Goya not

Last week we thought to Goya, thought to Goya without booking in advance. So we turned up at the National gallery at around 1100 on a weekday morning, to find long queues and what looked like an uncomfortably crowded exhibition. We decided to pass in favour of a spot of jigsaw hunting, that is to say hunting down pictures of which I had done the jigsaw.

We failed on the Garafalo of reference 1, it having been moved from its last known home in the basement, presumably on account of the building work evidenced by the complex scaffold outside.

But we did find the ambassadors of reference 2 and we did find the adoration of reference 3. The former reminding me of the carpet used as a table drape in the recent performances of Henry IV Part I and the latter seeming oddly subdued in tone. At this point we branched out into art history, as exemplified by the rooms in the middle fifties. Rooms in which there seemed to be trouble with, for example, connecting heads to shoulders - and with the folds of cloth.

I suppose part of the interest in cloth arose from richly coloured cloth being a marker of wealth, so something which patrons wanted to flaunt, something with which one wanted to clothe objects of veneration and something which came to be of interest in its own right. How does one capture the seemingly random folds of cloth in a realistic and interesting fashion? An interest which has survived to our own time, at least in this part of Epsom. But a trick which the master of the St. Bartholomew altarpiece had not mastered in his early work - late fifteenth century - snipped from the National Gallery web site and include above. In the gallery. in the flesh, as it were, the folds around the right (as viewed) hand arm looked particularly odd. An example of the way that the brain can learn, from observation, how cloth should fold, without necessarily being able to articulate what is wrong when it is wrong. The wrongness is hidden in the connections of the millions of neurons which look after the folding of cloth and statistics do the business without the need for grammar. Further musings on this fascinating subject to be found at reference 4.

As it happened, we noticed something of the same sort a couple of days later. A chap was walking along the platform at Epsom station and there was clearly something wrong, something odd about the way that he was walking. Inter alia, the rhythm of his steps was all wrong.  But more than that we could not say: the brain could compute oddness, but could not display its reasons. I associate now to a chap whom I used to know who made a living out of the fact that neural networks could be quite easily trained to be very good at spotting odd behaviour, behaviour which needed preventitive maintenance attention, in complex machines at Heathrow airport. Again, the network would know that something was wrong, but would not know what was wrong; that bit you had to do for yourself.

We also noticed the elaborate chairs in which some of the saints were placed. Mostly elaborate wooden chairs, but which very much reminded us of the niches in the Lady Chapel at Ely, older than these paintings by getting on for two hundred years. Perhaps they were already anachronisms by the time of these masters. The heritage speak of their day.

While Tura's muse (to be posted next) reminded me of the sort of thing that the writers of fantasy novels and fantasy computer games go in for now. A reference forwards rather than backwards in time.

Out to wander down Whitehall, to wonder outside the Houses of Parliament about whom the large black Mercedes saloon, allowed inside the security perimeter, might belong to. The person whom I took to be the chauffeur would not tell me, would not even tell me that he was not allowed to tell. Perhaps foreign, perhaps diplomatic, as my understanding is that important politicians of our own get driven around in British flavoured cars.

Bused ourselves to Vauxhall for lunch at the Estrela Bar. Some opted for what turned out to be an excellent lemon sole, grilled, while I settled for a substantial portion of a stew involving some sort of bony beef, some red beans and some rice, served in my own private saucepan. Taken with the bread and olives with which we started, a substantial lunch indeed. Washed down with a half bottle of the entirely satisfactory house white called 'Encostas do Bairro '.

PS: despite the interest in 'The Virgin and Child with Musical Angels' evinced above, I was not able to recover it from the excellent online catalogue maintained by the National gallery on their website. I had, for example, already forgotten that the picture was topped with a round arch and it took a further visit to the gallery yesterday to get things straightened out.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/jigsaw-2-series-2.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/jigsaw-7-series-3.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/jigsaw-9-series-2.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.

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.

An ongoing story

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

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

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

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

A 1998 adaptation from US TV is pending.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a dog's life

My belief is that a dog, while not particularly good at many human things, is nevertheless conscious in the same sort of way that humans are. A dog knows and remembers pain, a dog is friends with some dogs & not with others (as Amundsen explained in his big book about the South Pole), and a dog knows that a grizzly bear is not a rabbit. My expectation is that a dog’s consciousness will turn out to be organised and implemented in much the same way as ours is.

It is also true that my PC does wide pictures better than tall ones, so a dog as a quadruped makes a better diagram than a human does as a biped. Click to enlarge works quite well on my PC.

So all in all, the dog is fair game.

The placement of the arrows is deliberate. Electrical messages only get to and from the brain via the brain stem, while some chemical messages have direct access. The division of the brain proper into hemispheres does not seem to be relevant in this context, Julian Jaynes notwithstanding - see reference 1.

My first contention is that consciousness arises in a critical part of the brain stem and that one can be conscious without very much - if anything - else. One piece of this jigsaw is a report about the life of people with hydranencephaly. A rare birth or neo-natal brain defect, often quickly fatal but sometimes leaving some years of life.

My second is that consciousness manifests itself as some kind of complicated, vector valued electrical field in, and to a very limited extent, around the head. One might perhaps think in terms of some new force of life, emerging from just the right kind of electrical field, perhaps in the way that the force of gravity emerges from its astrophysical soup. This consciousness manifests itself in short bursts or periods, from say half a second to a few seconds in duration, of relative electrical stability. Too short a period and we are in the world of the subliminal, a real enough world but not one that we know about subjectively, directly. Too long and we can't keep it up. These periods of stability can be detected by electrodes placed on the scalp: that is not to say that we can detect the contents of consciousness from the scalp, at least not yet or to any great extent, but we can say that it is there. These periods may sometimes be correlated with the saccades of the eyes.

Successive periods may be separated by rapid transitional periods during which the brain changes tack, as it were, or by rather longer periods of unconsciousness.

My third is that one might impose a topology on this cloud, inherited from the three dimensional space in which it lives. One might perhaps say that the cloud vanishes where the modulus of its vector value is less than some small number. This opens up the possibility of a cloud waxing and waning in time. Even the possibility of having more than one cloud on the go at once, although that would be complicated by the postulated need for consciousness to occupy some particular part of the brain stem. The brain stem forces a degree of single threading, in contrast to the massive parallelism elsewhere.

PS: the limited extent mentioned at second makes telepathy difficult. These fields are going to be very weak outside the head and you may not be able to do much even if you put identical twins head to head.

Reference 1: http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php. 

Trolley 34

Captured at around gmaps 51.351347, -0.264484 on the Chessington Road in West Ewell and returned to the Ewell Village small Sainsbury's, discovering on the way that the replacement front wheel, while apparently having the same relevant geometry as the original, was very prone to spontaneous swiveling, which made for rather a bumpy ride. The only difference that I thought might be relevant was that the tyre of the replacement wheel was a lot wider than that of the original. Front left in the illustration.

Most of the area outside the shop was paved with a cunningly bumpy sort of brick which made wheeling a trolley on them hard work - but which had not deterred the borrowing of this particular trolley.

The new wine bar which had been proposed for Ewell Village, just along from Sainsbury's, seems to have failed to take off, there having been no action at the proposed premises for some time now. A wine bar which would have suited me, as it might have had a more interesting range of wine than our pubs manage, but which may not have floated for long, given that the nearby Star failed as a pub, despite it seeming quite busy when we visited, and which has now been stalled for some months, half was through a major refurbishment.

On the other hand the Village has acquired a country shop selling all the sorts of expensive togs and trimmings which us suburban people like to think that country people like to wear. The place would do very well as a prop store for Midsomer Murders. And we wait with interest to find out who has just taken what used to be the Oxfam shop, the one which kept me supplied with 500 piece arty jigsaws during my jigsaw phase.

Nearer home, Epsom coaches were discovered to have collared the contract for the Marsden Hospital bus and to have started to colonise the empty City Link site next door. While Blenheim Road has acquired a middle sized caravan, firmly shut but with a gas bottle standing outside and connected. How long will it last?

On the way out, the second enthusiastic small boy in two days. The first had been very keen to demonstrate how fast he could pedal his new tricycle. The second was getting very excited, I thought about me, but actually about a small digger behind me. I thought that maybe small boys like diggers because they are a large and visible demonstration of action and reaction at work. They can see something happening which they can understand, understand just enough to be fascinated by it.

But the really good news is that I saw an aeroplane on the flight path down into Heathrow from Horton Lane today, the first time for what seems like weeks. Sadly, despite the one proving that the cloud cover was above the flight path, I was not able to make it two.

PS: once again, about a month since the last capture. Although I did turn one up on the way home from the last car booter, down the passage running between Chessington Road and Hook Road, not passing it at a time when it was convenient to detour to Sainsbury's. Not yet found an opportunity to go back to see if it is still there.

Down House 1

Following the intention trailed at reference 1, we have now made it to Darwin's Down House. A visit with no cost at the point of consumption, following appropriate membership acquired on the occasion noticed at reference 2. I am pleased to be able to record that we are now well on our way to recovering the cost of that membership from visits to otherwise paying places.

On the way we came across a fascinating bit of church history. Once upon a time in Peckham, in fact at the very end of the 19th century, a church was built in the style of the end of the 13th century. A church which survived the war unscathed, unlike some others in that area, but which became surplus to Peckham requirements shortly thereafter. At this point the energetic perpetual curate (the first time I have come across one such, a real one, since first reading about them in Trollope, many years ago) of Biggin Hill, stepped in and obtained permission to dismantle the place for the materials, which he would then use to build a new church to replace the tin church of which he had charge in Biggin Hill. It seems that the shortage of building materials was such that, in the middle of the 20th century, this was a good option. He went on to put up an interesting looking church, the tower of which we mistook for the hose drying tower of a fire station, which was probably open, but which we, getting near Down House at that point, did not visit - which was odd for us. See reference 3.

But we did visit the adjacent memorial library and swimming pool, a thriving & cheerful place, complete with a cheerful & helpful librarian who, while not knowing too much about what was known as the moving church, was happy to dig out three books which filled the gap.

Shortly after that, we made it to Down House, the place which saw the origin of the origin of species, as it were. A large family house rather than a stately home, very much in the same vein as Hardy's house at Dorchester, albeit rather bigger and grander. See reference 5.

The top floor was laid out for educational purposes, with various displays about Darwin's life and work, complete with various objects from the time. And with a school party from a nearby primary school, a secular primary school which, as it happened, Darwin had helped to fund, thus heading off a church school. A well behaved bunch, but a bunch which made the place a little crowded. The upstairs trusty told us that it was all a matter of luck, with many week days being very quiet indeed - a trusty who was a volunteer rather than an employee, thus answering the wonder from Walmer. One of the objects on display was a copy of one of the volumes about barnacles, the volumes which established Darwin's credentials as a naturalist, gentleman amateur no longer, for holding forth on the origin of life. The book was open in the middle of a catalog of some part of the barnacle world, and I was interested to see that it was entirely in Latin - although I presume that the body of the book was in English.

The ground floor was laid out as a house, recreating what the place would have been like in Darwin's time, or at least shortly thereafter, to which end they had managed to recover quite a lot of original furniture and fittings. We were rather put off some of the rooms by the lines of grey hairs plugged into and absorbed by their audio guides, for all the world like iPhones or something of that sort, and with a gentle burbling coming out of each. To think that we might be like that in a few years' time. But we managed to catch the dining room illustrated when it was empty - not even a trusty to ask whether the service on display came from the family Wedgwood. Pleased to see that the service ran to no less than two large soup tureens, so they clearly had a proper notion of the importance of soup in a healthy diet.

Small but decent café which served for both elevenses and lunch, this last consisting in my case of a large slice of pork pie with a large dollop of some kind of brown pickle (not something which I usually eat) and a larger dollop of salad. Portions and presentation good, pork pie not so good, and I was reduced to smears of pickle by the time I got to the end.

Handsome and interesting gardens outside, including another vegetable garden, gardens which are clearly all the rage just presently. But they were rather late with their broad beans, which appeared to have only just come up; not up to HCP standards at all. They also had a large bed given over to hollyhocks, which I have never seem grown in that way before, being more used to them just popping up in odd places, typically along the edges of something else. The gardener was moaning about their not doing very well, something about the soil, but I should think that they will be looking well enough later in the summer for all that.

Passed an interesting looking lorry from Brink's on the way home. A middle sized box lorry, the sort of thing that might deliver bread to our local Costcutter, but rather lower and somehow rather heavy and solid looking. Inspecting their website this morning, presumably some kind of hardened lorry, hard to steal and hard to break into. See reference 6.

PS: quite forgot to ask in the Down House shop about a jigsaw. See reference 4.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/a-darwinian-fest.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/walmer.html.

Reference 3: http://www.movingchurch.org/about-us/history.htm.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=jigsaw+19+series+2.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/matters-hardy.html.

Reference 6: http://www.brinks.com/.

A darwinian fest

Triggered by watching a film a week or so ago called Creation, a pick me up from somewhere or other, certainly not bought for a proper price. Not, I thought, a terribly good film, dragging in the middle with rather too much water cure, but it did serve, once again, to trigger a darwinian fest.

There was some precedent in that, some years ago, I read, forgot and still own a book about Darwin and his barnacles, written, as it happens, by a former colleague of my brother's. About all I remember about it is that there are a lot of different sorts of barnacles, surprisingly various, with some of the males living inside the corresponding females. While a quick peek this morning reveals the rather different sort of fact that Darwin, while comfortably off, was not above speculating in railway shares, the makers and breakers of many fortunes in the nineteenth century.

But that had nothing to do with picking up the creative DVD. Was there some association to our university of creation here at Epsom (it does result in a very large art department in our local library), noticed recently for its failure to create its own logo? In any event, from there we moved to his and hers reading from the library, reference 2 for her (the book of the film) and reference 3 for him (an easy going, regular biography by a retired journalist with a passion for Darwin). Not terribly satisfied with either we then moved onto what I thought would be a less easy going biography by one Julian Huxley, whom I thought, correctly as it turned out, to be the grandson of the Huxley who starred in the film and the brother of the one who wrote about brave new worlds (and, I was reminded today, families of dwarfs), but which turned out to be an engaging Thames & Hudson picture book co-authored with one Kettlewell. This has now been given house room in our lead bookcase along with the barnacles and the DVD.

A few new to me facts from all this. That the scientific world was awash with stories about creation and evolution in the mid nineteenth century; the time was ripe. That both Darwin and his father married first cousins, not quite the thing these days - although his wife turned out to be a treasure in other respects. Then Darwin was chronically ill with some still undiagnosed abdominal complaint for most of his life, despite going in for looked like (in the film) frightful water cures. He started out as a gentleman amateur, on the strength both of talent and talents, by which last I mean family money. He could bring up a big family in what would now count as a big house without ever having to earn a living. All of which combined with a little (duly acknowledged) help from one Alfred Wallace to bring the origin of species into the world when he did,

Next stop, the Darwin family residence, Down House in Kent. A place which I imagine will come across in much the same way as Hardy's house on what is now the outskirts of Dorchester (see reference 5). With the sixty four thousand dollar question being, do they do a jigsaw of the place?

Reference 1: Darwin and the Barnacle by Rebecca Stott.

Reference 2: Annie's Box by Randal Keynes.

Reference 3: Charles Darwin by Cyril Aydon.

Reference 4: Charles Darwin and his World by Julian Huxley and H. B. D. Kettlewell.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/jigsaw-20-series-2.html.

Poussin & others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jigsaw 9, Series 3

The first jigsaw for a while (see reference 1), cunningly playing to my blogged interest in the periodic table (see reference 2).

Nicely produced jigsaw from the Royal Society of Chemistry, but with no clue on the box as to where the image came from or who actually cut the puzzle. So I have no idea whether the little pictures which come with each element have any significance, beyond illustrating this jigsaw. Perhaps the fact that they do not appear in the book at reference 2 is a clue. I note also the slightly non-standard presentation of the lanthanoids and actinoids.

A regular puzzle, with exactly four pieces meeting at every interior vertex.

Unusually, I did not do the edge first, rather the two blocks of words, easily the easiest part of the puzzle. Easy to pick out and easy to assemble.

Then finished the edge and then a bit stuck. Not the sort of image I was used to at all. Tried arranging some of the pieces with the legible beginnings of the names of elements in alphabetic order but that did not help much, perhaps because the table I use was not quite big enough to do this particular puzzle in complete comfort.

But I then noticed that the elements were colour coded.and it then proved quite easy to pick out all the pieces of any one colour, for example yellow. And it then proved easier than I expected to pull the right little pictures out of the heap to complete the row or column in hand. Worked in from the bottom three edges, doing the chunk of blue in the middle, roughly sodium across to roentgenium, last. The heap was by then small enough that the relatively large size of the chunk was not a problem.

The sky - in this case the small areas of deep blue, helped along by pink veins - was trivial compared with the sky in the average puzzle.

All in all an entertaining resumption of puzzle activity, ending up slightly bemused that so many of the little pictures had a circular theme, bemused as I could not think of any good reason why this should be so. Does it reflect the dominance of images with circular themes in the sort of image library one would have used to make the puzzle?

Probably rather easier to find out why so many, but by no means all, of the element names end in 'ium'. One presumes that the fact that most of the elements which have been around for a long time do not so end, for example gold, is related to the fact that most of the most common verbs are very irregular. Left as an exercise for the reader.

Last but not least, where is the element to the right of roentgenium and below mercury? Is there some mathematical or physical reason why this one does not exist, or is it just that no-one has gone to the bother & expense of creating it yet?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/jigsaw-8-series-3.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-works.html.

Turner

Yesterday to the Epsom Odeon to see Mr. Turner.

A discouraging start as we get to the cinema to find that the main ticket office to the right is shut and we were relegated to the side of the ice cream operation to the left. Perhaps it was senior time, but in any event we had to wait for any ticket action until a complicated ice cream had been assembled. We passed the time waiting eyeing up all the huge buckets and bags, sacks even, containing pop-corn, no doubt mostly coated in a great deal of sugar and which served to remind me of the way in which the Odeon people have messed up the arm rests of their seats by incorporating holders for the buckets, if not the bags. And then, when we come to be served it was more or less impossible to see what seats you are buying from the customer side of the machine, although after some fiddling about, we manage to get the back row premium seats we want, the front row ones not being so premium at all. Stumble our way - the layout being confusing in the dark and the stairs being steep - to our seats, which turn out to be capacious but not particularly comfortable. But we settle down to watch the few remaining trailers, very loud, as usual.

And so to the film, the opening of which includes some arty shots of a flat landscape and a very nifty graphic based, I think, on the picture illustrated above. The film goes on to include quite a lot of arty shots of landscape and of water, but oddly not much sea that I remember. The score is unobtrusive, and often entirely absent. So far so good.

We are dumped into more or less the middle of Turner's life, in a film which jumps around a great deal, with a lot of takes being broken off rather abruptly and which is not contrived so as to fill in much background about the missing first half of his life.

Slightly confused by Turner's father being portrayed by someone who appears to be younger than than the actor doing Mr. Turner (Mr. Spall). Turning to the women, the film did not include much in the way of young & improbably pretty women. The younger female lead was disfigured and the older female lead was older. Realism, rather than eye candy for the gents., was the order of the day.

It is always hard to made convincing films about the past and while this film tries hard, a lot of the town and interior scenes seemed very contrived to me. One almost felt the stage management people creeping around props warehouses looking out suitable bits and bobs with which to dress their sets. Nor was I very convinced about the arty bits, we being shown a Turner who spent a lot of time at his art, but who appeared to be impossibly slap-dash about it. We had, for example, his sketch pad flapping about while he sketched, which I thought most improbable.

The film is much too long at around two and a half hours and the first hour and a half drag a bit. But it comes to a fine end with Turner's aging and dying; to the extent that the film is more about that than about him as an artist or his art. Well suited to the more or less exclusively senior audience.

Home to read the short biography offered by Canaday, one of his longer, Canaday rating Turner as England's only artistic genius. Of humble oriigin, very successful during his life, dying old and rich, went out of fashion and was only canonised (as Canaday puts it) after he was made the subject of a show in New York in 1966. The start of a wave of fashion which has yet to break. But I should not knock as I do like his paintings, even if there are too many of them, and I do go and see them from time to time. See, for example, reference 3.

Canaday also observes that the only person to truly appreciate Turner during his life was Ruskin, shown in the film as a bit of a prat. Otherwise, I find that the film has been fair with Turner. The stuff portrayed did mostly happen, or at least was in the spirit of the chap and his way of life. But I think that we would have got on better with the film had we read this potted biography first, which should not have been necessary. I also think that we would get on better at a second viewing, perhaps in the comfort of our own home with a DVD from a Hook Road car booter.

Image courtesy of the Tate gallery.

PS: don't understand why click to enlarge the illustration works in the unusual way it does. Does the file include some anti-theft device? Tried converting from the png produced by snip to a jpg produced by paint but that does not seem to have made any difference.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/jigsaw-2-series-2.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=intimate+connections.

Tribute 2

I noticed the jigsaw tribute in the DT on 3rd October.

Today I notice a second tribute, to a different jigsaw, in the form of a booklet about Kent lodged in a holiday house nowhere near Kent. A jigsaw (jigsaw 5, series 2) which was completed at the end of 2012 (see reference 1) and which resulted, shortly thereafter in visits to the place in question and to nearby Rochester. Memorable visits both, with our being impressed on the first visit by the size of the Medway and on the second by the size of Rochester castle.

We learn from today's booklet that England is considered to have been invented on the occasion of the battle of 455 mentioned in the earlier post, the first time at which the resident tribes of what is now England had banded together in a joint endeavour to repel the German invaders. Ultimately unsuccessful on this occasion.

I then started to doze a bit and got to wondering about the way that the thousands of books from a single printing might spread out over the world - the sort of thing that, back in the fifties of the last century, one might have been required to write essays about. I recall my older brother being tasked with an essay on the day in the life of a gate post. So let us suppose that 10,000 copies of this particular book were run off during the week commencing Monday 4th February 1952.

First thought is that I talk glibly of 10,000 copies as if they were all the same, when in reality they were not. The first 10 were especially bound in white calf skin and used for presentation purposes. The next 90 were especially bound in blue boards and wrapped with a tastefully designed dust cover. The remaining 9,900 were knocked out as booklets and intended for sale in souvenir shops in the ordinary way. But even they are not all the same. The first batch was done by Fred who was recovering from a binge at the time and slightly overdid the blue ink. The second batch was done by Alf who never got the hang of the stapler. And so on, with a serious collector being able to distinguish copies from the various hands involved.

We next suppose that all of them were equipped with a chip which could report its position to base, rather in the way of a mobile phone. We are then able to track the movement of every copy through its life, and perhaps a little beyond as the chip might not expire with its host book. We neglect, in what follows, this interesting complication.

So, for any point in time after said Monday 11th February 1952 we can say that so many books are still extant and this is their geographical disposition. We stick to a two dimensional disposition and neglect, in what follows, other possibilities. So on Tuesday 15th September 1953, 5,000 of the books might still be in store in Rochester. There might be clusters of them scattered around the souvenir shops of Kent and beyond. One of them might have made it to Valparaíso in Chile, carried there by an expatriate lecturer in the university there. Fifteen might have made it to Stratford, Ontario of all places, carried there by enthusiastic members of Stratford High School's famous girls' choir which had done a singing tour of Kent, England. One could make an entire television documentary about the disposition of the books on some particular day. One could make a series, taking a series of such days, a series which might include bearded pundits banging on in a learned way about the details of the mechanics of the dispersion of printed matter, rather as if they were talking of the migration of sardines around the Atlantic.

And the next thought is about the status in the scheme of things of something like 'the number of books from the February 1952 printing of this particular guide to Kent which were still extant and in the province (or duchy) of Aquitaine in France in the spring of 1961'. Can we assert that this number exists, even if no-one has bothered to articulate it in speech or words, let alone actually compute it? Is the failure of this number to exist anything to do with the fact that 'extant' is a rather woolly concept. Is the book still extant if it is being cannibalised to make wrappings for fish and chips?

I can see that such a number is different from the square root of 10, and certainly from the square root of minus 10. But it is perhaps in the same ball-park as 'the average age of the population of Cottenham'. And in the neighbouring ball-park as 'the length of the longest salmon in Loch Ness'. With due consideration being given to the angles that Cottenham might be empty of people or that Loch Ness might be empty of salmon. Or that length might not be a sensible attribute of a salmon.

At which point, my thoughts turn towards the breakfast baker.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2012/12/jigsaw-5-series-2.html.

PS: I notice in passing the attempt of one Fiona Grant to sell me an advent calendar this morning. Google, quite properly, shoves her email in the promotions pot, but I am beguiled by Fiona being the sender and open the thing up, to find that she represents the Eden Bible Company. They are not the only energetic company to hide their marketing material of this sort - bulk emails - under such clothes, with the Tate Gallery being another such. Faintly dishonest to my mind, but which, oddly, irritates me less than those letters from utility companies addressed and signed as if I was a personal friend of the sales director. Is the essential difference here that the former are usually women (whom one assumes, possibly quite wrongly, to be young and pretty), while the latter are usually men?

Perhaps the EC should make a law that all such communications should include a fair & recent mugshot of the signatory in the top right hand corner.

Tribute

For once in a while I picked up a proper, paying newspaper in the train yesterday, a Daily Telegraph. It seems a long time ago that one could rely on collecting a supply of such on leaving morning trains at Waterloo.

I was doubly pleased to find this tribute to Jigsaw 4, Series 2 inside. Very thoughtful of them.

It took a little while to track down my original post, blog search seeming a bit idiosyncratic this morning, but I tracked it down in the end at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/jigsaw-4-serie-2.html.

Yard retaining wall (phase 2)

Phase 2 poured on Tuesday, having settled for just one shutter and not going for the two. I have doing the bread at the same time for an excuse, bread which, despite all the rush, turned out really well.

Don't know about phase 2 yet as the shutter is only half struck. Let it loosen up a bit before striking it altogether. The cloths are to keep the curing concrete wet. The tatty looking bits of plywood nailed onto this end of the shutter are the lazy alternative to cutting the shutter end into the earth bank. Something which I do not have a very good eye for and which would, in any event, have taken a hour or so, rather than a minute or so for the plywood. But you do get a good view of the way the earth bank has been undercut.

I did have some computational problems. During shutter assembly the brain was not doing very well at solid geometry, not being able to compute very reliably whether a suitably rotated part of the assembly would fit in its intended hole. You can get the same problem with jigsaws with the brain refusing to work out whether a piece fits or not unless you turn it the right way round - something which is rather easier with a piece of jigsaw than a piece of shutter.

Half the second batch of old bricks were lost down the garden again, this time chopping them up a bit first. The other half went into rubble bags from Travis Perkins, maybe £4 for 5 and made out of some woven white plastic stuff, amazingly strong. The three I have used so far have not torn or punctured at all. Bags emptied at the waste transfer station at around 1000 yesterday (Thursday) when there was no queue, but the place was busy enough with most of the dozen or so parking slots being taken.

The screwdriver is older than I am, that is to say more than 65 years old, with the sort of properly shaped wooden handle you get a good grip on and give a bit of welly. Much less likely to give you blisters than the plastic equivalent, possibly made by Marples, but probably more or less obsolete in the builders' era of battery packs. But not quite, as I see from http://www.marples.co.uk/ that they still sell the things under the moniker of cabinet screwdriver, although they do seem to have stopped making chisels. When I was little they were the best and I still own half a dozen or more, including the fearsome half inch mortice.

PS: a quick call has revealed the truth. The marples above is Joseph Marples, the chisel one is William Marples, whom a glance at Google suggests has ceased trading.

Bad timing (reprised)

Following the post of almost exactly a year ago (see 22nd July 2013), I can report that we failed to make the jigsaw festival for the second year running, having decided that popping over for a day or so for the express purpose was perhaps a little extravagant.

Advertised, as it happens, in the same Yaverland church as last year. There must be a fellow enthusiast in the area.

Jigsaw 8, Series 3

Another go at the jigsaw last seen here on 14th May, having taken something over five weeks to solve on this occasion. Perhaps jigsaw life really is wearing thin.

For variety, solved the easy bits in a different order but ended up with most of the velvet robe of the right hand figure and the lower black of the left hand figures, as last time.

During this time we came across a computer image of the painting at the 'Colour' exhibition at the National Gallery (see 20th June), possibly in connection with the green curtain, possibly on account of Holbein's use of exciting new green paints, of a quality not previously available. I shall check when we revisit the exhibition.

The picture is also included in the collection of the Google Cultural Institute (http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/home?view=grid), where the zooming in capability is rather better than that offered by the owner, that is to say the National Gallery. A fine teaching or study aid, presumably the product of some fancy photographic work commissioned especially for the Cultural Institute. I wonder if one can organise things so that it displays a full size version on the computer screen on your wall? How close to the experience of the original would this come? Or has that been blocked on the grounds that that is tantamount to giving you the image, presumably not allowed.

From what I remember of Harald Küppers, it should be better than a printed copy. That is to say, a computer screen, being light emitting rather than light reflecting, should be far less sensitive to the vicissitudes of the ambient lighting.

Bouches-du-Môle

Following the visit to the Mole at Leatherhead reported in the previous post (also 14th June), we thought it time to visit the Bouches-du-Môle at Hampton Court, mysteriously renamed by that point for a small chain of eating pubs, the Ember Inns, itself now broken up and renamed. One of them was our very own Cricketers Inn on Stamford Green Pond, where, according to http://www.stonegatepubs.com/, you will find 'you’ll find friendly people and a fun atmosphere'. As it happens, not a place I have ever used much. But the renaming was rather an odd thing to do as the area, East Molesey, remains named for the Mole.

Started off at the station car park, deemed to be cheaper for a day than the car park at the Palace itself. From there to inspect the landing with its attendant geese, young and old, at the south eastern end of the bridge. From there to inspect the landing with its attendant rowing boats at the south western end of the bridge, starting with a lounging young lady who rapidly stopped rolling her fag to explain the renting régime for rowing boats to us, which turned out to be rather like that for punts in another place: substantial deposit followed by so much per hour, one hour payable in advance. We wondered whether, on another quiet weekday, she would have given us a better rate for the day - picnic and all that sort of thing - but on this occasion we settled for an hour.

Proper skiff shaped boat, if made of fibre glass rather than wood, with provision for up to four oars and including a rudder at the back. We opted to have one lady pulling the port steering rope and another the starboard, an arrangement which worked quite well once we had got over the initial confusion. And so for a gentle row down to the nearby island and back, passing said Bouches-du-Môle on the way. Back at the bridge, we wondered how the Cigarette Island Park came to be so named: there would have been plenty of day-tripping smokers around on summer Sunday afternoons in the olden days, but in the olden days they would have been able to smoke in one of the various pubs serving the area. So why the large smoking outdoor smoking den? Excellent echo to be had under Hampton Court Bridge, rather like that to be had under the rather lower and narrower Silver Street Bridge at said other place (see gref 52.201910, 0.115395).

And so onto the rose garden which was looking well, if a touch battered by the recent rain, with some truly excellent floribunda roses under the walls. Them, by then feeling hungry, we moved onto the Tilt Yard Café where, it being warm but overcast, eating outside was an option. I opted for a Greek style sheep sausage which looked well enough but which turned out to be rather dry, as was the flat bread on which it came. And the lumpy green goo was a little warmer than it should have been. Teaching point: do not buy this sort of thing at the end of the lunch period as they knock it all up at the beginning of the lunch period. But quite eatable, and otherwise well suited to the warm weather.

And so onto to the paying gardens where we learned from one of the (no less than 40) gardeners that they grew most of their own plants in their acre or so of glass houses, only buying in the more common items as plugs. And I had thought that, these days, they would have bought most of their stuff in, ready to be planted out. But whatever the source, the beds and the long border were looking good. As was the privy garden, quite different in tone in the bright summer light than the spring light in which we had last seen it. A garden which works well, without all that much flower and being more a symphony of green, all year round (see March 12th 2012, in the other place). A rather pretentious sounding phrase but one which, for me, captures what the designer was trying to do.

We wound up with the two sunken gardens, one mainly floral and one mainly green, with the former being the subject of Jigsaw 16, Series 1, noticed on July 7th 2012.

Car booter

This morning off to my first car booter of the season this morning, of moderate size following a run of rather wet Sundays and bank holidays.

Moderate haul.

Item 1, what look like 2 mint condition mono LPs from 1954 of 'Under Milk Wood', with one alcohol friendly Welshman reciting the words of another. According to Wikipedia the words were commissioned as a radio drama for the BBC, from whence this recording. I had thought the thing was a narrative poem, so I have learned something today.

Item 2, the first 6 episodes of 'Fawlty Towers', a series of which my younger brother was very fond but which I have never got into. Maybe with our taste in television veering towards the light and cheerful, this will now appeal.

Item 3, an old jigsaw. At 50p it seemed a bit churlish to open the box up on the spot, but back home it turns out to contain 1 piece from the jigsaw which came in the box in the first place, 2 complete jigsaws of the same sort but not as good, half of a further uninteresting jigsaw, 1 piece of a fifth jigsaw and a die. Box and 2 complete jigsaws retained to add to the nucleus of my forthcoming collection of heritage jigsaws (see 20th May 2013). However, the price of retention was the retirement of our copy of 'Alice Through the Looking Glass', an old edition from Nelson, line illustrated and in good condition, but whose place on the bookshelf has now been taken by the jigsaw. A pity, but we have had the book for a long time, I have never read it and don't think I will now.

Item 4, two thimbles, sold to me as having been fashioned by an outdoor silversmith from Agadir silver but which turn out, on closer inspection, to be African flavoured souvenirs from the neighbouring Lanzerote. I think it was a charity stall so let's hope that it was a charity that I approve of.

Item 5, the one that got away, or a collection of the words of Morse, to go with our Morsoleum (see 20th February), a dozen or so pale green (rather than the more respectable black) volumes still in their shrink wrapped plastic parcel. I had closed the deal at £2.50, rather better than the £10 which Epsom Oxfam were asking a few weeks ago, when I made the mistake of asking for a bag to put it in, and while putting it in the bag the seller - a lady rather younger than I - spotted a sticker on it saying something about ebay and £89.99 and cancelled the sale. My purchase was marginal so I did not insist on my consumer rights - and my own rather limited perusal of ebay this afternoon suggests that the going price is around £12 so I wish her luck with her venture.

Memory lane (4)

The thumb drum purchased quite some years ago in a shop near Warren Street, mentioned, for example, on November 26th 2010 in the other place, à propos of a performance of Hamlet at the Ovalhouse.

Looks to have been made by a village smith, beating the sounding irons out of scrap of some sort.

Still needs to be tuned and I have still to learn to play it, but I thought a more prominent hanging might result in at least a little use. So retained.

Also reminded that it is perhaps time that I had another go at my jigsaw of Olympia, last seen in the flesh some forty years ago when the 'Jeu de Paume' was still an art gallery. There is an illustration at June 13th 2012 in the other place, but the accompanying text suggests that the jigsaw had not been bought at that point, although by June 25th it clearly had been. Puzzle 15 of series 1.

Jigsaw 7, Series 3

This picture taken in natural light, not much better than that taken on the occasion of the last solution (Jigsaw 1, Series 3, 25th December 2013). Maybe the shiny black background is the trouble on this occasion.

This Ravensburger puzzle continues to be a pleasure to solve, although for puzzle purposes I prefer the Garafalo picture (see 23rd April for its last solution), which is more of a challenge, Ravensburger quality notwithstanding. Solved in pretty much the same order as last time, with the only significant variation being leaving the dark, lower part of the left hand figure until last and the central column of the right hand figure immediately before that. Sorting was very helpful in solving the green part and the two dark parts of the puzzle and I was quite often able to just pick the right piece out of the lines, without the need for trial and error. Ravensburger cutting is good for this sort of thing. Solution ended with the discovery of an alien piece, probably left over from careless putting away of Jigsaw 6. Put aside in the possibly fond hope that I will remember about it when I next tackle Garafalo - presently being embarked on another go at the Ambassadors.

My only comment on the picture is that the right hand face seemed rather dull compared with the left hand face, probably the result of the right hand face being given appropriate clerical passivity and the left hand face belonging to the chap who paid for the painting. The left hand chap was also in better position to give time to sittings, being resident in England at the relevant time, unlike his clerical friend who was just visiting.

Puzzle solution proceeded in parallel with reading one book about the painting, by Mary Frederica Sophia Hervey, and dipping into another, by John North, with both being bought from Amazon blind, not something that I do very often.

The first book told me a lot about who the two ambassadors were and how they fitted into the complicated European scene at the time of the breaking away of the northern half of the Catholic church from the southern half. The left hand ambassador, for example, was an honoured guest at the coronation of Anne Boleyn, which I learned Henry VIII did not himself attend. He also took the precaution of importing 30 tuns of claret, presumably having heard bad reports of the stuff more usually drunk here. The right hand ambassador, accredited by Francis I to the Imperial & Peripatetic Court of Charles V, was mixed up in the scheme to swap Burgundy for Milan mentioned on 9th April. He was also a good friend of the left hand, hence the visit to England to see him.

The second book was mainly concerned to tell one about the astronomical instruments on the top shelf, painted with such care & skill. North appears to think that the instruments have been carefully painted to indicate the time of day and the date of the painting with, to this end, Holbein drawing on the knowledge of his astrological friend Nicolas Kratzer. There is also talk of horoscopes and hexagrams. I ran out of puff about half way through this book, unconvinced that Holbein was being quite as careful about his painting of the instruments as North was suggesting. I rest content with the idea that they simply stand for an important part of the the baggage of an educated man in the early sixteenth century; no more and no less. But I allow that Holbein might have been having a bit of sport at our expense by painting the shadows on and around the instruments neatly enough to suggest that they might be telling the time or whatever and he died happy, like James Joyce, secure in the knowledge that legions of scholars would spend quality time trying to work out the solution to a puzzle which did not have one.

Now looking for a home for them, along with the bacon last mentioned on 7th May.

Jigsaw 6, Series 3

Garafolo for the fourth time of asking, and still going strong as far as I am concerned, but the jigsaw itself is getting a little tired, with some of the pieces a little the worse for wear. About a month in solution, including a week away. Very much the same order as last time, but this time with the irregular pieces ten in from the right and three & more down being the very last. This was a change from last time when I am sure that these particular pieces were near last, but not actually last.

I am tempted to go for the fifth solution but I must resist and get on with the 'Ambassadors', presently coming in second with just two outings to date. Decided against retiring the Garafolo to the compost bin as a rather drastic way to resist temptation and I might manage to fit in a visit to the real thing, probably still in the basement, in the near future.