Claim to fame

Our family's one and only claim to fame is celebrated this week in the 'Hunts Post', a website possibly connected to a free newspaper, probably connected with Archant Community Media Ltd. I take the liberty of quoting.

'This month marks 200 years since the death of James Toller who was known as the Eynesbury Giant.

According to St Neots Museum, which keeps details and drawings of James, he was born in Eynesbury, in 1798, to parents who were of average height. They lived in a small cottage, in Rectory Lane, and by the age of 10, James was already more than five feet tall. By the time he was 18, he was more than eight feet tall and his feet were 15 inches in length.

As the news of a young man, from Huntingdonshire, who had grown into a giant, spread across the country, James became famous and in 1815 he was exhibited in London.

His great size was noted in various publications and in one drawing he was shown next to a Dutch dwarf called Simon Papp who was only 28 inches tall. After touring the country in a show, he enlisted in the Life Guards, but his health was not good and he had to leave the army and return home to Eynesbury to live with his mother. He was given permission to walk in the rectory gardens to avoid attention from the public.

He died on February 4, 1818, when he was just 20 years of age. It was rumoured that a doctor had offered £20 (a year’s wages for an ordinary working person at that time) for James’s body, so that it could be dissected. His family feared his body might be stolen by body-snatchers once he had been buried and so he was buried inside St Mary’s Church, in St Neots, rather than in the churchyard.

“Many stories have been told about James Toller since his death about how he could walk along the streets of St Neots and Eynesbury and chat with people through their bedroom windows or pass by the public houses along the High Street and reach up and swing the signboards,” according to the museum.

A shoemaker in Eynesbury was said to have a pair of Toller’s shoes that he displayed in his shop, but these have never been found.

There is no mark or initials on the church floor to indicate the exact spot where Toller is buried in the church and his fame has diminished over the last 200 years, but his story is still told to local school children.

The museum is at the Old Court House, in New Street, and is open from Tuesday till Saturday, from 11am-4pm'.

Some kind of an uncle of the present users of the name. A visit is clearly indicated next time we are within striking distance.

Reference 1: http://www.huntspost.co.uk/home.

Reference 2: https://www.archant.co.uk/. A company which, despite appearances, was invented in 1845 in Norwich and is still headquartered there.

Float

In the margins of the Saturn of the previous post.

A float, which we come across from time to time, advertising an unusual restaurant in Berkeley Square. A restaurant which appears to be designed to appeal to the young nouveaux riches. Being neither nouveaux nor riches we have passed it by, at least so far. First noticed by us getting on for two years ago at reference 1.

There is also reference to a cycling fish, which may have been a mistake as this fish was getting charged up at the power point outside the Royal Institution, a point more usually used by flashy cars, like Porsches, than flashy fish.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/more-soprano.html.

Saturn

Last week for the first outing of the year to the Royal Institution to hear Michele Dougherty, professor of space physics at Imperial College, talk about the Cassini expedition to Saturn.

An experienced public speaker, who had a nice touch with silly questions (bearing in mind that it is quite hard to ask sensible questions at public talks of this kind), but who, I felt, tried to cram too much into her hour or so, leaving me a little dazed at the end of it.

Modestly, she only claimed leadership on an instrument for measuring magnetic fields, mounted half way along a 5m folding boom sticking out of the main vehicle. The splendidly named Jet Propulsion Laboratory had pride of place with another instrument for measuring magnetic fields, mounted at the end of the boom. Except that I think she said that theirs went wrong at some point before the end of the mission.

We learned something about the house rules for such things, which had to be made of long established technology which had flown in space before. Nothing novel. No mobile phones.

We also learned that at least one of Saturn's moons contained a lot of liquid water, below the surface. To the point where the surface as a whole was floating on the water.

We pondered about what exactly the period of rotation, the length of the day to you or me, meant when the planet in question was almost entirely gas, gas which moved around rather in the way that our own atmosphere moves around. One of the mission objectives was to measure the period for Saturn, so someone must have worked it out.

Perhaps most important, she conveyed something of the excitement and wonder of this kind of work, something of why one would want to do it.

On a lighter note, she was somewhere in the vicinity when the rocket left earth. One effect of which was a shock wave which arrived a few seconds after you saw the lift-off, rocking the ground in a rather scary way.

Started off badly by wearing the wrong clothes for a cold night. Should have had woolly jacket and woolly duffel coat. Not too bad once we had boarded at Epsom. Offered a seat by a foreign looking young man on the tube to Green Park, declined. Some elaborate cardboard box shelters for rough sleepers around Green Park, who seem to have got thicker on the ground. Refreshment beforehand in the pleasant upstairs bar of the Goat. While afterwards I learned that there are 100 steps down the main flight of steps to the platforms, rather more than I care to walk up these days. Mid sixties is about my limit. Back at Epsom, further refreshment in the Rifleman, including my first shot of Mount Gay rum for a while, probably since I was using one of their promotional umbrellas, which checking the archives this afternoon, appears to have been getting on for ten years ago. But I am pleased to be able to report that I still like the stuff. On the other hand, their website seems a lot quieter than I remember. No flesh at all. Perhaps guardians of our morals and life styles have got at them. Perhaps sales are not what they used to be.

Whiled away some of the time at the Rifleman wondering about where a hybrid car got its fuel efficiencies from. Efficiencies which must certainly exist because the eco people are very keen on them and the government drops your car tax to a pittance. The saloon bar moment advertised at reference 6.

PS: waiting for the off, which was a little late, whiled  away some of the time honing my skills at counting faces in auditoriums. I found that with the numbers involved in the block I was counting, about 75 faces, a straight serial count top to bottom (or bottom to top) was possible, but that something more structured was easier and more reliable, despite the increased demands on working memory.

Reference 1: https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/.

Reference 2: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/m.dougherty.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Dougherty.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mount+gay+rum.

Reference 5: http://www.mountgayrum.com/.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/trolley-not.html.

Overtime

Following his effort a couple of days ago, noticed at reference 1, Putin must have been putting in a bit of overtime.

Overtime which caused Cortana some trouble with the focus, only achieving acceptability in about one snap out of three.

I might also say that it was a lot colder outside than it looks here, even with duffel coat over the dressing gown. Around 0730, GMT.

PS: sorry to read that those dastards at Brussels have replaced good old GMT with some foreign invention which abbreviates to UTC. Something about Universal Time for Francophones, rather than good old British Time for Anglophones. Has the Pope been busy? Bound for Boris to be free of all of them!

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/present-from-putin.html.

Packaging and positioning

A few days ago I bought the bag of flour on the right, mistaking it for the one in the middle. They look different enough here, but in the shop, confronted with an array of different bags of flour, but mostly along the same lines as these two, it is easy enough to make the mistake, particularly if the wrong one is present but the right one is absent.

Oddly, on at least one occasion, I have wondered whether I have got it right when already half way home, and checking found that I had not. Odd that the brain should have clocked the bag and worried about it being wrong, but without bothering consciousness until rather late in the day. Answer: sneak back into Waitrose and make the swap. The prices are the same or very close so it does not seem worth going through rigmarole at the customer service desk.

On this occasion, a mistake which means that the unwanted white displaces my regular white, resulting in subtle differences to the bread dough and to the subsequent bread crumb.

A parallel complaint from BH concerns the practise at Sainsbury's of putting the flour they do not want to promote particularly on the bottom shelf, at floor level, and one is more or less reduced to lying on the floor to get one's bag of flour out from the back of said shelf.

PS: all the flour at issue is wheat flour, while the ears printed on the bottoms of the bags look very like ears of barley to me. It may well be that the Canadians grow a variety of wheat which is bearded, but the rule at my school was beard equals barley. Perhaps the creative types responsible for the design of the bags went to a different school.

More Haydn

More Haydn at the Wigmore Hall last week in the form of the first three of his Op.64 quartets given to us by the Doric Quartet. With the last Haydn being in January and noticed at reference 1, the last Doric being last November and noticed at reference 2. While today I am moved to asked Wikipedia how many there are altogether, with the answer being that it is now 68 having been whittled down from 83. I associate to the Catholic Church bearing down on the number of permitted saints. There is also a marked, but not universal, tendency to come in sixes.

Loud beneficiary of Universal Credit on the platform at Epsom. I was glad that I was not his case officer, either from a call centre or from behind a window.

The tube system and Oxford Circus was well packed, with some entertainment in the form of a young lady, Nordic or Russian blonde variety, working hard on her large black eyebrows. This following what had clearly been a lot of work on other aspects of her presentation before setting out. We wondered for what, or for what sort of, occasion.

Picnic in the Bechstein Room, where we admired the arty black and white photographs of the artists, taken over quite a long period by someone whom we eventually decided was Clive Barda of reference 3. Interesting to find that the majority of the pictures turned up by a quick peek were in full colour. Is it snobbery, age or what which makes me prefer black and white for these sort of purposes - that is to say tasteful decoration of the waiting room of (perhaps the antechamber would be more appropriate for a chamber concert) to a concert hall?

The flowers included fresias. A first.

Haydn quartets as good as we have come to expect. I would only quibble with some of the cello entries, a little too strong to my mind.

Out to some bad street music (which one could have done without, in the circumstances) and some very coarse, but otherwise unaggressive, drunks.

I pondered on the train home about whether I could devise a better rule for automatic spelling correction in OneNote than that which Microsoft have come up with for my telephone. Given that my spelling is a bit ropey, automatic correction has its points, but the vocabulary that it uses often falls short of what I need, and it sometimes seems to take it two or three goes before it decides that you do mean what you have typed. It could, I would have thought, be more context and more user sensitive. But not something worth spending many brain cycles on.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/more-haydn.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/haydn.html.

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

Fake 25

Yesterday saw my introduction to a restaurant called 'Fischer's' in Marylebone High Street, a restaurant which describes itself as an 'informal neighbourhood café and konditorei, warmly evocative of Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century'. It was very good and I shall be noticing it properly in due course.

Suffice it to say for the present that it is part of a small chain owned by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who first met whilst working at restaurants in London in the late 1970's. Nothing to do with Austria at all, rather an upmarket, retro scene. Not to be confused with reference 2 which leverages the same fancy word for cake. Not to be confused with the leader of the Labour Party, from a quite different, teetotal, branch of the family.

Reference 1: https://www.corbinandking.com/.

Reference 2: https://konditorandcook.com/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konditorei. According to which it is all down to the invention of cheap sugar from sugar beet in the 19th century. Not terribly traditional after all.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/fake-24.html. The last fake in our occasional series of notable public fakes of one sort or another.

Present from Putin

Arctic storm this morning, with winds and snow sweeping in from Russia. With yellow alerts on the television. With the results illustrated left.

For some reason, Cortana was convinced that what I was really interested was the pot middle left, a pot from Camphill in Devon, and would not be told otherwise. Tap the screen to tell her that what I was really interested in was all the snow on the patio and for a long time she paid no attention at all. Perhaps she mistook the pot for a face.

Reference 1: https://www.camphilldevon.org.uk/. Maybe they are having some real snow on the edge of Dartmoor.

Yellow flowers

Being stuck in a young peoples' pub with football one evening last week, the discussion turned to what a large multinational company might have in common with the National Health Service. A company which we estimated to be 100,000 people compared with the 500,000 (a guess) of the NHS. So smaller, but the same order of magnitude.

Both were pushing hard on costs, so lots of pressure on the shop floor (as it were) to get quarts out of pint pots. Mistakes are punished in both places, so lots of stress.

Both had a mixture involving a small number of large units and a large number of small units.

Both suffered from management fads and fashions, with disruptive new wheezes being regularly pushed out from headquarters. I believe that some Tories believe that the way to stop this is to cut headquarters' staffs to the point where they don't have the time to dream up the new wheezes.

Both suffered from a lot of regulation. Regulators peering over their shoulders telling them how things should be done.

The company had something of a class divide between the front-of-house fee-earners and the back-office support people - with these last being more or less expendable. While the NHS had class divides between management, doctors, nurses and others. Rather like the army, with its officers' ladies, sergeants' wives and other ranks' women. But do these class divides do damage in quite the same way?

We thought that the similarities ended about there.

NHS customers are more likely to be in poor shape. More apt to be a bother.

NHS buildings are more likely to be in poor shape.

NHS management structures are being badly disrupted by various privatisation and contracting out initiatives. Perhaps by fragmentation into profit centres, into silos, at the expense of the whole person approach.

A much higher proportion of NHS staff will be on or near minimum wages. A much lower proportion of them will have had fancy educations. There will be higher turnover and a higher proportion of temporary and contract staff. In aggregate, far harder to manage.

NHS is full of odd computer systems doing this and that; rather like police forces in that way. Very hard to roll all these systems into a neat and tidy, integrated service. Full of odd systems generally doing this and that; ditto.

NHS business is growing fast in that the number of expensive old people is growing fast - while funding is being held down. Bed occupancy rates, for example, are far too high.

Medicine is changing all the time, with lots of new drugs, new procedures and new machines rushing onto the scene, some of them very expensive. Change which the organisation somehow has to accommodate.

The division of labour between NHS and local authorities has not yet been sorted out, leading to plenty of tensions and inefficiencies in that area.

Health is something of a bottomless pit and we have much to learn about how best to do rationing. To which the company might say that you simply provide as much health as the market will bear, as the market will pay for - to which we might say that the US example does not provide much support for that approach.

At which point we reached the end of our ration of alcohol. Noticeable after the event how easy it is to put the NHS to rights after a drop of the right stuff. We all have views about health, just as we all have views about education!

PS: taking a quick bite at Earlsfield Station on the way out, I noticed a train which had been rebranded from Southwest Trains to Southwestern Trains and which was also sporting some large yellow flowers. Perhaps this is the big idea of the new franchise holder - an idea which did nothing for me, not caring for this fashion for putting pictures on the sides of wheeled vehicles. Just so much more visual clutter in a world which is already very busy in that way. A new franchise holder who fell even further from favour later on in the evening with services badly disrupted by a train broken down somewhere between Earlsfield and Waterloo,

Maigret and Alsace Lorraine

Maigret's wife Louise comes from Alsace, from where she always gets a Christmas drop of the local spirit, described in most of the Maigret stories as prunelle, that is to say sloe gin.

Maigret's dates are not given and the various clues in the various stories are probably inconsistent, but let us suppose that he was born in 1900, that his wife was born at the same time and that they married when they were twenty. I leave aside the complication that I have not come across any reference to what they were doing at the time of the first world war.

However, at the time I am supposing that his wife was born, Alsace had been German again for 30 years, having been first taken by the French (in the persons of Louis XIII and Louis XIV) from the Germans something more than 200 years before that. With this part of the upper Rhine valley having first been colonised by Germans from the north a thousand years or more before that. None of this is visible in any of the Maigret stories that I have read.

Curious that Simenon choses to draw a veil over what must have been a troubled business. Perhaps as a Belgian living in France he was keen to bang the French nationalist drum, just to be on the safe side.

Yew

The trunk of a substantial yew at Claremont. Much easier to snap than the tree as a whole. Last year's yew craze noticed, at least in part, at reference 1, has not completely died away.

Note the ability to sprout from the trunk. Our deciduous broadleaves can do this, but not usually so vigorously.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/yew-trees.html.

Group search key: cmb.

Mistletoe two

A general view of the clump of mistletoe detailed in the last post.

Group search key: cmb.

Mistletoe one

A fallen lump of mistletoe. Notice how the base of the mistletoe is a good deal fatter than the now dead twig to which it was attached. Does it count as a parasite or does it help the tree along enough for it to be classified as symbiosis? The tree provides the minerals and the mistletoe provides the carbohydrate?

Group search key: cmb.

Redwood

The bottom of the splendid redwood at Claremont.

Group search key: cmb.

Picnic two

Having done picnic one on Saturday (see reference 1), Sunday was another bright day and we thought to do picnic two at Polesden Lacey. But once in the car we diverted to Claremont Landscape Gardens at Esher, which we now appear to have last visited getting on for a year ago (see reference 2).

On arrival, lawless to the extent that we ignored the sign saying car park full, went in against the one way system and got a spot straight away. To be fair to the sign, the car park was more or less full, but it was lunch time and people were leaving.

Decided against tea and cake on arrival and set off anti-clockwise around the big pond, to find the dragon illustrated, a rare use of the zoom capability of the telephone, otherwise only managing to focus about one snap in two. The gardens were clearly not exempt from the National Trust attempts to provide amusements for children, no longer content with their core business from pensioners like ourselves.

Lots of chain saw action to keep the more or less feral rhododendrons under control. Lots of chain saw action on what they call the north terrace, a bit of hillside falling away down to Claremont Fan School, a school which is devoted to Christian Science and which occupies the big house which was once attached to the Landscape Gardens. Also a monument to Palladio, fashionable at the time of its building, which meant, inter alia, fake doors to maintain balance & proportion and hidden passages for servants who might otherwise sully the interior vistas. Visited by us on an open day, long before the invention of blogs.

Lots of mistletoe, not yet designated an invasive species, ripe for extermination.

Lots of young families with young children.

The grass areas were mostly in a very sad condition. The combination of footfall, geese and the winter was clearly too much for them. They looked to me as if they could do with a year off to recover, but I doubt whether the National Trust is up for such desperate measures.

Contrariwise, I was reminded that the gardens include some very fine trees. Also some snowdrops, winter aconites, camellias and daffodils. With a promise of a lot more to come in a few weeks time.

As it turned out, by the time we found a suitable spot for a picnic, it was no longer terribly bright. But we did have a good view over the big pond.

And entertained on the way home, by the car pulling up alongside us at some traffic lights, containing a young lady in the passenger seat calmly smoking what appeared to be a reefer. The things they get up to in Esher.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/picnic-one.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/claremont.html.

Reference 3: http://www.claremontfancourt.co.uk/. With this elaborate website including a mission statement starting with the words: 'To provide an environment where the God-given potential of every individual is recognised and valued'.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=claremont+macbeth. The earliest recorded visit to Claremont, back in June 2012, back in the days of bag life.

Group search key: cmb.

A new breakfast

We had a few left over chunks of boiled potato which needed using up. Which led to the following.

Peel and segment orange-wise a couple of middle sized onions, the sort you buy in a bag from Sainsbury's, rather than picking them out individually.

Fry in a tablespoon or so of rape seed oil, in the sauté pan, heat low but with the lid on. When the onions are nearly cooked add the potatoes on top and cook for a little longer, keeping the lid on but stirring with the fish slice from time to time.

Served with dry brown bread made a fine breakfast.

Tweet

Distinctive looking thrush on the back lawn yesterday afternoon, apparently pecking at an apple, although I have no idea how this last got there. And now, back again briefly as I type, that is to say around 0700, Saturday morning.

Big patch of grey on the back of the neck, brown sides/wings, grey under parts and pale speckled front parts.

Bing, BBC and RSPB conspire to make this a fieldfare, a bird which I have never knowingly seen before.

A change from all the redwings which I see quite often, not in our garden this year, but a flock of which seem to have taken up residence down Longmead Road, where they have become quite tame, running around on the grass there and only moving on when you get quite close.

Pain one

It is the time of year when our car insurance come due.

It so happens that we had been with company A for some years and had been entirely happy with them. Their rates had only climbed in a very modest way from year to year and we had not felt the urge to go in for all this shopping around nonsense. Not like our building society at all.

But this year, I was all set to renew again when I declared a minor speeding offence. This resulted in much palaver, much listening to canned music at call centres, much poking around in dusty records. And me getting steadily more irritated. The call centre then told me that they proposed to increase our renewal premium by more than the £100 fine I paid last year. Huffed and puffed a bit and then put the phone down. Really irritated now. Got better things to do with my time than go through this nonsense every year.

After a little while I cool down enough to phone company B whom I had heard about from my pension provider. Company B does not seem to be terribly interested in my speeding fine and proposed charging me pretty much the same as I paid company A last year. The deal is now done.

Peering at all the paperwork, I associated to the story that the drill in Russia these days is to have so much small print, so many petty fogging rules and regulations, that it is more or less impossible to comply with all of them. Which does not usually matter, but does mean that if the authorities ever want to bust you, perhaps because you have said something unpleasant about them on Twitter, they can always find something for which they can charge you, convict you and bang you up. With physical abuse being an optional extra.

PS: pain two is going through the same performance with our house insurance, prone to climb in a very immodest way from year to year, despite our not having claimed anything for many years now. A pleasure to come.

Pot two

One of the other nineteen, taken from a little closer.

Can't work out now what the sliver up the right is. Seemingly some kind of pillar but I don't remember any such thing. Clearly something else to be checked on the next visit.

Group search key: hch.

Pot one

Being presently concerned about focusing on my telephone, particularly with complicated see-through objects like shopping trolleys, I thought to try it out on the pots adorning the exit from the Fountain Court to the formal gardens.

Complicated, without being see-through. The telephone managed to focus in around one shot out of two, out of about twenty.

Group search key: hch.

Picnic one

Last weekend we took the first proper, outdoor picnic of the new year at Hampton Court. A visit which the record suggests in the first since last June, noticed at reference 1. A bright, cool day.

Parked in the station car park for £6 and set off across the bridge, noticing on the way that the corner plot, given a wash and brush up for the Olympic cycle races, is still boarded up and empty, with the boards to be seen loud and clear at gmaps reference 51.4029097,-0.3429358. Presumably there is an ongoing fight between the council, the heritage crew and the developer about how many stories the new block of flats is to be allowed. It is, after all, a very prominent site, seen by millions of tourists every year and we do want them to take away the right impression of our arrangements for town planning.

The guards at the main entrance had traded down from their army style red great coats to police style black jackets, not so unlike the sort of thing you or I might wear to go hill walking. Apparently the great coats can get a bit hot unless it was really cold, which it was not on this day.

On the way to the royal cabbage patch, we noticed this striking mistletoe which had taken a good grip on one of the cordon fruit trees. The palace grounds generally are infested with the stuff, so perhaps it has some kind of protected status - although I would have thought that it did a fair amount of damage to fruit trees - at the very least drawing the life blood out of the fruits for which they were planted.

Onto to the Tilt Yard café where I took tea with maid of honour. A cake of which I am fond and which BH learned involved potato, despite it looking and tasting more like a variety of cheese cake. A quick Bing confirms cheese cake but fails to confirm potato, so clearly something to check out on the next visit. It seems quite likely that the concession holder running the café is under orders to use some authentic, ancient Tudor recipe, at which time potatoes might have been a fresh off the boat, must use ingredient.

Onto the wilderness where there were plenty of crocuses, some snowdrops, a few winter aconites and a few daffodils. One or two striking beds of cyclamen. Follow-up visit to see the daffodils clearly indicated.

One large swan, clearly brushing up his act for the forthcoming mating season.

Took our picnic on a handy, sunlit bench in the sunken orchard between the privy garden (looking as well as ever) and the sunken gardens proper (not many flowers yet).

Out to come across a gathering of horse rangers, which appeared to be a horsey brand of girl guides with military trimmings. At the Palace, so a pleasant young lady told me, for their annual church parade.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-court.html.

Reference 2: http://www.horserangers.com/. Inspection of which reveals that the occasion in question was actually the Founder's Day parade. Lots of pictures on the associated Facebook page and the usual small prize for the reader who manages to find the one that includes us.

Group search key: hch.

A fairy story

In the course of trying to find out what a femto tesla was this morning, I came across the knowledge that it is possible to levitate a living frog using a variety of magnetism called diamagnetism. Levitation which seems to amount to a variety of magnetic repulsion: think of the repulsion of ordinary horseshoe magnets if you line them up the right way, then see reference 1.

I then wondered whether you could indeed levitate the roof of St. Pancras Station, a feat which I believed was attempted by an Indian guru, some years before its metamorphosis into a hotel. Leaving aside the complication that this roof does not contain much water, at least not by comparison with a frog, I wondered if you got a million people sitting down in front of the station with their brain waves being synchronised by the antics of said guru dancing about in front of them, then their synchronised brain waves would indeed generate a big enough magnetic field to lift the roof of the station.

I compute that you could comfortably sit a million people in a space measuring 1,000 yards by 1,000 yards, allowing a generous square yard to the sitting person.

Reference 1: http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/.

The larger lentil

Following the light lentil soup reported at reference 1, today we had something a little more substantial.

Start with three and a half pints of water. Add eight ounces of red lentils and the inward parts of a stick of celery, sliced crosswise. Bring to the boil and simmer for about an hour, then take off the heat. This being around 0730.

By 0900, the temperature had dropped to around 60C.

By 1200, it had dropped to around 30C. Turn on the heat again and bring back to the boil, or rather to the simmer.

Peel half a dozen medium potatoes and cut into chunks of about a cubic inch. Add to the soup.

Take half a dozen carrots, top, tail and slice crosswise.

Take four onions, slice into segments. Start cooking them, in oil, in the sauté pan, around 1245. Chop half a dozen rashers of Sainsbury hand-trimmed smoked streaky into half inch lengths and add that, taking care to spread it out, given its tendency to clump. Stir occasionally.

Add the carrots to the soup around 1250.

At 1300, transfer the onions and bacon into the soup, stir and serve with brown bread. We probably did about two thirds in our first campaign.

PS 1: a wet soup, nothing like as thick as we used to make it. One advantage being that a wet soup is much less likely to stick or burn. And, as it happens on this occasion, just a few dead flies. For a previous report, see reference 2.

PS 2 : the next day: the remaining third was rejuvenated with a middle size leek, a nest of soft noodles and a little water. Down in one.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/light-lentil.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=bug+alert+flies.

Cedrus Atlantica (Glauca)

Startled by a sharp crack as I was walking down from East Street into Ewell Village this morning, a crack which turned out to be a falling cone from what I carelessly call a white cedar, a handsome tree with a large, spreading crown. A cone which shattered on impact into its component scales.

I picked up a handful and they are now planted out in John Innes No.2, despite it being rather doubtful whether the scales still contain any seeds. We shall see.

PS: the proper name is the white Atlantic cedar, not to be confused with the weeping Atlas cedar or the white cedar, both quite different. See, for example, reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/atlas-cedar.html.

Trolley 125

Captured the other side of West Hill from where trolley 124 was captured, that is to say just outside Gillespies' Bakery. Not very keen on their bread, which I find a bit light, but I do buy cakes from them occasionally, things like Eccles cakes and Hot Cross Buns.

The same sort of trolley as 124, but one which had not been outside in the weather for weeks if not months. Just wet.

Returned to the Waitrose front of house trolley park in the Ashley Centre.

Reference 1: http://gillespiesbakery.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/trolley-124.html.

More Maigret

That is to say, three more words from Maigret which caught my attention.

First, sharecropping. It seems that Maigret's family came from a line of sharecroppers, métayers in French, a form of landholding which I do not think has been common in this country for a long time, although I think you used to get sharecroppers in the US, a rather low form of agricultural life. But have I got this right? Littré also talks of métairies also meaning, by extension, small farms generally. I could try and find a translation of the book in question and hope that the translator had done his homework. Or what? I don't think my French is up to browsing French agricultural tenure sites. Or should I be looking in Simenon's mother country, Belgium, on the grounds that this is the sort of thing he would have learned about young, before he turned up in Paris (and on canals) and started writing books?

Second, suitable. Reading the word souhaitable, something to be wished for, it struck me that this was clearly the origin of our word suitable. Checking with OED this morning suggests that I was wrong. OED has more than three pages about suit before getting onto the straightforward derivative suitable. It seems that it started out as a legal term in the middle ages, then extending to a an action or process, ending with suit for or pursuit of a  woman. Then onto groups of followers or suites, and perhaps from there to to the sort of uniforms that might be worn by members of a suite. Branching out from there to various other sorts of matching and clothing. Decks of playing cards. But nothing to do with the aforementioned souhaitable.

Third, aire, known to me as the name of the sort of large laybys you get, or at least used to get, on major roads in France. Places at which to stop, stretch your legs and picnic. Perusing Larousse and Littré, I also find threshing floors, one of the thirty two points of the compass when used to specify the direction of the wind, polygons in the plane, tectonic plates, the field of action of something or someone and a flat place up a cliff where an eagle has made its nest. Also the area of a polygon, which last is fair enough as Littré says that aire comes from the Latin area and OED says that our word area is also from the Latin area, a vacant lot in a town, and only got to mean square yards by extension.

It struck me this aire was clearly the origin of our word eyrie, which, in consequence, has nothing to do with it being up in the air, as I had vaguely thought. Checking with OED made difficult by the word being listed under 'a' for aerie rather than under 'e' for eyrie. This being just two of the four available spellings. I had not realised before that OED does not include cross references for this sort of thing, at least not universally. Got there in the end when BH got out her Concise.

Stabat Mater

Last week to Milton Court to hear the Academy of Ancient Music do a mixture of sacred and secular song, a mixture entitled 'Mortal Voices'.

Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.1 from Corelli. Cantatas HWV230(short)  HWV82 (long) from Handel. Stabat Mater from Pergolesi - apparently a great hit, much copied, in its day.

All unknown to us, with our vinyl Corelli stopping at Op.4 and with the rather more numerous Handel not including any cantatas. It does, however, include 'La Resurrezione' from the very same Academy, in the days when it was directed by Hogwood, rather than the rather stout gentleman who directs now. All unheard by me, at least so far.

This was the first concert, with four repeats to follow around the country, ending up at Bath on Friday. We supposed that the Academy had a tour bus, rather in the way of the football team, with much muttering if the director preferred to travel in private, in his own car, rather than slumming it with the team.

Waterloo trains in trouble (for once), so we took a very crowded train to Sutton, made even more crowded by the presence of a bicycle just about where we were standing. No bicycle rack after the fashion of the Southwestern rolling stock. But in fairness to the rider, I imagine that this particular train was not usually crowded, that his cycle would not usually matter, rules or no rules.

Pleased to find a connection to Elephant & Castle at Sutton, pleased to find our way from Elephant & Castle (overground) to Elephant & Castle (underground) without getting lost in the market or anywhere else.

Took our picnic in the rather canteen-like basement of Milton Court, an area probably dedicated to students rather than customers. A picnic which, for a change, consisted of cheese rolls made with crusty rolls from the Coughlans at Horton Retail. Light and fluffy rolls with a crust which did not smash fillings. Rather good. Upstairs to take a little Jameson, which we thought very cheap at £6 for a double. But did not think to buy an interval drink then, which was a mistake, as buying a drink in the interval would have been difficult.

Onto the stalls, where one of our neighbours was an older lady who had been driven from Newbury, a trip she made, it seems, quite often, not caring to stay over in hotels. We did not get to find out how her driver whiled away the couple of hours or so he had to wait. Something of an AAM groupie, so perhaps we will find her at the Wigmore one day and get to know her a little better.

The music was very good, with the soprano (Keri Fuge) and counter-tenor (Tim Mead) making some wonderful music in duet mode. Strings, lute, small organ and harpiscord, this last looking to come from the same stable as the one noticed at reference 1. Slightly marred by a young violinist who could not stand still at all when he was not playing and a lute player who looked about him in a rather distracting way when not playing. Contrariwise, the soprano was very good at keeping very still in her intervals. Off the back and shoulders red gown and I thought rather a lot of make up, but a tremendous voice and great poise.

No record of our having hear Fuge before and too tiresome to check Mead, as the search involved finds 'Longmead', of which there are lots. Maybe there is a workaround, but I have yet to find it.

The Pergolosi did not strike me as being terribly tragic, which was a little disappointing, as I had assumed that it would be. Perhaps it would have been had I followed the words rather than the action. Perhaps it would be if I listened to it again. But I also associate to some musicologist writing that the music of Bach's cantatas was all very mixed up and that it would be quite wrong to think of his secular cantatas being a different breed from his sacred ones.

After a 10 minute wait, No.4 bus back to Waterloo, where the trains were still in trouble, but where we caught a very late running train to Epsom, more or less as we arrived. A crowded train, in which a couple of young girls - that is to say twenty or so - gave us their seats. Gratefully accepted.

Home to turn the last roll into the first fried egg roll for a while. Improper to the extent of frying in rape seed oil rather than lard and in the new sauté pan rather than in a frying pan. Rather good all the same.

PS: the illustration being that which caused the flap this morning. Google image knew about and knew what it was, but failed to say anything about where the image came from. Or what the sword is for.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/kings-place.html.

Morning scare

This morning, getting ready for the daily post, on this occasion mainly about something called 'Stabat Mater', I asked Bing to find me a suitable illustration. It turned up something which did indeed look suitable - but I wondered what it was. This took me to something called something like Pixshare, whereupon up popped a more or less pornographic picture, possibly a heavily made-up photograph. This was followed by all kinds of unpleasant sounding warnings, purporting to come from Microsoft, and inviting me to phone some number to sort it all out.

I did think about doing just that, but then thought that closing the relevant Edge tabs might be better, followed by a call to the BT Help Desk, a service I have had good value out of over the years.

They seemed fairly sure that the warnings had been faked and that phoning the number given was apt to result in a more serious attempt to extract money out of me, either by damaging the PC and wanting money to fix it or by relieving me of interesting personal details.

Recent browsing history has been cleared and the PC has been pronounced clean. Windows Defender on the case. If it happens again, action one should be to close the browser, if necessary by powering down the PC.

I don't think that I much care if the people doing this sort of thing have Asperger's syndrome. Take them and their computer skills out of circulation. Bang 'em up if that is what it takes.

On titles and titling

Introduction

Early on in reference 1, a book I have had for a while but which I am only now getting around to, I find the observation that sometimes titles are important, that without the title, the work of art in question is not comprehensible. Cooke gives as an example the short poem illustrated here, without the title. I completely failed the test, having no inkling that the writer of the poem was talking about an eagle until I popped the first line into Bing. So the question now is, to what extent is a title an important part, an integral part of a work of art? To what extent should a work of art need a title?

With my opening answer, that of much younger person, rather too sure of himself, or perhaps that of a member of the Britart crew, being that a work of art should be sufficient unto itself and should not need to be propped up by either title or commentary.

But being now not so young and more inclined to the ways of the civil service, we might consider this matter of titles under various headings:

• Subject: what sort of a work is being titled? Does medium or genre bear on whether or how a work should be titled?
• Form: some titles are just one or two words. Some are something more complicated. Sometimes one has both title and subtitle. Or even a title followed by a paragraph of explanation. Sometimes one has a first title then an alternative title. Sometimes titles are not words at all, rather bits of tune, as they are in some editions of Beethoven’s piano sonatas
• Function: what is the title for? What does it do for us, the consumers?
• History: how did the work come by its title. Was the title successful? Who used it? Did it change from time to time?

In what follows I am mainly interested in function, which we might consider under some more headings, not in any way exclusive, with any one title usually being a mixture:

• Identification: the title is used in communication, so that we have can have a conversation about the work. As might be used as a label or a name on a file cover or on a computer record
• Description: the title tells the consumer something about the work
• Direction: the title tells the consumer something about how he or she should approach the work, consume the work
• Discrimination: the title helps the consumer discriminate one similar work, perhaps one of the many stories about Maigret, Biggles or Poirot, from another.
• Commemorative: the titles celebrates something, perhaps the person who paid for the work or the person who owned the work
• Advertisement: the title is intended to sell the work in question. Thinking again of Maigret, we might have ‘L’Amie de Madame Maigret’, a title which tells us that the book in question is one of the Maigret stories which we like and that, unusually, is something to do with Maigret’s wife, so we have not read it already.

Which leads me to modify my opening question, and I now have: should a work of art need a title in order to tell us what it is about (description) or to tell us how to use it (direction)? With the preliminary answer being no. Other aspects of titles are not without interest, but do not seem to raise the temperature in the same way, do not get one going in the same way.

In what follows I mostly use ‘title’ rather than ‘name’, two words which one might at first think were more or less synonyms. Then I thought that title might be derived in some way from the French ‘titre’, perhaps with links to ‘en-tête’, at the top of, at the head of. A thought not supported by inspection of the dictionaries which all talk of the Latin ‘titulus’, nothing to do with heads, a quite different word in Latin. But there is talk of at the top of, a sense which is not present with ‘name’. I leave aside titles like 'Marquis' and 'Earl'. I leave aside titles to property.

I then ask whether the title is part of the work so titled, or is it something aside? In the lingo of IT people, is it meta-data rather than data? Is it something on the catalogue card, or part of the thing itself? Is it in the properties of a file (right click in Windows) or is it in the file itself? A subject about which Wikipedia gets quite carried away (at reference 5) and a distinction which is clear enough in the case of computer systems, but like many apparently clean, binary distinctions, rather breaks down in the real world.

And then I wondered about consciousness. To what extent is one conscious of the title of a work when one is consuming it. To which the fairly clear-cut answer seems to be that one is not. The name is something that one uses for purposes other than consumption.

Case law

Starting with music, my understanding is that lots of pieces of music by famous composers, people like Haydn or Beethoven, acquired their titles from their publisher, the publisher who wanted to catch the eye of the paying public, this being the way that many composers made most of their money. While lots of songs are titled, in a straightforward way, by their first lines. Others are titled by their subject, for example Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’.

Lots of novels acquire their titles by negotiation between the author and his or her publisher, titles which usually point up something important in the novel in question. Or are intended, along with a suitable jacket design, to draw in the paying public, to draw the paying public into the bookshop where the novel is displayed. Publishers, no doubt, sometimes take a lot of trouble with such matters. Authors, no doubt, sometimes care and are sometimes in a position to argue with their publisher about it.

The titles of many novels tell us very little. For example, the title of the well known novel ‘Middlemarch’, while accurate enough once one has read it, gives little enough away in advance, even if we include the subtitle ‘a study of provincial life’, a subtitle which is dropped, as it happens, from my own copy, and the title of the first book, ‘Miss. Brooke’, does not give much more away. We buy such a novel on the strength of its advertisement or on the reputation of the author, rather than on its title.

Some novels have more informative titles, titles which might, inter alia, serve to avoid error. So if the novel is called ‘The Bounder’, I know to look out for a bounder, I know how to read the leading man. Or perhaps we have Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’, a novel published, as it happens, in serial form at almost the same time as Middlemarch was published in the same way. With a title of this sort not being used in the case that part of the point of the novel was that it is not always easy to sort the wheat from the chaff, that it is not always obvious from the outset that this or that character is a bounder, in which case one would not want to give the game away in the title, or to offer the reader ready-made judgements, any more than one want to give away the crucial twist in a thriller.

Famous old master paintings in art galleries usually have titles on their tickets, titles which usually say something about the subject matter, perhaps ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, subject matter which may or may not have much bearing on why we value the work. While lots of new master paintings have titles which do not say anything much at all, perhaps ‘Abstract No.17 – August 1963’, perhaps, a cynic might say, properly reflecting the lack of content in the work concerned. Then there are the small number of galleries remove the tickets on the grounds that the presence of the ticket pollutes the pure consumption of the painting.

Titles also function as labels, an aid to communication. So people in the know can talk knowingly about the Emperor or the Serioso without having to bother with opus numbers or any other kind of number. Or talk about paintings without having to bother with even more tiresome catalogue or accession numbers. I associate to Proust and Simenon writing about the nicknames that top people give to each other, names which are only known to those in, or at least near, the magic circle. So in Proust, the super-snob, M. de Charlus, is known to some as ‘Mémé’. Agatha does it a bit too, with, for example, ‘Bundle’ being the nickname of Lady Brent in ‘The Secret of Chimneys’.

Another angle, in the case that the work of art is about something in particular, is the identification of that something, the subject of the work. So if I see a picture that I like of a building, I know which building it is. I can look the building up in Pevsner and perhaps go and take a look at it for real. One might want to write an essay on the relation of the picture to the real thing. Or, if I were Henry VIII, I might like the picture that I had seen of an eligible young lady and send my ambassador off to check her out.

Associating once again to IT, to computer systems, there used to be a principle which said that the identifiers attached to the records in files or databases, things like telephone numbers, email addresses, VAT numbers and tax reference numbers, should not contain information, they should just identify. Something which it is well to bear in mind when building an IT system but to which one often fails to adhere in detail. So car registration marks often contain information about date and place of registration. National insurance numbers contain a limited amount of information about the date and place of issue. While the first names of people often contain a limited amount of information about their date of birth.

Proper names are used to identify particular things, often but not always people, animals, jewels or places. Leaving aside the topographical or occupational roots of many family names, proper names do not usually include any descriptive information, although the name of a famous or infamous person may associate to some quality of that person, such as avarice, beauty or cruelty, which association might qualify our consumption of a portrait. And then, in some cultures, the names given to new-borns might express hopes as to the nature of the person to come, perhaps Prudence or Charity. Proper names may also have a commemorative function: buildings and parts of buildings are often given the name of the person who provided the money to build them, for example the Blavatnik Extension at the Tate or the Jerwood Hall at St. Luke’s. And in the past, buildings were often given the name of the person who owned them. For example, the foreign mercenary Falkes, a fixer for King John, who once owned a hall in what is now Vauxhall. Or Buckingham Palace, once the London home of the Dukes of Buckingham. Ditto Somerset House, one of the once many grand houses built along the river between Westminster and the City. Or less often the person who built them, for example the Wren Library at Cambridge.

One might digress even further into the related field of the titles of shops, goods and brands. Here however, my interest is in descriptive titles of works of art, in titles the purpose of which is to inform, to facilitate the consumption of the work in question.

Conclusions

I started out with the idea that there ought to be a principle, with a strong candidate being the principle that a good work of art should not need a title, that it should be sufficient unto itself. A principle which is probably related to my belief when young that one should go to the work itself, not to some commentary or criticism; that one should stick to the primary sources.

But having wandered around the topic today, I now come to the view that there is no principle. If someone gives a work of art a title, be that someone the originator, the publisher, the advertiser, the owner or some other consumer, and that title sticks, so be it. If the title serves some honest purpose, fine. It does not matter what that honest purpose is and there is no need for principles. Where by ‘honest’ I mean a title which is not intended to misinform, mislead or deceive – not that, in the case of a work of art, I can see much point in such deception, apart from jokes at the expense of the consumer. Jokes, perhaps, of the emperor’s new clothes variety, a gentleman last mentioned at the beginning of the month, at reference 4.

Plus there is a suspicion that the honest purpose is often discrimination rather than description. The title is mainly there to help us discriminate between the various works of some particular artist. It is usually enough to know the name of the artist, usually just the surname rather than the full name, and the title of the work.

And as far as meta-data is concerned, there is a suspicion that titles are usually meta-data rather than data, something stuck on to the work, rather than something integral to the work, with the eagle poem being something of an exception, an exception from which I associate to riddles. You read the poem and your job is to guess the title. Is it like cross-word puzzles, the knack for which some people have, or have acquired, and some people do not? Which is perhaps a good place to stop.

References

Reference 1: The Language of Music - Deryck Cooke - 1959 – OUP.

Reference 2: http://www.englishverse.com/poems/the_eagle.

Reference 3: Middlemarch - George Eliot - 1971/2.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/bricks.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata.

Dream dough

A waking dream this morning about kneading some bread dough which had gone wrong. Somehow, a lot of the dough has got out of the mixing bowl. Some of it having got under the rim of the bowl, some of it having got further afield. But it has all dried out and I am having a terrible job kneading all the dry & lumpy dough back into something like properly soft & smooth bread dough.

A rather odd dream in that while, if the first rise has gone on too long and risen up and out of its bowl, one might have some dry bits, I do not knead the dough in the mixing bowl. Rather, the dough is mixed in the mixing bowl, then dumped onto the table for the first knead, then put back in the mixing bowl for first rise, then dumped back onto the table for the second knead. Furthermore, dry bits has never been a problem; they quickly knead back into the mass of the dough.

For some reason, in writing the first of the two paragraphs above, I associated to a striking sentence I read recently at the beginning of reference 1. I quote: 'Language is a central link through which we interact with other people. As a channel of communication it is limited by our physical ability to speak only one word at a time. The question arises therefore how the complex products of our brain are transformed into the linear string of words that comprise speech or text. Since our mental processes are far from being one dimensional, the use of memory is essential, as is the existence of some type of correlations in time'. Put another way, it is remarkable that the thoughts and images about the three dimensional outside world, a world which is continuously evolving in time, can so successfully be reduced to a one dimensional stream of bits, of zeroes and ones.

At a more prosaic level, I note that my most recent batch of bread was the 457th. 457 in the five or six years since I stopped cycling to the baker in Cheam because of back pains brought on by my cycling posture, hunched over the handlebars. For which see reference 2. Probably more batches of bread than an apprentice baker (if there still are such) would ever make by hand.

PS: checking this morning, it seems that what was a small baker in Cheam is now one branch of a three branch operation, an operation which looks much more fancy than the one I knew, so I must go and inspect. Is their white bread still up to scratch or have they sold out to fancy goods? In the meantime there is reference 3.

Reference 1: Hierarchical structures induce long-range dynamical correlations in written texts - E. Alvarez-Lacalle, B. Dorow, J.-P. Eckmann, and E. Moses – 2006.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=baker+cheam.

Reference 3: http://village-bakers.co.uk/.

Helmchen two

Quite by chance, a few days after hearing Helmchen at the Diabelli event noticed at reference 1, we heard him again as part of an ensemble putting on a concert at the Wigmore Hall: Tetzlaff, his friends and relations giving us Schubert's Schwanengesang and his C major string quintet.

Friends and relations to the extent that Tetzlaff fielded both his sister and Helmchen's wife on the cellos. The fourth time that I have heard Tetzlaff, with the first being something over three years ago and noticed at reference 5.

Started our journey at Epsom where some smart green ('Emerald') buses from Reading were providing some of the replacement bus service to Sutton. One supposes that the Southwestern Trains people shop around a bit, and the Emerald people offered the best price, distance notwithstanding. Luckily the Waterloo service was not on the buses.

Onto Oxford Circus and Wigmore Steet, where we were very impressed by the enormous plastic barriers erected around at least one of the cross roads on Wigmore Street. We did not see any accompanying road works, but one supposes that there must have been some somewhere. Rather than an elaborate joke at concertgoers' expense.

Helmchen and Prégardien on first. Helmchen playing on a Yamaha piano, rather than the Steinway he had used at St. John's earlier in the week and Prégardien singing in an open necked white shirt. All very informal. But he had a very good voice, bags of power and flexibility. Enough power to balance the piano, except for the first couple of songs or so, which I thought Helmchen took a bit loud. The only real downside being that the closing song 'Der Taubenpost' was a bit of a let down, a bit tagged onto the main business. Usually a song with which I get on very well. Furthermore, it must be a few months since I last heard it, so not just a question of overstimulation. According to the blog record, nine months.

Quintet also very good, although at the end I had the sense of having had two main meals. Rather a lot for one sitting. Perhaps in the future I will go for a B film then an A film, as it were, rather than a double bill.

Some discussion of the way home of the well worn subject of the extent to which one's mood or state of health affected the music that one wrote, with me in the not much corner and BH in the lots corner. Cortana told us that Schubert suffered from something called cyclothymia, apparently a milder version of the presently fashionable bipolar disorder. While part of my argument was that the quintet had not come across as particularly sad or tragic, despite the programme notes. Despite 'an ominous D flat haunt[ing] the final cadence'.

PS: trying 'Der Taubenpost' on YouTube this afternoon, with the words in parallel in front of me, I wonder yet again whether I am getting the best of it by watching the stage rather than the programme.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/st-johns.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/repeats.html.

Reference 3: https://www.pregardien.com/en/.

Reference 4: Bing does not offer a regular website for Teztlaff, but does turn up: https://www.houseofnames.com/tetzlaff-family-crest. So clearly from a part of Germany, that is to say Pomerania, which had once been part of Sweden and is now mostly part of Poland. All very mixed up.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/big-tent.html.

Design error

Public transport comes with lots of grab rails and grab poles. The idea being that you can either hang onto them through your journey, or make a grab for one when the vehicle lurches.

The rails and poles in trains - both overground and underground - are reasonably non-slip, so if you grab hard enough you get some traction in some direction which is not at right angles to the pole. So if, for example, you grab a vertical pole in an effort not to crash into your neighbour, it does not work if your tightest grip just slides around the pole - and you rotate around the pole with it, crashing nicely into said neighbour. Grabbing two poles would work, but that is not usually an option.

The steps in railway stations and tube stations are usually very non-slip, with one's feet rarely slipping on their leading edges.

But London buses fail. Their poles and rails are not non-slip at all, which might easily have very untoward consequences when you try coming down the stairs before the bus comes to a complete stop - because waiting would slow everything down for everybody else.

One would think that at £333,333 a pop, or whatever Boris paid for the things, a simple and important matter like the hand rail on the stairs could have been got right.

PS: on some of the older tube lines, such as the City Branch of the Northern Line, the wooden hand rails provided for the steps sometimes come with bosses or bumps every couple of feet or so. An effective if potentially painful form of non-slip.

Still more irritation

The morning continued with inspection of the junk email which had arrived overnight. One of the emails had a title about upcoming gigs at the about to be reopened Queen Elizabeth Hall, once a staid and respectable venue for classical music, mostly western classical music with the occasional foray into parts eastern - and now an accessible venue, trying to entice in anyone who happens to be passing.

The word 'gig' coming from the South Bank Centre was another morning irritation. Worse, I think, than the Microsoft irritation just posted. For me, there is nothing more irritating than older people trying to get into the lingo of the young. Trying to be relevant to the needs of today. Trying to reconnect to their lost youth. Far better to stick with one's own lingo, to be yourself rather than to try to be somebody else.

A disease which, in my closing days in the world of work, had made serious inroads into senior management teams in the civil service. A disease which had previously made serious inroads into the senior management teams of churches, particularly those belonging to that sad case, the Church of England. Think church in the round, Mexican waves, tambourines, drum beats and overhead projectors.

I wonder if the young find it as irritating as I do.

PS: I seem to recall that Mexican waves have also made it to senior management in what is still, just about, our national health service. Some news item about the whizzy, go-ahead centre trying to gee up the slack periphery.

Minor irritation

My current laptop is Microsoft flavoured, with the browser being Edge and the search engine being Bing, which is all fine. Especially the picture of the day that you get from Bing - although today's is not one of their best.

Now when you fire the thing up, or open a new tab, by default, you get a rather busy page, a bit like the front of the Sun newspaper.

A row of header stuff, the weather for Epsom (where we live) and then a whole lot of what appear to be news items in rectangular boxes, visually the equivalent of the display format small ads in local newspapers like the Epsom Guardian. This morning, one of these items announced the forthcoming demise of landlines in Epsom, in words to that effect, rather than the vaguer words in the corresponding item in the screen shot included here; the computer had clearly taken where I live into account when putting the first item together. Which item caught my eye and so I clicked to find that what had appeared to be a news item was actually an advertisement for voice over IP telephone services.

Or rather, not exactly an advertisement, rather a puff for the services in general, but including click here to take you to providers in your area.

Initially I was really irritated that an advertisement was masquerading as a news item, rather in the way of the stuff you get in women's magazines. Irritation which was only slightly dissipated by reading the small print under the item which said sponsored.

And now, about an hour later, I am thinking that maybe I ought to know about this sort of thing, that maybe I am too much of a pushover for BT. But I think I would rather read about it in the Guardian at my leisure, than having some trade sponsored advertisement distracting me first thing in the morning.

To be fair to Microsoft, Google makes (even more) money out of advertisements in the same sort of way - but somehow manages to be less intrusive about it.

Reference 1: http://www.talktechdaily.com/new-phone-system/uk/.

Trolley 124

Trolley 124, captured in the margins of taking our car for its annual service. An elderly Waitrose trolley, the first for a while and which looks to have been outside for a while.

Returned to Waitrose's back door, rather than to the trolley park out front, in case they want to skip it, rather than clean it up.

Just twenty five trolleys since I last had occasion to do this. See reference 1 - although on this second occasion, it being a little early, I did not trouble the lady at customer services.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/trolley-89.html.

Ben Lawers

The fold

Many years ago now we visited and climbed a mountain in Scotland called Ben Lawers. At the bottom of the mountain there was rather a handsome souvenir shop, probably run by the National Trust, from which we acquired the National Trust Guide, third edition, 1986. The shop included a geological model which explained that the mountain was something like the diagram above, with what you have now on the right and the giant fold from which it was eroded on the left. Note the reversed order of the strata and bear in mind that this mountain is more than a kilometre high, to the point of rising more than a kilometre up from the nearby Loch Tay. A striking example of the power and grandeur of geological movements, with some of our party declining to believe. Not exactly creationists, but not convinced by the geology.

The geology

We were not much helped by the diagram turned up by Google, but we suspect that Ben Lawers is something to do with the Tay Nappe, the pale blue area, and may be about where we have the word 'Schiehallion', a slightly smaller mountain, indicated by an arrow, a few miles to the northeast of Ben Lawers. Another rather striking mountain which was climbed around the same time.

The map

While the Ordnance Survey offering is clear about where things are, but quite unhelpful when it comes to the geology. Perhaps I should turn up a map from the Geological Survey, but I have not got around to finding out whether I have to pay to do that online.

All this prompted by another copy of the National Trust Guide turning up in the Raynes Park Platform Library, clearly being serviced by a better class of commuter. A booklet with a stronger focus on the alpine flowers to be found up the mountain, sufficiently old to be undated and in more or less mint condition. Probably from the 1950's.

The National Trust, now left, then right

Perhaps the slight change in size is to do with the move from Imperial to Metric measurements. We also learn that the mountain was bought by the National Trust for Scotland in 1950 through the generosity of one Mr. Percy Unna, killed shortly afterwards in a climbing accident - up a mountain in his early seventies. He does not make it to Wikipedia but he is to be found at reference 1, from which I take the liberty of the following opening quote: 'Environmentalist and philanthropist. Born in London, of Danish extraction, Unna was educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge. He became a civil engineer...'. A Sassenach. With the boys from Eton getting everywhere, then and now!

PS: I find that this particular item has been waiting for a slow news day for just about two years now, which might explain the stains on the first illustration. See reference 2.

Reference 1: http://www.scottish-places.info/scotgaz/people/famousfirst3558.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/chelsea-chatter.html.

Box out

Just about 10 days after planting the first wave of box plantlets out, as noticed at reference 1, the second and last wave (of 10) went in today, behind the unclipped box bushes that I must have planted more than twenty years ago and which are now seven or eight feet tall. Filling in the gap between those bushes and the boundary fence, recently vacated. Vacated by something which puts out long straggly shoots from root stools and spreads underground. I think it was a garden plant, but apart from spreading it was not doing terribly well in the shade. Also rather a dry spot, with the water being sucked out of the ground by the various established trees round about. We will see if the box does any better - it does alright on the dry chalk of Box Hill - but there it does get the sun.

Joined towards the end of the proceedings by a tame robin, possibly the same one as joined in last time, given that they are territorial.

Note the pile of stones blocking what I took to be a fox hole in the fence, one of them being a slab of flint possibly taken from the beach at Birling Gap, before I noticed the notices which forbade the practise.

PS: I clearly had trouble with the title of the post of reference 1, omitting it altogether in the first instance and getting it wrong in the second.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/just-about-five-months-after-potting.html.