The real thing

A proper tractor mounted concrete mixer. With real rotary power from the tractor's power take-off, rather than one of those dinky little electric jobs powered off of a 13 amp socket that we use in the suburbs.

Snapped in a farm yard up Whistley Hill at Ashburton.

Portuguese connection

Off to the last St. Luke's of the season, Thursday past.

The day was dreary, but the company on the train out was not, with my being entertained by a party of mature ladies - say forty to fifty years in age - out on a bash somewhere. There were five of them, all very much of a size and shape and mostly blonde. I did wonder whether they were all from the same family. But whoever or whatever they were, they were clearly out for a good time, with important supplies in a shopping trolley. Sadly I did not get to see what the important supplies were - had I thought at the time, I imagine I could have raised a laugh by asking in a suitably droll way. It was not taking much to get them going.

There was also a very expensive school satchel opposite me, an elaborate replica, only slightly elaborated, of the sort of thing I had at school, until the wave of duffel bags swept over the schools of Cambridgeshire. Quite different, I may say, from the sort of things that google turns up this morning. While I, needing to make a statement of my own, used an ex-RAF haversack, a sturdy blue affair. I wondered about the cost of the replica satchel, at a guess, £100 or so. How did that compare with what my mother paid sixty years ago? A quick peek at google this morning suggests that the RPI has gone up by a factor of around 25 in that time, while I would think that my satchel cost perhaps £1 or so from Remploy (probably late lamented). So the expensive school satchel was not that out of line, particularly if you allow for it being a fashion statement rather than a bit of school kit. See reference 3.

Pimlico Plumbers looking very festive, but I completely forget to pay them a visit on the way home. Perhaps a special expedition is needed.

Took a Bullingdon at the very top of the ramp (a life time second) at Waterloo 3 and pedaled off to Roscoe Street. Stamford Street eastbound was rather blocked up, probably because of the building going on at the northeastern end. Slightly surprised that the young builder I talked to at the lights sounded as if he came from Denmark or Germany, rather than somewhere further east. Perhaps he was an engineer rather than a grunt.

Came across some Californian walnuts in Whitecross Street, the first I have seen for a while, at what must have been very nearly the last proper market stall, the rest having been given over to street food. Proper cockney too, with a wife who liked wet walnuts. We agreed that this must be a lady thing. Also that stamping the red diamonds on the nuts would be a pretty tedious job and that one would be better off stacking shelves.

Market café in good form, as busy as I have ever seen it. Bacon sandwich on crusty bread (aka thick sliced factory wrapped white) very good. Made to feel a touch old by a party of young people cheerfully chomping away outside despite the cold: given that it is not as if there are not plenty of young people about, perhaps it was that they particularly reminded me of my student days for some reason.

St. Luke's sold out for Pires and Khachatourian, I think for the former, whom, notwithstanding, I had not previously heard of, never mind heard. Modest enough not to have a web site, at least not under her own name, although there is one for her Partitura project at reference 1, a project with the admirable mission '... to create an altruistic dynamic between artists of different generations and to offer an alternative in a world too often focused on competitiveness'. Playing at St. Luke's with a much younger pianist was very much part of this. He explained that being on a platform with another pianist was a wonderful way to learn. Playing something four handed even more so, and we got a demonstration of this last with the funeral march from Chopin's Sonata No.2 - played instead of the billed Bartók. She explained that the hands were different, with the left hand playing in a different way to the right hand, a difference which made playing something four handed which you were used to playing two handed even more interesting. Something I must look up, lateralisation being of interest on another account. See Gazzaniga.

Chopin Sonata No.1 interesting, Nocturnes Op.9 and Op.27 terrific. But the funeral march seemed a bit vulgar after the nocturnes. There was also the minor irritation of talking head in some of the intervals - which I would much preferred them to have dubbed in after the event. It was not as if the thing was going out live, despite the lunch time billing.

To the 'Masque Haunt' for afters, the first time we had been there for a while, to find it very smartly decorated up for Christmas. Presumably the Christmas lunch season is well under way. There were also a couple of chaps from Pickfords, the people who moved us from Norwich, many years ago now, so we could swap removal stories. I then learned about an important reunion of nearly all the people who passed through the 'Kinks', now mostly in their seventies, at the Boston Arms at Tufnell Park, a public house which I used to use occasionally in the olden days, not at that time the music place it seems to have become. Just an old style boozer for paddies. See reference 2. Sadly, it was too late for the reunion.

Bullingdon'd backed from Berry Street to Stamford Street, this time to find that Alaska Street rather than Stanford Street blocked up, with a large film lighting crew rather than the builders. I was reminded of a very cross New Yorker, really cheesed off that his street was being used for the umpteenth time for filming - without, it seemed, any form of fee or compensation. Being so up close and personal to the luvvy scene was thought to be reward enough. I found the baker - Konditor & Cook - far too crowded and passed.

Reference 1: http://musicchapel.org/presenting-the-partitura-project/.

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

Reference 3: http://swanlowpark.co.uk/rpiannual.jsp.

French connection

This appeared in my in-box this morning, making me think that the French couldn't just do Black Friday like the rest of us; they had to do something different. There was also the angle that they were a lot quicker off the mark with things cyber than we were, doing dating & porno on computers long before we were. See reference 1 for an engaging picture of the sort of heritage PC which could do the business for you getting on for forty years ago. Which prompted the memory (from camping there) that the market stalls of that time in Les Sables-d'Olonne were mostly wired up - which would have been very odd indeed in Chapel Street.

Then I take a look in my promotions tab to find that that was full of Cyber Monday too.

PS: also prompted to think that a return visit to Les Sables-d'Olonne would be good now that we could afford to stay in a hotel instead of roughing it. Great beach there, with the sand absolutely spot on for drip castles, an activity which the French don't do but do watch. Great fun. Maybe next year.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel.

Potato soup

We have been giving lentils a bit of a rest and have been doing more potato soup in recent weeks, usually fresh rather than recycled. That is to say one can use mashed potato as a padder, but one does need fresh cooked potato lumps for the authentic texture.

Peel a couple of pounds of potatoes and chop into chunks of around a cubic inch. Put in a couple of pints of water, bring to the boil and then down to simmer.

Add a three or four sticks of celery, sliced thin crosswise.

Add a couple of medium onions, coarsely chopped.

Continue to simmer gently until vegetables nearly cooked. The potato chunks should not be falling apart.

Then we have options for toppings.

Option 1: a packet of Knorr chicken noodle soup.

Option 2: a Knorr chicken stock pot. A sort of brown jelly, coming in little plastic tubs, does much the same job of adding flavour as the chicken noodle soup, but without the bits and bobs. Both contain a good whack of salt and MSG.

Option 3: 100-200g of Italian salami, skinned and chopped into lumps of rather less than a cubic centimetre.

Add in the chosen option, add in thinly sliced white cabbage to taste.

Simmer a bit longer and serve. A good deal more filling than the unadorned soup and, on options 1 or 2, doing it this way gets the salt and MSG down to levels which suit our palettes. Does quite well when one does not have a chicken carcass (band carcass illustrated) to hand to make proper stock with, and I should think we are putting them down at a rate of around three to the fortnight just presently.

PS 1: the idea is that the soup is substantially composed of things which are white or pale green. Do not be tempted by things like carrots or peas which would disturb the colour scheme, the feng shui of the thing. See reference 1.

PS 2: some people add in a block of Sharwood's medium egg noodles with the white cabbage. If you do this, you may need to add a little more water. The idea is soup not stew.

Reference 1: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/understanding-the-principles-of-feng-shui.html.

Towered 2

The chapel in the White Tower. Another association, strong on the colour of the stone, but only just arrived, being the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, where we came close to touching a real relic in the course of our last visit to Paris, now some time ago. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Jardin+Catherine+Laboure.

Towered 1

On Tuesday, for the first time in many years, to the Tower.

Started off with a tasteful cancer advertisement hoarding about a bump growing in the road, having previously seen a moving version on television. For some reason, I thought it quietly effective, all the better for managing without finding it necessary to show us gory body parts, after the manner of some anti-smoking advertisements. But maybe it worked for me, as a veteran. Maybe others will just pass it by.

Followed up by a young man sitting next to us on the train eating his breakfast, a breakfast which consisted of a large paper cup full of coffee and a middle sized paper bag full of pastry, from which last he was taking large bites from time to time, mastications in between. This I found all rather off-putting, perhaps because of the childhood prohibition about eating in public. From where I associate to a Japanese observation that they find the western aversion to eating noises rather odd. They slurp and slop in their restaurants as much as they want and none of their own are bothered by it at all.

And so on to the Tower where we took coffee in a café done up in what I took to be shuttered concrete. A bit of heritage concrete from the sixties to show respect to the World Heritage Site adjacent. I was a bit taken aback to find that it was actually wood, dressed up to look like shuttered concrete. See snap above.

Outside a police patrol of six, two armed with machine guns, plus two dogs. But a fairly cursory inspection at entry got us into the precincts. Inside there were a few ceremonial soldiers of the Buckingham Palace variety, but I did spot a few regulars in desert colours round the back. Which reminded me of the days when Osbert Sitwell, then a household cavalryman (or perhaps a foot guard), was stationed there. See reference 1.

One singular turret, which I did not remember at all, contained elaborate graffiti carved in the stone by the various illustrious - or at least armigerous - persons who had been kept there over the years.

The Tower is now part of the same operation as Hampton Court (which made buying annual senior membership well worth while), and had the educational displays to show for it, In the summer I think they do replicas of catapults and luvvies dressed up as knights in armour. Perhaps they do the Tower and the Court, turn and turn about.

One big attraction was the refurbished display of jewels, with the jewels themselves being behind two very serious steel doors, about a foot thick and including some huge bolts. Presumably complemented by unseen concrete all around. There were also some rather bossy guards, mostly smaller ladies from parts overseas and one of whom was very officious about telling me to put my telephone away, my not using it at the time either for taking pictures or as a telephone notwithstanding. I suppose it was all in keeping with our long tradition of mercenaries - from Germany, Nepal and Ireland to name just three countries of origin - in our armies.

Quite taken with the short moving walkway to keep the punters moving past the crowns. A simple but effective way of dealing with the crowds of the summer.

Quite put off by the large amount of show off gold, a lot of it dating from the restoration. Not at all sure that this reminder of the wealth and ostentation of the ruling classes was a good thing. But then again, perhaps it is good to be reminded of what they are like. For gold pot read monster basement. With the love of underground living of the very rich continuing to puzzle me: are they scratching some rare gene lifted from the mole or the earthworm?

Lunch in a canteen not unlike that at Hampton Court, although I did not see an attendant who looked on the ball enough to know whether it was actually the same contractor. Inter alia, I took some baked root vegetables, with the amount of oil on them compensating handsomely for the lack of sugar and saturated fat.

Closed the visit with a quick visit to the White Tower itself, the home of a great deal of armour, some of it collected from the battlefield of Waterloo, and a very handsome chapel, reminding me of both Rochester Castle and St Bartholomew the Great. See reference 2 for the former, reference 3 for the latter. It was, I suppose, of very roughly the same date. I wondered about the date of all the windows punched through the outside walls of the tower, presumably some time after the original construction. The entry stairs were new construction, but all oak and dowels, very retro. There were a few British trusties in this part of the operation, all smiles and welcome. Well informed too.

Out to get a glimpse of some ravens in a cage and to cross Tower Bridge. To find that the trains from London Bridge to Waterloo East have not been running and will not run for some time, this from a chap who sounded as if his parents might have been real Cockneys. Reduced to using the swish but rather more laborious Jubilee Line.

We also came across a stand up wheel chair on the riverside walk between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, something I have never seen before. With the standing up resulting in the occupant being rather higher than the rest of us, rather than the usual rather lower. It all looked a bit unstable to me, but presumably the occupant thought it a good plan. If you ask google about 'stand up wheel chair', you turn up the very thing, a snip at just under £15,000. Only the posh disabled need apply.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/osbert.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-rocks-of-rochester.html.

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

Jerusalem

Last Sunday to Smith Square for a concert relocated from the South Bank, the QEH refurbishment presumably being under way, I think our first visit since the Chopin at reference 1.

Same route as last time, exiting at a very quiet Pimlico, with just a few small helicopters overhead. Nothing as grand as a chinook on this occasion. Refreshment at the Hilton Doubleday, surprised by the size and location of what must be the Burberry's head office and then off to run the small gauntlet of demonstrators against all things Israeli, in this case the Jerusalem Quartet, outside St. John's. Otherwise, security at St. John's up just a notch from its usual very laid back.

I suspect the Quartet of being made up of emigrés from the last days of the Soviet Union, but whether or no, they have cast in their lot with Israel, and they have to put up with demonstrations, which I have to say make me a bit uncomfortable, my not being very comfortable with Israel in general. I know that there is all the bad history and I dare say they have been provoked by more recent events, but I do feel they could do better in the search for peace in their part of the Middle East than they are. In this age of public apologies for bad things done long ago, perhaps they could make a start with some public recognition that they did some bad things of their own back in 1948. And if they do not do better, maybe it will get to the point when sanctions will be needed to get some action. In the meantime, I go to the Quartet, a quartet which is very good at its trade, home base notwithstanding. See reference 2.

Sat about ten rows back which did very nicely and from where, for some reason, I was rather struck by the way the top of the (Corinthian) capitals above us took on a very dragons' heads appearance. Followed by a nicely balanced concert with Haydn, Bartok and Dvořák, with the minuet from Haydn's sunrise by way of an encore.

Shouting by demonstrators faintly audible in the quiet bits, the front of house claim that audible demonstrations on Sundays were banned by by-law in Smith Square notwithstanding. Presumably the idea was the the long suffering residents of nearby streets (Harold Wilson used to be one) deserve a break from politics at least one day a week.

St. John's was about three quarter's full this Sunday afternoon, quite a lot of people of working age and a sprinkling of children. One wondered what they made of it. When I tried the Bartók (No.6) again, a few days later at home, an ancient Hungarian recording complete with Hungarian labels, it seemed very flat compared with the real thing. Maybe I will try again when the performance has worn off a bit; the start of the Takács Quartet version on YouTube is certainly encouraging. Maybe Bartók at home really needs the headphones I use when I am typing.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/chopin-as-in-shopping-1.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/a-politicised-event.html.

The travellers are coming...

An advance guard has turned up in Longmead Road, next to the Sartorius shed. One front, one rear. The front one is staked to a chain and has used it to mow a very neat circle of grass, with part of the boundary visible front in the snap left.

A snap taken on a dull winter day, which seems to mean that the telephone makes a bit of a mess of the colours. Maybe the actual snap was a bit dull for its taste, so it tried to gee things up a bit, getting a bit carried away in the process with the stronger colours. No doubt I could put things back together again with photoshop...

We await the main body. Perhaps relatives of whoever it is that has been parked up in a small caravan a bit along the road. See reference 1. Perhaps relatives, perhaps in more senses than one, of those on Horton Lane. See reference 2.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/a-new-sort-of-rubbish-1.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/new-horse.html.

Sleeping with the enemy

I was amused to read this morning that I can pay extra for my fancy malt from Ben Riach on the grounds that the stuff has picked up some proper flavour by having been stored for near twenty years in a barrel which was once used to store bourbon in the US of A, that is to say real whisky, whisky with a bit of poke to it, a whisky with a real nose and never a whiff of the peat bog about it. The advertisement does not say what sort of bourbon, although maybe the chaps who do the forensic stuff on 'Morse' could make something of the label illustrated left. In the meantime, beggars can't be choosers.

See Fogwatt on Spey, gmaps 57.6111946,-3.2940742, otherwise, for the lazy, reference 3.

PS: I have just been told that it is black Friday, despite it being nowhere near the 13th of the month. Will I, I wonder, be doing my bit? With a 20 year old malt? I suspect not, being rather put off by the designation of black, which hardly seems auspicious. How did all the marketing chaps come to want to make us think that it was? For me anyway, it is an uphill push. Not that blue seems a terribly good colour for a whisky bottle either, blue label notwithstanding (see reference 1) - maybe the Ben Riach people need a dose of the Portas. Rates on application from reference 2.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/luvvy-spotting.html.

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

Reference 3: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@57.6111946,-3.4341552,11z.

Pour le Mérite

I have, rather late in life, got around to reading Ernst Jünger's 'Storm of Steel'. As a young person I read Sassoon, Graves and, in a rather different vein, Hašek. Got around to Blunden much more recently, more or less by accident. Perhaps when I was young, still under the parental shadow as it were, the second world war was too recent for a book by a German soldier, even one from the first world war, to be considered proper.

Jünger, from Hanover, joined up more or less the day the war started, joining an ancient and honourable regiment which had seen service alongside the British at Gibraltar (for which the regiment wore blue flashes) and at Waterloo - and I have only just found out that part of the army commanded by Wellington at Waterloo included around 15,000 troops from Hanover, out of a total of around 90,000. Like most serious soldiers, Jünger had proper respect for his opponents, British, French and empire. Respect which was mutual and extended to exchanges of letters with former opponents who recognised events described in the book.

He joined as a ranker, rose to be some sort of a lieutenant and was awarded the 'Pour le Mérite' after being badly wounded at the very end of the war. An award which appears to recognise sustained valour, rather than single acts of conspicuous valour, like our Victoria Cross.

He kept a diary through the war, with a first edition of this book appearing in 1920, rather before the Sassoons got underway, a book which went through lots of substantial revisions over the years, with the different revisions varying significantly in tone. This translation was made from the 1978 collected works, but there the trail goes cold. I don't know from where the collectors took their text. But despite all the revisions, it reads very fresh and raw. A record of how it was on the day. I share various snippets below.

He spoke both French and English and appeared to get on well with the French civilians among whom he lived when not in the front lines. I don't think in those days of the first war we were so hard on civilians who got along with their occupiers as we became in the second war.

He seems to have been a member of some sort of assault company (or perhaps platoon) for a good part of the war. An assault company whose job it was to smash themselves into a foothold in the opposing trenches, a foothold which could then be consolidated and extended by the troops which followed. Not quite the forlorn hopes of the 'Sharpe' stories, but certainly tendencies in that direction. I was struck by the vulnerability of a trench once you broke into it. Strong enough against a frontal attack, but very vulnerable to being rolled up once penetrated.

I was also struck by how much open ground there seemed to be between the two opposing front lines, at least most of the time. Not the fifty yards of the (excellent) model at Imperial War Museum at all (see reference 2). At one point, he passes time in a crater in this open ground, waiting for the off, by reading Tristram Shandy, a book which made it with him to the hospital following. It seems that he was accompanied, once he was an officer, by his orderly at all times, an orderly who took good care of all his personal effects. Who would have considered it a stain on his honour to have lost any of them; as bad as a fighting soldier losing a machine gun (in this war) or a colour (in the olden days).

Playing with live ordnance seems to have been a hobby with plenty of bored soldiers, some of whom made collections for their dugouts and some of whom got themselves killed or badly damaged in accidents. One, for example, wondered what would happen if he lit the green powder coming out of a partially dismantled grenade with his cigarette lighter.

He reports his surprise at gradually learning how many other soldiers were needed to support the relatively small number actually in the front line. And his irritation at the procession of specialists, this was in the early days, from HQ, advising on all aspects of trench warfare. The wire man, the dugout man, the latrine man and the drainage man.  I was reminded of our Treasury, where their front liners (in a manner of speaking) get pestered by a similar procession of specialists, all with special axes to grind - and all with special powers to interfere.

Towards the end of the war (by which time it was clear that the Germans were done for. They had run out of both men and matériel - while some of the British dugouts ran to armchairs and gramophones), he reports an assault where he was walking with his cane, his revolver and his orderly, between the two lines of advancing infantry. Lines perhaps fifty or a hundred yards apart. At one point he notices that his Iron Cross has fallen off his tunic, so he and his orderly spend some quality time scrabbling around in the mud for it, successfully, before resuming their walk.

After the war he was able to resume, or to take up, his fascination with beetles. Not a poetry man at all.

I have now turned back to Graves, back to 'Goodbye to All That', which turns out to be much more autobiographical than the German book. And having got into the trenches, it is striking how much more moaning there is. The moaning, the derelictions and defections of the rank and file. The now ludicrous behaviour of the regular officers of another ancient and honourable line regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Perhaps the difference is that Graves was in the war by accident, whereas for Jünger it turned out to be his vocation. I shall report further on Graves in due course.

Before I close, I report an association to the Boy Scouts, their second appearance in just a few days (see reference 1). In my time with them, night wide games were an important and popular part of what we did, games which often took the form of hide and seek in one of the neighbouring woods. with the older scouts searching out the younger scouts. One had to learn to be still in a rustling wood, full of strange nocturnal noises; something that was, in the beginning, quite scary. The experience did give one a little of what life in the trenches, life out in no mans' land might have been like. Perhaps that was the whole point, perhaps the militaristic associations of the Boy Scouts were no accident, if a little anachronistic by the 1960's.

And I wonder, once again, what I could have made of books such as these, as a child. What did I make of them? My dominant thought now being that it could not have been much. I would have understood the words, could probably have written sensible essays about the words, but it would all have been, essentially, childish. Would it have been of any help had I been called up a few years later - instead of going off to gap year and university? But there is another thought, the thought that what one might have felt as an impressionable child was just as important then as what one feels as a serious & sensible senior is now - just different, different and a long time ago.

The illustration is taken from the cover of an early German edition of the book, from https://www.gutenberg.org/.

PS: I think he recorded a bit of synesthesia, something which I quite often come across elsewhere, reporting the sound of a particular sort of shell as being yellow in colour. Possibly a misprint or an error, but I cannot now find the place. With gutenburg not offering an English machine readable version, that will now have to wait for a re-reading.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/trolley-36.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=trench+experience+fil.

Ambulance chase

While asking google about something else yesterday evening, I came across an interesting case from Oregon.

It seems that a few years ago there was a chap who was qualified as both an ambulance chasing attorney and as an emergency room doctor, whatever this last might mean in the US. Free to set up his stall in emergency rooms in the state of Oregon? His attorney flavoured professional body wanted to name and shame him (what they call a public reprimand) on the grounds that he was using his medical activities to promote his legal activities, or to put it more crudely, to point him in the direction of promising looking ambulances to chase. As it turned out, the professional body was blocked from so doing by the local supreme court.

Perhaps the chap was not guilty as charged, but it would be a lot simpler if people did not did not do this sort of thing. A lot clearer that nothing unsavoury was going on. Quite apart from the issue of whether you would want to buy professional services from someone who divided their time between two demanding professions in this way.

Prompted to post by a surveyor pushing leaflets through all the doors in our road about the excellent services they offer in cases of dispute about building works in one plot damaging buildings in another.

Waitrose

I got wind of a fine new Waitrose opening in Nine Elms Lane, so I thought I ought to attend this celebration of life beyond Lidl. Life for those who don't want to shop in the bargain basement.

It was, as it happened, a rather drear and wet day, so I thought to try out the bicycle cape on a Bullingdon. I always used to carry the cape when I used a proper cycle, although with lack of use there are interesting spots, not to say splodges, of mould growing on the inside and an interesting smell as one puts the thing on. I also worried about where I could buy a replacement, should that become necessary, yellow cycle capes not being anything like as commonly worn as they once were. Hi-vis before their time though they might have been.

So I pulled a Bullingdon at Grant Road East, Clapham Junction and pedaled off past the 'Asparagus' and Battersea Dogs Home and onto the shiny new Waitrose. Quite busy less than four hours after the off, bigger than the Epsom Waitrose, a lot smaller than the Kiln Lane Sainsbury's and about the size of the Leatherhead Tesco's. That is to say, about the right size for the senior shopper - or the metropolitan flat dweller dashing in for a quick bit of ready-meal after a hard day's work extracting money out of the rest of us. Sadly, being on a Bullingdon and not having thought to bring a bicycle lock, not practical to collect either my free organic bag or my free restaurant guide. Perhaps I was not missing much as I learned later that neither the restaurant where I lunched, not that which I lunched at reference 1 was listed. Who on earth could have put the thing together? Perhaps also I would have found that 'My Waitrose' card did not stretch from Epsom to Battersea; they certainly didn't bother to send me an email about this important juncture in Waitrosen affairs.

By the time I got to Vauxhall Cross I was a bit cold and wet, despite the exercise, so I paid one of my rare visits to a Pret, complete with cape, bicycle clips etc. I couldn't find the soup but two young ladies behind the jump took me into their care and I exited with quite a decent cup of something described as Christmas ham hock soup. Something of the pot noodle about it, maybe the MSG, but for a ready made soup not bad at all, just the ticket for the occasion. This despite sitting underneath an umbrella which seemed detirmined to drip on me - this because I did not think it fair to inflict wet cape on those sitting in comfort inside. Also because it would have had me steaming up in short order.

I wonder now whether I will remember to confess my visit to a fast food joint when next asked about such places by YouGov, screens which I usually briskly tick through with 'never'. More on them in due course.

In the meantime, on to the Estrela Bar, on or near South Lambeth Road, for lunch, well known to google despite not having moved into the world of web sites. I got the impression that they had either changed their baker - their bread used to be very good indeed for a restaurant - or that their baker had changed the mix. But they made up for that with a large portion of some excellent lamb, strips of lamb, cut with the grain, which had been lightly spiced and grilled. Served with overcooked seasonal vegetables; overcooked, I imagine, because they had been sitting for a while in a bain-marie. Or however you say that in Portuguese. Or perhaps a relic of the days when few adult Portuguese had much left in the way of teeth. But the vegetables did include some cabbage, something which many grander establishments have trouble with.

Picked up the Bullingdon for return at South Lambeth Road (underneath what used to be the striking BT building, now probably headed for more luxury flats) and pedaled off to Falcon Road. Which allowed a visit to the Turkish emporium there where I was able to pick up some of their excellent & cheap Turkish delight - at least BH has never complained about it. I don't eat the stuff - and some of their excellent but not so cheap Greek figs. Which I do eat.

Overall verdict, much more comfortable in a cape when on a bicycle in the rain than in anything else I can think of - except, perhaps, waterproof jacket and trousers, but with these last being a bit of a fiddle to get on and off. The only down side was that one then had a wet cape to carry about. We shall see whether I repeat the experiment/experience.

PS: the Wetherspoons web site tells me that the 'Asparagus' was named for all the asparagus that used to be grown in Battersea when the area was one big market garden for the then rather smaller metropolis.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-touch-of-pepys.html.

The typical MP

I read yesterday that the reason the proposed assisted dying bill failed in the Commons in September was that a good proportion of our MPs have a strongly held belief that assisting dying is wrong and are unable to vote for such a measure whatever other people - the 80% of the electorate who think that assisted dying is right - might think. Their beliefs trump those of the rest of us.

Which is not as wrong as it might sound, as part of the point of a representative democracy is to lift legislation, to some extent at least, out from the tricky tides of democratic fashions. Other descriptors which spring to mind include erratic, treacherous, fickle and murdoch-media-fueled. There are times, I imagine, when a lot more than half the population would vote to bring back flogging, if not hanging. Perhaps we are in one of those times now.

That said, I got to wondering about the sort of people who are apt to get to be MPs these days. We do not have lists in the way of much of the continent and I don't suppose we have anything like as many Trade Union sponsored MPs as we once did. So to get to be an MP, you usually have to be able to get through the rough and tumble of selection and then to get through the rough and tumble of election. Your name does not just emerge, quietly and discretely from some bureaucratic huddle. You have to be able to take plenty of knocks and reverses on the way and this is not a business for the faint-hearted. Not a business, perhaps, for those who want to be able to chuck in the towel when the game is up.

Not the sort of person, perhaps, who might want an assisted death on their own account. Or at least that is what they might think when they are hale and hearty. So the trick is to somehow get it through to them that, in this matter at least, they have no business inflicting their own take on the ends of others.

PS: think of California! See http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/california-does-something-sensible.html.

Luvvy spotting

Back to the 'Swan', just off Queen's Square, last week for a spot of luvvy spotting, to be rewarded by a spotting of Adrian Scarborough, mainly known to me for his portrait of an amateur photographer who took cute - not to say saccharine - pictures of pets in the 'Picture of Innocence' episode of 'Midsomer Murders'. A chap with ordinary clothes and ordinary accents, but he either was the luvvy or his double. I was going to ask him as we left but forgot, possibly because in the meantime I had celebrated with a shot of Johnnie Walker 'Blue Label', spotted on the top shelf. A shot which necessitated the bar maid finding and climbing onto a special stool and my making a special visit to the mulberry. It was fine stuff, the best whisky I had tasted for a while, but not sure about buying a whole bottle.

From there to Conway Hall for another New Scientist lecture, this being the official reason for the outing. A second lecture about the LHC on the Franco-Swiss border, the first being reported at reference 1 and the second being a much better lecture than the one reported at reference 2. We had two lecturers, one a professor of experimental physics at Liverpool and the other a professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge. Both very good, in different ways, at talking to a lay audience - although they both used some complicated gadget to produce the visual aids, which I thought might have been better powerpointed.

But I did like one of the visuals which showed the size of various data sets from the world of big data, a visual which google turned up for me on the third attempt (search?q=data+Youtube+LHC) and which showed that the amount of data coming out of the LHC each of its working days, was roughly equivalent to the amount of data being loaded into YouTube.

The experimental professor was very tiggerish and it would be interesting to see her university lecturing style - she might just be a little tiring if she kept up the tiggering all the way through a tricky bit of leptonery. The theory professor was a bit less tiggerish and had a slight tendency to lapse into matey slang, which I find tiresome, but he did take some questions during his half hour slot, which I like, even if the questions were not particularly apt. That is to say they were mostly big questions, not admitting small answers, more suited to the saloon bar of a public house than a lecture theatre. Maybe what they lost in freshness, they gained in quality when they took the questions in writing at the consciousness day (see reference 4).

All in all, a good show, all going to show that the older brain is taking to second helpings. My only suggestion would be that it would have been good if they had been able to give us more sense of how these various billion pound experiments fit together. So, for example, is the Chinese collider just a bigger and better version of the LHC or is it doing something different?

On the way out, my second sighting of a car being charged up from a pole in the pavement, the rarity saying that there can't be that many people at it.

Bus back to the 'Hole in the Wall', on which we got talking to a lady, who, while not a luvvy herself, at least I don't think she was, did forcefully remind me of Lana Morris in the 'Last Enemy' episode of 'Inspector Morse', the very episode mentioned at reference 3. An old trouper, once a starlet, well known in the sixties, although an old trouper who died relatively young. That apart, I think the lady on the bus might warrant a half point on my luvvy tally. I notice, in passing, that google does not seem to know the difference between a trouper and a trooper - although perhaps I should rather blame all the people putting the wrong tags on their pictures from Star Wars.

Checking the bar man at the 'Hole in the Wall', I found that he was an Israeli, seemingly not too pleased to be asked what sort of Israeli he was - that is to say Polish, Russian, Moroccan or what. I thought European rather than Middle Eastern or African, but he declined to say more than that half his grandparents were Israeli born. But we passed on smoothly enough and he processed my order without hitch.

The only other incident of note was a lady punching the keys on her telephone at a tremendous, not to say scary, speed, while the train to Epsom was moving, a lot faster than I could count and a lot faster than I can punch the keys on a real keyboard.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/hadrons.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/conway-hall.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-riddle-of-third-mile.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/new-scientist.html.

Magic number?

Early this morning I was thinking about alphabet songs and was struck by the thought that it was another manifestation of the rule of the magic seven, a rule which I notice from time to time, as can be seen at reference 1.

I very rapidly convinced myself that the rhyme I learned at infant school went with three groups of seven, followed by a terminal 5. That is to say (7, 7, 7, 5) or 'A, B, C, D, E, F, G', 'H, I, J, K, L, M, N', 'O, P, Q, R, S, T, U' and 'V, W, X, Y, Z'. With the three groups of seven being sung evenly, but with a bit of variation with the closing group of five to make it fit the tune properly.

Having now checked, I find lots of alphabet songs offered by google, with the one that seems most like my memory at reference 2 (illustrated). But rather than (7, 7, 7, 5), it goes (7, 9, 6, 4), with only the first line being sung evenly.

The version offered by BH, a former infant teacher, went (7, 9, 7, 3), with her 9 being scanned in the same way as the US version, with a quick 5 at the end, which was not how I remembered it at all.

So what is going on? Has the song changed since I was little? Do they do it wrong in the US? Were there lots of local variations before radios and google got in on the act? Or have I decided what I want to remember before I get around to the remembering, with the magic number not actually being as potent as I would have it?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=magic+seven.

Reference 2: http://supersimplelearning.com/songs/original-series/one/the-alphabet-song-sing-it/.

How does a brain do the sort of things that a computer is good at?

In what follows the workings of computers, of which I know something, have been rather simplified for the purposes of the argument. The workings of brains, at which I guess, have to look after themselves.

So thirty years ago it was thought that computer programs were best designed using structured techniques, one of which was SDM, then widely used in government. For all I know it might well still be so thought, although I dare say the detail of the techniques has moved on a bit since I knew about them.

In this SDM world, all the logic needed to write computer programs is reduced to three constructs, three sorts of action: sequence, repetition and choice. Sequence is do this thing, then do that thing and so on. Repetition (boxes marked top right with an asterisk) is do this thing so many times or perhaps until some condition – for example, end of file or end of life – is true. Choice (boxes marked with a small circle) is do this thing when A is true, do that thing when B is true and so on. These three constructs can be used to build programs of more or less arbitrarily large size – programs which do work – with part their success lying in the way that the problem has been broken down into manageable chunks which can be specified, designed, built and tested in isolation. In the case of the brain, while such chunks may exist, we are some way from identifying them and what they do – and I think it likely that even if we do succeed in identifying such chunks, there will be a lot more complicating chit-chat between them than would be the case in a computer program; they cannot so easily be looked at in isolation.

The tea making example included above is adapted from a memory of a training course.

But underlying these three constructs we have two other ideas, so well understood by computer programmers that they are often more or less forgotten about.

First, in order to be able to do these things, you need to be able to execute a named object, a named object which might well be the subject of its own SDM model. The name of the object is a way to identify, to specify a place in the computer program which has been loaded into the computer from which to start execution – a place which, in the case of a brain, might be the name of a region, the name of a position in the cerebral space.

The caller, which is usually itself another named object, might supply some input data, pass control to the called object – often called a subroutine – and then be given some data back when the execution of that object terminates and control has been passed back. The calling routine will generally, although not necessarily, wait for that termination before carrying on. It is all very orderly and in many computers there is only one thing going on at once, code is being executed in at most one place at any one time, although modern computers do pretend to be cleverer than that. And there will be a very definite something doing all this controlling and passing, perhaps Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android.

Second, your data, be it in memory, on a tape, on a disc or whatever, incorporates the idea of next. You can bookmark your last chunk of data, perhaps all the information about a house in the street or a giraffe in the zoo, and then, perhaps some time later, get the next chunk of data, the next house or giraffe. A techy might call such a bookmark a cursor.

One widely used subroutine which builds on all of this is the SQL select statement which might do something like ‘give me all the birds with blue wings and yellow beaks’ – with SQL being the name of an internationally standardised query language which came after SDM (with, as it happens, ‘S’ for structured in both cases). Computers are rather good at this sort of thing. Brains, if they can manage at all, usually prefer the support of pencil and paper.

So how does the brain do it?

A brain, with its jungle of billions of interlaced, not to say interlocked, neurons rather than more or less neat sequences of instructions, does not do things in the same way at all, although we can draw or suggest parallels. In what follows I use the term region for a compact (rather than straggly) part of the brain responsible for something or other, with a region with very roughly comparable to a process or a subroutine. Maybe we have a hundred or so such regions, maybe several hundreds, but not thousands.

Roughly speaking , there is no fat controller, from Microsoft or anywhere else. The regions might talk to each other, but they all do their own thing – more or less. There are some regions which do have control functions, but these are rather global, rather broad brush. Activate or inhibit this or that region or super-region. Activate or inhibit this or that type of synapse.

Roughly speaking, all the regions are executing all the time, there is no question of just one region being allowed to be on the go at once, although that said it is also true that at any one time, some regions are more active than others and some regions are not very active at all.

And while a region never stops, never sleeps, it might exhibit periods of stability – with these periods perhaps being around half a second in duration – when it is projecting a repeating signal to some other region. A repeating signal which is not trivial in the sense that it is not no neurons firing and it is not all the neurons firing all the time; a signal which does contain some information, something interesting. We might say that this information, the content of such a repeating signal is expressed by its Fourier coefficients and if such a repeat is of sufficient strength, one might say that it amounts to the first region completing its action and passing the results on to the next. Projecting the results to some other region, with this other region being activated along the way and with all this being roughly analogous to sequence in a computer. It might, of course, project the results to a number of other regions, to be dealt with by them in parallel, something that an old fashioned computer could not do, although this is one of the things a modern computer can pretend to.

So in this projection we have something like the SDM sequence, with the sequence being expressed in the projection from one region to another, rather than in the sequence of execution.

Turning to SDM repetition, we could have the second region project back to the first. The second region does something, tells the first something about what it has done, which first region then does something else again. Maybe after a bit there would be a period of stability, when the signals in both direction are repeating themselves and we could say the repetition has finished. Rather a weak analogy, but the best that I can do.

Choice is rather easier. One region could project to a number of other regions, depending. So depending on the input, the first region chooses which of those other regions to project to. This seems entirely plausible; one could do this with neurons. What sort of choices one might be able to make in this way is another matter.

But none of this is the same as executing a subroutine. A region cannot stop what it is doing for a moment while it gets some other region to do some little job for it, perhaps converting a string like ‘October 14th 1066’ into the number of days since the birth of Christ, having made proper allowance for calendrical changes and leap years in the interval. That said, those two regions can interact and maybe that interaction can amount to a subroutine call of one by the other. Whether the brain actually does stuff like that I don’t know – although just presently I rather doubt it.

The brain is not very good at next either. While in principle one might have a chain of neurons, perhaps even allowing hundreds of neurons at each link of the chain just to make sure, and while one might devise a neural network which maintained a cursor on that chain, once again I rather doubt that this is what the brain does. And anyway, how could one be sure that one link was only firing up the next link? Given that neurons and their synapses are a lot more plastic, a lot more organic than the average line of computer code, how could you be sure some of the firing up was not leaking out to some place else? On the other hand, a brain can count well enough and it can be trained to say the alphabet. It can be trained to recite a more or less arbitrary sequence of words, say names of vegetables, and some people play games involving such sequences in public houses. Some other people can manage very long such sequences, but I do not think that this is the brain’s natural, or native way of working.

Just as an aside, I read recently that the brain is very good at discriminating colours. If you put two patches of colour next to each other, the brain is very good at saying whether they are the same or not. It can detect what are really very small differences. While it is very bad at naming colours, with most of us not going beyond ten or so and certainly not agreeing with anybody else past that point.

So what do we learn from all this?

Lesson one is that the brain does not look to have subroutines in the way that a computer does. It cannot package up widely used tasks in such a way that they can be invoked from anywhere and everywhere. Going further, it seems unlikely that it does much of the sort of stuff that subroutines are used for at all. Rather a tall order to code such stuff in genes, or learn it, post-natally, from first principles, then copy the resulting neuronal program all over the place.

It seems much more likely that great swathes of brain processing are driven by just a small number of general purpose, basic processes, basic processes which do fit the neural way of doing things and which can be replicated all over the place. Like the processes required to do hierarchical predictive coding (ask google about Hohwy & Friston). So perhaps the question of interest is to identify those processes and to catalogue all the stuff that they do.

That said, lesson two is that while the brain is not organised in the way that a computer is, it is, at some level, doing the same sort of stuff. So how does the brain do the stuff which a computer would do with sequence, repetition and choice?

This is left for the next episode.

Acknowledgement

Michael Jackson and SDM. See, for example, http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mj665/JSPDDevt.pdf.

RSPB on the boil

Last night saw our first serious frost of the winter here in Epsom, so following the erection reported at reference 1, I can report this morning that the bird feeder has really sprung into life this morning, with a lot of great tits, rather small so presumably this year's birds - and some robins. One or two pigeons waddling about, wondering how they can get in on the action.

The great tits and the robins don't seem to care for inter-species feeding and the form is that the robins wait until the great tits are done.

Whereas, a little later on, the RSPC did not seem to be on the boil at all. A youngish woman, probably an inhabitant of the nearby mental estate and not a bog-standard at all, was encouraging her young boy, perhaps three years old, to charge down one of the ramps at the skate board rink at Southfield Park (gmaps 51.3433586,-0.2787464), on his small bicycle, as fast as he could possibly go. As far as I could see he had no protective gear on, apart from a bulky jacket. I thought the woman was wrong, although not so wrong that I intervened.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/rspb.html.

Venetian echoes

Last Saturday back to Weston Green for the Ripieno choir's Michaelmas concert, with the choir supported on this occasion by the organ and by other wind from the Meridian Sinfonia.

The programme was drawn from the golden era of Venetian music, that is to say around the time of the golden era of English drama. A time when the Venetian composers - at least one of whom was actually a German - were experimenting with part music, the parts being taken by varying combinations of voice and instrument - the instruments being the organ, the sackbuts and the cornetts offered on this occasion.

By way of a change we sat quite near the front, which worked well most of the time, when most of the music was coming from in front of us, not so well when it was more spread around the church. The console for the organ was more or less immediately in front of us, while the pipes were in the gallery at the back of the church, leading me to wonder how much lag there was between pressing a key and getting a tone back from the back of the church. Enough, I would have thought, for the organist to be aware of it. With a big lag being bad, weakening the link between the fingers and the sounds. Clearly a matter on which to press an organist, should I ever get into conversation with one.

The concert was well up to the Ripieno's usual standard, rather better perhaps as we rather liked the programme.

There was a compromise on the clapping front with no clapping between the pieces before the interval, with clapping after. A reasonable compromise between the no-clappers - this group including myself - and the clappers.

I got into rather a muddle about sackbuts and cornetts on the way home, a muddle eventually resolved by google. These instruments were all wind, mostly brass and looking rather like small trombones, with a few vaguely oboe like instruments, tapered and bent, without the complicated keys of the modern instrument. First thought was that a cornett was a sort of small trumpet, so that must be the trombones. Second thought was that maybe a cornett was something to do with horns, the sort of thing than ancient Germans blew in the woods when out hunting boar, or maybe used to drink from at the feast following. Perhaps these particular horns were from animals grown especially for their long horns, slightly bent rather than very bent in the way of a cow or a bull. After a few false starts, google came up with a picture of various ancient instruments and from that lead I was able to establish that the bent oboe was indeed the cornett.

Had I looked more carefully at the picture by Praetorius offered by the programme, I might have worked out rather faster that in the beginning it was all horns. Evolution took place along two axes, one to do with the material from which the horn was made, the other to do with the way in which one varied the tone when one got tired of doing this my mouth alone. Eventually getting to the modern oboe made of wood and with its fancy keys, the modern trombone with its slide and the modern trumpet with its valves. The Venice of this concert was clearly still at the ammonite stage.

While our Royal Trumpeters stick with the old ways, the Royals being a heritageful bunch, and still do it all by mouth, even now.

The whole sponsored in part by a company called Accuracy, a company which looks to have risen from the ashes of the late lamented Arthur Anderson. Accuracy express some of their community spirit by support for the Ectodermal Dysplasia society, with this unpleasant sounding ailment being a large family of disorders mainly, but not exclusively affecting hair, teeth and sweat glands, bits of us which are linked by both their evolutionary and their embryological heritage.

PS: the apprentice conductor deserves a mention in dispatches. She might be very young, but she is clearly going places. Neither conductor, incidentally, used a stick.

Reference 1: http://www.meridiansinfonia.com/Meridian_Sinfonia.html.

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

Reference 3: http://www.ectodermaldysplasia.org/.

Digester

Crows waiting for some action above the digester which has been installed in the Sainbury's car park at Kiln Lane - at least I assumed that was what it was. However, in so far as I could see inside its enclosure, just visible at the bottom left of the snap left, it appeared to be just a large white tank, the sort of thing you might use to store liquified gas in. A large label on one end saying 'SCART'

While BH thought that these trees were where the crows had always perched, in between forays into the car park for child dropped snacks. Nothing to do with the digester at all.

Reference 2 talks of a photovoltaic system at Kiln Lane, which I take to be a fancy name for solar panels on the large flat roof rather than the tank in the car park. This being a web site which does recognise digesters. But I have no idea how comprehensive or accurate its listings are.

The corporate site for Sainsbury's has a useful search feature which turns up much talk of solar, some talk of geothermal and odd snippets about biomass. But I couldn't find anything specific about Kiln Lane.

Having been defeated by google, I was reduced to phoning them up at Kiln Lane and within seconds I was being told by a rather amused young lady that underneath the white tank there was a very deep hole, a very deep hole from which geothermal energy was extracted. There is another one such at Crayford should you be truly curious. So it looks like BH was right after all.

Presumably Aldi and Lidl don't go in for any of this green nonsense. Far too careful about their costs and their bottom line for any of that - no part of their mission to look after our future, which will just have to look after itself.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/digesters.html.

Reference 2: http://www.variablepitch.co.uk/stations/1839/.

Trolley 36

Things are looking up, just about a month since the last trolley, rather than three months. Found at the entrance at Victoria Place, so not far from the Sainbury's trolley depot at Kiln Lane. Front right hand wheel one of those big black jobs again. Maybe where they hide the illicit removal detector?

After return, I came across another trolley behind a six feet chain link fence, on the way to the rail bridge which gives access to the Longmead industrial estate, via the back of Epsom Coaches. Must have been quite a palaver to get it there. I got to thinking about the fun we had in my days as a Boy Scout with pioneering poles, ropes and pulleys, of which my (school) troop had a good supply. Would 15 year old boys still think it fun to organise said pole, ropes and pulleys so as to be able to hoist the trolley back over the fence, without climbing or otherwise touching the fence? One could always add a bit of spice by doing it the dark against the clock, with patrols taking it in turns to see if they could beat the best time to date.

Maybe a special bonus if one managed to put a scout across the fence to effect the hook up, rather than using a grappling iron.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/trolley-35.html.

More law

Having had a skirmish with class action suits yesterday, another brush with the law this morning, following a dose of Agatha - the Pale Horse - last night.

Suppose we have three witches. Three witches who, for a fee, go through some kind of satanic ritual involving an item of clothing of a first someone whom a second someone wants dead. The first someone reliably dies shortly thereafter.

The twist being that the first someone dies, but has actually been murdered by someone else altogether, a third someone, in a more or less conventional way. We suppose that there is no connection between the witches and the actual murderer, at least no connection that they might reasonably be expected to know about. The witches just believe that they are doing the business.

We suppose that all this is taking place in an advanced western country where the performance of a satanic ritual is not in itself an offence, let alone a capital offence, in the way that it would have been as little as three hundred years ago.

I am clear that the three witches are very guilty. Certainly very guilty in the heavenly sense that when hailed before the judgement desk on the day of judgement, they would be cast down into hell-fire.

But I am not at all clear that they are guilty at all in a criminal sense. Perhaps one could pin attempted murder on them on the grounds that that was what they were trying to do, with the fact that someone else actually did the deed being irrelevant.

Then I get to think that this is a very contrived situation, very unlikely to happen in real life, at least in aforesaid western countries where belief in witchcraft is more or less extinct. We can therefore afford to neglect this hole in our legal defenses. There is no need to legislate for this sort of thing because it is very unlikely to happen and doing something about it would not be a good use of scarce & expensive legislative resources.

We don't need our laws to cover all conceivable eventualities, just those with a reasonable chance of cropping up.

I am reminded of the way in which it is quite easy to devise experiments in laboratories or conjuring tricks in theatres which make the brain do silly things. First thought is how on earth could evolution have come up with such a dumb bit of brain. Second thought is that evolution has not wasted time & effort on things which do not happen in the real world. Our brains are geared up to cope with real life, red in tooth and claw, on the primeval savannas of what is now east central Africa, not with some cock & bull story dreamed up in third millennium London.

Slightly depressed

From time to time I have a moan about the greed of the legal services and financial services industries, taken in the round, sterling service by many foot - and not so foot - soldiers notwithstanding.

I am also conscious of the role that union greed & stupidity played in the smashing of the unions by Handbag Thatcher.

But I was still a bit depressed by a piece in the Guardian the other day about the way that our universities are going. It seems that while some of those at the top of the heap are getting themselves paid in excess of £500,000 a year plus perks, quite a large proportion of those at the bottom of the heap are on zero hours contracts, with little job security and are having to scratch around to make up, say, £30,000 a year. To the point where some of them are on welfare, and a far cry from the relatively sheltered life of an Oxbridge don (see reference 1). Depressed by the fact that those at the top of the heap, despite their fancy education, don't seem to see the need to set a better example.

Salt was rubbed in the wound by a further piece in the lastest NYRB about the workings of the class action industry in the US. It seems that the biggest money spinners are the class actions against big corporations for some failing or other, possibly more or less banal, possibly not, but failings which affect a large number of people. Maybe some food packer forgot to include a warning about peanut allergies on their jars of peanut butter. There are legal firms which specialise in this sort of work, actively seek it out, the upshot of which is often that they make lots of money and sometimes that one lot of more or less innocent shareholders in the corporation concerned have to stump up compensation for another lot of shareholders. Or possibly stakeholders. And to pay off the lawyers - with such paying off sometimes more or less amounting to paying protection money. Some shareholders find themselves in both lots. The executives responsible for whatever it is get off more or less scot free.

To be fair to the US authorities, they do know about all this. But no-one has yet dreamed up a better way to punish or otherwise curb corporations which do bad things.

On the other hand, authorities generally show no sign of understanding that unless they start to do something about all the inequality swilling around, both within countries and between countries, something some day is going to go bang, just as it did in what was, and what is again, Russia, just about 100 years ago.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/just-like-us.html.

Celebrity selection 2

A snip from amazon, included just in case I fall for it.

Number One International Best Seller, just like a fat paperback in an airport lounge book stand. Quite enough to put one off - but we shall see.

And I wonder now what the recording quality would be like, the original recordings having been made maybe eighty years ago. Have they been digitally enhanced by IBM's clever Watson?

Celebrity selection 1

Last week saw a serious discussion of the selection of all-time greats offered by the Busch Quartet, a quartet which I now know to have been famous in the inter-war years and to have been refused entry for settlement in Britain during the run up to the second war. At least that is what wikipedia says.

Bach and Beethoven fine. One might quibble about the detail, but it is all stuff that one has heard of, heard even, mostly reasonably frequently. But I get a bit more shaky on the Brahms and Geminiani is never heard of - although I find this morning that YouTube knows all about him. Maybe I ought to. Mendelssohn heard of, but not the piece in question. Mozart OK. Reger another never heard of. Schubert OK. Schumann and Vivaldi heard of, but once again not the pieces in question.

So the verdict is that getting to know the stuff I don't already know might well be a pleasurable extension of my rather limited range. On the other hand, I get a bit stuffy about collections put together by the executants rather than by the composer. Not too keen on medleys.

Back to Earlsfield on the bus, where I was entertained by two young ladies. One, who could probably claim links to the north western part of the sub continent, was busily typing away on her apple laptop. not very successfully as far as I could see, although with rather more success than I was managing on my telephone. I blame the small keyboard. And the other, who could probably claim indirect links to the west central part of the large continent, a handsome woman who had spent a lot of time and effort on her appearance, including valiant work on her hair to make it less curly than it started out.

Onto the platform at Earlsfield where, in the dark and with a lot of the leaves down, I was able to score a succession of threes. I even made a four, the first for some time, just as my train came in, noticing in the nick of time the fourth plane rising from the horizon rather to the left of where I was expecting it. I think I have been caught out by this business of rising slightly to the left and heading right before swinging around to the left before: is it all an illusion to do with spherical geometry, with the aeroplanes heading more or less west the whole time?

Other keys to success included first standing so as to block the light from one lamp by the post of another and second swaying slightly so that one could be sure of an aeroplane behind the twigs. The slight movement was enough for confirmation. Or maybe it was really the slight shift of direction keeping the vision system locked onto the case, stopping it getting bored.

Onto the train where I was able to discuss the business of bicycle bells with two cyclists, one after the other. Both had bells and both said they rarely if ever used them, although the lady did say she found it easier to shout, as I do these days - although I have the excuse of older reactions. For some reason the mouth can get into gear faster than the fingers. She also thought that the absence of decent restaurants and bars in Epsom, à la Earlsfield, was all down to the stuffy planning policies of the ruling Residents' Association. I'm not sure she was right about that, but the Residents' may have an image problem among the young.

The outing closed with my inspection of a neat little wooden shelf fitted into the off side driver's window of my taxi, a shelf used to hold a little pad, presumably of receipts. I think the driver was rather pleased to have built something of himself into his workplace. Good luck to him!

The collected works

The other day I mentioned (at reference 1) an offer of the full Freud for a touch under $5 plus postage. This has now turned up and this is to report on the experience so far.

The first hurdle was finding, some weeks after the event, that the Windows 10 upgrade on my HP desktop had wiped out the disc drive, the one you shove CDs in that is. Not something that one needs to use very often these days. A long and helpful session with the BT help desk did not get it to work, but did run the problem down to HP not having gotten around to a new driver yet and did poke into life a large Windows 10 update, which had been sitting quietly in the background for a while, an update which will no doubt do good otherwise.

In the meantime I discovered that my HP laptop, upgraded to Windows 10 at about the same time, still had  a disc drive and could read the CD which had arrived from the US. To find that I had bought a 12Mb pdf file, a file containing  the 5,000 odd pages of the complete works of Freud.

A cursory check of Volume X of the standard edition, the one such volume that I do have, suggests that the CD has used the standard Strachey translation. But it is not a photograph, if for no other reason than that the line structure has changed, so someone must have scanned the thing in, a process which is likely to introduce errors, although I did not spot any. I wondered who paid for all this? You would need to sell a lot of CDs at $5 a pop to pay for all the scanning and editing which must have been involved. Do that many people still do Freud?

I found no proper introductory material about how the CD had been prepared or about the credentials of those doing the preparation. Maybe it is there, but I have yet to find it.

There are two ways of getting into your 5,000 pages, with one contents page organised chronologically and another organised alphabetically. Which is a lot better than some of the cheap collected works, which can be very clumsy in this regard, that one can buy for Amazon's kindle.

The editor's notes prefacing each of the two works - 'Little Hans' and the 'Rat Man' - in my edition have gone missing - and have not been replaced by anything else. Which is a pity, as such prefaces would have given one confidence in what followed.

Some, but not all of the footnotes in my edition have made it to the CD. Some appear to have been edited. Some of this may reflect the changes made over the various editions of the standard edition.

The CD might well be the collected works, but it does not preserve the arrangement of the standard edition.

Lastly, having read the CD from the US, I had enough information to find out that I could have downloaded the pdf for free, had I known where to look. A minor irritation. More important, the bibliophile said to be responsible for the CD remains, so far anyway, invisible. On the other hand, a chap doing Freud for his PhD was visible and was worrying about whether he could trust such a CD for such purposes. I guess the answer is up to a point: fine for reading, but if you want to use anything for real, best to check it in a real book.

For my more amateur purposes though, the pdf will be fine.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-full-freud.html.

The wall test

I once heard it alleged that a good measure of the vitality of a street was the length of time it took passers-by to find and remove more or less useful objects placed on one's front wall. Two hours was thought to be good.

So yesterday I came across the child's scooter, illustrated left, in a hedge on Horton Lane. Not quite an honest illustration as I did not think to snap it until I had already moved on a hundred yards or so from where I had actually found it.

The scooter appeared to be in working order, although the front bracket - the assembly which connects the two halves of the 'L' together - was a little loose and, for some unknown reason, one of the five screws, short but stout, which fix the handle to the front wheel and which are front located in a black plastic fitting just above the upper shiny ring (but barely visible here), was missing. This did not appear to represent any threat to health and safety, but, just to be on the safe side, I thought I would call in the cycle shop at Pound Lane and see if he could help. I would have been quite happy to give it too him if he had a use or could find a home for it, but as it turned out, although the sign on the front door said open, the door was firmly locked.

So wall test it was. Wrote out an appropriate message on both sides of a luggage label, a small piece of brown cardboard complete with strings, the sort of thing you can still buy in Rymans, attached it and left the labeled scooter by the hole in the front wall where there may once have been a front gate. I was hopeful because there is an infant-primary school at the end of our road and plenty of mums, dads and children walk by, despite the unhealthy propensity to use cars for delivery.

In the event, it took just 22 hours to move, including 12 hours of darkness. In the event, to a neighbour rather than a common-or-garden passer-by.

Additional information

I never sorted out which way round the handle was suppose to be - although I think there is a right way round because of the way the front wheel is mounted.

The whole exercise triggered various pavement conversations on the wasteful ways of the younger generation - partly because I had found out from google that one can spend about £100 on these things, a lot more than I had guessed, despite their sturdy construction, of the same order as what one might spend on a child's first bicycle. So I shall now ponder on how the thing got into a hedge. What plausible story can I come up with? Is it one and the same person as the phantom smasher, otherwise absent for some time now? See reference 1.

Ebay calls the labels '50 Strung Reinforced Tags 120mm x 60mm Brown Buff Size 5 Luggage Labels Tagging' or alternatively '50 Strung Reinforced Tags 108mm x 54mm Luggage Labels Tag String Buff Manilla'.

Colours on the illustration poor. They also varied a good deal among the dozen or more snaps that I took. The telephone does not seem to be at its best at winter light levels.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/phantom-smasher.html.

RSPB

It's that RSPB time of year again, with the last 48 hours seeing the annual installation of the bird feeder, a feeder carrying the full authority of the Chessington Garden Centre, the RHS and the RSPB.

I was quite impressed that I was able to find the hanging bracket, the feeder and the feed in the space of less than 10 minutes among the great variety of clutter in the garage and that I was able to complete the installation in less than a further 10 minutes.

Starting at the top we have the handy, substantial & permanent screw eye (Screwfix reference 17867), the crucifix (made by yours truly) and, at the bottom, the window frame (also made by your truly. Impressive except that I did chicken out of making a window with a casement).

And I am pleased to report that, despite the mild weather and the proximity of the viewing window (out of picture, to the right), a great tit had found the feeder by 0630 this morning, whereas I had been expecting to have to wait for another week. Last year, there were no impressive tweets but there was some sport with squirrels and pigeons trying their luck. Robins, generally speaking, were quite intelligent, simply waiting for the seed to fall onto the table beneath.

Orange flowers

Not altogether by chance, we have followed the Ottawan custom of orange flowers on the doorstep in the autumn (see reference 1). Slightly varied in our case as our front door is only used for ceremonial purposes, so the small stretch of concrete outside the back door takes the place, for floral purposes, of the front door step.

There is also the consideration that most Ottawan houses have several substantial step ups to their front door, often wooden, possibly something to do with snow, whereas we have just the one, insubstantial step.

The chrysanthemums illustrated left have done well this year, particularly well as they are now into their second year, the achieving of which, I am told, requires significant input of TLC. Not mine, I ought to add.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/housing.html. The finding of this post was somewhat complicated by the quirky spelling of chrysanthemums therein - finding being one of the few contexts in which I would like my spelling to be less quirky.

Out for lunch

I have been reading this morning about an interesting set called the Cantor set, about which there is also a good article in wikipedia. But it bothers me that I do not recall reading about it before, despite doing a fair bit of mathematics when young. Was I out for lunch that day or has that chunk of memory just melted away?

Digging into the wikipedia article, I also read about compact sets, about which I do remember the odd snippet. But then there was an interesting concept called separation, something that comes in various varieties, all interesting and important, certainly in the glory days when topology was being invented - and I remember nothing about it. I comfort myself with the idea that it was all so basic that it was quickly buried in a mound of more serious matter, and so forgotten.