Inexperience

When I used to use TB more regularly than I do now, one of the inhabitants used regularly to tell us stories about the nonsense & worse enacted by architects who knew how to work the computer and how to write about stuff, but knew little or nothing about buildings. No experience you know, not like us chaps.

Which I think is probably the explanation for the rather unfortunate appearance yesterday of a newish block of flats along East Street, between Ewell and Epsom. The (invisible) block across the road to the left, more or less the same in essentials, has been given a white finish which has not gone blotchy like this at all. They clearly used the right sort of paint, probably quite by chance, while this block used the wrong sort? Or no paint at all? I can imagine that BH would get rather cross about it if she lived inside.

Doom and gloom

It being the time of year when older people like to explain why the world as we know it is coming to an end, I thought I ought to offer some recipes for doom of my own, large and small. In no particular order.

Global warming is going to bring stresses and strains - for example those arising from large scale movements of people away from low lying areas - which the creaky world order is going to be hard put to cope with. The numbers involved might well be large compared with those in, for example, Syria today.

Muslim warming is going to continue to cause trouble for some years yet. The Christian wars of religion centred around the 16th century took a hundred years or so to work themselves out, and we still have some pockets of bother left. And the meek have not yet inherited the earth (see reference 1). Will we be able to contain this trouble while it works itself out?

Distribution of wealth between rich and poor. Is getting bad and the poor might well, at some point, fight back, using whatever weapons they can get hold of. Be they the hard weapons of the thrown brick or the soft weapons of benefit fraud.

Distribution of wealth across the ages. The half of the population that is working is going to have to support the quarter that is too young to work and the quarter that is too old to work, while the old are presently holding onto rather a large chunk of the available wealth. We need to find some way of sorting this out. Bit more optimistic about this one; maybe we will muddle our way through to a sensible solution over the next decade or so, at least in this country.

Distribution of wealth across the world. Some countries, with oil-rich Arab states being the worst, have a disproportionate share of primary wealth, through accident of geography. How do we soften the impact of this disproportionality without doing too much damage to property rights, essential for the orderly conduct of business?

The collapse of two party government. The nice tidy, two party system which has served parts of the western world well over the last couple of hundred years looks to be falling apart, at least in the UK and the US. Perhaps the cosily adversarial era of Her Majesty's government and Her Majesty's loyal opposition is over. Will we manage to move on without a fall? From which I associate to a worry that governments will fail to control the power of the giants of the corporate world, the unruly barons of the 21st century.

The exhaustion of fossil fuel. Are we going to run out of fossil fuel before alternatives come on stream? Before we crack the fusion problem? Bit more optimistic about this one too, with solar power and wind power now coming on stream big time.

And so I reach the magic number of seven and can stop for breakfast.

Reference 1: King James' Bible, Matthew 5:5, Beatitude 3.

A Christmas offering from Saatchi

I rather liked this one from Karin Kay White of Shoreham-by-sea. Saatchi do offer a rather larger image, but it does not quite fit on my screen which means that the MS snipper won't snip it. But you can have the real thing, about a yard high, for $US1,200.

If we had had a new and empty house, I might well have been tempted.

The social whirl in Dublin

Yesterday saw our third and, for the present, last visit to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, to hear one Irishman read 'The Dead' from the 'Dubliners', with occasional accompaniment by another Irishman on a (closed) Yamaha grand.

Got there a little early, having taken just 20 minutes to walk from Waterloo, so we were able to indulge in coffee (for her) and white wine and pork pie (for him). The bill came to what we thought was a very reasonable £10 or so and the pork pie, served at room temperature, was quite good. We were entertained by a rather busy trusty busying himself with trying to persuade people, not very successfully, to make use of the rather DIY cloakroom arrangements, on account of the shortage of leg room in the playhouse.

Different seats again, to the immediate left of the stage, in a more or less full house which included a lot of young women in addition to those of vaguely arty appearance. Plus, of course, the pensioner contingent to which we belonged. Close enough to the stage to be to observe how many black marks it had acquired in its short life, marks which BH thought were the result of careless cleaning up of wax dripping from the chandeliers - which were all very pretty - but how on earth, in this playhouse chock-full of dry wood, did they get them past the health and safety people? Do they have some special pull with the men from the ministry?

The story was nicely presented with the Irishmen in period costume, which included, in the case of the reader, what I presumed to be what used to be called a boiled shirt. The reader sat, which looked right with the piano, but went with a rather conversational delivery which, for me but not for BH, felt a bit flat in the first half.  Certainly I found the seat rather hard, but, with the addition of my scarf to the cushion at the interval, things went much better. Both quality and quantity of piano music were about right, enough to provide a bit of colour without getting in the way, but I did wonder about the choice of music, music which sounded rather dainty and French to me and which did not go with the story very well - although, to be fair, it was hard to see what they could have played which would have done better. Maybe the reader should have stood to a lectern, given the thing a bit more wellie and done without the music? At least he could read, unlike Armitage (see reference 1).

A rather abrupt end to the first half, possibly because there is no convenient break in the text. But as I say, the second half went much better, with the tension rising nicely to the rather sad conclusion.

A spinkling of odd words. So we had screwed for drunk, which one could guess and I liked. Stirabout for porridge which one did not guess but which was in OED. Pansy for a sort of dress-making material which one did not guess either and which did not make it into the OED, although what there was there suggested that it might be a sort of purple velvet, coloured for the purple of the original pansies. One use of language which irritated me, was the placing of the two square supper tables end to end. Clear enough what was meant, but squares do not have ends and that jarred, on me anyway (see page 180 in the Penguin edition of 1973).

Reading the story for myself when we got back home, I thought that the world so well evoked was perhaps all too foreign for the younger portion of the audience. We could remember when things were rather like those in the story, while they could not. Which perhaps accounted for the usual crop of nervous laughter in what I (as usual) felt to be the wrong places.

My take was good effort. Came over fairly well on the whole, but came over much better when one read it for oneself. It is not, after all, as if it was a difficult read. The pace of the thing seemed all wrong when read aloud and the humour, of which there was plenty, did not come over very well at all. Aloud it all seemed too loud and intrusive, out of keeping with the story as a whole - which it is not.

Good effort I think sums up, for me, the whole playhouse venture. Interesting to have seen three quite different things done there, but I wonder how it will go on. Will they be as successful in getting people in as they have been in the Globe proper? For ourselves, I think we will give it a rest.

Home, taking 30 minutes on the return journey to the station along the (prettily illuminated) river, to just miss a Wimbledon train at Blackfriars and to just miss an Epsom train at Waterloo, eventually catching a rather delayed train to Guildford. The posh wine bar above platform 1 was shut, so I made up with a couple of small bottles of red from the more reliable 'Whistlestop' below. Also thoughtful in that they supply a bag in which to hide the Boris-forbidden alcohol and a plastic glass. About half the price, by volume, of that from the Globe.

This morning I think of Joyce's contemporary Aldous Huxley, also interested in the way that two people, who perhaps know each other very well, can be together, but to be moving on parallel tracks, coming into real contact just occasionally. In different worlds for the rest of the time. Perhaps it will come to me in which of his stories he uses this image of tracks. The two of them met, I think once, at a literary lunch in Paris.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sir-gawain.html.

Refrence 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/smp2.html.

Tudor greens

Yesterday to visit the new vegetable patch, about a walled acre, at Hampton Court Palace, presumably not once Tudor as my recollection is that rich people at that time ate very few vegetables and suffered in consequence.

I place the garden at gmaps 51.405659, -0.340155, the aerial photograph for which suggests that there must have been some chain saw activity, as I recall the patch clear of mature trees. But, to make up, they have planted a lot of fruit trees, particularly apple trees, with the ones against walls being espaliered. We shall see how the ones on north facing walls do in the years to come. There were also a lot of gooseberry bushes, interplanted in the lines of apple trees. I dare say they were all heritage varieties.

The vegetable department was very neat and tidy, would have put my allotment to shame, and included a lot of cabbage and kale. These looked fairly ordinary and not particularly heritage. There were some nets against birds, but I was still impressed by how little sign of bird damage there was, given that the nets were mostly down at the time of our visit. A lot of cabbages to be messing around with nets coming up and down with the waves of visitors.

There was also a lot of other green stuff which I did not recognise at all, so perhaps that was particularly heritage.

There was even quite a lot of what looked like pea, which was odd as in my allotment days it was normal to plant peas in the spring when danger of frost was mostly past and one would certainly not have pea plants upstanding boldly in the middle of the winter. Maybe as much as a foot high. Further confused by reference 1 which suggests that some varieties can be sown in the autumn without being clear about whether it is the peas or the plants which have to overwinter.

Signs suggested that some of the produce will be sold, perhaps with a special dispensation from HRH The Prince of Wales to use his special brand name (see reference 2) without paying him the special fee. I expect they will also shift some in their various restaurants, which will be able to make hay out of 'produce from our own gardens', in the way of the National Trust. Will they complement the actors and actresses wandering around in court gear with some wandering around in garden gear? Complete with period wheel barrows and so and and so forth? It would be much more democratic and fit in well with our predilection for, fascination with upstairs downstairs, as in, for example, Downton Abbey.

Reference 1: http://www.thompson-morgan.com/how-to-grow-peas.

Reference 2: http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/news-and-diary/wednesday-11th-september-2013-1.

The professionals

The chain saw volunteers (see, for example, reference 1)  may be a bit quiet for the moment, but it seems that our council can also call on the services of professionals for its chain saw action.

The evidence being the stump illustrated, snapped the other day on the eastern corner of Clay Hill Green (gmaps 51.334325, -0.276126) when I was  on my way to some important shopping at the Epsom Waitrose. To be fair to the council, the middle of the stump, the part inside the brown ring, was very soft and the tree had clearly been ill before its demise: in this age of noisy, free and often thoughtfree media, I suppose the council did have to have regard to the million to one shot that someone with problems with either their legs or their senses was going to be underneath the tree when it finally keeled over.

Instead, the irritating thing was that despite having passed this tree what must be thousands of times, once it had gone I was quite unable to bring to mind what it had looked like in life. It can't just be an age thing as I have been noticing a similar effect with shops for years. A shop might have been there for years & years and passed many times, used even, but once it has gone I have a job to remember it once its fascia has been taken down. And once it has been replaced with something else, it is more or less as if it had never been.

PS: the view at gmaps from above does provide some consolation.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Midsomer+gathering.

A room with a view

Another lucky find among the chuck-outs at Bourne Hall library a few weeks ago, in the form of a DVD of a 2005 adaptation for ITV of Forster's 'A Room with a View', not from a charity shop at all, as alleged at reference 1.

So we watched the DVD once, then read the book (serially, we do not do parallel), then watched the DVD again, then this morning bought the 1985 & even more start-studded adaptation by Merchant Ivory. Oddly, I can see the full 2005 version on YouTube, but only snippets of the 1985 version.

The book was a rather nice edition from Penguin's English Library. Perhaps their Modern Classics range, well known in my youth, has been expunged by the marketing people. Having now read it, I don't think I had read it before, but I was struck by the parallels with the work of Forster's near contemporaries Lawrence and Huxley - including their shared love of Italy, a love which went beyond it being a cheap and convenient place for impoverished scribblers to live. Rather a big jump to Proust, also of roughly the same time, and an even bigger one to Joyce. Clearly a time when there was a lot going on.

A lot of gentle humour, for example in the titles of some of the chapters, a humour which does not fare very well in its translation to the screen. Then I was interested in old Mr. Emerson's talk of muddles and the need to avoid them, muddles, seemingly being, both to old Mr. Emerson and to Forster, the many avoidable idiocies into which get drawn. Not big disasters which are beyond our remedy, rather little disasters which, on a good day, we might have avoided. I associate to a worry of my own concerning the seemingly never ending drip of avoidable lapses in what I regard as proper & civilised behaviour. Again not disasters, certainly not felonies or mortal sins, but lapses none the less.

By way of analogy I offer the drive to Tunbridge Wells from Epsom. The last leg of this journey is through Southborough and on into Tunbridge Wells from the north. The main road on which we are heading south is generally quite busy and there are lots of side roads, from which vehicles do not have the help of traffic lights to get them out. So I try to remember to let people out, more or less free to me given the slow moving traffic in which I am travelling, and often get it wrong. So sometimes I only think to help in this way when it is too late and sometimes I do think in time but get it wrong and try to help in a way which turns out to be unhelpful. Sometimes I get it right. A parable of social life.

The adaptation, the 2005 one that is, was generally good and was certainly well cast. The main flaw, to my mind, was the invention of a new tri-partite ending: energetic sex in Florence, then death in Flanders and closed by romantically flavoured memory lane in Florence & Fiesole. The book ends much more quietly, on a promise, on the word rather than on the deed. Minor flaws included the overcooking of Miss. Lavish (the writer) and the exit of Cecil Wyse, with him being made to look improbably silly rather than dignified. We were confused on exit by talk of one Rafe Spall, having been entertained by Timothy Spall as old Mr. Emerson and I only learn this morning that the Rafe Spall who played the son of old Mr. Emerson, was the real-life son of old Mr. Spall and was named for someone in 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle', presently being done in or around the Globe Theatre.

The viewing was given additional interest by our having gone to Florence for a short break back in 2008, a visit which was covered in the entries for early October at reference 2. We remembered, for example, the Piazza della Signoria and its statuary, which got a good outing in the adaptation. But, oddly, we do not remember at all the road running along the north side of the Arno, a road in which the party seem to be staying in the adaptation. We shall have to go back to see, clutching our DVDs, rather than the Baedeker's which get outings in both book and adaptation. Or perhaps we will have loaded our DVDs onto our tablets so that we can really compare life on the tablet with life in the street.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/chateaubriant.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/2008_10_01_archive.html.

Fowlsew

The remains of the Christmas fowl have already been rendered down into soup and drunk with Sharwood's medium egg noodles, so it is time to notice the sewing of the ends ceremony which preceded the first cooking.

Make sage & onion stuffing - using ready shelled organic hazels this year, the few that had been seen in their shells not looking too clever. Stuff bird, not too tightly, stuffed stuffing being apt to turn out a bit rubbery. Put the balance of the stuffing in a white enamel pie dish and cover with a good layer of streaky bacon, to be cooked underneath the fowl - with the variation this year of adding maybe a table spoon of rape seed oil to the stuffing before the bacon, in a bid to keep it moist when cooked.

Sew up head end of fowl, using equipment pictured bottom left and the needle middle right. Unfortunately, I had mislaid my first class needle holding pliers (complete with a selection of grooves for better grip on the needle) and had to use the second class pliers from Kemptown (see reference 1). I also had to settle for a straight, regular sewing needle, rather than the half circle (the full circle being about the size of one of our 10p pieces) needle which my father used to use for the job. Worse still, the green packing thread which I had sourced with some difficulty some years ago (see reference 2) had gone AWOL and I had to use regular sewing thread, too thin & sharp for comfort for this sort of work. Despite all, I managed quite a neat, continuous blanket stitch, or at least what I call a blanket stitch. Far too lazy to knot each stitch separately in the way of a proper surgeon.

On the way, I found that the near needle point pliers made some aspects of thread manipulation a lot easier than they would have been, with fingers, which are cunning but clumsy for thread, particularly when manipulating the carcase has made them a bit greasy. With three hands the pliers would have been just the ticket: perhaps that is what the apprentices & (in the last resort) nurses are for.

Sew up nether regions. The second class pliers turned out to be quite good for pulling the stumps of quills which had been broken by the plucking machine, now visible middle right. (The fowl had been sold as woodland reared, organic, etc, etc but I don't suppose that even all stretched to hand plucking).

Cook fowl. As it turned out, the stuffing cooked inside the bird was not quite as good as the stuffing cooked outside, it usually being the other way around. Maybe I should add the rape seed oil to the whole lot.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=kemptown.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=packing+thread.

Turkey power

Back to the templars (reference 1) this morning to see what was cooking yesterday.

Item 1, we were taking power off the French the whole day. Don't they do Christmas over there?

Item 2, the pumped sitation, which I take to reflect peaks & surges in demand, was dominated by the turkeys. Turning the ovens on peaked at 0920 with peak power consumption following some hours later at 1315.

Item 3, the evening seemed to be dominated by television programmes, with small peaks about 10 minutes after the end of popular programs. So the first small peak at 1925 (reading 232 or so) was the end of Morecambe & Wise. The next at 2010 for the end of Emmerdale, then 2110 for the end of Coronation Street and 2215 for the end of East Enders. But then things drift to a messy conclusion, with nothing much seeming to match the last peaklet at 2255.

Item 4, the picture at the time of the Queen's speech is confused, with the peak at 1455 (reading 177 or so) matching just before the off rather than 10 minutes after the finish of the monarch. Then what is the tabletop mountain from 1630 from 1715?

I don't think I have enough information. How long, for example, does it take for the rush to the bathroom at the end of East Enders to work through the water pumping stations in the Home Counties and on to the pumped storage turbines in the mountains of Wales?

Reference 1: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/.

A festive power snap shot

Following the recent post at reference 1, I am starting this Christmas morning to wonder about the peaks in power consumption when all those turkeys are banged up in their ovens and when all those children rush out at the advertisement breaks afterwards.

A quick peek at pumped storage this morning reveals a lot more activity in the last week or so than I would have guessed. But to keep a sense of proportion, the load mostly runs between 30,000 and 40,000, day and night, so even at peak, pumped storage is only doing a percent or so. I must take another peek this afternoon, just après bond.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/all-power-to-pc.html.

A festive geranium

Snapped under what must have been the good shelter of a fence outside 'Danehurst' of East Street.

I associate to the hugely more vigorous geraniums which climb up through the hedges of La Laguna on Tenerife, geraniums which have the advantage of being quite near the equator, rather than half way to the North Pole.

Also to the daffodils now showing in the new bed in our back garden. Leaves and flower buds, maybe two inches high. We will see how they get on. If they are biennials we should do well in the coming spring, not having done well this year. in fact, rather feeble.

And, for the record, it is 0636 on Christmas Day morning here, whatever the posted blog might say in (I think) Pacific Standard Time.

A festive trolley 16

As far as I know, trolley 15 (see reference 1) still lies in its ditch down the Longmead Road. But I have had some compensation in the form of an easy trolley 16, picked up on the way to Waitrose through a not very busy Epsom market and dropped off on the way in, in exchange for a basket. I rarely actually use a trolley.

Pity about the traffic cone, which I have only just noticed. As they say in the cognitive psychology books, if one is focused on one thing in a room, one does not notice another, even it it is an elephant, or in this case a cone.

Home to invent a cheap variant on the expensive bisque at reference 2. Take over the left over potage bonne femme knocked up by BH the day before. The ingredients being, more or less and by descending weight, two pints of water, potatoes, onions, carrots, milk, flour and two chicken stock cubes (these last from Knorr). Take over the left over grilled salmon and crumb in a cup with a fork. Mix the two left overs together and bring slowly back to near boiling point. Serve with freshish crusts from a Waitrose essential white tin loaf; old enough to be a bit chewy and to give constrast the smooth texture of the soup, young enough not to be a challenge to the fillings.

The fairly highly flavoured grilled salmon gave just the right amount of carnivorous bite the basically veggie soup. I imagine one could pull the same stunt with tinned salmon or tinned prawns, which would be even at Rowley's.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/trolley-15a.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/chateaubriant.html.

Last stand at the wiggers

On Thursday to our last concert at Wigmore Hall for this year, with the main course being, slightly appropriately, Schubert's publisher's Schwanengesang. D957. It was paired with Beethoven's 'An die ferne Gelliebte', Op.98, to start with. John Mark Ainsley tenor and Malcolm Martineau piano.

I had not heard the Beethoven before so I took a peek on YouTube and downloaded the words. I don't know whether that helped, but it went down very well. A lighter, more controlled thing before the chiaroscuro of Schubert which followed. And the Schwanengesang was superb, helped along by being sat just right, about nine rows back at 'I'. Further helped along by the stage presence & manners of the two performers which nicely, for me, evoked the sense of something intimate and drawing-room.

Two part page turning, in that for the first half, that is to say the Beethoven and half the Schubert, the piano music was in loose sheets, so the page was turned, as it were, by moving the sheet on the top of the pile on the right to the top of the pile on the left. A proceeding which means that there is more page turning and so more eye movement, but, on the other hand, one can always be playing in the middle, with the brain being able to keep an eye on what is to come. In the second half we were back with conventional page turning and I associate this morning to the contraptions noticed at reference 1, which I believe work in terms of page turning - while they could, it now occurs to me, simply scroll down a continuous score, with the bit being played being always more or less in the middle. I wonder if any of the contraptions now available - and google suggests there are plenty - would do this. A further twiddle might be that modern software could take over the page turning and not need human intervention at all. A catch might be that you cannot use the same source for both computer and printed image, which might amount to a blocking expense.

We had 'Taubenpost' as the encore, the last song that Schubert wrote and most definitely not part of the Schwanengesang canon, despite what others might think, or at least this was what Ainsley took the trouble to explain to us. Very good it was too, although I had no idea at the time that its title meant pigeon post. Indeed, although I had a general idea what the rest of the evening's songs were about, not knowing the words in any detail did not seem to matter on this occasion. But listening to a version of 'Taubenpost' on YouTube by one Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau this morning, it does seem to matter. Having the words added quite a lot (with thanks to reference 2). Extraordinary that Schubert could pump out something of this quality and with this hauntingly light tone (an odd phrase, but the best I can do), in extremis.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/things-swedish.html.

Reference 2: http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=14766.

Disgusted of Epsom

The DT had a particularly annoying headline today - 'Scandal of neglected pensioners' - about the poor standard of council in-their-own-home care for the elderly. What on earth do we expect, given that we don't like paying taxes and that we elect a government on a slashing ticket, a government which has gone on to slash local government expenditure? Halved it or something.

The DT's and, it seems, the politicians' answer to the problem is more and tougher central standards, but what on earth is the point of setting all kinds of fancy standards for such care when there is no money in the system to pay for it? Apart from siphoning off an ever bigger chunk of what little money there is to the people that supervise from a safe distance from the people that do.

Also true that people on fancy pensions who don't like either the council carers or paying taxes are perfectly free to go off to the agency of their choice and to pay them instead - which is presumably what most of them do. Not so hot of course for those not on fancy pensions.

Head case

Or to be more precise, some thoughts arising from reading 'The Language Myth' by one Vyvyan Evans of Bangor University, published by CUP earlier this year and brought to my attention by NYRB. First noticed here at reference 1.

The main purpose of the book is to dispose of the theory that human language is rooted in a universal grammar, itself rooted in genes; in its short hand, language as instinct as opposed to language as use. A theory said still to be advocated by the very eminent Messrs. Chomsky, Fodor and Pinker, amongst others. So eminent, that endorsement from any one of them is more or less sure to get one's research grant or PhD waved through...

A book which is, I think, directed at both a general audience and those with a more serious, professional, not to say professorial interest. But perhaps with the first audience in mind, Evans has adopted a rather populist style, which I found very irritating. Rather jokey but rather rudely adversarial at the same time. He shows little respect for or courtesy towards his opponents. He has sexed up a large proportion of his examples, with much talk of supermodels and kissing. Maybe it is OK to talk like this in the seminar rooms of Bangor, but I like my printed word to be in a more sober & neutral style.

Disposition is achieved disposing of six subordinate, albeit interconnected, theories.

One: language is not related to the communication systems of  other animals. Observations: some non-human animals do communicate with each other and even more with humans. Some such animals can even talk about things which are not there, not in the present. Some of them can lie. So false.

Two: there are language universals. Observations: this despite the diversity & irregularity of grammar exhibited across the world, never mind that of vocabulary and sound. The evidence does not support either of the following propositions:

There are universal ingredients and universal rules for combining ingredients, words, into sentences. Around 20% of languages, for example, manage without word order - although this 20% can be a little misleading in that it does not copy to 20% of humans and I have no idea whether this last is too big or too small.

There are universal ingredients and universal rules for combining ingredients, sounds, into words.

There always seem to be at least some exceptions to any proposed universal rule. So not proven.

Three: language is innate. Observations: along the way he knocks out a favourite biblical phrase of mine ‘in the beginning was the word’, heard in a church no less than 36 hours ago. It seems reasonably clear that things, deeds and the corresponding concepts came into mind before the words we then used to describe them. It also seems reasonably clear that young humans learn language from those around them over a period of years. For ordinary mortals at least, no those around them then no language. So false.

Four: language is a module. Observations: a module would need to satisfy three conditions, none of which hold up too well in the light of what we know today, what has been learned in, say, the last thirty years:

A specialised part of the brain, doing just language. The search for bits of brains doing just language has not been very successful. Brain processing now seems to be distributed across brains, with any one function of interest appearing to involve lots of different regions.

Dissociation: people exist with language but not cognition and people exist with cognition but no language.

Distinctive development trajectory. But the learning of vocabulary – clearly not instinctive – and grammar seem to be mixed up together. And the learning if both is continuous; changes in speed perhaps, but not jumps.

So not a module in anything like the way of a module in a computer system.

Five: there is a universal in-brain language, here dubbed ‘Mentalese’. Observations: how can we disentangle symbols of mentalese from the cloud of images needed to give them meaning? Clouds of images which are the result of experience. (Aside: we often talk of abstracts in terms of concrete analogs: so we talk of love in terms of journeys). A sentence in any language can be well formed, but still meaningless when the meanings of the individual words are taken into account. But this sort of information is not going to be coded in, by genes or otherwise, at birth. And how does does mentalese deal with the very different strategies for doing things in languages across the world?

There is interesting talk of the way in which words activate bits of brains. So, for example, a good word might activate good emotions, a bad word bad emotions. A motor word like 'running' might activate motor pathways, sometimes to the point where there is twitching where the motor action might be. I wonder whether people differ in this regard. So perhaps some people can process language, as if it were a computer or mathematical language, just symbols to be manipulated. While other people are much more rooted in reality and have difficulty generating language about things of which they have no experience. Or which they dislike.

I associate to that fact, which interests me from time to time, that children can talk about something, reasonably sensibly, just on the basis of learning the appropriate language of discourse, without having much, if any, real life experience of the subject of that discourse. I guess this is possible because so much knowledge has been coded into that language of discourse that applying generative rules to make conversation generally generates sensible stuff. But I also think that one of Evans's points is that while this may be true, the rules will also generate nonsense. Language which is not rooted in experience is not enough - at least not unless it is about something reasonably ethereal like the groups of mathematics.

So probably false, certainly not proven.

Six: thought is independent of language. Observations Evans describes various experiments which demonstrate interactions between the quirks of particular languages and the behaviour of its speakers. So false.

Then, very impressed to find 27 pages of references at the end of the book. To think that to produce a book like this you have to read & digested, or at the very least to be able to give the appearance of same, of so much stuff. So much time exploring what has gone before which might have been spent in other ways. That is not to say that one shouldn't do it, but I think I would find wading through the treacle of so many others rather tiresome.

In sum, despite the irritations mentioned above, the book is convincing. Language as instinct might have been a reasonable working hypothesis when it was first articulated sixty years ago , but the accumulated weight of evidence dug up since then is against it. But there is then the thought advertised at reference 1: so what? The journey has been interesting but what do we take away from it?

Oddly, amazon thought that I would like to buy a second copy of the book, sending me an advertisement for it, along with a number of others. Including a second book by the same author, a treatment of the treatment of time in languages across the world, so sober that it had been remaindered from £60, which was a bit strong for me, to the £10 or so (plus P&P) which I fell for, having been interested by his treatment of colour in the first book.

With thanks for the illustration of an early version of the modularity of mind myth to wikipedia.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/a-lapse-into-error.html.

Another worry reprised

Following the worries aired at reference 1, I was interested to read about a spate of car thefts in Chelsea, thefts which were enabled with a £50 gadget that you can buy on the internet. A gadget which, it seems, lets you break into high end cars - beamers and the like - with no bother at all.

I suppose that such car have fob action locks, with the fob sending and receiving appropriate radio signals from the lock on the car. But the dealer has to be able to get into the car for you if you lose your fob, so he is able to interrogate the lock with his manufacturer supplied gadget. The tricky bit is how does the lock know that the gadget it is talking to is OK?

Maybe the people who work for beamer were on a bit of a tight budget and could not go in for the sort of proper checking that banks go in for before they allow online access. So they just put a magic number into the lock and provided the gadget knows the magic number it is allowed in.

But how do you stop the bad people stealing the magic number if, for example, they manage to borrow a gadget for a little while? Maybe you encrypt it, but then you have to give the gadget another magic number to do that.

Another angle is that the manufacturer would need to be able to disable gadgets which have been stolen. So that, before the gadget is allowed to do anything at all it has to log into the central bunker to check that it is still OK and has not been reported mislaid, missing or stolen.

 And so it goes on. There are answers to all this, but it all costs.

Perhaps buyers of high end cars are going to have to ask for certificates of security worthiness, only obtainable after serious people have tried seriously hard to break the systems concerned. So, in the round, the bad people are adding to the costs of living of all the rest of us. Not a victim free crime at all, even if we don't count the people with the high end cars.

Reference 1:  http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/another-worry.html.

Châteaubriant

Not François-René, vicomte de Châteaubriant and not even the place named for him, but rather the variety of steak named for him, usually spelt in the variant chateaubriand. More famous of course for his tale from beyond the tomb, the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, of which I still have Vol. I of the edition from the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, picked up from somewhere or other and somewhat read. Quite a good read so I am not sure why I never got around to finishing it.

Or more briefly a subsidised expedition to Rowley's of Jerymn Street (see reference 1) to try their famous version of the steak. We got to know about such steaks from Caspar's of Epsom High Street, sadly no more, an interesting establishment combining B&B, wine bar for thirty something lagers, notable for its session on Sunday afternoon, and restaurant, this last boasting a far better chef than the location and general appearance of the establishment would suggest. Also notable for allowing one to smoke a cigar after one's meal. Inter alia, they did a very good chateaubriand. We have also taken one, made from an exotic brand of cow called a dexter, from a hotel at Camber Sands (see reference 2). There one had to smoke on the terrace, rather windy the last time we were there, one May I think.

We got to Rowley's via Victoria Station, more by luck than judgement as we had just missed our more usual Waterloo train, walking through Green Park to get to Piccadilly, where we came across the Canadian Memorial, which we learned was cleaned about once a month but was on this occasion having its annual spring clean, including replacing the grills which let the water out with something less likely to trap the shoes of small children. Even with work in progress it looked rather impressive at close quarters, if rather miniature compared with the HQ at Ottawa, the place which was the scene of an outrage during our time in Canada.

From there to Albemarle Street, somewhere near where we found a couple of outfitters with nice lines in gentlemens' dressing gowns, something which I was happy to spend quality money on at one time, but now tending to settle for M&S. But perhaps I will try and find them again, in amongst all the other fancy shops in the area, when the current gown needs to be retired.

Rowley's turned out to be busy, more posh café than plush restaurant (which I had rather been expecting). We turned up at just the right moment and we got a small table for four rather than a small table for two, which was nice. Service good. Lobster soup, called bisque, was OK but could have done with a bit less milk and a bit more lobster. White bread, sourced, I should imagine, from a freezer in one way or another was also OK. Good selection of wine and we started, for a change nowadays, with a 2007 Rioja Vina Amezola Crianza. But the main business was the chateaubriand which was very good, if rather different from the version from Caspar's, which, inter alia, came with a brown pouring sauce rather than a yellow buttery sauce. This one also came in its own little handleless frying pan, along with half a grilled tomato, which sat on top of a little burner to keep it warm. The meat was grilled so that it was almost charred on the outside while being dark pink and juicy on the inside, something that I have never been able to manage at home, on fillet steak or on any other kind of meat. Given up trying now. Plenty of fresh McDonald's style chips with the result that we needed to top up the wine with a little 2013 Pulenta La Flor Malbec from the Mendoza Province of Argentina. Not quite as good as the Rioja but it did have the merit in coming in smaller quantities than the bottle. A bit full after this lot, so we both passed on pudding, although BH did manage an expresso.

Out into the late afternoon darkness to stroll back to the souvenir shops on Buckingham Palace Road to admire their fine, festive window displays. Also to admire the stone prawn's tail which decorates the apex of the rather pompous, but rather handsome, doric styled entrance to the Queen's Gallery.

On the way we took in the big Waterstones in what used to be the big Simpsons, interesting on this occasion as the DT had just run a piece about their boss, one James Daunt, a banker turned bookseller, now working at least part time for the oligarch who owns Waterstones. The article mentioned that one could not get by selling just books these days, and all the shops had extras, the nature of which varied from shop to shop. This one included rather natty plastic rain coats, packed down to the size of a packet of paper hankies ('Handy Andies'). I bought one, but had some trouble stopping BH from getting the thing out to inspect it; she would never have packed it down into its bag again. I should have bought several as they were only £1.99 and I imagine best regarded as a one-time thing. But we were able to buy a copy of 'A Room with a View', having been reminded of the book's existence by coming across, quite by chance, a quite decent adaptation on a DVD in some charity shop or other. More of that in due course.

We also noticed that Fox's cigar shop appeared to be open again, if in a bit of St. James's improbably described as the A4 by google maps: I had thought that the place had closed down, in the wake of the crusade against puffers. But the large Indian outside had morphed into two rather smaller Indians inside, in the shop window. On the other hand, Berry Bros. just down the road, was alive and well. The place which was once able to sell me two bottles of wine from the same village in France, one rather posher than the other, to see if we could tell the difference. A game which they were well up for once they got the idea and decided that I was not pulling their chain.

PS: illustration of some sleepers on the way to Victoria. Dreadful condition. Someone ought to tell Network Rail about them.

Reference 1: http://www.rowleys.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://thegallivant.co.uk/.

Epsom Common

For the first time in a little while, around Epsom Common this morning, taking in the loop which takes one south of the Wells estate and back up Wheelers Lane.

Modest showing - maybe half a dozen - anglers at the small stew pond.

About as  many dogs, with one black and white spotted animal almost as large as the young lady who was jogging along with it.

No sign of cows and no sign of chain saw activity. But I got pleased a little too soon as it turned out that the Chain Saw Volunteers had been out, cutting back some brush to the right of the stretch of path which heads northeast, above the railway, from gmaps 51.322582, -0.293570. They had also made a bit of a mess cutting back a middle sized tree.

But there was some positive, balancing activity. There has been some work on or around the railway cutting to the right as you head down Wheelers Lane towards Epsom, and these volunteers, presumably for Spencer, have made good the hole they had made in the hedgerow in order to get access to the bank of the cutting. All carefully fenced in, as illustrated, and we will see if the new planting survives the depredations of local youth.

Horton clockwise

White cedar (?) looking well today in the bright late morning light and I managed to get two thirds of it into the telephone. Also the first coal tit of the season, not in a flock on this occasion.

Apart from that all quiet, but I did have some sharing thoughts.

Started with the irritating thought that most of us are suckers for the word free. If we stop and think about it we know that very little is free and that the cost has to fall somewhere, either on us the customers or on the owners of the business concerned. Mostly on us. But that does not stop us from going for whatever it is that is said to come with something that is free.

But I then moved on to think that our legislators are not immune from a variant. They are virtually powerless these days, and even if they had power they wouldn't have any money to spend. So making things illegal (see reference 1) is a free-to-them way to salve their prides and consciences - with the costs arising from such illegality being so far down stream as to be invisible. And even if the Treasury in costing proposals for legislation (one of the things it is deep into in the months leading up to the Queen's Speech) thinks to include such costs, I would be very surprised if it went on to award the enforcers any extra money.

I associate to Putin and his clique, which is alleged by the NYRB to enact such a mass of legislation, to create such an intricate web of legality & illegality, that they can always find something to pin on someone who has annoyed them. Perhaps by being rude about a favourite ballerina, or worse still slept with a favoured ballerina. Or sold the mother-in law a less than perfect cabbage. Or got their snouts in a trough that Putin & Co. like the look of. They can't decently be banged up for that, but the forces of law & order can be relied on to come up with something suitable from aforesaid web. Perhaps they can get the google search engine to help them navigate their web.

Aided and abetted in all this by the Russian legal profession, which can no doubt recognise a gift horse when it sees one.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/criminality.html.

Clarinet

Earlier in the week to hear the Brahms clarinet quintet, last hear in 2012 (see reference 1) with a couple of outings for the Mozart version in between.

Kicked off with the near-last Bullingdon from Kennington Lane Rail Bridge and from there over Lambeth Bridge, up Whitehall, up Regent Street and so to Broadcasting House, the one in London that is, not by some derelict canal south west of Manchester - although a quick peek at gmaps suggests that the place would be well worth a visit with plenty for the tourist to do. What, for example, is or was the St. Francis Basin?

Tracked a young lady (on a bicycle) in the vicinity of Parliament Square, who, for once, did observe the Highway Code, with only the one lapse when she overtook me on the inside when I was only a couple of feet away from the kerb and thinking about turning left. Luckily she got away unscathed. And then tracked a lorry from the vicinity of St. James' Palace to Oxford Circus, a lorry from no less an outfit than Kent's Transport (see reference 2) and carrying a small load of mixed building materials. This driver had manners enough but did not seem to know London very well or be terribly sure about where he was going.

Arrived at Broadcasting House early enough to take a little something, a Riesling (my pronunciation of the word being quietly corrected by the waiter), once again at the Langham Hotel, where the waitress was happy enough to change the nibbles that came with it for biscuits, my not caring much for salty nibbles, much preferring sugary biscuits. In between whiles I was able, once again, to admire the fine brown wood cupboard behind the bar (old style) and the large off-white white wood candeliers (new style) hanging from the ceiling. The bar was quite a large L-shaped room with a very high ceiling and the interior designer, quite rightly to my mind, had decided that there needed to be something to occupy some of the space above. The chandeliers were, again to my mind, rather ugly, but that did not seem to matter, their function was to occupy some space and this they did. The ladies next to me were talking Lamborghini, but I was not close enough to catch whether it was Lamborghinis in general or their Lamborghini.

And so to a full Wigmore Hall to hear the first of what I imagine were hundreds of compositions by Haydn, his String Quarter Op.1 No.1. A slight thing, but amusing to have heard it and a suitable warmer-up for the rather more sophisticated Brahms Op.115 which followed - although it did take a couple of minutes or so to get online, as it were, with this second piece. The quintet sounded very good on the day, with the oddity that, as a former very bad player of the clarinet, I was picturing some of the score in my mind (in one of those yellow miniatures) but none of the fingering came back to the fingers. And then, back home, I thought to have a bit of my vinyl version by members of the Vienna Octet, who sounded better still. They marked out the string bits, the clarinet bits and the ensemble bits with a clarity and punch which had entirely eluded Badke & Martin - although, to be fair to them, that may not have been what they wanted.

Interestingly, Martin on the clarinet appeared to be based in Scotland but to have connections with the Canary Islands. I wondered whether his parents had been part of the migration from there to here to work our mental hospitals and hotels, this before poles had been invented.

Out to lose my way to Bond Street and then to lose my way to 'Leonidas', ending up in the 'Maison de Chocolat' in Piccadilly instead, where, as it happens I had ended up the year before, not having been able to cope with the crush at F&M.

Picked up the second Bullingdon at Sackville Street and made my way to Soho Square. And so to Foyles which seemed to have turned into a mixture of pop-up shop and pound-store. But then I remembered that they had moved into the Art College next door. It was my first visit to their new shop and very good it was too, which was just as well as the Blackwell's opposite (which I had never liked very much, far too low ceilinged and cramped feeling) was shut. No less than two collections of Sir Gawain books, one in the King Arthur section of the poetry department and one in the King Arthur section of the history department and I chose one from the latter. Then off to the mathematics department to look up geometry (see reference 4), where there was a quite a decent selection and I selected a slim paperback from Cambridge. Rather dismayed to find that it cost £60 and almost abandoned ship, but relented and had the price checked, with it turning out to be £30 rather than £60. Still a bit more than I had wanted to spend, but it was the right sort of book and I was rather committed to it by that time. We will see how I get on with it.

Picked up the third Bullingdon at St. Martin's Street and off up the ramp (for once in a while) to Waterloo 1. I was accompanied across most of Westminster Bridge by a police car, but he peeled off somewhere handy to the Marriott (in what used to be an important place of local government, in the days when we still had such) so perhaps he was not there to mind my crossing. Just in time for a train so did not bother with further refreshments, although I was rewarded with a fine pink sky to the west as we passed through Earlsfield.

PS: odd the ceiling which presumably comes from the same place as the French ciel should be spelt the way it is.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=clarinet+quintet.

Reference 2: http://www.kekentsltd.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://maximilianomartin.com/. Notice the reference to 'Ensemble Villa de la Orotava', Orotava being a handsome town in northern Tenerife, the natal town of a former mental hospital cook who used to get into TB.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/memory-lane.html.

Criminality

A few weeks ago Simon Jenkins had a piece in the Guardian about our collective mania for criminalising every thing in sight, with anything that a quorum doesn't like being fair game, and I commented on an aspect of this at reference 1.

So not impressed to read yesterday that the government is going to criminalise another tranche of smoking behaviour, to wit smoking in the presence of a child in a car. What is the matter with us? We are in the process of savage cuts to public services on the grounds that we cannot afford them any more, despite the modest growth being experienced in GDP, and at the same time we are extending the range of services that we are asking for from our hard pressed police forces.

More serious and more difficult, was the death, several years ago now, of a child in a hospital in Leicester. It seems that the resuscitation of this child was interrupted because it was mistakenly thought that he was the subject of a do not resuscitate order. The child was very ill and subsequently died. The other child, who really was the subject of the order, had, as it happened, been released. The CPS has now decided that no less than three people should be charged with negligence amounting to manslaughter. On the face of it this strikes me as very wrong: we are not going to help anything by attacking those in our health services who make mistakes, perhaps under pressures arising from all the cuts & reorganisations, with the blunt instrument of the criminal law. Such matters are better left to the hospital and professional authorities. One can only hope that the CPS know what they are doing and are not just giving in to pressures which they would do better to resist. Not enough information to make a considered judgement, but my hopes are not high.

But I dare say the management consultants will devise another batch of forms, which the staff at Leicester hospitals can use to while away any odd moments of leisure that they may have. Process rules the waves! Nothing that can't be fixed with a bit more process. (A proposition with which, I should add, I am in broad agreement. The trick is not to overcook it).

PS: I believe that most of said modest growth in GDP is finding its way into the pockets of those who already have plenty, rather than those of the rest of us. I did try to investigate GDP per head at national statistics (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/index.html) but did not get very far. The concept clearly exists but I failed to translate into a useful spreadsheet. Maybe distribution of income & wealth is not something they put quality time & effort into.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/nonsense.html.

The extension

The school at the bottom of our road occupies a large, if green belt, site and it did not seem unreasonable that it should be made a bit bigger to accommodate the wave of small children about to arrive at their front gates, although it is a pity that they could not find some way to make use of some of the large site in question to better deal with all the traffic arising morning and afternoon.

But I think I would be a bit alarmed if I lived in one of the houses at the bottom of the road and to regularly wake up in the morning to find a large crane towering over the back garden. The telephone, as is it's way, does not give much sense of the size of the thing, but some idea can be deduced by comparison with the nearby mature trees.

Is the school quite sure that they are only adding a few single storey classrooms?

On round the Horton Clockwise, the first time for a few days, to find that the new baker, Coughlans, at Horton Retail, had been open for 10 days. In to find a busy shop, with at least four young assistants and a large supply of, inter alia, sugary looking cakes. The place describes itself as an artisan baker and does indeed sell quite a range of bread, although rather more space was given to cake and it was not clear how much baking took place on the spot. I took an experimental small white bloomer which, despite being fresh enough, looked and smelt very much like the offer from Mr Sainsbury. I shall report further in due course, but in the meantime read all about it at http://www.coughlans.com/ where it seems that they are a well established chain in the south east London area. Are they starting a push to the west?

Further round I find that trolley 15a (see reference 1) is still there. Been nearly three weeks now and I have still done nothing about it; the new hobby is slipping badly. So long indeed that the trolley has been joined by a rather stressed looking office chair.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/trolley-15a.html.

PS: I might add that it is also a pity that the school was built (in the sixties or seventies I would think) to such an economy standard. Not a patch to look at on the hundred year old, red brick school at Pound Lane, a few hundred yards the other way. Proper pointy roof with real slates and with expensive & tasteful extensions in the same red brick as the original..

Important opportunities

I thought that readers who do not see the Guardian should know that two important opportunities have arisen in the world of donkey welfare, where it is proposed to appoint no less than two senior donkey welfare advisors, one to work in Great Britain and the other to work the whole of the island of Ireland. Donkeys are clearly far too important to recognise human trivia such as national boundaries.

I was intrigued over the toast & marmalade by a vision of a whole hierarchy of donkey welfare advisors, with donkey advisors (trainee or entry level), donkey advisors, senior donkey advisors. principal donkey advisors, senior principal donkey advisors and chief donkey advisors, all coming with, naturally, proper distinction between temporary, provisional and substantive grades.

Sadly, after attaining the dizzy heights of chief donkey advisor - and those interested in a career in donkeys should also bear in mind that only countries as large and as hot as, say, Nigeria, warrant such a person - one has to abandon the donkeys themelves and enter the open structure. To become, as it were, a general officer commanding.

And to think that this advertisement appeared alongside all kinds of advertisements for important work in the field of welfare more generally.

All in all, it was good to see that all the money we had put out on Christmas Cards from the charity concerned was going to be put to such good use.

PS: I am not so pleased to find that the logos etc which charities are putting onto their cards are getting bigger and bigger. They have grown from being a discrete little affair at the bottom of the back of the card to quite a large & additional affair on page 2, competing vigorously with the carefully chosen image on the front of the card and just opposite where one puts one's own message. One has to be so careful to match charity with recipient.

Dvořák

To the Wigmore on Saturday to hear the Ivo Kahánek do Janáček's 'In the mists', the Pavel Haas Quartet Smetena's String Quartet No, 2 and then all of them do Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2. With Ivo Kahánek being flown in from Prague at more or less the last minute.

As it happens, we heard the Pavel Haas Quartet a couple of times last year, on the second occasion giving us the Shostakovich Piano Quintet. I wonder now if having both quintets in one sitting would work - and I suspect not.

Entertained on the tube to Oxford Circus by a tall young woman in full war paint, that is to say full makeup and a backless, black evening gown, long enough to trail along the platform when she got off. She was carrying a pair of very high heeled shoes to put on later, but, oddly had no wrap or coat. It seemed likely that she was going to get cold later in the evening if she was bold enough to want to use late night public transport. Was she doing it for a dare? Was she a young woman at all? If not, she was not given away by the size of her hands.

And then in the hall itself by another young woman. more soberly dressed, who seemed to be a jack of all trades. She had both to know her piano well enough to turn the pages and to move furniture, including the piano, on the stage between pieces.

The introductory pieces, which I had not heard before, went well enough. And then, to my pleasure & surprise and despite some lapses of balance between piano & string sections, the quintet regained quite a lot of the original magic from the QEH, which had become somewhat attenuated in subsequent hearings. This notwithstanding Visser remarks about no repeats noticed at reference 1; perhaps not having heard it for a while helped. I had forgotten what a large part the piano had in the quintet, with the pianist not getting much rest at all. And we got a little extra in that a first violin string broke along the way, necessitating a movement restart. Perhaps they ought to have done an ultrasound test on all their strings before the off to detect imminent ruptures. But perhaps one cannot do that without taking the strings off the instruments, which would be apt to cause more trouble than the test would be worth.

Minor irritation in that there was a lady in the basement bar who reminded me of one of my boss's boss's (see yahoo answers for placement of apostrophes and esses) at the Treasury, but I could not remember her name, despite the relationship in question being good for some years. It is in my mind that her surname starts with a 'C', but such notions, despite their nagging persistence, have often proved wrong in the past.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=festive+nibbles.

Lysozyme

I was impressed by this model of something called lysozyme in the museum in the basement of the Royal Institute in Albemarle Street yesterday. However much work must have been involved in elucidating such a structure before modern equipment was available?

Sadly, I did not find a sign which told us. But there was one which told us that the stuff was found in various bodily fluids, such as spittle and mucus.

Now I wonder whether the Royal Institute people got it right. The two pictures offered at the wikipedia entry look very different - but I suppose you have to be a chemist to be able to expect to understand it all. On safer ground with the miners' lamps, said to have been invented on the premises.

Content free (4)

Having decided that this fine pastiche of an early Twombly was not quite good enough to displace one of our existing pictures, 'Content Free 4' has now been found a permanent home elsewhere, that is to say at the back of the garage.

As it happens, with the hardboard glued to the back to hold it together, the pastiche as a whole behaves rather like the bi-metallic strip of the school physics class; that is to say, as it dried out indoors it warped, with the paint side the concave side. The spruce was drying out and shrinking more than the hardboard. There was even a crack to the right, annoying in such a young piece. We shall see how things develop in the damper, cooler air of the back of the garage: I hope for spontaneous repair.

I guess that a more experienced man would have used a wooden frame rather than a sheet of hardboard; something made of a similar if not the same material as the panel and so contrived as to give the panel a bit of room for manoeuvre while at the same time giving it some support & constraint.

Interestingly, the auto-focus on the telephone, usually very good, could not cope with this free hanging picture, which must have been moving around enough to disturb the auto-focus computing. The others which I took at the same time are much worse.

Content free (3)

State 3, probably final.

It has been interesting to see how one fiddles with the thing if it is lying about, to hand. Something which did not arise with the elaborate doodles I used to do at meetings, usually chucked with the meeting.

I had trouble getting the camera square on to the subject, trouble which shows with a subject of this sort. Despite moving around, despite noticing that the camera hole is not in the middle of the telephone, I didn't seem to be able to get it right.

But I did find that the telephone worked better facing north in the shade, outdoors to get good light, but not doing the thing in direct, bright morning sunlight which seems to be too much light.

Patio compost dustbin just visible, right background.

Youngs do it again

To Tooting the other day to see what Youngs had made of the Castle during the recent refurbishment. Poked our heads in the door to be greeted by the noise of a lot of young people, clearly part of the gentrification of this part of south London. A boozer no more and we beat a hasty exit.

But it does seem that Youngs know their business of pub keeping - which is just as well since they have abandoned the business of making beer. They changed the décor of the Halfway House at Earlsfield and that, from being a quiet & comfortable old-style boozer, lots of the brown wood and shiny red (leather?) seat coverings which used to be the Young's house style, went to being full of young people, a managed house making lots of money. And now they appear to have pulled off the same trick with the Castle. I associate to a story - perhaps about a Biba refurb. in Kensington - I once read about the layout of big stores being terribly important: get it wrong and you get no customers, get it right and you fly. So a good retailer must have the feel for such things. It does not say much for us, the customers, that our habits are so easily shaped by such matters.

Back to Earlsfield Station for a quick game of aeroplanes, where I would have scored an easy three had I not worked out that the right most aeroplane was indeed coming into land at Heathrow until the left most aeroplane had disappeared behind the clutter on the horizon. I had not expected such a large swing round from a southerly course to a westerly one as it came over east London. But I had taken on enough alcohol to spend the remainder of the journey pondering about whether the three counted: it was there and I did see it, it was just that I did not know it for what it was.

At the level of the game one could easily make rules to cover this sort of thing, with penalty points if you called, say, a three, and you turned out to be mistaken, so discouraging over-calling.

But at the level of the subconscious, I think things are more complicated. I think the game arises from my fascination with the way that planes funnel down, from east to west, onto the one landing runway at Heathrow, with, at peak, one touching down every two or three minutes, each one trusting to the one in front being out of the way and off the runway in good time. I dare say the intervals are calculated so that if anything bad happened to plane 1, plane 2 would have time to pull up and go round again, but it does not look as easy as that from the outside. It all looks slightly scary, with the column of aeroplanes marching forward, to the drum perhaps, mechanically and in good order, without much regard for what might be in front of them. All very going over the top in the first world war. I think that is what gives the game its pull. So when you can't decide whether an aeroplane is in the funnel or not, the illusion and its pull are broken.

At another level again, is it all about trust?

Reference 1: for something on Biba see http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/biba,-barbara-hulanicki/.

Hen harrier

Some people are very keen on goshawks. See, for example, reference 1. Other people are very keen on hen harriers and I remember my father coming as close to excitement as he ever came in public when he spotted one over some moor as we motored across Wales on our way to a holiday cottage.

And some journalists have bad days, which they indulge with a rather bad tempered rant about something or other. So on Saturday, one was given a centre page spread in the DT in which to dilate about those awful people at RSPB and RSPCA who have the hates for people who like to kill animals for sport. I associate to all those fine ladies in days gone by who used to watch their menfolk kill each other for sport, then taking their pick from among the survivors. Days gone by which included 14th century England and 19th century Mexico. Then to all those townsfolk who flock down to the bull ring to see the sport there.

It seems that the trouble with hen harriers is that they like to eat grouse, so there is some tension between the people who are keen on hen-harriers and the people who are keen on grouse, with the former being into tweeting and the latter being into shooting.

Now I am not that keen on either the RSPB or the RSPCA. They might do good work (although the feeble bird identifier offered by the RSPB continues to irritate me), but they also soak up a lot of money which might be put to better use. So I was interested to read a claim in this article that fund-raising, management and advertising consume near half of the RSPB budget, when RSPB themselves claimed until recently that they spent 90% of their budget on good works.

So off to their web site where their annual reports were invisible, at least to me. So off to the Charity Commission web site where their annual report for the year ending March 2013 was visible. I reproduce one at reference 2 for the convenience of readers. From which I find that their annual income is of the order of £120m of which about £30m was spent on generating that income; a bit like a large chunk of government expenditure going to service government debt. £85m was spent on what they call charitable purposes, and of that £85m about £30m was spent on conservation activities, things like putting up huts and bossy notices on Exminster Marshes. The rest going on research, policy, communication and education. So it looks as if the figures could indeed be so construed to get to the near half figure above - but I don't think that would be very fair. Policy, education and education are fairly muddy waters, but waters in which the likes of RSPB are properly paddling. One hopes though, that it is a condition of employment there, that one gets one's wellies into real muddy waters at least once a month.

All that said and leaving the hen harriers aside, I do not much care for the rather corporate style which the larger and more successful charities have adopted. Maybe it is a condition for success these days, but I still don't care for it and I am nostalgic about the days when charities were run on more amateur lines and their headquarters were not overrun with lobbyists, management consultants and other fat cats.

But good that it is so easy to check up on these things through the Charity Commission web site when the charity one is interested in seems a bit coy. Not the National Trust though - their annual report for the year ending March 2014 (not 2013) is very easy to find on their web site. A legacy of some ex-civil servant doing a stint as their chief executive?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/goshawk-white.html.

Reference 2: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/rspb1.pdf.

PS: internet connection very bad here in Epsom yesterday, perhaps because everybody was surfing around in search of presents, although the geekorama was disturbed by Microsoft burning up a lot of disc time on my PC on some indexing activity or other. Things much better this morning.

Ballet Rambert to the right

Two not-theatres and a not-bar

Discovering that my old school, the LSE, do a regular series of free lunch time concerts, thought to catch the last one of the Michaelmas Term last week.

Started off at the stand at Grant Road East in the usual way and headed up Lavender Hill and on to the Lost Theatre, a theatre built at the front of the recent redevelopment of a branch of Lambeth College. It appeared to be inactive, as it more or less always has done, but inspection of their web site today reveals that they are doing a family musical. Maybe we shall take a look. On to break the journey at Vauxhall Cross and walking past the spy house wondered whether their security guards had been privatised, like the ones at the Treasury (and one result of which has been that what has replaced the Treasury Guard, a civilian formation which was of approximately company strength, is a good deal more diverse than the Guard ever was). Thinking it a bit tactless to ask, decided not to. Then picked up another Bullingdon at the Albert Embankment to pass another large lump of construction steel, not on a lorry from Severfield Rowen (see reference 1). On round St. Thomas's and over Waterloo Bridge, to find that I was unable to park up at Houghton Street, so I had to push on up Kingsway to Sardinia Street where there were a few free slots. From there back to the Caffe Amici where I made the mistake of having a ham salad roll which was not up to much - while, judging by what other people were having, they probably would have done a perfectly respectable bacon sandwich, à la Whitecross Street, had I been less impatient.

And so to the Shaw Library, a place in the depths of the Anthropology Department, which I had rarely used when a student and which was now, as I think it was then, a cross between a rather relaxed library and a lounge, including a very grand and presumably very unused fireplace. I dare say one was allowed to smoke there in the old days. We were given Haydn Op.20 No.2 and Beethoven Op.74 by the Wu quartet, young but effective. There was a retiring collection, but I was impressed that LSE could put on such frequent & regular concerts on this basis. Perhaps they have done well out of the foreign postgraduate market. See reference 2 for the quartet and reference 3 for future concerts.

Needing refreshment afterwards, we eschewed the house bar, the 'Three Tuns', and thought instead to try the 'Nell of Old Drury' in Catherine Street, a watering hole with theatrical associations but which turned out to be old-style-boozer enough to have the temerity to be shutting at 1430. Must be an old-style-tenancy rather than a managed house; a chain would not tolerate the loss of our business, even such as it was. The not-bar. So off to the 'Coach and Horses' of Wellington Street, which was open and came complete with a modest number of rugby types, whiling away their busy afternoon. And while there was food it was fairly unobtrusive and the not very big bar area had not been colonised with tables on which holiday makers could take their luncheon. So fairly old-style-boozer too.

Back down Wellington Street to spot the flat beamer illustrated. Back across Waterloo Bridge to find the second not-theatre, and this time it really was not. I had noticed some time ago (see reference 4) that the Ballet Rambert were up to something on a vacant site next to the National Theatre, and it now turns out that the something is not a theatre for them at all, rather an administration building containing some rehearsal space. Presumably the ballet is up and running OK, but not to the extent of being able to justify their own theatre in London, not even one in the middle of the art hub of the south bank. Which all goes to show that all those theatrical administrators who are alleged to be so much keener on building theatres than on paying actors & actresses to put on shows in them, do not have it all their own way. (It should also be said in their defense, that government bean counters are traditionally much more relaxed about capital beans than current beans - with buildings coming out of the former pot and actors & actresses out of the latter).

Finished off in the wine bar above Platform 1 at Waterloo where I took a perfectly decent glass of gewürztraminer, despite the waitress not having a clue what I wanted until I found the place on the wine list for her, and where I noticed that despite it being quite a superior sort of wine bar, a good deal more beer was being drunk than wine. So what chance for a wine bar in Ewell? See reference 5.

For once in a while, an older & burbling drunk on the train home. We all looked the other way and did nothing, but he was a bit of a pain for the young lady alongside whom he has sat himself down with his plastic bag full of tinnies.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/first-luke.html.

Reference 2: http://wuquartet.com/.

Reference 3: http://www.lse.ac.uk/intranet/LSESocial/artsAndMusic/musicAtLSE/musicLentTerm2015.aspx.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=rambert.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/trolley-15a.html.