Napoleon's New Year's Party

Some people argue that what goes on in history is all a matter of the interaction of grand forces, of tides and currents of history sweeping across the world. Or of economics.

Other people argue that it is all down to charismatic individuals, individuals who shape history. The Alexanders, the Napoleons, the Prophets and the Hitlers. One hesitates to call Stalin charismatic, but he clearly had something going for him. And maybe there is even a bit of room for free will for those charismatic individuals. Maybe some people will have something big to answer for when they get to the Pearly Gates.

Other people again argue that pondering about what might have happened if such and such is a waste of time. One should concentrate on what actually did happen, rather than on what might have happened. Not a bunch with whom I happen to agree because I think that looking at variations on the past enriches history, gets more out of history. First, thinking about what might have happened, for example, had Napoleon turned left instead of right when he marched out of the village of Austerlitz, helps us to get inside Napoleon’s mind. Why did he turn right rather than left? So thinking about the left option seems to me to be to be a line of enquiry which is both elementary and interesting. Second, we get more about how we might avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Was there any other way, given the circumstances of the time, for the municipalities of Ancient Greece to organise themselves? And if there was, why not? Would the Athenians have done better to stick with biremes, rather than being seduced by the arms corporations of their time into the more expensive & flashy triremes? Third, it often easier to have a sensible discussion about options in the past than options in the present; people are not usually committed to the past, particularly the ancient past, in the way that they are committed to the present and they really can have a full and frank exchange of views without getting too steamed up. A useful proxy for a full and frank exchange of views about the present – and particularly useful in places where the rulers do not encourage discussions about the present. Or in pubs where people who have taken strong drink can get a bit heated.

So let us suppose that we have a grand model of the world and all its affairs on a suitably grand computer, perhaps a scaled up version of one of those models that economists like to build, but including agents and events as well as statistics, something the Treasury Model did not do, at least in years gone by when I was close enough to see. A model into which you could add, subtract or modify agents and events. Perhaps more like Eve Online than the Treasury Model. See reference 1.

An agent might be a person like Napoleon or a company like Lidl. A modification of an agent might be the assassination of Napoleon.

An event might be an earthquake, a hurricane, a plague of locusts or a record breaking soya bean crop. Or Napoleon’s horse throwing a shoe at some critical moment. Or the Saudi’s flooding the market for oil.

And if one wanted to just sit back and watch, rather than participate in a more active way, one might go in for a game master who threw the dice of fate from time to time.

If the model was really clever it could say things like ‘you have really got an opportunity to make a difference here’. An opportunity, say, for someone like a Luther or a Hitler. You might then specify such an agent, pop it into the model and see how things panned out.

Or you might think about the probability that a Hitler would pop up – with a Hitler being a rather specialised requirement and one could not be at all sure that reproductive diversity would produce one at the right time. But if the opportunity required something slightly more mundane, like a gang of first rate bricklayers, one might be more confident. In the real world, one might even have notice of upcoming opportunities and manufacture the necessaries to order, rather as we expect the government to organise the training of suitable numbers of teachers against some expected bulge in schools’ admissions – without the lags the free market offered in the sinusoidal pig cycles of yore. See reference 2.

It might be that the model came up with the collapse of capitalism or a flood of Biblical proportions without offering any opportunities which made a difference. It didn’t matter what you or anybody else did, within reason, the collapse or the flood was still going to happen. Maybe you could change a few details or the timing, but not the big picture. In this case the model would be with the tides and currents of history school of thought.

But, alternatively and more probably, there might be opportunities to make a difference. Opportunities for Buddhas, Hitlers and Stalins. One might think of these opportunities as taking take the form of a complicated lock. If you happen to have, or perhaps rather to be, the key to the lock and you get yourself into the keyhole in time, the opportunity will open up before you. You have rubbed the magic lamp and the genie has appeared.

Another analogy might be an opportunity in a football match. An opportunity which pops up, quite suddenly, perhaps more or less at random, an opportunity for a really good, goal scoring sort of move. Will the player on the spot see the opportunity in time to be able to act on it? Presumably being able to do this is part of what makes a good footballer. And part of the interest in watching a match is being able to see such stuff going on, in real time, as it were. Not that I watch football matches myself.

I offer a last example, adapted from ancient history. An Asiatic horde is pressing through a pass in the Alps and is about to gush out onto the fertile plains of northern Italy, where they plan to settle, to be fruitful and to multiply. As luck would have it, there had been a lot of snow and there are great masses of snow lodged on the high ground, just above the pass. Masses of snow which happen to have fallen in just the right way that they can be set in motion by a seven second blast on seven alpenhorns. The Lord sees fit to send a message down about this, by archangel, to the shepherd, overwintering in his hut up on the high pasture. The shepherd just has the time to gather up his mates from the pub, to gather up their alpenhorns from the shed around the back and for the necessary blast to ring out over the snow. The snow turns into an avalanche and sweeps down into the pass. The Asiatic horde is utterly destroyed, and Italy can go on to be the country we know and love now, Popes and all.

The lesson for the Cameron & Osborne team might be to look to the manufacture of alpenhorns.
The lesson for the most of the rest of us is that more or less chance events and individuals really can make a difference, at least at the sort of scales of space and time which interest us humans. And for the non-believers mentioned at the outset of this post, I can only suggest a course of model building.

But I don't think we have done much for free will. The fact that there happens to be a rather mechanical attraction between a key, that is to say you, and the lock out there which you happen to fit, that is to say the opportunity, does not advance the case for your free will that much. And what about all the other keys out there who might have got there first? See reference 4.

PS: I should like to add that I have the jigsaw of the picture of Napoleon used as an illustration to this post. To be more precise the jigsaw discussed quite extensively in January 2008 in the other place. See reference 3.

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

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/2008_01_01_archive.html. See, for example, the first post for January 6th.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/free-will-1.html.

They wonder why we hate them

The travellers mentioned at reference 1 have now departed, perhaps pushed, after a stay of about ten days. I was quite cross at the amount of mess that they had left: they have suitable pickups and it would not have taken much for them to have bagged it up, loaded it onto a pickup and then taken it to the tip, perhaps five minutes away in a motor. Maybe even, either not to make the unsightly ruts in the grass, or at least to tidy them up a bit on leaving. It would only have taken a few minutes with a spade.

I wondered about their leaving behind the gas bottle - the red lump - which one might have thought would be worth a bit. Google suggests maybe £50 for the gas, but it vague about the bottle, which I would have thought would have been more than that, given that you pay £30 to hire it. I even thought about going out with the car to collect it myself, but then thought about the elderly back.

It looked much worse in real life than it does in this snap, which has been kind to them.

It does not encourage one to make better provision, if this is the best that they can do in what might otherwise have been a reasonable place for a short stay. Gmaps 51.355425, -0.273458.

See also reference 2.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/testing.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=romani.

Chain saw alert

Still on the Horton Clockwise, a tree marked down for chain saw action by the advance guard.

The tree is not particularly healthy and is probably still recovering from the ivy which once covered it (and is now growing back), but I see no pressing need to kill it. While the Chain Saw Volunteers clearly think otherwise - or just want some practice. Perhaps also they take a perverse pleasure in annoying the residents of the borough, whom they are supposed to be serving, chopping down conspicuous rather than inconspicuous trees.

Another rather washed out effort from the telephone, which for some reason has seen fit to make the fluorescent pinky-orange of the spot into something else.

I don't suppose the tree will make it through the year.

Horton Clockwise

There were a lot of daisies in flower on the Horton Lane stretch of the Horton Clockwise the other day, so I set myself to flower spotting.

Quite a lot of plants with small yellow flowers, subsequently identified as nipplewort. Google explained that this is a very common weed, but one of which few people - me included - know the name. We speculated this morning why this might be, given that, as a society we are quite comfortable with nipples in our newspapers. BH thought that it might be down to an association with some kind of ailment, something to be kept hidden from view. She associated to a neighbour who once rather cringed at being told something was a fleabane (aka a sort of daisy). Google thought that there was some tension between my plant being so named for the shape of the flower buds and in being so named for the medicinal - breast ulcers - properties of the sap. In the credulous 16th century, the two thoughts probably fed off each other.

Some small cow parsleys (anthriscus sylvestris) in flower down the stream down Longmead Road - although on checking in wikipedia I find I could easily have been mistaken, there being a number of plants of this general appearance.

A few dandelions in flower, plenty of seedlings coming up.

A few celandines in flower, of which one is illustrated left. A picture taken before I had read about being able to tell the telephone on what to focus by tapping, so it will be interesting to see, on the next occasion, whether I can do a better job on the flower. I shall also think about turning off the image enhancer, not being at all sure about the colours it comes up with.

Getting back into suburbia proper, a few daffodils in front verges. And in our own front garden, a lot of pink bergenia in flower underneath the bay window.

Other peoples' festive fayre

Despite having just posted about P. D. James, I was struck rather than amused to read the piece snipped left from the Telegraph of yesterday.

A piece written by a graduate of studies in English literature from St. Peter's College in Oxford. More or less a new build, so not exactly Merton, but nevertheless, fully a part of Oxford University. A place which it is quite hard to get into.

A piece which explains that War & Peace is far too long and is much better consumed as a costume drama on television, preferably with the addition of a bit of sex and violence to spice up an otherwise rather tame story. And which, to be fair, goes on to make the more respectable point that a lot of modern fiction is far too long, particularly fiction from the US.

However, I found it a bit dispiriting to find that someone close to being a member of the ruling classes, almost certainly a resident of Islington, should more or less make a boast of not bothering with novels from the great era of novel writing. How far have we come from the days when the privileged lawyers who used to inhabit our House of Commons used to quote Cicero in the original at each other or when senior civil servants could make a reasonable fist, in between meetings, of a Beethoven sonata on the office piano?

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it is just a bit of froth, knocked out months ago to go in the pile of stocking fillers for holiday editions. Nothing in it at all. Perhaps even, one would find that in the privacy of her own home, far from prying eyes, she actually does read 'À la recherche du temps perdu' in the original...

PS: such a piano still existed for most of my time at the Treasury. A respectable grand, perhaps a Beckstein, kept in tune.

Amazing oddity

In the course of checking the price on amazon of the collected works of Dickens, as part of the research for the post at reference 1, I came across the book snipped left.

As far as I can tell there is nothing special about the expensive one, a perfectly ordinary copy which was once the property of a perfectly ordinary public library, now a used copy in good rather than excellent condition, so presumably looking a bit worn. One might think that in these days of clever computers, amazon would weed this sort of thing out - but as they haven't, if you were stupid or drunk enough to pay the asking price, would you get a refund if you subsequently complained?

Collected Dickens on kindle come in as low as 49p, so £1.99 was not that bad a guess.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/festive-fayre.html.

Festive Fayre

Christmas drivel - the definition of drivel being used here being stuff that does not appeal to me - having washed over the ITV3 schedules, action was required. So off to the Tadworth Childrens' Trust charity shop in Epsom High Street, the source of many fine DVDs, for example a collection of Greta Garbo films (see reference 3). The source on this occasion for four slim boxes of Adam Dalgliesh mysteries: roughly 1,000 minutes of viewing at roughly 1p per minute. So not bad value for middle of the road senior viewing.

We have now done one mystery, and done a Morse on it. That is to say, watch the mystery, read the book and then watch the mystery again. At the end of which one feels one has a grip on what is going on. Not that different to the procedure for Henry IV Part I, concluded in the previous post (see reference 2). The book had the advantage over the Morse books of managing without their seediness, their boozing, fags and dirty mags. Dalgleish is a real gent., even if much of that is lost in the TV version.

The story involves four flawed barristers. One who is making mistakes because he is too old and does not know when to stop. One who has an expensive wife and bends the rules to make the money needed to keep her (and her shopping habit) in appropriate style. One - the one who gets killed - who takes her duty of defence too far, too often getting the guilty - including the evil guilty rather than just the greedy guilty - off. In her defence, one should say that she never defends the same person twice, thus providing herself with some moral cover. But there is a real point here: how far is it proper for a lawyer to take the need for all to have the benefit of a defence, whatever one might think of the people concerned and of what they are charged with. And lastly, one whose obsession with neice and nephew, lead him to murder. Played by a fat man, now a veteran of Midsomer Murders, whom I confused with the rather less cuddly Cracker. At least I now know that there are at least two very fat actors treading the boards, the death of Robert Morley notwithstanding.

Being impatient, the written story was taken from the amazon kindle store, downloaded via my desktop, having still not got around to connecting my kindle to the wide world. Costing, I may say, slightly more than double what I paid for the TV version. P. D. James is not yet in the world of all you want to read for £1.99, in the way of Trollope or Dickens. And the first time I have read anything on the kindle for a while, some months I should think.

The TV version sticks to the written story fairly well. But despite its 150 minutes, it still drops some of the diversions. So we lose the diversion about the agency specialising in legal cleaners. We lose the diversion about the former husband of the murdered lawyer, gone to self-sufficient ground, deep in the country. We lose the poetical and senior management trimmings of Dalgliesh - although we are left with the improbability of a police commander heading up, hands on, a murder squad. We lose one of his two side kicks and much of the by-play in his squad.

But I do find out about the Temple Chruch in London, an ancient foundation and companion to the rather less grand Round Church in Cambridge. Perhaps of a similar age to the church in Smithfield (see reference 4). A place we shall visit once it reopens in the New Year. Once the home of no less an outfit than the Knights Templar. I have yet to get to the bottom of how that turned into lawyering. Brutally suppressed for having become a state within a state, only to be reborn in different clothes?

In sum, a well made bit of television drama. Roy Marsden a bit wooden, but serviceable. Young villain very good. Rest of the cast and the production as a whole, fine. Fine to the point that one is little bothered by the improbability of the story, which is all as it should be. Full of sound and fury, signifying very little. Tricky enough to keep the brain cells ticking over, tricky to the point where one is unlikely to pick up all the clues on a first viewing. Proper escapism

PS: we once saw Marsden as Malvolio at the Thorndyke Theatre at Leatherhead. Very wooden in that, not helped by a production mainly concerned to trash Malvolio. No room for respect for a faithful & probably efficient servant.

Reference 1: https://www.thechildrenstrust.org.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/henry-iv-part-i-part-ii.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/resweded.html. Plenty of other stuff to be turned up by the search term 'garbo'.

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

Henry IV Part I Part II

Running time about three hours, a length accounted for in part by the slow delivery of most of the big speeches - slow enough that I could follow most of them. A sensible concession to both the modern and the older ear. The three hours only seemed long in that Act II, the one before the interval, seemed a bit too long on both occasions.

Something of a one-man band with Falstaff (Antony Sher) in a fat suit being allowed to dominate the proceedings. We lost the sense that Falstaff, while providing fun and games, was a parasite, and the age-old tension between the entertaining parasites, the lovable rogues and the solemn productives was lost by default of the productives. But I rather liked Falstaff's slightly public school accents and manners; they struck the right note for me. Posh boy gone to bad.

Good attempt by Percy to redress the balance, an actor with power and presence, but spoilt by irritating mannerisms (mainly physical rather than verbal) which made him into a petulant adolescent rather than the first soldier, albeit a young one, of his time. Perhaps a case of weak direction.

Prince Henry competent. But he seemed to me to be a too straightforward sort of a person to execute the rather self conscious volte-face of the second half. Not all of his big speeches convinced. But there were good bits, for example when he was explaining how he had learned skink-speak (Act II, Scene IV).

King Henry started weak on the first occasion, little trace of him having been the Percy of his day, but he got better on the second occasion, with a strong finish.

Staging generally good, with the first exception of too much being made of the fights, which I found a bit tiresome. But which led me this morning, on waking, to ponder on what sort of fields battlefields actually were. Presumably not like the recreation fields we use for sporting battles now. On the other hand, battle was something of a sport and both sides did want a battle, a trial by ordeal, to settle the quarrel, whatever that may have been. There may have been a sense in which both sides, jointly, sought out a place where that might conveniently be done. Large scale manoeuvring in the eighteenth century sense did exist, but it was not so important in the fifteenth century. Perhaps not much more than trying to fight from the better end, a bit like winning the toss at a cricket match.

The second exception was that I did not care for most of the recorded sound track. The Globe do better here, with their period musicians with their period instruments.

I was in two minds about the small pram used by Falstaff for his travelling gear, notably a carboy for his sack. I thought it silly first time around, funny the second. The illustration above was the best that google could offer, not quite the carboy used on the stage, but it is the right colour and it does give the idea. £150 or so from https://www.etsy.com/market/carboy, noted purveyors of ornaments for the better sort of house in Islington. I wasn't able to find the supplier of laboratory glassware I was looking for.

Turning to some other details, there was a slight echo during the opening speech from Henry IV. The lady on my left on the second occasion noticed this too but thought that it was a feature rather than a bug. I disagree.

Percy's lady changed gear from demure and dignified wife in her opening scene to something rather coarser in the farewell scene (Act III, Scene I). In which scene Glendower's daughter, Lady Mortimer, does not have a good enough singing voice for what was expected of her.

Her lord, Lord Mortimer, was made into a rather smarmy saloon bar type, not exactly the marcher lord he was. The Barbican here replicating the Globe in being unable to muster enough actors who can convince as medieval lords.

Glendower was made into a figure of fun, and Douglas, while not a figure of fun, was a music hall wild man of the north. While both were serious fighting men, albeit robbers rather than kings, who would have had respect in their own time, and would have been better for a bit of respect in ours.

Poins quite good. A tricky part to my mind, reflecting the difficulty of being boon-companion to a prince while remaining a person in one's own right.

Vernon a bit feeble. To fat for a fighter.

Overall a good show which I was glad to have seen twice. The play came through, despite the various faults in the playing, enumerated, or at least sampled, above.

PS: reminded, on both occasions, of the parable of the prodigal son.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/henry-iv-part-i-part-i.html.

Horton Country Park

In the olden days, before retirement, FIL and bag life, we used to walk in Horton Country Park quite often, whereas as it is I can't remember the last occasion we walked there together and the best that the blog can come up with is the solo job at reference 1, from more than two years ago.

But this morning it was bright and we thought to do it. And a very nice place it was too, popular this bank holiday morning after the grey days of the last week or so. Lots of dogs and Christmas presents out. Plenty of birds singing, but the only small birds I identified were robins, which don't really count as tweets.

Two country geeks, one almost a caricature of same. Thirty something male, weedy, spectacles and country flavoured tackle, including map and bins. Quite possibly compass and penknife in two of the many pockets.

Regrettable chain saw action in two places, where the volunteers thought that chopping things down was a better use of their time than mending the paths, in rather bad condition thereabouts. Perhaps the work of the vehicles used to get them to their actions - with no respectable volunteers actually walking to, never mind in, the woods they fell. Not done at all.

PS: pleased to see that Horton Country Park is known to gmaps under that name. See reference 2.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/decanted.html.

Reference 2: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Horton+Country+Park.

Marples' time

Being moved to thin the nut tree in the back garden, the one from which we never get nuts as the grey squirrels always check them out before the nuts have reached eatable size, I had occasion to use my half inch mortise chisel, mentioned at reference 1 and possibly bought 45 years ago from the hardware store - London DIY - at gmaps 51.4016835,-0.1185625. It may, despite the new fascia, be the same shop at which I spent some of my university grant money at that time. Maybe the same in the sense of continuous existence as a hardware store, but not in the sense of continuous operation by the same family. Where does one draw the line?

This use because it is more or less impossible to tale unwanted, individual branches out at the base, at the stool of the tree. Cutting down all the branches and starting again is one thing ( a procedure known to suburban cognoscenti as coppicing), selectivity is quite another. But where the pruning saw can't go, it came to me the other day that a mortise chisel could go and I have now taken out five branches, all the crossing branches which were rubbing up against another, two of them with the chisel. Not the use imagined or intended by Marples, who no doubt hoped for better, but I could do a surprisingly neat job with it, illustrated, with the cut facing the camera being one of the chisel cuts.

It is also a big day because I have finally got my hands on a user guide for the new telephone, by the simple expedient of asking Google for one. This worked, while asking Microsoft did not, despite it being their guide, and I now have 4Mb of guide on both desktop and telephone. There will be a New Year resolution about spending at least 10 minutes a day with it. No particular programme or requirement but hopefully, over time, stuff will sink in.

I am making some progress with the camera moving into go slow mode. This seems to be because it is taking many pictures for the price of one, the idea being either to generate a short video clip or to provide a range from which you can then select the finest for presentation and/or display. But I have to find out what prompts it to start doing this or how to stop it.

I have also discovered something called enhancement, which you can turn on and off in at least one of the photograph viewers offered by Windows 10. Enhancement seems to mean doing something with the colours, perhaps strengthening the dominant colours, with the sort of unfortunate effect noticed at reference 2. But although the distinctive markings of the bark of this particular sort of tree are clearly visible above (or at least they are when you click to enlarge), it is also true that the snap is a little washed out, over exposed. Must carry on with the user guide! No more point and click!

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/shed-time.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/horton-clockwise.html.

Feminists

There are still some places which the feminists don't need to bother with, with the women having been in charge in them for a long time.

Herewith a picture from the National Geographic of a girl from the Khasi tribe, a tribe who still follow ancient matrilineal traditions. Where succession, money, property, and power pass from mother to daughter, where girls rule the roost and with the roost being somewhere in northeastern India. But they may have trouble with the current union government as they do eat cows.

Henry IV Part I Part I

The current theory is that there is economy of scale in cultural events; that is to say, I often do better if I go to the same event more than once, a theory which is working quite well for drama. So you go once to get orientated. Then you read the programme, the York Notes, the Arden. Whatever. Maybe even a review in the Guardian if you are really stuck. Then you go again to do the thing properly, having got a reasonable grip on what it is all about. Furthermore, it quite often seems to be the case that the event has matured, improved in the interval, so you get a double whammy.

So, two recent visits to the Barbican Theatre, handy for Whitecross Street market, to see King Henry IV Part I, a play to which I am attracted in part for its having been a favourite with my father. Both matinées - and I puzzle now why we use a French word for morning for a theatrical performance in the afternoon, by definition no longer the morning or forenoon. Google not very helpful on the point and the usually helpful OED neither - beyond the observation that Catholic clergy often say Matins, properly said at dawn, on the more convenient afternoon before, so giving us an improbably relevant afternoon connection.

Breaking my usual chronological convention, I shall deal with the visits in this post and the performances in the next.

So, on visit one, I particularly noticed a careful and colourful graffiti executed on a building site hoarding on Wyke Road, visible from the train when standing on the northbound & northmost platform at Raynes Park. I wondered whether there was a convention amongst graffit artists that one did not deface the quality creations of others, at least while they were fresh and new. But a convention perhaps not much observed by the more pikey end of the fraternity. That being as it may, this one, on this day, was still pristine and was not without merit.

From where, by some invisible chain of association, I got to wondering about the confession of state secrets to a priest. How was the conflict between the seal of state and the seal of the confessional resolved? Does the confessional of the Catholic Church, that is to say not the church established by the state, have some special standing in the eyes of the law? If the state got to know about the confession, what then? If someone tells me something which I know to be a state secret which he or she should not have told me, is there some theoretical duty to report the matter to the police? Or to Special Branch?

On which note I arrived at Waterloo, from whence I Bullingdon'd from Waterloo Station 1 to Roscoe Street, the only point of note on the journey being a rather dodgy right turn into Golden Lane. Just the one Bullingdon on the stand at Roscoe Street when I arrived. Whitecross Street market busy, as was the Market Café, to the point of being full apart from a group of tables pushed together, decorated and reserved for a dozen or so. Not the sort of thing one expects in a café where the main business was various forms of fry-up. For example, Special 1 through to Special 8. Perhaps the owner has ambitions to match the bottles of wine stored above the counter. The two slender & distinctive waitresses, probably from somewhere in eastern Europe (the owner of the café, I think, being Turkish rather than European), replaced by one, possibly one of the original two, but I was not sure. Bacon sandwich spot on. Outside, in the busy street food scene, a noticeable number of small & cheerful Chinese ladies dispensing their grub. Ladies who managed to strike a nice note of cheerfulness & politeness without being in the least servile or otherwise irritating. Walnut man present (see reference 1), with his lorry, but I desisted on the grounds that walnuts in the theatre might be a bag too far. Possibly a mistake, as walnuts turned out to be missing thereafter.

As it turned out, I was allowed in the auditorium with jacket, helmet and bag despite the warning about enhanced security. An auditorium which seemed remarkably smart for its fifty or so years and which I did not remember at all. It must have been many years since I was there - as one might think one would remember the unusual arrangement of a separate entries to each of the rows of stalls, one on each side, arranged down two flights of stairs from the foyer.

Stalls about three quarters full, giving the lie to the Barbican booking system which claimed to be more or less sold out. Maybe they dish out blocks of seats to resellers, which they cannot easily recall when unsold. My neighbour was a chap who lived in a village near Aberystwyth, a village which had recently become home to a dozen refugees from Syria; refugees who were very grateful and who had promised to learn Welsh, still quite widely spoken in the area. I was able to reminisce about my time with the Outward Bound, just up the river at Aberdovey. His plot was Shakespeare on day 1, Travelodge at Kew (he had not realised how far out Kew was), then Goya on day 2. Maybe something in the university at Aberystwyth but I did not get around to asking. Maybe a timely reminder for me to go to the Goya.

After the show, Bullingdon'd back from the Barbican Centre, the stand right outside the entrance, to Waterloo Bridge, South Bank. Dark and wet but I managed not to get lost on a slightly unfamiliar route down to Blackfriars Bridge. Nor to run into one of the many pedestrians popping up all over the place. In their defence, I imagine that Bullingdons, nipping in and around the motor traffic, are not, despite their flashing lights, that visible in the press of the traffic, in the dark, in the rain.

On visit two, Bullingdon'd from Waterloo Station 3 (confusingly, the first of the three stands one comes to when exiting Waterloo Station by the taxi stand) to Roscoe Street. Honked at the turn into Golden Lane, not altogether unreasonably. Market a bit quieter than on the last visit, walnut man missing, the café a bit fuller and no more slender & distinctive waitresses. I got an older lady who might have been the proprietor's wife, all smiles, but with a limited command of English which resulted in my bacon sandwich turning up on regular rather than crusty bread. A disaster which was compounded by overcooked bacon. But I let them off this once as they were very busy - to the point where the proprietor had to turn out a couple of lads, perhaps sons or nephews, to make way for me. Some of their space being taken by a couple of holy rollers, one fat and rather ugly, one thin and rather delicate looking. Possibly once good looking but ravaged by care, nerves or something. Kind and decent people, but probably hard work in larger doses.

Security kerfuffle at the Barbican where they would not let me into the auditorium with the same baggage as last time. Strict enforcement of the new one item of luggage rule with my cycle helmet counting as an item. For some reason I don't quite understand, I got rather angry, almost to the point of rudeness - which didn't do a lot of good as I still had to troll off to the left luggage. And it took quite a few minutes for me to calm down, I suspect yet another effect of getting older. What on earth will I be like in ten year's time?

Stalls about three quarters full again. Lady to the left with part of her family, all geared up for the second half later in the day. She also told of a version of Henry IV staffed up by ladies and set in a ladies' prison at the Donmar Warehouse. I wonder if I would have tried to go, had I heard about it at the time? Lady to the right from Australia, all geared up for lots of shows while she was in town, including the second half later in the day. She explained that Sydney, while not bad from a culture point of view, was not a patch on London or New York, both of which places she appeared to visit on a regular basis. While Canberra sounded about the same as Ottawa; good facilities but a bit weak on content.

On this occasion, tube back to Tooting after the show to try for walnuts in the indoor market there. This was a complete failure, so I consoled myself in Wetherspoons. No aeroplanes at Earlsfield, but I did meet a chap in a wheelchair who had been to the Eastman Dental Clinic (where my father did some or all of his training) to see about his wisdom tooth, now scheduled for removal. As well as being chair bound, he had some kind of a speech difficulty, which last did not, as it happened, get very much in the way and we had quite a good chat. A salutary reminder that people in chairs vary as much as people who stand up - and they must get a bit tired of all being lumped together. As it happened, he was also a beneficiary of the sort of (more or less) independent living mentioned at reference 2.

PS: I have only just noticed, while snipping from Street View, that the Market Café, is actually the Market Restaurant. Has it always been so? Or did I assume, without looking, that it was the Market Café on the basis of the menu? Clearly not a reliable witness.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/portuguese-connection.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/independent-living.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=finest+five+year+old+whisky for the last visit. There have been others, perhaps before blog life. The DVD at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/chimes-at-midnight.html only scores half a point.

Dream time

A remembered dream last night, the first for a while. Also unusual in involving a particular person. Some of it keyed to real events in the past couple of days.

I was at a meeting with the King of Saudi Arabia. Me, my boss and the king. The king was a large person, with a bright blue suit, a bright pink face and blue eyes. Nothing like the actual king at all. Not even much like a real person at all, rather a cartoon person. I associate now to the cartoons of Cameron in the Guardian. The boss and I were some kind of consultants or contractors, I know not what for.

I was talking far too much. It was not that I was talking rubbish, just that I should not have been talking at all. The king gazed at me, wondering what I was at. A rather condescending gaze - a condescending to which he was entitled, considering.

Then we leave to catch the aeroplane home. The boss and I emerge into some sort of sub-tropical car park, complete with some brightly coloured flowers, on tall stalks like sunflowers, and some palm trees. It is wet, windy and cold. I associate now to the car park at our local Homebase (gmaps 51.345577, -0.248210). Is there any significance in the fact that Homebase occupy the site of what used to be quite a fancy garden centre?

There is a lot of luggage lying around in heaps. Luggage of the ordinary sort, except in shape, which is long and square. In shape a bit like a larger version of the naval ammunition box in my study, say nine inches by nine inches by six feet.

There are a lot of people milling around, trying to get a place on one of the fleet of limos laid on to take us all to the airport.

I jump into the back of one, already carrying quite a few people and having very wide back seats. Quite a business getting from the door to the middle of my seat. Too late, I realise that I have left my suitcase behind.

I wonder about how I am going to get reconnected to my suitcase. Is all that going to be taken care of by someone else? This seems a bit unlikely. Think about, but decide against, jumping out of the limo.

I worry about refund of ticket money should it prove necessary to get a later flight. I work for quite a large outfit, with people going back and forth the whole time. Maybe there will be someone who can use my ticket.

Wake up.

PS: for some reason, I now go off somewhere quite different. When one is an executor for someone and have obtained the letter of probate, one can write off to all the someone's banks and get their accounts opened up. So what would happen if I sent off a letter of probate to Microsoft and asked them to open up someone's OneDrive or to Google and asked them to open up someone's gmail? Are the call centres that one would get through to geared up to deal with such requests? Would they push you off with some drivel about data protection? Or would they get smart with you and starting asking about whether you were a full blown literary executor or just some common-or-garden money one?

Christmas reading

Not long ago I happened to pick up a rather worn copy of 'Alone of all her sex', written by Dame Marina Warner back in 1976. A lady who is only a few years older than myself and whom, although I have been aware of her, I have not previously read. See reference 1.

As it happened, yesterday evening I got as far as opening the book up, to find very seasonal reading about the pivotal role of the Gospel of St. Luke in the Christmas story and at the beginnings of the Marian cult, with both looming much larger in the practice of Christianity than a bare reading of the Gospel might lead one to understand.

And having idly wondered, over the years, what exactly the 'Benedictus', the  'Magnificat' and the 'Nunc Dimittis' were, I have, rather late in the day, discovered that they are all three canticles taken from chapters 1 and 2 of this very Gospel. The first would have featured in morning prayer at Ely and the second and third did feature at evensong (see reference 2). Not to mention the BBC adaptation of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', which last YouTube knows all about.

All of which provided occasion to turn out both the family Bible and the family Prayer Book, this last being very grand and probably not intended for use by a layman. Knocked down to me when the interestingly stocked second hand bookshop which used to be at Thames Street, Sunbury-on-Thames closed down, some years ago now. As far as I can remember, the place is now some kind of an eatery.

Next stop to see if I can turn up the version of 'Nunc Dimittis' illustrated above amongst all the vinyl.

PS: turning up St. Luke, I wondered if it had ever been called 'The Epistle of St. Luke to Theophilus', after the manner of some of the later books of the New Testament, this seeming to be its form. Not something that I had noticed before.

Reference 1: http://www.marinawarner.com/index.html.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/evensong.html.

Vibes

TRB. I did have some trouble with trolley 38 in that from time to time, the two back wheels got into a vibration which made it more or less impossible to continue to move forward. One had to stop and let the vibration die down before pushing on.

A combination, I should imagine, of not being able to have stays as the trolleys need to stack and the legs being a little too thin. Perhaps Sainsbury's, as part of its drive for green points, asked Wanzl to economise on the steel.

I need to check the record to be sure, but I had thought that Sainsbury's did not use Wanzl for trolleys, while Marks and Spencer did. See reference 3. Did the Sainsbury's trolley contract come up for renewal? Did their purchasing people get all kinds of jollies to Germany on the strength of that renewal? Perhaps to gmaps 48.4449735,10.2112013?

The telephone does seem to be quite good at close-ups - see reference 1 for another example. But it did wobble a bit with the shot of trolley 38 at reference 2. Of the twenty shots, only about a third had the trolley in reasonably sharp focus. Perhaps instead of the licking picking suggested in the previous post, I should spend the time reading the camera chapter of the telephone user guide, such as it is.

PS: reverse engineering the gmaps reference back to Wanzl is left as an exercise for the reader. As is working out why the nearby Danube has been given its Rumanian name - the Dunărea - in the middle of Germany. Sloppiness on the part of google's mapmakers or what?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/horton-clockwise.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/trolley-38.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/trolley-5.html.

Litter

TRB. Sainsbury's might be into deep hole energy and all the green points earned thereby (see reference 1), but they are not into clearing up all the litter which accumulates on the road out the back. Out of sight, out of mind, despite the road clearly be well used by the litter dropping public.

A path which did not look to have been litter picked for some time, with some of the litter looking to have been there for some time. There were even some receipts from Marks and Spencer if you please, a shop which must be more than a mile away. A long way to walk to drop one's litter. I suppose I could have checked the date, but forebore.

Shall I, by way of a New Year's Day activity, take it upon myself to clear it up for them? How long would it take? How many people would comment or attempt to interfere if I did?

Having collected the sack full of litter I could then have some sport with the customer service desk. Perhaps they would give me some of their green points. Perhaps they would turn out to have supplies of the green tokens dished out by Waitrose.

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

Trolley 38

TRB. Yesterday was the day to check that Sainsbury's really didn't sell Californian walnuts in their shells, and having discovered that they did not sell any nuts at all in their shells, despite the time of year, despite the example of the Whitecross Street market trader (see reference 2), I took the back road back to the West Road bridge over the railway line, which would have led me back to the back of Epsom Coaches. Making no less than four backs in just the one sentence. A back road where I was rewarded by a seasonal trolley, a trolley which, being on the right side of the fence, was clearly destined to be returned to one of the Sainsbury's trolley parks.

A trolley which, unusually for a Sainsbury's trolley, did not sport a black contraption on its front right hand wheel assembly, the contraption which can be seen. for example, on the trolley at reference 3. Did this make it an old model or a new model?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/trolley-37.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/portuguese-connection.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/trolley-35.html.

A hero of science

There is a chap in the US, a psychologist by trade, who volunteered to be examined very thoroughly, over a period of more than a year. He kept a detailed diary, has allowed the computer access to his email, has climbed inside a brain scanner a couple of times a week and has had his blood thoroughly gone over once or twice a week.

One of the ideas being to look at the way that the brain changes over that sort of period. Are the changes bigger than, for example, those you might expect to see between people? Another idea being to see how much more one can find out about the brain by looking at one in great detail - rather than the more usual procedure of looking at lots of them and adding it all up, a procedure which probably smudges out all kinds of fascinating detail.

As it happens, this chap is a fellow sufferer from psoriasis. So maybe something good for me will come out of it. So far what we have is that 'psoriasis severity had a significant negative association with T-cell receptor-related expression, consistent with the central role of T-cells in the disorder', consistent with my prior understanding that it is all mixed up with the immune system misbehaving. Maybe this will turn into something really helpful before too long!

The illustration is of a patch of his corpus callosum, that is to say the very large bunch of neural fibres connecting the two halves of the brain together. Millions if not billions of them. I presume that each of the fibres in the illustration is actually a bunch of fibres, rather than an actual individual fibre, but I did not get that far. But why have these particular fibres got all crossed up? Does it matter? Do you really want to know? Bearing in mind that you can cut right through the corpus callosum, a procedure called a corpus callosotomy, something sometimes done in severe cases of epilepsy, and you still have a more or less working person left.

You can read all about it at reference 1, or by asking google about 'myconnectome' - in which case I suspect that you will find other heroes out there doing the same sort of thing.

PS: has he never heard of data protection?

Reference 1: http://myconnectome.org/wp/.

Ultimate visit

Last week saw our last visit of the old year to the Wigmore Hall, to hear, for the first time ever the Belcea Quartet. Also the UK & Toller première of Larcher's 4th Quartet.

Very large dog on the train, complete with large collar and a substantial chain, with 3cm steel links. Which did not stop some gent. plonking himself down in front of it and engaging the owner in a long doggy conversation, quite loud. But to be fair, the gent. in question did seem to know about how to handle dogs, with this particular very big dog being very happy with all the attention.

The Belcea Quartet turned out to be a multi-national affair, one Rumanian, one Pole and two French. The Rumanian first violin turned out in a bright red evening dress, not terribly well fitted. The rest of them turned out in red trimmed jackets which BH described as Beatle shirts. She was not at all impressed. Furthermore, the second violin did not know how to sit during his intervals and tended to fidget which was irritating. Unlike the demure young page turner for the Brahms, who did know how to sit. I wondered both about her long sight and about the folds of the red evening dress, associating from there to reference 1.

The Beethoven. Op.18 No.6 was very good. I am coming to like it almost as much as its cousin Op.18 No.4.

The Larcher was interesting, perhaps a little long. It would be a plus rather than a minus if it turned up on another programme, but I don't think I will be buying the CD (the concert was being recorded, presumably for the well-regarded Wigmore Live label). The Larcher music looked as if it might have been written out by hand and included some large coloured spots, presumably some kind of colour code for the executants.

BH was unable to finish her interval ice-cream using the little plastic shovel provided, in the time available, rather to her annoyance. Maybe next time we will take our own, rather more substantial. spoon.

Brahms Piano Op.34 Quintet as good as ever, although it took me about half of the first movement to change gear from the Beethoven, to get on board, as it were. But rather squashed by the encore, the slow movement from Dvořák's piano quintet, a piece which I have come to like better than the Brahms. So the encore was good in itself, but perhaps not the right thing to play after the Brahms. Encores should be light and fluffy and not steal the thunder of the progammed events.

Out to a very quiet Oxford Circus, although for some reason the train we caught at Earlsfield, after taking waiting-time refreshment there, was very crowded. Including a very smartly made-up young lady in a hijab. Her smart and dignified appearance was an interesting contrast to the rather sweaty appearance of the young whitey ladies nearby.

Further entertainment provided by debate about the difference between a plait and a pigtail. Honours even, despite my not realising that pigtails did indeed have something to do with pigs (via chewing tobacco).

This morning I check out the carefully constructed but carelessly maintained website for the Belcea's. It seems that the way they work is to learn three or four pieces, then flog them for all they are worth around the music halls of western Europe. Our particular programme might have been special, but all three pieces had been done lots of times in the recent past, including the same accompanist (Till Fellner) for the Brahms. The schedule looked rather like that you get for a comedian or small theatre company in this country. One day here, one day there, some days a day of rest. Huge amount of travelling, life out of a suitcase in a succession of hotels.

PS 1: the image of the programme is a bit faded. Apart from the cheap scanner having a flat bad, the new telephone would have done a much better job. But then, the new telephone was not bundled up with the desktop.

PS 2: OneNote failing to synchronise this morning. Notes from more than a week ago missing on the desktop. Can't put that down to the power failure just reported.

PS 3: amused by a young man in the 'Half Way House' (at Earlsfield) explaining to a second young man that it did not bother him that a third young man was snogging his girl friend as he, the third young man, was gay and snogged everything. Didn't mean anything.

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

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

Power

Woke up this morning to find there was no power. Looked out of the window to see none there. Mind drifted, unhelpfully, onto the curious geography of the sub-station areas on our estate. Housing estate that is.

Next onto all the cooking which is a feature of this particular day. How on earth were we going to manage to cook the traditional lentil soup? Was the gas bottle for the camping stove, a two burner affair, not used in earnest for going on twenty years, going to be completely empty? What is the leak rate of such things? What about women and children?

Then what about the computer, my usual early morning activity these days? There would be a bit of battery life in the laptop and rather more in the new telephone and its 4Gb of main memory - a lot more, I might say, than that of the laptop. What about the internet? The land-line might be OK with the telephone people (hopefully) having their own power, but what about the router which certainly did not? And could I trust my slightly creaky OneDrive to put itself back together, once we had everything back online?

Then onto our provision of candles and candle stick holders. We do have some provision for these emergencies, unlike in my childhood, dotted with both gas and electricity cuts, against which we took more serious precautions. I settled for reading by candle light.

At this point, around 0545, the electricity popped back on.

PS: in the course of cranking up the lentil soup, I find that the new lentils from Costcutter (see reference 1) are of a paler shade than those in the jar. Have Costcutter truly been cutting costs? In any event, soup now well into its first boiling. Three cheers for the giant saucepan, bought on retirement from John Lewis of Kingston and which has, in its ten years with us, averted all the boilings-over which we would otherwise have had, with boiling red lentils having a tendency to rise, like boiling milk.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/horton-clockwise.html.

Horton Clockwise

Needing attend to lentil supply against tomorrow's traditional lentil soup, I walked the Horton Clockwise anti-clockwise today, the first time for some time.

To be surprised, yet again, how different the one road can look when you rotate your point of view 180 degrees. Furthermore, it seemed more uphill, which is, of course, nonsense. Nonsense which I believe to be the result of there being one short sharp bit of uphill clockwise, but one long bit of gentle uphill anti-clockwise, and it is this last which one notices. One gets even more of the same effect on a bicycle.

Impressed that our local Costcutter carried red lentils, not so impressed that the packet declared them to be the product of more than once country - as tradition really requires lentils from Ontario.

On into Longmead Road where, as well as getting sightings of both sorts of wagtail, there was a small flock of chaffinches. Something that I have not seen around here for ages.

I then thought to pay a visit to the encampment mentioned at reference 1. Three caravans, one tree surgeon's pickup, sundry milk churns (very suitable, I should imagine, as water containers), several children and one mum. A fair amount of mess. There was also a very small pony on a short tether, without, as far as I could see, much access to grass. But cute, and I thought to take a picture but was deterred by the thought that travellers and cameras might not get on, at least when these last are in the hands of gadjos. Or when I might quite reasonably be suspected of being someone from the RSPCA or the HPL.

And down Horton Lane there was an opportunity to test the new telephone on a close up of some unseasonal mushrooms. I thought it turned out rather well, with a good depth of focus. But that's not to say that one can't still carp. The green of the grass, for example, is too bright and of a lurid hue; a bit of Photoshop action needed there.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/testing.html.

Suspicions

I noticed the spook marks illustrated around our water meter the other day, suggesting that, not for the first time, people dressed in Thames Water livery are going to fiddle around with it.

I suspect the security service of importuning Thames Water (which, being Australian owned, falls within some or other intelligence umbrella, probably five eyes) to strap a data collection device onto our main water intake. This device will be capable of picking up voice originated vibrations in the water pipes inside the house and sending them back to base.

Something called independent component analysis plus some fancy computers will then be more than enough to transcribe what we are saying in the privacy of our own home, even when we take the precaution of talking in more than one room at a time. So I wish the analysts many happy hours listening to our ruminations about lentils, soups, magpies and other important matters. Perhaps we should throw in the odd key word like 'dope' to keep them, or their computers, on their toes.

It is, of course, a nice point about who owns these vibrations. If I leave rubbish on the pavement, it becomes the property of the local council rather than mine, but my source is not helpful on vibrations. Not that I suppose that the securocrats trouble themselves with such niceties.

Value for money

I am presently looking at yesterday's 'Daily Star' of 48 pages for 20p and today's 'Guardian' at 46 pages for 180p. Allowing for the difference in page size - the Guardian's pages are about one third bigger than those of the Daily Start, the Guardian is charging around 9 times as much per page.

I have not done the count, but a quick flip suggests advertisement density is about the same in the two offerings.

The Guardian continues to run the tasteful legs of the new face of Chanel (one wonders how much the model was paid for this picture, which seems to be everywhere at the moment), while the rather more extensive Daily Star legs are included with the copy, rather than with the advertisements.

The Guardian goes on to further damage its feminist credentials with a small but handsome picture of a mountain goat sitting on a rock overlooking his harem, somewhere in Snowdonia. While the Daily Sport goes on to tell me about a new app which I can buy for my new telephone called 'Kimoji'. I think that the idea may be to include Kim Kardashian flavoured glyphs in the text messages that I send. An idea which I pass on, but with the up-side that the KK name has now been firmly lodged in the brain and I will maybe stop asking BH who she is every other week or so.

I also read of the outrage of the fans of someone called Tyson Fury over some local difficulty with telephone lines. See reference 2 for some twitter speak.

Of a monster Christmas storm called Christmas Eve. But when I told BH about this, she claimed that, on the basis of reading some more reputable weather forecast, that the Daily Sport was rather overdoing it. It might just about reach the Western Isles, but it is not going to trouble the Surrey Hills.

Of Gazza, who it seems can still afford to overdo it at a place called Champneys. Judging by the splendid grounds (illustrated above), overdoing it must cost a great deal. See also reference 1.

At this point, having made it to page 15, I give up, Daily Star now in the recycling bin and I don't think I will be lashing out on another one.

PS: for the avoidance of doubt, I should make it clear that I did not lash out on 20p for the first one, which I lifted from a branch of Wetherspoon's.

Reference 1: http://www.champneys.com/spa-resorts/champneys-forest-mere.

Reference 2: https://twitter.com/tyson_fury.

Error

There must be some mistake. The Guardian ran a cartoon on Saturday which was funny, thought provoking and without much reference to nether regions or bodily functions. No exhibition of infantile fascination with same.

Thought provoking in the sense that the accompanying words explained that the European leaders are all engaged in bandying sign and symbols around, signs and symbols which they all need to calm down the depressingly simple minded and nationalistic fears and ambitions of their voters - which are not altogether just the result of murdoch media activity, dodgy or otherwise. They, the leaders that is, mostly know that it is all nonsense, but nonsense that they nevertheless have to be seen to take seriously.

I am reminded of the negotiations which eventually resulted in the formation of the Irish Free State, near a hundred years ago now, and which almost foundered on such signs and symbols. On, for example, the exact relationship of an independent Ireland to the British Crown. What about the oaths of fealty to the crown of office holders, usually, at that time, taken on taking office? What limit could be put in writing, if any, to Irish ambitions for the incorporation of Ulster into the Irish imperium? More seriously, as it turned out, what about British access to the ports & havens of Ireland in the event of another war? Was an independent Ireland to have charge of its own bouys, lightships and lighthouses?

Goodbye to All That

Following the advertisement at the end of reference 1, I now get around to noticing 'Goodbye to All That', first read as a child. But now thoroughly confused with Sassoon's memoirs read since, as a result of the accident in Ely. See reference 2. Brain no longer capable of holding the two stories in separate compartments.

Graves had a not very happy time at school, turning to boxing to save him from bullying by the sporty types, there called 'bloods'. A skill which served him well in the army, which he joined straight out of school, more or less the day the (first world) war started, where it was regarded as some compensation for his being useless on a horse, an accomplishment expected of all proper officers. A skill to which quality training time was devoted, at least in the early years of the war.

In the advertisement, I wrote of the ridiculous behaviour of the regular officers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. This now turns out to be slightly wide of the mark, in the sense that while it was rather odd behaviour by the standards of today, it was deliberate, being thought to be a good way of turning young men from public schools into officers. And Graves comes to have a high regard for the two regular battalions - the first and the second - which I think that he thought were all the better for all the spit and polish. And all the wart bashing - wart being the moniker of junior officers. Maybe this is something those in charge of the firearms units of the Metropolitan Police would do well to better understand. See reference 3. See also Graves' words about the value of drill (p156 of the Penguin edition).

I associate this morning to the 'prentice name of King Arthur in T. H. White's 'The Sword in the Stone', also wart. But while White was difficult childhood, public school and Cambridge. he was an inter-war man and no soldier. Perhaps instead he read and admired this very book.

Then there is the question of drink. Graves records that one could only stand so much front line service in the trenches and after a while, say a year or so, one's nerves went. Some officers got around this by getting through a bottle or more of whisky a day - which had the serious disadvantage of resulting in awful mistakes in battle. Others were simply shipped off to safer billets, either in the rear areas or back in England. The men, however, just had to soldier on until killed or wounded. Not so many cushy numbers for them, only cushy wounds, if they were lucky. He claims that this was all brought on by misbehaviour of the endocrine system, misbehaviour which took years to come right after the war, if one got that far.

Graves also records much nonsense and many unnecessary deaths; the army on which he reports is recognisably of the same type and time as that on which Hašek reports. He is not a warrior in the way of Ernst Jünger and is not ashamed to say that his main concern was to come out of it all in one piece, in so far as that was consistent with honourable service in his honourable regiment.

Honourable service which included, for some, having to shoot a few privates to get the rest to go over the top. Which as well as being an awful thing to have to do to men in one's own platoon, must have been very scary - as I imagine that it would be quite likely that the men would shoot back. Or shoot you in the back later - of which practice Graves makes no mention at all, except in the context of sergeants being told off to look after officers behaving in a suspect way. German spy scares were not restricted to England and there were plenty of officers with family ties to Germany.

Graves says that each of the first two battalion of the Fusiliers, say with a nominal strength of 1,000 men, got through around 25,000 men in the course of the war. Very few who went in at the beginning came out at the other end. One problem being that battalions with a good reputation were apt to be abused by senior officers, stuck in at the sharp end time after time. I recall reading of someone in another famous regiment, the Durham Light Infantry, thinking much the same sort of thing during the second war.

All of which means that the maintenance of discipline in this dreadful war remains a puzzle to me. How did the governing & officer classes get away with it? As, of course, they did not in Tsarist Russia.

A good book, although one does wonder, given its polish and the ten year interval between it and the trenches, how much of an artefact the book is, rather than a diary. Graves does not mention keeping one. A good book, full of telling anecdotes and one could go on retelling them for a long time, but I close with one Sir Pyers Mostyn, then a young lieutenant, whom he comes across at some point, possibly a relative of the late General Sir David Mostyn, lately Adjutant-General. Evidence for being that they both look as if they come from military families. Evidence against being this last's service in the wrong regiment, the Green Howards.

Camera notes: taken inside, this may have been the snap for which I was invited to adjust the luminosity (see reference 4). In any event the picture turned into a 4Mb file (quite a lot larger than in the olden days) with name 'WP_20151218_15_56_05_Rich_LI'. It claims to be a jpg file but blogger disagrees and I had to take a snap, so converting it to a png file, before blogger would load it. While Windows Explorer declines to display it as an icon. Curiously, the nearby files for which it does display an icon have the same names and type but are nearer 6Mb than 4Mb. Maybe all will be revealed in due course. In the meantime, I can be pleased that the new Lumia does better with low luminosity indoors than the old did. Assuming that is that luminosity is the right word.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/pour-le-merite.html.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/topping-books.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/dress-code.html.

Reference 4: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/testing.html.

Of mice and men

A lot of people spend a lot of time modelling the behaviour of neurons, often using a model which is founded on the idea that the weighted sum of the inputs from the synapses determines the output up the axon.

However, some other people at Boston University (MA) have produced the striking picture reproduced left of a small bit of the brain of a mouse, a bit of the brain which looks after one of the whiskers. Two chunks from two neurons, one blue and one green, The numbered yellow blobs are the synapses. White bar a micron, a thousandth of a millimetre?

But can we really expect to model the behaviour of something as complicated as this picture with a weighted average? Would we get the same sort of picture if we tried this on a human?

Testing

Found somewhere on the Horton Clockwise. It looks rather like the thumb flap which serves to tighten the fitting which holds the saddle of a Bullingdon in place - but I have never seen one as far south as this. Despite reports of them being seen as far away as France and Scotland.

But it did serve to demonstrate that the new Lumia could do a better job of a close-up of a small object that the old Lumia could. So perhaps the Zeiss lens really is the business. Note the seeds which have fallen out of the feeder mentioned at reference 1. Hopefully the local rats will not find them and make a nuisance of themselves.

It also seems that the cameras on telephones are getting as complicated as the real ones which they have so largely displaced. Certainly this new one seems to have lots of bells and whistles which pop up around the edges of the screen. And I was, for example, invited to fiddle with the light level on a recent indoor shot, being presented with an on-screen slider for the purpose. The good old days of point and click seem to be coming to an end.

Other recent trivia from the Clockwise include the arrival of travellers, no doubt here to visit lapsed relatives for Christmas, that is to say the ones who have given up on living out in the mud and have taken to houses with hot water, drains and roofs. See gmaps 51.355403, -0.273505.

A pink spot has arrived on a not very well looking tree at the Christchurch end of Horton Lane, usually a sign of impending chain saw action. To which my response is that the tree might not be very well, but why can't it be left to eke out the years remaining to it in peace?

A gray wagtail was spotted among the regular wagtails, that is to say the black and white ones, along the stream which runs alongside Longmead Road.

Continuing dearth of trolleys to return, so I have taken to picking up (glass) bottles and putting them in bars and bins. A minor contribution to the appearance and safety of the borough. There is usually quite a lot of litter on the Horton Clockwise and from time to time I think to do a spot of litter picking but have yet to get around to that, and so in the meantime bottles are a soft alternative. Maybe if I had a proper council bag and picker - the pickers one seems to be able to buy in regular shops not really being fit for serious picking - I would get going properly. In further mitigation, I also plead the sterling effort noticed at reference 2.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/decision-time.html.

Topping books

This to puff the topping book company, one branch of which we came across in Ely.

A remarkably well stocked book shop for a small town - mostly if not entirely new books - spread across maybe three floors, in a shop with a deceptively small frontage. There was, for example, a strong art section, offering no less than two versions of the complete letters of Van Gogh, one running to three volumes and one to five.

Quite unclear how such a shop can survive the combined onslaught of Amazon and Waterstone's - perhaps Ely having turned into a dormitory village for nearby Cambridge helps. But, whatever, long may it continue to do so!

PS: having been re-reading 'Goodbye to All That', more or less on an off chance and partly just so as to spend something, having spent time there, bought the first two volumes of the Siegfried Sassoon memoirs, some of which I read as a child. As it turns out, very pleased that I did. More about all that in due course.

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

Members 3

HM1. A snap of a once favourite tree, along the river terrace. But it seems to have lost its magic.

Members 2

HM1. A picture of Louise, lifted from among the many to be found at her web site at http://www.louisahaggerty.com/.

Members 1

HM1. I first noticed the projected changes to the fare structure at Hampton Court back in May, at reference 1, and attentive readers will recall that we bit the bullet and became concessionary members, more or less by chance, at the Tower, at reference 2. Then last Sunday we thought to exercise our membership. Which membership does not extend to parking privileges, so we parked in the station car park and walked across. Noticing on the way that the prime corner site, derelict for years although tidied up for the visitors to the bicycling olympics, remains inactive. Perhaps, just like at Heathrow Airport, we have spent huge sums on planning inquiries but remain unable to decide what to do. Not at all like our new strategic partners, the Chinese, who just get on with things. See gmaps 51.402914, -0.342478.

First stop the royal cabbage patch, looking a bit tired for the winter, with most of the cabbages looking very tired, especially the brussels sprouts, mostly burst in the warm damp weather. But the cabbages illustrated left were not doing too badly. I think the idea is to pick by the leaf rather than by the head. We also spotted a grey wagtail, the second of the season, the first having been back in Ely, unnoticed.

Past the rose garden where a few flowers were left from last season and into the wilderness where we were greeted by the first daffodils of the new season. Pressed on, exercising our members' rights, into the Privy Kitchen for tea, coffee and cake, in my case one of the 'Maids of Honour', one of the specialities of the house. Very nice it was too.

Out from there through Fountain Court where we were treated to the heritage dilemma of the roundels. painted in the eighteenth century by one Louis Laguerre. These have faded, more or less to the point of invisibility and the heritage team are pondering what to do with them. My solution would simply to have them replicated new. And if one was really fussy about the heritage angle, cut out what is there now before replication. The cut outs could then be flogged to some Chinese billionaire to adorn some fine new museum in the depths of China, while also helping to pay off the national debt. And us members would be able to see the roundels in the way intended by the artist - and whoever commissioned the roundels in the first place.

Plenty of energetic children bounding around outside, as was one Chinese girl, whose friend was trying to capture her on an iPad in full bound, which took a number of tries. But the privy garden was quiet and we were able to enjoy the green symphony in peace. We were also able to try out the newly restored wooden steps at the southern end of the east terrace. Those at the southern end of the west terrace remain to be done, the whole project having gone on for some time now. The two flights of steps are clearly visible in the satellite version of gmaps, the eastern ones being at 51.401373, -0.336985. See reference 3.

From there to the Chapel Royal where Louisa Haggerty was offering a free recital of a Christmas Medley: the hoops that wannabee sopranos have to jump through on their way to fame and fortune. The audience was a mixture of the gray brigade and tourists, an audience which did not understand about it being better not to clap between numbers, especially in a church. While the trusties did not think to stop people bustling around the entrance and the gallery. But Haggerty was good nonetheless - and dressed to kill, despite it being a church. She gave me the impression of being a rather immature person with a very mature voice - the price one pays, I suppose, for being a musical prodigy. The lady sitting next to us was from Carmarthen, spoke Welsh and knew all about the salty yellow bacon sold in the market there. See reference 4.

We learned in passing that the carol 'In the bleak midwinter' was set by no less a musician than Gustav Holst.

And so to lunch of meat pie, back in the nearby Privy Kitchen.

Wound up with a visit to the trees along the long terrace running alongside the river. Altogether satisfactory.

PS: the illustration will probably be one of the last to be posted from the Lumia 630, now retired.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/towered-1.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/hampton-court-1.html.

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