Donkeys

Sunday was the big day for the South East Region of the Donkey Breed Society, the day of their show at Hook Road Arena. This is at least the second time they have been at the Arena, having been previously at the nearby Horton Country Park - where one might have thought that proximity to the polo playing Equus Equestrian Centre would have given the event a bit more tone than the rather proletarian - if very practical - Hook Road Arena. Ask the other place about 'donkey' to get the full gen.

An interesting, if not very large event with maybe as many as 25 participating horse boxes and 50 participating donkeys. One of the horse boxes came from as far away as Bristol.

Some of the interest was generated by the humans involved, something of a caricature of the sort of people who turn up at country shows at places like Honiton. Black hats, tweed jackets, wellington boots and whips. Ladies of various sizes, shapes and ages in very short tweed jackets and tight tan trousers. Floral dresses and elaborate, matching hats. The sort of hat which might have been bought and then trimmed by the new owner with material left over from her dress.

There was a stand from the brook (see http://www.thebrooke.org/) selling various summer fête stall stuff, most of it donkey flavoured.

There was a lonely Poitou donkey, a great big thing with a very hairy chest, with hair in what looked a bit like dreadlocks. Wikipedia knows all about them, a variety of donkey which used to be used in France to breed large size working mules and which came very close to extinction at one point.

I learned that proper donkeys, like those illustrated, are marked (first) with the Sign of the Cross, the result of one of their number having carried Our Lord into Jerusalem. The cross takes the form of two black crests of hair, one across the shoulders and the second cutting across it, running along the spine. Best seen in these grey donkeys.

The inside of their front legs are marked (second) with chestnuts or ergots, these marks being more or less absent on the inside of their back legs. A left over of evolution, like the appendix, in this case something to do with feet rather than with stomachs.

I was sufficiently impressed by all this for donkeys to be included in my waking dream this morning. I was in some sort of work environment involving a Polish girl of mid twenties and a large window overlooking a busy motorway. When along came a large cortege, probably travellers, which caused something of a backup by doing a slow turn right across said motorway. The centre piece of the cortege was a large, luminous, translucent object the size and general shape of a large caravan but also associating to diamond. The sort of magic object which turns up in science fiction films, sometimes with Dustin Hoffman. One assumed that there was a casket at the centre of the thing but could not quite make it out. Bringing up the rear was a procession of donkeys, showing their crosses loud and clear, perhaps appropriately for a funeral.

PS: dream clearly rather unreliable about Hoffman. The film called 'The Sphere' doesn't look quite right in Wikipedia. But I shall check it out properly.

Matching?

Irritated the other day by this advertisement on the tube from the dating outfit Lovestruck.

Whoever prepared the image has, for some reason, inverted the image from side to side and the twin towers of St. Paul's appear in the east instead of in the west where they belong.

Was it an accident or does one, with modern technology, have to do such a thing on purpose? Had the artist been outsourced to Bangalore, from where he or she could not be expected to know too much about the London skyline. Or, if there was a purpose, one asks oneself what purpose could that possibly be? One can only hope that their love matching algorithms are better crafted.

See for yourself at http://www.lovestruck.com/london/ - provided, that is, that you are the sort of fun loving genuine person which this organisation appears to cater for. Or, even more challenging, in the words of the New York page, 'someone amazing, fantastic, awesome, beautiful'.

PS 1: a rather complicated possibility now occurs to me. That the error is deliberate, intended to catch the eye of the sort of discerning, knowledgeable Londoners whom they want to sign up. All publicity is good publicity sort of thing.

PS 2: another irritating advertisement is the pop up from Oracle I seem to get two or three times a day asking me if it is OK to update the Java code on the PC, blanking the screen before it pops up to make sure that I attend to the thing. Eventually I dare say that I will find out how to deal with this, but the black spot on the Oracle file will stay there.

Ascolan cucumber

We recently acquired a book of the Annunciation, a chuck out from Surrey Libraries. Rather an odd little book from Phaidon, approximately 6.5 inches high, 5.5 inches wide and 1 inch thick. The book opens with St. Luke 1:26-38, taken from some modern rather than the authorised version, then plunges straight into reproducing rather more than 100 annunciations, in roughly chronological order. Most of the reproductions full page right with a little light commentary on the left. A few notes and an index at the back and that is it: no preface, introductory essay or anything like that. The other odd feature being the religious adherence to lower case throughout. No-one and nothing is accorded the accolade of an initial capital, an affectation which I last came across in a quality consultant from the norwegian truth (http://www.dnv.co.uk/). On further thought the book and the consultant were roughly contemporary at the start of the new millennium, so perhaps it was a new fad for that new millennium.

Prompted by all this for a further visit to the ascolan cucumber, last noticed on 14th February. Ascola being an old town, north east of Rome, quite near the north eastern coast of Italy.

Off to a good start (Boris's recent blast at the contractor is maybe having some effect) and collected my Bullingdon from Waterloo 3: across Waterloo Bridge, around the Aldwych for fun, up the Strand, around Trafalgar Square, past the Cockspur Street stand (which had vacancies for once in a while) and onto the stand at St. Martin's Street, hard by the back door to the National Gallery, clocking just 15 minutes for the journey.

Mixed starters in the form of a triumph from Rubens, a golden calf from Poussin and a young lady from Vermeer. The first struck me with its fanciful exuberance and more particularly with the expressions of the elephants. One wondered how many elephants Rubens had seen in the flesh. Did he have a model? The second reminded me how careless I am about the overt content of paintings, with it being a long time before I worked out that the central white figure was Aaron, the brother of Moses, fallen back to the old gods. Working out which didn't seem to make much difference as I was much more interested in its sharing material with 'The Dance to the Music of Time' on the other side of town. The third started by seeming quite dim in a dimly lit room, but it rapidly grew on one as the brain adjusted to the picture.

Onto the main course, Crivelli's Annunciation, an annunciation which is more a townscape and does, indeed, include a cucumber resting on the masonry ledge framing the bottom of the picture, along with an apple. A picture which I am coming to like a great deal. The sort of thing one might sensibly get reproduced in China and hung in one's house - if one's house was a little larger than ours. Poorly served by Phaidon who got the colours very wrong and I don't think that they have the excuse that the picture has been cleaned since they took their photograph. Reminded by the pot plant of a recently seen painting by Holman Hunt about a pot of basil. Was it a crib or a coincidence?

To come down from the clouds, down to Gordon's in Villiers Street (http://www.gordonswinebar.com), a place I have not visited for a while. Pity about all the food, but the place still has some of its old atmosphere - which must have been pretty fetid in the days when one could smoke there, down in the cellars. A convenience was the availability of a range of half bottles, handy for occasional social drinking.

PS: back home I take a look at the National gallery site (http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/). Excellent place where one can browse good quality images of nearly all the pictures at one's leisure. I imagine that it would also be an excellent study aid: one can imagine, for example, an art teacher projecting things onto a screen from his PC while he harangues his class. Hopefully he would not sound as tiresome as some of the lecturers/guides one comes across at the Gallery itself. Meanwhile, I was able to learn that the bird sitting above the rug top right was probably a pigeon (see illustration above), my eyes not being good enough to work this out from the real thing. I had wondered whether it was a hawk.

DIY fest episode 2

The B&Q mentioned on 22nd April was actually the Grand High Temple of DIY at New Malden. Huge great place, roughly square in plan and sufficiently huge that B&Q are planning to disguise one side of it by building flats up it and to disguise another side of it by building offices up it. It also runs to a café where an impressive model of this impressive development is on display and from where you have a panoramic view of the interior of the temple.

Our mission was shelving, but as an extra we hoped to replace the seat of our downstairs toilet which was both insecure and the wrong size - this despite Professor Google assuring us that seats were mostly of a one size fits all variety.

However, in our innocence, we light upon something called 'popular toilet seat white - soft close pure', a snip at £30 or so from an outfit called Cedo. Get the thing home and it is approximately the right size. Start to assemble it to find that the spindle of the hinge is not round, rather it is as illustrated, the lack of roundness all being due to the soft close business. Which means that you can't just shove the spindle into the waiting hole, you have to get the hole the right way round and the upshot was that I burst one of the holes to the accompaniment of much cursing. As a stop gap I assemble a seat with one half new and one half old, with the two halves not quite fitting together. The good news is that the fixings are very solid and easy to tighten up with the natty little spanner supplied.

At this point we think we will check Cedo out but find them elusive. The outfit at http://www.cedo.com/ doesn't seem to be right and that at http://www.cedointercultural.org/ (the intercultural CEnter for the study of Deserts and Oceans) is certainly not right. So we give up on that one, but investigating upstairs we decide that maybe Bemis would be a better bet and they do have the respectability conferred by a web site - http://www.bemismfg.com/. Off to the much more modestly sized Homebase up the road and get one of those. No soft close and no easy remove for cleaning, having decided that trying to pack such functionality into a pair of small, cheap, plastic hinges is not a good plan: something simple might be a better bet. Plus I thought that soft close was a pain, like those irritating doors you get in public places which are on fancy springs which you cannot just shut; you have to wait and let the spring do its thing in its own good time.

Get the thing home and it is exactly the right size. Fix it using the nut part of the fixings from Cedo - which is better than the one from Bemis - and all is well.

And as bonus 1 we now have a selection of parts from toilet seats hanging up in the garage roof. We have a bet on on whether we will ever find a use from them. Whether we will remember that they are there when we do have a use for them. Hopefully this last day will not come for many a year. Bonus 2 is the entertaining cedo site about oceans, the ocean in question being the far north of the Gulf of California, something of an abuse of language, but an entertaining site just the same

Jigsaw 14, Series 2

A 'tower press fully interlocking jigsaw puzzle on qualitex board' sold under the name of 'Viscount', new to me from Oxfam at 99p. I think Tower Press must the name of the company operating the jigsaw press, rather than the name of the jigsaw press itself, which was my first thought.

A rather shabby puzzle, rather faded and the pieces rather worn, so one suspects that it has been around for a while. Perhaps a chuck out from some deceased relative's attic, or the further recesses of some cupboard or other.

Despite the circularity, apart from a few exotic pieces around the perimeter, a regular puzzle, pretty much laid out on a rectangular grid. Most pieces of the prong-hole-prong-hole configuration. None of the prong-prong-hole-hole. A small number of prong-prong-prong-hole's paired with prong-hole-hole-hole's. A very small number of 4 prongs (small) and a very small number of 4 holes (large). Most of the time four pieces met at a vertex, although the cutting was a little sloppy so a little out quite a lot of the time.

Due to the age, the fit was a bit sloppy too, and on a number of occasions I fitted a piece to the wrong place and had to back track later. Fair amount of time spent in this way, especially at the end where I ended up with three pieces, three places and no fits.

Colour was interesting in that as individual peices the greens, especially the dark greens, were very nondescript, but once assembled the colour advertised on the box shone further through.

Sky line first, then the church tower, then the white buildings. White  mountains just below the horizon. Then rather slowly finished off the buildings, the roofs and the interplanted trees. Field at the bottom. Field middle right. This then left most of the top half of the puzzle.

And it all got a bit scrappy. The right hand hills finished first and eventually would up with a hole in the dark green and a hole in the sky. Knocked off the former first then the latter, with the issue mentioned above. A fair bit of sorting, trial and error involved during this closing chapter of the puzzle.

Took quite a long time to do this one, perhaps slowed down by the puzzle - as opposed to the puzzler - being a bit tired. But satisfying in the end.

PS: Professor Google reveals quite a lot of interest in qualitex, not least from Waddingtons, who were big into it for their puzzles. But I did not spot a company making the stuff, although I did come across http://www.qualitex.ee/, a chuck out from the demise of the USSR.

Bread & Tulips

On Tuesday off to Polesden Lacey, in an attempt to see their tulip fesitval, just about a year since the last such (see May 2nd 2012 in the other place) and just about six months since the last visit (see 11th November). Arrived to find that there had been a lot of daffodils, now more or less over, but that the tulip festival had gone awol. There were some handsome tulips, particularly around the house, but the massed ranks were missing and their beds were empty. Perusal of the festival site (http://www.dejager.co.uk/) suggests that the sponsors have pulled the plug on freebie tulips for stately home down south, in favour of dahlias up north.

On the other hand it was a very warm and balmy spring day, so we ensconced ourselves in a couple of deck chairs on the south lawn, the one sloping down towards the wooded valley, and we both promptly fell asleep for an hour or so. For long enough that I started to worry about sunburn when I woke up. Snooze followed by lunch. Main course rather full of some Paxo like quantity and the Bakewell slice not much like a Bakewell tart - but it did have far too much white icing on top. But reasonable value at £20 for 2.

Then yesterday, revolution on the bread front. BH has been cooking our pizzas on a flat baking stone for some time now, stone baking been strongly advocated in some quarters. So I thought I would try doing bread on a stone. Had to go for half quantities as an unenclosed one pound loaf would occupy a stone. The other loaf went in a pyrex baking dish, maybe a foot square and an inch and a half deep and usually used for spare rib under potato bake. The stone loaf turned out large, slightly leathery crust and very light crumb. Very good it was too, bringing to mind the superb wholemeal loaves of much the same size and shape which I used to buy in Gerrard Street, before the bakery in question became a Chinese restaurant. This loaf did one sitting for one person. The pyrex loaf was rather smaller and was not quite as good. Not at all clear to me why stone should make such a difference and why stone should be different to pyrex: the increased amount of yeast did not seem to make any difference to the rising so I don't think it was that.

The problem now being that while the stone loaf was good, the stones are quite dear and even if one had two of the things one would only be baking 2lbs of bread on stones at a time rather than 4lbs in tins, which would take one to near daily baking, which is too often even for an enthusiast of my water. Much thought clearly needed.

Will I invest in a new stone? How much will I care if it does not match the one we have? I am rather tidy minded about such things and I would certainly be much happier with a match than without. Professor Google suggests that there is a whole world of cooking stones out there, including oven to table stones for the smarter presentation of your cooked meat.

PS: the owls are back. For two nights this week we have heard owls, the first time for some while.

Gavrylyuk

We should have been off to the Wigmore Hall on Monday to hear Cedric Tiberghien do, amongst other offerings, Schubert's 'Wanderer Fantasy', but some weeks ago we were told that this was not to be and that we could have Alexander Gavrylyuk (of whom I had not previously heard either) do, amongst other things 'Pictures at an Exhibition', of which I had heard even if I knew it not at all. We persisted on the grounds that we ought to stray out of our fairly small comfort zone from time to time. We enquired of Wikipedia to find that the piece seemed to have a far bigger existence arranged for an orchestra, or at least something other than the original piano. But this time we would be hearing the piano version of something for which there were also orchestral versions rather than an orchestral version of something which started out as a piano quartet (see 12th April). Poked around on the shelf to find I had a record of an orchestral version and gave it a whirl, to decide that it would not be very helpful as preparation.

In the event, the concert was tremendous. Started out with a Mozart Rondo (K485) followed by three short pieces by Rachmaninov (Op. 32 No.12, Op. 23 No. 5 and Op. 34 No. 14). All good. And then a very stirring rendering of the pictures. The audience, including us, got well steamed up. Much enthusiasm when it came to clapping. Followed by a short encore which I was not so keen on - but I was pleasantly surprised to have found that I liked what I had expected to be a piece of show-off music, something which one gets rather a lot of at the Festival Hall and which I do not generally like.

Gavrylyuk rather an odd looking chap who reminded me very much of President Putin. See http://www.alexandergavrylyuk.com/.

Sufficiently excited after the concert to give the nearby '2 Veneti' a try, a restaurant (see http://www.2veneti.com/) we had often clocked but never tried. Very good it was too, and not as expensive as one might have thought by looking in from the outside. I had a tomatoish soup (something I do not care for from Heinz) and a sausage risotto, both good. They were generous with the bread, which was nice, even if the bread itself was not that clever. Washed down with a very decent carafe of red (which being somewhat smaller than a bottle suits better these days) and an excellent pudding wine (in my case) in lieu of coffee. A touch of humour in the form of sugar bowls which were porcelain versions of a slightly crumpled plastic cup, the sort of thing you might give yourself water in in a National Trust canteen.

Walked off lunch by an short expedition to the nearby Bell & Croyden to investigate medical tuning forks, the idea being that you set the thing off and apply the base to the part which is causing concern. If you can't feel it you are probably right to be concerned and maybe better pay a visit to the doc.. Ample supplies available but we retired without purchase to reflect. Interesting clientele.

Followed by a slightly longer expedition to Chappell's of Bond Street to see if we could get a parallel score of either the Brahms or the Mussorgsky, the whole business of musical adaptations being both intriguing and a welcome change from Christie adaptations. Marched down the lengths of New Bond Street and Old Bond Street where there were interesting passers by but otherwise drew a blank, so we caught a bus to Victoria. Home to find out that Chappell's of Bond Street actually live in Wardour Street, which had not occurred to us. We shall make it on another occasion.

PS: not pleased to find a small bug in the template which I use to display the blog. If you click on April, for example, it does not load the whole of April, just the first thirty entries or so. You can get the balance by clicking on the 'older posts' at the bottom, but that is not quite the same. You are not getting the entire calendar month on a single page.