Policemen

The day approaches when we will be able to vote for our very own Police & Crime Commissioner. A wheeze which may turn out to be better than the Police Authorities we have now, although I still hanker after a world where the primary tier of local government gets to do everything, including police, education and health. Give us local authorities with a bit of clout, some more serious money raising powers and less interference from the centre - but that is another story.

Coverage has been fairly thin here although our local free paper (no longer delivered in our road) did carry election addresses for each of the six candidates, and very short they were too. As a result of which I thought that the current chair of our current Police Authority was the best bet. The Labour man made a bit of an ass of himself by promising all sorts of things he was not going to be able to deliver, although in his favour it should be said that he was the only candidate to come out strongly against privatising the police.

I wondered about the support that the new commissioners were going to get. Were they expected to do their business out of their own front rooms? Poked around on the web a bit but wound up sending in an email enquiry to some Home Office enquiry processing unit, which to do them justice got around to replying within a few days. The only catch was that they didn't answer the question. All they said was that 'PCCs will be required to appoint a head of paid staff and a chief financial officer. The head of paid staff will be responsible for employing the administrative staff and for acting as monitoring officer for the PCC. The chief financial officer will be responsible for advising the PCC about their financial obligations and the impact of their spending decisions. The PCC may appoint other staff, but all employees will be politically restricted and appointed on merit'. Which is all very well but it does not tell me what funds the PCC will have for his office. He will need office space, meeting space, policy wonks and support staff and one might have thought that there was some central guidance on the matter. Does he sponge off the relevant local authorities? Is he brigaded with the local courts & justice people? Is he funded directly by the Home Office? Who sets his budget? Who checks his claims for petrol for driving all around the county counting policemen?

As a former bureaucrat, I think that these sort of things are important, will crucially condition the way in which PCCs do their work. So why the complete silence on the topic? Why did it not occur to the Home Office to answer the question properly? Why does it not occur to the media to ask the question?

Warning!

We have been phoned up half a dozen or more times this week by a number withheld which wants to know, in a subcontinental voice if not from a subcontinental call centre, what sort of washing machine we use. Sometimes they just call and there is silence, sometimes you get the full washing machine patter. What on earth are they up to? One would not have thought it was anything much to do with our washing machine. Is it a matter which I could trouble our shiny new PCC with? Will he have teams of people fielding emails of this sort? Chris Grayling certainly does and in my very limited experience his machine works well.

More interesting, I have been experimenting with a new sort of fish soup, at least a sort of fish soup which I have not made for a while. Slice about 2oz of pork tenderloin into 1cm cubes and fry gently in butter. Add a couple of coarsely chopped onions and fry for a bit longer. Peel some potatoes - number according to the number you plan to feed - slice them coarsely and place on top of onions. Cover with water and simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes. Slice about 12oz of skinned haddock fillet into bricks maybe 1cm by 1cm by 3cm and place on top of the simmering potatoes. Stir the fish in a bit - gently so as not to knock the potato around too much - and simmer for a further five minutes. Not bad at all but I think on the next outing I will use smoked haddock (see 11th November). And maybe I need to consult some Irish potato experts about what sort of potato would be most suitable; ideally something a little firmer and yellower than the whites I used today.

And then some news from Waitrose. The good news is that their Lincolnshire Poacher is proving a reliable hard yellow cheese. It even has rind for those who are sentimental and we are getting through a fair amount of the stuff. Read all about it at http://www.lincolnshirepoachercheese.com/.

The bad news is that their whole meal bread is no good, despite the fact that the whole meal bread I have been making with their whole meal flour is fine. The lady behind the counter explained that the stuff is nearly made in a factory somewhere and then delivered to the fairly small kitchen behind the shop for finishing. This probably accounts for the bread not being properly cooked and having a rather sticky texture. But it does not account for the flavour which I do not like at all. So, this morning, I thought I would try one of their premium breads, cooked off the premises, on this occasion a mixed wheat and rye sour dough. A plus was that it was properly cooked and the bread had a good texture. The minus was that I do not much care for the flavour of sour dough bread. But it was better than their regular whole meal nonetheless.

Jigsaw 2, series 2

An Elite 500 jigsaw, one of two, from the Oxfam shop in Ewell Village. 99p each. Made by Philmar, yet another jigsaw outfit which is very visible on the web, for example on ebay, but which does not have its own site - presumably because they are no longer up and running. Is there a niche here for chaps like me to set up sites for defunct jigsaw manufacturers as a home for all the information you could possibly need about them? Would this count as an infringement on copyright?

This particular puzzle is described an an antique love scene by Garafalo. The National Gallery has this and maybe half a dozen other paintings by him and will sell me digital images of same. A low grade student image for private study only comes in at £50 - very close to the price charged by Vic Guy for a photographic image of Worcester Cathedral (see October 19th in the other place). Perhaps market forces really are forcing prices together. But what student is going to pay £50 for an image which he or she can browse on the Internet for free? And if they live in London, maybe even go and take a peek at the real thing? Mysteriously, the chap is missing from my usually reliable Canaday, which seems odd for a chap with a presence at the National Gallery. But alive and well on Wikipedia.

The puzzle was quite difficult, although a pleasure to solve in a leisurely way, in part because it was all very brown, while the real thing has clearly been cleaned since Philmar took their image and is now much brighter in colour. Not altogether comfortable with this business of restoring pictures; not an unreasonable thing to be doing but one can never be quite sure that one is heading back to the original and one may have become quite attached to the old, faded and unrestored picture. Maybe high grade replicas would be a better way forward, leaving the original to moulder?

Edge first. Then the red and white cloths. Then the scene in the top left, or at least most of it. An interesting example of the growing interest in landscape, with allegory no longer quite enough. It took quite a long time to adjust to the quite subtle changes of colour in the landscape, changes which were more or less invisible at the start of the proceedings. But once one has tuned into the palette as it were, one can motor along quite quickly, selecting the right piece by its colour.

Then the faces, then pushed out from the faces to do the bodies, gradually filling in the interstices. Why are cupids so often as obnoxious looking as this one? Is that all part of the allegory?

This leaving the dark, top right quadrant, for which I sorted the pieces by prong configuration. And given that there was quite a high proportion of pieces which were odd in one way or another the dark quadrant was not as bad as one might have expected.

One panic along the way when I was convinced that a piece of the boundary between the top left and top right quadrants was missing, a piece which should have been conspicuous for being half white and half black. Which I failed to find until fairly near the end because I had earlier decided that the missing piece was actually part of the white cloth and the brain's search algorithm omitted this piece from its search for the boundary piece without further reference to me.

Turning to the jigthoughts of 1st November, the jigsaw did not have properties 2, 3, 4 or 5, although the pieces were in a roughly rectangular array. An exotic touch was a small number of prongs which needed to be clasped by two half holes, rather than the simpler and more usual arrangement of a prong fitting in a hole. Achieved by stretching (say) a lower piece to include half of what should have been the upper piece, including half a hole, thus preserving the count and property 1 - while breaking property 2. Properties 3, 4 and 5 were nowhere.

Virtually no jigsaw dust.

PS: a tweet in the form of a twit-twoo. Or put another way, the first evening visit of an owl to our back garden for quite a long time. We used to hear them along the stream behind the houses opposite, but haven't heard one there for a bit either. This one was undoubtedly an owl, despite its cry being closer to a twit than a twit-twoo. Perhaps it will work up to that on its next visit. Perhaps there is a sex difference here?

PPS: I actually voted for a PCC yesterday, one of the few occasions on which I have voted in recent years. A vote on this occasion because there was choice, I thought the contest was reasonably open and I did have a view on who should have the job. That is to say the chap who has been chairman of the Police Authority for a bit. At least he should know the ropes while the new arrangements settle down. Then we can see. Meanwhile, counting proceeds as I type.