John Musgrave Heritage Trail

On Monday we thought about going to Berry Pomeroy to revisit the castle there, with the first visit having been noticed at reference 1, but settled instead for a visit to the John Musgrave Heritage Trail, part of which runs from Totnes to Marldon, taking in the river below Berry Pomeroy. It was possible, if a little unlikely, that we would get that far.

So we left the car just outside Totnes and headed north up Bourton Lane. A once public road, or at least lane, which has now fallen into disrepair, only suitable for agricultural vehicles and two or four footed animals. In places the water coming down the hill had swept parts of the road surface away to reveal what appeared to be several campaigns of road surfacing, possibly over a couple of hundred years.

About a mile into the walk we came to what looked as if it had once been a gate, with two substantial masonry piers on either side of the track, complete with relics of iron gate hangings. And just past the gate was a sort of masonry niche, perhaps three or four feet high, fashioned in the bank on the western side of the track. The bottom of the niche was full of water and we wondered if the niche had enclosed a spring for the supply of drinking water for passing animals, of all varieties.

A bit further along and we came to a substantial cluster of caravans, old and new, strung out along a couple of hundred yards of track. Most of them appeared to be inhabited and most of them looked to have been there for some time. One of them was a smartly converted, albeit old and shabby, furniture van. Just about visible, if you click to enlarge, in the snap taken from gmaps above, around where it says Bourton Lane. Many had solar panels propped up against them, perhaps going some way to explaining the serious security measures taken at the fields of same in the area. See reference 2.

Reasonably messy and we wondered about the mix of people who lived there, given that the two of the three people we greeted did not sound traveler born and bred. And it seems likely that such a community is going to attract more than its fair share of difficult people. We also wondered about baths, not noticing any of the milk churns commonly used for watering such camps in and around Epsom.

Down the hill to the next stop, the mare and foal rescue sanctuary, quite a large complex including a large indoor riding school. We were told that lots of people buy horses for one reason or another and then abandon them in some handy field - and some of which end up here. Plus quite a lot of Dartmoor ponies. BH had been very impressed that I had managed to spirit her morning coffee out of the fields, but despite loud advertisement, we found that we could only have coffee by rooting someone out of the office, which seemed a bit mean. A failing made up by the sight of plenty of Thelwells in full fig: black hats, whips, jodhpurs, the lot.

So back to the car without refreshment, and onto the banks of the Dart for our picnic, opposite the sheds of what used, until fairly recently, to be the sheds of the Baltic Timber Company - with the heritage board including a photograph of timber being unloaded from a Russian schooner around 1900. With a rather later photograph showing a near completed wooden minesweeper.

From there there was a pleasant riverside walk of about a mile down the river, once past the sheds, out in the country. Very peaceful.

Peace somewhat disturbed on the way back to the car park by the sight of what looked very like an endoscope, as used in the better class of hospitals. The reel of black hose certainly looked very familiar - but the chaps in charge assured us that it was to do with drains rather than people - although they did admit to there being a camera on the end.

Having done orgo the previous week, a doing noticed at reference 5, we thought it proper to call in at the mother ship on the way home, the Riverford organic farm shop, selling all manner of orgo food, some of it grown more or less on the premises. Including a variety of cheese and a butchers. Not to mention the all important pearl barley needed for the day's soup - which they had, although for some reason they called it barley grain rather than pearl barley. Not as clean and plump as the stuff from Sainsbury's, but essentially the same thing. While the fine looking January King savoy came with livestock and, for once, we were moved to resort to the salted water of our childhood.

We were also able to take tea and cake, something called a raspberry bakewell, a tray bake rather than the usual cherry topped tart, rather good. Thus closing the outing.

Snaps to follow in due course. Connections in south Devon not quite the same as those in south London.

PS: back home, we had some trouble finding out who John Musgrave was, expecting him to be some local worthy, perhaps a successful merchant from the 17th century. Eventually we ran him down as a past president of the South Devon Ramblers, a past president who left the money needed to establish this fine long distance footpath.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/two-follies.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/whistley-hill-power-station.html.

Reference 3: http://www.southdevonramblers.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.mareandfoal.org/.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/orgo.html.

Group search key: jma.

Fields

Last week to the Royal Institution to hear an excellent lecture about the fundamentals of physics and the world by one David Tong, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and professor of theoretical physics. A fellow who managed his lecture without notes and a relatively small  number of well chosen visual aids. As good as the chap noticed at reference 1.

An expert on fields, a man who believes that fields are the be all and end all of everything - which gave the talk a little added spice as there are some people who believe that a field might be the be all and end all of the phenomenon of consciousness, that consciousness is something which emerges from the contortions and perturbations of some field, probably a field which we know something of already, in much the same way as Tong explained that particles emerge from the contortions and perturbations of fields, with one field for each sort of particle.

Appropriately, the evening started with what I took to be two planets, visible in the sky in the south, over the end of my road. One low and very bright, one up and to the right, not so bright with a tinge of red. I guessed Jupiter and Venus respectively, but subsequent checking on my telephone suggested Saturn for the first and Mars, the red planet, as a further candidate for the second.

Green Park was very crowded when we arrived, a combination, so a policeman told me of one lot of people leaving the winter wonderland in some park or other outside and another lot of people trying to catch trains to Wembley for some sporting event or other. However, when we got home we learned of a power cut in the West End which may also have had something to do with it. A power cut which was visible neither at Green Park tube station nor in the vicinity. The Goat was also very crowded but demonstrated what sufficient numbers of efficient staff can do, with our being served very quickly.

I think the talk started with a picture of the periodic table, one of the wonders of its time, but which Tong said was hopelessly complicated and not very satisfactory from a mathematical point of view at all. He showed us a version of the quantum table, with just four entries, which he much preferred. Observing in passing that the quantum particle terms 'up' and 'down' we were just terms, without any up or down meaning in the ordinary sense of the word.

As noted above, a field man, and he gave us a couple of neat demonstrations of invisible fields which nevertheless did stuff. One was a picture of an apparatus used by Farraday at another Friday discourse, in the very same lecture theatre, which involved pushing one solenoid inside another, without touching, inducing a current which resulted in a needle fluttering in some other part of the apparatus a few feet away. The other was the more mundane business of magnets repelling each other if you hold them the right way around. Action at a distance, mediated by fields,

One of his visuals was an animation of one of the quantum fields throbbing away in a vacuum, but not throbbing quite to the point of particles manifesting. I associated to William Latham, a sample of whose video work we had been shown, many years ago, on a visit to the IBM site at Hursley, near Winchester, with Latham, at the time, being the artist in residence and having been given lots of state of the art computing toys to play with. Digging into reference 2 might turn up something of the sort that we saw.

Fields which were very continuous, not discrete at all. The discretion of quanta being an emergent property of said fields. A mathematical property or consequence of the way that these continuous fields were organised.

He offered a one line equation which he claimed to be the explanation of everything, or at least the best explanation on offer. An equation which I think started 'ΔV =', but when asked what V was, Tong went in for a bit of arm waving and said that that was not really the point. Wikipedia offers a rather more complicated version of what I think is the same equation, described as a Legrangian, which I used to know as being something to do with minimising something. I have no idea what is being minimised here, but I did notice that the equation appeared to contain quite a lot of repetition, with some features appearing several times in slightly different clothes. The wikipedia version is illustrated above, with still more details to be found at reference 3.

Strings only got mentioned as a bit of an afterthought.

Some talk of the LHC across the water, with the big news being, it seems, that there had been no news since the discovery a couple of years ago of the Higgs boson  - which, we were reminded, manifested itself as a wobble in a statistical distribution. A wobble on a line graph: it was not as if you could actually see the thing in the ordinary way. Some people said be patient, something will turn up soon. Some people said let's build a big new collider. The Chinese were keen on this one, keen to move the centre of the particle physics universe back to somewhere near Beijing, where it belonged. While Tong belonged to a rather smaller camp which held to peering at the equation as being the way forward. There was some interesting wrinkle there, waiting to be found.

A very pleasant young lady to my right, with a Swiss-Swedish background. A young lady who reminded me of the dating opportunities waiting there to be taken up, in adult education.

Closed the evening with my first visit to the Rifleman at Epsom for what must be ten years or more. Seemed a very civilised place this Friday evening, with a proper mixture of people, but not unpleasantly crowded or unpleasantly noisy. And very convenient for the pole dancing club across the road, although, despite having, as it were, a ring side seat, I saw no action. No one in and no one out.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/john-nash.html.

Reference 2: http://latham-mutator.com/.

Reference 3: http://pdg.lbl.gov/.

Bay Horse

We have noticed the absence of pubs in Ashburton, a place which, as a country market town, should have had lots. So we were interested to learn yesterday evening, in the course of a visit to the 'Bay Horse' in North Street, that there used to be 23 in the sixties of the last century, now down to 3 or 4.

A pleasant place, with furnishings and ambience which used to be normal in pubs in country towns. Staff from up north, so regional if not local accents. We even used, many years ago, to visit one like it in the margins of outings to Dorking Halls. Rare now. Sufficiently old style that they had barely heard of wine, but carried instead an interesting collection of drinks in small bottles, such collections having been a feature of public houses in Devon for as long as I can remember. I did not think to check, but they may even have run to Babycham. I ran, for the second drink of the evening, to Famous Grouse, my usual Jameson being absent.

End of term

This being the notice of the last lunch-time concert at St. Luke's of this Michaelmas Term. And given the state of the upcoming programs, who knows when I will be back? I have rather conservative tastes in these matters and while a bit of new in the schedules is all fine and good, I like to have a bit of late 18th early 19th century, middle-of-the-road substance as well. Wigmore Hall lunch-time programs are having the same problem: maybe the common thread is the failure of central funding, although it is hard to see the connection. Or is it that the Radio 3 people think that their audience needs lots of variety? Not enough to stick to the standard repertoire?

Be all that is it may be, off to a bad start with the chosen ticket machine rejecting my card - not for the first time. No surprise that the machine says 'Southern' on the front. Luckily the next-door machine did take my card and I had enough time to catch my intended train - which then proceeded not to stop at either Earlsfield or Vauxhall, citing signal failure, although here again it was hard to see how a signal failure would give one this particular result.

No Bullingdons on the ramp at Waterloo, so I walked across to Concert Hall Approach 2 and pulled one there, to pedal over Blackfriars Bridge, where the cold wind and what seemed to be the large number of traffic lights meant that it took me about the same time as a small young lady jogger to cross the bridge. Which made me feel my years.

On to Roscoe Street, where I would have had time for a last bacon sandwich if the stand there had not been full. So back to Finsbury Leisure Centre where there was a slot. Got a ham sandwich from the nearby Tesco and consumed it while watching the five-a-side from a bench set up on a platform for the purpose. The sandwich was factory ham on factory white, with a smear of mustard - and was quite good, reminding me that it was not just bacon sandwiches which are improved by factory white. Cheap as well, at £2.30 or so. I also learned that at least some five-a-side people go in for referees; perhaps they found the rules as confusing as I did.

Concert good, with a couple of string quartets. Mozart K.589 first, Tchaikovsky Op.11 second, it being at least the second time that I have heard this last. Must be all the thing just presently, with the Dorking people having featured the complete set of them earlier in the year. See reference 3. Ehnes, the man from Manitoba, continues to please with his quiet, self-effacing manners at first violin. See reference 4. Not quite as cold in Brandon this morning as it was on that first occasion, it being just about zero (centigrade) there - although there is a winter storm pushing up from North Dakota.

Refreshment downstairs again, after which I pulled the second and last Bullingdon of the day for the trip back to Waterloo.

Lots of construction activity. Lots of concrete wagons, lots of cement tankers, including one from Hanson and one from Civil & Marine, and lots of cranes, including one of those flashy jobs with booms. See reference 1. Not fully extended on this occasion. Oddly, google, knows about Civil & Marine cement, with lots of entries in business directories, but does not offer a proper web site, not going further than suggesting that it might be mixed up with Hanson. So about the same result at that recorded at reference 5, another day, as it happens, which started with problems with Microsoft. See reference 6.

As on the northbound journey, there seemed to be lots of lights going down the cycle expressway way on the western side of Farringdon Road, but I am getting the hang of it. To the point where I look with disfavour on the cyclists who continue  to share what it left of the road with the motor traffic there, no doubt irritating this last as well.

Pleased, at Waterloo, to get the pole position at the top of the ramp. First time for a while. Illustrated above, for the record.

PS: having done the leisure centre and the square on this occasion, once lived near the park and clocked the town hall (from the bus) on the orgo outing, moved this morning to look up the connection at reference 2. Reliable people at wikipedia.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/baldwins.html. With some very impressive pictures to be found at http://www.baldwinscranehire.co.uk/gallery.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finsbury.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/heath-quartet.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/bach-not-brahms.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/clein.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/grumpy-user.html.

Twin set

We managed the first soup of the holiday within hours of our arrival down here in Ashburton, having brought most of the necessary with us.

Just needed a quick visit to Gribble's to get a couple of slices of pork - and to admire a fine bit of fore rib, cut from a South Devon. We agreed that such a cow was certainly a proper colour for a cow, a brown cow indeed.

Given the absence of full sized sauce pans - or even full size soup pans - we elected to make the soup as a twin set.

Part 1 was made with red lentils, maybe a  pint of water, half a chopped onion and a chopped clove of garlic. Bring to boil and simmer for an hour, remembering to stir from time to time towards the end of the process. Rather good, although I have to say that BH put a little salt and pepper in hers.

Reasonable showing on the dead fly front, despite these particular lentils only having been in our possession for a couple of weeks or so. See reference 1.

Part 2 was made with maybe two pints of water. Add the pork, sliced into chunks about 20 by 10 by 5 mm. Bring to the boil and simmer for half an hour. Add rather more than a pound of whites, cut into chunks of around a cubic inch. Simmer for a further 15 minutes. Add chopped mushroom stalks. Add chou pointu to taste. Bring back to the boil, add the mushroom caps (gills down) and simmer for a further 3 minutes. Very good - and I might add that having fresh pork was a great improvement on the frozen we usually use for such purposes, this last often being a bit stringy.

What little was left of part 1 was added to what was left of part 2 and reheated for a warming, winter breakfast.

PS: we ought, I suppose, have used the more conventional butcher on East Street, but he keeps more conventional hours and was shut by mid Saturday afternoon. I shall make a point of taking some of his sausages in a day or so.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=dead+flies+lentils. Never managed to get an honest answer from one of our supermarkets about this, and, to my shame, we did not manage to visit the agricultural research place at Ottawa when were there, a place where I am certain we would have found people who would have known all about the problem, with Ontario to the south being the centre of the red lentil universe.

Heritage

I was interested to read that austerity has stretched to our government bunging £7.5m at a large country house near Rotherham, a place called Wentworth Woodhouse. A place which we are assured was not the inspiration for Pemberley, whatever the BBC may have got up to. See references 1 and 2.

The Guardian sports one handsome picture of the place and that from the Daily Mail is included here, pictures which leave me wondering why we bother with these places. White elephants, monuments to the gross inequality of past times, places for which it is now very hard to find a sensible use. Far too big for any health spa or hotel which the good people of nearby Sheffield could make pay. No use now as a rest home for the steel workers and coal miners whose labours once kept it up and running.

Perhaps the Guardian ought to play devil's advocate and make the case for knocking it down and recycling the materials into something better suited to the third millenium.

Reference 1: http://www.wentworthwoodhouse.co.uk/.

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

Sir Hugh

The foyer of the town hall came with a statue of Sir Hugh Myddleton, a chap from Wales who did very well in London in the reign of James I. Mainly known as the inventor of the New River, an aqueduct built to supply fresh water to London.

Wikipedia seems to think that this statue is on top of a substantial plinth in nearby Islington Green. Gmaps confirms, so maybe there is more than one of them. Maybe the one in the town hall is a fake, a Victorian copy? Clearly something to check up on when we are next there.

The same New River that we used to live near, and which is noticed at reference 2. BH claims to have known all about it all along, but I make no such claims.

The same Myddleton who gave his name to Myddleton Road near Wood Green, which when we knew it was a nest of second hand furniture shops, from one of which we bought our fine principal bed for the princely sum of £2 and have used ever since.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/snippet-3.html.

Group search key: dcb.

Razor wire

A little up the street from the illustration to the last post. Razor wire possibly to do with inhibiting access to the studios right. Or is some outpost of the secret state? Tony's minders?

PS: more grumps. If I use the search key supplied below, I get just the first of the posts. But when when I sort by date, the second pops up. Perhaps this index anomaly will get sorted out overnight.

PPS: with the PS, this post popped up as it should. Was it just a timing thing or was something more complicated going on?

Group search key: dcb.

Orgo

In the course of one of our visits to Asburton, we came across the Riverford Organisation, taking tea and cake in their farm shop. See refrences 1 and 2.

Then last week we we had two young men trying to sign people up for organic vegetable boxes in the Epsom Market Place. We did not sign up, but we were reminded that they operate a pub, The Duke of Cambridge, in Islington, so we decided on a visit, earlier this week.

Opened the proceedings with coffee, tea and a drop of Monkey Shoulder in the wine bar above platform 1 at Waterloo, a place doing a good trade in same before the lunchtime topers turned in. A place, I might say, where I once had a surprisingly good bacon and egg sandwich. See reference 3.

No.341 bus to Islington Green, which mainly seemed to consist of restaurants and bars intended for people younger than ourselves. But there was a well stocked Oxfam shop where I nearly parted with £10 for a fat book about the geology of Pennsylvania, published by the US Geological Survey. There were lots of pictures and I think I would have had my £10's worth, but it was a bit early in the day to be picking up such a weighty book, maybe 5lbs of it. So settled for a spot of Branagh doing Wallander instead, about 8 hours of it at around £1 an hour. A change from the fare on ITV3. And when the restaurants and bars petered out, it was solid estate agent, offering houses which were expensive and flashy but which looked, from their pictures, rather cold, more like show houses than houses which were actually lived in. Plus a couple of pub-theatres just to remind us what a fashionable area it was. Which it was, at least in part; but you did not have to walk very far to find out where the affordables lived. So really a bit mixed, like lots of other London districts - say Notting Hill, Balham and Brixton.

Quick look in the handsomely rebuilt St. Mary's, which we visited when we were last in town, probably in the margins of the visit noticed at reference 4. Quick look inside the once proud town hall, one of the relics of the far off days when local government stood tall.

And so to the Duke of Cambridge, in the street illustrated, once proud to be part of the Barclay's licensed estate, a gang gobbled up by Courage at some point. Quite busy for late lunch time on a weekday, pleasant atmosphere and service. Two very cute children, around a year, just about walking. One rather into trying to take bites out of the nearest bench.

Slightly surprised to find that orgo was not the same as veggy, with the menu being quite into meat.

Starter of bread - not bad for sour dough - and roasted vegetables. Lots of parnips and carrots. Various other stuff, including a couple of sprigs of romanesco cauliflower, first spotted by us some years ago in Boston Stump, HQ of the gangmasters. And contrariwise, of the vote for Brexit,

Main course for me of pork faggot, actually a meat ball, with various trimmings. Rather good.

A meal with plenty of bread, but otherwise low on carbohydrate, with my faggot only coming with a smear of mashed potato. Washed down with an orgo sauvignon blanc from South Africa. So all very good, and we were very full at the end of it, root vegetables being quite bulky.

Unable to inspect the not very old and rather grand St. Peter's church nearby, seemingly closed for conversion into starter offices.

Entertained at the bus stop by a herd of school girls, off to Cheapside to sing carols. Their teacher, a graduate of Goldsmiths who liked to compose, was head of music at the nearby academy and seemed very happy with his lot there. Enthusiastic place, much better than when under the previous management. Happily for all concerned, our entertainment was curtailed by our being slated for different buses.

Reference 1: https://www.riverford.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/buckfast-1.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/master-builder.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/an-adventure-in-islington.html.

Group search key: dcb.

Grumpy user

I go to open a Word file on OneDrive this morning and I get the message included left. I carry on to open the file and find that two of the images therein are missing and one has been damaged. The only good news is that it appears to be clear where the damage is.

I go to google and find quite a lot of stuff about OneDrive file corruption, but most of it a couple of years old.

I find out about something called 'Open and repair' which does no good at all.

I find a suggestion that maybe I was playing around with a USB device and turned the PC off, or something of that sort. Not applicable.

I talk to the helpful people at BT, to be told that this sort of more or less random corruption is just going to happen from time to time: Word is a complicated product and you cannot expect it to be perfect. On the up side, it seems that the previously odd behaviour on this file with the 'save' command - with Word treating it as a 'save as' - was, with hindsight, early warning of a problem.

So I am left rather cross. I am a reasonably careful user of Word and the whole point of paying MS rent is for this sort of thing not to happen and for me not to have to worry that it might happen.

Triffid

Flower bud continues to forge ahead, well clear of the leaves on the left now.

Picture taken against an overcast background, with no direct sunlight. So much so, that the flash on the telephone engaged - with the rather unsatisfactory colouring which seems to come with it.

Group search key: tfa.

Stop press

Important news culled from yesterday's Guardian over breakfast.

Having interviewed an important sea ice scientist from University College London, the Guardian was able to report that because the temperature of the water of the Arctic Ocean is rather high, it will be rather difficult for sea ice to form there. Not impossible, so there will be some sea ice, but difficult.

Messiah

Having missed a couple of concerts given by the Ripieno Choir, with the last one we went to having been noticed way back at reference 1, we turned out again last Saturday for Handel's Messiah, a work I knew by repute rather than by performance. We learned that it was first performed in Dublin in aid of a prison flavoured charity, in the middle of the 18th century, perhaps 50 years before Beethoven & Co. got cracking.

A fine performance and I was taken by the stateliness of it all, the procession of orchestral sections, airs, recitatives and chorus; a pleasing contrast to the Sturm und Drang we more usually get from concerts.

The choir was supported on this occasion by the Monteverdi String Band, which included period trunpets. Or at least one such trumpet - we could not see that well as we had arrived a few minutes before the off to find the church more or less full, and we had to sit quite near the back.

The church as good as ever for this sort of thing. I wondered in passing, looking at the sculpting of the aisles (probably white plaster covered brick or concrete), whether the architect was familiar with the rather larger version at Guildford Cathedral, quite possibly built around the same time. Eyes also wandered up to the sparse timber beams which appeared to be holding the roof up, and I thought that they were quite possibly fake, being timber clad steel rather than genuine timber beams. Two more examples of the eye being pleased by the idea of the thing, the appearance, rather than the substance. Both aisles and beams can be seen, after a fashion, at reference 2.

A bonus in that I was reminded by the young lady sitting next to me about the business of bullying off in hockey, something which we had been puzzling about a few days previously, for reasons which I have now completely forgotten. Also that while she remembered about Indian mahogany being the business for sticks, carbon fibre is the business these days. More punch for your swing; young ladies can have more aggression in them than you might think, looking at them.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/venetian-echoes.html.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/ripieno.html.

Secret state

Writers for and readers of the Guardian often get excited about the increasing grip of the secret state. The fact, for example, that it, along with Microsoft and Google, is probably reading my email.

A new worry surfaced today, with the PFI contract to look after their roads and chop down their trees that Sheffield Council has signed with Amey (I think) being so secret that even the Rt. Hon. Nick Clegg, so great and so good that he provides private counsel to the Queen, as well as being MP for some part of the city in question, is not allowed to read it, let alone any of the rest of us.

I have not given the matter much thought, but so far I have not come up with any reason why this might be a good thing. I can just about see that one might want to keep some of the numbers secret, but not the body of the contract.

Nor can I see why one should let such a contract for 20 years at a time. It is not as if - although who knows what might be in the secret contract - Amey are having to invest in a new hospital or a new power station in order to fulfill it. Something which would last rather a long time.

Cognitive something else

I mentioned loss of password in the postscript to the post at reference 1, a loss which prompted a discussion about loss of passwords in general over breakfast.

In the course of which I remembered the snippet which I now share, loosely linked to the post at reference 2. The snippet being the occasional loss of my bank PIN number, when I stand in front of the hole-in-the-wall, wondering rather blankly what on earth it might be. But then, my fingers approach the key pad and the brain remembers the motor commands needed to get the fingers to tap the numbers in - after which it remembers the numbers in word form that I can bring into consciousness in the ordinary way.

Perhaps something of the sort can happen to musicians with their body, their arms and hands, remembering the phrase to be played before they can bring it to mind.

PS: second snippet. I was rather struck yesterday by the following quote, from somewhere in 'Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience': "it is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot - Francis Crick".

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/cheese-hunt.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html.

Cognitive hynotherapy

Clear shot of the cognitive hynotherapy vehicle noticed the week before at reference 1, so I now know that the bricks of the operation is probably somewhere near St. Luke's while the clicks are at reference 2.

Clicks from which one is played irritating music. And from where I learn that they also do neuro linguistic programming and the emotional freedom technique, this last a form of psychological acupressure. Clearly a very go-ahead place, with the clicks clearly leveraging all the skills in computer gaming said to live in the general area. Our very own version of silicon valley.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/more-trios.html.

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

Cheese hunt

Last Thursday off to St. Luke's again, taking in Borough Market for a cheese hunt on the way.

Good start with a two aeroplanes at Clapham Junction, spotted from sitting in the train, always a bit limiting as one gets at most half the field of view that one gets from the platform.

Bad continuation in that I got screamed at on the ramp at Waterloo. I was coming slowly down the ramp on my first Bullingdon of the day, approaching a group of people milling around. I approached them slowly, they saw me coming and drew back. I carried on to find one chap, of middle years, dressed smart casual, did not. I did not stop and nor did he. As I drew level with him he start expostulating about how he was on a pedestrian crossing, with right of way, possibly but not obviously true. I suggested that he calmed down a bit, whereupon he started screaming abuse at me, while I made my escape, thinking that further interchange would be unhelpful. I could only think that he was either a mental patient on day release or someone who had had an unpleasant encounter with a cyclist in the past - something which could easily happen in London with plenty of both cyclists and pedestrians with neither manners nor road sense.

Checked the crane noticed at reference 1 and was pleased to find that it was still yellow and had not changed back to red in the intervening week.

Dropped the Bullingdon at the Hop Exchange and made my way to one of the French cheese shops in Borough Market. No Camenbert but the young Frenchman assured me that the round wooden tub was all the thing at a tenner, and it did indeed look as if he sold a lot of them. Curiously shrink wrapped with the lid on the bottom of the tub rather than the top, presumably to show off the interesting interior, an undulating crust of cheese, cream and pale brown in colour. He assured me that it would be fine for the Saturday following if kept in the refrigerator which indeed it was, despite my bag being very smelly by the time that I got home that day. Vaguely Camenbert like, with an edible crust but more or less liquid inside rather than more or less solid. Almost a spoon job rather than a knife job, taken in our case with brown bread. Looked rather better at that time than when I snapped the left overs, later that day.

It turns out that the Longuevilles in question is not the one near Dieppe, rather the one near the Swiss border in Franche-Comté (see reference 2), from which I deduce that the cheese shop has a regional loyalty. None of your Normandy stuff for him. With Mont D'Or being a hill rising to about the height of our own Ben Nevis out the back of the village.

Second Bullingdon from the Hop Exchange to Finsbury Leisure Centre and on to the basement of St. Luke's to take a glass. To find a young man in front of me making a first class performance of buying his coffee etc. Not rude, but just taking rather a long time about it, worrying first about this and then about that.

After which Lawrence Power and his friends gave us Schubert's overture for string quartet, D.8 (written we were told when he was all of 14 years old), Beethoven's fugue for string quintet Op.137, the last thing he wrote, and Brahms' quintet, Op.115, with the solo part on this occasion taken by the viola rather than the clarinet. With the good sign that it was Brahms himself who had done the adaptation.

The Schubert was fine, if a little scary in that such a thing could be produced so young. The Beethoven was very short but would, I suspect, have improved with some preparation. The Brahms was very good, with the stand-in soloist (as it were) making much less difference to the feel of the piece than I would have thought, despite Power's telling us that it made all the difference. Almost a new composition. I also had a repeat of the experience of the day before with the five parts rather standing out by themselves, with less integration than usual. See reference 3.

Instead of bacon sandwich, on this occasion I investigated the cellar food, to find it all very foreign. A knife and fork version of the street food available across the road. Not impressed, so pedaled back to Waterloo for a cheese and tomato sandwich there. To find that instead of the usual packet cheddar (ready sliced variety), the sandwich was made with Mozzarella, despite the stall having a name with a French flavour, with some green goo added instead of chutney. I should say that it was a rather good sandwich, despite the foreign cheese, with even green goo rather good - unlike brown chutney, which I am not keen on at all. A great puzzle to me why so many people use the stuff; they can't all be smokers with no taste buds left.

PS: alarmed this morning when my usually well-known  password for TFL went missing for a second or so. A sign of things to come?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/more-trios.html.

Reference 2: http://www.ccmontdor2lacs.com/commune/les-longevilles/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/st-john.html.

St. John

Drawn to St. John's in Smith Square on Wednesday, mainly by the Dvořák piano quintet, heard many times since its first magical outing at the QEH, many years ago now. The Dumky trio, with which it was paired on that occasion does not seem to pop up nearly so often. Considering all of which, I am not sure that I believe my search of the blog which does not reveal a quintet less than near two years ago. See reference 1.

On this occasion we got Mozart's K.458 quartet and Fauré's quintet No.1 in support, with the latter being new to both of us, beyond a quick peek at YouTube.

A cold & wet evening, so well wrapped up and double umbrella, our days for cosy sheltering under the one umbrella being long gone. No.87 bus from Vauxhall, more or less to Smith Square, but fearing to be baulked at Lambeth Bridge by the northern stretch of Millbank being blocked off for some reason, we got off just short of the Security Service, thinking to pop into the Marquis on Horseferry Road.

Marquis full of after-work people so we pushed onto the crypt of St. Johns, which was very quiet. We pondered on the function of crypts, with my offering being that the main thing was to get the foundations well below ground level, on good solid ground. Getting a bit of usable space was a bonus.

The church upstairs turned out to be very quiet too, with maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty of us, not many at all for a Premier League concert transferred from QEH. We had not previously heard of Martino Tirimu (see reference1), but but both he and the Carducci Quartet are entirely respectable people. A pianist whose stage manners rather reminded me of Pollini, who sat with very straight arms and who actually used the score - while most pianists whom we see seem only to use the score as a prop. While the Carducci Quartet fielded, inter alia, a very enthusiastic & engaging cello, with her dress off the bow shoulder, giving her plenty of freedom of movement - something which I remember Rosen saying in his book was not what you got from the penguin suits which used to be expected of concert pianists. See, for example, reference 4.

The programme was in the right order, with the Mozart very good, followed by the intriguing Fauré, which, at the time, seemed to me to point forward to the Dvořák. But the timing (in years) does not work and, by the time that we got to the Dvořák, the pointers seemed to have vanished. All very odd.

On the other hand, following my remarks about my mother yesterday (see reference 3), I was very much into hearing the separate lines of music, so much so that at times they seemed to fall apart, to fail to come together into a whole. This may have been something to do with our sitting in row G, further forward than we often are.

The net result though was that the Dvořák was very good. Not the magic of the first hearing, but perhaps something more enduring.

Out to find Millbank still blocked off with plenty of blue lights there and roundabout, but we got picked up by a cheerful taxi who took us over to Vauxhall, where we were pleased to find that Epsom trains were still running at 15 minute intervals, so not much of a break, and what there was broken at Raynes Park, where I was pleased to pick up a text book for those studying for an ONC in physics, once a good qualification, but one which may no longer be current. I was also pleased to learn about valves, something about which I probably knew something many years ago. To be reminded that an electrical, red-glowing, glass valve could be used to control the flow of electricity in rather the way that a valve on an oil pipeline was used to control the flow of oil. From where I branched to the valves of shelly animals in the sea.

While OED starts with pairs of doors in ancient Rome, perhaps folding doors. Then a door in a sluice. Then the hinged shells of the shelly animals, the bivalves. Then a sort of one-way trap door in a pipe in an animal, including here the well known valves of the heart. With another column of a two column entry to go... All good stuff.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/dvorak.html.

Reference 2: http://www.martinotirimo.com/homepage.asp.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/an-assembly-for-consciousness.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/cuarteto-casals.html.

Triffid

The flower on the old triffid, now in our downstairs front room where it catches the morning sun, continues to grow, with the flower bud looking to top the plant soon, but presently partially obscured by the leaf at 1100.

Will we have a flower for Christmas, to go with the Christmas cactus nicely in bud in the back extension? A Christmas cactus which seems to manage very well with very little direct light at all. Also known as Schlumbergera truncata, possibly some poor relation of the Schlumberger I used to know as an IT contractor - good but dear. Perhaps there were botanists in the family.

For some reason, it seems to be quite hard to take a picture of the triffid. Maybe it needs to be moved away from the window for the purpose, but that seems both a bit of a bother and a bit of a cheat.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/both-old-triffid-and-new-triffid-aka.html.

Group search key: tfa.

An assembly for consciousness

I have posted before on frames and threads of consciousness - see references 1 and 2. Here I put an assembly spin on them.

I start with an illustration of a fragment of consciousness, a take in the film flavoured jargon I have introduced with descriptive experience sampling. Where frame 207 is made up of 7 threads of varying degrees of consciousness – red more conscious and black less conscious, with the waterline marked in green – with 3 unconscious threads in support. Perhaps they were conscious recently, will become conscious soon or are important for some other reason, remembering here that threads can have quite long and varied lives. Perhaps one of them is not quite conscious, carrying one of those very short, subliminal stimuli that psychologists and neurologists like to play with, especially now that they have got computers to make it easy for them, to flash the lights for them. An example which points up a worry about frame duration: the illustration allows for frames of various durations, but what about the duration of the cells within a frame?

By way of another example, my mother used to claim that she could track the four lines of a string quartet, so in her case one might have, inter alia, a thread for each of those four lines. The irritating person sitting next to her, turning the pages of his programme, might be another thread, might be popping into the edge of her consciousness from time to time. Organising lunch for the children the next day might be yet another.

Each of the cells in the column for frame 207 stands for an assembly of neurons, throbbing away, a clump which is possibly visible to the right sort of scanner. We suppose that this assembly is active in, what I think is called in the jargon, a meta-stable state. That is to say, the state persists for a short while, perhaps as long as a second, but is easily pushed off its perch to make way for the next one, in this case, frame 208. By the state persisting, we mean that the assembly of neurons and synapses is spiking in some more or less repetitive way. We suppose that the assembly is fixed for the duration, with the same population of neurons and synapses, the same synapse weights and the same anything else which goes to specify the assembly. Some models, for example, talk of synaptic delays as well as synaptic weights.

This repetitive pattern of synaptic activity and firing amounts to a cell of consciousness in the sense of the illustration above, with the proviso that one needs a reasonable number of repeats to generate the phenomenon of consciousness. Perhaps a dozen or more. Perhaps there is some frequency band within which those repeats need to lie, with the 40Hz of the gamma band of brain waves fitting well with the notion that consciousness comes in chunks of half a second or more.

We suppose that in the future we will be able to devise some test which could peer at an assembly from the outside and decide whether or not it amounted to a bit of consciousness – hopefully, sometimes, with the agreement with what the subject of that bit of consciousness thought about it. Perhaps something along the lines of the Bispectral Index contraption mentioned at reference 2. Perhaps something which would also tell us how it is that consciousness manages to emerge, to be visible, as it were, against what must be the huge amount of background clutter which is not visible. Will it turn out to be something much more complicated than just a bit of form, something loud and clear emerging from the background chaos, a log drifting about on the water foaming around it, chaos which might for these purposes be thought of as white noise? No doubt doing something important, but just noise when seen from this particular point of view?

We suppose also that the total amount of consciousness is limited in some sense, the blue square of consciousness in the illustration below, perhaps by the volume or intensity of the content, measured in some cunning statistical way, although it seems likely that people are going to vary in the amount of stuff that they can hold in consciousness. And in the case of most people, we would expect the various threads which are conscious to add up to a more or less coherent whole, perhaps adding up to some part of the complicated scene in which the person concerned found himself, while bearing in mind that some other people seem to be able to keep various quite different things on the go at once – noting in passing that these must be people for whom the act of hearing cannot activate the speech apparatus in the way it might for the rest of us, there being only one such apparatus. See references 3 and 4.

Note the dark matter, not available to consciousness, but perhaps available to a clever ECG or to a clever fMRI machine.

The whole operation needs to be enabled, to be fuelled – not exclusively in the sense of the energy needed to drive all this electrical and chemical activity – by more than ongoing sensory stimulation – which may not, after all, be what one is conscious of. We suppose that this fuel is pumped up, in some sense or other, from the upper brain stem. Knock out the upper brain stem and you knock out consciousness.

I close with a couple of comments on other material. First the dog’s life at reference 5, which does not really cut across the present story, despite appearances, rather it sets the current story in its biological setting. Also, there is more interest there in what it might be that drives the subjective experience of consciousness, rather than the information processing machinery in the background. Second, the integrated information theory (IIT, or Phi) at references 6, 7 and 8, a theory which is very much tramping around in my chosen ground. I started with the picture book at reference 8, but got a bit lost in reference 6 and even more lost in the mathematical version at reference 7. I ought to have another go, but my present take is that I am not convinced by IIT. In particular, I am not convinced by the integration bit, I do not believe that a moment of consciousness is integrated, whole and indivisible, in quite the way that Tononi and his colleagues would have it. I like my threads and go for a loose federation rather than a unification.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/describing-consciousness.html. 

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/a-day-in-life-of-brain.html. 

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-case-of-fran.html. 

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html. 

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/its-dogs-life.html.

Reference 6: Consciousness: here, there and everywhere? - Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch – 2015.

Reference 7: From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 - Masafumi Oizumi, Larissa Albantakis, Giulio Tononi – 2014.

Reference 8: PHI: a voyage from the brain to the soul - Tononi – 2012.

Pets and more

We used to have a Dagenham Motors along East Street, living in a dull but decent block, probably built in the 60's or 70's of the last century. The very place from where we bought our current car.

However, Ford have now consolidated their North Surrey footprint in a rebuilt shed at Blenheim Road (the main road through the industrial part of the Longmead Estate), leaving the way clear for pets to move into East Street, as illustrated. It all seems rather loud at the moment, but maybe I will get used to it. In the meantime, I am impressed that google streetview has already caught up with Dagenham Motors moving out, not so many weeks ago, even if it has not caught up with pets moving in.

Carrying on round the Ewell Village Clockwise, I did not count the Ewell West bike shed on this occasion, but I did find some starlings in their tree down Longmead Road. Not as many as the occasion noticed at reference 1, but enough to maintain their footing in the stand of trees concerned.

While down below there was another sighting of the shopping trolley collection van, which might go to explain why I have not found any trolleys recently. I failed to whip the telephone out fast enough to record the name on the van, so the best I can do is that while the van was decorated with various government logos, it was not actually a government van. Perhaps it was one of those working in partnership with operations - code words for the privatised versions of local government services.

And lastly, a little upstream from the starlings, I was pleased to see that the mistletoe colony in another stand of trees is still there, visible again now that most of the leaves are down. Slow growing stuff, first noticed just about four years ago at reference 2, not a patch on that noticed at reference 3. Perhaps this last does better being near a real river rather than a feeble stream. With, as it happens, the arrival of the stream in the river being just a few hundred yards from the mistletoe.

PS: are the pets people going to reinstate the pavement at the left of the illustration? Taken down by the Ford people for their vehicle exit. Sad to say, memory no longer clear on whether it had been used as such in recent years. I think not, but I would not like to put money on it.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/murmuration.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/jigsaw-3-series-2.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/nasty-bug-down-at-court.html.

More poor whites

A depressing read in yesterday's Guardian this morning, all about employment in our universities. It seems that roughly half the teaching and research staffs of our universities are on some form of temporary, not to say zero hours, contract. A complaint which appears to have infested both good and bad universities, with Oxford being one of the places at it, while Cambridge was an honourable exception. So universities have become sweat shops where half the staff are eligible for income support, while those at the top of the heap are drawing maybe £350,000 a year.

Depressing in that if the people at the top of this particular, very highly educated heap cannot see their way to behaving better, what hope is there for the rest of the world?

But perhaps it is only right and proper that the wannabee middle class types who work at universities should feel the pinch in the same way as all those working class types in the rust belts up north.

Will the disease spread from the tertiary sector to the secondary sector? One can just hear some hard pressed timetable builder in a big secondary school explaining that it is so much easier to make the timetable work if you can plug all the awkward gaps with staff from the agency down the road. And it certainly helps even more if the agencies have big pools of permanently under-employed teachers to draw from. Incentives in all the right places.

Synchronisation

For the moment, I have left synchronisation of the pictures I take on my telephone with OneDrive on; it is convenient and I have yet to see a bill for the increased line traffic thereby incurred.

Sometimes it happens quite quickly, but overnight seems to be more usual. So the synchroniser gets cracking when we have mostly gone to bed and all that fibre optic band width is sitting there more or less idle. A sensible use of resources. Which last night amounted to six snaps of the same objects, about 25Mb worth. Maybe I will remember to check when it is sixty snaps, a not unusual rate of snapping when we are on holiday - a time when we are apt to be relying on the BT fon service for computer connection, rather than the far superior service we get at home. So that might be another bottleneck.

A down side of all this is that the telephone is kept busy overnight too, servicing requests from the synchroniser, with the result that what was a fully charged battery when I went to bed is now only half charged.

PS: fon no longer seems to be the brand name of the moment with BT. The word is recognised but not majored on. See reference 1.

Reference 1: www.bt.com/btfon.

A triumph

Last Saturday, off to the 'The Red Barn', picked off the National Theatre programme because it was a (Hare) adaptation of a Simenon story - a story which I thought it best not to read beforehand, on the assumption that it was a police/murder thriller.

Good start in that, on the way to the station, I found a neatly folded five pound note in a shallow puddle by the side of the road. A note which had sufficiently dried by the time we got to the theatre - even old style fivers are pretty resilient objects - to pay for the programme from a programme seller with a very warm personality, a warmth which she was willing and able to share with all comers. Some mature ladies have this knack, rare in young women. Furthermore, a programme which turned out to be unusually informative.

But back at the station, the train we were heading for was cancelled so we tried the fast train to Victoria (Southern Trains) option, a train which did its usual fast train to Victoria trick of idling most of the way there, so not being very fast at all, and, changing at Clapham Junction, we may well have caught the train we could have waited for at Epsom.

Out at Waterloo, to notice the once grand post office illustrated, at the corner of Stamford Street (once home to both a records outpost of the Foreign Office and a heritage outpost of Sainsbury's), a post office which I have not noticed for a while. Had I ever used it? Now firmly shut and presumably mostly subsumed into the next door King's College.

Into a full Lyttleton Theatre to see the barn. A play which turned out to be a triumph of the stage designers' art, but rather thin on content otherwise, which may well have been why it was shown in under two hours without an interval. I thought that the mistress - Mona Sanders played by Elizabeth Debicki - had been miscast, with my not being able to believe that anyone would get themselves into a pickle over her. Far too tall and thin for me; suspension of disbelief failed. OK rather than good, none of the good, solid content which we had had at the Rose a few days before, noticed at reference 2. More like the canary noticed at reference 3, also at the Rose. But I should say in the play's defense, that BH was much more taken with it than I was.

Out to take tea and cake - described as a prune and almond tart but actually a vehicle for golden syrup - at the coffee shop at the corner of the theatre - and then onto ASK at Epsom, to fine dine in what used to be a National Westminster Bank and then the 'The Old Bank' public house, a house where, years ago. we used to take apéritifs before moving onto eating elsewhere. Where, also, the music was gradually turned up so as to drive out older people such as ourselves, so that the evening proper could get started.

My main course was a confection of meat ball, pasta and sauce, a basically good recipe, a confection which had good taste and texture, but which had been ruined by liberal addition of chilli powder. Not helped by it being a ready meal which had been rather badly microwaved, a process which made the pasta at the top of the pile very chewy indeed. Checking now at the ASK site, I find it described as 'Rigatoni pasta with beef meatballs, beef and pork ragu, fresh chillies, roasted red peppers and caramelised onions; topped with mozzarella and Grana Padano cheeses'. Lesson: read the description more carefully and avoid anything which volunteers information about chillies.

But a jolly meal for all that. The place was busy early Saturday evening and was turning plenty of people away. We only got in because we were two who could be stuck in a corner rather than four or more. So the Prezzo which is cranking up nearby should do well. And we did well with them at Ely. See reference 1.

PS: my copy of the original book 'La Main' has now turned up and I am stuck in. Page 38 of 191. As I expected, rather more to this short book than got through to the play. While BH is trying her luck with Assouline's biography of Simenon. I shall report further in due course.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/eline-epicures.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/inspector-slack.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/good-canary.html.

Bike shed counting

I first thought about counting cycles in the new shed at Ewell West station back at the time of reference 1 and today I actually did it, making it around 75 cycles occupying perhaps 100 slots, arranged in four rows, two on each side, as can be seen in the snap left. Mid morning on a working day.

It seems rather a lot for a cycle shed that has only been open for a few days, so perhaps there was some on-platform facility before.

PS: I noticed no fag ends behind this particular bike shed, bike sheds being the smoking den of choice when I was at school.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/bike-shed.html.

Late entries

A trio of late entries for the fungus of the year award.

This one from Wisley, omitted from the record of our last visit, otherwise collected by the group search key wsc. Rather striking, although I have no idea what it was.

And this one from Clay Hill Green, bright and early this morning. Bright and fresh is was too, so much so that all the traffic on West Hill was very well mannered, giving way to each other all over the place. 

A few days past their best, and some of the smaller members of the cluster are out of snap, but fine examples of amanita muscaria all the same - and probably still loaded with plenty of interesting hallucinogenic gear. I wonder if it has become illegal to tolerate such things in one's garden? See reference 1.

And, lastly, a clump of something from the bottom of our very own road, at the top of an alley leading to some off-road flats, on top, I should imagine of a tree stump. Still not tempted to try and find out their name. Maybe that will come if I keep finding such good specimens.

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

Group search key: wsc.

Inquiryitis

From time to time I comment on the way we all too often mismanage the inquiries made into man-made mischief, where things have gone very badly wrong as a result of mistakes made on the ground. Inquiries which generate huge amounts of heat and cost huge amounts of money and which, to my mind, offer very poor value for money. The only winners are the lawyers and the journalists.

Yesterday's Guardian included a reminder that this disease percolates down onto small as well as large mischief, with some medical people (returning volunteers from the West African ebola outbreak) being hauled over hot coals in public, for two year old offences which could charitably be described as errors of judgement, errors of judgement made at a time when the people concerned were stressed and tired. At least the people concerned who have been charged, as it were. The managers behind the scenes, those, to my mind, most responsible for the whole sorry business, seem to have escaped public hauling. Plus ça change...

I am just sorry that the whole business could not have been handled, if not in private, at least more privately. That we cannot just trust the appropriate authorities to deal with the matter appropriately - all of which is not helped by the erosion of trust in said authorities, particularly of the elected variety.

Booklife

Yesterday, I noticed a book lorry in Horton Lane and mentioned a book company in Blenheim House.

Blenheim House has now been checked with the result left, which does not quite agree with google's allegation reported at reference 1. And I have to say, that 'Books at Work' did not ring any bells.

However, google now admits to the good book living in Blenheim House and with a web site at reference 2. A god shop which appears to be alive and well. 'All of us here at The Good Book Company are passionate about the Lord Jesus, His word, His church and His gospel of grace. Motivated by this passion and our involvement in local churches, it is our privilege to create and select trustworthy, relevant and accessible resources that will encourage you and your church family to keep going, keep growing and keep sharing your faith'. Who said only in America?

If I ever see someone there I shall ask whether they are any relation of the other gang. Clearly nothing to do with the world of books, with whom I deal.

Which all goes to show that the word according to google does sometimes need to be checked out.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/wartocracy.html.

Reference 2: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/.

Knotweed

About six weeks ago, the day after my birthday as it happens, I passed a clump of Japanese knotweed in the Horton Golf Clubs hedge, along the north western side of Horton Lane, not quite opposite the Carlson Memorial; almost a notifiable disease of the botanical world. Feeling busy, I thought to go and tell someone in the club office, who was very nice about it and I followed up with a picture.

No reply and no action at the time, but this morning I find that the clump has been chopped down. Have they put anything evil on the stumps? - because it will grow right back next year if they havn't. I will watch with interest.

There is another much smaller clump a bit nearer the entrance, but I managed not to go and tell them about that one.

PS: I had felt sure that I had noticed this before, but cannot now find anything under any of the likely search terms. Memory defective again.

More trios

Back to St. Luke's for more power trios last week.

A stray wasp or a bee at Motspur Park feeding, or at least trying to feed, on the ivy flowers. Attracted, perhaps by the stink, my memory being that ivy flowers do.

Two new chimneys rising up over Battersea Power Station, leaving just one to do. It remains a mystery to me why the heritage people think that rebuilding the chimneys of a not very old power station is a good use of funds. Or is it really just a handbag, as it were, to bash the foreign property speculators with?

Not many Bullingdons on the ramp at Waterloo, but there was one for me, on which I pedaled off to the Hop Exchange for a spot of Poacher. Looked at the Double Gloucester, and went as far as tasting, but declined as it was a bit dry compared with the good stuff we once bought off a lorry in Cirencester Market. The same town where I bought my raincoat before last, that is to say the one that I am wearing now. Passed on apples.

The second Bullingdon of the day took me from the Hop Exchange to Finsbury Leisure Centre, passing a flat bed with some very large rebars, maybe two inches or more in diameter. Never seen anything so big before, at least not at close quarters. Then arrived at the Leisure Centre Stand (busy with several five-a-side football games going on over the fence) to be invited by a smartly dressed Mini to a spot of cognitive hypnotherapy. Not quite enough of the instructions visible to be sure which of the many offerings google turns up is this one: clearly therapists are sticking 'cognitive' in from of their name in the same way as many other consultants and contractors are sticking 'forensic' in front of theirs. Must be good for a few extra tenners an hour. Not sure whether the burly gentleman blocking the view was the therapist or a prospective punter and I did not have the cheek to ask.

Into St. Luke's, to find that Power was accompanied by Nicolas Altstaedt and Vilde Frang. I think that Altstaedt was a first, but we had heard Frang in October, to good effect. See reference 1. We were given a string trio by Varess, a pupil of Bartók and teacher of Kurtág, both rather better known, to me anyway, than he was. But his trio was rather good. Followed by a very jolly bit of very early Beethoven, Op.3 (with 130 or so opus numbers to come, never  mind works) a trio which was more in the form of a divertimento, the sort of thing which Mozart did a lot of, a Mozart, to whom Beethoven was still rather looking up to at the time. Ms. Frang as engaging as last time.

Warmed up with a bacon sandwich, then pulled what proved to be the last Bullingdon of the day at Roscoe Street and pedaled off in search of the clock museum, with clocks and their escapements being of present interest. I found Gresham Street OK and found what turned out to be the Guildhall, but missed my stand, so continued back to Waterloo. Probably just as well, as I found out after I had got home that the clock museum had been gobbled up by the Science Museum. Presumably the worshipful masters of the clockmakers' company needed the space for better paying corporate entertainment. Seduced by turnover, just like the people at Wisley.

Having noticed and been puzzled by a red crane at reference 2, was even more puzzled to find that it was yellow on this occasion, yellow but inactive, jib telescoped up and down, so as to speak. Was it a new crane on the old site or was I having a protracted senior moment? Perhaps I am having a long term muddle about red and yellow, rather like my long term muddle about right and left.

Much faster going west down Stamford street in the afternoon, than east in the morning.

Proceedings closed with a fine rainbow east over Worcester Park. Or, from I was sitting, the southern half of a strong rainbow with a weak echo.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/nostalgias.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/viola-times.html.

Wartocracy

For some reason, I got it into my head the other day that I would like to take a look at the memorial garden which was planted on the site of the demolished Horton Hospital water tower.

Despite the fact that I had visited the site a number of times in the past, my first attempt, on Sunday was a failure, with the only positive results being that I worked out that Horton Crescent was a good ring road around the housing estate on the site of Horton Hospital and that Manor Cresent is a bad ring road round around that on the site of Manor Hospital. To be fair, Horton Hospital was the neater of the two in the first place.

Today, I armed myself with both a satellite picture from gmaps and the maps on my telephone and eventually tracked the memorial down, illustrated above, with the plaque on the brick pier giving a little potted history of the hospital and its place in the world. Ten of out ten to whoever organised it; nothing flash, but a decent and sensible memorial. Rather more positive, four years down the line, than I was at reference 4. Plants which didn't make it have gone, plants which did have settled in and the place as a whole is neat and tidy.

Along the way I noticed a TQuality wagon pulling into Horton Retail, no doubt servicing the fish and chip shop there, the place where we had a good experience quite recently. As it happens, the last time that I noticed TQuality was outside another excellent fish and chip shop in Ilfracombe, North Devon. See references 1 and 2.

Also a middle sized caravan in a front garden, which appeared to be in residential use. I would not be too impressed if someone tried that down our road.

And then, in Ewell Village, apparently outside a charity shop, there was a much smaller lorry, more Luton size, from World of Books, people from whom I buy secondhand books, from time to time, for not much more than the postage. I get to them through Amazon. Reference 3 suggests they are big in the world of second hand books and it seems quite likely that they might do business of some sort with charity shops, perhaps as either buyer or seller, depending on circumstances, but I did not like to ask the driver who looked to be too well engrossed in his newspaper.

I then thought of the book flavoured unit/warehouse in Blenheim House, Blenheim Road, Epsom, but google suggests that this was a company called 'Books at Work', now defunct. Must check next time I am down Longmead Road, probably tomorrow.

Reference 1: http://www.tquality.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=fish+ilfracombe.

Reference 3: http://www.worldofbooks.com/.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=wartocracy.