Vintage agatha

During our round of Epsom charity shops yesterday we were lucky enough to come across a vintage box set of Miss. Marple films, vintage enough that that lady who sold them found it hard to believe that I had not heard of the star, one Margaret Rutherford.

Watched the first one last night, 'Murder, She Said', which turned out to the first adaptation of the '4.50 from Paddington', of which we already had the third, knocked out by ITV and Geraldine McEwan. Very entertaining it was too, making the McEwan version look a bit po-faced and a touch precious. I can see why Agatha (according to Wikipedia) might not of liked it, this very first adaptation of one of her Marple stories, with Rutherford having turned the thing more or less into farce, with an old lady stamping around the place in a most entertaining & improbable manner, absorbing two quite large characters along the way, Mrs. McGillicuddy and Miss. Eyelesbarrow. And quite large chunks of the book just vanished, only to reappear with the more respectful McEwan - or perhaps with Hickson in the missing BBC version.

The book was written in 1957 and the film was made more or less contemporaneously in 1961, while it was nearly fifty years old by the time that ITV got to it. In 1961 there was no need for the heritage side of the Marple brand as, for example, there really were steam engines, no need at all to roll the puffing Poirot out of its heritage shed. They even allowed a diesel electric to appear, a solecism which ITV would never have allowed. And, amusingly, in the film, the train went to a real place served by Paddington called Taplow, which, as it happened, I visited for the first time in my life on Friday (more on this in a post to come), while in the book the train goes to more fanciful places, including a Haling Broadway standing in for Ealing Broadway. But the film was careless enough to have this suburban train departing from Platform 1 which I thought used to be reserved for county types heading for Devon, rather than for the more mixed clientèle for Taplow.

Not quite sure why the thing was graded PG, containing as it did very little sex or violence, at least by the standards of 1989 when the DVD was issued.

The whole thing seemed much more stagey than a modern film, this despite the fact that this was a film made for cinema, itself by then near fifty years old, rather than for the relatively new television. The interiors seemed like stage sets and the dialogue seemed like that of a play, with the music mostly turned off while people were speaking, which meant that we could hear what they were saying.

We look forward to the remaining three films of the set. Just the thing for viewers a bit too old to really take to 'Game of Thrones'. Our version of the Morecambe & Wise which I used to sneer at older people for watching - and now I am older myself!

PS: I learn over breakfast that the amusement of paragraph 3 above falls in that I have confused if not conflated Taplow (see http://www.taplow.org.uk/) with the nearby Twyford (see http://www.twyford.co.uk/), the latter being the place visited via Paddington Station on Friday. But amusing instead that there should be two places with names so similar yet so different so close together.

Rooster booster

Following the post of 13th December last year and our recent visit to the roosters of Guildford, we finally made it to the roosters of Epsom today, to pig it, as it were, on chicken.

It all looked a bit young to us, and not very busy, but we decided that we ought to give it a go. Smart, clean and decent with friendly young staff who assured us that there were low spice options for the older palate. Musak rather loud where we sat at the back, despite their turning it down for us. Chicken was OK, although with rather too much lemon flavoured oily sauce for me, nowhere near as good as the offering from Debenhams (see 14th May) and there was rather too much of it, relative to the green & carb.. Would need to tweak the order a bit on any future visit.

But not bad. A good sign that there is room in the market for the lower choresterol offering; a bad sign that there were quite a lot of staff for the amount of food being served: so let's hope that they pull through.

Green welly day

Proper bank holiday weather on Monday - that is to say overcast with frequent showers - so off to London Road Guildford to see the Surrey County Show, an event which we had not previously made. Off to a good start by finding that getting to London Road by train on a bank holiday was fine, much better than driving if you are starting from Epsom.

Part of the reason for going to the show was wanting to see spinning and weaving being demonstrated, interest having been sparked on 1st September last. And as luck would have it the tent occupied by the West Surrey Guild of Spinners, Weavers and Dyers (see http://www.wsurreyguildspinweavedye.org.uk/) was one of the first things we came across. And, in a small way at least, we were able to see both spinning and weaving in action, and very interesting it was too. I associate to the wealth generated from textiles over the years, in Norfolk, in Florence and during the industrial revolution; an important part of human life almost everywhere, once we had abandoned our caves and settled down to growing sheep, goats and wheat. One of the claims made in the tent was that, in the olden days, just before the industrial revolution, one spinner could more or less keep one weaver going. I had always thought that it took several spinners to keep one weaver going, so if we ever make it to another such tent I shall ask again. (My own knowledge of the matter is more or less restricted to what can be gleaned from Silas Marner, who was able to service a number of farmers' wives, but who were only part-time and so do not bear on the present question).

Next stop was the tent of the chickens where we were able to admire a great variety of caged chckens. I decided that those with feathery feet should be disqualified as being unhealthy and impractical and that I like the Rhode Island Reds best, associating here to the childrens' books from North America of my childhood. Large chickens of a conventional shape with a ticket claiming descent from the Malay stock, stock which I learn this morning is a fighting stock, a variety of the Kulang Asil stock from southern India and not to be found anywhere in Malaya. All this chicken lore which I did not know was out there. We also learned something about the niceties of judging eggs, including the fact that some classes of eggs were judged from the outside and others were judged from the inside, this last being a destructive form of judging. Furthermore, a lot of the judging of chickens, eggs and other animals was to do with their breeding capabilities, so the egg, for example, had to be the right shape for a hatching chick to be able to break out of. And we never knew that there was such a shape! I tried meeting the eyes of some chickens which had been caged at the right height, but one did not seem to be able to do this. The chicken could clearly see you, but one got no sense of a meeting of minds. Not even that which you get from something like a lion when it is eyeing you up from the point of view of lunch. And nothing like a dog when it is eyeing you up, from the point of view of lunch or anything else. The chap next to me said that it was probably all down to having a bird brain. One should not expect to be able to make contact with such a being.

And so on to the flowers, the goats, the sheep and the cows. We passed on the pigs as their tent was rather crowded. We supposed that there was a special class of farmer which made their livings by appearing at suburban shows of this sort and that a proportion of our ticket money went towards paying their expenses. Or is it just a hobby for the older farmer? An excuse to travel about a bit and see foreign parts, in much the same way as some model train enthusiasts tramp the country with their prize layouts?

BH lunched off a hog roast roll, that is to say a large recently thawed bread roll, long rather than round, filled up with warm shredded pork and with the option of various kinds of goo to pour over to supply extra flavour. Some people were making full use of this option. Shredding the pork did not seem quite right to me, hardly the way to make a proper hot meat sandwich, but did have the advantage of meaning that the thing could be eaten outdoors standing up without too much strain and without lumps of meat, skin, fat or gristle hanging out of either mouth or sandwich.

And so back to London Road. A good day out, if a trifle wet. Sadly we missed the musical drive of the King's Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery, so we never got to find out why we have a King's Troop when we have had a Queen for more than half a century. I suppose I should have asked one of the many soldiers wandering about - in fatigues rather than the fancy dress I assume would have come with the musical drive.

PS: http://www.army.mod.uk/artillery/regiments/24679.aspx unhelpful on the matter of king or queen but does tell me that they have six men or women deployed in Afghanistan at any one time. What an odd number!

Green men

English - and I dare say foreign - cathedrals often have green men lurking in their stonework, that is to say faces, sometimes grotesque, carved in among the foliage, maybe on the capital of a column or on the boss of the vaulting. There are quite a lot of them, for example, at Ely and maybe they were once painted green.

This morning I came across my very own green man, lurking in the top of the leylandii hedge which can be seen out of my study window. Very real and vivid it was too when I first saw it, now more or less vanished. But a point of contact with the medieval masons who presumably got the idea from similar experiences. Did they use magic mushrooms to enhance the effect?

The technical term is, I believe, projection, the projection of the contents of one's head onto something in the real world, something I used to play at with the randomly dotted flooring of late night tube trains after taking on drink. It was surprising what one could sometimes find in the dots.

Investment

I noticed an investment opportunity along Mill Road on 4th February and since then someone has taken up the gauntlet, with the result illustrated.

Roof off, site shut up and silent on this working day with more rain in prospect. Not a good point at which to pause the opportunity; another few days and I do not suppose that there will be much plaster work at all left inside.

Has the someone got his financing all wrong?

Foxgloves

We have not got to a proper place to see foxgloves this year, such as the long border at Hampton Court, but I did come across this splendid specimen this morning on a bit of waste ground alongside Mill Road, a bit of waste ground which I believe was recently denied planning permission for development.

Fat stamps

On the 22nd I gave some space to the noble sport of stamp collecting. Today I give some space to that of collecting old books, to wit a visit to the antiquarian book fair held last week at Olympia. Not something I have been to before, finding enough to do in the second hand book fairs which are a bit more in my league, with books which I can sometimes afford and which I might actually read.

First step, print off my free tickets off the internet.

Second step, pull a Bullingdon at Grant Road East and pedal off to Olympia. Pleasant enough ride, which took me a little longer than I expected, not looking far at all on the map. Thought I was doing well enough but I got a bit confused crossing the A4, aka the Cromwell Road, a big and busy enough road to be a little intimidating on a bicycle and where I kept station with an army lorry for a while. Eventually arrive at my destination, Kensington Olympia Station, to find that I can't dock the Bullingdon at the stand there. So next stop Russell Gardens, just up the road, where the same thing happens, but luckily someone else parks and pushes off while I am fiddling about, thus demonstrating that there was nothing wrong with the stand. After a closer inspection, I try lift and push rather than just push and the Bullingdon is docked: the bike and the stand must have been slightly out of vertical alignment, and given that it had happened on more than one stand, it must have been the bike. Not something that had happened before. Furthermore, the whole business took well over the half hour allowed for free, so my credit card had to stump up a supplementary pound. All most annoying.

But there was a little parade of shops, including one fancy restaurant which I took to be Lebanese and one café run by a chap whom I took to be Lebanese. I go for the café and opt for tea and bacon sandwich, rather than some of the more ethnic offerings, which while interesting were, I thought, a bit too substantial for my purpose. Entirely satisfactory bacon sandwich served by the Chinese cook, an older gentleman, sufficiently satisfactory that I order another, despite my previous remark about substantial. All the while entertained by the supposed Lebanese gent. organising the outdoor smoking den for a couple of chaps who wanted to hookah. Organising the little hot coals which sat on top of the hookah resulted in a rather unpleasant burning oil smell. Playing with the little hot coals with a pair of what might otherwise have been sugar tongs was clearly all part of the hookah thing. I missed the Georgian Embassy which turns out to be opposite.

And so onto to the fair, managing to get there without the rain coming on which was good as I had elected, despite the rather dodgy looking weather, not to take the umby on this occasion. Where I find all kinds of interesting stuff.

For example, a copy of Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian', with dust jacket and looking identical to my own and bought for £11.95 back in 1989 going for close to £300. My copy has now been graced with a book plate just in case someone tries to pinch it. Furthermore, a rather better book than some of his more recent offerings, which from what little I have seen of them look a bit dire.

For example, a copy of the wood engravings of Robert Gibbings, also looking identical to my own. My own which has not only the plastic dust cover (which adds a lot of value) but also the prospectus (which adds another slice). So the fair ground people can't be all bad if they run to some of the books that I have myself.

And then there was the chap who sold a lot of fancy James Joyce. For example, a small hardback copy of the 'The Dubliners' for £125,000. He explained that only a few of them ever got printed in this first edition, there being some problem with the censor or something. But it struck me that the whole business was very like stamp collecting indeed, with the value of the collectibles being geared far more to rarity than to intrinsic value, in this particular case quite low: it does give one a bit of a lift handling an object of this sort, but not £125,000 worth of lift, not to me anyway. Is it significant that most of the customers were slightly shabby older men, not that unlike myself?

With the James Joyce to be compared with an old bible which I came across, a snip at £25,000 or so. Something called a Lutheran bible, printed in Germany, I think in the middle of the 16th century. A short while later someone had had bound in some rather handsome coloured woodcut illustrations, illustrations which had held their colour remarkably well over the centuries. All in all, a truly interesting book, worth far more to me than the Dubliners. Also interesting, the chap (from the US) selling it did not seem to understand my question about whether a modern German could read this old German: he knew all about why the book was valuable, and why it what not as valuable as one which had not been tampered with, but not how it worked.

Lots of foreign stalls, with lots of Europeans and including at least one from Russia. There was also Graham York from Honiton, whose shop I have frequented in the past and from whom, on at least two occasions, I have bought books from, books which, as it happens, I still have. He seems to be strong on drama. See http://www.gyork.co.uk/.

I got the most from the chap on the Blackwell's stand. Perhaps he was not busy so did not mind chatting with someone who was unlikely to buy anything. Anyway, I learned from him that the first editions of D. H. Lawrence, from Duckworths I think, were particular cheap productions. Not posh books at all, but that did not stop them commanding a fair price. I remain amused by the way that having a dust jacket can add so much to the value of an old book.

And if you want to see a sample of the full story, see http://assets.cambridge.org/97805213/91825/sample/9780521391825ws.pdf.

More in my league was a booklet, 25 pages of it, about how to play skat, a game I remember from Švejk and it would have been fun to have the booklet next to the book, which I once knew very well indeed, for a non-Czech. But £25 for a tatty booklet seemed a touch extravagant, even if it was old. I would have been tempted by the book boxes on some of the stalls, fancy boxes with fancy gold tooled labels which would have looked engagingly pretentious on my humble shelves, but it seemed that you could only have a fancy box if you bought one of the much more fancy books which they served to protect in transit.

Then lastly, I find this morning, actually taking a look at the booklet which served as the entry ticket and which one had been given in exchange for the thing printed off the internet, that there were quite a lot of activities at the fair which I completely missed. The St. Bride Foundation, for example, were offering something on letterpress printing and something else on wood engraving, in both of which I might happily have taken an interest. Next year I shall have to retire to the bar and actually read the thing on the spot before I start just drifting around the stands, which is what I did this year. And looking up St. Bride (see http://www.sbf.org.uk/) I find that they offer all kinds of stuff back at their base. There was something, for example, yesterday evening which would have done nicely.

Miniature azaleas

Pride of place on the West Park roundabout on Horton Lane have been the miniature azaleas (or were they rhododendrons?). They were crimson in colour, were last noticed on 2nd May and I am sure I have taken their picture before now - but cannot find any trace. They will have to wait for another year now as they have ceded their place to clumps of small mushrooms, or perhaps fungi, which have sprung up all over. Perhaps this is what happens to damp wood chippings.

A little bit further round the Clockwise circuit, I fell in a little way behind what I took to be another sort of parasite, a rather shabbily dressed young man, but not so poor as not to be able to afford headphones, and presumably some gadget to pipe noise into them. First slings his empty can of Red Bull into the hedge and then he proceeds to spit to his right at about 30 second intervals. Not clear why he was spitting as the spittle did not appear to be the grim yellow & green stuff from the days of my youth when plenty of older men had dodgy lungs for one reason or another. But then, to my surprise, he carefully put what might have been a screwed up receipt from a shop into a litter bin as he turned off Horton Lane into the Tesco's there. Perhaps he felt me giving him the evil eye from behind, having resisted the temptation to take & post his picture.

PS: still worrying away at the missing prior posts and this morning (Thursday 29th) I turn up one about autumn rather than spring fungi on this same roundabout. Red rather than yellow, so presumably different. See 9th November last.

More irritations

I got a polite email from ebay yesterday explaining that they had mislaid some personal details and that it might be a good idea to change passwords. Not sure exactly what the concern was, given that the mislaid details only included the encrypted passwords, not the passwords themselves. Could the bad people have broken the encryption? Were there enough personal details which were not encrypted to let the bad people break into one's account through some side door? Why, if the data was mislaid in March, was a password change in April not good enough? Who knows, but it seemed prudent to take their advice as there are links of some kind between ebay, paypal and my bank account.

And while I was at it, I thought it best to give all my important accounts the benefit of a password refresh, a process taking two or three hours spread over two days. All very tedious.

As one would expect, the change password process varies quite a lot from service provider to service provider. One was very weak, not even requiring one to type the new password in twice. Most serious providers either send you an email saying the password has changed (without saying what it has changed to) or a text. Some do both. Along the way I noticed something wrong in one account and fixed that and then, overly confident, got completely lost amongst the mysteries of something called Google Plus, something which I have hitherto avoided, it being full of jargon like 'hanging out' which I have never gotten used to and certainly don't use.

However, all done now. Quick peek at Norton and Malwarebytes to make sure they are all quiet and peaceful and I can move onto breakfast. Perhaps to ponder on for how long I will need both, the last scan of the latter having picked up maybe 20 slightly bad things which the former had not blocked.

PS: I wonder if ebay staggered these mails. Doing the A's on day 1, the B's on day 3 and so on, to reduce the load on the password changing bit of their systems? They wouldn't have wanted to compound their error with poor service from an overloaded system. Or do they have so many servers that thousands of password changes a second present no real challenge to them? I think of some statistical colleague at Ebay HQ feeding data into Excel and drawing nice graphs of the numbers of password changes by minutes and seconds.

Two irritations

First, I seem to have vanished from the world of google. A crude test used to be to take a string from a post, enclose it in quotes and ask google about it. In the quite recent past, provided that the post was a week or so old and the google crawlers had gotten around to it, the search returned one's own post, reviving one's faith both in search engines and in one's own visibility. However, this morning, trying as far back as 8th May, the test is not working. What am I doing wrong? Have my doings been demoted?

To further investigate this important matter I include here hoage, homalographic, humanitary, wendic and weothe, a string of reasonably obscure words drawn from OED and which today, conjointly, get no hits at all. Having just the three 'h' words get 1,480 hits, the first few of which at least are dictionary flavoured sites, which last are foiled by having more than one initial letter. On the other hand, there is further confusion in that results are not repeatable, with exactly what google does seeming to depend on the time of day or the weather. Or something.

Second, another incomprehensible message from an electricity utility company. Some gobbledegook about how much electricity I am using and whether am I am on the best tariff or not. I really do not want to spend quality time trying to understand all this stuff and would much rather be back in the days when I could just buy electricity from an electricity board which I could trust with my direct debit details and forget about the whole business. Not only have Cameron and his friends arranged for profits from the supply of electricity to accrue to themselves, they have also arranged for a lot of bother to accrue to me.

They also seem to have arranged it that no-one in the UK is building power stations any more. We can't, at least at the present state of the art, import the stuff from China, so there might not be any electricity to squabble about in the future.

Taking notes

Many years ago, when I used to work for the organisation then known at CCTA (headquartered in the Riverwalk House at Vauxhall Bridge, recently and expensively demolished), some of the people with whom I used to work and who were better at it than I was, used to take notes of all their doings in fat A4 note books, and were thus able, when one day had blurred into another, to recover what it was they had done when they last visited this or that customer.

I now do this myself, making use of fat A4 note books from Rymans for the purpose, using the right hand pages to take notes and the left hand pages for any commentary - contemporary or subsequent - that may turn out to be necessary. I have just finished one such book, after 21 months service, and I offer a sample page from the left hand path.

I am pleased to record that its successor is identical with the same number, 352, of pages and only the stuck on product label has moved a little with the times. It is good when one has grown used to something to be able to replace it, a trick I rarely manage in the case of, for example, clothes. But I have done better, over the last year or so, with trainers.

Osbert

Or Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, 5th Baronet to give him his full name and title, was involved in the posts of 12th, 19th and 20th just past.

And now I have just finished the third volume of his autobiography, 'Great Morning'.

The strongest impression was that this was an aesthete who, apart from doing time in the Grenadier Guards (of whom he had much fonder memories than those from his rather shorter time with the Horse Guards), seemed to be very keen on opera & ballet and seemed to be on dinner terms with many of the great and the good from those walks of life, the likes of Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky. He also did his time in the trenches of the first war which, unlike many of his friends, he survived to live to the ripe old age of 75, to die at Montegufoni, his castle near Florence. Is he turning at his grave to know that the place is now a wedding venue, complete with wifi and farm holidays? See http://www.montegufoni.it/en/castle_tuscany.php. But be careful, for some reason, gmaps is no longer dishing out map references, and those given at the web site are near enough but not exactly right: 43° 40. 25 N 11° 05. 42 E.

I share one anecdote from his grenadier days, from the time just after the start of the first war. It seems that he had been reported by a temporary officer for having taken drink with a private soldier in the Café Royal, something quite clearly forbidden in Standing Orders. But Osbert explained to the Lt. Col. of the Regimental Orderly Room, that the private soldier in question was a famous sculptor by the name of Jacob Epstein whom he did not propose to cut just because he had gone for a soldier. The Lt. Col., on this occasion anyway, allowed the matter to drop. Wikipedia confirms that Epstein did indeed serve, albeit briefly, and also supplies a thread linking him to one Wynne Godley, a gentleman whom I once disturbed, by phone, while he was at his luncheon. Presumably, since he was disturbable, sandwiches at his desk. Very pleb.

Another of his friends was one Sir Denis Anson, of whom he relates two incidents. The first concerned his nipping twenty feet down a drain pipe to recover a handkerchief that a young lady had dropped from a balcony, the second his diving off a pleasure boat, to his death, early one morning in the Thames. The first incident reminds me of the hero in 'The Return of Don Quixote' (1927), the second of the male lead in 'Zuleika Dobson' (1911), the one post-dating and the other pre-dating the incidents in question. What, I wonder, were the connections, if any?

Then there was his spendthrift mother and his odd if learned father. A father who while spending huge sums of money on buildings, contents and gardens, used to spend happy hours working through his sons' accounts to make sure that they were managing wisely on their allowances. He was also a habitué of the British Museum reading room, to which he used to take his special cushion.

Moved this morning to get the other two volumes from the Amazon second hand department, rather more expensive than the Raynes Park free library. But I have learned that there are a lot more copies floating about over the waters, either in Eire or the US, than there seem to be in this country. I drew the line at buying another copy of the engaging book about Brighton, by the same author, which we once owned, then retired and now regret. See January 24th 2007 in the other place, a time when I clearly had more on, less time on my hands and notices were rather shorter than they are now.

The rise of the great powers

Back in February 2007 (see February 15th in the other place), I read and liked a book about Napoleon's march on Moscow by A. Zamoyski. The march which, as it turned out, marked the beginning of his end.

And in February 2011 (see February 21st), I read and liked a book about the treaty of Versailles by M. MacMillan.

Then a few weeks ago I accepted an offer from Surrey Libraries for a book about the Congress of Vienna by the same A. Zamoyski, despite being vaguely aware of unkind reviews which suggested that he was not really up to the tricky business of diplomatic history. Perhaps I was swayed by C. Clark, himself the author of a successful but rather long history of how the Congress was ultimately trashed in 1914, presently being read (rather slowly), saying that the Congress book succeeded 'brilliantly ... with intelligence and grace'. I think I paid £1.50 for 569 pages, exclusive of notes, compared with the 557 of the Moscow book. And one fat wadge of pictures rather than three thin ones.

Book now finished and the Congress turns out to have been an interesting business, a long drawn out squabble on four fronts: about who beds who, dividing the spoils, jostling for place & position and about trying to set up a reasonably stable Europe, reasonably free from sanguinary menaces of the Napoleonic variety. Zamoyski gives rather a lot of space to the first front and to the bedroom and epistolary antics that went with it, all of which became a bit tedious after a while. But I soldiered on and in the end felt that I had a reasonable grip on the whole business. He closed with something of a rant about how awful it all was, which made me rather cross, but he then proceeded to back-pedal for the last few pages, granting that the Congress did provide peace of a sort for close on a hundred years. And I suppose one must make allowances for the facts that Zamoyski is a plastic Pole (that is to say a person of Polish extraction but who has never lived there. Properly styled Count Adam Stefan Zamoyski) and Poland got properly squeezed, once again, between her congressional neighbours.

My take is that is was all rather grubby, with plenty of greed dressed up in fine clothes. But that was the way the world was at the time. And at least there was a Congress and the emerging great powers did come to an agreement of sorts. It was better than the sort of things which had gone on before, when might was right and no-one asked too many questions about it. It was progress.

Whereas at Versailles, despite the facts that much less energy was dissipated in bedrooms (at least I do not recall MacMillan even mentioning that kind of thing) and that some of the players were trying quite hard to come to decent and fair solutions to the many problems that they faced, they failed in so far as the whole thing ended in tears some twenty years later. Although, on that, I think it unhelpful to place the whole blame on Versailles, to scapegoat Versailles for all the mistakes made by Britain, France and others afterwards. And taking the long view, France trashed Germany in the 18th century, Germany trashed France in the 19th century and then we had the dreadful mess of the first half of the 20th century, but with Germany ending up back on top by the end of it. There was history for the vindictiveness displayed at both Vienna and Versailles.

I close with a the new-to-me fact that the rather vain and stupid Murat (aka Marshal of France and Grand Admiral of France Joachim-Napoléon Murat), but the most dashing leader of cavalry of his day, came to a rather sorry, if brave, end in front of a firing squad somewhere near a place called Pizzo in Calabria, the natal town of Pizza.

Memory lane (4)

The thumb drum purchased quite some years ago in a shop near Warren Street, mentioned, for example, on November 26th 2010 in the other place, à propos of a performance of Hamlet at the Ovalhouse.

Looks to have been made by a village smith, beating the sounding irons out of scrap of some sort.

Still needs to be tuned and I have still to learn to play it, but I thought a more prominent hanging might result in at least a little use. So retained.

Also reminded that it is perhaps time that I had another go at my jigsaw of Olympia, last seen in the flesh some forty years ago when the 'Jeu de Paume' was still an art gallery. There is an illustration at June 13th 2012 in the other place, but the accompanying text suggests that the jigsaw had not been bought at that point, although by June 25th it clearly had been. Puzzle 15 of series 1.

Memory lane (3)

The naval chest, once in the garage of the naval uncle, presumed to be the personal drawer space for a person in the navy of 50 years ago. The clean design suggests stacking, whether ashore or afloat I have no idea.

38 inches wide, 22 inches high and 21 inches deep. Carcase made of 1 inch pine boards, rub jointed to make up the 21 inches then dovetailed together. Drawers still slide sweetly, without needing any candle grease.

Altogether a substantial piece of work. Retained, although a fair proportion of what were the contents this morning have been retired.

Memory lane (2)

Bought, I believe, at a Hook Road car booter and worn with my duffle coat to work for some years. Life washed out of it now, but associated with some good memories.

One of a battery of Australian girls selling tickets to the London Eye, shortly after it opened, who tried to buy it off me for a tenner.

Another of an Australian barman, somewhere in Belgravia, who was able to fetch his matching scarf from upstairs. I remember celebrating the coincidence with a couple of decent cigars over the hour or more following.

Retired. And later scarves were not up to the same standard at all. See http://www.afl.com.au/.

Memory lane (1)

Spring clean the study day has been thrust upon me, affording a rare chance to view this bit of second year undergraduate DIY. Retained.

Piketty

Earlier in the week to London Bridge for a discussion of the work of one Piketty, much feasted in the media of recent weeks, the man who says that it is all because the rate of return on capital is generally higher than the rate of economic growth.

Started off at Grant Road East with the first leg taking me to Vauxhall Cross. Second leg from the Albert Embankment to the Hop Exchange. Uneventful journey, only marked by passing a trotter near Lambeth Bridge, not (for once) getting lost at St. George's Circus and joining the A3 for part of the home straight. Onto boozer 1 where I had the rare for me experience of being accosted by a lady of the night, a rather pretty one, who mistook me for a foreign businessman at a bit of a loose end for the evening. The mistake may have arisen from my asking for the most expensive white wine that the house could offer (which turned out to be £4.50 for a glass of something cheap and cheerful) and, to be fair to her, she recovered from her mistake with great aplomb and no-one, apart, perhaps, from the rather cheerful barman of colour, was any the wiser. This clearly would not do so onto boozer 2 which was rather prettily decorated with a bit of upside-down umbrella art.

Here there was a different sort of temptation in the form of a warm evening in a bar with outdoor seating and which sold quite decent looking cigars. I was more tempted to have a puff than on any other occasion since I gave up over (a life-time third) something over two years ago, and since which I have denied myself on the grounds that the odd puff always seems to lead to lots of puffs; I don't have that rare gift of being able to enjoy the occasional smoke. I remember one ex-smoker telling me how the special occasions you tell yourself are the only permitted occasions gradually become more frequent, you start to have special occasions in order to smoke, rather than allowing yourself when there happens to be one for some other reason. Another describing the process as slowly spiraling up to whatever your regular habit had been before. Which all sounded all too familiar so, for the present, I abstain.

We made up with a short discussion about the works of Piketty. I had taken on enough wine by this point to observe that in the olden days, as recorded by no less an economist than A. Trollope, the rate of return on land was and had always been 2%. That was the rent you got from your farms, after allowable expenses. Flashy people went in for speculations which might get you more - but which might also get you broke. And for a lot of the time there was no growth: things just trundled on as they always had, Piketty was trivially correct, the rate of return on capital was indeed higher than the rate of economic growth and there was indeed a lot of inequality. But then we start to invent new wheezes like mechanical looms and trade with far off places where things are different and we get economic growth. Then we start to invent doctors and we get population growth. At which point I got lost; I could no longer see how all this as going to lead to more or less equality in the distribution of wealth.

Furthermore, it was thought necessary to escort me to my platform on London Bridge, partly to make sure that I did not attempt a Bullingdon for the return trip to Waterloo and partly because I would certainly have got lost in the new layout of London Bridge station - having fairly often got lost in the course of my occasional visits in the past.

And so to bed to wonder whether I would stump up the £25 to read the 700 pages of words of the master himself. Presently, after the feasting mentioned above, out of stock at Amazon.

Decorations

Some people get the order of the bag, with either 1st or 2nd class being available. Some of us just carry bags just in case. And still others get the order of the boot. This particular one was awarded for action on the evening of Monday 19th May.

The mass extermination of Jews in German occupied Poland

There was a rather odd supplement included in a recent issue of the 'Guardian', entitled 'THE WORLD KNEW' and published on behalf of the Polish ministry of Foreign Affairs. The supplement was about one Jan Karski, of whom I had not previously heard and who was one of those responsible, in late 1942, for telling the world about what was going on in Poland at that time. My first thought was that this was all a bit odd, given the rather mixed record of the non-Jewish Poles in this matter.

But the supplement highlighted the document illustrated, which I now find to be well known to Professor Google and whose Cultural Institute offers a good quality facsimile. He also draws my attention to the Polish Institute in Prince's Gate where I could no doubt be shown a copy of the actual document.

A document which says that a third of Poland's 3 million Jews had been killed by the Germans in the first three years of war but which, it seems, had little immediate effect on the conduct of the allies. We did not attempt to disrupt the killing, we did not attempt to bomb the railways which fed the camps - although I have no idea whether such attempts would have been possible or whether they would or could have achieved much. I suspect that they would not have achieved much but I also think that we should, nevertheless, have mounted something of a demonstration, a demonstration of knowledge and intent, which would have been better than doing nothing, particularly when one thinks of the bombing that was done - for example, not quite at random, of Caen and Würzburg - and of the difficulty of finding ordinary bombing targets by the end of the war.

Perhaps the best we can do now is to remember what was done, and what was not done, then.

The good news is that Karski at least went on to a long and successful life in the US.

Shrinktime

An odd experience the other day, a new sort of senior moment, slightly modified in what follows.

I used to be a very keen stamp collector which meant that I could not pass a stamp shop - like the one in the Strand - without poring over the contents of the window and quite possibly going in. Quite possibly making a purchase. Certainly keeping a sharp eye out at car booters for the odd collection being slung out with the rest of the junk from grandpa's loft. So stamps were very important to me and while I am not as keen as I was, the buzz is still there. Until the day before yesterday that is, when I passed a stamp shop without a flicker. I saw the shop, knew that it had once meant something, but at that moment it meant nothing at all. The whole business was just absent and there was a clear sense of loss, of contraction, of shrinkage even. However, there is hope, as once home, I turned the pages of my most important album to a glass of Johnny Walker and it all came flooding, or at least trickling, back.

I am reminded of once being told by a widow of some years standing that her late husband had become no more than someone whom she had once known, with the suggestion being that any feelings she might have once had, had more or less gone. I was quite taken aback that someone whom one had known very well could fade to that extent - but it seems that the same sort of thing can happen to my stamps. Also reminded of a chap from TB who told me that he had more or less lost his sense of taste, that he still took on the lager as it made him feel good when the active ingredient got going, but there was no pleasure in the act of drinking itself.

Rounded out the shrinkery by taking a test this afternoon for something called 'locus of control', a personality trait invented by one J. B. Rotter in 1966, with the locus being on an 11 point scale between 0 (internal) and 10 (external), with external, for example, meaning that you believed that your life was more or less under the control of external agents, rather than yourself. The test consisted of 13 pairs of statements and the instruction was 'click on the button next to the one statement that best describes how you feel'. I think one could cheat easily enough and click the question to push the score towards your preferred outcome, but answering honestly was not so easy as most of the time I did not agree much with either statement. One pair was, for example, 'the idea that teachers are unfair to students is nonsense' and 'most students don't realize the extent to which their grades are influenced by accidental happenings'. But I managed, coming out at the end with a score of 5, so comfortably sitting on the fence where I can attend to my stamps.

Wartocracy resumed or a wartological tweet

Or perhaps a wartological treat. Regulars readers will remember the succession of posts on the subject of wartocracy, mainly in the other place. Whether or no, they can be found by searching on the term or by looking, for example, at May 8th 2011 where there is a fine picture of a now demolished water tower.

The other day we decided, for no good reason, to take a walk around what used to be the West Park Asylum, now the property of Crest Nicholson, Linden Homes and possibly others. Generally speaking, the developers look to have made good use of the usable asylum buildings which look pretty well in their new clothes.

Started off by Hollywood Lodge, once Horton Lodge, built around 1750 and now derelict (see http://derelictmisc.org.uk/ for more details. An unusual and interesting site both for its content and in that it appears to be an entirely private effort, not for commerce or gain at all. The work of one D. A. Gregory). The story is that the lodge and its land were sold off by the council or by the NHS to an East End restauranteur for a nominal £1, but there must be more to it than that. In any event, the place caught fire, is now derelict and what used to be its paddock or some such is now the rather tatty home to some horses, presumably the property of some travelers. See the lime green area marked A on the illustration, which you may need to click on to enlarge. The slightly less tatty blue area marked B is also home to some horses but a sign suggests that it is the property of Crest Nicholson, presumably anxious to do something about it as it can't being doing much for the prices of few houses left to sell. I stand by my comments on the subject of camp sites for travelers on 23rd February, but may be part of any deal ought to be their sorting these two fields out: the travelers can have their horses there but they have to do it in a regular and decent way, doing something, for example, about the derelict featherboard fencing someone saw fit to erect, goodness knows why.

I note in passing that there must be the right sort of number of horses in area B as it is neither churned up nor grazed bare, something a lot of much posher horsey people do not always manage. There are also huge numbers of buttercups in attractive flower, which made me wonder whether horses don't like their taste.

We moved onto to a half completed batch of rather pretentious and no doubt expensive semi-detached houses, complete with mock stone surrounds to doors and windows. At least I think it is mock stone: some sort of fine grained, dull yellow material, with shapes which look moulded rather than carved to me.

The next thing to strike one was the half-hearted way that the extensive and potentially handsome public green areas had been tidied up.The developers no doubt sold the development to the council and is selling the houses to the punters on the basis of the beautiful park land setting - but having now sold most of the houses are not too keen on stumping up the necessary to make the park beautiful. Straight off the bottom line you know. So while the houses might look pretentious, the public green areas do not. A particularly irritating example was the short avenue planted in front of a handsome bit of restored & pilastered portico: the young trees were probably planted early last year and then nobody - the developers, the council or the occupiers of the new houses round about - thought to water them properly during the hot summer, with the result that some of them now look rather sad, despite the wet spring. About on a par with the tree planting effort at our shiny new & redeveloped railway station. Things had looked much more hopeful when I visited on 7th December last year and when one would not have expected to see any leaves.

BH tells me of a story from a borough councillor about their depressing wars of attrition with the developers of these brownfield sites, who promise all kinds of stuff, then fail to deliver. The council pegs away at it and the developer stalls, hoping that the council will just get tired and give up.

And then we came to the water tower, about where the red circle marked C is. A tall and imposing edifice. What are they going to with it? Will they shove a lift up it and make it into luxury flats? Will they not shove a lift up it and make it into affordable flats? What about a multi-storey bunk house for care workers from foreign parts? There were a couple of chaps with a van busily taking pictures with fancy looking cameras, so I asked them to find out that some peregrine falcons have taken up residence on the edge of the roof. I even got to see one - the first time I have knowingly seen such a thing; a tweet or what. Which presumably means that all bets are off: even the mighty developers will stand no chance against the RSPB. They can really put some tanks on the lawn. I wondered whether I ought to put my oar in by suggesting to the Residents' Association that there be a proper exclusion zone around the water tower, for the greater comfort and safety of the peregrines. Any houses that might have to be bought up for the purpose could be left derelict to the bats, which could then provide supper-time snacks for the falcons.

I close by remarking that what used to be my allotment is the purple circle marked D, lower far right.

PS: if you want to do Gmaps for yourself, use the reference visible in the search bar at the top of the illustration, the bit that follows the '@'.

The master

More of the Elias Quartet on Monday, with a rather similar program to that reported on 22nd February: an early quartet (the second of the famous series, not the first as the 18.1 number might suggest), a substantial quintet (op. 29) followed after the interval by a late quartet (op. 132).

And, again following the report of 22nd, difficulties with the train. There had been problems south of Epsom with the result that the train I caught was promoted to express and did not stop between Motspur Park and Waterloo, omitting my intended Vauxhall, although this did not mean that the thing thundered along, rather drifted. But we did make it to Waterloo in time for the train to incarnate the 1720 to Woking from Waterloo, so at least the journey of the folk from Woking was not disturbed.

On the way, prompted by pondering on how the in-train indicator board might - or might not be - updated to reflect this new off-train situation, I had the time to ponder about how the in-train indicators worked, that is to say the overhead displays with the moving yellow dots. Were the yellow dots made by a yellow light coming on or by rotating a small object black on one side and yellow on the other? I had always assumed the former but close inspection of a display with temporarily stationary dots suggested the latter. And if the latter, where was the light coming from? Would the indicator work in the dark? I thought it best not to pursue my inquiries too closely lest I was removed from the train for treatment.

This was followed by getting slightly lost in the tube station at Waterloo and I eventually emerged at Oxford Circus where I was able to admire the early evening crowd, coming, as it did, in all shapes and sizes. There was, for example, a rather plump young couple with extensive but rather faded tattoos, all the more visible for their not very extensive clothing. Not too appetising.

Unlike the sub-ground lounge at Debenham's, noticed on 14th May, which was fully up to expectations. We were looked after by a very personable young waiter, whom we suspected of either being a management trainee or a student, rather than a professional waiter. I think he told us that he worked from 0900 to 2100, so perhaps the lounge was a franchise which more flexible employment arrangements than those appropriate to a respectable place like Debenham's. I had a Lebanese chicken something by way of a snack and very appetising it was too: a confection of chicken strips, humous and some sort of white cheesy confection served on a round flat bread. Plus a perfectly respectable red wine. All this in a quiet and spacious lounge where we stopped noticing the rather loud musak after a surprisingly short time.

Arriving at the Wigmore Hall, my neighbour was a young lady from the US, perhaps New York, who seemed quite knowledgeable about music and its performance and who was very enthusiastic about the Elias Quartet. But she left rather briskly after the first half, leaving me to wonder whether she was or was connected with the agent for the supplementary viola, Malin Broman, who was then finished for the evening, but subsequent perusal of  http://www.lauratearmanagement.com/ was inconclusive.

We enjoyed the two opening pieces, while the performance of Op. 132 completely blotted out that of the Takács Quartet only a few days earlier, and was very good, albeit in a different way, with the Elias doing it with a lighter and fresher touch, perhaps reflecting their relative youth. I noticed the tossing of the pony tail of the cellist, a tossing which nicely highlighted her bits of the quartet, but which one might have thought was a bit distracting for the cellist herself, rather as I had thought the floaty muslim (or similar) top of the cellist from the Takács Quartet might have been distracting. Perhaps lady cellists like to flaunt it a bit.

Once again, in the interval nipped across to the Wimpole Street branch of http://www.beatone.co.uk/, the only disadvantage being that one is a bit nervous about missing the bell. But it worked on this occasion.

Home through Raynes Park, where I found the free library shut, but the platform included a thirty something cyclist complete with cycle, bottle of wine (being opened) and a fag (already lit). No helmet, but no-one thought it necessary to bother him about that or about anything else. I thought about the free library as a place to deposit Bacon (see 7th May), but I felt the customers were too mixed and I would be concerned lest the Bacon fell into profane hands, profane hands being far worse than a waste paper recycling plant.

PS: too late now to find out whether the programme notes for the two interpretations of Op. 132 were the same, identical even. Does the Wigmore have to economise on fees for writers of notes? Or do these last do it for the glory of seeing their names in small print?

Chill from the past

On 19th May I featured two anecdotes from Osbert Sitwell. Then last evening he offered another odd fact, to wit that the composer Scriabin was a nephew of the Soviet politician and long time ally of J. Stalin, V. Molotov. Odd, despite the fact that I knew nothing of Scriabin beyond the fact of his being a composer; I doubt whether I would have even got his nationality right.

Odd enough that I was moved to look it up on Google, to find that the odd fact is not a fact at all, rather a common mistake, at least according to Wikipedia, arising from the fact that Molotov's family name was Scriabin before he changed it to Molotov. So don't believe everything that you read in Osbert.

But Wikipedia also offered a picture, reproduced left, which I found chilling, described as a 'list of persons to be tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Union of the SSR. April 1937. Approving signatures: Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Andrei Zhdanov, Vyacheslav Molotov. The first page of a typical trial (de facto execution) list from the time of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union. This particular list, compiled by Senior Major of State Security Gendin, Deputy Chief of the 4th Department of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD, itself contains 145 names in the first category (to be executed by firing squad), 50 names in the second category (to be imprisoned for 10 years) and one name in the third category (to be imprisoned for 5 to 8 years). Stored in the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation'.

The chill was probably enhanced by my having taken on more wine than I am used to these days, but chill nevertheless, arising I think from the cold blooded bureaucracy of the thing. The contrast between the uncontrolled savagery of the deed with the decorum of the word. Thinking about it this morning I suppose the Stalin's and Hitler's only get away with the deed because of the cloaking decorum of the word: remove the cloaking words and one descends into chaos where anything might happen.

PS: I also sweep away another illusion. I had thought that Molotov the revolutionary invented the cocktail during the revolutionary wars, but Wikipedia tells me that the Finns invented it during the winter war, naming it for Molotov as an insult. At least he was insulted and he hated the fact that the things, which became ubiquitous, were named for him.

Isabella plantation

On Saturday to Richmond Park to pay a visit to the Isabella Plantation, not named for an Isabella, rather for dingy yellow, an old meaning of the word with the first recorded use in my OED being an entry in a stock take of the dresses of Elizabeth I.

Name notwithstanding, clearly a May place with the three recorded visits being in May 2009, 2010 and 2011 (see the other place, http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/).

There via the A3, which gave us an opportunity to inspect the giant B&Q at New Malden, at least on a drive-past and also last visited in May (see May 13th 2013), and back via Kingston, on this occasion without getting lost in the one way system, although I did earn a few honks from an impatient builder's van driver, presumed hot, bothered and hung-over.

The Richmond Park inner ring road was alive with cyclists in both directions, making driving a bit tiresome. - to the point that one would have thought that there must be accidents. My instant solution, given that banning cars would make access for most people a bit difficult, would be to make the ring road one-way for all traffic. They could have a very intense debate about it, Richmond being just the place for intense cyclists to lock horns with equally intense motorists, bent on getting to the Isabella Plantation.

The Plantation was a little past its azalea best, but there was still plenty to see, altogether an attractive place. But the managers have a bit of a problem with there being so many old trees of roughly the same age. A bit drastic to cut them all down (as they did, rather successfully, at the Long Water in Hampton Park), but a bit shabby just to let them slowly decay and fall down: I think they are going for some sort of compromise, which seems fair enough - and I imagine that the managers are fully alive to the need to provide supplies of dead tree to provide supplies of beetle habitat.

Onto Pembroke Lodge for lunch. Busy, but being a hot day most people wanted to sit outside, which meant that there was plenty of space in the cool interior for us. Quite decent sandwiches too. After lunch to inspect the gardens, in particular King Henry's Mound, which would have been a wonderful place to play the aeroplane game, with a view of the flight path all the way down to Heathrow, if only they would cut all the trees down. There was a view of Heathrow itself and they had cut  hole in the trees so that one could see St. Paul's, but that was not quite the same. There was also quite a decent telescope to look at St. Paul's with and, oddly for such a thing, free. No need to put pennies, or even fifty pennies, in the slot.

I was thinking of the aeroplane game again yesterday, on the Horton Clockwise. Absolutely no aeroplanes on the flight path down into Heathrow, which seemed a bit odd, late on a Sunday morning, but there were a number of aeroplanes, more or less in formation, flying high and west over Heathrow. I got as far as four and nearly made it to five. First thought was that there had been an emergency at Heathrow and that the aeroplanes coming in to land were having to pull up, but on reflection they were flying far too high, more or less at cruising height, for that to be plausible. They seemed a bit high for trans-Atlantic flights coming out of Stansted so perhaps they had come from some continental airport, further away. They were high enough that one could hardly complain about the noise, so we could not reasonably insist on their being routed round the channel.

PS: the illustration is of a rather pretty red hawthorn we came across in the Plantation, an illustration which does not do justice to the deep redness.

DT

The DT may have its faults and the Guardian may have its virtues - but cartoons is not one of these last. The Guardian just doesn't seem to be able to manage the good clean fun of this offering from Saturday's DT, not having progressed from a seemingly infantile fascination with body functions. In any event, this good clean fun livened up this morning's breakfast.

Luvvies

I reported on 12th May acquiring the second half of Osbert Sitwell's four volumes of memoirs, from which I today share a snippet.

It turns out that he is a rather self-conscious relic of another age, the time just before the first world war when the life for the rich was good. Osbert used to see something of Sir Herbert and Lady Tree and offers an anecdote from each.

One day, Sir Herbert wanting a stamp went to the Post Office and asked for a penny stamp. He carefully inspected the one offered and asked if they had any others. A sheet of stamps was proffered, which he proceeded to inspect even more carefully. After just the right interval, he announced that he would have that one, pointing to one in the very middle of the sheet. Do I know anyone who could pull off such a stroke in the West Ewell Post Office?

And another day, the Trees were out to dinner and haddock was served for the fish course. There was a joyous exclamation from Lady Tree of 'Cry haddock and slip the dogs of war!' (see Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I, Line 273. According to my copy, crying haddock was the especial prerogative of monarchs). Lady Tree was known, was invited even, for her inventive contributions to the conversation.

According to Wikipedia, amongst other exploits, Sir Hebert also founded both RADA and Oliver Reed. Also half brother to the Beerbohm of Zuleika fame (see 24th March 2013).

On an aspect of leadership

For the past few days I have been pondering about the difficulty which leaders have in changing their minds. The basic tension seems to be that on the one hand one often gets things wrong and ought to change position but on the other a change of position is apt to be seen as a sign of weakness, in the various senses of not being in charge, of not being the man, of being pushed around by others and of being indecisive. There is also the consideration that one may need a decision, right or wrong, in which case the time for changing minds has run out and the flawed masterpiece, as it were, has gone to press. The trick is, as the process guys (see, for example, http://www.pcubed.com/) would say, is to have the right process for taking the decision.

Sometimes people want a lead to be given. FIL used to say that one could pretty much always get one's way on a committee if one knew what one wanted. And I remember a time of modest IT catastrophe when just coming up with an articulate way forward carried the day, more or less without discussion.

I associate to the bit (I think) in Rambaud's 'La Bataille' where he talks about Napoleon officiating at a battle and just soaking everything up without much reaction. Everything is happening as he predicted and everything is under control. Just the odd touch on the rudder needed here and there. And this stance is important to his officers and other ranks; they will fight and die for this fiction of control but not for the actuality of muddle and confusion.

And then there was the occasion when, while still in the world at work, I was responsible for making a recommendation about something, a recommendation which had to be cast in the form of a paper and submitted to a committee. But by the time the committee met I had almost changed my mind, and was indeed invited to confirm that I still stood by what I had written, but I felt unable to exhibit a change of mind, feeling that such a change would reflect badly on me. In the event the recommendation was adopted and things did not turn out particularly well, but it may, nevertheless, have been the right recommendation. Perhaps the difficulty, or the failing, was my failure to properly rehearse my doubts in my paper, preferring to submit something which was much more cut and dried and which would not invite the committee to chew over the whole business ad-nauseam. Or perhaps it really was my duty was to take and document a decision which the committee could reasonably rubber stamp and not to expect them to take an intelligent interest in the matter.

But politicians live in a much rougher world. They are always food for the media vultures. Furthermore, whatever view they come to, there will nearly always be others who take a different view. There may well be lots of different views. Generally speaking, a more thoughtful and detached person, the sort of person apt to be useless at being a politician, will find it hard to take a definite view on, for example, the right way to organise educational services. There are always points for and against. There are always likely to be points that one has not thought of. But the politician's job is to take a clear & simple view and to take if forward: as my father used to say, when annoyed by an interminable discussion in the council chamber, the important thing was to get on and do something. The penalty for inaction was much greater than the penalty for the slightly wrong action. However, the politician, unlike my father and certainly at national level, has to be prepared to put up with all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. With being rubbished by one or other segment of the media, with this rubbishing being what passes for public debate.

And if he changes his mind, even those segments of the media which agree with the new line might go on about how weak he was to have done a U-turn.

The party system provides one way of escape. The Prime Minister has his little coterie within which private discussion and dissent is possible. Then once the coterie has come to a view, that view might be taken out to some bigger group, perhaps the cabinet or perhaps the party at large. But by this time the line to take is pretty much settled and packaged up: the Prime Minister is no longer in receive mode; he has circled his wagons and is ready for a fight, proof against more or less anything. And by the time he gets to Parliament he is just going through the motions. All of which protects him from, helps him get through the rough and tumble of public discussion, but which makes it hard to change his mind. He, and those around him, will have sold themselves the clear and simple line and they may well have forgotten that it was not an easy decision, which might easily have gone the other way. Perhaps more important, there is the question of face with which I started: how could I possibly be so weak as to admit to a mistake? The media pack will know I have weakened and will go for the jugular - in which, given the way we do things now, they may well be right. So if, perchance, he does change his mind in public, one of the coterie will have to be offered up for sacrifice, or at the very least one of the cabinet.

Maybe one day the standard of public debate will improve, will move beyond chucking rocks about and give public speakers room to air a bit of decent doubt and uncertainty. And maybe we the public will learn to put up with a bit more doubt and uncertainty and not expect things which are difficult to somehow be made easy.

And now it is time to head off to see if I can make it in time for the end of the car booter.

South Pole

Made it to the southernmost point of the recently expanded Bullingdon world yesterday with a trip from Grant Road East to Neville Gill Close, this last being in the King George's Park in Wandsworth, a park which was new to me and while not old was very pleasant. On the other hand, Wandsworth High Street, while boasting a fine town hall, was very crowded and a touch intimidating for the tourist cyclist, a cyclist, that is, who did not know the roads.

And so to Mixed Blessings where they were unable to supply coconut buns in the shape of sausage rolls (see 3rd May) but were able to supply an interesting confection of sugar and coconut, much appreciated on arrival back at Epsom.

Tooting Wetherspoon's was the locale for an inconclusive discussion on penalty fares. Was it legal to charge a penalty fare where there was no intent to avoid payment? One view was that it was, one was that it was not and one view was that the penalty should be proportionate to the offence, this coupled with the allegation that one of our train operators was currently under fire for officious & vexation prosecution of non-contumacious offenders.

On the way to Epsom, did badly at aeroplanes at Earlsfield, with significant periods with none in sight and at no time more than one. On the other hand, I did tweet three swifts swooping around, high over the cemetery. Not something I recall seeing in London before.

Appropriate to the discussion concerning penalty fares, I was greeted at Epsom by a large force of police men and women and at least one dog. Some of them were wearing the baseball caps sported by the more exotic elements of police forces. Were there guns present? My taxi driver assured me that the presence was much more to do with drugs than fares, but that it was the wrong day of the week and the wrong time of day to do much drug business, with late Thursday evening being a much better bet. I wondered how she knew, as she claimed to restrict her substance consumption to alcohol and nicotine and complained of the smell left behind by users of the illegal weed. Maybe it was not drug business at all, being more to do with a bit of soft overtime before going home to the family. She also took the time to tell me about the rather poor support for driver comfort offered in the rather cramped cab she had to sit in. I think I would have found it very uncomfortable.

This morning I was moved to try to check out the whole penalty fare business and poking around the South West Trains site I fairly rapidly turned up a penalty fares leaflet which suggested that not being able to present a valid ticket (or a permit to travel) when on a train incurred a penalty. There was no talking of being let off because one had simply forgotten to buy a ticket, forgotten to have one's discount card about one's person or failed to notice that the discount card had expired. And not having time to buy a ticket was specifically excluded as an excuse. But the leaflet was not a proper statement of the penalty fare regulations, for which one had to apply to Overline House in Southampton, presumably an office block with a good view of the line. From there to the penalty fare rules issued by no less a body than the Strategic Rail Authority, rules which appeared to supply a framework within which a train operator could set up penalty fare scheme. Here there was talk of letting off, for example when there was no ticket buying capability at the place of boarding or when the passenger had been given reasonable grounds for thinking that a ticket was not necessary. But there was no talk of intent, at least not a quick skim. Perhaps the difference is that one can charge a penalty when there is no ticket, irrespective of whether there was intent to avoid paying the fare, but that one needs to be able to prove intent to secure a criminal conviction in a court of justice. Which strikes me as fair enough: but how much time, effort and money would it take me to be sure?

Reflecting further, I do not think that there has to be intent for there to be crime. If one kills someone without meaning to, one might not be guilty of murder but one is apt to be guilty of criminal negligence. Or, in lesser cases, of driving without due care and intention. But maybe these are the exceptions which prove the rule. All in all, much meat here for my next discussion with a lawyer in a saloon bar, Wetherspoon's or otherwise.

PS: I can now confirm that Overline House is indeed over the line, being the block immediately above the railway symbol in the illustration above, courtesy google maps.

Wood preserver

On 24th October last I celebrated the construction of a winter house for the pipework outside the kitchen door, a winter house which we have decided not to take down for the summer.

Two of the issues not mentioned on that occasion concerned the roof. First, the type of tongue & groove board used (see sketch of section left), while fine for a vertical fascia or the side of a shed, is not so clever for a roof at 45 degrees, with water being apt to lodge in the top feather edge, the one next to the wall, in the depression formed at A. Second, due to some problem with wood preserver, the nature of which I no longer remember, the top feather edge is an irritatingly different shade of jacobean oak than the rest of the house.

And apart from that, the fence behind the water butt is also two tone, this simply because I ran out of wood preserver when applying a renewing coat some years after the fence had been installed.

So earlier in the week off to by some more, starting in Homebase where we found great mounds of all kinds of different stuffs, some something called 'decking oil', whatever that may be, and nearly all of it sold in very large quantities. I suspected most of it of being the sort of wood preserver which is like a low grade paint, the finish of which I greatly dislike, rather than the sort which is rather like wood stain.

Gave up there and tried Wickes, a useful if rather cheap'n'cheerful place, and wound up with a 5 litre tin of own-brand something described as traditional wood preserver (dark oak). There was hope in that the stuff seemed to slop around in the tin the way old-speak Cuprinol would have. There was comfort in that it only cost £19.99 rather than the £29.99 asked for the nearest thing from Homebase.

Then today I get out a plastic mac and a brush and get cracking, to very rapidly find that maybe the reason that people like the paint-like wood preserver is that it does not slop all over the place, which the Wickes stuff certainly does unless you are very careful about how you hold and fill the brush. With the good news being that it does not bond very well with damp surfaces, so if you water the surrounding concrete before you start, your concrete does not end up pale brown.

All done after about 2 hours, including the time needed to empty and move the water butt. Used maybe 1 litre of the 5 available. All looking much better and no longer two tone - although I now know that the fence behind the water butt is in a reasonably fragile condition and I may have to touch up the formerly white wall behind the pipe house.

Epsom Common

Tried a Yellow Brick Road Anti-clockwise this morning, with the Wells extension.

Small stew pond very still and bathed in bright sunlight.

Lots of twittering but no tweets. A near miss in the form of a dingy gray bird with a speckled chest, about the size and shape of a very large thrush. It put me in mind of the cuckoo, which I have not heard for some years now, but I don't think this was one. Perhaps some kind of a juvenile.

Pleased to report no cows and just one place where the chainsaw volunteers had been at it, probably last autumn (maybe gmaps 51.323279, -0.292916). Maybe I will get myself to the Epsom Common Day in July and find a senior volunteer to make known my views to.

Home to the last bramleys from last year, stewed with a little lemon juice and sugar, with the few apples then remaining heavily spotted and now in the compost dustbin awaiting transfer to the bin proper.

Takács Quartet

The past week has seen two outings to hear the Takács Quartet, taking the recorded tally to 5, with the last occasion being on or about May 15th 2010 and the first being on or about May 19th 2007. In fact all our Takács have been in May, so perhaps the form is that they abandon their home in Boulder each Spring to take a spin around Europe. A spin which involves, this year, repeating first of these programmes no less than twice next week, in Paris (see http://www.takacsquartet.com/). They clearly believe in getting value out of their rehearsal time.

Opted for the Green Park route on Saturday, the better to see the pretty people of Mayfair, and had time for a quick visit to the 'Running Horse' in Davies Street, we were treated to, in addition to our respectable white wine, a tepid pork pie, hand crafted on the premises. Rather good it was too. Pretty people represented by a party of four, done up in full formal party gear, mainly black, despite the early hour. We spent a happy five minutes speculating whether a rather flashy necklace was just flash or the real thing.

On arrival at the Wigmore we were entertained by the middle-aged lady behind us explaining how naff the twin flower arrangements flanking the stage were. Mainly composed of green and two sorts of large red flowers they did not, it seems, have enough colour contrast, despite looking OK to our untutored eyes.

The Shostakovich was good but oddly more modern sounding than three of his later quartets which we had heard on or about 30th April. Webern very modern but oddly good in this small dose. An excellent amuse-bouche to place between the two courses of substance. Beethoven very much up to standard and I wondered afterwards whether I would be moved to read the book of the quartet - Point Counter Point - again. This morning, I think not, it all looks a bit dated, this despite having read it happily enough not that long ago, in both 2008 and 2010 (see the other place).

Being the occasion of the presentation of Gold Medals to the members of the quartet, we were treated to a free, decent if not good, glass of wine in the interval and two speeches at the end, speeches which were not too long and were well pitched to the occasion, not bad at all for people who were not professional speakers.

On exit we were entertained by a very striking window display of fishes at Pull & Bear (http://www.pullandbear.com/), not least by a shark which swam into view towards the end of our visit, occupying pretty much the whole of the bottom of the window display. And then by a party bus, seemingly full of squealing young women. Why on earth would one want to spend an evening being driven around London in a blacked out double decker bus?

Rather wet on Monday so thought it better to pass the 'Running Horse' up and get a bit closer to the Hall before it started raining again, ducking instead into a quietish but very much open Debenham's (this ebing around 1900) to use their excellent facilities, a visit which caused me to wonder how much different it must have looked before what I imagine was the large light well was filled up with escalators. I also came across a quietish but comfortable looking coffee/cake/wine lounge in the sub-ground and I made a point to visit it when I had more time.

They still had the same flowers at the Hall, with the large red lilies now opening, but instead of a middle-aged lady declaiming behind us about the flowers, I had a middle-aged lady commenting on her misfortune in being sat behind three large gentlemen, of which I was one, largely blocking her view. She did not, however, take advantage of the three empty seats - in a house which was otherwise pretty much full - in front of me after the interval so it can't have been that much of a problem. The large & important looking gentleman next to me found it necessary to consult his telephone at regular intervals, but at least he was careful to make sure the sound was off when he put it away during the music.

Excellent programme again, although the Shostakovich piano quintet has, sadly, lost a lot of its once consdierable power over me. But still good and Op. 127 was really good; a masterwork from the master. Struck by how different the cello sounded in the first half than it had a few days earlier. Were the accoustics such that sitting in the left hand aisle a few rows back from the centre stalls we had had those few days earlier made all the difference? Nipped across to what had been the Pelican Bar at the interval, it being near & quiet enough to make this a better option than waiting in line downstairs at the Wigmore. Afterwards, crossed Oxford Street to be disappointed by Pull & Bear at close quarters, the screens making up the aquarium being a bit grainy at that range.

On the way home the doors nearest me failed to open at Stoneleigh, much to the annoyance of a young lady who had hoped to get off there. I might have offered her a taxi had she waited until Epsom, but she elected to get off at Ewell East, presumably to walk back to Stoneleigh from there, there not being much in the way of taxis. Perhaps she knew how to summon one with her tablet - the owning of which would have suggested that she should not need me to stump up the taxi fare.

Jigsaw 7, Series 3

This picture taken in natural light, not much better than that taken on the occasion of the last solution (Jigsaw 1, Series 3, 25th December 2013). Maybe the shiny black background is the trouble on this occasion.

This Ravensburger puzzle continues to be a pleasure to solve, although for puzzle purposes I prefer the Garafalo picture (see 23rd April for its last solution), which is more of a challenge, Ravensburger quality notwithstanding. Solved in pretty much the same order as last time, with the only significant variation being leaving the dark, lower part of the left hand figure until last and the central column of the right hand figure immediately before that. Sorting was very helpful in solving the green part and the two dark parts of the puzzle and I was quite often able to just pick the right piece out of the lines, without the need for trial and error. Ravensburger cutting is good for this sort of thing. Solution ended with the discovery of an alien piece, probably left over from careless putting away of Jigsaw 6. Put aside in the possibly fond hope that I will remember about it when I next tackle Garafalo - presently being embarked on another go at the Ambassadors.

My only comment on the picture is that the right hand face seemed rather dull compared with the left hand face, probably the result of the right hand face being given appropriate clerical passivity and the left hand face belonging to the chap who paid for the painting. The left hand chap was also in better position to give time to sittings, being resident in England at the relevant time, unlike his clerical friend who was just visiting.

Puzzle solution proceeded in parallel with reading one book about the painting, by Mary Frederica Sophia Hervey, and dipping into another, by John North, with both being bought from Amazon blind, not something that I do very often.

The first book told me a lot about who the two ambassadors were and how they fitted into the complicated European scene at the time of the breaking away of the northern half of the Catholic church from the southern half. The left hand ambassador, for example, was an honoured guest at the coronation of Anne Boleyn, which I learned Henry VIII did not himself attend. He also took the precaution of importing 30 tuns of claret, presumably having heard bad reports of the stuff more usually drunk here. The right hand ambassador, accredited by Francis I to the Imperial & Peripatetic Court of Charles V, was mixed up in the scheme to swap Burgundy for Milan mentioned on 9th April. He was also a good friend of the left hand, hence the visit to England to see him.

The second book was mainly concerned to tell one about the astronomical instruments on the top shelf, painted with such care & skill. North appears to think that the instruments have been carefully painted to indicate the time of day and the date of the painting with, to this end, Holbein drawing on the knowledge of his astrological friend Nicolas Kratzer. There is also talk of horoscopes and hexagrams. I ran out of puff about half way through this book, unconvinced that Holbein was being quite as careful about his painting of the instruments as North was suggesting. I rest content with the idea that they simply stand for an important part of the the baggage of an educated man in the early sixteenth century; no more and no less. But I allow that Holbein might have been having a bit of sport at our expense by painting the shadows on and around the instruments neatly enough to suggest that they might be telling the time or whatever and he died happy, like James Joyce, secure in the knowledge that legions of scholars would spend quality time trying to work out the solution to a puzzle which did not have one.

Now looking for a home for them, along with the bacon last mentioned on 7th May.