Two dreams

The first dream was unusual for me in that it involved a public figure, in this case one of the few footballers of whom I have heard. It seems that I was doing something banal & innocent with his wife, perhaps going shopping, and towards the end of the expedition he joined in. He turned out to be a rather rough sort of chap, but underneath that decent enough. For some reason, I thought it polite to talk to him about something other than football - and that is about all that I can remember.

The second dream was something completely different and involved an unspecified mathematical object, but perhaps a group or a field, which evolved over time. The group was a function of time. As I woke, I started to ponder about what such a thing might mean.

Starting with, if time t1 was near time t2, then group(t1) should be near group(t2) in some sense. Which suggested that the group would need to be infinite for this to be interesting and that there would need to be some kind of a measure on the set underlying the group, a measure which could be used to define nearness.

Maybe we would say something about the sets over which the groups were defined. Maybe the set for time t2, later than time t1, would need to be a superset of that for time t1.

Then time would need to preserve group structure. If a and b were in both group(t1) and group(t2), then the product of a and b would need to be the same in both groups.

Now I have woken up, I have no idea if people work with such groups. But I was moved to remind myself of the definition of a group in my trusty Rotnam: associative & closed binary operation, identity and inverse. Maybe something more will come as the sun rises.

Cheapskate?

The infant-primary school near us, Stamford Green, was built as a vaguely temporary building in some previous fit of austerity, perhaps in the sixties. It is now being extended as part of the effort to cope with the expected flood of new children entering the system.

Part of this extension is remodeling the entrance and part of that is remodeling the pavement, illustrated.

It bugs me that rather than buying the presumably slightly more expensive curved kerb stones, they bought straight ones and laid what should have been a pleasing curve in straight line segments. Is the rest of extension to be completed on similarly cheese paring lines? Is this the best we can do for those who are going to staff up our care homes in our hour of need?

Or am I missing something about the arcana of kerbs? Is there some new fashion in such matters that has passed me by?

Post

An example of the sort of agricultural fence pole I associate with gentleman farmers of the late nineteenth century. You get quite a lot of them in Surrey.

Was it a patent fence pole sold to farmers with more money than common sense at agricultural fairs, did it come with barbed wire (said to be the key to the opening up of the West in the US), or did it really do a better job than a wooden one?

This one on Culver Down (50.668424, -1.117426) on the day of the shadow of the buzzard of 19th July.

Posh

The posh house mentioned in the last post. Must have been a great blot on the landscape at the time it was built, a great loud statement of status and wealth, presumably from some 19th century nouveau-riche.

There will be fine views down over the Mole and the countryside beyond from the windows at the back.

No idea what it would fetch if it were to be put on the market. Garden a bit slopey, not all that much car parking, not all that much to the adjacent town, not very convenient for the railway station and high maintenance & utility bills. But handy for the church, handy for the Leatherhead Institute (the owner of this house might expect to be invited to take the chair), big & grand. Not sure about a lodge as the only one in sight, the OJ Lodge, appears to mostly meet in Great Queen Street.

Leatherhead

Idly turning the pages of our Surrey Pevsner the other day, we came across the section on Leatherhead where Pevsner seemed to have had a very bad day and couldn't find a good word to say about the place. To which our response was that Leatherhead might well be home to a river prone to flooding, to some rather massive water works buildings and to a possibly extravagant Police Federation hotel, but that there were some buildings of both merit and interest and that we ought to check them out again. So off to Leatherhead last Tuesday, on which day we believed the church to be open.

Which it was and we found a church probably founded by King Edward the Confessor just before the Conquest, on land rising to the north above a crossing of the Mole and what were its water meadows. A doorway dating from not that long after foundation can be seen to the left of the large monument. Much of the visible fabric of much more recent date, including the unusual dormer windows. Inside, inter alia, there are some massive old piers and a handsome new barrel vault to the chancel. The large monument, the largest in the extensive church yard, is to the relict of one Mr. Smith of the Grange, Bermondsey, presumably not the former licensee of the pub of that name in that town. The relict died at the good age of 75 in 1838.

One of the other larger monuments was for a former owner of the rather grand undertaker & monumental mason, with the monument conveniently placed at the top of the yard so that it could keep an eye on the business still going on, just over the wall.  The most unusual monument was a miniature ziggurrat with three or four levels, done in white marble, perhaps a yard square at the base, something less than a yard high and with the rather various names carved around the steps defying organisation into a family tree.

A little down hill from the church there was a very pleasant garden, just the thing for a snooze in the sun and including a small walnut tree, perhaps the size of a mature standard apple, but mature enough to be carrying some green walnuts. And over the road was a very fancy house, to be illustrated in the next post and which reminded us that the district of Leatherhead, despite including some refugees from the war time bombing of London, contains some of the highest priced housing in the land. There was also an interesting selection of older housing between the church and the High Street. Closed the visit with a visit to Oxfam where we were able to pick up a couple of items of interest, including a more or less new shirt for £6 which BH assured me would have cost £36 in a proper shop.

And so back to the Running Horse (a Shepherd Neame house, not to be confused with the rather snootier place in Mickleham), by which we had parked, to take a light lunch, in my case in the form of a couple of ham sandwiches. They managed to omit all trimmings except mustard which was good, but made up by using rather too much mustard for my taste, completely obscuring the taste of what I suspected of being rather ordinary ham, despite there being rather a lot of that too. Sliced white bread of the sort which comes in a plastic bag, slightly stale. So sandwiches substantial & adequate, white wine satisfactory and ambience good. A genuine olde-worlde pub.

Antony & Cleopatra

To the Globe on Wednesday, the first play there for just about three years and the first visit of any sort for just about a year, that visit being to do with trumpets (see 17th August 2013).

A hot day, but Bullingdon'd without trouble from Grant Road East to Vauxhall Cross and from the Albert Embankment to the Hop Exchange, the two stands nearer the Globe being full, perhaps of all the holiday makers going to the same place and causing me to be somewhat late for my rendez-vous. I also had to hump a rather heavy bicycle down some steps to the river and managed to walk into the side of a van: I was intending to cross Southwark Bridge Road (on my way back from the Hop Exchange) behind it as it traveled south, but misjudged the distance and was rather too close as it veered sharply to the left and brushed against me as I stood, at the cost of a mild abrasion to the right elbow. And so onto the Globe where I took a couple of glasses of their vinho verde to recover equilibrium - decent but dear. Pleasant if noisy bar overlooking the river, with cooling breeze off the river.

Show itself not bad, although it must have been quite heavily cut to get it down to three hours including interval, a length which I could manage quite well with a cushion. My front seat was between the entrance and a pillar which meant I had plenty of space and a good view, but the distraction of all the comings and goings in the entrance, as pitters came and went - for a fiver a pop one might well just pop in for a few minutes just so that one could say that one had been. A bigger distraction was the full on afternoon sun. Sunglasses did not work as they meant one could hardly see the stage, but the paper hats provided by the volunteers, helpfully lurking below me in the entrance, did, and the chap behind me assured me that I was not blocking his view. Quite a lot of noise from the auditorium - including a good crop of inappropriate collective titters - which meant that mobile phones going off - which quite a few did - did not irritate as much as they would have done in an indoor theatre.

Good costume and set, with the former mainly vaguely Jacobean for the men and mainly vaguely Egyptian for the ladies. Unobtrusive, as it should be. They had song, dance and music but went easy on it, so that was fine too. They ran around a lot, adding to my usual difficulty in grasping the words, thought by some to be the main attraction - but not, presumably, for most of the aforesaid (foreign language) holiday makers. They laid the humour on a bit heavy, with Antony in particular, to my mind, rather overdoing it. But I did like the sense I got that Antony and Cleopatra, while indulging in grand passion, were also grand-standing, that the grand-standing was an integral part of the grand passion. Not something that I had thought of before.

Octavius rather good but Enobarbus was not quite right and there was the usual problem with the Globe that the actors and actresses did not convince as serious players, as movers and shakers in their world.

A large helicopter interrupted one important speech by Cleopatra and a seagull another, but she, Eve Best that is, managed to work round both rather well, albeit at a cost of raising a laugh at a wrong time.

Illustration take from the National Gallery of Victoria, who also offer a lot of interesting drawings by the same Tiepolo. This painting being of a Cleopatran banquet, another copy of which was included in the programme. It also rather good, including a cut down version of the sort of stuff you get in the Arden edition. Maybe as many as half the pages about the play, rather than about the Globe or advertisements and good value at £4.

Bullingdon'd back from Bankside Mix to Waterloo Roundabout to pick up a rather splendid fruit flan, a sort of higher grade Bakewell tart, from Konditur & Cook (http://www.konditorandcook.com/). And so endeth the outing to the Globe.

PS 1: checking afterwards in Baring-Gould, I find the action spread over half the Mediterranean and more than ten years, some way from the theatrical ideal of one action, one time and one place (see Ἀριστοτέλης, aka Aristotle). And that the marriage of Antony to Octavia produced a grandson who went on to become the Emperor Claudius. Antony was quite a fertile chap altogether, marrying five times and having one child by the second, two by the third, two by the fourth (Octavia) and the last three (of those recorded) by the fifth (Cleopatra). While of three grandsons to Octavius and Scribonia (the second of his three wives, the only one to produce), two died young and one was imbecile and had to be murdered when Octavius died.

PS 2: so one adaptor takes ten pages of Agatha Christie and makes it into sixty minutes of television. Another takes ten years of history and makes it into a hundred and eighty minutes of theatre. From which we deduce that Agatha could average around three pages a year.

Anxious times

A mild anxiety dream last night, vaguely in the Treasury but with some detail-free odour of OPCS (now ONS) and of my secondary school about it. I was running the sort of meeting for which one needs to do preparation, to cook up some business, not the sort of meeting where there is something reasonably firm to bite on and which runs itself, but had failed to do the preparation and had failed to produce an agenda. But I did have a meeting room, copies of the minutes of the last meeting and copies of some paper promised for this meeting, with something unspecified being wrong with this last. The dream opens with my removing a warm covered silver plate or stainless steel platter from the previous meeting, a platter containing half a very large & savoury baked potato, with the half being the right shape but far too large, with the idea being to provide refreshment for the unprepared meeting in question.

I am then in the meeting room, having arrive a little late, and rather than take five minutes out to cook up some business (which is all the time I would have needed), I try to ad-lib it and rapidly get into deep water, at which point I wake up and sail off into more or less innocuous reminiscences from the past.

It presumably says something about me that such reminiscences are more often about things that I got wrong than things which I got right.

PS: I associate now to a meeting about the Postcode Address File, then a rather new thing in the statistical world, at which I did get into rather a muddle for lack of preparation. This being at a time before personal computers and when a file containing millions of records was a serious proposition - unlike now when one can run an SQL query on such a thing in seconds.