Thursday 30 June 2016

Tree problem

Following the post at reference 1, we have been looking at the largest ash tree at the back of our garden, maybe thirty years old and showing signs of ill health, signs which we had been putting down to grey squirrels.

Now however, we have been alerted to ash die back and so we go to the Forestry Commission web site - which told us a great deal about it - but which did not nail the problem and in any case stopped short of telling us to cut diseased trees down. The way forward appeared to be a file a tree report.

So I get out the ladder and take Cortana up the tree and take lots of photographs, one of which is included left. After this close inspection, I do think that the tree is ill, that it is not just a case of squirrels, but I am still not sure about the illness as not all the symptoms listed for ash die back seem to be there. I have also discovered that taking photographs of bits of trees is quite difficult, with the bit that you think is interesting usually being lost in a clutter of other stuff.

Back to the Forestry Commission web site to file a report, a report which crashed at the very end of a reasonably tedious process. Do it again and the same thing happens. I am now a bit irritated and they do not have the pictures.

Next stop Epsom Council and after a much shorter time than it took me to file the report, I have spoken to someone who assures me that the Council tree man will be in touch. We await developments.

The good news is that the tree is just about small enough for me to take down myself. No hefty payments to tree surgeons indicated.

PS: the Council have now rung back and say that my tree is not important enough for them to offer me any advice. Clearly time to visit TB to take the view there.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/fraxinus-excelsior.html.

A rejoinder

Yesterday I made remarks about lawyers being paid to twist the words of the law. See reference 1.

Then, this morning, I remembered that I started it, that I was twisting the words of the law to suit my purposes, while the lawyers in question were twisting the words to suit the purposes, the intention of the Crown in formulating this law. And I cannot deny that my purpose was to subvert that intention, that intention to deny the people psychic pleasure.

With the distinction between the letter and the intent of the law having occupied big brains for a long time. My recollection is that the Continentals, being Roman in these matters (as largely in others), allow a preamble to a law which sets down the intent, while we Anglos only allow the letter.

So suppose that we are in the days before there were land registers or computers and that I need to raise some money to pay for a war to make some more glory for our already glorious army and navy. Perhaps the capture of the Rock of Gibraltar would suit the purpose.

Now I am a fair sort of chap and want to make my people pay up according to their ability to pay – unlike the arrangements which pertained in pre-revolutionary France or Russia. So I light upon the scheme of making householders pay according to the number of windows in their houses and write a short law to this effect. A good scheme because the number of windows in a house reflects the wealth of the owner in a straightforward way, can be determined by ocular inspection from the outside, cannot quickly be changed and is obvious to all right thinking people.

But then I find that the householders, despite being decent people who do not beat their dogs, their children or their wives and who attend Divine Service on Sunday, are keen to minimise their contribution to glory.

Some of them simply brick up most of their windows and reduce their liability that way. The catch being that it rather spoils the appearance of the outside of the house and makes it rather dark inside the house – this being before the days of the electric light. So most of them go in for more elaborate subterfuges.

Some swap the glass in their windows for parchment. Some replace their large rectangular windows with small round portholes. Some fix cunning shutters to the outside of their windows, so cunning that, when the shutters are shut, the windows are no longer there to the casual glance. Some arrange things so that they can take the glass out of the windows when the tax assessor is in the area. While some go the whole hog and build houses with no external windows at all, but with plenty of windows opening onto an interior light well – which they might go so far as to roof over (with glass). And they all go on to fight their assessment for tax.

Such fighting is, of course, a matter for the trained specialist, a lawyer if you will. And so we are off. The Inns of Court never looked back.

Conservatives will read this story and will observe that you will never change human nature – and that socialists are talking twaddle or worse. To which I reply that you might not be able to change nature, but you can change the way that people behave. It used to be socially acceptable to boast in bars about your ability to drive when drunk or to drive at irresponsible speeds on public roads, but that is changing. Perhaps, one day, it will not be socially acceptable to minimise your tax liability – and what will be acceptable will be to pay according to your means, without troubling lawyers to work out exactly what that was.

PS: these days, of course, there are more interesting possibilities. Taking a leaf out of the people who did the interior design for cold war bunkers, I could have no windows, but screens on the inside of walls onto which I projected a view of something outside – a view which might or might not bear some relation to what actually was outside.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/psychic-pleasures-forbidden.html.

Wednesday 29 June 2016

Smaller pockets

For those who cannot afford the services of the company featured in the previous post, how about a spot of Wodehouse? Also snapped in the vicinity of Brown's Hotel.

Given that I had thought that large numbers of Wodehouse books were sold at the time, I am surprised that run of the mill copies fetch so much. Too rich for me in any event, partly because I do not believe in paying more for a book than it is worth to me, in this case perhaps 100th of the asking price.

I was quite impressed with Cortana on this occasion, with this smap taken in the dark, through a window.

Migration

Snapped outside Brown's Hotel on the day of the accelerators.

According to their web site (reference 1) what they are up to is: 'CS Global Partners is an international, industry-leading, legal advisory firm specialising in citizenship and residence solutions. Our business was born out of a desire to deliver efficient and effective solutions for businesspersons and high net-worth individuals looking to safeguard their future and that of their families. With a global physical presence, counting ten offices across the world and an expert multi-lingual team fluent in over eleven languages, we are always available to provide tailored guidance and advice. CS Global Partners’ strong reputation for expertise and integrity has also allowed us to establish a government advisory practice, making us the consultants of choice of countries offering the world’s most sought-after citizenship and residence programmes'. I wonder whether the grumpies of Boston and Spalding would want to get rid of these kind of people too?

They might have a point if they did; one suspects that some of the customers for this outfit would not be terribly nice people. Would certainly not fit in a car of this sort.

Reference 1: http://csglobalpartners.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/accelerators.html.

Psychic pleasures forbidden

When not getting us into a pickle over Europe, Her Majesty’s Government has been having a go at peripheral drugs, that is to say recreational drugs other than alcohol, nicotine, sugar and caffeine, with the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 (Chapter 2). I have no idea what happened to chapter 1.

The idea seems to be that you have medicines which are OK. Food is OK. The aforementioned traditional drugs are OK. Then you have controlled substances like marijuana or khat which are not OK. Anything else that can be said to have a psychoactive effect is not OK, with the big change being the catch-all wording of the new act. No need to go to the bother of putting every new substance that someone comes up with on the list of controlled substances, they are all illegal by virtue of what they do.

I expect the lawyers will do well over the years out of litigation about what exactly a psychoactive effect is. I am sure that one could argue that having a stimulating or depressing effect on the central nervous system is a quite narrow test, with something that has a stimulating or depressing effect on just some small part of the central nervous system not counting at all. Burden of proof on the Crown to prove that it is some big part. And what about just turning some small part of the central nervous system off, not usually what one would call depressing? And what about this natural & organic food additive – absolutely essential for the enhancement of flavour?

Another angle might be that one does not need to use drugs at all – with my being prompted here by reference 1, a bit of work which suggests there may be better ways to deal with depression than dope. So, I could go to a clinic and get them to stick some small electrodes into various special places in my brain. Wireless connection to a gadget in my pocket, and whenever I feel like a blast, press the green button. I would be able to tune the gadget to deliver the sort of blast that I like, it all being a question of which neurons to stimulate for the purpose. The blast will, of course, for reasons of health and safety, time out after a suitable number of seconds. The only catch might be that I would not be able to get this done on the NHS, and might not be able to get it done in the UK at all. I might have to go to Gibraltar or to the British Virgin Islands where they are a bit more relaxed about such matters.

Going further, one might get an even better result by implanting some artificial neurons in the brain, and then using the electrodes to fire them up. One would need to take advice about whether the artificial neurons constituted, for the purposes of the act, a psychoactive substance. On the face of it not, but we all know how lawyers can twist things when there is a fee to be had.

And then a bit of lateral thinking. What about the machines sold by the likes of the people at reference 2. Completely non-invasive, with the catch presently being that such machines cannot deliver to places deep inside the brain. But maybe that will come. Can we look forward to another piece of legislation to ban psychoactive machines?

And to close, a leaf out of the luvvies exemption from the smoking rule, whereby one can smoke on the stage of any bona fide theatrical production or rehearsal. One could cook up all kinds of medical trials which require lots of volunteers to try out interesting new substances - with medicines being one of the exemptions from the present act.

Reference 1: Dysregulation of Prefrontal Cortex-Mediated Slow-Evolving Limbic Dynamics Drives Stress-Induced Emotional Pathology - Rainbo Hultman, Stephen D. Mague, Qiang Li, Brittany M. Katz, Nadine Michel, Lizhen Lin, Joyce Wang, Lisa K. David, Cameron Blount, Rithi Chandy, David Carlson, Kyle Ulrich, Lawrence Carin, David Dunson, Sunil Kumar, Karl Deisseroth, Scott D. Moore, Kafui Dziras – 2016. A report of work done with public money and now freely available to the public – upon payment of a modest fee to cover postage and packing.

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

Tuesday 28 June 2016

Big computer

I thought that big computers were quite small these days, but once again it seems that I am quite wrong.

According to the Kurzweil Newsletter, 'Chinese supercomputers maintained their No. 1 ranking on the 47th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, announced today (June 20). The new Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer operates at 93 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) Rmax on the LINPACK benchmark - twice as fast and three times as efficient as China’s Tianhe-2 (at 33.86 petaflop/s), now in the #2 spot' - and illustrated left - and occupying rather a lot more floor space than the water cooled ICL 1900 series machine that I started out on.

I would be pleased to know how many high specification PCs you would need to clock up a petaflop. For where, for some reason, I associate to pétomane. Perhaps there is an IT person out there with a sense of humour.

Reference 1: https://www.top500.org/.

Fraxinus excelsior

Having named the unusual ash noticed at reference 1 last summer, I accidentally tidied it up in the course of the autumn, failing to remember that it was special without its special leaves.

But I have been keeping an eye out for rebirth and I am pleased to be able to report today that it has been reborn and is now about a foot high - compared with the two to three feet it was this time last year. Now staked, which will, hopefully, stop me from tidying it up again.

In the course of checking I learn that the common ash, of which we have quite a lot of seedlings in the wild back of the garden, is native to south western asia, making it to about up half way up Norway, although now doing well in New Zealand. Struggling in North America. It is late to come into leaf and early to shed, so I guess that it does not care for the cold, despite its being deciduous.

I wonder what eco-correct action is indicated by the arrival in this country of ash dieback from Poland? They know all about it at reference 2, but the only suggestion seems to be to tell the Forestry Commission if you come across it - which seems a little heavy handed. Would the chain-saw volunteers know? Is Fraxinus excelsior f. diversifolia resistant to this particular disease? I shall, at least, now go on an inspection of the ash in the garden.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/not-exotic.html.

Reference 2: http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/.

Monday 27 June 2016

Pianos

On Saturday to Bourne Hall for the concluding item of the Epsom Arts Festival – curiously named MGSO4 for magnesium sulphate, aka Epsom salts – widely used for medical and agricultural purposes, not least purgative purposes. See reference 1. A concluding item which took the form of a concert given by a pianist born without a right hand, Nicholas McCarthy. See reference 2.

Also the last leg of his UK tour, although there are more concerts booked for the Autumn. A good place to end, with McCarthy being an Epsom boy.

The first surprise was that Bourne Hall included a full size theatre, with a bigger stage than the somewhat later Epsom Playhouse and a fair size auditorium. The theatre would also have done well as a dance hall. Perhaps when Bourne Hall was built in the early 1970’s, it was thought that one could make a go of such a place with concerts, theatricals and dances – whereas my impression is that the place must be very lightly used – which is a pity. We may have been there once before, years ago now, in the context of an antiques fair or something of that sort.

The theatre also included its own piano, a small grand, not the Yamaha which is McCarthy’s instrument of choice and looking slightly battered. But it sounded well enough.

We learned that, largely as a result of the First World War throwing up a significant number of pianists with just a left hand – more common it seems that pianists with just a right hand – that there is a considerable repertoire for such pianists, some of it adapted from two handed music, some of it written for the left hand. We had a selection of 15 short pieces, spread over about 2 hours, with McCarthy introducing most of them with a few words about where they came from and how they came to him. All fairly new, mostly 20th century, and nothing from those staples of the concert hall, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

Mostly, to my mind, pieces intended to show off what could be done with one hand. Which was impressive as far as that went, but the result, to my mind, was oddly one dimensional, although I think that, on the whole, the pieces written for just the left hand worked better than the adaptations. Perhaps the piano and its repertoire are all about two hands, and dropping down to one takes too much away – unless, perhaps, one was content to play tunes – which McCarthy was not.

I wondered whether he gave much time to playing two handed music with another pianist taking the right hand, possibly a little awkward as the two playing hands would be separated by two bodies. I then wondered about whether one would get on better with an organ with its pedal manual and where a one handed organist could manage two out of the three manuals available. One could, of course, with an electrical Yamaha, get it to play the right hand while one played the left hand – but perhaps no serious musician would want to do that, with the loss of control so implied.

But one had to admire the drive & talent of the man, strong enough to fight through his disability to the extent that he had. One could not help but think, while he talked to us, of all the things made so much harder when you only have one hand to play with (as it were). Sadly, I dare say there would have been a bigger and better niche for his talents in the days when we still had music hall and variety.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_sulfate.

Reference 2: http://nicholasmccarthy.co.uk/.

Accelerators

The day the results of the recent referendum was announced was also the day of the accelerator, that is to say a discourse about accelerators at the Royal Institution from an accelerator physicist at the University of Oxford.

Started off in the usual way with a quick perusal of the expensive art work for sale in Albemarle Street followed by a spot of white in the Goat. Lots of people outside, most of whom were not smoking, less inside - perhaps because of the noise coming from the televisions. Or perhaps the loudspeakers.

Onto the lecture where, although the lecturer was an old hand at selling science to the general public, somehow I felt right from the off that she had not pitched this one quite right, at least not quite right for me. Maybe she was thrown by the (usual) mix of school children, colleagues, older scientists, drop-ins and university of the third age types (in which category I put myself).

She had some clever toys with which to make some of her points, with the one I liked best being a tube maybe two feet long and three or four inches in diameter with a yellow beam of electrons down the middle, a beam which she was able to move about with an ordinary magnet. Nothing particularly fancy, being only a more visible version of what an old fashioned television used to do, but I had not seen such a thing before.

Her main point seemed to be that there are lots of beams of particles which need accelerating about, with ten of thousands of them in various bits of medical equipment alone: not all of them are on the scale of the collider underneath the Swiss-French border which we had first heard about getting on for two years ago. See references 1 and 2. Very useful things, despite the skepticism as to real world applications which had greeted their first arrival in the world, more than a century ago now. And all described by much the same sort of equations. So a puff for pure science - for science which in her case depended on the EC for around 10% of its funding.

There seemed to be some kind of a trade off between beams travelling very fast - which I think is power - and the number of particles in the beam - which I think is intensity. But she failed on Friday and google fails today to clarify the point.

Another angle which could do with clarification is the idea that you don't actually want the electrons. What you actually want is the second wave of particles that you get when you fire the electrons at something, perhaps a sheet or slab of some metal or other, and these are the particles which do your business.

Not to mention the whole tricky business of focussing your beam, something it seems that you could only do in one plane at a time. Failure might mean burning an expensive hole in one's beam tube.

All in all slightly depressing that I have devoted several hours to these beams and their collisions now, but my knowledge remains terribly sketchy, with most of what was taken in now having faded away again.

Half Way House at Earlsfield all present and correct though, if surprisingly quiet this Friday evening.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/hadrons.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/luvvy-spotting.html.

A dream in four parts

Woke up very early this morning to the most substantial dream I have had for a while, a dream in four parts.

Part 1 took place in some internationally flavoured office on the Continent. Vaguely European Commission.

There was some rather awkward luggage, a sort of composite suitcase made up of three modules. The core was a heavy cubical box, maybe one foot square. One of those telescopic handles to pull it along with. A flat pack was attached to the box, rather like the sort of thing that artists carry their wares around in, perhaps when they are on their way to try for a commission. A regular, if rather large suitcase, was attached to the flat pack. The soft top sort of suitcase, pale in colour.

There was also a rather odd letter, from a Dutch lady, whom I do not know but was able to visualise in her open plan office. A letter which had been hand written in very neat handwriting, then photocopied, with my having the photocopy. A letter which contained some oddly personal (not overtly sexual) material. I was quite unsure as to the meaning of the letter and I thought that perhaps several of us had received versions of the same letter.

Part 2 took place in a similar office in London. Vaguely the late lamented Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, the headquarters of which used to be housed in Riverwalk House, on the northern corner of Vauxhall Bridge, now demolished in favour of the expensive looking but rather ugly flats illustrated. Hopefully the rather good Henry Moore sculpture will survive in the triangle of public space known as Riverside Walk Gardens.

I made my way to my office through some sort of training course which was going on in the corridor to find that my office had been taken over by a bunch of young people, my having been away for a while. I had trouble finding somewhere to sit and more trouble trying to get online. Disaster.

Part 3 took place in a lift in some very high building which was partially completed and partially occupied.

I was now trying to get out of the building, along with a lot of other people and with my three modules of luggage. Eventually squeeze myself and my luggage into a rather small lift, already rather full of workmen. I find that the lift is going up, right up to the very open and incomplete upper parts of the building. I remember that I am very bad at heights and think that this is going to be a rough ride. I close my eyes and the next thing I know is that I am sitting on the floor of an empty, but much larger, lift, now in the basement. Someone has pinched the large suitcase module of my luggage, leaving me with two modules.

Part 4 took place in a version of the London Underground network.

I now need to get home on the tube and go down some steep spiral stairs into spaces and tunnels which I now think I knew from previous, although not recent, dreams. Maybe quite a few years ago now. Notwithstanding, I get lost and after a while find myself in a very dark tunnel where I can see nothing, but suddenly come out into the courtyard of some old building, complete with a tower with a pointed roof showing up against the night sky. A bit like the tower of St. James the Less in Vauxhall Bridge Road. See reference 1.

Back into the tunnel and find myself more or less on top of some tracks. I need to get across them but think that crossing the live tracks with the odd train coming past was not a good plan. Go back up the platform to find a goods contraption which can take me down, under the tracks and up onto the platform from where I can get my train. Rather a rough railway type (old style, long service British Rail) working the contraption, who manages to crunch up the flat pack module of my luggage. From which, anachronistically, I manage to retrieve my telephone, scratched but otherwise unharmed.

On which happy note I wake up.

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

Sunday 26 June 2016

Theatrical wine

The enthusiastic young bar maid at the National explained to us that it was much better value and much more convenient to buy a bottle rather than muck around with wine by the glass. That way you did before the show and the interval in one go, without needing to burn up valuable drinking time in the interval in the queue.

She had a point, but I did notice that we were the only people she managed to sell this particular line to.

The wine was undistinguished, drinkable and weak. Fair enough for £20, but BH was not impressed with plastic cups. While I thought that as plastic cups went, they were quite good, with cunningly curved lips doing quite a good imitation of glass, on the lips if not in the hand.

As it turned out, the barmaid was right. A bottle covered the occasion nicely with no need to smuggle a near empty bottle into the second half.

PS: I was surprised at the poor choice of wine at the National. Other arty venues, for example the Tate and the Globe, do much better in this department.

Group search key: dba

The unfinished journey

Being a journey which started some time ago with a DVD sold on by Surrey Libraries - in the days when they were casting out good stuff - that is to say they still cast out but that treasures are thinner on the ground. See an earlier notice at reference 1, which also offers the other side of the DVD.

The DVD being the 2011 film of the 1952 play by Terence Rattigan called 'The Deep Blue Sea'. We thought it rather good and have watched it several times.

So along to the National Theatre last week to see what they made of it.

A while since we had been in the Lyttelton Theatre, long enough that I had forgotten how big and comfortable the seat were. To the point of there being significant space between my knees and the seat in front.

Clever stage, a representation of a rooming house in section, front (left of stage) to back (right of stage). Some see through effects, first seen for a play involving a dining or living room front with a bedroom behind. Probably Ibsen or Chekov but blog search fails to uncover this particular secret.

At some point I decided the male lead, Tom Hiddleston in the film version, also led in Agatha's 'The Blue Geranium'. Google explains that this is not so, with this latter lead being Toby Stephens. One assumes that actors are not like authors, using one name for their classy roles and another for their bread & butter.

Good programme, with a good ration of background material, in addition to the usual slew of advertisements. I learned, for example, that Rattigan was the son of a diplomat who went through Oxford before becoming a playwright in the 1930's and an RAF air gunner in the 1940's - this last being a deduction from the picture supplied.

Audience not very enthusiastic, with the full house not making nearly as much noise as we had had a few days previously from a half full house at the much smaller Wigmore Hall. I also wondered about fires, with it taking a long time to get out. Perhaps there were emergency exits, not available unless there was an emergency.

Overall disappointing. Helen McCrory did well as Mrs. Collyer, but I thought most of the rest of the acting was rather pedestrian. With her lover verging on the weak - I much preferred Tom Hiddleston doing it in the film version. Husband rather better. Doctor good. The actors were not helped by the staging, which was indeed clever - but was also far too big - and most of the characters seemed to be lost on this enormous stage. Otherwise good one-liners thrown away somewhere in outer space. But the reviewers must have thought otherwise as the show now appears to be sold out until late August. In fairness, I should add that BH liked it a lot more than I did. Any maybe it would have been better a bit nearer the front than row 'T' - although one might then have had to swivel, as at the Rose's 'Romeo and Juliet'. See reference 2.

The final leg of the journey will be to take another look at the film, inter alia to ponder on what lessons the director of the play might have learned from the director of the film.

PS: it might have been disappointing, but it was much better value than Branagh across the river. Maybe half the price. See reference 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/marker.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/romeo-alpha.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/an-expensive-outing.html.

Group search key: dba.

Saturday 25 June 2016

Pride

Surprised a few minutes ago by the sound, if not the sight, of a fast jet over west Epsom. I now suspect that it was going home after putting on a show for the marching gays of London.

Clarinet

Last week to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Jerusalem Quartet with clarinet for the second half and just about a month since we had last heard them. See reference 1.

Slightly unsettling episode in the afternoon when we learned from a parcel delivery driver that he got around 50p for each package that he delivered, working his own van from a base in somewhere like Leatherhead. A 50p that was held down by regular recruitment drives to get people prepared to work for such rates. A story which left me feeling a bit guilty, to the point where I thought that maybe I should tip each driver who got as far as knocking on the door a flat rate of a fiver - a proceeding which was not going to cost £20 in an average week. Maybe have a supply of fivers to hand by the door. But despite the guilt, I have not yet laid in a supply of fivers.

We then got caught in a heavy shower on the way to Epsom Station, the first time such a thing had happened for quite a while. Luckily we were prepared to the extent of having folding umbrellas with us.

The 1719 train out of Epsom was surprisingly full, a story which continued with a busy Vauxhall and a full tube train. Out to no rain and to picnic on the chairs conveniently left outside BHS in John Prince's Street. Chairs which may not be there for that much longer.

Onto to Wigmore Hall where we had the same burly gentleman on the door as last time, but unlike last time the hall was only around half full. Which was a puzzle as it was a perfectly respectable middle of the road programme - and I had thought that the Brahms clarinet quintet would have been popular.

The Beethoven Op.18 No.6 quartet continues to grow on me. I seem to like it better every time. Bartok good and Brahms very good. This last, I think, the best that I have ever heard it. And Kam's stage manners were much more attractive than those of Collins whom I find a bit full of himself. See reference 4. Her off the shoulder dress served, inter alia, to remind me, once a tyro of the clarinet myself, what a shouldery business playing the clarinet was. Along with the scissor wielding hairdresser, another trade which must be good for the shoulders. On the other hand, I did wonder whether having a dress which was tight around the chest did not interfere with breathing, particularly important for a musician who blows. But presumably not, as her web site (at reference 2) suggests she likes this particular sort of dress.

Audience made up in enthusiasm for what it did not have in numbers, enough to earn a short encore.

Treated on the train home to the sight of a large lady in summer clothes supping on a litre tub of yoghurt. At least she had remembered to take a spoon out with her, something we have yet to remember in connection with the rather hard ice cream that they sell at the Wigmore.

Further irritated by reading about some large sculpture to do with bees at Kew Gardens, whom one suspected of falling down the visitor attraction hole, rather in the way of Wisley. Nostalgia for the days when these places were botanical gardens. And by British Gas treating us, its customers, as if we were children, with advertisements featuring things called Gaz and Leccy. See reference 3.

PS: in the course of checking up on tyro (from the Latin), I find that, amongst other meanings, a toller is also a sort of small dog used for decoying ducks.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/jerusalem.html.

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

Reference 3: https://www.smartenergygb.org/en.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/clarinet-collins.html.

Friday 24 June 2016

Woolly pully

This morning's Maigret, still from the story of the yellow dog, but from the second reading rather than the first, is chandail. A word which is absent from Littré but is present in Larousse. A word for a knitted garment which is put on by pulling it over the head, a word derived from the phrase for a garlic seller, marchand d'ail. BH thought that the pully in question might have blue and white horizontal stripes, the sort of thing one used to see on garlic sellers cycling around Kent.

I associated to our jerseys and guernseys, woollen garments from islands not so far from the Brittany scene of the yellow dog story. From whence to worsted and shoddy, both once the names for particular sorts of woollen yarn. Shoddy being the woolly equivalent of new paper mainly made from recycled old paper.

So Simenon, whom I believe to have deliberately used a fairly restrained vocabulary, suitable for his mass market, continues, contrariwise, to be a source for fascinating words.

PS: I find second readings of his stories well worth while. Once one has got the hang of things, the drift, and is no longer rushing forward to find out what happens, one can read the story for a second time, at a more leisurely pace, taking the time and trouble to look up the words that one does not know or is not sure of - rather than guessing. Guessing not being terribly reliable.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/maigret-morning.html.

Reference 2: petit Larousse illustré 1986. Librairie Larousse, 17 Rue du Montparnasse, Paris.

Thursday 23 June 2016

Council

The council may have been on the case of the polling station (see last post) but they, or whoever it is who does the fences on the Manor Park estate, are not doing so well there. That is to say the estate built on what was the site of the Manor Hospital.

It rather looks as if the fencing gang went out with lengths of four by one cut to the standard size and were stuffed when one of the lengths to be replaced was, for some reason, a few inches longer than the standard size. A mend which irritates me every time I go past it, although not to the point of doing it again myself. Perhaps I will take measurements - although that means remembering both to take a tape and to walk that way.

I might add, that this particular sort of fence lasts no time at all, say less than five years before it is looking pretty tatty. This would not matter if its only purpose were to mark the line of a new hedge, but that was not the idea here. Not sure that emailing the council would do any good at all; they probably have more important things to worry about than supervising the fencing that developers see fit to erect around new housing. Perhaps the supervisors in question have been made redundant in some round of cuts.

Rain 2

The stream down Longmead Road after the rain of overnight Wednesday-Thursday (23rd June). The night of the thunder storms. I was asleep, but I am told that there was plenty of thunder and (sheet) lightning.

High and uncontained, in that the stream had come up over its bank during the night. I did try to take a picture of the new tidemark, to the left of this snap, but for some reason those snaps came out very pale and unattractive. There is a button on the computer called enhance but I have yet to take a look. So this one instead.

Taken at about the same place as the last one, that is to say at the point down Longmead Road where the stream used to flood over the road on a reasonably regular basis, but pointing northeast rather than southeast. Don't know what they did to the stream to stop the flooding.

See reference 1 for a snap of the last big tidemark, rather nearer the road than yesterday's.

Yesterday was also the day of the referendum and our polling booth, the church hall behind Christchurch, started the day in the middle of a small pond. The council were on the case and had men there doing stuff before we got there at around 1000. They had even been to Screwfix to get some nifty brown paper matting to lay down in the back of the church so that we did not mess up the carpet while they sorted out the path that we should have been using around the outside.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/tidemark.html.

Rain 1

The stream down Longmead Road after the rain of overnight Sunday-Monday (21st June).

High but contained.

Wednesday 22 June 2016

Bread

Manor Green Road is clearly not very high up the streetview pecking order as this snap is something over four years old. Since which time the Costcutter and the butcher appear to have thrived. Furthermore, the missing right end of the building has been put up, with flats above and three shop units below. Put up, I would think, at least a couple of year ago, with the three shop units standing empty ever since.

Until last week that is, when the unit nearest the butcher became 'Chad's', apparently a coffee bar, inter alia trying for some of the building trade which uses the coffee and hot snacks machines in Costcutter. An operation so new that it does not make it to google at all.

One of the offerings from Chad's was a pile of round brown loaves of bread in plastic bags, piled up on a table just inside the door. As it happened, at the time I was passing, a loaf was convenient, so I went in. To find that this bread, which did not appear ever to have been frozen, was supplied in a half cooked state and the idea was that one gave it a blast of 15 minutes at around 190C before eating it, a little less than half what I give my rather larger loaves altogether. I take a 900g loaf described as a white loaf with rye sourdough. Close inspection of the label later revealed dried potato flakes, dried onion flakes and soya flour, in addition to the bread ingredients proper. Made by a member of the Danzar Foods Company of Telford. See reference 2, from which I learn of something called ambient shelf life: 'all of our loaves are delivered with a minimum of 14 days ambient shelf life, there is no need therefore to store our bread in a freezer. Once removed from its protective packaging and baked off the bread will stay fresh for one to two days'.

In my case I had a first go for breakfast while the baked off bread was still warm. Brown inside rather than the advertised white and a little strongly flavoured for regular use, but not bad. Followed some hours later by a gastric incident. Second go when the bread was cold and starting to taste a little heavy. Followed by a second gastric incident. From which I concluded that my reduced gastric pipework could not cope with this particular sort of sour dough bread. My money is on the sour dough being the villain of the piece, being anyway something I have generally tried to avoid, not being keen on the sour taste imparted to the bread - despite the cheerful efforts of the staff at 'Mixed Blessings', another sour dough outfit, noticed at reference 3. So here endeth what may well be my first and last encounter with Chad, actually a young woman, despite St. Chad being a former bishop in the Church of England, that is to say not a woman, at least not until very recently.

PS: following the moon conundrum earlier in the week, which turned out to be an artefact of our double glazed bedroom window (see reference 1), I notice that the eight first floor windows on the left in the snap above do not appear to be lined up, something one does not notice in real life. Is this down to the image I get on my computer screen actually being made up of a number of frames from the google film, pasted together? Presumably the pasting in question is done by a computer which does not bother with such stuff as lining up windows, drawing the line at the roof, and not doing too good a job even there.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/moon-reprised.html.

Reference 2: http://www.breaddujour.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/back-to-st-lukes.html.

Referendum

To my mind, referenda are something which should only be used in very special circumstances, special enough to override the consideration that public opinion is a very fickle thing - this being one of the very good reasons why most countries go in for representative democracy. An arrangement which lifts executive, judiciary and legislature a bit above the ruck.

So I am uncertain whether tomorrow's referendum was a good idea. But I am certain that allowing the result to be determined by a simple majority was a bad idea. Many other places set a higher bar for drastic change, say two thirds. Inter alia, this makes unseemly disputes about every last vote rather pointless, as if very nearly two thirds have voted for something, then there is a clear mandate for that something.

Thinking to see what the law says, I thought, naively, to go to reference 1, to get it from the horse's mouth. But this imposing document does not seem to say anything at all about the meaning of the result, let alone whether or not and to what extent it is binding on the otherwise sovereign House of Commons. It contains lots of stuff about the conduct of the referendum, with various twiddles for the inhabitants of Wales and Gibraltar, but contains the word 'result' just three times and the word 'results' not at all.

Presumably I should have looked somewhere else.

PS: I ought to declare an interest. I had hoped that the Scots would vote to stay in the UK and I do hope that the UK will vote to stay in the EU. So a two thirds rule would have been good for me on both matters.

Reference 1: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/36/contents/enacted.

Tuesday 21 June 2016

Cross dressing

Last week, keen to get the most out of our Tate Member's ticket before it expires, off to their 'Paint with Light' at Tate Originals.

Preliminary snack in the members' lounge upstairs good, if rather dear. And rather too much sugary goo on an otherwise excellent carrot cake. I suppose that, inter alia, the goo helps the uncut cake to keep damp and fresh tasting.

Rather a lot of stuff to take in at one pass, but I was intrigued by the interactions between painters with paint and painters with cameras. So you had pictures taken out doors used as aide-mémoires back at the studio, photographs taking the place of sketches. Sometimes the photographs were touched up in colour. Sometimes they were used as a tracing and an entire watercolour was painted on top. Back in the studio, some enterprising chaps faked up popular paintings with props from the local junk shop and passed off the resulting photographs as photographs of the original painting, much to the annoyance of the owner of that original. Others created elaborate tableaux with models (both clothed and unclothed) and props and sold the resulting photographs as art. All of this taking place in the second half of the nineteenth century and resulting in the death of pictorial art as it had been known in the west for five hundred years. Leaving us with the tripe we mostly get now.

I was pleased to be reminded that Ruskin, while no doubt rather an odd chap, was also a very good draughtsman. Perhaps I will now turn up my reproduction of his once well-known book on the subject.

I also puzzled over some wood engravings which looked very much like sketches done with pen and ink, puzzled because I had thought that the blocks from wood cuts and wood engravings all printed from the uncut surface of the block, letterpress might be the printers' term, unlike steel engravings which printed from the cuts, as it were. Wikipedia explains that during the nineteenth century hey-day of mass producing illustrations using wood engravings, the idea was to produce something that looked like a drawing, reproducing the effect of the pencil line by cutting the wood away from around the line to be printed, a rather tedious process which was claimed to be an abuse of medium by the time we got to the first half of the twentieth century when wood cut was reborn as an art form (rather than a craft) and much more use was made of blocks of black and of white lines on black, rather than the black lines on white of the preceding century. There was, of course, plenty of overlap, but there was a change of emphasis.

Out to lunch at the 'Constitution' of Churton Street, a pub once run by a former manager of TB. Lunch taking the form of macaroni cheese, nicely presented if a bit wet inside, and white wine, surrounded by lots of what used to be called working men, that is to say people who did not work in offices. They were mostly there for the football, but I was pleased that there were still proper pubs in the otherwise thoroughly gentrified Pimlico, an area which was very shabby and run down in my student days. Lots of flop houses, aka cheap hotels and rooming houses used by all kinds of shabby people of both sexes. Intrigued to learn afterwards that England, despite being thirty times the size by population, could only beat Wales by two goals to one. One would have thought that numbers ought to make more difference than that - but then I don't do football.

Out to inspect the books in the nearby Oxfam shop, exiting with three finds. One of which was a memorial picture book published by the American Jewish Committee, a book in which I have yet to find any mention of the original inhabitants of what is now Israel, never mind any concern for their health and well being. Although plenty about the disgraceful treatment and worse of Jews in much of Europe - until depressingly recently. And another of which was a 1961 copy of Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams', complete with battered dust cover. I already had a copy, perhaps from the same printing although without dust cover, but it did not seem very respectful to leave it sculling around in the basement of a charity shop for £1.99.

Last stop Rippon Cheese, where they managed an adequate Emmental, from a shrink wrapped brick of the stuff. Maybe a visit to Borough Market is indicated, a place where I think there are still cheese mongers who can cut the stuff from the wheel for you.

To Vauxhall by No.36 bus.

PS: slightly put out that google, when asked for wood cuts and wood engravings generally, while producing plenty of stuff from the twentieth century, could only only manage one work of Monica Poole and none of George Mackley, although he turns up lots when asked for either by name. In all this, I was reminded how badly their wood cuts reproduce on the computer screen. They don't seem to like reduction to pixels at all, with the result being a very pale imitation of the printed version. But, contrariwise, I was very impressed how quickly one could scan the pages of stuff produced by google, at a rate of dozens to the screen, for the work of a particular artist. Brain seems to be very good at that sort of thing. I wonder whether anyone has tried to train DeepMind to pick out pictures in this particular way?

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_engraving.

Moon reprised

Following yesterday's double moon, we were able to observe the rising moon between Worcester Park and Epsom yesterday evening at around 2300. Singular moon all the way to the back door. But viewed from the upstairs bedroom window, back on the doubles.

For these purposes my eyes were only inches from the window and the extra image could be moved around relative to the original by moving around - so I now think it must have been some reflection effect inside the double glazing. I suppose you have to have something bright like the full moon against a dark background to notice it.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/two-moons.html.

Monday 20 June 2016

Two moons

A spot of mooning last night, following talk of strawberry moons, the first time for perhaps a couple of months. See reference 1 for a notice towards the end of the last bout.

So we had the full moon rising over the houses across the road, to the southwest, at about 2200 yesterday evening, behind some trees.

And slightly to the left of the full moon proper there was an echo, a full disc but paler. Was I seeing things?

I thought the fact that I was using a monocular and that I got the effect with both eyes was an argument against. Not some failing of binocular vision. On the other hand, the pattern of twigs on the two moons looked suspiciously similar.

No alcoholic drink had been taken.

I then thought of the account in Bostridge, that is to say in the book mentioned at reference 2. There is a chapter there about the song 'Die Nebensonnen', in which he explains that seeing three suns is a well attested atmospheric phenomenon, aka parhelia. Perhaps moons can do it as well? Perhaps you can have two instead of three?

Google is awash with double moons, but the small sample of hits that I have glanced at seem to be about Mars, all very improbable. See reference 3. While calling this particular moon the strawberry moon does not seem to be relevant at all.

Clearly something else on which I need expert advice - either from a doctor or an astronomer!

PS: for once in a while, google's blogger software was behaving badly in the course of this post, creating unwanted second posts on exit from first posts. Is it all a conspiracy? Is their a cunning, cortana controlled white balloon being flown over the downs?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/pinafore.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/winterreises-old-and-new.html.

Reference 3: https://weather.com/news/news/no-double-moon-hoax-august-2015.

Trainer time again

The boots from Cotwolds did, in the event, last longer than my usual shoes - 8 months rather than the usual 6 months. Unusually, the upper heel assemblies are still OK, but the boots are a bit hot in hot weather and the heels themselves have gone through - and the boots got very wet in today's rain - which I put down to water pumping in through the holes in the heels.

So I have today ordered another pair of Moab Ventilators, at £85 pounds the same as I paid for the boots and only £5 more than I paid for the shoes 14 months ago.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/for-record-again.html.

Ants

The ants' nest mentioned in the last post.

Rather too much for Cortana, who seemed to think that the surrounding grass was the interesting part of the picture.

Group search key: hla.

Trust again

At reference 1, I was moaning about how one can no longer trust many companies - particularly financial and utility services - to treat one fairly. One has to pay attention. Today I notice a different sort of trust, trust that things placed in public places will be left alone.

So on the Horton Clockwise last week, I noticed that the art work noticed at reference 2, provided for the people of Stamford Green has been removed. The stand is still there, but the art work has been removed, taking the stand back to its basic black.

A few hundred yards further on we had a clutch of steel cupboards and a tall pole, a sort of fat lamp post with a cylindrical white casing at the top, perhaps a foot in diameter and six feet high. Taken together, no doubt an important node in the BT broadband network. My point being that BT have put what is probably thousands of pounds worth of equipment into each of these cupboards and I think it is a fair bet that I could get into any one of them in about ten minutes using my No.3 wrecking bar, the sort of thing that one used to be able to buy from Messrs. Buck & Ryan of Tottenham Court Road. From where I associate to the foreman for the demolition company in Newcastle under Lyme for which I worked briefly, many years ago now. When we needed a No.6 wrecking bar, he simply went down to the local blacksmith and got one made up. Could our own Sparrowhawks do such a thing? They were able to make the boundary bars to our new daffodil bed - see reference 3 - but a wrecking bar is a much more complicated thing - and made of tempered rather than mild steel.

But back with BT, entrusting a lot of important & expensive equipment to some lightweight steel cupboards by the side of the road. Prey to any passing vandal or to any van or worse that loses control on the adjacent roundabout. I recall that the good people of Tattenham Corner were without streaming services for 'EastEnders' and without access to Amazon for a week or so when a car crashed into what I remember as being a similar sort of box up there. Much hullabaloo on Streetlife or some such place. Is it sensible for BT to rely on the local council and the local police to look after their stuff, rather than putting it inside something rather more secure - and expensive? What do their insurers have to say about it?

Further along still, I came to the sign illustrated in the snap above. I was amused to learn that what had been a residential facility for people not deemed suitable for life in the outside world with the rest of us, has been born again as a different sort of gated community. Presumably the estate agents think that the word 'gated' adds a few percent to the price they can get for these units. Perhaps they did not allow for the careful placing of the dustbins, rather detracting from the desired image.

It is possible that this particular facility was used to house unmarried mothers in the bad old days, mothers who subsequently declined to be moved when the authorities wanted to sell Manor Hospital, of which the facility was part, off to developers. Their quite reasonable line being that, having been locked up all their adult life (these people were by then quite old), they did not propose to learn, in their twilight years, how to manage outside. I associate now to the lady up north somewhere, in her forties, who is about to have her 17th child taken into care. Perhaps more evidence of having thrown the baby away with the bathwater when we pulled the plug on the mental hospitals.

The last item of interest was an ants' nest in one of Horton Lane's western grass verges. Not as big as our daffodil bed effort, but an intricately sculptured affair, which reminded me of the drip castles we used to make when the sprogs were of sandcastle age. Just the most spectacular of the many signs of ant activity this day. Must be their time of year.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/trust.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/outreach.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=sparrowhawks.

Group search key: hla.

Sunday 19 June 2016

Maigret morning

This morning's word from Maigret's yellow dog story is meurtrière, a murderess or, adjectivally, something used for murderous purposes. Also a loophole in a castle wall.

While our loophole, as well as being to do with castles, is also something through which lawyers do murder on laws which their clients have broken. Usually something important for them to be prepared to pay for the sort of lawyer needed for - or willing to do - such work.

With the loop bit derived from an old Dutch word originally meaning to peep or peer.

So a fairly weak connection.

Saturday 18 June 2016

Tulips

One of a pair of trees at Nonsuch Park which I had been calling tulip trees, also a sort of magnolia, on account of their large tulip shaped flowers. But not to be confused with the liriodendron tulipifera, the sighting of which was confirmed at reference 1.

The park was in very fine form this Wednesday morning and one felt that the volunteers who look after the flower beds had nicely pitched their activities & planting to what they could properly manage. It all looked very well.

As was the council part of the operation, that is to say the rough grass to the south of the mansion house garden of the tulip trees. A big expanse of rough grass, left to grow, with plenty of paths cut through, maybe six feet wide, for the use of the many dog walkers. So plenty of interesting grass meadow with its attendant flowers, weeds, thistles and so forth - with plenty of access so that you could see them. Grass cutting costs modest.

There were lots of swifts and/or swallows swinging about over the grass, so perhaps the park is the base from which the swifts also noticed at reference 1 flew from.

Also pleased to see that someone is attending to tree succession, which can be a problem with parks laid out by the Victorians. Proper proportion of young trees coming on.

PS: I think the second tree of the pair can be seen creeping in at the left of the illustration.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/nature-notes.html.

Bentinck Street

The mystery crosses in the kerb stones of Bentinck Street. Not all of them, just some of them, despite their all appearing to have been laid at the same time.

Maybe the serifs on the arms of the crosses are a clue.

The nature of the buildings corresponding to the crossed stones did not seem to be a clue.

The nearby church at Hinde Street not a clue either as that was a Methodist church and the Methodists did not have any pull with the Church Commissioners.

Group search key: whb.

Hinde Street

The interior of the church at Hinde Street. Faulty columns to side gallery visible left, faulty arch above pulpit invisible top.

For those interested in the minutiae of rendering pictures onto screen, note the way that brown trim to the gallery balcony left and the pulpit back has been overdone in the small version. Click to enlarge for a more natural rendering.

Proust would have been pleased.

Group search key: whb.

Vivaldi

Monday past to the Wigmore Hall for some Vivaldi.

Dull and overcast day, with showers. But as luck would have it, I managed without getting wet.

Bullingdon'd in both directions, although I can't now be sure of the details as I have managed to get myself locked out of my account in the course of it telling me to change my password - although why this particular password needs to be very secure is beyond me.

Second complaint is that the main danger to cyclists in London seems to be other cyclists. On this day I had to do with two young lady cyclists, neither of whom had to seem to have any road sense at all. That is to say in heavy but slow moving traffic with plenty of other cyclists about. Unfortunately one of two was going the same way as I was. The traffic did seem unusually heavy and I have to confess to one offence myself, turning right off Oxford Street westbound somewhere I should not have, in the vicinity of Marylebone Lane - something I have yet to get the hang of despite having made a similar turn several times over the past few months. Got off on this occasion with nothing more serious than being shouted at by a taxi driver.

Being a few minutes early, I then turned into the Methodist Church at Hinde Street, which probably should not have been open but had only been rather carelessly locked up. Very handsome building inside, in very good decorative condition. Main space large without pillars, suggesting that the roof was held up by steel beams. No altar, rather a fine pulpit with curved flights of stairs both left and right. Two minor failings in the detailing. First, the arch over the pulpit was a little too flat. Second, the spacing of the columns holding up the galleries to the side was not quite right. with the alternation of columns and bosses not quite working out. But definitely another option for Project Proust, last noticed at reference 1.

Outside I was puzzled by the crosses worked into some of the granite kerb stones in Bentinck Street. Marking property owned by the Church Commissioners did not seem to work - so who could one ask about such a thing?

Still a few minutes early, so I took a beverage at the Coach Makers. Empty at this time of day on a Monday, but that did not stop them playing loud and ugly music. Flower arrangement, bar staff and beverage rather better. Another large space, so probably another roof held up by steel beams.

Puzzled there about the hanging of the art tiles on the outside of Debenhams. I had thought that each tile - maybe five or six inches square - was hanging on a couple of pegs and swinging free, but from the shimmering effect it was clear that their swinging on their pegs was coupled in some way; independent swinging would not do it. Was the fact that all the pegs were stuck into some resonant substrate enough to do the trick - or did the tiles need to be connected in some way? A quick google this afternoon failed to provide the answer: perhaps it is an intellectual and artistic secret - but see reference 3 for an early notice.

The Vivaldi was put on by the very engaging Gli Incogniti, led by Amandine Beyer on the violin. A string quartet with extras such as a harpsichord and a theorbo. There was talk of a positive organ - a small, portable organ pumped with one hand and played with the other according to wikipedia - but that must have been a mistake. For one number there was also a special violin, from an original design by Vivaldi, which had a sort of rasping tone, a tone which made me think of the violin casing working a bit loose and vibrating in places that it should not, but I don't think that that was how it was done. Much tuning action in the course of the proceedings and I wondered whether their tuning pre-dated equal temperament.

Very lightly introduced by the BBC producer - much better than the song & dance they go in for at St. Luke's - an introduction which went no further than to tell us that the viola player had made her first appearance at the Wigmore Hall, some years previously, selling ice creams.

The chap next to me was swatting up on his Ulysses for the Bloomsday coming up a few days later. But, unusually for a concertgoer, he declined to be drawn and just stuck his nose further into his book. Penguin edition I think.

Some interesting notes were provided, from which I learned, for example, that Vivaldi was a full time school teacher and that the original function of a symphony was to calm down the rowdy Italian opera audience before the opera proper started.

No fewer than 10 microphones, from which I think we had a bit of feedback from time to time.

In one or two places I felt that the first violin was struggling a bit, but overall a very entertaining concert. Light, cheerful and undemanding - while still including some very fine passages. I was reminded of some of the contemporary Tartini lurking on my own shelves. I shall certainly go again should occasion arise.

Lunched from Upper Crust at Waterloo. Not a bad roll, but not impressed that they are into messing about with vouchers and coupons - all a bit tiresome when one is in a queue and hoping to catch an imminent train. Half Way House calling!

PS: have now got through to the Bullingdon Control Centre and sorted my access out - and I am pleased to report that the operator who did the sorting out lived in London and was sitting in Enfield - not in Glasgow, Belfast or anywhere else even further afield.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/project-proust-1.html.

Reference 2: http://www.gliincogniti.com/en/home.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/razumovsky.html.

Group search term: whb.

Friday 17 June 2016

Civil servant with hands in the till

Interested to read this week of the sending down of a civil servant who stole a little over £1m from his department a little under ten years ago. The theft having taken a little while to come to light, and only then by the thief being shopped by his nearest & dearest.

It seems that the deed was done by the time honoured mechanism of setting up shell companies with plausible sounding names and then making payments to them for fictitious services. While my limited understanding of such matters is that one of the basic objectives of accounting procedures & processes is to stop exactly this kind of thing. So, for example, you have to get a company put onto a list of approved suppliers before you can make a payment. You can only make a payment against a duly authorised purchase order. All kinds of stuff.

No doubt somebody has been tasked with writing a report on how such a thing could come to pass in the Department of Education.

No doubt also part of the answer will be that if you cut back hard on headquarters staff, the kind of processes that were in place to stop just this sort of thing are apt to be skipped or scamped.

Don't think one can put it down to the strain of taking on the duties of the more or less abolished Local Education Authorities - people you might think would have been better placed to make payments to do with swimming - as it all happened before that got properly underway.

PS: presumably the Department has been able to get its money back as it had been invested in a flat in Wandsworth. A flat which may well have doubled in value over the years in question. Were they able to take the whole flat back? Or were they reduced to charging interest - that is to say more or less nothing - for the period in question?

Trust

A week or so ago we got a paper brochure about changed terms & conditions from Halifax. While this morning we got an electronic brochure from HSBC - complete with instructions that it was very important for us to read all this stuff.

On this occasion I actually went as far as downloading a pdf, but rapidly decided that I had better things to do.

I also thought that in the olden days one could just trust one's bank to behave properly: ordinary people with ordinary affairs did not need to spend quality time reading the contract - or even to pay some financial adviser to do it for one. There was some trust in the system. And a bit of slack at the margins to cope with special cases which the standard terms & conditions made a bit of a mess of - remembering here that there will always be such cases: terms & conditions will always suffer from their own special version of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

I suppose the government, in its wisdom, has instructed entities like banks and utilities to be honest & open and to tell their customers exactly what they are up to. But the entities are well ahead of this game, knowing full well that information overkill, while costing them a bit in posting & packaging, is very nearly effective as no information at all. A trick well known to employers in the days when we had trade unions who demanded to be kept fully in the picture.

All that said, whether banks are any more greedy now than they were in the days of pipes, bowlers, pin-stripes and fat ledgers with marbled covers is a difficult question. They are certainly more centralised, which means that perks and profits can be concentrated in the hands of the few, a bad thing in itself, never mind the amounts involved. Looking at it from the other side, there is also the appetite of the paying public for not paying; we love the free and are suckers for services which are free up-front but which recover their costs discretely, perhaps in some devious, roundabout way. So we love the excellent services provided without charge by google, while also loving to complain about their roundabout ways.

Clearly something for the Guardian, or perhaps the LSE, to get its teeth into.

PS: regarding Gödel's incompleteness theorem, I read recently that unprovable statements in the mathematical and physical sciences are really quite thick on the ground. Rather more than philosophical curiosities.

Thursday 16 June 2016

Strelitzia

A rather striking version of the coloured strelitzias one brings home from the Canary Islands, spotted in the big hot house at Wisley.

But actually, according to wikipedia, a native of South Africa, which together with Mexico seems to account for a lot of the exotics grown in this country.

Group search key: wsb

Tree circles

I have continued to fret about the name of the tree responsible for the circle noticed at reference 1, not being at all sure about western cedar, with google being keener on the western red cedar which looks rather too big.

So I was interested to come across a tree at Wisley, in the course of the visit noticed in passing at reference 2, which had somehing of the same habit. The nearby ticket said 'chamaecyparis pisifera filifera', but google wants to stick an 'aurea' on the end and comes up with something which looks rather too small.

At least Wisley is a good bit nearer than Stourhead, so I will be able to check it out properly on our next visit.

Comparing the two photographs not, in any event, the same tree. Perhaps this suckering off roots in this circular way is a more common format than I had thought.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/cedar.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/nature-notes.html.

Group search key: wsb.

Puzzle

This morning I reached 'Le Chien Jaune' in Volume II of my collected Maigret and came across the term 'dundee' for a sort of boat.

Asked Larousse and he tells me that it is an English term for a two masted boat used for fishing or in the coasting trade. Entirely consistent with the story being set in the late twenties, in Concarneau, an important fishing port in Brittany. But slightly irritating in that we have here an English word about boats which I did not know of, rather priding myself on my nautical knowledge, derived from boyhood fascination with same.

Dundee was about cakes and was a town with a seaside railway. Nothing to do with fishing boats.

Furthermore, OED does not even contain an entry for dundee. skipping direct from duncur to dunder. Even google fails to deliver. So what is Simenon on about?

Worse still, I remember there being a long, low railway bridge across the Tay at Dundee, having crossed the Tay on it one very picturesque evening, many years ago now. Wikipedia knows all about it, but google maps only shows a road bridge. But I persist, and eventually google maps reveals a very faintly drawn rail bridge, crossing north from Wormit. Much more visible in the satellite version. All present and correct in streetview. Even more present and correct in the OS map illustrated - a good example of how much better a real map can be than a google map. But I suppose I have to allow that google does better on accessibility and coverage.

So at least that puzzle is solved and I can now concentrate on the boating problem.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/larousse.html.

Reference 2: http://www.larousse.fr/.

Wednesday 15 June 2016

A feeling without a name

There are serious people about who put a lot of effort into naming, listing, arranging and classifying the various drives, feelings and emotions that they can experience, maybe a hundred or more of them, without, to my mind, bringing such lists and classifications, interesting though they are, to a satisfactory conclusion. It is not even terribly clear what counts as an emotion or what the differences are between a drive, a feeling and an emotion: there is a whole range of different things going on here, with any one category you come up with fading into some other category at the margin. What sort of things are elation, pride, nostalgia and pain? In what, if any, sense are they the same sort of things as fear or disgust? What sort of thing is it that the Japanese call ‘amae’: a feeling or a sort of behaviour? See reference 1.

But at least it seems to be fairly clear that most people the world over do anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Some people regard these as the basic emotions, combinations of which give us all the rest, rather like combining the base vectors of a vector space. Some people try to get computers to recognise these basic emotions in other people – and, indeed, animals – by looking at their faces, an enterprise kicked off by Darwin as long ago as 1872.

Something else that one can do with emotions is to qualify them with prepositional phrases. One is sad about the death of the cat. One is happy about this year’s apple harvest. Such phrases often identify the cause of the emotion. Or, less often, the location: one has a pain in one’s left foot. Or, more complicated, one is angry with Jennifer about the extravagant claim form she submitted last week. Alternatively, one is just angry, without being terribly clear why. And while might be thirsty for blood, one might just be thirsty.

This naming and qualifying make it much easier to talk about these things, to deal with them or to share them. If someone talks about being angry, I have some sense of what that someone might be feeling.

Some people do this with music, thought by many to have direct access to the emotions part of the brain. So back in 1936 or so, Kate Hevner came up with near 70 descriptors which can be associated with music; descriptors like sad, triumphant, playful and tender. But in my case, while I often (perhaps more often as I get older) get emotional about music, perhaps to the point of being close to tears, the emotion does not have a name. I am not sad or happy, I am just being emotional. I have been moved by the music, but without a label of that sort being appropriate.

I associate here to the notion that one of the functions of tears is to offload psychoactive substances which have accumulated in the brain and which need to be got rid of.

I leave aside the complication that I might judge the music to be, for example, sad, without it making me feel sad. Or that whatever I feel is more to do with my perception or knowledge of the performer or the composer than with what has been composed. Or that my feeling is more a product of my own mood at the time than of the music.

Sometimes, in the case of music, the emotion is so intense that I have to switch off – not to the extent of holding my hands over my ears, but certainly removing my attention from the music by an act of will. From where I associate to the rather theatrical sounding performances of Mme. Verdurin at the (fictional) musical soirées described by Proust. In her case, sublime music triggered neuralgia, a seriously unpleasant complaint which for present purposes might be thought of as a relative of migraine. Which performances, I am able to say with a little help from google, are all explained on and around page 218 of volume 2 of the Random House edition of 1932 of the Scott Moncrieff translation of ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ (thought by some to be superior to the original).

The word theatrical being significant because there are serious people who believe that some part, possibly a large part, of our emotional experience is the result of a computation; of computing, for example, that this or that situation is sad, and so we feel sad. Perhaps even that in this or that situation we ought to feel sad, and so we feel sad. Giving a name to the experience is important, is an important part of the experience. There are core affects, a basis if you will, grounded in physiology, in the need to maintain homeostasis (loosely, the myriad & delicate chemical balances needed to maintain mammalian life), but what we mostly feel is a confection of some of those core affects, a confection engineered by learning, language and belief. What we feel, the subjective experience, is not just a product of our brain and body at a particular time and place, it is also a product of the past, expressed in memories of one sort or another. A product also of the human liking for classifications and categories, for choice small ones that are easy to work with. Human brains seem to like to work with classifications, seem to like rules like ‘if A is a B then C’ or ‘if A is a B then do C’.

One of these core affects might be nothing more complicated than a number; positive for pleasure, negative for displeasure, or perhaps unpleasure, a term used by psychoanalysts, a mere mathematical negative of pleasure. Another might be arousal – and I have seen a diagram which maps all the commonly named emotions onto a two dimensional plot with these two quantities for axes.

Which brings me back to my point that the feeling with which I started out does not have a name. It resists classification, even placement on the pleasure/unpleasure axis, although I can go for a high value for arousal. I have not assimilated this sort of feeling to one of the common names for such things - which failure does not seem to fit with the idea that a feeling is as much a construct of the ego as a product of the id, that one only feels an emotion when one knows that one is: how can one possibly know anything much about something with no name?

I should add that I also have feelings when listening to music which can be named, when one feels that naming is appropriate. But I am concerned here with the case where it is not, which certainly happens to me quite often.

But one can certainly know something. I am reasonably sure that one can know a good deal about, for example, tigers before one gets around to giving them a name. What is a lot harder, in the absence of words, is sharing that knowledge with someone else.

One can say that one had this feeling at such and such a time at such and such a place. One might be able to tie it down, to give a fictitious example, to the entry of the second violin at bar 46 of the third movement of Op.130. One might attempt to describe the feeling to someone else who had been there and one might feel that there was some sharing, that the two of you were, to some extent at least, feeling the same thing, feeling in the same way. And if one was musical one might talk about the cunning beats, tones and intervals which precipitated the feeling. But one has still not named the feeling - although Aldous Huxley writes somewhere of such talk being useful for pick-up purposes at concerts, at least back in the 20’s of the last century.

For me, such feelings can come on quite suddenly, triggered by something like the entry of the second violin. Only triggered, note, in the context of the piece as a whole; just doing the highlights does not work nearly as well, if at all – and I imagine much the same can be said of highlights in football matches: take the highlights from the lowlights and the magic is lost. But, in the case of recorded music at least, one can do the whole thing over again, and the feelings can be repeated – with the catch that the feelings usually fade with repetition. Sometimes they get back their original strength if one puts the music aside for a while, perhaps a few months.

Thinking of the way that different cultures have words for different emotions, rather in the way that different cultures have different ways of doing colour, perhaps one could name this emotion or feeling in a useful way. It is just a question of whether enough people are interested in this particular sort of feeling to be worth giving it a name? Or is it more whether most people are simply content to assimilate it to some pre-existing category?

I dare say that any such naming would change the experience so named over time. Not that that would be a good thing or a bad thing, but there would be change.

I dare say also that one could write a similar story about any activity on which one was keen – say watching football or playing golf. Even coarse fishing. Even work. Certainly the archery mentioned at reference 3. Anything which one takes seriously enough to be emotionally engaging or arousing.

PS: I associate now to my favourite classification effort, that of occupation and with the result in the UK in the late 1960’s called CODOT. Mentioned in blog from time to time and illustrated above. Thinking as I type, what could one say about the interaction between the naming of an occupation and the occupation itself? There often would have been such interaction, if only in employment agencies, employment regulations and training arrangements. I close with the observation that the penultimate entry of volume 3 of the CODOT manual, on page 494, is that runt of the theatrical litter called a stage hand (CODOT code 991.30). Aka flyman. With the ultimate entry being for anything else not thought of in the 1,000 or so pages that had gone before. I don’t think the shrinks are ever going to match it.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Dependence. A source for amae.

Reference 2: Music, Language and the Brain - Aniruddh Patel – OUP 2008. My source for Kate Hevner.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/a-quandary.html.