97 Mitcham Road

A new-to-me brand of kabanos from a new-to-me shop at 97 Mitcham Road; Sklep Maciek.

I was assured in somewhat broken English in the somewhat busy shop that the kabanos on display did not involve any chicken and that I could have brown or red, with the latter being more heavily smoked. I opted for brown and they turned out to be very good - and very good value at just about £5 for two packs, in total just about 500g, so slightly more than one might pay for run of the mill bacon from somewhere like Tesco's.

For once just packed with the wrapper shown, no shrink wrap in brine, so no need to dry them out before eating. Plenty of other meat and sausage for those interested in such matters - but I tend to stick to the kabanos I have been eating since the days of delicatessens run by refugee Czechs, a breed which now seems to have died out. Not too dry & stick like, but not too fresh either - not that I have seen any really fresh kabanos for ages.

PS: I gathered that there were some kabanos not on display which did involve chicken. Perhaps they were a bit ashamed of them.

Hole 2

While the wall went well, at least so far, there was one casualty. The tray on which I have been mixing concrete for many years now is giving up and there is a hole in the hardboard base, in the middle, about a third of the way up, not really visible in this shot but magnified in the one before. The hole appeared half way through the wall and I patched the tray by tacking a bit of board underneath, which did the trick, at the cost of the tray sliding around a bit on the patio as it no longer presented a flat base. No doubt more holes are on the way.

So what to do? Nothing, on the grounds that I am unlikely to do any more concreting? Replace the base? The snag with this last being that I don't think I have anything suitable to hand and I rather resent buying something. Make a whole new tray using the oak-finished chipboard tabletop which I do have to hand but which is the wrong size (too big) for the tray I have now?

I shall let the matter rest for the moment and do nothing rash.

Hole 1

The hole. See next post.

Yard retaining wall phases 4a & 4b

Went for the double pour a couple of days ago, that is to say the near eight feet stretch between phases 2 (near in the illustration) and phase 3 (far) and so completing the retaining wall.

The earth at the base of the bank was now much softer, the recent rain having got it and the undercut was far less of a struggle.

I made the side of the shutter up against the earth of the top of the bank in a different way on this occasion, using a piece of two by two recovered from the shed (see 15th May last year and elsewhere) to stiffen the plywood boards making up the face of the shutter. We shall see how easily - if at all - I can get the thing out.

But two by two notwithstanding, the double length of wet concrete did push it out into the earth bank and while the wedges, just visible top and bottom helped, I also deployed my favourite carver cramp - a far better cramp than the Record G-cramps which were far more widely used at the time I bought it around forty years ago - to pinch in at the middle. Carefully covered with a heavy duty green carrier from Bentalls to stop it getting wet and possibly rusty. The cast steel of the cramp had some kind of a grey finish but I did not like to rely on it too much. No idea why we had such a large bag from Bentalls, not recalling a visit to the place for that kind of shopping.

However, I suspect that when the shutter is struck, I will find that the wall is not quite straight, that there will be a bit of a kink between phrases 4a and 4b. Hopefully the joins will be OK and the finish will be OK, without unsightly and weakening voids. On which front, so far, I seem to be doing rather better than on the last occasion (see 27th May last year).

I guessed, or perhaps guestimated, the amount of aggregate to buy quite well with only a small portion of the 1000kg bag now left: certainly less than a quarter, maybe as little as an eighth. 25kg bags would not have been a good way forward.

Hopefully also I have guessed the section of the retaining wall right, and the unreinforced concrete will be able to hold back the slowly moving earth. I would imagine that in its present state of hardness a few bashes of the sledge would have it down; fresh four inch concrete is not that strong, even when it is eight inches at the base. Not that I can actually try this as the handle of my last remaining sledge has rotted off.

PS: getting to wonder about sledges as I type, I find from wikipedia that the word sledgehammer is derived from the Anglo Saxon 'slægan', which, in its first sense, means 'to strike violently'. I then try to check this interesting fact, to find that most of what google finds on the subject appears to circle around the wikipedia article, although I do find some engaging if not obviously relevant material for schools from the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/anglo_saxons/anglo-saxon_life/. At which point I turn to the trusty OED which does provide independent confirmation of wikipedia.

Suburban bliss

On Wednesday to the very last performance of 'A Small Family Business' at the National, a revival of an Alan Ayckbourn farce on getting by in suburbia, revived from the late 1980's.

The show was worth going to for the set alone, a wonderful recreation of a substantial suburban house set in a crowded estate and on a rotating stage. Front view of house in-between times (along with stirring clouds, whizzing along behind), back view of cut-away house during the action, sometimes going on in several rooms at the same time. Didn't come across anything quite like it in streetview, although what I have posted does give something of the flavour. Let's hope the owners don't mind too much - a lot of the houses in the same general area seem to have been able to arrange things so that streetview can't peep in through their gates.

The story, as the title says, is of a family furniture manufacturing business, rather more than a shop but rather less than DFS (http://www.dfs.co.uk/), the people one knows so well from their efforts on ITV3. Bedroom antics on view for our entertainment. Various kinds of theft on view for our entertainment. The theft is puffed up into a morality tale in the programme, an inquiry into the various kinds of theft that go on in families and in businesses, from borrowing paper clips up. But I think that is all a bit too grand; the thing is just a good bit of entertainment. Plus a rather splendid sullen daughter and a rather splendid complaisant husband, keener on his fancy Porsche than on wondering about how his wife came to earn it. All good fun.

Pretty much a full house, of all ages. Some in clothes of the rather florid style one associates with theatrical and arty people - see, for example, Cora Lansquenet in the 2006 adaptation of  the 'After the Funeral' story from the Poirot collection. But no sign, to me anyway, that this was the last night. No special antics and no bouquets. Maybe there were subtle antics, visible to the cognoscenti, but they were not visible to me.

There were some further antics in the interval from a rather loud middle aged couple who seemed to be into creative writing, with one doing the writer while the other did the literary agent. All very odd, maybe they were attending classes in creative writing in the evenings rather than professionals. The writer left half her wine, almost challenging me to drink it up for her, but if she was, I failed the challenge. I might have passed just a few years ago.

As it happens the wine was adequate, nothing like as good as at Tate Britain.

Folk art

Prompted, inter alia, by finding the catalogue of the museum of shop signs at Paris (see 25th July), we decided to take ourselves off to the Tate Britain to see their exhibition of British folk art.

Started off with bacon sandwiches at the Madeira Café (http://www.madeiralondon.co.uk/), unusually crowded this Tuesday morning. Over Lambeth Bridge and so back up river to the Tate to make our way through the Barlow constructions first seen on or around 14th April, on which my opinion has stayed the same. Not without interest but perhaps not quite what one expects to find in the Duveen Sculpture Gallery, in which I dimly remember seeing the marble statuary of yesteryear. I wonder what Duveen, the Saatchi of his day, would have made of it.

Pushed on into the folk art to find an eclectic mixture of stuff, in all shapes and sizes.

There was a lot of splendid quilting, mostly quite unlike anything I have seen before and some of it involving a prodigious amount of work, a lot of it by servicemen. It seems that the War Department (or perhaps the War Office, heritage variations of our present Ministry of Defence) encouraged the chaps to soak up the time they spent waiting doing this sort of thing, rather than soaking up the booze. The quilt illustrated is about eight feet square and was made by our chaps in the Crimea during the war there (the mid 19th century one that is), with the illustration being lifted from the Tate's web site. It usually lives in Tunbridge Wells and it would interesting to know how it wound up there. Why not Aldershot?

A room full of ships' figureheads, only a few of which were busty ladies. The largest one, maybe 12 feet high, came from a ship built in India and, when the ship was broken up, was presented to a retiring admiral, presumably to decorate his garden in Surrey. Would I need planning permission to erect the thing in our front garden?

A room full of copies of old master paintings executed in needlework. They were very clever and were the work of one Mary Linwood (1755-1845) who made a lot of money out of it in her day, despite being excluded from the newly invented Royal Academy of Arts on the grounds that copies of old masters did not constitute mastery, did not exhibit the originality deemed necessary in proper Art. The book of the show includes some solemn tut-tutting about this, but I think the excluders were right. The copies are curious but they are not art.

A lot of shop signs which I did not find very interesting; for that sort of thing one might be better off in Paris. Or in Norwich: a lot of the stuff on show at the Tate came from the Castle Museum at Norwich, a fine example of a provincial museum, one which we have visited once or twice ourselves and which is also known for its world class collection of teapots. See http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/Visit_Us/Norwich_Castle/index.htm.

I was amused by a picture of Hammersmith Bridge on a boat race day, with people perched all along the suspension cables. They had clearly never heard of health and safety and I dare say a reasonable number fell off and hurt themselves. And lots of other stuff - but if you want to see it, you need to get a move on as the show closes in a couple of days.

Lunch in the members room upstairs, pleasantly quiet and taken with a pleasant half bottle of Gavi di Gavi (bottle labelled entirely in Italian, not a speck of English. Very cool) but let down by the poor quality of the bread.

Back home, being invited to comment on our visit and having fought my way into the Tate's Facebook page (being slightly put off along the way by a confusingly presented prompt for my password. Was someone trying to steal it? How can you be sure that someone asking for your password is who they purport to be?), I found various rather acid comments about the lack of representativeness (or should I say representativity?) of the show, comments which I thought were rather unfair. Folk art is a huge and grey area, out in the suburbs of art proper, and in a show such as this one cannot expect more than a taster, a few bits and bobs. Thinking back on it, I associate to folk music; attractive at first acquaintance but with nothing like the staying power of real music: one quickly tires of it.

Where angels fear to tread

I woke up yesterday to the news of child abuse in Rotherham. There was a modicum of good news in that in less than a minute I was able to down load the Jay report, print off the first 20 pages or so and start reading it. A good deal more sober and sensible than the headlines of most of the newspapers that I came across later in the day.

I offer a few thoughts.

First, central government must take its share of the blame. Successive governments have stripped local authorities of both authority and money and it is no wonder that things go wrong. A lesson that the Israelis have yet to learn in Gaza and elsewhere.

Second, I wonder how many decent and experienced front-line social workers will just chuck it now and take early retirement. Just can't take the strain and abuse any more; that from difficult clients is one thing, that from everywhere else is another.

Third, there is a bad whiff of inquiryitis about the whole thing. Well meaning people have been inquiring into child abuse in and around Rotheram since at least the start of the century. If all those well meaning middle management types had been deployed on the front-line instead of in front of their word processors, maybe we would not be in such a mess now. There have been outbreaks of the same disease in the mental health sector, where I have sometimes been given the impression that there are far more chiefs than indians. In acute cases we set up giant inquiries which spend huge amounts of money on lawyers and others; an even worse diversion of resources away from the front-line. We do need good management, very likely better management than we have now, but lets keep things in proportion.

Fourth, lets hope that the boys from Eton don't use this as an excuse to privatise child support services. There would be great confusion in the short term, bad quality & expensive services in the long term - but maybe some profits for their friends.

See http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham.

A touch of geometry

Woke up feeling geometrical one day last week, so off to the Royal Academy to see what they could do.

Pulled a Bullingdon, the last one as it happens, from Vauxhall Cross in the usual way, over Lambeth Bridge and onto Parliament Square where there were no less than three policemen from the Metropolitan Police Bicycle Command and I wondered what brand of bicycle they used - but this was not a convenient place or time to find out. On up Whitehall to find the long way to the stand at Sackville Street where I parked up in the very last vacant slot just as it was just starting to spot a bit ominously, ominously given my light clothing. Luckily it stopped again as I wondered about a quick visit to Sotheran's book & print shop but decided against. They are very polite in there but I am rather out of my league and I don't care to shop in places where I am not going to buy; don't have the necessary brass for it.

On to the RA courtyard for tea and cake at the rendez-vous, the cake being a wedge shaped portion of a sort of Bakewell tart, good but dear, only marred by its being served on an oversize paper plate. The end of the courtyard opposite the street entrance where I was sitting had been made into rather an elegant smoking den with a rather elegant awning stretched over two poles, with the whole got up rather like a battleship of old with lots of ropes and knots and it must have cost a great deal. Oddly, the few smokers chose to sit on the stone benches beyond the awning. I wondered about what happened when it rained proper, there not appearing to be any gutters or drains. Did all the flunkies rush out on deck to close reef the main topsail?

We decided to leave the Dennis (Easy Rider & cocaine) Hopper's photographs on this occasion to concentrate on the radical geometry from South America which was the object of the exercise, and which was rather good, nicely set off by the newish gallery up on the second floor, inserted in a gap between the older buildings, a gap which might be marked by what I take to be air conditioning units installed on the roof in the centre of the illustration, with the gap running bottom left to top right or northeast. Which all goes to show, once again, the difficulty of interpreting aerial photographs. But at least the smoking den is loud and clear bottom right. With the smaller square to its immediate left being the tart stand.

Most of the radical geometry pieces had the interesting property that you had to move about slightly to get the best out of them, unlike old master paintings where one generally stands in just to one position to take it all in, perhaps moving a little to avoid some unfortunate trick of the lighting or a badly placed person or to see what different distance does, but essentially stationary. Here most of the essence lay in the effect of movement.

Visited the shop of the exhibition to be amused by a fat book of Euclid's first six books and was enticed by the shop girl's reply to our query about how many she was selling to open it up, to find it was a colour version, with coloured symbols being used to identifiy points, lines and extents, rather than the usual ABC notation, and making for an easier read. Or at least so it was claimed by her Majesty's Surveyor of the Falkland Islands, responsible for this version back in 1847 or so. Printed in the first instance by Pickering (presumably the Pickering of Pickering & Chatto of Pall Mall who are too old fashioned to go in for a web site) and now handsomely reprinted for Taschen by China, the same crew from who I obtained a handsome two volume 'What Great Paintings Say' from a shop in Topsham last year (early March, although I cannot now find any reference to this particular shop). I was sufficiently impressed to buy a copy at the same £25 and have now started the read, although I have not yet found out what sort of colour printing was available back in 1847. One would have thought that it must have involved several blocks to the page and have been rather dear. But I have found out that this version of the book was reproduced photographically from an original picked up from a bookseller in San Francisco.

On the way out, we learned from another shop girl that the chap who paid for a whole lot of rooms at the Academy, John Madejski, was the same John who has had a football stadium named for him in Reading. Clearly a gent. of catholic tastes. It struck me that things have moved on a bit from my days at work, both in that the shop girl had access to the Internet from her front desk terminal and that she found it easier to ask google than to consult the academy.

And so to 'Les Deux Salons' for lunch where we took their lunch time special. Splendid place, spacious, light and quiet, although it seems that it gets much busier in the evenings when the holidays are over. In the meantime, an excellent place for lunch. Amongst other virtues they are generous with their good quality bread and they have a good choice of wine by the glass. I was reminded of our visit to http://www.lecafeducommerce.com/ in Paris back in 2007 (see October 28th 2007 in the other place). But for this place see http://www.lesdeuxsalons.co.uk/.

Moaning packaging

Time for a moan about packaging, about three over-packagings to be precise.

My first is Elastoplast, in particular the ready-cut strips intended for use on cuts on the ends of one's fingers, the sort of thing that happens when one is, for example, gardening. So one comes in from the garden to a long fight with the cunning packaging of the ready-cut strip, during which fight one's not very clean fingers get all over the so carefully sterilised surface of the dressing. Much easier when the stuff came on rolls and one just snipped off a couple of inches.

My second is peanut butter, the sort that comes to us under the aegis of a once Finnish outfit called Kallø, this despite the absence of peanuts in Finland and their presence in the US. In mitigation they can say they are not actually Finnish any more, rather just one of the Royal Wessanen brands, Royal Wessanen being a large health food outfit from the Netherlands. Who knows. Fortunately, for present purposes, that is all beside the point, the problem being that when you remove the screw top lid from your brand new jar of Whole Earth, smooth and original delicious peanut butter (I don't approve of lumps), you are confronted by a foil seal which you have to remove to get at the peanut butter, a removal which, unless you are lucky enough to peel the thing off in one piece, suffers from the same sort of problems as the Elastoplast. A device intended for our hygiene actually results in a lot of un-hygiene.

My third is Ribena, the one and only original, chock full of Vitamin C and glucose syrup. No competition at all really, with the few substitutes that I have come across being far inferior. Far inferior that is, when you succeed in getting the thin foil wrapper off the top of the plastic bottle, this last, sadly, not being original at all. I have never succeeded in getting the foil wrapper off in one piece and so, not liking to have scraps of foil scattered around the neck of the bottle, I am reduced to scraping the stuff off with a small kitchen knife. A third case of a device intended for our hygiene actually resulting in a lot of un-hygiene.

And when I have cracked the foil problem, it usually takes me some seconds to work out the next step, to notice that there is a finger loop hidden inside the neck of the bottle which I can use to pull the seal.

And while I am at it, I might also complain about the cunning plastic bags with complex seals used to hold dry goods like lentils and raisins. One is supposed to open the seal in some non-destructive way, pour out however much of the stuff inside that one wants, and then to reseal the bag. But it is only very occasionally that I manage to open one of these seals in a way which allows me to pour without spilling some part of the contents all over the kitchen table, never mind resealing the thing.

A disappointment

Family tradition has it that this chap was some kind of an uncle of mine.

But yesterday, reading the booklet illustrated left a little more carefully than I had managed previously, I discover that I am merely a product of the second marriage of his grandfather, one John Toller who died in 1807, shortly after the twin battles of Trafalgar and Austerlitz. The giant was a product of the first marriage. Much classier.

So just a half-uncle twice removed.

There was consolation in that an aunt of mine, of whom I was fond, got a friendly mention.

A Canadian factoid

The US has been a bit funny about Cuba every since Castro took over from Batista, the one who started well enough but ended badly, mired in crime and vice. Notwithstanding, it seems that both President Carter and President Castro were honorary pall bearers at the 2000 (state?) funeral of late Prime Minister Trudeau in La Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal.

How did the Secret Service cope? Did they feel the need for a full body scan of the Cuban President? Did the Cubans harbour analogous sentiments?

PS 1: checking at http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/trudeaus-funeral/, I find that another of the honorary pall bearers was Leonard Cohen, whom I had not known to be a Montrollan. He is also an alumnus of Westmount High, as my mother was.

PS 2: (much later) I have only just twigged that Carter was no longer president at the time. Confused by the custom whereby former presidents retain the presidential courtesy title.

Yard retaining wall (phase 3)

Following a planning session and taking into account the weather forecast for Monday (today) and Tuesday, decided to go for a single, corner pour yesterday, leaving a double pour in the middle to finish the job off.

Brickwork facing the hill now entirely stripped out, down to a handy foundation layer maybe an inch below the level of the paving slabs. All bagged up and ready to go although I think I shall wait until the coming week, rather than attempting the waste transfer station on a bank holiday. After all, we did have a bad case of tip rage a year or so ago. The short remaining stretch of brickwork, the return facing south, in the shadow across the top left of the snap left, can wait until the urge to concrete rises again.

Then, thinking that the ground would be quite soft after all the rain we have had over the past few months, I was surprised to find the ground in this corner quite dry and I had to resort to using the edge of the spade to break it up, although it softened by the time I had got down to the yellow clay sub-soil. Odd stuff, containing a variety of stones & flints which can do a good job at blocking the thrust of a spade. I guess the answer to the dryness must lie in the nearby leylandii, just visible top left.

Finally deployed the second shutter, not yet having finally struck the first shutter from the second pour.

During preparation last week I had cut half a dozen wedges, thinking they might come in useful at some point. Which they did at this point, deploying three of them, two of which can be seen under the bottom left hand edge of the shutter and with the third peeping out behind the cloth.

And lastly, a bit of nostalgia in the form of the distinctive sound of wet concrete falling down against a wooden shutter as I poured; there is nothing else quite like it. As distinctive in its way as the related sound of a large amount of small lego being stirred in its box.

Samuel à Beckett

Off to the Purcell Room last week for a bit of avant-garde, or at least what was avant-garde back in the seventies at the Royal Court. To wit, three Beckett shorts - Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby - more or less monologues all - at the Purcell Room, the first time I have seen any of them and the first time I have done drama in the Purcell Room: it seems a long time ago that it was a seven nights a week chamber music place. On this particular evening we had break dancing or some such in the QEH, with some of a diverse looking audience loitering just outside, just to make it clear that the South Bank Centre was not just for the arty types who might frequent Beckett.

The more or less sold out show only lasted an hour so we had the performer - the ballet trained (dancing, as a child, with no less than the great Rudolf) colleen called Lisa Dwan - and perhaps her producer doing a bit of chat and taking a few questions. One of which was from a rather emotional luvvie who had herself, at some point in the past, done nine exhausting performances of 'Not I' and who questioned the absence of the dark auditor called for in the text. She also recalled the waves of nausea which used to attack her before her performances of the work, something which I have heard of before in connection with concert piano players. (The absence of the auditor does not seem to sit well with the claim somewhere in Wikipedia, turned up after the event, that Beckett's nephew, his literary executor, is very fierce about people sticking to the stage directions of the master, of which the auditor is one).

We were sitting at the very back of the Purcell Room which meant that we found out that there was no aisle running along the back and no back exits. One could get a bit claustrophobic, luckily I did not on this occasion. The performance was conducted in complete darkness, which included turning off the emergency exit lights, which I wondered about. I also wondered, before the off, whether the sensory deprivation would send me to sleep, as it does in experiments on same, but it did not on this occasion.

The first piece involves strapping the actress into some sort of a scaffold with lights so arranged that all you see is the illuminated mouth - but in our case we were too far away for the mouth to look like anything other than a small spotlight, so the intended effect was rather lost on us. The performance was a tour de force of speed talking, but at such a speed that I could actually understand, consciously, anyway, very little of what was being said. Despite this, and for some reason, quite impressive and I was led to wonder whether Beckett had trained as a psycho-analyst, this being very much the thing during his formative years and he was in France where this was particularly very much the thing, but it turned out afterwards that he had been an analysand rather than an analyst, with no less an psycho-analytic eminence than Wilfred Bion, so perhaps that amounts to much the same thing for these purposes.

The second piece involves a lady walking up and down talking to her dying mother. On this occasion the actress doing the lady also did the voice of the mother.

The third piece had the lady in a rocking chair. I had wondered whether the first piece had been done by speeding up a recording (and decided that it had not) but the stage directions actually call for this piece to be a duet between the lady in the chair and her recorded voice. No idea whether it was or not.

All in all very arty. I would have done better had I done some preparation beforehand, but I am not sure that I am going to spend any more of my dwindling quality time on this sort of thing. Interesting to have seen and leave it at that. Stick with what I know.

On the way home I wondered about the monkey selfie (see 14th August) featured in an advertisement in the train. A selfie with bared teeth which looks like a grin and which is intended in this context to be a grin, but which was, as I understood it on the train, a very aggressive pose in a monkey. An understanding which turns out to be fairly wrong, having now taken a peek at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2555422/.

PS 1: until recently my only acquaintance with Beckett was knowing how to spell Godot, frightfully important during to have heard about during my adolescence, but more recently we have been to two different performances of 'Happy Days' (see, for example, February 23rd 2007 in the other place, http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/). And we have touched base with him regarding his internship with one J. Joyce and his daughter.

PS 2: the monkey paper referenced above is an example of a learned article which is not hiding behind a paywall. See 11th August.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Being a book from the twenties by one Thornton Wilder, mentioned a couple of days ago on 19th August, now delivered (sturdily wrapped, albeit in a rather more artisanale fashion than would be offered by Amazon) and read.

A little shabby as might be expected of a book which is 85 years or so old, but nicely produced by Longmans. Very close to if not actually A5 in size with the text set in nicely judged margins & gutters. 16 woodcut illustrations in the 160 or so pages, with the woodcuts being pasted onto otherwise blank leaves, a technique which frames the woodcuts in a satisfying way. Better than if they had been included in page, printed directly onto the page, in the way of a modern book. Illustrations which catch my eye as we had our own woodcutter in the family and which remind me of another woodcutter once saying that one needs to play to one's medium, something picked up in the novel where it talks of the way poetry (of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, of whom I had not previously heard, thought by some to be up there with our own bard) needs to work with the metre to produce the goods. And something, as it happens, that I have my own opinions about. Most of the art which I like is the product of the interaction of some creative urge with some constraint, constraint of both medium and convention. A lot of modern art which I dislike seems to start with chucking this constraint away, leaving, for me, nothing much at all. All that said, while Claire Leighton is not my favourite woodcutter, her illustrations work well enough here, illustrating rather than trying to steal the scene.

Otherwise, a rather odd book (although very successful in its day), which served me mainly to introduce me to early 18th century Lima. But Wikipedia suggests darker purposes; a meditation on good, evil and the chances of life. Where does God fit in? Also that the book is a pre-cursor of the modern disaster film in which a disaster is used as an excuse or frame for short stories about the mainly separate lives of a group of people caught up in the one disaster. In this case there is another linking theme in the form of a famous actress, based on a real actress in a story by Prosper Mérimée (see 12th April and 28th February for another connection), something other than the disaster linking the three sub-stories together. Which also gives Wilder an opportunity to tell us something about the plays and poetry of the aforementioned Pedro Calderón de la Barca, a sufficient eminence to make one wish one could speak Spanish. But too late now, never going to find the time or the drive. Also various asides about the works of Tomás Luis da Vittoria, to the works of whom we have been introduced over the last couple of years or so by the Ripieno Choir (see 25th June and http://ripienochoir.org.uk/). I wonder now whether Wilder actually had any particular liking for the work of these people or whether he was just providing a bit of cultural colour, culled from some encylopedia.

There is another link between the three sub-stories in the form of an abbess, Madre María del Pilar, who looks after both orphans and the dying, so perhaps the darker purposes are fair enough.

I like Wilder's occasional flashes of rather dry humour.  Like the 'it turned out not to be necessary', to rest, that is, after crossing the bridge, at the end of Part Four. One got them in 'The Ides of March' too.

Irritatingly, I remember the parental copy of this book being blue and fat, the fat bit of which is clearly wrong, this being a short book. Clearly yet another senior moment.

PS 1: illustration courtesy of http://bobsbeenreading.wordpress.com/ and found by Google.

PS 2: wikipedia provided admirable support for this post. As did my ancient Chamber's encyclopedia - this last still on paper if you please.

Yard retaining wall (phase 2)

Phase 2 poured on Tuesday, having settled for just one shutter and not going for the two. I have doing the bread at the same time for an excuse, bread which, despite all the rush, turned out really well.

Don't know about phase 2 yet as the shutter is only half struck. Let it loosen up a bit before striking it altogether. The cloths are to keep the curing concrete wet. The tatty looking bits of plywood nailed onto this end of the shutter are the lazy alternative to cutting the shutter end into the earth bank. Something which I do not have a very good eye for and which would, in any event, have taken a hour or so, rather than a minute or so for the plywood. But you do get a good view of the way the earth bank has been undercut.

I did have some computational problems. During shutter assembly the brain was not doing very well at solid geometry, not being able to compute very reliably whether a suitably rotated part of the assembly would fit in its intended hole. You can get the same problem with jigsaws with the brain refusing to work out whether a piece fits or not unless you turn it the right way round - something which is rather easier with a piece of jigsaw than a piece of shutter.

Half the second batch of old bricks were lost down the garden again, this time chopping them up a bit first. The other half went into rubble bags from Travis Perkins, maybe £4 for 5 and made out of some woven white plastic stuff, amazingly strong. The three I have used so far have not torn or punctured at all. Bags emptied at the waste transfer station at around 1000 yesterday (Thursday) when there was no queue, but the place was busy enough with most of the dozen or so parking slots being taken.

The screwdriver is older than I am, that is to say more than 65 years old, with the sort of properly shaped wooden handle you get a good grip on and give a bit of welly. Much less likely to give you blisters than the plastic equivalent, possibly made by Marples, but probably more or less obsolete in the builders' era of battery packs. But not quite, as I see from http://www.marples.co.uk/ that they still sell the things under the moniker of cabinet screwdriver, although they do seem to have stopped making chisels. When I was little they were the best and I still own half a dozen or more, including the fearsome half inch mortice.

PS: a quick call has revealed the truth. The marples above is Joseph Marples, the chisel one is William Marples, whom a glance at Google suggests has ceased trading.

The Warren

We have spent a lot of time at Dawlish Warren over the years, my being lucky enough to have got to know it just about the time that new breakwaters (tropical rain forest all) were put it and the warren grew back up to its present size.

So the attached picture from the Saatchi black and white collection of the week caught my eye. It was taken by Paul Cooklin at the Warren and you can obtain one of the 50 proper prints from Saatchi for $650. Lots more of the same sort of thing to be found at http://paulcooklin.com/, where they might be a tad cheaper.

Roman affairs resumed

Rounding out our marking of the 2,000th anniversary of the death of Caesar Augustus (see 19th August. 1st August a touch previous), back to the Globe for a rendering of 'Julius Caesar' last Friday. Bright sun of the previous occasion missing, so from that point of view a much happier occasion.

Bullingdon from Waterloo Roundabout to Bankside Mix (oddly named as it is outside the Blue Fin Building), then hoofed it to the Globe to find the stand there half full. I had not pushed on that far on the bike as I thought it likely to be fully full with the consequent retreat irritating. After the show the stand was still half full but my key was red-lighted in the three or four posts that I tried. Had I failed to properly dock at the end of the outbound leg? Hoofed it back to Bankside Mix where my key was green lighted and so back to Waterloo Roundabout in no time at all. No better way to travel when it is not raining.

The only other transport event was an interesting chap on the train home in black jacket (possibly with tails), black trousers with the sort of broad grey stripes favoured by masons, a very loud tie, a small bag rather than the slightly larger suitcase usually favoured by masons for their accoutrements and an open 'Economist'. Older chap, did not look like a mover on the city front, so what was he? In my experience, masons only come out after dark and they do not wear very loud ties.

Back at the Globe took a couple of beverages on the terrace outside the Swan bar, to find that a waitress served beverage cost 37% more than getting one from the bar. But at least it had the advantage of not interrupting our viewing of St. Paul's Cathedral, rather both striking and rather odd from this point of view and in the then prevailing lighting conditions. Dome and its drum standing up dark and austere above the surrounding buildings, with the two west towers standing detached to the left, with nothing much in between: the dome was all very well, but I am sure that Wren intended that one should see rather more.

Caesar pretty good, although I got on better with the first half - up to the death of Cinna - than the second half. Maybe a matter of stamina.

We opened with various costumed menials putting things up on the stage (which I eventually realised were the decorations which Flavius and Marullus so disapproved of), action which then morphed, seamlessly into the opening of the play; a rather muddied start.

Caesar the right age for once, with bearing, if a touch oafish for someone who was clearly a someone very out of the ordinary. Antony did well with the dogs of war, even if he did seem more like a smoothie in the the corridors of Westminster, rather than a boisterous - but seasoned and successful - soldier. They made rather a lot of the business of the Lupercalian runners touching the ladies in the watching crowd, but failed to make its fertility point and I don't suppose that many in the audience knew what the touching was all about. Crowd scenes generally a bit overcooked, culminating with the (hopefully post-mortem) castration of Cinna, which castration the director would no doubt say was in the text, which it was up to a point. But I am content for such things to be hinted at rather than enacted. The synchronised marching of the soldiers used to frame the battle scenes in the second half was rather tiresome - and reminded me of the rather stronger version of same in a Berkhoff production of Coriolanus at Puddle Dock (see http://www.stevenberkoff.com/buyco.html), one of the very few plays we have left at half time (another being a Macbeth at the Globe. See June 23rd 2010 in the other place).

I had forgotten the extent to which the play was about Brutus, in which connection I thought the role of his wife, Portia, though small, could have been made more of, pointing up the vital turns in the story, full as it was of portents and signs.

In sum, coming back to the Globe after an absence of a couple of years, things seemed to have improved. They have pulled back from pantomime and settled down to more middle-of-the-road performances. Not terribly cerebral, but quite well suited to my aging cerebrum and, presumably, to those of all the holiday makers, many of whom did not speak English very well and for whom bardic English must have been pretty impenetrable. Certainly the young French family next to me did not make it back for the second half.

But I felt that I was missing a lot too and maybe I am going to have to start buying theatre tickets in pairs. Go once to get orientated, do some proper homework and then go again to get the full monty. I seem to recall that Pepys often went to several performances of the same play, so there is good precedent.

PS: thinking of portents and signs, I had suddenly been struck, reading Wilder on the Ides of March, why one might go in for reading the entrails of sacrificial animals, as the Romans did at that time. If one believed that the hand of a god was in the drawing of lots, why should the hand of a god not be in the selection of an apparently healthy animal which turned out to have blemished entrails. Perhaps some unpleasant growth on the outside of its liver; a sign from the god that something was amiss. I associate to the Axiom of Choice, something which I once knew a little about, an axiom which asserts, inter alia, that there is a always choice which can be made from a group of animals. That there is a god. On which note, thoughts turn to siesta.

Mistress Masham's Repose

Toying with the next blog button in an idle moment, something mainly useful for turning up recipes, babies and other children, I came across a glowing review of a childrens' book by T. H. White called 'Mistress Masham's Repose'. As a child I had been fond of the 'Sword in the Stone' (the first part of what became the 'Once and Future King') and somewhat older I had read the 'Goshawk' which I remember, for some reason, as being rather a sad book, perhaps because of the author's mixed feelings about attempting to hold a wild and beautiful bird captive. In any event, there is quite a lot in this book about how one should not try to hold captives, to take hold of people, however virtuous the motive. That aside, it seemed fairly clear that White was a bit odd.

But I had never heard of this book, so poked Amazon and about a day later the thing popped through the letter box, now read, although sadly without the illustrations puffed in the review (the reviewer was an illustrator himself). An entertaining fantasy, not without some odd colours here and there, the product of much the same sort of expensive education as '1066 and all that'. Lots of echoes from preparatory and boarding schools. Lots of nostalgia for the death of the big country house, not unlike that in the almost exactly contemporary 'Brideshead Revisited'. A sprinkling of Latin.

I learn along the way that monopteron is a fancy word for a cupola on legs, an example of which is to be found in the Commonwealth Memorial not that long erected in Constitution Hill. White is not pulling our legs as the word is confirmed by OED, which also points out that, oddly, the 'opt' bit of the word is the same as that in coleoptera, the fancy word for beetles.

The book is dedicated to one Amaryllis Virginia Garnett, for whom google turns up quite a long article from the 'Daily Mail'. It seems that she was a daughter of a Bohemian & Bloomsbury family, a grand-daughter of the Garnett who translated so much Russian fiction, very gifted as a child, but failed as an adult and drowned herself at the age of 29, a ghastly echo of the death of her great-aunt, Virginia Woolf. Presumably White, when he was not being reclusive, moved in that set.

I marked the occasion with a Mediterranean bigos.

Stew some garlic, onions and tomatoes in a little olive oil. Coarsely chop some left over potatoes into the mix. Coarsely chop some saucission sec (ex Sainbury's) into the mix. Leave overnight to settle. Cook some white basmati rice and leave that overnight to settle. Mix the two halves of the dish together, add some mushrooms and some finely sliced cabbage. Simmer the whole lot for about 10 minutes and serve. Very good it was too, if only a fairly distant relative of the Polish original.

PS: see http://vinpauld.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/mistress-mashams-repose.html#disqus_thread thread for the review which kicked all this off. The disqus bit being another story.

Summer with the NYRB

Just about finished with their summer edition now. Just over 80 pages with one third advertisements, one third stuff which did not interest me and one third which did; I get my monies worth.

Amongst the stuff which did, there was an interesting article about Oman, which turns out to be rather an odd place, with lots of the inhabitants speaking Swahili or Gujerati rather than Arabic, the result of Oman's days of glory in the Indian Ocean slave trade. One consequence of which was that for quite a long time the Sultan found it more convenient to live in Zanzibar than in Oman.

There was another article in the series about CIA and DoD matters, including the interesting snippet included left. I had not realised that the US deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by stirring up the fundamentalists, a wheeze to give the Soviets their Vietnam, to discourage them from crowing about the US one.

And another about Kenneth Clark (Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark OM CH KCB FBA (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983)), to whom the Tate Britain had devoted an exhibition, further evidence of the worrying trend of museums to worry about themselves, rather than about what it says on the box. The same chap who wrote the fat book about nudes which it was very cool to possess when I was in the sixth form of my secondary school.

And then, nicely timed for today's 2000th anniversary of the death of Caesar Augustus, the first and most successful of a long line of Roman emperors, an introduction to two famous epistolary novels about those times. 'The Ides of March' by Thornton Wilder and 'Augustus' by John Williams. I had not previously heard of either novelist, although we did once own by inheritance, unread, what I now know to be the most famous of Wilder's books, 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey'. The start was not promising with neither epistolary nor historical novels being my thing, but both turned out to be easy and interesting reads, with my only qualification being the large number of participants with funny foreign names - a bit like 'War and Peace' in that respect. Recommended to anyone with an interest in the end of the Roman republic. Entirely suitable as aids to the study of either history or politics in schools. I now move on to two other novels by John Williams, my having been enticed by some Amazon deal for all three at once. And after that, onto a second copy of the bridge, courtesy AbeBooks (for a change from Amazon) and illustrated by no less an eminence than Clare Leighton.

Last but not least, yet another piece about the strange workings of the US Supreme Court, a place in the which the NYRB takes a keen interest. Can't see the LRB taking the same kind of interest in our Supreme Court.

PS: I have also learned about frankincense from Oman. Wikipedia tells me that you get the stuff by tapping the tree, as one does for maple syrup or rubber, but does not confirm my theory that it was mainly used to cover the very unpleasant smell of the outdoor cremations once common in that part of the world.

Yard retaining wall (phase 1)

Following the decorators' maxim of 'so much more preparation, so much the better', the first phase of yard retaining wall reconstruction was completed yesterday.

Started by going through all the same palaver as last time, pondering on cubic metres and the difference in cost between buying aggregate in small bags (25kg) and getting one big bag (1000kg). The estimate was that I needed about a third of a cubic metre of concrete. The man at Jewson's says small bags better. Partly because you don't need anything like as much as a big bag, partly because small bags are sale or return and partly because you can do small bags in your car and save the £20 delivery. The two computer sums sites that I tried suggested that I might easily need half rather than a third a cubic metre. So the bottom line was, big bag might be marginally dearer but I would not need to mess up the car and I would not need to rush out for more stuff half way through as the big bag would certainly be enough. As it turned out, the big bag of aggregate, 6 for the price of 5 bags of cement (which have lost their French flavour since last time) and delivery came to just about £100.

The industrious preparation was mainly a response to the rather dodgy concreting of last year, on which occasion I had failed to take adequate account of the weight of wet concrete and its consequential habit of pushing feeble shuttering aside (see 27th May 2013 for the more successful part of that endeavour). But it worked, and there was no movement yesterday - although we have yet to strike the shutters and take a peek at the finished concrete: let's hope there is a nice clean finish without last year's voids.

The wall is a brick's width, just over 4 inches, at the top and about double that at the base, with the left hand face in the illustration vertical and the right hand face dug into the clay. Vaguely the section of a dam.

So far, about half a day to take down a section of old wall, a whole day spread over two days to build two shutters (only one of which was used for phase 1 - I was not sure how much concrete mixing I was good for at one go) and half a day to mix and lay the concrete itself. If I move up to two shutters, there will be two more phases and I should be finished before the end of the month; plenty of time for it to settle down before the winter frosts.

The earth at top of the illustration, the earth cut away from the bank can easily be lost, which means that the only outstanding decision is deciding what to do with the old bricks. So far they have been added to the invertebrate sanctuary at the bottom of the garden, that is to say the small ivy covered mound of rubble on the way to the compost bin, but there may be pressure to bag some of the rest of it up and take it down to the waste transfer station down the road.

Red cliff

Google does not offer a very good picture of the red cliff at Yaverland, so I am reduced to using my own effort, which, for some reason, perhaps the very bright light on the day, has come out yellow rather than red.

On the other hand, careful inspection of the very middle of the picture reveals the buzzard mentioned on 19th July, incidentally reminding one that twitter pictures really need a proper camera with a zoom lens.

Solstice stone updated

I have been adding the odd stone to the Solstice Stone Complex last mentioned on July 11th last year, but today, having some concrete left over from the morning's DIY, decided that the Complex should be enhanced to feature a piece which fell out of the red cliff at Yaverland (see 15th July this year and 22nd July last year), a piece which I grant looks rather like a weathered half brick, but I am reasonably sure that it is indeed from the red cliff. I did not like to wash the cement smear off while the feature was still wet, but hopefully it will weather off in reasonably short order.

Immediately to the left of the not-brick is a sea-rounded piece of something else sedimentary but from I now know not where, and to the left of that is a chunk of concrete laid maybe 20 years ago in an effort to hold together the brick retaining wall which keeps the low clay hill behind our house out of the extension and which is now being replaced with concrete.

More on that in due course.

On the evolution of lying

I came across another striking story in Hurford (see 31st July) yesterday, this one concerning baboons, retold from Domb & Pagel's original article of 2002 in Nature 410. It seems that the female's highly visible sexual swellings are reliable indicators of her reliability as a mate: females with big swellings have lots of children, they have good quality reproductive apparatus. So far so good: males can choose females on the basis of swellings, male success in fighting off other males is a good indicator of fitness in other respects and so the swellings do indeed help the best males mate with the best females, this being widely thought to be the best way for a species to thrive and survive.

But then suppose that nature decides at some point that putting all this investment into swellings is a bit wasteful and that it would be more economical, better, for females to signal their reproductive fitness by a special sort of grunting, a grunting which only requires a bit of training of the vocal apparatus, apparatus which has already been put in place for other reasons, apparatus which does not require a lot of energy in construction or maintenance. In business-speak, nature leverages its investment in vocal apparatus.

At first all goes well, swellings are off but, instead, reliability as a mate is reliably indicated by grunting.

But then the female baboon brain, already quite large for other reasons, finds out that, with a bit of time, effort & application, she is able to fake. Enterprising baboons set up schools for faking, possibly public schools (in the English sense of the word), open only to baboons with money. The question then is what sort of indicator of mating reliability does grunting become?

It might be a good deal for the females because it enables them to catch better mates than they might have otherwise. It might be a bad deal for the males because they are swindled - at least if being a brainy female baboon does not confer reproductive advantage in some other, compensating, way. One could spend happy years modelling such stuff on one's computer.

But in any event, I think it likely that Mother Nature would have given it a go, and so set the Original Lie in motion, never to look back.

Confusion

Very much the building season in our road and yesterday we were moved to take a look at the planning applications for our road in the Epsom & Ewell council planning system, a system which makes the whole business usefully transparent. No more need to make the time to trundle down to the Town Hall to look at stuff - although one can still do that if one feels strongly enough about something to want to talk to somebody about it.

The pictures included left were presumably the product of some design package on a computer and my first thought was that there must be some mistake. The top picture does not seem to be of the same building as the bottom picture.

Looking at the right hand side of the left hand element of the top picture, I saw a narrow chimney like structure springing off the top of the right hand side of the ground floor. Great ugly and rather useless looking bit of space which seemed to be absent from the left hand side of the right hand element of the bottom picture.

Eventually I work out that the two pictures do agree, but the computer package has not been very clever about the viewing angle or the shading of the left hand element of the top picture. The pink oblong which I had taken to be the vertical, rear face of the chimney like structure was actually the bit of sloping roof which is hidden but implicit in the right hand element of the bottom picture. The two part line rising up through the middle of the same left hand element is not vertical as I had thought; rather the lower part is vertical and the upper part slopes away, a confusion which would have been avoided with a slightly different angle of view which would have bent the line in the middle.

But even now that I have worked it all out, the brain refuses to conform. The ugly chimney is still there, albeit not quite as stark & brutal as it was in the beginning. Perhaps it will fade with time.

And another six

But this time spread over four days. So six Bullingdon's, one tube & walk (including a long change at Oxford Circus between Victoria northbound and Central eastbound), one walk & drain (this last very quick and convenient), three visits to the Barbican and with one diversion to London Bridge accounting for two of the eight legs. One penalty fare on account of the time taken out to view Ubsopolis (see 10th August). In sum, three visits to the four days of Wikimania.

Waiting for the off on Thursday evening, there was entertainment from a piano trio (piano, violin and cello). Rather good, and rather good music for this sort of occasion. Unluckily for them, they were not well placed in the sprawl of the ground floor of the Barbican Centre and I was pretty much the audience apart from a wiki type making a video of the proceedings - but they can take consolation in the fact the performing to a very thin audience is all grist to the mill of learning to be a performer.

They was a lot of food and drink available and one could easily have had a good feed and a good guzzle although I did not notice anyone doing either. I wonder what happened to all the left overs? Did the large number of staff knocking about get their noses in the trough when they knocked off - which would have been a lot better than down the chute to the pig swill, assuming that is that places like this can still do that. Perhaps it actually goes off to some ecobiodiograder to generate methane these days as you can't call your pig woodland reared organic if you feed it on such stuff.

Near 2,000 people there, mostly young men, say 20-30. Mostly rather casually dressed - the sort of thing you might see at a real ale festival - with the exception of a small party of Japanese girls in full war paint. I didn't get to meet them but I did get to meet the delegation from the Philipines from whom I learned that their official language is English, which surprised me. It seems that the US had more impact in their 50 years of occupation than the Spaniards had in their 500.

Interesting talk from the boss of Amnesty International who, inter alia, drew an interesting parallel between the two organisations, both of which were multi-national, if Anglophone in origin, used lots of volunteers, had grown very rapidly and both of which had to contend with the tensions between the salaried staff and the volunteers. The National Trust has this last one too. The boss of Wikipedia was good on his feet too, if a little irritated that his important announcement about transparency (https://transparency.wikimedia.org/) had been rather put in the shade by a lot of nonsense about the copyright - if any - of a picture taken by a monkey. (In the course of getting the link just included, I also came across an article alleging that the UK government indulges is various kinds of jiggery-pokery in the social media space, including altering wikipedia articles it does not care for or finds inconvenient. See http://rt.com/uk/178652-internet-censorship-police-uk/ and http://rt.com/. No idea who these people are or whether they are respectable).

A variety of interesting talks, some a little marred by sloppy presentation. So I learn that the wiki people are climbing on board the methods way of building computer systems, a way which has been knocking around the rest of the IT world for thirty years. That you can get early warnings of flu epidemics by counting the wikipedia requests for information about flu (more reliable than the same sort of thing from Google). That there are lots of academics deeply into the sociology, ethnology and oligies in general of the wikipedia movement. That something called the essjay controversy had resulted in a consensus that while wikipedia editors hiding behind pseudonyms was OK, puffing your fake identity with fake credentials was not. All of which seemed fair enough.

I continued to ponder about the way the wiki endeavour is growing to include all manner of good things. Is it going into hubris and overreach? I continued to ponder about the great weight being put on the article, the building brick for more or less everything. The article with its associated talk page, with its read, edit, new section and view history tabs. The article which is open to all comers. I associate to the great weight that the once so fashionable product Lotus Notes put on its note. Is it prudent to put so many eggs in the one basket?

Pleased to find that the sub-tropical conservatory was open. Full of all kinds of exotic plants and well equipped with chairs to sit and enjoy them from.

Amused to pass the same extravagantly bearded Sikh guarding the entrance to a building site in Carthusian Street on each of the three times that I passed.

All in all excellent value for money - but I doubt whether I will be in Mexico City for the next one!

Five-a-day

A warm and sultry day last Wednesday and all the slugs had come out to play on the compost heap, mainly the pale brown sort. So obviously a day to take to the Bullingdons, of which I managed five in the end.

Five very talkative young people on the train with a young girl from what sounded like the US in the lead. I still find it odd how easy it is to be irritated by other people's conversations: why don't I just listen in and enjoy? As it was, all very tiresome, but I decided not to move.

First stage, Grant Road East to Millbank then Smith Square to St. Martin's Street and so to Stanford's for a map of the Adirondacks. Rand McNally had updated their map covers but still not quite the thing. The The US Geological Survey turned out to do new-to-me topographical maps not that far from our own (excellent) OS Landranger maps (a free download sample being illustrated), but I would have needed three or four to cover the area in question and none of them were in stock, so I settled for a more holiday maker style of map of the whole of the Adirondacks from Jimapco (http://www.jimapco.com/). That will be quite good enough for now and we can always go further on the spot should need arise. All these people jostling for position in what must be a very rapidly changing market place for maps.

Interesting black and white print dress on a tourist, so patterned that it shimmered when the occupant moved. Very nifty.

Second stage, William IV Street to Aldersgate Street, which served to demonstrate that while I could get to Old Street OK, I did not really know where the Barbican was. Walked down the Beech Street tunnel to check in for the Wikimania conference and generally get my bearings before the off. The young lady at reception thought I deserved two tee-shirts, after which I took a light but expensive lunch in a pleasantly airy restaurant next to the main ponds. The place has worn quite well but it must be a long time since I went to a concert there. 20 years maybe? I find it rather too far to go in the evening now, seeming much further than the Wigmore Hall for some reason. Plus they mainly do orchestral.

At this opening stage my concern with the wiki people was that the scope of their endeavour seemed to be pushing out. Was it under control? Were pushing out too far, too fast? As it turned out, looking ahead, one of the talks did focus on one aspect of this very point. That is to say, à propos of the activities of one Greek Diu, was it appropriate to publish something about a politician which was clearly true, but which offended and provoked litigation? My feeling, not shared by many wiki folk, was that this was all a bit political and that the wiki movement with its very democratic and somewhat anarchic style (which has served well hitherto) should maybe try and steer clear of politics; that this was not what it should be about. But maybe I am being unrealistic: maybe wikipedia is so successful that it cannot help but be political in an age when information is all - at least unless it restricts itself to dandelions and leopard seals. Further thoughts in due course.

As it happened the politician shot himself in the foot. By protesting  in the way that he did, he advertised the whole business so successfully that ten of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people now know about his dirty deeds who would not have known otherwise.

A further snippet was that plenty of wikipedia editors who edit articles about live people under their own names attract very unpleasant mail, mail which is easier to take when hiding under a pseudonym.

Third stage, Barbican Centre to the Hop Exchange to replenish the cheese dish. Stuck to the very reliable Comté from the Borough Cheese Company, but topped up with a cheeky little piece of Tomme, some rather splendid Turkish Delight (so I am told, don't eat the stuff myself) and a visit to Vinopolis to talk to their helpful spirit people.

And so to the fourth and last stage, New Globe Walk to Waterloo Roundabout. Total charge £2, no excess.

Another pink lady

I mentioned some unsatisfactory  pink ladies from New Zealand on 17th September last, following up on the 29th. Pink ladies being a variety of apple which I had first come across in an article explaining that MacDonalds bought an awful lot of them to put in their pies. My own early purchases were very satisfactory:  perhaps a little bland, but of good size & texture and slightly sharp.

The other day the chap in the market at Epsom had a great pile of them. They looked well enough and so I bought five of them for £1.50 (or perhaps £2.00), declining the offer on ten as they were rather large apples and I could not be sure of the quality by looking. As it turned out, five was about right. Not a bad apple, better than some of the stuff on sale at Tesco's and Sainsbury's at the moment, but not perfect. They had lost their first freshness. All was revealed by inspecting the label to find that they came from Chile, which, on the assumption that they ripen late summer there, means that the apples are maybe four or five months old here. We are clearly in the land of cunning storage, but not that cunning as these apples were starting to show the same signs of inner rot as those bought nearly a year ago now. Furthermore, one of the apples was a mutant as one of the pips had sprouted inside the apple, with the sprout being getting on for a centimeter long, something I have never seen before. Did I ought to report this disturbing occurrence to the Horticultural Development Council (http://www.hdc.org.uk/)? Would an outfit with such a broad remit take an interest in the humble pink lady? Would we have done better in the good old days of the Apple & Pear Development Council? Would I do better at http://www.englishapplesandpears.co.uk/? Or is it really a matter for which ever government department does international trade?

While I am in moan mode, I should also mention the existence of call centres which specialise in cold calling people on behalf of major charities, the likes of Oxfam and RNIB being said by a recent DT (11th August) to use such outfits. Some of this cold calling is quite aggressive. I dare say that using professional outfits to extract money out of people does produce the results, produce better results than the charities concerned were likely to produce under their own steam, but I find it faintly distasteful. As I have said before in these pages, I was comfortable in the days when charitable giving was a quiet and usually private affair: one did not make a parade of giving and the charities did not behave like people who sell conservatories & decking. I regret the passing of those days - although it is hard to argue against the likes of Oxfam raising more money.

I should also add that I have never been troubled by such a call center myself. All hearsay.

In the same vein, I regret the passing of the days when suitable retiring professionals, having done their thing out in the big wide world, were content to come in and run charities more or less for peanuts, and find the sort of salaries that the bosses of the big charities seem to require these days more than faintly distasteful. Almost as bad as the greed of the bosses of some of our academic institutions, a greed which coexists with many of their subordinates, the chaps at the coal face, being on zero hours contracts.

DIY

One result of the Bertha hurricane was that we found out that the two wooden holders of the pipe which take some of the rain from the roof of the house across the garage and so into its drain, had collapsed of old age, with the vertical elements, being untreated timber, being in a far worse state than the horizontals which had had the see-thru green gear added before purchase. This slightly odd arrangement being the result of the garage being built thirty years after the house was built, in a space which was not really big enough.

So putting aside the Horton Clockwise, spent yesterday morning making two replacements, of which one is shown left. Mahogany bases, probably once intended to be part of the sill for an external door, with old-style four by two sawn for the verticals. Fittings reused, albeit with new screws and gutter bolts.

Loose fitting, but the idea is that the holders are heavy enough not to be moved about by either weather or crows. And the chippings keep them up in the air and dry.

Couldn't find a space-suit (the sort of thing the doctor wears in later episodes of 'Midsomer Murders') in which to apply the wood preservative, as it suggests on the tin, so had to make do with wearing gloves and washing my hands afterwards.

PS: thinking of the doctors in 'Midsomer Murders', it has often struck me that they do lots of stuff at a crime scene which I would not expect a doctor to do and the relevant professional website http://www.bafm.org/ does indeed suggest a rather narrower role, as does http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=1088. Perhaps I should draw this to the attention of the producers. Perhaps the remit varies from country to country. Maybe the légistes in France do it different - but I do like the word. Maybe a closer reading of Fred Vargas is indicated.

Lentil world

Readers will have noticed that red lentils play an important part of our diet here in Epsom. I am pleased to be able to report today the chance discovery of an outfit which takes them appropriately seriously, to wit the Canadian Grain Commission (see http://www.grainscanada.gc.ca/).

They offer a lot of useful material, including, for example, a new specification of red lentils - for which you can see the accompanying presentation at http://www.grainscanada.gc.ca/lentils-lentille/grading-classement/rl-lr-eng.htm. I wonder if our own men from the ministry offer material of this quality about the sort of stuff we grow here.

Hopefully, a bit of quality time should now give me the answer to the dead fly problem mentioned here on 7th February last, amongst other occasions.

Academic presses

I recently came across a reference to the work of one Viktor Sarris and to a book of his called 'Relational Psychophysics in Humans and Animals: a Comparative-Developmental Approach', said to contain lots of good stuff about such matters as whether you can train chickens to tell you that, for example, one cube is big for a red cube, while another cube of the same size is small for a green cube.

It was unlikely that I was ever going to read such a book all the way through but it would have been interesting to take a look, so off to the computer to see what I could do. Oddly, despite having a proper reference, I got no further than finding out that the author came from the Goethe University at Frankfurt upon Main. I try again a couple of days later and find the book both at the publisher at £60 for 176 pages and at Amazon at a variety of prices between £60 and £45. No idea what went wrong the first time. Small discount, £3, on the full price for Kindle.

I decide that for the moment that this is a bit strong and remember all about all the moans and groans in the NYRB about prices of books reporting publicly funded research from commercial academic publishers, the likes of Elsevier (see http://store.elsevier.com/). Where does all the money go? Why not just stick the thing out on the web for free, not even hiding it behind a paywall?

A few days later I happened to hear a talk by a chap from, I think, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (see http://new.huji.ac.il/en), all about his experience of writing an article for a printed encyclopedia and comparing that with his rather more extensive experience of writing articles for Wikipedia. It seems that Brill are still very much into specialist encyclopedias of the printed variety and they asked him for an article about the evolution of the use of vowels in Hebrew for the then forthcoming 'Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics'. This was all very flattering and would look well on his CV, so off he went.

But off he went, more or less without support from the boys at Brill. He was more or less on his own, an experience quite unlike that of a Wikipedia editor where there is lots of generally helpful support, both from other editors and from written guidance (in the form of Wikipeda articles, naturally). I think he said that there was some kind of a refereeing process, but it was refereeing with a very light touch. Just enough so that the article would count as a peer reviewed publication, important from the point of view of aforementioned CV. And when he had done, he had to sign away all rights to use his own material except in certain very limited ways. His only reward was a 15% discount on the $1,330 cover price of the finished encyclopedia, a price which meant that no-one other than an academic or specialist library would buy the thing, which meant in turn that his article was inaccessible to anyone without access to such a place. He never got to the bottom of where all the money went.

Turning to Wikipedia, which is free to all by design, he could not have published the article there, as it stood, both because articles have to be verifiable and he could not cite any published work in support and because original research is not allowed. Wikipedia is a tertiary not a secondary, never mind a primary, source. Although he could now, as he could cite the encyclopedia, the only remaining catch being the Brill copyright.

All very tricky. But it remains a bit irritating that work which is in very large part publicly funded should only be available to that public at such unrealistic prices from a profit-taking press.

I wonder whether I will raise enough steam to persuade some library in London to let me take a look?

PS: to be fair to Brill, they look to be taking a leap into the world of open access themselves. See http://www.brill.com/.

Public art (4)

It was bright & sunny by the time I reached the large steel sentry guarding the entrance to Ubsopolis (pronounced you-bee-sopolis) at Broadgate Circus, and I had trouble getting a shot at all, this one being the best that I could do.

But, once again, very impressive, albeit in a rather brutal way. Some might say that it was appropriate to the business conducted behind, with the some might say phrase being borrowed from Ian Richardson (see 7th August), who rather overdid it.

Public art (3)

The flats which have been built on top of Epsom Station looked rather impressive this morning, with this snap not really doing them justice. I think the colour scheme of the flats must have nicely balanced that of the overcast sky, sky which was dumping rain big time by the time I reached Vauxhall, where, for some reason, there were lots of people scurrying about. This being around 1030.

Public art (2)

An interesting piece from West Ewell, occupying the parking bay which belongs, in some sense at least, to the hairdresser behind, closed, at least to outside appearances, for some years now.

Public art

I came across this entertaining bit of public art at the Waterloo Roundabout a couple of days ago, entertaining in large part because so many other people were entertaining themselves by climbing onto it.

A rather playful work from which I associated to the sort of thing that one comes across in France and Spain. The green stuff used as a furnishing fabric seems to have taken the public art world by storm, with a number of examples of its use having popped up in and around Waterloo over the past few months.

Inoffensive and hopefully not permanent, unlike the more metallic green stuff springing up all over Hyde Park and its environs. And to my mind in a quite different league from the sort of thing offered by Henry Moore on, for example, Millbank (see 51.489327, -0.127598). Proper art, involving thought, craft, dignity and restraint; something more interesting than huge but otherwise uninteresting egos sprawled all over the place. Let's hope when they have finished the swanky new building on the site of what was Riverwalk House (see, for example, 25th January), they will put the terrace on which the Moore work sits back together again.

Wikifact

One of the facts that I thought I had acquired from Wikimania yesterday was that Wikipedia was the fifth ranked internet site in the world. So this morning I get to wondering what the top four were and so ask Google, who points me straight back to Wikipedia, where I find that Wikipedia is actually sixth, just ahead of Twitter. I had correctly guessed that Google, Facebook and YouTube would be up there,  but I missed Yahoo! (a portal) and had never heard of Baidu (a Chinese search engine). Blogspot, my own home, comes in at a respectable 17.

Interestingly the top ten includes some very different kinds of things. And while there might be a number of search engines, a number of portals and a number of shops up there in the upper reaches, there is only one encyclopedia and there is only one Facebook - which leads one to wonder why the internet market churns out oligopolies for some things and monopolies for others. No doubt there are people out there beavering away on this very question at this very moment.

The primary source for all this stuff seems to be http://www.alexa.com/, an outfit owned by Amazon (it's a small world at the top of the internet tree) which gives away some data about the internet and sells the more serious stuff. The top 500 being free and being found at http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global.

Decided that I would not get into the tricky statistical detail of exactly what is meant by being top.

Milk and sugar

As a child I did not much like tea, preferring water and only taking to tea at around the age of 15. At which time I took it with both milk and sugar.

At some point, maybe forty years ago, I came off the sugar. I forget why and I forget how hard it was to make the switch, but I do now find tea with sugar rather unpleasant, although I do do it, very occasionally, if for some reason I am very tired and need, as it were, a shot in the arm.

At various other points, I went through phases of or fads for tea without milk, to which end I switched to some kind of oriental (as opposed to subcontinental) tea, often oolong. I remember hunting down the distinctive yellow packets of a particular tea from the Sea Dyke range. More recently still, about the time that Chief Inspector Wexford overdosed on the stuff on ITV3 (see google, who knows all about it), the oolong started to disagree with me and I now restrict myself to subcontinental with milk.

Apart from one interlude when we had the use of full-strength milk fresh and unpasteurised from a Jersey cow in Hampshire, during which interval I don't think I thought about the matter at all, and until very recently, I used to insist on blue top milk, milk with some active ingredients, and used to make nasty remarks about the green top milk, more or less water with some white colouring matter, as used by BH. An insistence which also meant that we were a two milk household, a complicating factor in our household economy. But then there were a few unpleasant experiences with blue top milk which was slightly off, mainly because I got through so little of the stuff, not using it for anything else. Furthermore, BH alleged that I was drinking green top milk without fuss or complaint when out as that was what was in more or less all tea bought out.

At which point, I flipped without pain from blue to green and we are now a one milk household. But I can still make a fuss about long life and the stuff which comes in little plastic tubs, although to be fair to them, most tea outlets now supply milk in jugs.

PS: I had been quite sure that Wexford was a Chief Superindendent, but google seems to think that he was a paltry Chief Inspector, down among the Barnabys. Perhaps he got promoted towards the end of his run.