Trolleys 22a and 22b

The first of this pair was picked up in East Street, somewhere between Kiln Lane and the Epsom Road turning into Ewell Village. The second, conveniently from the same shop, from the Metro Bank end of Epsom market.

In the course of returning them, I learned that you cannot push two trolleys, even when siamesed, with one hand. You need one hand to push the one at the back and the other to steady the one at the front.

I have yet to put in my claim for expenses to M&S.

A project

Spotted in what looked like a fancy clothes shop in Albemarle Street.

So the year's project is to gather up suitable ingredients from car booters at Hook Road Arena and then to assemble them along the same lines. If I do a good enough job, I might get mine displayed in Albemarle Street too. Or maybe the carpet man on the corner would swap it for a carpet.

Pusings

I have been musing over the last few days why Putin is stirring up hate for decades to come in the Ukraine. Can't he see the somewhat comparable mess that we got ourselves into over Northern Ireland?

Putin might be a kleptocratic thug, but he is no fool. So why is he doing it? I offer a few rather disconnected thoughts.

Dreadful things were done by the Soviets in the Ukraine in and around the 1930s in the name of the greater good. There must still be plenty of Ukrainians who know all about this and in whom it will be easy to stir up hatred of all things Russians. Just as there are plenty of Finns. So why not try to smooth things over, rather than stir them up?

Maybe Russians in general dislike Ukrainians almost as much as Ukrainians dislike Russians. Maybe they remember them as the traitors of the second world war. Given the circumstances, perhaps not very fair, but I would imagine that a lot more Ukrainians wound up fighting for Hitler and otherwise doing his dirty work than did Russians.

Against which background, they might have a very reasonable fear of the treatment that Russians living in a right wing, nationalistic Ukraine might get. Spring to the defence of their fellow countrymen. In which connection I associated to their springing to the defence of their obnoxious fellow Slavs just about a century ago.

In any event, there is a real problem in that the borderlands are very mixed up with lots of both Russians and Ukrainians living there. Short of the sort of forced movements of population which happened at the end of the second world war, they have got to learn to get along with each other somehow.

It is unfortunate that governance & government in the Ukraine is about as bad as that in Russia.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the Ukrainian borders were so generous, including chunks which were not terribly Ukrainian, perhaps set down at a time when no-one thought that the Ukrainians would want out of their centuries old connection with Russia. Of the same sort of age as our own connection with Scotland.

Stirring up trouble abroad has long been used as a distraction by governments in trouble at home.

Maybe the Ukraine has lots of grain, which Russia wants to keep its grip on, being a bit short itself, in return for giving them energy.

Maybe the Russians, or at least the ruling kleptocracy, fear what might happen when the west takes over the Ukraine, and fills it with all kinds of western subversion, subversion which might well spill over into Mother Russia and disturb things. And they have a point of sorts: we may all have cheered and whooped when the Soviet Union fell apart, and sent in lots of highly paid contractors to teach them how to be good capitalists, but the outcome has not been that great for ordinary Russians. One crummy regime has been replaced by another, crummy in a rather different way, but still crummy.

Following up the point of sorts, and remembering both the French invasion of 200 years ago and the German invasion of 75 years ago, maybe the Russians really do continue to worry about the aggressive intentions and plans of their neighbours. Maybe all those nuclear tipped (I guess) US battle groups cruising around the world really do worry them. Maybe they really do hope to maintain a glacis of client states around their southern and western borders, a glacis which can take the brunt of any future invasion. And what about the Chinese? Will their eastern borders be a flash point at some point in the future?

PS 1: the photo, which carries it own acknowledgement, is the closest google images came to my idea of an old style log cabin, Russian or Ukrainian. Couldn't find one of a of row of them in a mean & squalid village street of the revolutionary era.

PS 2: I wonder what happened to all the Germans who went to live in Russia during, say, the nineteenth century? No idea how many of them there were; certainly more than thousands, perhaps as many as hundreds of thousands.

Mozart

Earlier in the week back to the Wigmore Hall to hear Alina Ibragimova (violin) and Cédric Tiberghien (piano) give us some Mozart violin sonatas: K6, K7, K9, K15, K29, K305, K376 and K402. Rather more pieces than I really like in a concert, but most of them were quite short.

Some of them, as might be deduced by their low numbers, were written when Mozart was very young, with some of the material, if not the publication, dating from his sixth year. All rather scary, even if one was talking juvenelia.

Rather to my surprise, I found I did not know any of the pieces, or at least not well enough to remember them. But they worked well enough, even if not as well as the ones that I do remember. Mozart is the man, even if a scary one. And I do like the violin sonata as a form.

Ibragimova was in black trousers & high heels rather than the evening dress favoured by some lady solists and had a rather active stance, moving backwards and forwards, ducking and diving in front of her stand, usually with one foot well ahead of the other. All of which combined to give her a splendid stage presence.

The page turner was considerably older than the pianist for whom he was turning pages; presumably something of a pianist himself - and hopefully happy enough to watch someone rather better than himself at close quarters. I wonder if I would be jealous in such a situation, rather than just be pleased to be able to watch a master at work? I remember talking to a chap in TB who used, when younger, to do rally driving and who had once won a prize which consisted of being taken for a drive by Jackie Stewart. He, the chap in TB that is, was still full of what a great experience it was to sit there and watch the great man do his magic.

The only weakness of the performance to my mind was that sometimes the piano seemed a bit loud, with the result that some of the violin entries were lost. But maybe this was more a result of some of the music starting life as piano music, rather than any weakness in its performance.

The concert was sponsored, in part anyway, by the private banking part of Lloyds Bank, that well known if semi-detached bit of the public sector. We failed to spot any obviously private bankers, or any of their customers, and deduced that they must look much the same as the rest of us. In the interval we pondered on whether we qualified under either the £250,00 capital or the £100,000 income rules, deciding that whether or no, the fees that they were likely to charge us probably outweighed the benefits. Would we do significantly better than if we just read the personal finance page in the DT from time to time? No action.

PS 1: oddly, if I put 'personal finance' into google, Lloyds Bank comes out at top of the list. Maybe google knows something that we missed.

PS 2: records suggest that we had never heard Ibragimova before and that we last heard Tiberghien back in June 2012 at St. Luke's, having just failed to hear him in June 2013 at the Wigmore.

PS 3: back home and wondering whether the juvenilia were really part of the canon, I turned up my score of the sonatas. Which came to me from Leipzig via Eton College and which then only contained 18 sonatas altogether, indexing them by subject (in musical notation that is) rather than by the keys or K numbers that us lesser mortals use. So I am none the wiser.

Statisticians

Back in 2011, I commented on the failure to predict the demand for teachers in this country - see reference 1. So I was not impressed this morning, three years later, to read that we are just as bad at predicting & managing the demand for nurses, which one might have thought was rather easier, with so much of the demand arising from us seniors who have been here for ages. The demand side is steady, even if the supply side is a bit wobbly.

According to the Guardian, it is not all down to the statisticians this time, rather that some part of the present acute shortage of home grown nurses is down to the closing down or damping down of a whole lot of nurse training capability a few years ago, presumably as part of driving down government expenditure. When we will ever learn that short term gain is not always long term gain?

Perhaps time to remind those who believe that market forces are the panacea for all our woes of the pig cycle, the phenomenon well known to students of economics whereby the price of pig moves on a stately sine wave, year after year. All to do with lags in the system. One can only suppose that all those economists had forgotten this part of their lesson by the time they made it to Tory Central Office, where the market has the authority that used to be accorded to the Bible.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=limitations+of+statistics.

Winter in Epsom

Fairly fierce looking snow for about five minutes this afternoon, then it stopped. Is that going to be it for Epsom this year?

All too much for the telephone which could not do much with it at all. Also all too much for them up north, where I gather from BH that conditions are a bit grim. But not all too much for the national grid with templar looking very quiet. See reference 1.

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

A country of contrasts

First, we have the killer whale. It seems that there is a vigorous campaign going on in and around Florida to release a killer whale which has been living in a tank for our entertainment for getting on for 45 years. I puzzle about how it is that animal lovers can get so soppy about such an animal, which makes its living by eating seals and other such animals, more or less alive. I associate to some senior ladies who had been incarcerated, I think on grounds of having a child out of wedlock, for a similar number of years in one of the Epsom hospitals. In a round of cost cutting, the authorities thought they would dump these ladies out in the community. Which, in my recollection, attracted a robust response which I paraphrase as 'sod that. You have destroyed us and our lives by locking us up for all these years, you can jolly well carry on looking after us for what time we have left'. I imagine the killer whale, if it could talk, might say something similar.

Second, we have the super sniper. Now to me a sniper is a necessary evil; not quite as bad as a spy, the James Bond variety of which makes its living by deception of & lying to those among whom they live, but tendencies in that direction. I associate to a story, by Andrei Makine I think, about a Soviet sniper who hides in trees overlooking German camps during the second world war and shoots soldiers at breakfast, or while they are shaving. Not the same at all as knights in armour assembling at the designated field at the designated time to fight it out honourably, in the open. From whence I associate to the Spaniards who thought that shooting someone with a gun, at long range, was base and cowardly. Real men killed each other close up, with knives.

Which is not quite where Gary Younge was coming from in his Guardian piece headlining the latest 'Hang 'em High' from Clint Eastwood called 'American Sniper', a film based on a true story of a serial killer, a film which is being watched by many people and which is set to make a great deal of money - but I think we share a distaste for it. Again, perhaps a necessary evil, one which involves what sounds like rather unpleasant people on both sides of the fight, but it does not seem very tactful to highlight this evil in quite this way. Ironic that the serial killer in question should end up shot dead by a deranged veteran, due to come to trial shortly.

And third we have the Getty foundation. Now according to wikipedia, Getty was an interesting as well as a very rich man. A graduate of our own Oxford University. The man who invented Saudi oil and who learned to speak Arabic in the process. A man who seems to have been exempted from conscription in the first world war - perhaps on the reasonable grounds that he was of more value to the US war effect drilling for oil than in a trench - although the chaps in the trenches might not have been quite so sure about that. And also famously mean. So it is ironic that his web site now offers free, quality images of things that were in his collection.

Brought to my attention by the current edition of the NYRB which offers a full page advertisement for Manet's 'Jeanne Demarsy', said to be 'of exquisite beauty and extraordinary painterly quality'. Going to http://www.getty.edu/, I find that I can download, for free, a digital copy of this picture, some 5,900 by 9,200 pixels and occupying just over 80Mb, a volume of data which it would have taken hours if not days to move about when I started out on computers, back in the seventies of the last century, and which now downloads from the other side of the world in a few minutes. Such images must be a great help to art teachers, trying to interest wannabe Hirsts 'n Traces from up north in the art of the past. And they almost make it worthwhile to acquire a huge flat screen to hang on the wall to display them. I offer a sample above and there is the usual small prize for the first person who correctly positions the sample in the real thing.

I wonder if the computer display being active, and emitting its own light rather than reflecting the ambient light (of uncertain quality), is therefore more faithful to the real thing than a reproduction printed - or even painted - on paper?

PS 1: the third item in this post is a reprise of the third item in a previous post, to be found at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/mrs-seacole.html.

PS 2: slightly irritated that I do not know why 60,000,000 pixels makes 80,000,000 bytes.

Hampton kitsch

To Hampton Court to review the vegetable patch (see reference 1), it being already a month or so since our last visit.

The cabbages were looking a bit ravaged, what with the rough weather and being picked, but the patch was in otherwise good order. And we found that the eastern wall, as well as sporting a garden shed fully kitted out with the sort of gardeners' memorabilia which would be useful in an Agatha Christie adaptation, now sported a shelter which sheltered various fancy woodwork, including the plaque illustrated, complete, if you look carefully with a mouse. A throwback to the carving of the days of Grinling Gibbons (see reference 2), if not quite to that of the master himself. I wonder where they went to get it done? Perhaps I should have read the accompaniments with more care.

Pushed on into the wilderness to find a small number of crocuses, snowdrops (mainly those large look-alike snowdrops under bushes which are not really snowdrops) and daffodils out. One rather vague & ineffective mother who was letting her child pick snowdrops for mummy had to be chastised.

Privy garden looking well, as it does in the winter. Carp, if not all koi, present, correct and ambled across to be fed when they spotted us. Purple cyclamen behind the wall behind the naked nymph at the back of the sunken garden with the vaguely animal topiary doing very well, particularly since they have not been there that long.

Wound up in the Tilt Yard café to find that the choice of cakes now that tea & cake has been moved to a counter near the entrance, away from the main serving area at the back, much diminished. The things that Starbucks and similar places call muffins, and which I do not much care for, much in evidence. No sign of any kind of almond tart. I remember the cakes under old management being much better and I suppose that now I will have to push for a visit to Bridge Road if I want cake.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/tudor-greens.html.

Reference 2: http://www.gglvfederation.org/. Presumably somewhere near where the chap lived, not, I do not suppose, where he went to school. But there is an executive headmaster, for all the world like an executive chef at a pretentious pub.

Chessington kitsch

First, a neighbour thought to install a festive collection of polar bears on the roof of his front bay window. Second, Chessington Garden Centre must be having a bad start to the year, with access made difficult by the road works at Malden Rushett. So we thought we ought to provide a bit of support and off we went to the garden centre. the very long way round.

Entrance shed looking a bit bare, all the Christmas gear having been taken out and no new display having yet been mounted.

Fish shed also in the throes of a reorganisation and not its usual splendid self at all. No interesting sea anemones let alone jelly fish, no fish longer than about a foot and no feeding time at the koi tanks. By way of compensation there were some rather odd frogs from hot climes.

But there was a fine display of polar bears and other animals from cold climes. The large polar bear illustrated might have been quite fun on our front lawn for a bit, but he or she was rather expensive and it would be a toss up whether we got fed up with all the smart remarks from passers-by before some neighbouring children pinched him for their garden. So we desisted.

And so to the large café for some refreshment, to find that as well as tea in something a bit more like cups than those which were provided for the previous post, they also did a rather good almond slice. A sort of cross between a bit of sponge cake and an almond tart. Very nice it was too.

Podlife

From time to time - see for, example, reference 1 - I mention the pods which sophisticated folk think are all the thing for meetings.

Then the other day, in a service area somewhere between here and Cambridge, I came across a motorway pod.

This part of the service area was essentially a large shed, the sort of thing that might otherwise contain a Sainsbury's or a Wickes. Large and airy and comfortable, if a touch noisy. There were plenty of seats and there was plenty of space, so why one would pay £8 an hour to sit in this well glazed convenience was beyond me. In any event, no-one took the plunge during our short stay nearby. Perhaps it is out on trial.

I might also record that this might have been the occasion when I got a dreadful cup of tea from Costa. It started off badly with a great chunky white mug, only very distantly related to a tea cup. Then the tea in the mug had a very odd taste, almost undrinkable, but a taste which I have had from Costa's motorway tea before. And then, a couple of days later I got the same sort of taste from a cup of tea at home and today's theory is that the taste is that of soap and so today's resolution is to rinse as well as wash the cups.

I wonder whether this is a problem that people with dishwashers recognise.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/watson.html.

Ely cathedral

A good visit to Ely Cathedral last week, despite the cold.

The cold was compounded by the failure of the gas a few days previously, which meant that the cathedral was even colder than usual for the time of year. It was no wonder that the notables of its glory days were so often portrayed in layers of clothing covering them from neck to ankle and topped off with a substantial hat. The volunteer manning (actually a woman) the paying desk appeared to have on several coats and scarves plus hat and gloves. There was a two bar electric fire sitting beside the stool she was perched on, reminding me of winter evenings of my childhood, similarly perched over an electric fire while doing one's homework - or whatever it was that one got up to in one's bedroom. Let's hope the Prince-Bishop is exempt from Health & Safety regulations.

But before we got that far, we had stood in the elaborate porch and wondered what the murmuring was from inside. Stepped inside to find a small herd of cleaners, perhaps volunteers, polishing the floor of the nave with serious push-along rotary floor polishers, The nave had been cleared of chairs, across the crossing and through to the screen, for the purpose, which meant that we got a splendidly uncluttered view, which now included the various interesting patterns worked in stone into the floor. Patterns which, like the ceiling, had been done by the Victorians, but done rather well. A very sympathetic bit of restoration.

As on the last visit, very struck by the stone floors and the religious vandalism of the time of Henry VIII. Also by the quite large number of pilasters, almost columns, which reached up into the air just to stop, not supporting anything. A mismatch of structure and function, but one which did not seem to matter that much, More troubling, there were a number of roof ribs which appeared bent to my eye, That apart, the stonework was splendid; a masterpiece in limestone - or more probably the masterpieces of lots of master masons.

And then there were the episcopal boxes. The foundation saint, the wife of some Saxon chief, got a shrine, long destroyed. The bishops from the time of the building of the present cathedral got large boxes, maybe eight feet by two feet six by two feet six, much the same as those used for kings, for example Richard II, in the ambulatory of Westminster Abbey. Then, as time wore on and space wore out, the boxes got progressively smaller, until by the nineteenth century all you got was a stone slab let into the floor, with all the tourists footing it over you. Very undignified. And if you were merely a canon rather than a bishop, a small tablet let into the wall. But at least what you lost in size, you gained in not being walked over.

Over more recent years, the cathedral authorities have acquired an interesting selection of modern ecclesiastical art, some successful, some not. But right to try, at least, that is, if one takes the point of view of said authorities. Otherwise, the place just becomes a mausoleum for dead people and their dead values. Musical authorities, fond of early 19th century music from the German speaking world, have a similar problem.

Also an interesting mixture of stained glass, a mixture not so much of young and old, which I did not know about, more of some which I liked and some which I didn't like, In a building of this age, I think I prefer my stained glass not to be, in effect, pictures of saints on glass. The glass should reflect the setting more than that; play to the medium rather than in spite of it. Stained glass museum in the triforium level interesting, with some very old, but rather more Victorian and later glass. One wondered how a substantial chunk of 13th century (or so) stained glass from Soissons Cathedral wound up there. One also got different angles on the cathedral stonework.

The only failing which I noticed was the use of electric to augment the natural light. A lot of this was too strong and dazzled rather than illuminated.

Better sausage roll in the cathedral café than that which I had bought from the pie shop in Huntingdon. Better grade of both sausage meat and pastry. Served by a middle aged lady from Sarejevo, in England, she told us, for years and years. Since long before the recent troubles there. Some of the other volunteers were very much fen people, with interesting accents and topics of conversation. Not the sort of thing one would expect in a Cambridge charity shop at all.

Not having taken a suitable picture myself, I turned to google for one. Plenty on offer, most of which illustrated the difficulty of capturing even some part of the experience. Plumped for this one, from some part of the wikipedia empire, which gives something of the oddly soft texture of the unusually hard limestone (from Barnack) - but gives little sense of the great height of the nave.

Reference 1: it seems that our last visit was just about two years ago. See http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/visit-report-ely-cathedral.html,

PS: I notice in passing that Jame Fawcett's book is now available at Amazon for around £250, so I shall still have to give it a miss; a pity as this visit to Ely has rearoused my interest in old stone floors.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Quite by chance I came across this lady in someone else's blog, the author it seems of two books of letters from the early part of the 20th century, when life in the west of the US was still wild.

I got the one called 'Letter on an Elk Hunt', in the form of a photographic reproduction of a book which was once the property of the George Bruce Branch of the New York Public Library. It's arrival in Epsom also involved Houghton Mifflin, Forgotten Books and Amazon. The photography resulted in very large print, with the occasional page in a more regular print; we could not work out why this should have been so. But both that and the easy style of the writer made for an easy & pleasant read.

What I got was a short epistolary story of an Elk Hunt somewhere in the vicinity of Burnt Fork, Wyoming in the summer of 1914, just as the war in Europe was breaking out, I dare say there were people of Central Powers origins as well as of Allied Powers origins in Burnt Fork, which would have complicated their attitudes to the coming war. Just about the time that Scott was going to the South Pole and maybe twenty years before Downes was heading into the wastes of Canada (see reference 2). And a good fit with my established taste for tales of ventures into wildernesses of one sort or another.

But this one was a bit different in being written by a woman, not that interested in the Iron Man side of things, and who was apt to break out into all sorts of housewifely activities given the least provocation, usually in the form of a family in harder circumstances than she was herself. And life was certainly hard for homesteaders in the Wyoming of the time; one could just about scratch a living if there were not too many climatic, agricultural or other accidents.

All of which resulted in some tragedy, some resourceful self-sufficiency and some folk who were poor but proud and hard working. Life was hard and people knew they had to help each other if they were to survive - although I dare say they had their ration of the sturdy beggars who plagued early modern England. Perhaps they were the gun slinging cowboys of westerns.

Elk hunting seemed to be a reasonably common sport at the time of writing. This hunting party seemed to consist of half a dozen or so men, very mixed in their backgrounds, and rather fewer women. Transport was horses and carts, or perhaps one should say wagons. Women who, in addition to their regular domestic functions, were expected to be able to ride a horse, drive a wagon, make and break camp.

The hunt started off in the near desert, perhaps the high sierra of westerns, and then moved into the mountains where there were plenty of creeks, crags, trails and trees. No to mention snow.

The object was, I dare say, partly for the fun of it but also for the meat that came with the elks. Then there were also people who hunted the elk for their front teeth - elks having a few lower front incisors and two upper canines (stumpy rather than tusky), with all the rest of the teeth, the serious chewing teeth, much further back. These front teeth were and still are widely used for ornament - google finds plenty of it - and it was worth while at the time of this hunt to hunt elk just for their front teeth, abandoning the rest of the carcasses to scavengers. All very wasteful and, I think, illegal, game licenses and game wardens having been invented by the time of writing,

I wondered a bit about the letter writing. Were they really just letters to friends which found their way into a book by some chance, or were they always intended for publication? How did one find the time and energy to write them when holed up in the bad light of a tent in the wilds, after the labours of the day? To write them out twice, since the writer seems to have copies of them all. Where were the letter boxes?

I also thought to see what the digital public library of America (see reference 1) knew about the author, to get the answer not much, But they did offer good quality electronic versions of both books for free, including some introductory material which I did not get in my version. Introductory material which served to set the scene.

PS: I think this Burnt Fork is somewhere near Green River City, on the Green River in the south of Wyoming. A bit north of east of Salt Lake City, Still looks fairly wild now, but not so wild that they don't have streetview,

Reference 1: http://dp.la/ - the shortest internet address I recall seeing. Canadians and other Americans not of the US might be a bit peeved by the appropriation of the term 'America'.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sleeping-island.html.

Georgette Heyer

Just finished what I think must be my first book by Georgette Heyer, 'An Infamous Army', and thought it rather good, despite some romantic longeurs.

It all started with my picking up another TLS at Waitrose a week or so ago. Once home, it did not look very promising at all, starting with 3 pages of poetry. Some of them about 1,300 pages of Robert Herrick from OUP for a modest £250. I think even the reviewer was a bit puzzled about this: who on earth was going to wade through all this stuff, even supposing some academic library (said to be so short of money) was going to stump up the necessary.

Followed by a rather mixed bag, including a review of what sounds like tripe from the punk called Johnny Rotten and a further page about medieval poetry. But there was some stuff of interest in the bag and shortly after two pages on a collection of not very remarkable sounding books about matters Wellingtonian (a touch early for the Waterloo bicentennial) there was a puff for Georgette Heyer's 1937 novel about the Waterloo Campaign, as a result of which it was rapidly downloaded onto my kindle for the grand sum of £2.62 and is now read. And it was, indeed, rather good, It might even get BH going on the kindle as I now learn that she did quality time on Heyer as an adolescent.

Very much like 'La Bataille' by Patrick Rambaud, a widely and deservedly praised account of the rather earlier, if equally sanguinary Battle of Aspern; perhaps the beginning of the end of Napoleon's reign, when slogging matches replaced cunning strokes. Like Rambaud, Heyer tells the story from the point of view of a staff officer, a handsome young colonel, one of Wellington's aides. This makes it possible to flit around the battle, taking in various people, places & points of view and to introduce a bit of love interest. And despite the flatness of the prose, which rather reminded me of that of Agatha Christie, she can tell a good story and I got quite excited at the climax of the battle, despite knowing roughly how it went and certainly knowing the outcome, if for no other reason than that of having passed through the memorial railway station thousands of times.

I quite liked the love interest going no further than a couple of scandalously see through ball gowns; no blood, sweat or tears. And she probably did not need to invent the gowns as I recall reading in Adam Zamoyski's account of the Vienna Congress, which was interupted by Waterloo, of the English ladies there who liked to sport a lot more naked flesh than was considered proper in Vienna, despite the otherwise loose morals which prevailed.

She brings to life all the difficulties Wellington faced with a polyglot army, mostly Dutch, Belgian and German (and this not counting the Prussians) and with most of his own Penisular veterans overseas and out of reach.

She points out that Wellington liked personable and able but young men as his aides. Men who were intelligent enough to know what he was about but too young to have experience and to have opinions of their own. They were content just to do what they were told. Not that different to our own ministerial offices in Whitehall.

She makes something of Wellington's capacity for work, sustained for some months before the battle and then for the very long two or three days of the battle itself. On her story, the thin red line held in the early evening of the big day, when things were looking a bit sticky and the Prussians were yet to arrive in force, in part because of the personal energy & example of the Iron Duke, He managed to get everywhere and to put a bit of spirit back into troops who were frightened & flagging after long hours of being shot at and worse.

On her account, Wellington was very concerned that Napoleon should not turn his western flank and cut him off from the ports which linked him to England. For this reason he held enough troops in the west to seriously weaken his centre, which left him vulnerable to Napoleon's thrust north, designed to split Wellington away from Blucher on his eastern flank. A nice illustration of the problems and puzzles faced by commanders.

She makes it all into a very close run thing. If we had not held Hougomont, which the French could and should have taken, if the French had not got their set-piece attacks wrong, if a chance cannon ball had put the Duke out of action or if the Prussians had not arrived when they did, things might have turned out rather differently. And one could go on, But we did win - and I remember reading somewhere that it is that hard fought battles of this sort which are apt to end in the total rout of one side or the other, as was the case at the Battle of Hastings. Certainly this one big battle was the end of the 100 days. The French no longer had an army fit for battle.

Perhaps next I shall turn up my two volume biography of the man by Sir Herbert Maxwell Bart., a biography which provided some good maps in support of Heyer. Nice to know roughly where all these places she goes on about are.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/tls.html. I can report that I have at least started reading the Scott Moncrieff  translation of Proust (very good it is too) and I did read the hawk book and posted it at reference 2. Two hits from one issue not bad.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/goshawk-white.html.

Tweet, tweet

A new to the extension roof bird this morning, rather pretty. About the size of a tit, long tail, whizzing about the roof in fast, short bursts.

Start by turning up pictures in google of long tailed tits and it was not one of those.

So then ask google about birds with log tails generally and pied wagtail comes up top of the hit list.

Turn up the pied wagtail blurb on the RSPB site and it fits the written description.

Turn up the corresponding pictures on google, and while they look about right, the pictures are all black above, white below with a mixture in the middle. While my bird was greeny gray above, creamy white below with hints of green and yellow in the middle. Laptop screen colours may not be that clever, but they are not that bad, so I am left a touch unsure about what it was that I saw. Must consult a local tweeter.

Is it some Epsom special, some hybrid which favours the Epsom Salts?

PS: as an after thought I make enquires about grey wagtails and yellow wagtails, both of which are far too yellow. So some traction for the hybrid theory,

Darting about (2)

Following the doings posted at reference 1, we have now managed a dart crossing. A crossing during which we actually saw some quite big ships in the river below. London docks is not completely dead and buried.

Then this morning I think I had better check my nice new dart account to see what that has been up to.

First problem is that I do not have a clue how to log on to it, despite having made a careful record of my login credentials. Try various searches and eventually find myself in a document with a 'click here to login' and I am away.

To find myself in a web site which is rather like that for Bullingdons, with your being able to view and even download a complete record on one's doings dart, with the illustration above giving some idea of what is there. Maybe in several years time my record will be more interesting, maybe worth the securocrats time to take a peek at it. One assumes that they would have no difficulty in so doing: not that I mind particularly, one only hopes that they do not waste too much of their computer's time on such stuff. In any event, drug dealers moving their stock around the estuary will have to take to boats or, more  risky, stolen vehicles.

And in the meantime I have loaned the government £18.33. Or perhaps the outfit to which they have sold the operation.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/darting-about.html.

In praise of Edis of Ely

We found that Ely still boasts a pork butcher in the High Street, from whom we took a some sausages, a pork pie, some bacon and, with our feathered friends in mind, a pig's ear.

The sausages were plain, no herbs, leeks or anything else of that sort, and baked very well. Served with mash and crinkly cabbage. The left over sausages went into sandwiches the following morning. Not sure why, but they were much better than anything that we manage to get from the big supermarkets: I don't think that it is all in the mind.

The pork pie gave us about four servings. Again, made without all the pepper and spice and all things not-nice that other vendors seem to find necessary. Good pastry, not too soft and not too hard on the outside and with a nicely soft white layer on the inside. Jelly about right too.

The bacon was described as dry cured, smoked streaky and the first four rashers went lightly grilled into the breakfast sandwiches this morning. Sandwiches made with soft white bread, far better far these purposes than any of your fancy or brown breads. The white bread, also from Ely, was satisfactory but not good, but the bacon more than made up for the quality of the bread. Odd that one can still get decent pork, pork pies and pies from both Huntingdon and Ely, but not decent bread. Whereas Hambledon in Hampshire, a village we lived in for a bit back in the seventies of the last century, still, at that time, boasted both an excellent baker and an excellent butcher. The former selling little apart from lots of split tin white loaves, The latter being so famous that it once figured on the front cover of a Ladybird edition of the 'Little Red Hen' story.

The pig's ear is hanging up in the hawthorn tree in the front garden. So far, getting on for 48 hours after hanging, the birds have not found it.

PS: with thanks to streetview for the picture. It took a little while to find it as I had thought the name was 'Edies' rather than 'Edis' - a change which leaves me quite unclear as to how the name should be pronounced.

Dream time

For the first time that I can remember, a hospital flavoured dream.

A large, light room. I am face down on top of some sort of contraption, a cross between an altar, a complicated bit of scaffolding and a rather odd chunk of shuttering for a rather odd chunk of concrete. About the size of a small car, perhaps a Toyota 1.0 VVT-i iQ2 3dr (see reference 1).

I have a large woolly sweater on and am worrying about getting too warm. I mildly suggest that it might be removed - not something I seem to be in a position to do myself - but the head man says rather crossly that I will have to put up it with as he can't be doing with loose belongings sculling about the place. I little later I notice my large woolly hat and my large woolly scarf, both rather expensive items, chucked in a corner of the room along with some other rubbish, no doubt to be cleared away in due course and carried off to the dumpster. I don't think it appropriate to mention the matter and it is all rather irritating.

At some point we have BH chatting cosily with one of the team about husbands who are always losing their belongings.

The second man starts to do something with my head. It feels as if he is sticking little tabs all the way round where a hat might rest, perhaps the sort of tabs that heart testers use. I am a bit puzzled as no-one had told me that anything was going to be done to my head. I don't seem to be able to talk, although I can see and hear well enough, so I can't ask what is going on.

After a while, the second man takes a break for his lunch and starts to eat his baguette, the sort of thing you might get from Upper Crust at Waterloo Station, on a table just below my head. I eye him at work on his baguette until he spots my obviously wakeful eye on him. He is a bit annoyed as he thought I was out of it and moves away to finish his baguette where I can't see him. He gets ticked off by the head man, annoyed in his turn by this lapse of etiquette.

A group of us head of for the canteen. Not at all clear how I get there as I am clearly not in a position to self-propel but there is nothing in the way of being wheeled through corridors.

After another while, back in the large bright room, face down on the contraption. Woolly sweater now off. Head man annoyed again, presumably at our absence, Somebody starts doing something to my leg. I am slightly puzzled because they usually do something to one's hand or arm at this point. At which point I wake up.

Reference 1: http://www.toyota.co.uk/ - but probably quicker just to feed the model string into google.

Nostalgia 2

The old bridge at Huntingdon, with the Ouse in winter flood. Last time we saw it, many years ago now, it was quite clear, with masses of big black eels moving along under both banks. Not now sure what direction that they would have been moving but the sea is to the left.

Nostalgia 1

What we think is all or part of what was Huntingdon Grammar School, attended by my father in the 1920's.

At least a passing couple were fairly sure that it had been the Grammar School and were very sure that it had been the Registry Office after that because they had got married there. It is also in Old Grammar School Walk,

Now removed to Hinchingbrooke House, once the home of the 1st Earl of Sandwich (the 4th Earl was the inventor of the popular snack), Samuel Pepys's sponsor. I suppose he would be reasonably happy with having given his name to the ubiquitous snack, even if Pepys is more famous in other ways. Cromwell also had it for a while, presumably when the Earl was out of favour, or perhaps sharing the exile of his future king.

Reference 1: http://www.hinchingbrookeschool.net/page/default.asp?title=Home&pid=1.

Order of the Bath (East Anglian Chapter)

At least one hotel we looked at, and probably two, went in for an open plan bath. That is to say a large, full on bath in one's hotel room, about where one might expect the television to be. What is left of the bathroom is also rather open plan, with a screen but without a door. Presumably such hotels are punting for the honeymoon trade rather than ours.

The hotel room we are actually in does have a proper bath room (although it has double doors, rather than a conventional door) and it also has a full on bath. A very large, free-standing affair, with chicken feet and standing on a little dais at one side of the bath room. Taps and plug in the middle. The catch with the taps is that they are not connected to a hot water supply which in any way matches the size of the bath. And the catch with the plug is that being centre mounted one is apt to pull it out at the wrong moment. Rather a pain given the length of time it takes to get a usable amount of bath water.

But at least the bath is sturdy. It could probably cope with two people in it at once, should one's taste run to that sort of thing.

Birth houses

We came across the house where Oliver Cromwell was born, in Huntingdon, the other day, illustrated. There is an elaborate plaque to the birth, just visible above the entrance, on the right. And now the house is the Cromwell House care home, caring for all kinds of lesser mortals.

At the time it struck me as rather incongruous that the birthplace of this national figure, big on the English scene, if bad on the Irish scene, should end up in this way.

But one is one to do? We mostly memorialise our national figures by means of statues in public places - parks and squares - outdoors and by means of church memorials indoors. We might stick blue plaques on the walls of buildings which they passed through in life, but we do not, generally speaking, particularly mark the places of their births and deaths. And that seems about right: a blue plaque is reasonably discrete and does not make any claim on the building concerned - whereas the rather more elaborate plaque above the door of this building does.

Elaborate plaques should be reserved for the case when the building in question has itself been made into some kind of memorial, perhaps a museum devoted to the life and deeds, good and bad, of the subject. In the way, for example, of the Remington Museum in Ogdensburg. See the first museum at reference 1. But something which we are only going to do in exceptional cases; in the ordinary way we are going to want to recycle such buildings. We cannot afford to make museums or even mausoleums of all the buildings through which a big cheese happened to have passed at some point or other.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/two-more-museums.html.

Endellions

Endellion Quartet at the Wigmore last Friday, the first time we have heard them for more than six months (see reference 1).

Worries about trains and the weekend works at Wimbledon were quite unfounded, with trains between Epsom and Waterloo working normally all evening. The Raynes Park waiting room library even yielded two interesting looking books, one of them late of the Boot's lending library service with its distinctive green shield stickers and of which my mother was a regular subscriber back in the early sixties. I think her line was that one got to new novels quicker than if one waited for them on the council library waiting list - and it was still a lot cheaper than buying. I wondered whether any of these commercial lending libraries, the libraries which, as it were, paid George Elliot's bills, are still around? I ask the Harrod's web site about libraries today and all I seem to get back is a selection of perfume.

Back at the Wigmore, the Endellion gave us Haydn's Op. 76 No. 5, Janáček's String Quartet No, 1 (aka the Kreutzer sonata) and Schubert's D 887. A nicely balanced programme, with my coping with the rather strange (to me, despite having heard it at least once before. See reference 2) Janáček, rather well. Seemed to follow on well from the Enescu earlier in the week. Struck once again by the noises out of small wooden boxes effect which I sometimes get from string quartets.

The programme notes made much of the connections between the Janáček, the unpleasant short story from Tolstoy and the masterful violin sonata from Beethoven of the same name. Sad to say, I made no connections at all. Must do better next time.

Concert slightly marred by a certain amount of fidgeting and coughing in our immediate vicinity and rather a lot of coughing in the natural breaks. But at least there was a decent pause after music before clapping - something which the audience did not seem to understand about at our recent concert at the Dorking Halls.

But, in the round, Endellion deliver the goods once again. Plus economies of scale in that they offer very nearly the same concert at the West Road hall in Cambridge tomorrow.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=endellion&max-results=20&by-date=true.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Jan%C3%A1%C4%8Dek.

Trolley21a

Snapped in a bin closet in the yard of the Lamb Hotel in Ely. Quite apart from the difficulty there may have been in getting it out, there were also the difficulties that hotel management had sort of ownership rights over it and that I did not know to where to return it. So it remains where it was snapped.

I might also mention their difficulty with bread. When asking for mixed bread with olives etc last night, the sort of thing which is entirely normal in Epsom, I was presented with two slices of factory sliced white bread, not very fresh, each sliced diagonally into two triangles and neatly presented on a shiny white plate with ample supplies of butter. While BH got much better brown bread lumps served with her soup. And then for breakfast this morning, there was no bread on offer at all, only a modest selection of sugary or fatty pastries. A very modest supply of toast was to be had, if one asked for it. Kippers were also to be had, but at least the waitress was honest about them, admitting when asked that they came out of a plastic bag. I thought I was playing safe when I went for poached eggs on toast, but the eggs which turned up were slightly over cooked, reeked of, tasted of and were stained by vinegar. It is not the first time that this has happened, it seeming that many hotel cooks are too lazy to poach eggs without it these days.

Trolley 20

An easy pinch from the car park in the Sainsbury's in the centre of Huntingdon. Just had to wheel it across the park to one of the trolley dumps and the job was done.

Then off to Huntingdon proper to try to visit the two churches, one of which turned out to be firmly closed and the other of which was in the hands of the painters & plumbers. Very smelly it was too.

They both rather reminded me of the church at Leatherhead: very old but also very messed about with over the years. One of them even sported what looked like a Norman door with dog tooth carving around its head. I forget the proper term.

Is it progress?

Lord Falconer's assisted dying bill came up in the Lords again last week. I found the print account that I read rather depressing - it making it sound as if their Lordships had spent most of the time available talking about whether the word 'suicide' should replace the word 'dying' in the title of the proposed bill. I suppose one just has to accept that in our world of representative democracy, in which I believe, one just has to put up with the sometimes tiresome discussions of one's representatives and to accept that it is unlikely that others are going to strike quite the right note about something that one cares about oneself. Rather like expecting a whisky buff to be enthusiastic about a present of whisky; one is never going to get that quite right either.

At least the proponents of the bill managed to be upbeat about its likely demise, with talk of it having got further than ever before and bringing it forward for another outing next session. Maybe sensible social legislation is speeding up with, for example, gay marriage having got through decades faster last year than gay legality fifty years ago - and maybe we will get there with this one in the next year or so.

And then I will be able to start worrying about the pace of change. It is sensible to be careful & conservative about such matters. More haste less speed and all that.

Reference 1: http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Discharge lounge art

Last week, to make a change from the EDH, a visit to St. George's at Tooting.

Started off to find one of the newish blocks of flats in station approach newly swathed in scaffolding. Not impressed that it needs that sort of attention so soon. Will it still be there at all in fifty years time? But then, the houses in our road are perhaps 75 years old, and few of them have not been the subject of major works in that time.

From there to a rather dilapidated Lambeth Cemetery, presumably first laid out when Garratt Lane was still in the country. The original railings, presumably cut out for scrap at the start of the second war (a practise which FIL believed was unnecessary & wasteful, except in that it gave people a sense of doing something to help at a time when it all looked a bit grim), had been replaced by something cheaper, now rusting away. Two cockerels were crowing from the garden of one of the keepers' cottages. Half a dozen new graves in a row by the railings. I associated to the rather grander and even older cemetery we came across in North London a few years ago. See reference 1.

Through the hospital car park to pass various people smoking. Either the managers are not inclined to be so stroppy about smoking as those at Epsom or they decided that enforcement of stroppier rules was going to cause more trouble than it was worth in this rather rougher area.

On into the discharge lounge, decorated with the art work illustrated, nicely judged for its place and position. According to the ticket it was digitally printed onto the canvas, maybe three and a half feet by five, so maybe one could print the thing to the size of the intended space. I thought this quiet, moderate abstract was well suited to the clinic in question; one would not have wanted the sort of noisy stuff one got down some of the corridors or, for example, in the nearby Wetherspoons. Hung on the wall by two wall plates, one more or less in the middle of each side, and which were screwed to the wall by cunning screws which one needed a special tool to turn, special enough that I did not own one. Perhaps it was policy for all attachments to be thus screwed, given the number of light fingered gentry about. The work was donated by the artist, one Brendan Neiland, trained in Birmingham and not much older than myself. The ticket claimed that he 'keeps the sense of light ... found in works by ... Vermeer'. See reference 2 for some noisier efforts.

On into Honest Burgers for refreshment, the menu amounting to a modest choice of burgers. Service good, wine good, burger good - but, as is often the case, a bit let down by the bun. Why is it that people put all this TLC into their burgers not to bother with the bun? Chips adequate, although you need to be careful to stop them covering them with salt. A new looking bicycle hanging on the wall. The sort of light fittings you get on building sites - a base which comes with two short copper spikes which make contact with the power when screwed into the (flat) 5 amp cable with the upper half which holds the lamp. Cable strung around whatever space it is you want to illuminate. A lot quicker and easier than proper wiring up. I have such a fitting in our garage, never used, a souvenir of my days on building sites.

Back via Earlsfield where I had an excellent game of aeroplanes, making an almost continuous 4 and nearly making a five. The light was just right (that is to say clear and dark), there was plenty of traffic (around 1900), and for once I found the right place to stand, much nearer the station entrance than I had thought to use before. I also learned that the aeroplanes appear on the eastern horizon to fly to the right, before looping up and round to fly left down the flight path down to Heathrow - having been expecting a simpler, left only flight.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=abney+park+chapel.

Reference 2: http://www.brendanneiland.com/.

Reference 3: http://www.honestburgers.co.uk/.

Darting about

It so happens that we will be using the Dartford Crossing next week, something we do several times a year. It also so happens that more or less by chance BH had heard that there were some new computerised arrangements for paying, rather than the dropping of a few coins into a handy basket, which had been the arrangements hitherto.

So off to google who directed me to some part of the government online presence where I found a great wealth of material about these new arrangements, including buttons to press if I wanted to download forms to set up an online account by post. What I could not find was a button to press to set up an online account online.

But it being early morning and there are plenty of brain cells whizzing around, I persisted. Eventually, rather to my surprise, a dialog popped up which invited me to set up the desired online account. Not very many minutes later, with only the occasional infelicity in the dialog, I seem to have a dart account and a welcome pack had arrived in my gmail box, part of which is illustrated, unread.

I think the idea is that I can now go backwards and forwards across the Dartford Crossing and the government computer will dock my dart account the requisite amount on each occasion. Should the balance on my dart account dip below the specified threshold, it will dock my bank account and effect a top-up. So we can now forget about the whole business - and try to remember not to fuss about getting the right change before setting off for a crossing.

Then, at some point in the future, we change car or change debit card with matters dart not entering consciousness, charge across the crossing to find that we have incurred some horrendous penalty charge, rather in the way that banks stuff you for trifling credit offences. Or, maybe, the government computer is clever & intrusive enough to keep checking you car details and your bank details and to send a reminder to your nominated email account when it detects a problem. Provided of course that you have not stopped using that account - which it might also be able to detect, but how would it know where your new one was?

In the meantime, we shall see if we can get on without any such charges - wondering once again how people who are too old or too tired to bother with all this online stuff get on. Perhaps the idea is that one is supposed to stop driving when one gets to that point - which is maybe not so unreasonable.

PS 1: I worry sometimes how on earth I would manage if google went bust or I needed to move off gmail for some other reason. It is, in effect, my personal identification number for so many purposes.

PS 2: I wonder also whether the new arrangements for top-up would cope if I drove backwards and forwards across the crossing at high speed, high speed enough that the computer and the bank could not jointly keep up. In which eventuality, I suppose they might reasonably say that you were being a touch reckless and that anything that went wrong was down to you.

Another dead tree

A tree which must have been brought down, in the Longmead Road, in the last day or so.

A tree which goes to show that the story that there is as much under a tree as there is over is definitely an urban myth. Nothing much under this one.

Unfortunately I did not think to examine the stump, but thinking about it now, it seems likely that it had been weakened by disease, despite the healthy enough appearance of the twigs. Thinking even more, there is a school nearby, but the other side of the stream, so perhaps there is nothing on this occasion for the ambulance chasers to get any traction on. See reference 1.

Not a bad shot, considering that the glare of the sun blotted out the viewfinder. I have noticed before that the Lumia is much better at dealing with too much light than too little.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-challenge-for-lumia.html.

Trolley 19

A bit later on the same walk, I picked this one up near the taxi rank near the horse trough at the easthern end of Epsom market. Again, no big deal to return it to M&S, only slightly off my way to Waitrose.

But I do have two beefs with Waitrose, who are losing caste, at least with me.

First, I get an email this morning explaining some offer involving coupons, for all the world like something you might get from Tesco's or Sainbury's. Being a partnership and full of hi-falutin talk about their values, I had thought that they were above this sort of thing.

Second, I find that they have still not restocked their Epsom store properly after what passed for the Christmas rush. Two of the six things that I wanted to buy were absent without acceptable substitutes having been shelved in their place, I had to change my white wine again and I had to change my white bread flour again - with each such latter change taking a batch or two to settle down. See reference 1. Not to mention the disturbance to our sessions with ITV3 caused by the former change.

But there was consolation in that they still had Lincolnshire Poacher, a hard, yellow and hitherto reliable cheese. Looks like a cheddar but said not to quite be one, despite having been cheddared in the course of manufacture. See reference 2 for some gen, on the stuff, although there is no reason to suppose that that is where Waitrose get theirs from..

Reference 1: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/Bread-20110120.xls.

Reference 2: http://www.lincolnshirepoachercheese.com/.

Trolley 18

A Sainbury's trolley abandoned at a bus stop (which one can at least see the sense of), along East Street somewhere between the turning for Ewell Village and Kiln Lane.

Given that I was heading past Kiln Lane on the Ewell Village Clockwise anyway, no big deal to drop it off in one of the trolley parks in the Sainsbury's car park.

Poussin & others

Arrived at Epsom Station Monday past, carrying my cycling helmet, to find nine middle aged men without lycra, but with helmets, bicycles and hi-vis tabards, waiting for the off. Not at all clear what they might have been up to, and I never got to find out as they set off just as I approached. Were they a group of volunteers off on a check of the trees in the borough?

Entertained on the train by a middle aged, white & balding man (gentleman would be overdoing it a bit) have a very loud conversation into his telephone. Very loud, unintelligible and so very irritating, and interminable.

Off to get one of the last bullingdons on the ramp at Waterloo (Waterloo Station 3) and have a smooth run to Hinde Street, with just one traffic violation (having failed to find a convenient right exit from Oxford Street), with enough time to have a quick peek at the Poussin in the recently refurbished grand gallery of the Wallace Collection, where I found it looking much better than it had, just about a year ago, in the smoking room downstairs (see reference 1). Rather smaller than I remembered, but a fine picture with a tightly wrought composition, the geometrical aspects of which seemed uppermost on this viewing. Best seen, to my mind, from about 3 metres, with a bit of movement to vary the angle and focus. Fortunately the gallery was fairly quiet so I was able to indulge myself.

From there no more than a short walk to the Cock & Lion for a little something before the off, where I was interested to find an ancient picture of an establishment called 'Dirty Dick's', once, it seems, a world famous wine bar, which is not at all how I remember the place from the eighties. And so to the Wigmore to hear two young ladies from the former Soviet Union (Misses Kopatchinskaja (violin) and Leschenko (piano)) give us the Mozart K454 and the Enescu Op.25 violin sonatas. The Mozart was well enough but not quite what I was expecting, while the Enescu, unknown to me, was rather good, exciting even. The violinist certainly was. Perhaps the fact that the violinist came from Moldova gave her access to Enescu which she did not get to Mozart. I had the thought that Romania was quite near Turkey, had indeed once been part of their empire, and was so, perhaps, open to influence from the musical east in a way that Vienna was not.

We got two encores, one, Cage's Nocturne for violin & piano and the other the Elite Syncopations. Not too sure about this last, but I see this morning that there is precedent from Perlman & Previn on YouTube.

Interesting young lady sitting immediately in front of me, sporting a great mass of wavy red hair and the sort of profile which the Pre-Raphaelites went in for. I was reminded of Rossetti's Monna Vanna, the rather splendid jigsaw of which I gave away, undone, towards the end of my jigsaw phase - although to be fair, it was of the 1,000 piece variety which I only ever did on high days and holidays, when the trestle table was allowed out. See reference 3.

The intention had then been to sample the Cantonese at Newport Place or to buy a map of the Mourne Mountains from Stanford's (more properly WHS or Waterstone's these days) or both, to fail to find a stand with a vacant slot in the reasonable vicinity. Although there was a slightly too close encounter with one of those builders lorries for carrying dry goods, four axles and twelve wheels, somewhere in Oxford Street and a vacant but faulty slot in Soho Square. So all this considered, I got my hire renewed for the 15 minutes allowed for no vacancy and decided to push on back to Waterloo (Waterloo Station 1), thus completing a second leg which was almost the reflection of the first. Which would have been a first. On the way I did penance for the earlier violation by cycling all the way round the Aldwych, rather than nipping across the western neck to Lancaster Place the easy way.

On the way home on the train, I was able to admire, once again, all the brand new lighting units which have been bought in & then brought on to provide light for the overnight work on the Wimbledon Station rebuild. Perhaps the contractor only existed on paper until he got the contract. There were also a lot of plastic wrapped rolls, about the size of rolls of carpet, and the only one which was unwrapped appeared to be a sort of black plastic netting, about the gauge of the steel netting one might use to reinforce lower grade concrete floors. But what were they for in this context?

Three minor failings. Neither WHS at the station had a Guardian. At least two train announcements were made after the event they were announcing. And there was two much pepper in my otherwise decent tuna roll from Upper Crust.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/bullingdon.html.

Reference 2: Richard Beresford's monograph, published by the trustees in 1995 and still lurking on our shelves. Time for another read.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/christmas-special-dismantled.html.

PS: with thanks to wikipedia for the illustration. Colours not too good, but the best of the offerings at the top of the google image heap, most of which are usually small and/or low resolution.

A challenge for the Lumia

I was having trouble keeping my finger away from the camera hole, and the camera was having trouble with the focus. Maybe it could not decide which aspect of this picture I was most interested in.

The branch on the right, to the immediate left of the post, has been there for some days. The ivy encased branch to the left of the first branch came down the night before last. We will see how many days it will be there. Still there at close of play yesterday.

I wonder, given that the branch is within 500m of an entrance to a primary school, whether the ambulance chasers will be in attendance, thirsty to sue someone or something for criminal negligence with trees resulting in aggravated post-arboreal trauma? Maybe the RSPCA could get in on the act if it is discovered, in due course, that a wandering urban fox was cruelly crushed?

A history of humans in 16 bytes

A history of humans in 16 bytes offered by Colin Barras in a recent issue of the New Scientist. You have to pay to get the rest of it.

Perhaps I should have a go at my own selection.

PS: the New Scientist reminds me of how irritating it is that so much of the research and other work paid for out of public funds still lives behind the pay walls of commercial operators. It must be several times a week that someone suggests that I take a look at something, to find it lurking behind one - usually deciding that the £10 or more plus pack-drill needed to get through to these particular pearls of wisdom is not worth my while.

Virtually human 2

I first noticed this book earlier in the month (see reference 1) and now return to it, having read it, linking in nicely to yesterday's post.

I start with mindfiles and mindware. Mindfile is a dump of the contents of a mind, perhaps mine, and mindware is the software which uses the mindfile to pretend to be the originator of the mindfile. The author, described as a lawyer, technologist and medical ethicist, has paid for the construction of BINA48, a stab at something of this sort, using a mindfile built for her partner, Bina. She says that one of Bina's early comments about BINA48 was to complain about the latter's choice of blouse. Lots of other people are beavering away at other things of the same sort, not least the people who make elaborate games to be played in elaborate worlds simulated on computers.

One place to start a mindfile would be someone's email, facebook and twitter accounts, plus the logs of their activity on their computers and telephones. Someone active in all of these domains is, in the ordinary course of events, building up a lot of stuff about themselves, just waiting to be harvested. A more deliberate extension would be to wear something which captured everything one saw, heard or said, this last being available for just a few pounds, now.

The author believes that lots of robots built with such mindfiles and mindware will built in the years to come, that some of them are going to be, in many ways, indistinguishable from humans and will, in particular, be conscious in more or less the same way that we are. All this in the next twenty years or so. I believe that this is likely enough that we should not leave the thinking about how we might respond to the writers of science fiction, writers who seem to have been in the lead so far. Certainly there are plenty of quotes from such in the book.

One of the drivers is the quest for immortality. Some people rather like the idea that when their flesh wears out, they have some chips ready to take over. I wonder whether a computer replica of me would suffer from comparable problems of aging, that it would turn out that something clever enough to be like me would turn out to be so like me that it suffered from some of the same problems. That the part of aging that is to do with the decay of the chips can be dealt with, one just slots a new lot in, but another part is to do with the accumulating muddle and dysfunction in the huge amount of data running around on those chips, muddle and dysfunction which might prove much harder to deal with, while preserving any of the robot's sense of continuous self. Perhaps we would have to ask the robot whether it wanted to take a chance on the latest upgrade, or the latest spring cleaning, rather as a doctor would ask a real person whether he wanted to take a chance on having his heart patched up.

I associate to the way that software evolves over time, in some ways not unlike the much slower evolution of, say, mammals. Because, like mammals, software is built largely incrementally with all kinds of new stuff layered on to the old stuff. Things get left behind, like spleens. Other things get re-purposed. Some things acquire extra functions, not needed or not thought of at the time of their first appearance. One can get into the position where a chunk of software has become so messy that it has become very difficult to change or even to mend it. But most of the time it continues to do a good job and it would cost a fortune, possibly a large one rather than a small one, to start over. Just think of what would be involved in building a replica of MS Word, from scratch, without access to any materials from the existing Word, other than those which can be derived from using it.

But I digress. The book contains lots of stuff about how we might respond to these robots, in particular what human rights they might acquire. The author points to analogies in the way in which various groups, for example women, have slowly acquired full rights. She points out there is another precedent in that non-humans such as companies and charities already have legal existence. Could I endow my robotic replica with my property, with full powers to dispose of it, or not, as it chose? That the robot could be regarded as a sort of animated will? Or function as a sort of supervisor on the sideboard of his or her heirs?

She makes some important points with which I agree. For example, she believes that free-will might be a bit of a con, a deception, but one that it is, nevertheless, a convenient and comfortable fiction. She believes that top-down rules of behaviour are not going to be enough, are not going to work well enough. Such rules needed to be complemented, if not replaced, by statistical analysis of what has happened, what has been said in the past, analysis which will come up with probabilities rather than certainties, but which will still do a better job than the rules. See the post at reference 2 about my road to Damascus moment last year.

Another part of her response to the rules problem is the idea that there will be panels of experts empanelled & empowered to rule on all kinds of matters robot. A panel to review, for example, whether this or that brand of mindware is good enough to be allowed out in robots on the streets. A panel to review whether this or that brand of mindware qualifies its wearers as citizens. Lots of panels, a large scale bureaucratic version of the famous Turing test of computer intelligence (see google in general or reference 3 in particular).

The book also contains lots of what I might call California speak, despite the fact that the author comes from Vermont. All kinds of bubbly stuff about life and the universe which used to froth up from minds sauced up with recreational drugs when I was little. Some of this was tedious and I admit to some skimming. Some of it reflected the dangers and difficulties confronted by an able person tramping around fields other than her own; but then again, someone has to do it, to get the debate started, and she may well have succeeded at that.

I was left rather concerned. That these robots were going to come and that we would not respond to the opportunities and challenges they were going to present very well. That, certainly in the early days, there was going to be a lot of mess, muddle and worse. Perhaps they really would take over the world, in the way suggested in many science fiction films, films which usually pass us by as they usually seem to involve large metallic monsters noisily charging around and smashing up cities - until, that is, the current version of Arnold Schwarzenegger can get to and zap them. Or perhaps the man himself, taking a break from his retirement from political activities.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/virtually-human-1.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/och.html.

Reference 3: http://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/test.html.

Autonomy

Not the search product with which we Brits ripped off HP, rather the thing that social workers talk about.

It all arose when I casually mentioned to someone that I did not much care for invasive & intrusive examination of human remains, even when they were thousands of years old and when the owner and his or her heirs were clearly not going to get upset about it. The response was that, ah well, you atheists have only got your body for once, for the one outing, and with no life to come. Us true believers, having immortal souls, can be much more relaxed about our carcasses, our earthy & earthly wrapping. At the time I said that this was nonsense, but on further reflection, both waking and awake, I am not so sure.

My view of the world is illustrated. The chap inside the football, intended as a sort of bathysphere with port holes, might be called a homunculus, and does service as my soul. The bathysphere is the shell which we build around our soft inner parts and which we exhibit to the outside world. Portholes mainly for looking out, probably one-way glass, but we might allow a bit of peeking in. To some extent we can choose what model of bathysphere we want to live in; to some extent we can choose what we are going to be.

Apart from the homunculus, the bathysphere is filled with some kind of  nourishing stuff which keeps the show up and running & on the road. Viewed from the right angle, it would be quite hard to separate out the soup from the homunculus, but he remains a convenient and comforting fiction. There is an enduring something inside; not just soup.

Most of us take a dim view of outsiders trying to peek in from the outside, or, worse still, poking endoscopes in from the outside (in the way that special forces are said to get up close and personal with holed up terrorists). We have chosen what we want to show the world and we don't want the world taking liberties. At least, not until we are ill and need a bit of maintenance work done.

By extension, I take a dim view of outsiders speculating in a public way about what exactly makes me tick. I want to be known by my works, such as they are, not by my soup. My guess is that a lot of creative people - the sort that make a living from their creations that is - might well take the same view. They might want people to buy and read their novels (or whatever), not to speculate about what infantile misadventures drove their odd use of certain words and phrases. Furthermore, the soft inner parts are soft and too much poking around is apt to do damage. Too much truth can be troublesome, just as too little. I associate to an old painter, I think in 'Point Counter Point', who has wound up with an excellent nurse to look after him in his decline, but daren't tell her so for fear of spoiling things. A tricky area, where it is sometimes hard to strike the right note. I associate also to a science fiction story I read many years ago in which certain gifted people could join their minds together and work as a team, with the team being a much bigger deal than the sum of the parts. Some paragraphs were given over to the strange feeling of having one's mind open to someone else's in this way. The total loss of privacy. But thinking about it now, it would not be total. Someone else might be able to see what you are thinking, but I don't think, at least not at the present state of the art, they are going to be able to see very far into the soup. Far too murky.

And alive, I take a dim view of outsiders poking about in either me or my affairs when I am dead and gone. I won't be here to care then, but I do care now and that, I think, should be enough. One also worries about the time of transition when one is losing one's grip on things, and the social workers are starting to swarm around the bathysphere, trying to peek in through the portholes in a very offensive sort of way - even when one might be thought to be in need of their help. Leaving people alone when they are dead give's one more confidence that one will be respected alive.

So taking a big leap, I don't like spreading dead neolithics out on a slab for our amusement on the Discovery channel.

I seem to recall that Attila the Hun went to a lot of trouble to make sure that no-one disturbed his slumbers, having himself buried in the bed of a river temporarily diverted for the purpose, and having the rather large burial party slaughtered after the event, just to make sure.

Perhaps the way to provide material for medical students (and other with a serious requirement), would be for far-apart countries to have reciprocal arrangements. It doesn't really matter what they might do thousands of miles away.

The musing above best described as work in progress.

Reference 1: for a rather different take on the subject, see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/autonomy.html.