders, two pieces of rope, three mixed pruners, one litter picker (for fetching prunings out of the middle of the shrub), one wheelbarrow and a rake. Some four hours later job done, with the results illustrated - and the new shape is better from ten yards than this view from one might suggest.

We shall see how quickly the thing greens over again.

We shall also see if the coal tits (see 10th March) have been scared off. There was no sign of them yesterday and there was nothing this morning.

Pseudo-chambertin

Yesterday evening we got around to the first of the bottles bought at Hedonism (see 2nd March). A half bottle of 2011 Gevrey-Chambertin from the Domaine de la Vougeraie.

Label entirely in French with not even a 'Product of France' to be seen, with the rather impressive small print telling me that this was one of the just 300 half bottles of this tirage. But, inspecting Google, I find that tirage means a drawing off of some wine from the barrel to taste it before bottling, which might explain why the shop assistant warned me that it was a little young. For the rest, the label appears to be saying a lot about the geology of the wine but nothing about how whoopee the stuff was with crustacea, cheese, lemon sorbet and toffee apples, with notes of peaches and cream, in the way of a wine label from one of our supermarkets. From which we deduce that they have different fashions in these matters over the water.

We did not like it as much as other bottles of this name which we have had, for example from Lancelot of Hampton. Slightly earthy taste about it which we were not that keen on; perhaps it really was too young. But mus'n't complain as it did come in a convenient half bottle size, at about the same price (pro-rata) as elsewhere.

Will I ever get around to tasting a version without the pseudo? Hedonism did have them, but they seemed to be coming in at £1,000 or more a bottle, so just a little out of our league. I remember about the stuff having read in Rambaud on Aspern that it was all that Napoléon Ier would drink, but then I suppose that he got it compliments of the house.

Read all about it at http://www.domainedelavougeraie.com/.

Poster thoughts

In the past, I often used to spend the waiting time at Earlsfield Station at night inspecting posters at close quarters, finding the way that the dots were arranged fascinating. I don't remember anything much of those arrangements from that time, but I was moved last week to spend the waiting time at Epsom Station inspecting the posters there. Perhaps prompted by the Harald Küppers book about colour (see 7th February).

First we had the small posters, maybe 24 by 36 inches portrait, used by Southwest Trains and Network Rail. These appeared, to the naked eye anyway, to be printed in block colour, the sort of colour you would get by printing from a woodblock, but presumably actually printed by some sort of lithographic process. But how does one get from the pixels of the computer on which the image was first assembled to a lithographic plate with its block colour? There must be some kind of smoothing process going on.

Then we had the large posters which had various forms of dot colour. Going up from the small large posters to the large large posters, we had first flecks of colour, all, I think, with the same diagonal (southwest to northeast) orientation and maybe a millimeter long. Second came the dots of colour of various sizes and hues arranged in small hexagonal arrays, third came the dots of colour in large hexagonal arrays. With all of them appearing as continuous colour when seen from a meter or so away. For once in a while I could have done with one of the pocket microscopes last thought of on 20th February.

Back home, as an alternative, I thought to try scanning a very small poster, that for TB (see 7th March), and then blowing up a bit of the image using zoom in Paint and Word, but the interaction of the various printing and display technologies involved made the result shown above quite unhelpful.

I then thought that I could do with refining my understanding of the word 'pixel' to find plenty of accessible material in Wikipedia, but material which is far too voluminous to get to grips with. Not a good use of quality time. Along the way I also find that the business of poster sizes is also a lot more complicated than I had realised and that the standard of online translation (which looks to have been offered by Google's Chrome) of internet pages in foreign languages is not very good, at least not yet, not on my computer. Try the translation of the Wikipedia entry for Harald Küppers and see for yourself.