Cuarteto Casals

To the Wigmore Hall last week to hear, for the first time, there being no record of them either here or at the other place (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/), the Cuarteto Casals (see reference 1). Furthermore the violinist who played first for the first and last pieces (First A) reminded me of a former fireman from TB and I think I would have remembered him had I seen him before.

Haydn Op.33 No.3, aka 'The Bird'. Mozart K465, aka 'Dissonance'. Schubert D804, aka 'Rosamunde'.

Another first was baking bread on the same day as a concert, so I had my first taste of the new bread in a picnic taken on the chairs outside the café at the back of BHS.

Into the hall to be greeted by one small music stand, two large music stands and one regular music stand. I eventually worked out that the small music stand was actually an Apple with the score on it and discretely worked with a foot pedal. Only the second time I have seen such a thing, It was intended for the use of the First A and First B was a little taken aback when it fell to her lot for the encore - but she managed. Only the second time that I have seen such a thing - with it being rather irritating that I cannot now track down the first, a pianist who stood his notebook up on the surface behind the keyboard. The best I can do is reference 2. In any event, as far as I could see First A did not make much use of it, playing more or less from memory.

The dress of the three male performers was mainly smart casual, but all dark and all different. Only one suit. The lady violinist, First B, had an off the shoulder dress which looked very smart, but presumably had the downside that she had to worry about the appearance of all the flesh so exposed. And the upside that it left the arms and shoulders free. I was reminded of Rosen's remark in his (very good) book about piano playing ('Piano Notes') that shorts and tee-shirt would be most comfortable for the rather physical business of playing the piano at a concert. He may have gone on to say that the classical music audience would probably not like that, so he settled for something conservative, but without tails and bow tie. More of him in due course.

There seemed to be at least three kinds of bow in action, one for First A, one for the cello and another for the other two, with that for First A seeming to have a larger gap than usual between the hair and the wood. Bows which the programme told us were a matching set of period bows bought with an award from the Borletti-Buitoni trust. See reference 3 for a previous encounter with this trust.

I liked the stage manners of this quartet and I liked their sound, which was particularly striking for the Haydn and the Mozart. They even offered a few of those moments of musical transcendence, during which, for a short while, the rest of the world fades away. And respect for the country of venue in the form of an encore from Purcell, I think Fantasia No.4.

All in all an excellent concert and we shall watch out for further opportunities to hear this Cuarteto.

Out to be soundly beaten up the stairs at Vauxhall by three young men who managed to run all the way up.

PS 1: google now tells me that Fantasia No.4 was written for 4 viols and the YouTube version does not sound familiar at all. Maybe I got the name wrong - but I liked whatever it was well enough at the time.

PS 2: worried away at the Apple and eventually tracked it down to Dorking, earlier this year, at reference 4. The winning search term was 'electronic piano', having tried various permutations of apple, score, page, piano, wigmore, qeh, korean, japanese and chinese.

Reference 1: http://cuartetocasals.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/things-swedish.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/borletti-buitoni-trust.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/dorking-time-again.html.

Disgusted of Epsom

In the bad old days, say in the fifties and sixties of the last century, it was understood that the provision of public toilets in this country was pretty grim. Something you had to warn visitors from, say, Canada, about. Since then, things have got a lot better, with people like Wetherspoons and the National Trust doing pretty well.

However, yesterday, at the southwestern corner of Hyde Park, I came across a throw back. You paid 50p to use a facility which was in some, not to say, urgent need of attention from both a plumber and a cleaner. This in one of the most tourist infested spots in London.

Perhaps someone needs to remind the Royal Parks authorities - the toilet illustrated being within what I took to be their perimeter - that tourism is the biggest (honest) earner of foreign currency that we have. Something has to pay for all that stuff from China.

Would the response of those authorities be that all that sort of thing had been outsourced to private contractors a long time ago and it was nothing to do with them, thank you very much?

PS: Hyde Park itself in fine shape, on what was a fine Autumn day. Even the bicycles were not a problem. We learned that the round pond was not very round and in the course of finding out about this, I also found out how to rotate the map on my telephone. Given that Cortana has a penchant for displaying her map with north pointing down, this was something which had been annoying me for some time. A result, but one which also nicely illustrated the rather random and sometimes rather slow way that one learns how to use one's toys in the absence of proper instruction.

Breakfast in bed

Room service breakfast comes in boxes in Sloane Avenue, a surprise as I am sure that on their web site the breakfast came on a tray. But actually quite plentiful and nearly enough left over for tomorrow - with a fridge being supplied for such purposes.

The only catch being that they don't do newspapers with breakfast and the Sainsbury's Local just down the road which does, sells all the same sort of stuff to eat as well, at half the price.

And while I am usually quite sniffy about the bread from Sainsbury's, it was, on this occasion, better than the stuff which comes in a box.

But, to be fair, if you are fresh off the train or plane and are tired, it is quite handy to be able to settle for the box and crash out. Breakfast in the comfort of your own room in the morning and no need to search out the local grocer.

PS: the windows in the building concerned are the same model as those originally fitted to many houses in Epsom, including our own. But here the planning laws mean that they have had to settle for secondary double glazing, whereas we have ripped our old iron out.

Godot, waiting for 2

This snap, taken with the lights down after the show, gives some idea of the set. Quite a lot of sitting on the pile at the right.

Godot, waiting for 1

I have been waiting to see this play for a long time and finally made it last week when the London Classic Theatre (see reference 1) brought it to Epsom.

I was pleasantly surprise to be at a play, while unusual, was both accessible and entertaining. A product, I suppose, of the desolation of the second world war, the many displaced people and the many tramps, most of whom had been damaged in one way or another during that war, whom we were left with during my childhood.

The contrast between the public school manner of the one tramp and the building site manner of the other was nicely done.

I liked the set. The main ingredient was a dozen or so large flat stepping stones scattered around the middle of the stage, with the cast spending a lot of the time stepping, laboriously from one to another. For decoration we had three trees, bare rooted, suspended from the ceiling and four mirrors hanging at the back. The whole being rather dark in tone.

Reminded, on this occasion by the work of both James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or, in the word in a preface to the latter, 'affectless'. Which is not quite fair in this case, but one can see the connection.

A much more mixed audience than we are used, with quite a lot of couples of working age. Quite a lot of rather slovenly middle aged ladies whom made one think art teacher, or perhaps drama teacher.

Reckoning the audience at 15 rows of 15 people at £15 a pop, the MS calculator gets to £3,375. Say £1,000 for the venue (Epsom only rated a one night stand) , £500 expenses and £500 VAT, that leaves £1,375 for maybe 6 people - 2 principals, 2 others, 1 extra and 1 gopher-driver - we get to around £200 a day for (see illustration) 60 days spanning three months. Say £12,000 for a quarter of a year, say £25,000 for the whole year, allowing half the year for resting. Just about a living wage but one would probably want benefit, fruit picking or whatever to fall back on.

So having done even more exotic Becketts in the fairly recent past (see, for example, reference 2), the Beckett experience may now be said to have been rounded out.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/samuel-beckett.html.

A puzzle solved

From time to time I have wondered what granola is. Once, for example, when BH had it for breakfast at reference 1, not to be confused with reference 2, which might have a similar address and sell similar looking products but is actually in Singapore. The granola is the stuff under the fruit salad, but I was too busy tackling my doughnuts, one with crispy bacon. The one, that is, back left.

Then there are granola bars, confectionery items which one comes across from time to time.

Tiring of all this wondering, BH thought she had better get a packet of the stuff and put the whole topic to bed. Stuff which turned out to be a breakfast cereal version of the flapjack, inter alia a high energy dessert favoured by the Outward Bound authorities for long distance hikers. Days, that is, not the months favoured by the wild people at reference 3. An Epsom variation being called the mealy-munchy, famous for being unknown to the all-knowing google.

So what we had was oats, some rolled some not, toasted and coated in a sugar glaze. A few nuts and raisins for garnish. Some honey for flavouring. The whole described as 65% oats, 15% sugar, 20% odds and ends. I took mine with a little milk. OK, but rather sweet and one needed to be careful with one's fillings. Just the thing, I dare say, for a winter's morning in a cold country, but I don't think I shall be pushing for a second bag.

Reference 1: http://www.artisinbakery.com/.

Reference 2: http://artisanbakery.com.sg/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/wild.html.

Bognor 5

A not very good shot of a nice idea at the winery. Twelve pictures of the same vine, taken through the twelve months of the year. Leading the way to the conference facility which topped up the income from the café.

Bognor 4

Beach huts, Middleton style.

Bognor 3

One of the thatched cottages. The top of the sign explaining that it was a private estate with no access to the beach for non-residents just visible bottom left.

Bognor 2

The ice house. The telephone coped quite well with the evening sun.

Bognor 1

In the margins of the Arun, we stayed in Bognor Regis, a seaside town we have not visited for some years. Stayed in a very satisfactory Best Western, a brand we find reliable, called the Beechcroft (see reference 1). An establishment with a room described as sea view which really did, each morning, offer a view of the sun rising over the eastern sea. Nestling between the Butlins resort and the unexpectedly villagey village of Felpham.

Excellent esplanade and beach apart, the town was interesting for the variety of housing it offered, apart from the regular town housing of the town proper.

You have already had the modernist affair at reference 2, taken as a subject for the new-found toy of telephone zoom. Just beyond, it heading towards Butlins, we had the cluster of mobile homes illustrated above. I did not like to pry, so the snap does not really capture the quaintness of the cluster, a clump of mobile homes which seem to have all agglomerated together to form a continuous whole.

Then we had a house that William Blake (the poet one) stayed in for long enough to have a row in the public house opposite. Featured in a recent edition of the DT.

The ice house which was the only bit of Hotham House that we were able to find, apart from the rather handsome park. Behind the park there were the older Butlins chalets blocks, decent enough but rather reminding one of a prison camp. The place must have been quite something on a Saturday night in its hey-day. The oldest blocks came with a rather scruffy car park, complete with the various lumps of rubbish that accumulate in any operation of this size. We assumed that these blocks, together with their car park were dedicated to the staff. I note in passing that at least some of the eating establishments in and around Bognor had native staff, mostly pleasant young females.

Last but not least there was Middleton, home to the fanciest seaside villas that we had ever seen. Pride of place went to the gated estate of giant thatched cottages, all relatively new and all looking very expensive.

In the margins of the housing, we did also take a walk along the beach, rather splendid with the tide well out, in the bright autumn sun. A few white egrets among the seagulls. Five stone islands - barge loads of granite from Norway - to protect the fancy villas at Middleton. A view of Culver Down behind Selsey Bill, which, in the course of a senior moment during which my geography had gone awol, I had suggested might be Hengistbury Head. Interesting mixture of people, all shapes, sizes and social classes. Quite a lot of gold being worn by both ladies and gents.; fancy for the ladies, chunky for the gents.. Quite a lot of cyclists, despite quite a lot of signs saying that they were forbidden - not that it mattered, as it was a big esplanade, not very busy. Various factories offering lunch to holiday makers, some of them masquerading as public houses. We settled for a smaller place, very busy, called the 'Lobster Pot' where we had quite decent crab sandwiches. Also a cake while we waited, a sort of Bakewell Tart, but without both the pastry case and the sheet of white icing with cherry on top - in fact, rather good. See reference 4.

On the way home we took tea at Denbigh's Winery, where, or once, I felt rather sorry for the proprietors, leaving aside any doubts one might have about the wisdom of trying to grow grapes on the North Downs. Handsome replica of a French wine estate. Lots of vines with lots of ripening, if rather small, black grapes. Lots of wine stuff for wine buffs. But it seemed that it did not really pay and they had had to roof over the courtyard (with glass) and turn it into a café/restaurant for local ladies who lunched. Plus shop, a smaller version of the one offered by the Chessington Garden Centre, plus farm shop, which appeared to be a vanity operation run by some girls from somewhere in North America. These last were very free with the cardboard boxes which we are now using to house all the cooking apples that we are getting from neighbours.

Reference 1: http://www.beachcroft-hotel.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/zooming.html.

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

Reference 4: http://lobsterpotfelpham.com/.

Arun 5

A bit of detritus on West Beach. Perhaps from the fairground, complete with a ride disguised as a castle from Disneyland, behind East Beach. Different kind of nature preserved there.

Arun 4

A bit of West Beach, Littlehampton. To the immediate west of the mouth of the Arun. Oddly enough, with East Beach being on the other side.

Arun 3

Where the Arun runs down to the sea.

Arun 2

Catholic cathedral, not nearly as dominating as it was in real life, left centre. Fake castle, the one built in the nineteenth century, right. Real castle behind.

Not clear how the fake was paid for, but probably not beer, in the way of Polesden Lacey. Ducal biscuits perhaps, a harbinger of our own Duchy Originals?

Arun 1

Last weekend to inspect the lower reaches of the Arun, with Arundel having been the destination for FIL's last big day trip, with him somehow making it up to the old shell keep, built on a mound of conquest vintage. Raised, one supposes, to control the important river traffic and the rich farm land between downs and sea. Not for nothing named for the south Saxons.

Did not do the castle on this occasion and could not do the cathedral, dominating the other end of town, as there was a wedding, complete with RAF sword in attendance. We did manage the parish church, where I wondered about the mechanics of Cromwell smashing up the castle with cannon fired from the church tower, thinking here of the stories of chalk cliffs being shaken to pieces by the naval guns mounted inside them in the second world war. Boats can move around in the water, and soak up the recoil that way, an option not available to church towers. It is a short and stumpy tower, sturdy enough, but one would have thought that firing cannon big enough to smash the castle would not have done the tower much good. But I could not see any side of damage on that account.

The interior of this Anglican church was rather Romish in flavour, despite being rather plain and the stained glass being rather faded. One could also take a look through the glass at the Fitzalan Chapel which had taken over the east end, a chapel with a fan vaulted roof which looked to be made of timber rather than stone. Wikipedia unhelpful on this particular point, so question noted down for resolution in due course.

The main street contained a print shop which featured a Monica Poole print in the window, very like one in our own possession. Curious as to the price, which was not marked, I went inside to find the proprietor very sensitive to time wasters, people who asked the price of things then did not buy. He eventually softened a bit when I claimed acquaintance with the artist, but he left me thinking that his business was neither good nor helped by his manners.

Next stop the apples mentioned at reference 1, then down to the river bank for a picnic. Spent some time wondering about in which direction the sea was to be found, given that the tide appeared to be coming in. Was the sea coming in or the river going out? The flow was strong and muddy, suggestive of recent & considerable rain. For a short while there was also the suggestion of a bore, just about visible in the snap above. For the record, you get to the sea by going under the bridge, but I forget to record the direction of flow.

Took a walk the other way, at one point coming across a lady in an interesting soft cloth hat, with sewn on horizontal stripes and flower potted in shape. Pleased that we noticed it and even more pleased to be able to say that she got it from a charity shop. Quite a lot of Southern trains trundling across the meadows, so perhaps there is still plenty of traffic to nearby Bognor. Two water rats, or some such.

Then, a little less than two days later, we were able to inspect the mouth of the river at Littlehampton from the West Beach side. Very much the old and once important river port and it once did time as Henry VIII's royal dockyard.

West Beach a nature preserve and very handsome. Altogether a splendid beach, complete with two car parks and a flock of starlings. I imagine that parking would be something of a problem summer weekends, but it was fine early on a September Monday morning. We met a publican's daughter, a publican who used to keep a pub in Arundel and a daughter who was still smoking, well into middle age. She was now resident in Swindon, so I was able to air my knowledge of the town. It turned out that she knew all about the Windmill pub on Windmill Hill, living just nearby.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/aquamarine.html.

Bing down

From time to time I test the visibility of this blog in google, with the usual answer being not very.

So today off to the Bourne Hall Library, to a PC which google probably cannot connect to me, and put in the search term 'abstract expressionism dimensional random sheet modelling' into Bing, hoping to be directed to the post at reference 1. Rather a lot of search terms, but not being a celebrity, internet or otherwise, I have to take my place among a very large number of punters.

Bing produced a whole lot of reasonable stuff, but not me, at least not in the first few pages. Ditto google. I then put in 'abstract expressionism dimensional random sheet modelling blogspot' or possibly 'abstract expressionism dimensional random sheet modelling bogspot', the record being a bit murky on the terminating point of detail, into bing which finds nothing at all. Whereas google has me top of the list.

I collected a prize in the form of a well-loved box set of 'West Wing', series 3, knocked down to me for a fiver. There appear to be quite a few episodes to each of the six DVDs, so perhaps with the adverts stripped out they are not very long, but they may prove a welcome change from our regular diet of agatha and midsomer.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.

Workers' hut

The good news is that the contractors have finally vacated their encampment on the edge of the Common, first noticed nearly a year ago at reference 1.

They did rather a better job of clearing away their large amount of rubbish than I had expected, but there are a couple of bits left behind, one of them being illustrated left.

Had I still been running an allotment, I would have collected this particular bit of rubbish as it would make an excellent frame on which to grow runner beans. I think the way to move it would be to tie it down on a barrow, horizontal, and then wheel the whole thing, just like the giant wheelbarrow it had become. I little awkward perhaps, but a lot easier than trying to carry the thing, bodily and single handed. One does not like to volunteer allotment acquaintances for jobs of this sort.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/what-is-going-on.html.

Cycle madness

The works mentioned at reference 1 are now working up to a grand finale. A grand finale of posts marking the boundaries of the new cycle path over West Hill. The snap left captures a cluster of six of them, apparently needed opposite West Hill House. Plenty more in the vicinity.

As an older person who cycles, my thought was that the money would have been better spent paying council care workers a living wage or, alternatively, paying a decent rate for council places in private care homes.

BH's thought was that it was all a covert scheme to provide poles for illegally camping travellers to string their washing from. Or possibly the aerials for their antique long wave radio sets, needed to communicate with their relatives in remote parts of the world.

PS 1: I expect the last few blue plaques to be attached to their poles in the next day or so.

PS2: politics has been a dirty game for at least three thousand years, assuming, that is, that the ancient Egyptians were at it, as seems likely. So, thinking like an operator, doing a mandelson if you like, maybe the council are being cunning. Fed up with all the lobbying by eco-cycle nuts, they decided to go for a harmless but hi-vis project which would really cheese most of us off. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth in local media. With the result that said nuts can be shoved out into the long grass for at least the next ten years. Cheap at half the price.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/works-1.html.

All power to the Chinese

I am all against nuclear missiles and the expensive submarines that carry them about, but all for nuclear power. Regular readers may remember the post on this subject at reference 1.

But along with Simon Jenkins (of the 'Guardian' on this occasion), I am a bit puzzled about this nuclear power deal with the Chinese - the Hinkley Point deal which no-one else wanted to touch. One can vaguely understand the Tory obsession with privatisation, even if the main result is to feather the nests of their pals, even if one does not agree with it and even, as in this case, one never really privatises such a large chunk of the critical national infrastructure. Governments will always, and always should, meddle. But do we really have to pay the Chinese so much for them to provide some finance and carry some of the risk? Risks which are always alive and well with massive projects of this sort. Jenkins thinks that we are committed to paying the equivalent of a 10% interest rate for a very long time, at a time when the rest of us are getting 0% for our money.

It also looks rather expensive at £25 billion or so - well over half of what the much fancier fusion project noticed at reference 2 is said to be costing.

And then there is the question of national security. The Chinese are getting to have rather a large finger in our critical national infrastructure pie, and what is going to happen if push ever came to shove in the Pacific? Do they see us as a soft target compared with the US, which takes a rather more robust line in these matters? Or are we craftily hedging our bets, as the Chinese are hardly going to want to take down a country containing so much of their investment and generating such a splendid income stream for them. For a parallel case, see the first part of reference 3.

Or is it just another case of continuing to live beyond our means, getting even deeper into hock with the big players of the loan shark world? The Tories might be trying to haul in the deficit boat, but even they dare not haul it in too fast. In the meantime, I dare say that all the pals mentioned above will be able to fiddle away while Rome burns, as it were.

PS: and talking of pals, what about the ridiculous sailing yacht that some Russian gangster/oligarch has had built in Kiel? I hope we are not paying for it through our utility bills or whatever.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/magic-bullet.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/big-doughnuts.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=huawei.

Eva machina

Ex Machina was a film puffed in the course of the recent New Scientist conference (see reference 1). One of the lecturers there was, I think, a technical consultant for it. I think he also said that he found his stint as a temporary member of the filmies' world fascinating, which is just as well, as I was unable to finish the resultant film, at least so far. Half way was about as far as I could manage the DVD, for which, for once, I paid full price at Amazon.

I don't know why but I found the whole thing rather pretentious and irritating. Perhaps the take-home (a phrase they liked at the New Scientist) is that I should not go to, or even watch, films about things that I am actually interested in, in this case, when might you consider a robot to be a fully fledged person and what, if you do so consider, you ought to do about it.

The film was well made, in the narrow sense, that the story was interesting, the acting was OK and the sets were realistic and appropriate. It also contained lots of well ironed tropes, which, as a serial consumer of costumed detective dramas on ITV3, I can hardly complain about.

The nerdy computer programmer.

The super-nerd who had made a lot of money and goes to live, more or less as a recluse, in an expensive and largely underground hide away in the woods. A hideaway with all the electrical gadgetry that money can buy. A super-nerd who, against type, likes doing booze and likes doing press-ups. I found him much more creepy than the computer programmer and I dare say that this was the idea, but my idea is that you should portray creepy without actually being creepy. It can be done.

The slender young lady who runs around dressed up either in her underwear or as a robot. People from the US seem to have a taste for slender ladies in underwear in science fiction films.

The story so far revolved around nerdy getting to know slender, with super pulling the strings in the background. A love story set in a hide away. Perhaps this was supposed to pull the ladies.

Perhaps the shadowy government conspiracy, another well-loved trope from the US, was to come. To give a bit of zest to the second half. Perhaps I should try to come up with a few story lines to test against the actualité, should things ever get that far.

A fair amount of gratuitous bad language. A seasoning of F words and P words which I found tiresome. I dare say people from the US and people in TB do talk like this in real life, but I would rather they did not on film.

The mixture as baked did not work for me at all. Perhaps it is just as well that I tried it when BH was at the Odeon, at the ballet, as I can't imagine that she would have like it any better. It rather makes up for all those excellent DVD bargains struck at charity shops and at Hook Road car booters.

PS: an older lady that I talked to at half-time at the conference loved the film. So perhaps the aforementioned pull does work for some of the fair sex. So much so that I was pulled into buying the thing.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/new-scientist.html.

Abstract expressionism

This morning's muse was about the folding of cloth and it struck me that the fascination of artists with the folding of cloth - from the days of the ancient Greek sculptures up to the mid twentieth century (at which point arty people seemed to lose their interest in taking pains with their work) - was an early form of abstract expressionism.

Abstract in the sense that one is doing something complex which has little or nothing to do with human affairs, although I suppose a cognoscenti might talk about a fold being aggressive or sentimental.

On the other hand, the sort of foldings you get when you casually drape a piece of soft cloth over, for example, a part of a body or a piece of furnture, are a strange mixture of the random and the organised.

At first glance, it is all very random. The cloth just seems to have been chucked down. Then, looking more carefully, you start to see how the geometry of the support has influenced that of the cloth. But still with a large random component.

And this morning I started to think how the detailed folding of cloth was not random at all. A cloth can be thought of as a two dimensional sheet, a sheet which can bend but not stretch. And I dare say bending which is parallel to one of the two axes of the weave - we assume a woven cloth - is easier than other sorts of bend. I dare say also that a bend likes to be one dimensional, one usually bends something around a straight edge. Some materials will not bend around anything else. All this can, I imagine, be turned into a set of equations which can be solved.

Chuck the cloth over the chair and there will be one or more solutions to the equations. There may be lots of solutions, perhaps obtained by permuting the set of local solutions. It may be that the solution at the right big toe is largely independent of that at the left knee. But not completely; the flapping of the butterfly's wings at the big toe might propagate through to a tornado at the left knee. That said, my belief is that, for practical purposes, there is some randomness going on here. There is room for the axiom of choice.

So perhaps what the artist is doing when he paints the result, is expressing one solution to those equations, bringing them closer to the surface. And it may be that his choice of solution does have some connection with his personality, history or state of mind on the day. This being the expressionism part of the phrase of the title of this post. In a successful painting of cloth, we will, at some level, understand how those equations have been solved. The painter might, in order to achieve this, simplify things a bit, not attempt to express all the detail, to keep the result within the bounds of what the viewed can comfortably take in at one sitting.

I wonder if there is anyone out there who is seriously into the computer modelling of all this?

With thanks to Cortana and Bing (see reference 1), whom I now use from time to time to see how Microsoft compares with Google, for the image included above. They offered a similar, but slightly better choice than Google on this occasion, including this rather fuzzy reproduction of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. There was a better one, but it was rather small for present purposes.

PS 1: I leave translating these musings to the Goldberg Variations as an exercise for the reader.

PS 2: with thanks to Aldous Huxley for prompting my interest in all this in his book  'The Doors of Perception'.

PS 3: Bing failed to come up with the goods, with the computer models. There were programs which worry about how to cut clothes out of sheets of material with the minimum of waste, programs to help robots to fold things, programs which knew about the folding of complex chemicals and programs which knew about how sheets of cells grow in growing animals. Or how the cerebral cortex folds as it grows. But nothing which quite hit the required spot.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/more-windows-10.html.

Homewood 4

View of the main living room from the outside.

Homewood 3

A view of part of the garden.

Homewood 2

The patio.

Homewood 1

There is an offshoot of Claremont Landscape Gardens called Homewood, a modernist house built in the 1930's by a young architect, whose family funded this rather expensive venture by selling off a small Welsh town or some such.

Now owned by the National Trust on the basis that it is rented out to someone who does not mind parties tramping round alternate Fridays or some such. A quick peek at the Savills web site suggests that the ordinary rent of a house of this sort might be of the order of £15,000 a month. Perhaps I will phone them up and ask about discount for tramps.

The gardens, while handsome, looked like the work of a gardener neither being paid that much nor being much supervised. So perhaps the tenant is away a lot and is content to let the Trust people worry about the gardens.

The form is that you make a booking and then turn up for the bus from from nearby Claremont, a bus complete with the rather loud do not sign snapped above. Which we did Friday last, having taken a sausage roll in the Claremont café and having been thinking about going for years. You then get a couple of trusties who show you some of the house.

A handsome house with a handsome interior, with the interior sporting a lot of tropical hardwood, rather in the way of the not that much later Royal Festival Hall or, indeed, my secondary school in Cambridge. It would probably be hard to get either the timber or the craftsmen to work it these days.

The sort of chap that designed his own furniture as well as his own house. Again, handsome, but perhaps a touch eccentric. The main desk included a old phone, but not so old that it did not sport a small screen and a full keyboard. Probably an STC 3911 Executel, the first time I have seen such a thing, described at reference 1 as 'possibly the most well featured desktop telephone terminal ever manufactured'.

The sort of chap also who was into numerology and, for example, all the vertical heights & measurements were multiples of 20 inches. Odd, given that he was into Continental architects (he loathed the Lutyens' brand of fancy but fake cottage, from around the same time), that he didn't do this in metric.

Handsome black plastic finger plates for the electric light switches. A touch of the old in the form of a large Italian chandelier hanging in the main staircase, possibly Murano. The bathroom we were shown also looked old. Perhaps the ones we we not shown were a bit more up to date.

On the way back to Claremont we discovered the entrance to Esher Common which included a map board. Marked down for a future visit.

PS: I learned after consumption that the interior of the sausage roll was described as being a pork based filling. Honest enough I dare say, but scarcely appetising.

Reference 1: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/5910/STC-3911-Executel/. STC for the once proud British company, Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd, but with the abbreviation now appropriated by the Saudi Telephone Company. See reference 2.

Reference 2: http://www.stc.com.sa/wps/wcm/connect/english/helpAndSupport/contact.

Batch 324

Waitrose shelf stackers are falling down on the job, with the result that their own brand white bread flour is often not available. A pity as it worked and it was cheap.

So the 324th batch of bread was made entirely with Canadian flour and, by means of the expedient of cutting the first rise time from something over five hours to something over four hours, got the result illustrated. With each loaf being approximately 10 inches wide and 5 inches high. Good crackle developed as the loaves cooled, crackle being for me a good marker of quality, something the now defunct baker at Crouch End, Hales I think, possibly now the Golden Sand Cake Shop, say gmaps 51.579824, -0.123899, used to manage a lot of with its excellent small white bloomers.

On this occasion I did not try my loaves really fresh, but first thing this morning instead. When they had the advantage of having developed a bit more flavour. Freshest is not bestest, something it took me a lot of time, money and bother to learn with roast meat. It remains a mystery to this day why I did not read, understand and apply the instructions about resting.

And it is taking a while to learn that mostest rising is not bestest either. Two much rising before the oven and the bread seems to run out of puff.

PS: picture taken hot, so no crackle at that point.

Queues

Is this the end of my attempt to book tickets for 'The Master Builder', having been prompted so to do by at least two emails from the promoters?

Maybe they should give a discount of so many pennies to the queue position, or so many pennies to the second of wait.

More Windows 10

I took Windows 10 on PC No. 1 (a two year old HP laptop) more or less when it came out (see reference 1), but there was no action on PC No. 2, despite it having reserved the update.

Perhaps because PC No. 2 (a four year old HP desktop) was in trouble, rejecting all the background updates coming out from Microsoft Central. Eventually I happened to notice this - the rejections were by then going back for a year or more, without Microsoft bothering to tell me - and the helpful people at BT had a go. Eventually the PC did something called a refresh which got me back up to what I hoped was a clean copy of Windows 8.1. A first tranche of Microsoft updates was rejected again, but then a second lot went through OK. Did all the palaver about restoring alien applications, but losing various bits of unwanted rubbish on the way. Data fine.

Then after an uneventful day or so, I got another invitation to join the Windows 10 club. On which, I started the install, then paused it, then finished it yesterday. Very smooth, maybe 90 minutes altogether. No restoring application palaver but a bit of fiddling around with Chrome and OneDrive. Plus a shiny new browser, MS Edge to play with.

So far so good. Seems faster to do some things than it was before. Slightly flashier job on pictures, including when you click on them in blog posts.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/windows-10.html.

Basement 4

Following the war rooms, and following a quite respectable lunch upstairs in the 'Westminster Arms', a place where I have taken the odd pint in the past, on to Leicester Square where we were a little early for the state opening of 'Miss you Already', although there were a respectable number of fans in waiting and there was a great expanse of what looked like rather cheap pink carpet. Not a red carpet at all.

We were also able to admire the building, red rather than pink, which had once been the Royal Dental Hospital and where, as it happens, I had two wisdom teeth pulled by a student in the seventies of the last century. It was just as well that a licensed practitioner was to hand, as the student did have some trouble getting them out. And I had some trouble back at work when the cocaine wore off. The practitioner, who said that I would be OK, was clearly made of sterner stuff than yours truly.

PS: I was reminded earlier today that the Guardian seems to run a lot of creative writing courses and a lot of advertisements for the courses - so I am clearly not the only one with the urge to write. And as I type I remember that my mother caught the bug too, attending creative writing courses for adults after she retired. I don't know what, if anything, came of it, but it clearly runs in the family.

Basement 3

The war rooms, rather cramped and probably claustrophobic when there were air raids, were well presented with a good number of objects and displays, some of these last being rather hi-tech, at least to my untutored eye. One felt one was getting a good impression of what these rooms were like, what they would have been like to be be in, when they were in use, more than fifty years ago.

One object which made me pause was a copy of the standing instructions, each page enshrined in plastic but with the whole made up into a booklet. Very like the stuff that I remember from the days before word processors. I was interested in the plans of the rooms which were included, having been involved in the preparation of digital plans of the whole Great George Street complex as part of the run up to their privatisation, although I did not know it at the time. An interesting excursus into the fascinating world of digital drawing packages, the likes of AutoCad, then the market leader, although not the package which we had lighted upon. Also in the sections covering what to do in the event of ground attack. We were clearly allowing for all eventualities.

Another was Winston's watch, made for the 4th Duke of Marlborough, complete with distinctive watch chain.

It being very much Winston's place, perhaps wrong to carp, but I do note in passing his bad record on colonial matters, where, even by the standards of his time, his blimpish & racist utterances & actions are a something of a counterweight to his subsequent record in the second world war. See reference 1. The nearest to criticism that I saw in the war rooms was the display about the Gallipoli campaign - on which my understanding is that it was not such a bad idea and might have worked had we got stuck in fast, rather than dithering for months while the Turks built up their defences on the commanding heights.

One of the hi-tech displays was a long illuminated table, perhaps twenty or thirty feet long and about four feet wide. Along the sides were touch strips which enabled one to open up displays for particular days or months. All very clever, but so clever that most people spent their time working out how to work the displays, rather than giving what was displayed much of their time or attention. A risk the curators have to take with this sort of thing; you need to make it clever enough to attract but not so clever as to distract.

Lots of structural steel was visible, some from Dorman Long of Middlesborough. I wondered about how it came to be worth getting the name of the foundry cast into large steel girders. One sees larger versions of such names in the steel of the turbine hall of Tate Modern, although I think the steel there was Scottish rather than English. At one point, there was even a wooden companionway, the sort of thing you get in ships, down to the living quarters of the sub-basement. At another, an expanse of herring-bone pine parquet, varnished a dark brown, which I do not remember at all from days at the other end of the building. Perhaps a war-room special, for the benefit of all the top-brass resident at that time.

The close atmosphere made me a bit sleepy, so after a bit I found a quiet corner to sit down in and take a break. To wake up to find two middle aged ladies peering at me (from close range) in a very concerned way, patting my face to bring me back to life. I noticed a few sympathetic older males in the background, who looked as if they were thinking that a bit of a snooze was not such a bad idea.

Somewhere along the way there was a wooden board onto which wooden boardlets for donors were attached. It looked as if the size of the boardlet was proportional to the size of your donation.

The place was more crowded than I expected, a mixture of Londoners and holiday makers, these last from home and abroad. At least some Germans and some Japanese. Lots of people standing around with audio guides jammed into their ears, resulting in a slight hum sounding throughout. And as one expects in an attraction of this sort, a shop and a café, this last including another older gent. taking a time out. He explained that having been bombed out of his home during the war in question, he was not that enthusiastic about this sort of thing, the purpose of his visit being to accompany a son-in-law.

After the event, I remembered about the rather larger bunker at the other end of Horse Guards and realised that I did not know what it was called. A little work with google revealed that it was the Admiralty Citadel, something to do with secure communications for the Admiralty, privatised in the 1990's, but still in use at the time that the article I read about it was written. Best known for its often creeper covered walls. Illustrated above.

Reference 1: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest-hour-the-dark-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html.

Basement 2

The pelicans noticed in the previous post. Note the bride right, preparing to be photographed with them. A bride who. despite her dress, appears to be wearing trainers rather than matching shoes.

Basement 1

Last week also saw a return visit to the basement of the government offices at Great George Street mentioned at reference 1, to the western end, now known to google as the Churchill War Rooms. BH alleges that I have been there at least once before, perhaps in the days when serving officials were allowed in for free.

As it happened, the bicycle tuition people are in our road at the moment and I took the opportunity on this day to button-hole the lead tutor about bicycle bells. Rather to my surprise, she told me that use of bicycle bells was not part of the curriculum, in part because some people got quite rude and offensive when you rang a bell when coming up from behind them. I think I managed to convince her that teaching the children to at least do something when coming up from behind was a good plan - and I did not tell her that my reactions are such now that I sometimes find it easier to shout rather than to ring, with commands getting to the mouth faster than they can get to the fingers. In my defence, I should add that the finger action needed to ring a bicycle bell is a little awkward.

Then, at the end of the road, I was amused by the sight of a heron, taking refuge from a flock of parakeets by perching in the very top of a tall thin conifer.

After that, in Court Recreation Ground, I would have asked a gent, in civvies, about his litter picker, not having been able to source a decent one myself, but desisted as he was in deep conversation with someone else about the Ribblehead Viaduct. See reference 2,

And so to Green Park where I was able to inspect the bicycle signage at the southern entrance to Queen's Walk (illustrated), where there was nothing to be seen in the form of access denial to bicycles, although there had been some such on the way down from the tube station. I think I might reasonably refuse to pay any £60 fine that might be imposed after effecting a southern entrance.

St. James' Park saw my closest encounter yet with pelicans, although this was later trumped by tales of great flocks of them parked along the Pacific beaches of Peru.

We missed the sand bags at the entrance to the War Rooms by some four years, now replaced by a rather unsatisfactory brown metal porch. Not ugly, but uninspired; a pity that whoever had been tasked with its design had not been able to come up with something better.

I shall pick up the narrative in a post to follow.

PS: in the margins I learn that Court Rec., once a King George playing field (he must have had a personal stake in the creation of urban green space after the second war), has now been accorded the status of a Queen Elizabeth II Field, although I have not yet run down quite what that might mean.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/anxiety.html.

Reference 2: http://www.visitcumbria.com/carlset/ribblehead-viaduct/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/new-scientist.html.

Borodin

Last week to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Borodin Quartet give us two early Beethoven Quartets (Op.18 No.2 and Op.18 No.4) and Shostakovich Op.92. We puzzled about the talk about 70th anniversaries, but a quick visit to reference 1 reveals that they are one of the few quartets which I know to have an evolving membership. I have always assumed that quartets are formed during the younger years of their founding members and that, if successful, they dissolve when those same founding members retire.

The weather was not that great so we took our picnic tea at the tables and chairs conveniently placed on the pavement, outside the café at the back of British Home Stores, rather than in Cavendish Square. Onto the basement of the Wigmore Hall where we took a glass of white and were able to admire their natty succulents in glasses. Rather effective and probably less bother than flowers. Just take a small succulent out of the pot it was delivered in and pop the whole thing in an appropriately sized glass. But the flowers in the Hall proper were as good as ever, with the lead flowers on this occasion being some sort of white anthuriums.

Beethoven good, with 18.4 being as good as I have ever heard it. Perhaps the ears have settled back down after the overdose some years ago. And quite a few hearings more recently as attested at reference 2. Shostakovich rather more emotional, but none the worse for that. Quite a lot of seating changes at half time, which was unusual. Just the one phone went off during the performance, although various people thought it was OK to take pictures before and after.

Lost the race up the stairs at Vauxhall to a young man who ran the whole way. Two young ladies at the top were very scantily dressed, reminding me of the TB anecdote about a chap in there, some years ago now, in there one Sunday with his attractively mini-skirted wife, who bashed a chap who allowed his eyes to linger. It was OK for her to dress in a look-at-me fashion but you needed to be careful if you did look. Never mind touch.

Spent part of the journey home admiring the advertisement for http://www.greatestpotential.co.uk/. Going to the site today I learn that they can teach me how to build a strong passive income for future, whatever one of those is. Should I have made contact with these people years ago?

Spent the part that was spent waiting at Raynes Park trying to count two for every one second on the platform clock. That is to say one, two, three, four and so on, with my 2n falling on their n. Not too bad up to my twenty or so, but after that I could neither manage the simple mental arithmetic nor get in two numbers to the second. I had noticed before that my speed at counting numbers in my head is pretty much constrained to my speed at counting them aloud - and I can only suppose that counting in my head needs to go through most of the motions of counting aloud. Which means that, generally speaking, things slow down as the numbers get larger.

PS: it took me a while to run down the name of the lead flowers. I eventually asked google for images for 'large white tropical flowers' and came across something warm but not right but which got me to anthuriums. Learning on the way that you do not get an online picture catalog of the flowers available from even fancy Mayfair florists.

Reference 1: http://borodinquartet.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=18.4. Blog search not good at sorting out all the variations on Beethoven, Opus, 18 and 4.

Zooming

Following the thought posted at reference 1 the other day, I actually though to try the apple motion today on the lumia - and it worked. There was a limited amount of zoom to be had by appropriate two finger action, with the results left.

Not clear whether one gets more pixels to the house by zooming in on it, perhaps by the lumia being able to move the lens about, or whether it has just clipped the image for the purposes of display. The left hand part of the picture did not look too clever on the telephone, but it looks OK on the PC. And using the Powerpoint zoom suggests that by the time the two images have got there (Powerpoint being where I stuck the two images together) they have the same number of pixels to the screen inch. But who knows how many pixel destroying mappings the images have been through since leaving the lumia? Clearly a feature to be played with.

I also wonder how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there would have been had someone attempted to add something like the green roof illustrated to a house in our road. The one illustrated is in a road which contains houses of a sort which you might easily find in a London suburb - but on the other hand the circus-style tent of the neighbourhood Butlins is just off camera to the right. Maybe if you allow one of those, you are abdicating any rights you may have had to object to more modest extensions and infills.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/rural-pylons-1.html.

Aquamarine

For perhaps the first time, certainly for the first time that I can remember, I have seen aquamarine in the sea today, aquamarine not being a colour I associate with the sea around our shores, despite the name. While if holiday advertisements in the weekend newspapers are anything to go by, you may well get it in the tropics - where I have never been, having barely made it into the northern sub-tropics. Otherwise known as Tenerife.

But today we had flashes of aquamarine in the sea off Felpham, just east of Bognor, an hour or two short of high tide. Horizontal flashes of the stuff in the sea when the bright afternoon sun caught a bit of wave in the right way, whatever that might have been.

I celebrated by finishing off the 'James Grieve' apples that we had bought from the farmers' market at Arundel yesterday, from a chap who said that he only grew them as pollinators for his Bramley crop. This particular variety of apple used to be my favourite as a child, being a big apple, both tart and sweet, with not too strong a flavour. You don't get them much in shops as they neither keep nor travel. I did have a tree on the allotment, but I don't recall the apples being anything like as good as these were. Nice to have an apple, for once in a while, that has not seen the inside of an atmosphere controlled storage facility.

The illustration has been produced by using a custom background colour on a Powerpoint slide using the RGB code (0, 255, 191), with 255 being the maximum, one of three code triples offered by wikipedia.

Waterworks and bacon

Last night I was moaning about my poor visual imagination and the brain decided that it had better do something about it, with the result that I had three very vivid visual images while dreaming this morning.

The first two were in a dream about a train journey, a very straight train journey from the top to the bottom of France, Through a large town which turned out not to be Paris, rather some large town to the north of Paris, name unknown. Then, without much regard to geography, a strong association to Sedan, the place where the French got bashed by the Prussians in 1870 or so. Then, a sense that we were headed straight down to Marseilles. As I say, little regard for geography, rather a strong association to Thyde Monnier, the author mentioned at reference 1 who came from there. Although I did not recover the actual name until some time later when I asked google about 'Nans Le Berger'.

I am then in the dining car, at a table with three other people. Very vague. A rather plain, middle aged waitress asks what sort of sandwich I would like. A very vivid image of some very thin and rather small corned beef sandwiches behind her. Made with thinly sliced white factory bread, with one slice from a standard block of corned beef to the half sandwich. She offers others but I opt for the vivid image.

We then move onto water and the waitress fills up my glass. A slightly odd glass, clear and shaped a bit like a small jug without a handle. With the top rim sloping down to the open spout. Even odder, one can fill the glass up to well above the level of the rim, the meniscus holding it all together surprisingly well. But if one then just touches the face of the water just above the spout, the whole lot whooshes away leaving the glass three quarters full. A regular avalanche of the stuff. Another very vivid image of the glass, full right up and over, waiting for the off.

My table companions think that this is all very amusing and they have a go too.

Meanwhile, France rushes past outside the window of the dining car.

Sort of wake up.

The third was part of a fragment rather than of a dream proper, maybe an hour later. I was boiling up a small piece of very pink gammon in a rather large sauce pan. There was a problem with the amount of water, of which there seemed to be far too much. I scooped some out with a jug and then there seemed to be far too little. Furthermore, the gammon was floating, three quarters out of the water, in which position it was not going to cook very well.

Problems compounded by my having forgotten to tie the gammon up, and being only a piece rather than an entire gammon, it was starting to break up into lumps, rather in the way that some tree stumps can do when they have been out in the weather for a while. I suppose the gross structure of a tree trunk does bear some relation to that of a pig leg. Grain and all that. One thin sliver had already broken away altogether. But I did get a very vivid image of the pink gammon as it started to break up.

Cooked, but not overcooked, and if I could have held it together it would have done very well.

Wake up again, this time properly.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/a-tale-of-country-folk.html.

An ongoing story

Following Priestley, we had an outing with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a book which I had read a long time ago and a film of which we had seen a long time ago.

We started off with rather a good, 4 episode adaptation by the BBC from 2008. Ex Epsom Library, knocked down to me for £1.

Followed up with the Polanski version of 1979 - in which I thought Kinski did very well as Tess. Captured her strange - and as it turned out, fatally flawed - personality rather well. More generally, the film had aged well.

Then started reading the book again on the kindle, in the £1.89 for the collected works version. As always with a film which starts from a real book, I was struck by the amount of stuff which a film version misses out. A film might capture the general tone & times well enough, but an awful lot of what Hardy wrote goes missing. Partly because of the constraints of time, but more because the written word cannot always so easily be turned into pictures. A picture is not always worth a thousand words, whatever they might say in salesman school. The pictures also lose much of the subtlety and most of the often gentle humour.

A 1998 adaptation from US TV is pending.

For the moment, the biggest prat of the story is Angel, the love of Tess's short life. With the antiquarian parson who starts the tale off being the smallest prat. A prat who also reflects Hardy's fascination with posh, being a sucker for an invitation to tea from a posh lady until the very end of his life. I shall report further in due course.

With thanks to google for the image, presumably taken from some early edition.

And see references 1 and 2 for older hardiarna, including the jigsaw.

PS: did the film adaptors borrow the various railway rolling stock they needed from the Poirot Productions Corporation?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/matters-hardy.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/jigsaw-19-series-2.html.

An inspector calls

Some evening recently we saw the BBC adaptation of Priestley's 'An Inspector Calls', oddly my first meeting. Oddly in that wikipedia tells me that the play is a lefty classic, first performed in the Soviet Union in 1945, then basking in the glory of having won the war against Hitler. I plead in mitigation that sprog 2 did it at school, a doing which included going to the play in London.

An unlikely yarn, but one which nevertheless gripped, partly because of the unfolding story but also because, unlike our usual viewing on ITV3, the story had content: there was tragedy but apportioning the blame was not so easy. Probably best not to read what follows if you intend to see the play for the first time any time soon.

The mill owner sacks a girl for being an agitator.

His daughter gets the girl sacked from her shop - a fancy department store - because the girl was pretty and because the daughter was having a bad day. Girl falls on hard times. Becomes a fallen women in the jargon of the times. The sort of women that both Gladstone and the Salvation Army liked to save.

His prospective son-in-law rescues the girl from the clutches of a grasping & unpleasant alderman in a pick-up bar and ends up having a short affair with her.

His son, some time later, has an affair with her, financed by putting his hand in his father's till.

Both son-in-law and son appear to have been generous to her with money. They did pay, perhaps more than the going rate.

The girl gets pregnant but drops the son when she finds out that he is stealing.

The girl fails to get charity from the charitable committee run by the mill owner's wife, thus accounting for the whole mill owning family.

The girl commits suicide by drinking disinfectant - a convenient but unpleasant.way to do it.

Much bourgeois huffing, puffing and hypocrisy along the way. All good fun.

The mill owner started the ball rolling, but was very much a man of his times. To my mind, the daughter has the most guilt, being guilty of doing an unnecessary wrong, an unforced fault as they say in tennis. But her guilt is much mitigated by her also feeling ashamed of what she has done, being far quicker to feel and to accept guilt than most of the rest of her family. The prospective son-in-law may not be a particularly good person but he has not done anything terribly wrong either. The son, hand in the till apart, neither. The wife, like her husband, a product of her position and the times. The times perhaps being the most guilty. Times when young girls could be destroyed by their betters in this way.

Test question (which was posed in the adaptation): how would the distribution of guilt change if each member of the family had to do with a different girl?

As it turned out, the Evening Standard was spot on target a day or so later with the story scanned above. The world has not changed as much as we might like to think. And there is an ongoing debate here in Epsom about whether £900 a week for a shop security guard is the going rate. Do Harrods pay more or less than the going rate? My argument being that some big name places - like Buckingham Palace - can get away with low wages because of the pull of their names.

Rural pylons 1

Following the post at reference 1, I thought it right, particularly as trolleys have been conspicuous by their absence in recent weeks, to start a collection of pylons.

This one carrying power across the old Portsmouth road, south of Esher. Not one of the telephone's best efforts, but I could not see my way to getting closer, to doing a proper shot peering up inside the thing.

However, yesterday, I noticed a lady with what looked like an Apple telephone do zoom by the same action with thumb and forefinger that one used to enlarge an image already on the phone. Maybe the Lumia does something similar? In which case, what does it do about all the on-screen controls?

Or perhaps a feature whereby you pointed at the pylon and the transmission lines, told the telephone that that was what you were interested in and then leave Microsoft to sort it all out? Maybe to offer you a few options?

As it is, it does have a stab at what it thinks you are interested in, but in this case, and given my history, it is going to go for the trees.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/pylon-madness.html.

Anxiety

Mild anxiety dream last night, content probably partially induced by yesterday's proximity to the Great George Street government offices, of which more in due course.

I was involved in the preparation of a substantial booklet, about the size & shape of the Treasury Red Book, once published on the day of the Budget. The red book still exists, although perhaps more skimmed in the web version to be seen at reference 1, rather than in a paper version. Furthermore, the paper version that I remember had a deep red cover rather than an orange cover and did not have tasteful shades of green inside. Perhaps the décor consultants have been in.

Can't remember what my dream booklet was about, but my main contribution was to write a couple of pages at the very front, a couple of pages of creative writing. Fiction.

Towards the end of the production cycle, I decided that I did not like what I had done and fiddled with my pages in the master copy being prepared for the printer, but did not bother the tell the print coordinator, someone with whom I did not get on very well.

As a result, he noticed the unauthorised change and thought, quite reasonably, to revert to what had been there before, but without bothering to consult me. He ended up reverting my two pages to some third version, which I did not like much better than the first version. And this was what got printed.

Much worry about how my name & reputation was going to be forever tainted by this naff bit of publication. Quite forgetting in my anxiety that practically no-one read such stuff and the few that did were unlikely to remember the following day, never mind the following month.

As it happened, my two pages came with those near invisible perforations running down the gutter, thus enabling their neat removal. I vaguely thought that I could tear out all the offending pages and replace them with the right ones.

Wake up, perhaps overwhelmed by the unconscious thought of all that pasting in.

PS: impressed by the speed with which the orange book loads on this PC. Have they done something cunning? Also makes a change from the DT, or even the pinkun. But I notice that they have lost their penchant for side headings, side headings causing me much IT grief at one point. In the days when Ventura Publisher was the cat's whiskers and Word had not been invented. House style for charts and tables seems much as I remember it, shades of green aside.

Reference 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/416330/47881_Budget_2015_Web_Accessible.pdf.

New Scientist

Last Saturday to a Instant Expert conference put on by the New Scientist on consciousness. A ticket cost around £130 and as things turned out it was a good event, well worth the money.

It took me three attempts to get out of the house early on this Saturday morning, but I was rewarded by the sight at the station of a Southern railway employee vigorously applying genuine Brasso to the copper table tops of the coffee bar on platforms 3/4. He was doing a good job, but he said that it was all a bit depressing as they all looked dirty again in no time at all.

My train to Waterloo being cancelled, I gave some thought to the question of how to travel. In the end, I settled for a Victoria train, getting off at Clapham Junction. Puzzled by triangular 'P' signs on the windows of first class carriages, rather like miniature road signs in appearance. And for the second time in days my Bullingdon, from Grant Road East to Green Park Station, incurred a £2 excess. I also learned, after the event, that I was not supposed to cycle up Green Park's Queen's Walk. Poor signage. And I found it quite a pull up the last stretch to the station, which resulted in some sweating on the platform. Oddly, Queen's Walk does not seem to exist in google maps, a rare lapse.

Out at the very smart new tube station at Kings Cross to find myself, after a long tubular walk, outside, but in entirely the wrong part of the complex. Pulled myself together and eventually got myself to the British Library, in the equally smart new conference facility of which my conference was being held. So swish that the rest rooms had taps with levers which you can work yourself, rather than taps with minds of their own, and roller towels, which I also like. Conference sold out. A lot more young people than is usual at the sort of events I go to. Some evidence of the social/dating activity traditionally associated with adult education. Refreshments simple, decent and entirely adequate - so I managed to stay awake and reasonably alert until 1500, not bad for me at all.

Six lectures, in three pairs with three breaks. The lecturers were uniformly good. They were all established in this burgeoning field - not a respectable specialism at all until maybe twenty years ago - and looked to have been chosen, in part at least, for their ability to lecture to a lay audience. They did well, although I had done plenty of preparation and am not sure how I would have fared otherwise. I suspect that it would all have been a bit too much for the semi-retired brain.

Generally good visuals, including, for example, an engaging picture of an elephant doing the mirror test, seemingly fascinated by the inside of its mouth. I learned that cats and dogs fail this particular test, which I find odd, given that I believe both cats and dogs to be conscious in something like the way that we are. Lots of other new stuff, including some good leads to follow up at home. Leads which can be followed up at home, now that I have found out that a lot of science is available for free and not all locked up behind paywalls at all. See, for example, reference 1. And one which told me that I am not the only person who thinks that there might be something in our Freudian heritage after all. See reference 2.

No questions at the end of lectures, which I thought a mistake, as I like to ask my questions when they are still warm, but maybe the New Scientist people know what they are at. In any event, I skipped the terminal question session to stroll past old haunts of the late sixties, to pick up a second Bullingdon at Doric Way in Somers Town and then to peddle down Kingsway to Stamford Street. No excess for this leg.

PS: google does not offer a picture of a triangular sign but does suggest 'P' for priority. When I have a moment, I must read who is getting the priority, hopefully older people like myself. Not a problem on this occasion as very few people were using the first class carriage. I don't suppose any of them paid the extra and I have always assumed that class is a bit of a nonsense on a commuter line.

Reference 1: https://www.plos.org/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-freudians-fight-back.html.