Tweet of the day

"I had not realised that lying on the record was not covered by the ministerial code. Deeply regret".

Reference 1: https://twitter.com/. Anon.

Bats?

In the margins of our last visit to the west end, we came across a line of openings which had been let into the underside of the Oxford Street facing canopy of the John Lewis store there. We wondered whether they had been visited by the local bat inspector, or some other guardian of endangered species. A special kind of clothes moth? Or wood boring beetle?

Floral display

A fine display of cherry blossom (or some such) between Hook Road and Costcutter.

I believe that the household concerned is Italian, perhaps drawn here by the prospect of work in the mental hospitals up the road. So perhaps a style of tree favoured in their natal Italy. In any event, the trees flower very reliably. A bright spot in this particular road.

While the hospitals have now been sold off for houses and care in the community (or in ditches, on pavements, in police cells or in prisons, as the case may be).

Serious songs

Last week we were to have gone to the Wigmore to hear three of Schubert's more dramatic lieder, but for some reason, not long after we bought the tickets the programme was switched to some of Brahms' serious songs. Heine, von Platen, the Bible and others. Provoking various unproductive speculations about what might have triggered the switch, but not cancellation.

Started off badly with a young mum sharing a Tesco's sandwich with her pram bound toddler, with the pair of them eating away, as they walked away from the package, not thinking to make any use of the litter bin provided only feet away. Leaving me to put the package in said bin.

Then at Cavendish Square, one of the concrete pots noticed at reference 1 had been twisted round, revealing that it was actually some kind of trap for waste water, a large version of the trap we have between our garage roof and its soakaway, a trap which we clean out from time to time.

Into the hall to find the flowers did not seem as bright as they had on the Monday and only two thirds full, despite our having been relegated to row M, further back than we had been for some time. With relegation suggesting heavy demand for tickets. Presumably the other third had been prompted by the switch to cancel. And at least one lady had not known that there had been a switch, from which we deduce that at least some people still buy their tickets over the counter, not leaving any address, electrical or otherwise, for updates.

Both the short pianist (Schmalcz) and the tall baritone (Goerne) were big chested men, and the baritone had a very big voice, big without being flamboyant in manner; a good stage presence. A presence which included, for a good part of the time, holding onto the piano with his right hand, prompting the thought that this was, in some part at least, a device for keeping track of what the piano was doing through his hand, rather than through his ears, busy with his own noises. Fanciful?

Despite my only having glanced at the words before the off, all rather intense, so at an hour without interval, about right for us - with the change of programme having pushed out our comfort zone a bit.

Several twos at Wimbledon. Sight lines quite good, but platform lights were a nuisance.

PS 1: I wonder what my father would have made of the songs taken from Ecclesiastes. He was keen on music generally and knew his Ecclesiastes well, but I do not recall him ever playing anything other than Schubert songs at home.

PS 2: too early in the morning to thin out the aways in the fourth sentence above. Something I seem to do quite often. Perhaps the brain having loaded the word, unless otherwise directed, saves time & effort by using it wherever it fits.

PS 3: it occurred to me later that while I, if I attempt to explain my different responses on the different occasions I hear a piece of music I know well, I tend to explain in terms of my own mood or state of mind at the time, in part because I am not qualified to do anything else. Had I eaten too much or too little? Did I not get enough sleep last night? Was I in a bad mood for one reason or another? Did I neglect to do some necessary revision? While a more or less professional critic will tend to explain in terms of the idiosyncrasies of the performance or the performers, less often in terms of the composer and rarely if ever in terms of his own mood or state of mind. In part because that is what we are paying him for, but is it not also neglect of an important part of the experience?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/ronan-ohara.html.

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

Reference 3: http://boulezian.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/goerneschmalcz-brahms-26-april-2018.html for a rather more serious appreciation than I attempt. '... The Neun Lieder und Gesänge, op.32, fared much better. Why we do not hear these songs more often I really do not know. Perhaps it is simply that Brahms is still thought of more as an instrumental than a vocal composer. Surely the autobiographical element – Graham Johnson once suggested considering the set as a Komponistenliebe sequel to Schumann’s Dichterliebe – should attract. Above all, though, the sheer musical – and musico-dramatic – quality should. Wagner’s was not the only way. Schubert often hovered in the background, more oppressively than benignly, the opening...'. I wonder now what proportion of the audience could have managed this sort of thing; certainly not this proportion.

Reference 4: http://boulezian.blogspot.co.uk/. For a great deal more of the same. Clearly a much more serious blogger than yours truly.

Reference 5: https://twitter.com/boulezian. For the Twitter version. With Mark Berry, the chap in question, seemingly having generated 79 thousand tweets. Perhaps my tweetspeak has come unstuck.

Trolley 147

Captured this morning at the foot of the footbridge over the Waterloo line at the bottom of West Street.

Picked up two more in the passage through to the front of Sainsbury's, not here scored on the grounds that they were in range of the CCTV which covers the passage.

Week five

Inflorescence now 26.5 inches above the window sill. Eight and a half inches in the two weeks since week three. Up to runner bean standards?

I associate to a story about the rate of growth of climbers along the lines of runner beans in East Africa, said to be prodigious by our standards.

Group search key: tfc.

Fake 34

A shot at dusk of the former Debenhams building in Wigmore Street. I feel sure that I have reported the heritage story of a talkative gentleman on the desk, but have not found it yet. A heritage story which turned out to be based on the truth rather than being nothing but the truth. Perhaps I will be able to find it later.

With the snap being included with the fakes because of the way that the stone frontage stops at the front, with this exposed side clearly being something else. With the extra accommodation which has been added on top being cunningly terraced so that most of it cannot be seen if you stand opposite the central tower on the other side of the road.

I also take the opportunity to post an update on fake 29 of reference 1. The dining area at Chessington Garden Centre was busy late lunchtime today (Saturday), but we were able to sit close enough to the fire to see that the fire was indeed, as suspected, a film on a computer screen, perhaps because some visiting child had pushed it back a bit, enabling one to see the screen surround.

PS: later, after a snooze: the heritage story has now turned up at reference 2, via a second route. But I remain puzzled as to why the first route did not work. Nothing so banal as upper versus lower case or a misspelling of Debenhams.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/fake-29.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/three-shops.html.

Waiting rooms

A snap from one of the National Geographic's noticed last November. About to be moved to a new life on a downstairs coffee table. Shall I donate them to my doctor's waiting room next time I happen to be there? Would any of the other patients appreciate the change of diet?

I seem to remember that when I was young, dental and medical waiting rooms of the better sort were always equipped with the National Geographic and the London Illustrated News - with my father taking out a subscription to the latter for that very purpose. I don't suppose he ever made any attempt to recover the cost - at least I would be disappointed to learn that he had.

It is a while since I have seen a current number, but I imagine it is much slimmed down, rather in the way of the Scientific American, in the face of the onslaught from the Internet. A once proud magazine, fighting for its life, now offering 12 issues for as little as 12USD.

A quick peek at this number, turns up various items of interest. The quaint advertisements, the very ancient colour printing, the interesting ladies' fashions. A picture from a place called New Glarus in Wisconsin of a young lady in full-on national costume from Switzerland sitting in the middle of what looks like a pile of emmenthal cheeses, with a fine set of holes in one of them on show. Whereas I have not seen an entire emmenthal on show since Paxton & Whitfield in Jermyn Street stopped doing them, what must be years ago, in favour of better paying tourist stuff.

Perhaps I will get to read a bit more during the advertisement breaks on ITV3.

PS: old Lumia struggling with this sort of close-up. Hopefully the new Lumia will return from the menders before too long.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/new-season-at-ri.html.

Reference 2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.swisstown.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.paxtonandwhitfield.co.uk/.

Another job for Dr. Venn

When I did physics at school, duality of matter was all the thing. The fact that when one got down to basics, matter could either be considered to be waves or it could be considered to be particles. So we had both waves of light and particles of light, aka photons.

Prompted by reference 1, it strikes me that something of the sort is appropriate in psychology.

Let us suppose that we have a list of all the possible psychological disorders, perhaps derived from the controversial DSM-5, the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association (references 3 and 4).

We then postulate three overlapping categories of disorder:

• Disorders which result from some structural or anatomical problem. Perhaps a stroke has damaged some small but important part of the brain
• Disorders which result from some disturbance to the brain’s chemical regime. Perhaps there is some problem with the supply of adrenalin (see references 5 and 6)
• Disorders which can be described in psychiatric or even psycho-analytic terms. Perhaps there is an unresolved Oedipus Complex.

The circular regions A, B and C respectively in the diagram above, where we use ‘A’ (said A bar, short for A excluding or barring both B and C) to refer to the part of that region which does not meet either of the other regions.

I suspect that A is a relatively large region, with many structural or anatomical problems not being amendable to pharmacology or psychiatry. They need the scalpel to cut things out, although there is a harbinger of a more positive sort of repair work at reference 2.

While I also suspect that there is quite a lot of overlap between B and C. That there are plenty of disorders which are amenable to either pharmacology or psychiatry. In any case, I believe that it is often the case that one needs pharmacology to calm down acute symptoms, to make space for the psychiatrist to work.

So there will be some disorders which can be described in either pharmacological terms, or it psychiatric terms, with both descriptions being equally valid, and with there being a two way stretch between the two. With successful pharmacological treatment correcting the psychiatric symptoms (matter over mind) and with successful psychiatric treatment correcting the pharmacological symptoms (mind over matter). A duality between the two avenues of attack.

While I believe in this duality already, it would be interesting to explore the precise mechanisms by which psychiatric intervention has a pharmacological result. No great problem in principle, seen from a good distance away: the psychiatric intervention rearranges a whole lot of neurons and synapses, some of which also happen to be involved in management of the brain's chemical regime, management which might well include just the sort of thing one might otherwise achieve pharmacologically. But a close up would be good. Perhaps it is time to take another look at the book noticed at reference 7.

References

Reference 1: Amygdala circuitry mediating reversible and bidirectional control of anxiety - Kay M. Tye and others – 2011.

Reference 2: Developing a hippocampal neural prosthetic to facilitate human memory encoding and recall - Robert E Hampson et al – 2018. Presently paywalled.

Reference 3: https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/dsm-5.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/ancient-wisdom.html.

Reference 6: Motor, cognitive, and affective areas of the cerebral cortex influence the adrenal medulla - Richard P. Dum, David J. Levinthal, and Peter L. Strick – 2016.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/a-day-in-life-of-brain.html.

Tiberghien

Chopin preludes came around earlier in the week. Plus the Op.18 Arabeske and the Op.17 Fantasie from Schumann. Plus a romance from Schumann's wife by way of an encore.

For starter looked in the Wigmore and in the Langham, both places usually quiet enough at lunch time, but both busy enough early Monday evening. So I passed on them and settled for half price at the Cock and Lion up the road. Passing, on the way, a clutch of bicycles, complete with smart wicker baskets, stood outside the Langham for the use of their guests.

Interested by a young lady in the Cock who was sharing her time between her three gentlemen friends, her burger and chips, her mobile phone and news on the telly on the wall about the recently arrived royal baby. A very busy young lady.

Hall about two thirds full, including what looked like an older chap a few rows in front of me who had what used to be called curtained hair: cut very short at the sides but left longer on the top. The only catch being that the once black hair was now largely grey. Slightly puzzled when I caught a glimpse from the side to find that the chap in question was not that old at all. Flowers very good and fresh looking, mixed pink, including some strelitzia, with a solid background of green.

The nearly-new-to-me Cédric Tiberghien did very well indeed on the Chopin preludes, my only comment being that he maybe needed to work on his pedal action, with dying notes at the end of passages sometimes seeming wrong and intrusive. Last heard nearly three years ago and noticed at reference 4.

An occasion for a third spot of counting (for the second see reference 2), getting to 25 preludes by the end for the 24 that were actually there. Usually clear enough when there is change of prelude - perhaps because there is a switch between major and minor key - so I guess I just lost the count at some point. No pack drill with memory aids on this occasion; rather low key counting altogether. But once again, helpful in that it seemed to help keep one on the music, rather than drifting off somewhere else.

According to the programme, the sequence was organised by relatives for minors and fifths for majors, perfectly clear and tidy, but different from the organising principle of, for example, Bach in the well tempered clavier, where he simply goes up the scale with pairs of majors and minors. So C major, C minor, C sharp major and so on rather than Chopin's C major, A minor, G major and so on.

At the interval, I thought to use the Cock and Lion again, but this was busy with football, so tried the cocktail bar 'Be At One', which used to be the Pelican Bar, in Wimpole Street. Nice enough young lady, I think from the US, but she had great trouble understanding that I just wanted a double shot of 'Monkey Shoulder' without ice, rather than some complicated cocktail made with same. No less than two false starts, by which time the interval was more or less spent. As it happens, it looks as if the first time I used the Pelican Bar was nearly eleven years ago, once again after hearing the preludes, once again with pedal trouble. See reference 3.

The Schumann was new to me and would, I think, repay trying again, despite tendencies towards the complicated piano music which had come in by the end of the nineteenth century and which I do not care for at all.

There were some dropouts, that is to say people who only turned out for the Chopin, but the remainder more than made up for their absence when it came to clapping and cheering. With one young lady in his claque being both dressed very loud and just being very loud.

Just missed the connection to Epsom at Vauxhall, so I had, the first time for while, ten minutes or so at the aeroplane game at Earlsfield. Good sight line to the west, fairly good to the east. A couple of quick twos and closed with a probable three, with the third aeroplane in question swinging round sharply from the north, somewhere over south London.

Reference 1: https://twitter.com/TiberghienC. There does not appear to be a regular website, just one of these. From which I learn that he knows someone who knows Gevrey-Chambertin, so he can't be all bad. The stuff for those of us who can't afford the real thing, as drunk by the great Napoléon, even on his retreat from Moscow. See references 5 and 6 for notices.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/winterreise.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=goose+paste.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/violin-sonatas.html.

Reference 5: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=gevrey+virginia.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/rambaud-concluded.html.

More Penshurst

Some bits and bobs from our recent visit to Penshurst Place, near Tunbridge Wells.

Front

Back

A playground fad which has swept the primary schools of Tunbridge Wells. Cards with come with some particular sort of confectionary and which are collected and swapped. It seems that one of these fads lasts around a year before it fades away in the face of the next one. I have failed to find out what confectionary they come from, but perhaps quality time at reference 1 would do the business.

Cards snapped on the tables outside the café set up in one of the outhouses of the main house. Not National Trust, but much the same sort of format as Polesden Lacey, with the variation that we were driven outside by the noise inside, presumably put on to keep the young people working the place on-side.

I must make enquiries about whether these cards have reached Stamford Green, here in Epsom.

Mistletoe

Mistletoe infestations have reached Kent. A danger to small boys in that when in the vicinity of one they are apt to be grabbed by older female relatives for hugs and worse.

PS: in one of the suburban roads just to the north east of Mount Ephraim, I am reasonably sure that I saw a hawk of some sort sitting in the top of a large old tree in someone's back garden. Not the sort of thing that one expects here in Epsom. Furthermore, we were also accosted by a friendly, mixed-age team from the women's equality party, canvassing for the upcoming local elections. Something else that one does not expect here in Epsom.

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

Reference 2: http://www.penshurstplace.com/. Owned by Philip Sidney, 2nd Viscount De L'Isle, Her Majesty's Lord-Lieutenant of Kent, proud to be free of the National Trust, but is associated with the RHS, an association which helped to get me in for free.

Reference 3: http://www.womensequality.org.uk/tunbridgewells.

Group search key: tba.

Image search

We came across this handsome pond last weekend, at Penshurst Place in Kent.

White flowers which I felt sure were the same as the ones we had once seen in a pond near Newbridge near Ashburton in Devon. However, I did not think to look for a ticket on the pond in Kent.

This afternoon, search of the blog archive for white flowers and new bridges failed, possibly because I spelt Newbridge as two words, but more probably because I was too in too much of a hurry glancing through the hits, easily done with the hits coming as months rather than as posts.

Next up, Bing turns up a couple of pictures of what are probably the right plant, but I could not turn up any label for them. Then Google image search, ditto. Then Google regular turns up a picture which does have a label, Aponogeton distyachos, Water Hawthorn or Water Hyacinth. From where I get to the RHS site which has a picture of same with the right sort of leaves, that is to say with rounded rather than with pointed ends. And hyacinth gets me to the relevant blog entry, from April 2015, at reference 1.

So search works eventually.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/botanical-walk.html.

Group search key: tba.

A new sort of lie detector

Reference 1 was about one aspect of the fact that inner thought in words is apt to activate the vocal apparatus, even if that activation does not go so far as to get the lips and mouth moving, and towards the end of the post I wondered about interesting experiments.

I now learn from an advertisement in the Kurzweil Newsletter that someone in the US has indeed been doing interesting experiments and has developed, with his colleagues, a wearable electrical device which can pick up your inner thoughts from the invisible twitchings of the muscles of your lower jaw. With one aspect of this trick being that there is less electrical noise in the jaw than there is in the brain, less of the stuff which clutters up and confuses the signals picked up by an EEG machine.

A device which is some way off being able to capture all the inner thoughts of some person picked off the streets, it does not, for example, do Pashto, but it does demonstrate proof of concept.

Now while there are suggestions, for example at reference 3, that is possible to block this device by voluntary action, it strikes me that it might be a useful addition to the range of lie detectors deployed by police (and other) forces. The average bad guy might be able to keep his mouth shut, but he might not be able to shut his brain down, to shut down his inner thoughts. So if you interrogate him while he is wearing the device, maybe you would learn some interesting stuff.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/on-saying-cat-again.html.

Reference 2: AlterEgo: A Personalized Wearable Silent Speech Interface - Arnav Kapur, Shreyas Kapur, Pattie Maes – 2018.

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

Park works

A rare stroll through Long Grove Park this morning, to find a gang of workmen hard at work at something complicated next to the skate board park. Something which involved some expensive looking metalwork. It also involved what appeared to be a substantial new path, not to say road, over the park and through a hole in the fence into the nearly new Southfield Park Primary School.

Maybe all the new classrooms, added after the first building campaign, have eaten up all the playground within the fence, and the school now finds that it needs to colonise a bit of the adjacent park.

PS: before I came across the gang, I had come across a small caravan parked on the unnamed cul-de-sac running down from Chertsey Lane and providing pedestrian access to Christchurch road. A rather squalid looking dwelling which will, no doubt, be chucking its rubbish over the fence into the otherwise green and pleasant bit of field. Gmaps 51.335776, -0.287275. Which left me wondering what redress one would have if such a person decided to park up in our green and pleasant road? Are there by-laws about living in caravans parked on suburban roads, in the way of the by-laws about overnight camping in seaside car parks?  As I recall, the camper van which parked up in Blenheim Road a couple of years ago was there for months. See, for example, references 1 and 2.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/collectives.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/a-new-sort-of-rubbish-1.html.

Progress report

Getting on for a month ago, I noticed the arrival of two sequoiadendron giganteum's in Longmead Road.

Yesterday, I noticed that while they have not been attacked by bipeds, they are both showing signs of stress, despite the recent rain, which I would have thought they would have liked. So not off to a flying start.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/sequoiadendron-giganteum-in-focus.html.

Trolley 146

A trolley from Wilkinson's, a rare capture. Which is odd as, given the sort of people who make up most of their clientèle, one would have expected more.

This one was clean & tidy enough, but it did look as if it had been outside for quite a while. Certain amount of white fuzz on the wire, which I take to be oxidization.

Returned it to the stack to find that it was the wrong size. Was it the wrong branch of Wilko's? Had it been away so long that they had changed their trolleys in the meantime?  I thought to let the young man on the customer service desk know about this, but when he eventually got off the phone, I don't think he appreciated what the problem was. Just a matter of being polite to some old buffer banging on about something. Then his phone went again, so I let it go at that. Their problem!

Checking the archive, I found that this was the second trolley from Wilkinson's, with the first having been found in the autumn of 2016 in Manor Green Road, near 100 trolleys ago. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/trolley-51.html.

Succession planning

I have watched with interest while the long time manager at Arsenal Football Club has finally, at the grand old age of 68, cranked himself to announce his retirement at the end of the current season.

No doubt there will be problems, as there were when the long time manager at Manchester United finally chucked it in.

I associate to the mess you get when long serving dictators in banana republics start to lose their grip. But maybe, given the huge sums of money involved and the business background of most of the owners, modern succession planning will start to move in. Maybe rules about five year contracts, renewable once, after the fashion of presidents in the US.

Will we ever get to know what Wenger does in his retirement? Will he manage the transition from a life which has been devoted to football, obsessed with football? Will he take up water colour painting on the quiet, in the way of at least one tough-guy film actor from California? Or translating Zola, like the journalist in 'Ink' who wanted a break at weekends from the rough trade?

PS: perhaps not Zola, given that Wenger is French. But having lived in England for a long time, he could have a stab at George Eliot or Joseph Conrad.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/ink.html.

Mould

Brick compost bin in Epsom

Two tone dog vomit mold reappeared in the compost bin at the bottom of the garden this morning. The debris it is growing on is not locusts or anything like that, rather the pussy bits from a pussy willow which hangs over the back garden.

Properly, according to reference 2, dog vomit slime mold.

Something I felt sure that I had reported and illustrated since the notice at reference 1, near ten years ago, but first search fails to turn anything up, despite the search term 'dog vomit' being simple and clear enough. While second search, a little later, for 'mold' turns up reference 3. Given that 'vomit' finds it now, why it failed to show up first time around is beyond me.

On the other hand, some of the pictures turned up by Bing look very like the stuff we saw out on Holne Moor, a place which sees plenty of rain and mist, on the edge of Dartmoor, a year or so ago. Clumps of bright yellow mould clinging to twigs in gorse bushes. Not like today's mold at all. The sort of thing that might have been included at reference 4, but as far as I can make out, was not. On the other hand, inspection of the archive turns up the snap below, from 20th October last year.

A very modest specimen from Holne Moor

PS 1: note confusion of mould and mold. Wikipedia seems confident that the latter is correct in the present context. While OED appears to allow both, but has its substantive - several columns worth - at mould, with just a stub at mold.

PS 2: 24 hours later, that is to say Wednesday morning: both now ripened to a pleasant, mottled brown. Rather like something flat which has been lightly baked.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=dog+vomit+mould.

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

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/an-old-friend.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/in-and-around-holne-moor.html.

Pad

In course of the recent outing to Marylebone, the discussion turned to the price of flats in the area. An area which looked like a good place to have a flat, with good access to Marylebone High Street, Regents Park, Wigmore Hall and other attractions. Could we trade a modest suburban house in Epsom for one?

Shortly after that, we passed an estate agent offering a large, smart looking flat for £1.4m, quite a lot more than our house would fetch, but not beyond imagining. And shortly after that, I passed the block of flats in question, in Luxborough Street, right up against the side of the University of Westminster. And snap notwithstanding, they did not look nearly as smart outside as the estate agent pictures were inside. Did the block start its life as part of the Peabody Estate, or something of that sort?

Bottom line: we shall stay in Epsom!

Group search key: bsb.

Catching crims

I am now doing volume XXII of the standard edition of Maigret, in which Simenon continues to prompt pondering about the best way to organise the catching of criminals, a pondering first noticed in the story noticed at reference 1.

When I was young, earnest young people often talked about the merits of the examining magistrate system in France, with the examining magistrate said to have a less adversarial approach than our police. To keep an open mind about how a crime had been committed for longer, not so likely to lock onto a likely suspect, never to let go. Talk of this being the result of the French using Roman law as put together in the Code Napoléon, with Napoléon being considered to be rather more than a general who was both very successful and very good at getting people killed.

Simenon, as he and his creation Maigret get older, seems to regret the passing of the days when the branch of the police to which Maigret belonged, the Police Judiciaire, took charge of important criminal investigations, certainly in the Paris area, and carried them through to the end, an end preferably involving the confessions of the criminals. The juges d'instruction - that is to say the examining magistrates - and the Parquet - that is to say the public prosecutors and the judiciary - were around but usually stayed in the background, only getting involved in cases which were either very important, in the public eye (that is to say in the Sunday newspapers) or involving members of the upper classes.

By Volume XXII, the juges d'instruction and the Parquet are poking their noses into everything and the role of senior policemen like Maigret is much diminished. Part of Simenon's position here seems to be class envy. The Maigrets are much more men of the people, while the juges, and particularly the Parquet, wear the old school tie. They look after their own and don't really know or understand the lives of ordinary people or of ordinary criminals. The other part is the fact that the Maigrets have spent a good part of their working life tramping around the haunts and homes of ordinary people. They are much closer to the criminals they are chasing and there is some degree of mutual respect and understanding. They are also much better at snuffling them out.

On the down side, while, as I have mentioned before, there are few if any miscarriages of justice in Maigret's world, there is, at least in the early volumes, plenty of talk of fairly aggressive methods, of passages à tabac - that is to say beatings or perhaps kickings - and fairly aggressive, protracted interrogations, perhaps involving relays of policemen and perhaps lasting many hours. Not the sort of thing expected of police here in the UK...

Another down side, is that in the days of the young Maigret, there seemed to be a very large number of policemen on the ground, on the beat as we would say. And boots (the souliers à clous of the mémoires) on the ground are expensive.

Wikipedia suggests this morning at reference 2 that the examining magistrate system is on the retreat, having been abandoned in several European countries and watered down in its French bastion.

While here in the UK, there has been some swinging of the pendulum regarding the proper relationship between police and prosecutors, once thought to be much too cosy and now thought to be much too remote, or at least it was during my time at the Home Office.

All very difficult, and while there are class and race angles on which party politics are needed, really a matter of organisation, management and control. Probably not matters in which our elected leaders (and opposition leaders), let along our media, are likely to take much interest. They are content just to pay fat fees to management consultants from the likes of Price Waterhouse. Although, to be fair, I dare say these matters do get a reasonable airing in academia.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/les-memoires-de-maigret.html.

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

Reference 3: http://www.vie-publique.fr/. A good source on public institutions in France.

Riesling glass

Prompted by the glass snapped left, I mentioned earlier today, that it was proper in parts foreign, perhaps a café in Brussels, to serve Reisling in fancy glasses with fancy stems, perhaps with a touch of green about them.

Subsequent checking with Bing failed to confirm anything of the sort. Bing even went so far as to turn up the people at reference 1, who sell expensive glasses for particular sorts of wines and grapes, and whose glass for Riesling, while handsome looking, is not what you would call fancy at all.

What I can't do is turn up the corporate web site for these people and the best that I can do is the Wikipedia entry which tells me that they are Austrian/Bohemian and have been going since the middle of the eighteenth century.

PS: note the napkin masquerading as my handkerchief, middle right.

Reference 1: https://www.riedel.com/en-gb.

Group search key: bsb.

Too posh to polish

The very dirty roof on a Bentley parked up in Albemarle Street, snapped on the way to our last visit to the Royal Institution (noticed at reference 1).

A roof which had collected quite a bit of dust, dirt and droppings. Perhaps it had been parked in one of the leafy squares of London. But it struck me as odd that someone who cared enough about cars to have one of these - with the price of such a car buying many thousands of rides in the taxis which ply the crowded roads of London - would not care enough to have the chauffeur keep it clean. Perhaps someone who had not grown up in the suburbia of the 1950's and 1960's when everyone who was anyone spent most Sunday mornings polishing their Ford Cortina (or whatever).

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/gravitational-waves.html.

Trolley 145

We spotted these two trolleys from Waitrose, up against the railings across the road from the Marquis of Granby, when we drove past them around 1930 yesterday (Sunday).

The Waitrose store is only a couple of hundred yards away, and it is a fair bet that quite a few people from the Chase estate passed them on their way to Waitrose in the course of the morning (Monday). But with no-one thinking to return them until I came along. Presumably the sort of people who think that these sorts of jobs are down to someone else, whoever this anonymous someone else might be. Perhaps the sort of people who would leave litter in the roads outside their houses on the grounds that it was not their job to deal with it: that's what we pay the council for. Probably forgetting that we do not pay councils very much at all these days.

My reward was that taking the trolleys back into Ashley Centre, where my GP surgery is to be found, along with Waitrose, reminded me that I had not dropped my prescription off, despite this being the primary objective of my morning walk. Without the trolleys it is quite likely that I would not have remembered before BH checked up when I got home.

Continuing in the tradition of reference 1, only scored as one trolley, as the two trolleys were tethered the whole time.

PS: I learned in the course of my first visit to Waitrose of the day, that tinned crab meat now comes from Vietnam, with John West seeming to have withdrawn from the market. Described as free swimming crab, which prompts the cynical thought that this means that it is not the sort of crab that one would care to eat if one knew what it looked like. Not the sort of crab dispensed on the Isle of Wight at all.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/trolley-142.html.

Trolley 144

Captured this morning on the path running from the south western end of West Street to the back of Sainsbury's. To where it was returned.

Stack of trolleys of this size was running very low and the car park looked very full. This being around 1100 on a Monday morning.

Bullingdon

It being, at last, a fine summer's day, I decided it was time for another go on the Bullingdons. It seemed like a long time and I wondered whether it was the first time this year, although inspection revealed four hops in January and one each in February and March. I almost did not bother, so perhaps the Bullingdon era is coming to an end.

It has taken too long to find out exactly how long it has been, but I have tracked down evidence of use as far back as 2011, at reference 1, around a year after the scheme started in 2010.

So the first hop of 22 minutes 52 seconds took me from the ramp at Waterloo to one of the last two spots at the stand opposite Broadcasting House. On the way taking in a small demonstration at the bottom of the steps and Waterloo and a lot of very stationary traffic at th northern end of Waterloo Bridge. I learned afterwards that this was all to do with some Commonwealth flavoured demonstration, but I never did learn exactly what flavour. Windrush? Modi?

Some civil disobedience on the part of the cycle traffic, both holiday makers and regulars. Motor traffic as well behaved vis-à-vis cyclists as usual, certainly in so far as it affected me.

Strolled past the usual crop of rather miscellaneous people waiting outside the Consulate General of Portugal into the Langham for a spot of their house white, with biscuits. Served in fancy glasses with fancy stems, de rigueur, as I recall, in parts foreign. And where I almost mistook the small napkins they dish out with their drinks for one of my own handkerchiefs, dropped. There was also an interesting line in spherical floral displays, two of them, maybe as much as a yard in diameter, erected on stands flanking the entrance. I did not like to inspect them too closely, but a casual brushing with the fingers revealed the pink roses to be soft, so at the very least, a higher grade of artificial flowers.

The draw at the Wigmore Hall was the Brahms Piano Quartet No.1, first heard in its orchestral version around five years ago, an event noticed at reference 3. With the only recorded visit to the Britten Sinfonia being noticed at reference 2. An outfit which is based in Cambridge and look to perform regularly at the West Road concert hall there, a place I used to visit reasonably regularly in the days when my brother used to do Mozart piano concertos there. With this very concert having been given there the day before this one - not to mention Norwich on the Friday. Another group which likes to get some mileage out of its rehearsal time. Maybe next year a proper tour?

But first we got a new work by Caroline Shaw, called the thousandth orange, rather sparse in texture but none the worse for that. Nor for having passed on the pre-concert talk about it - another A talking to B job, as mentioned at reference 4. In this case Caroline Shaw talking to Kate Kennedy, the Weinrebe Research Fellow in Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, no less. But the Brahms was a bit patchy, at least for me: not its best day. There were plenty of good bits, but sometimes they seemed to lose it, particularly in the loud bits, when all four instruments were at it.

Out to the Persian restaurant in New Cavendish Street, visited and liked once before, a couple of years ago and noticed at reference 7. Celebrated the fine weather by taking luncheon al-fresco. Some sort of grilled lamb with two-tone rice and salad in my case, very good (after discarding some small green peppers which were far too hot for me). Followed by what amounted to the Dorset Apple Cake with a foreign name. Also very good. For a change, fizzy water with my glass of white.

Second Bullingdon from Westminster University to Waterloo Station 3, just slipping in under the free ride bar at 29 minutes and 58 seconds. Euston Road, Woburn Place, down to the Aldwych and over the bridge. Lots of traffic and probably not the shortage route, but a route which I knew and did not have to think about. Lots of traffic. Probably a good thing that I did not know how close I was running it at the time, or I might have been tempted to try too hard.

PS: I am reasonably industrious & conscientious about responding to requests for feedback, but there is an awful lot of it these days. You only have to buy a bottle of water to get an email asking about your experience. So on this occasion, I declined to complete the questionnaire of four A4 sides from the Sinfonia. And I forgot to mention, that like that other Cambridge based outfit, the Endellions, they opted to do their own programme. From which one deduces that they hired the hall rather than the hall hiring them, both options being available.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=albert+cathedral.

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

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/adaptations.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/gravitational-waves.html.

Reference 5: http://drkatekennedy.co.uk/.

Reference 6: http://www.galleriarestaurant.co.uk/.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/more-tuition.html.

Group search key: bsb.

Tunbridge tipple

Chanced across an establishment called 'The Secret Cellar' yesterday afternoon, in Church Road of Tunbridge Wells, one of the dying breed of independent off-licenses. While the church for which the street was named had been converted into what looked like a thriving theatre operation. Sadly, access to the nave, now the auditorium, was denied, so we were not able to see what had been done to it.

The off-license was well stocked, with the stock still including some respectable cigars, although the current rules say that there have to be sheets of brown paper hiding the actual cigars from sensitive eyes. Run by a youngish man who either knew his wine or could think on his feet as he knew all about the Sylvaner (as at reference 1) once being a common choice in Luxembourg cafés. Didn't have any in just presently, but I settled for a Riesling from one Louis Guntrum. An operation which reference 2 tells me is now at the 11th generation of Guntrums.

And at the back a couple of bottles of a new-to-me Greco di Tufo from Vesevo, apparently Italian for Vesuvio. Google did not turn up a website but, once it had corrected my spelling, it turned up plenty of people who could sell me the stuff. I also learn that 'this is a lovely appealing summer wine that is refreshing yet complex. Lemon-gold in colour with an intense, aromatic ...'. We shall see.

The shop was just shutting at 1800 and when I queried not going for the evening carry-out trade, the youngish man explained that he once done an evening wine bar trade, but not just presently, six days a week being enough for him, never mind any nights. He also explained that the huge bottles of red wine for sale in Hedonism (in Davies Street) would probably be moved about the dining (or drinking) room on a special, hydraulically enabled trolley, something like the sort of jack they use for cars in garages. I suppose that if you can both afford and have a use for a bottle of wine of that size from that sort of shop, you can probably afford the jack too.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/cheese.html.

Reference 2: http://www.guntrum.de/english/home/welcome/.

Reference 3: http://www.trinitytheatre.net/.

Group search key: tba.

Making a statement

This morning I have made a small statement about the unfortunate concomitants of platforms like Facebook. That is to say, being neither a politician nor a celebrity, I do not feel that I have to play these particular games and I have deleted my Facebook account. A deletion which will become irrevocable in 14 days. For good measure, I have deactivated my Nextdoor account - deletion not seeming to be an option there.

Two platforms of which I used to make very modest use, but with which I can well manage without.

Cake

Despite muttering about date cakes from time to time, it seems that I have not actually made one since the summer of 2013, noticed at reference 1. Since then, the dates have been displaced by dundees, that is to say Dundee cakes. This despite the fact that we can now, once again, buy brick dates for cooking, from Grape Tree.

But yesterday, in the intervals of baking the bread, thought to do a date cake, settling for the recipe in the ancient Whitworths recipe book.

In the event, I fell into my usual error of skim reading, rather than reading, with the first result that I creamed the butter into most of the flour and sugar, rather than just the sugar, with such subtleties being potentially destructive. In this case, the mixture was rather wetter than I was expecting, although it tasted fine. Second result that I did not work out that they meant for the cake to be cooked as a tray bake, rather than in a round cake tin. Which might have meant that the cake would be rather under cooked.

As it turned out, not a fluffy cake, with some sinking of the walnuts (just about visible in the snap above), but entirely acceptable. I think next time, if I remember, I will try the tray bake but cut down on the cooking.

PS: yet another quirk of aging memory was that I had no recollection of soaking the dates in hot water, despite it clearly having been an issue back in 2013. As far as I am concerned, a rather unusual proceeding which I would have thought that I would have remembered.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/more-cake.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/cake.html.

Week four

The buds of the florets now starting to separate. No sign of a second inflorescence.

Group search key: tfc.

Cheese

Last week back to La Fromagerie of Marylebone for a spot of Emmenthal. The young lady there was a little apologetic in that she only had French, but that looked well enough. Lots of big holes which I think a good sign.

We have now given it a go with yesterday's bread, still fresh, and found it very good. Maybe good for a couple more days at the present rate of consumption.

A pale cheese, rather palid in this early evening light with the Lumia 630. Time to chase up the people at O2 about the 950 - who said they could sort it out for £25, which seemed very reasonable. Except that was a fortnight or so ago.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/sick-bay.html.

Gravitational waves

Being the story of the discovery of gravitational waves, the existence of which had long been predicted by the theory of relativity, as told by Sheila Rowan teamed up with a journalist from Nature, at the Royal Institution. I did look for the journalist at reference 1, but far too elaborate a site without more to go on. Sheila Rowan being easier to find as a director of the Institute for Gravitational Research at the University of Glasgow and moonlighting as Chief Scientific Adviser for the devolved administration in Edinburgh, thus proving that Glasgow people can talk to Edinburgh people without necessarily getting into a fight. Perhaps things have moved on since I used to travel north on a reasonably regular basis.

Started off in the usual way with train and tube to Green Park. No offers of seats on the tube, but there was a gentleman sporting a bracelet which appeared to have been made from a short length of nicely polished motor bicycle chain.

Quick glass of 'Quickie' at the Goat, a cheeky, young, white wine from Australia, a wine which I am sure I have mentioned before but which search fails to turn up this morning.

Historic brown wood desk missing, the one which Maxwell and Faraday had stood at in their time, reminding me of my disappointment when I first learned that it moved. Fullish house for gravity, clearly a better pull than teeth had been at reference 2. The new director, first seen last time around, acted as MC. He did not do much, but managed to give the impression that he had a good opinion of himself and that he liked the sound of his own voice. Two youngish boys near us, both rather badly behaved in the sense that they could not sit still, despite at least one of them clearly being quite clever. And the other may have had one of the currently fashionable behavioral disorders. Took me quite a while to count the occupants of the bank of seats opposite, perhaps because there were gaps which confused the count, but ended up fairly convinced that it was 61, with 2 more arriving late.

Moving onto the session proper, I might say that I do not usually care for the 'A talking to B' format, but on this occasion it worked reasonably well. Plus, being two ladies, more time was given to human affairs, at the expense of scientific affairs, that is to say the LIGO at reference 3. I offer various snippets.

Hunting the gravitational wave was a big endeavor, involving thousands of people, and a small number of very serious instruments, maybe with arms which were a mile long. Large cubes of very fancy glass suspended on threads of silica, with microscopic wobbles of the cubes being the mark of the wave. But it took a long time to bring the instruments up to the mark and the team leaders had to put a lot of effort into persuading the holders of the various public purses on-message.

I associated to the scanners of neurologists, another endeavor yielding vast amounts of signal and noise, all mixed up, and requiring all kinds of computing, mathematical and statistical trickery to get at the signal.

The signals in question being what you get when a couple of black holes or a couple of neutron stars spiral into each other, an annihilating collision. Events which seem to happen once a week or so, once you know how to look. Waves which head for us at the speed of light, entirely undisturbed by interstellar dust, dark matter or anything else.

Scientists can be into secrecy and it seems that when the team, the thousands of people, got wind of the first gravitational wave, they were all sworn to secrecy until the wave had been properly nailed down and confirmed. They wanted to make a splash with it, rather than having it leak out, and possibly having to be denied. In this rather like government statisticians who are similarly careful with important, market sensitive statistics.

Then all three thousand of them get to have their names on the papers in which the work was published. A democratic arrangement which we had heard about before at the Institution, but one which rather changes the meaning of the word 'publications' when applied to an individual. Do they list alphabetically in the way of some cast lists for shows or are the names effectively ranked by their order? I have come across phrases like 'lead author' and 'corresponding author'.

It seems that the instruments can detect a wave, but with one of them you cannot do direction. But with two of them at opposite corners of the US, you can do something, rather like ears being on opposite sides of the head. Perhaps more important, if two instruments both detect a wave at the same time, much more likely that you are looking at signal rather than noise.

One Ferrari and several Bentleys out in the street afterwards.

Wound up with another glass of white at the Rifleman in Epsom, while the chap I was with downed a couple of glasses of 'Naked Lady' from the people at reference 4, to complement my earlier quickie from Australia. Possibly named for the large naked ladies in York House gardens, by the river at Twickenham. Which house was named, according to Wikipedia, for some wealthy farmers called Yorke, rather than for any Duke of York. Furthemore, given that both public houses were Greene King operations and that the landlord of the Rifleman took a keen interest in the matter, we look forward to both quickie and naked lady for our next visit. Opposite which, as it happens, we have Epsom's one and only strip club.

Reference 1: https://www.nature.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/dental-affairs.html.

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

Reference 4: http://twickenham-fine-ales.co.uk/.

Review

Randall Munroe’s dress

I have already commented on the use of a pseudo-quote from Dostoyevsky in reference 1 at reference 2.

I now move onto more substantive matters.
For me a slightly irritating book, well padded out with animal stories – not to mention shaggy dog stories – which only bear in a marginal way on the advertised subject – what it is like to be a dog. But there is some good stuff and there is enough to convince me that Nagel’s famous essay (references 5 and 6) about (not) knowing what it was like to be a bat was unduly pessimistic and that we might well learn what it is like to be a dog, maybe even what it is like to be a bat.

So, in between the stories, we are told of interesting tests and experiments with dogs and sealions, with some of them involving the scanning of the brains of live animals, some of them the scanning those of long dead animals. Dogs, it seems, can often be trained to keep still in an MRI scanner, no mean achievement given the amount of noise that the things make.

Noting that animals, mammals even, dogs even, vary a good deal in their ability to deal with the sort of tests we routinely administer to children. So, for example, most dogs will follow the pointing of a finger while most monkeys will not. A lot of animals can do the A-not-B test of reference 7, while elephants, despite their large brains, cannot.

One of the objectives of this work was to try and find the regions of dog brain which were activated in the course of various cognitive tests, for example the A-not-B test just mentioned. Were dog brains much like human brains in so far as this sort of thing went? With the not unreasonable thought being that the more human-comparable neural activity arising from higher grade behaviours that you could find in dogs, the more likely it was that being a dog was comparable to being a human.

There was some discussion of what it is that animals see with their eyes. With Berns explaining that some animals – like frogs – use their eyes in ways which do not involve building a picture of the world at large, in the way that we do, at all. Much lower level stuff, with much more direct connections between the eyes which see things and the muscles which do things.

There was an allegation that dogs do not get Alzheimer’s. Which I believe to be false, another example of the sloppiness noticed at reference 2.

There were a number of helpful tutorials. For example, on scanners and scanning. On why we have brains at all. On why they are as big as they are.

Quite a lot on domoic acid poisoning, of which there have been outbreaks affecting both people and sealions and which might be the result of agricultural runoff promoting the wrong sort of plankton or the wrong sort of algae.

It is possible to get sealions to dance; that is to say to get them to bob up and down to a beat and, within reason, to change the bobbing appropriately when the beat changes.

It is possible to teach dogs lots of words, although there is some dispute about what exactly they can then do with them.

The book prompted a variety of interesting digressions. Into the evolution of self-control and cylinder experiments with hundreds of animals. See reference 8. Into the strange appearance of Randall Munroe’s dress. Into the work of Jay & Maureen Neitz on colour vision.

The book peters out after around 180 of the 260 pages, leaving aside acknowledgements, notes and index. Peters out in tales of strange animals and a plea for the rights of all the animals presently used in teaching and in research – which does not add much to the argument, but may well please animal lovers.

There is also a more serious point. What difference does it makes to the rights of animals if we come to know that they are conscious, at least after a fashion? That they know pain and fear in much the same way as we do? With it seeming quite likely that at least some animals are so conscious; perhaps the learned border collie who features in references 3 and 4.

References

Reference 1: What it's like to be a dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience - Gregory Berns – 2017. With the book supported by reference 9.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/a-little-sloppy.html.

Reference 3: Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents - John W. Pilley, Alliston K. Reid – 2011.

Reference 4: http://www.chaserthebordercollie.com/.

Reference 5: What is it like to be a bat? – Thomas Nagel – 1974.

Reference 6: https://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-not-B_error.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/cylinder-test-experiment.html.

Reference 9: http://gregoryberns.com/.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story.

OneDrive

OneDrive has been fairly well behaved of late and it is more than a year since I felt the need to moan at reference 1.

But the last two days have been a OneDrive pain, burning up maybe half a day all told, maybe more.

The trouble was caused by attempting to bring a laptop back into service which had not been used for a couple of months. Wired it into the router with an ethernet cable - which I thought might speed things up - and turned it on. Waited half a day or so while BT (Cloud) and Microsoft (OneDrive) did their synchronisation and update stuff, probably in competition. When they finally ground to a halt, BT (Cloud) announced that all was well, while Microsoft (OneDrive) announced that it had been unable to deal with 20 or so files.

All very puzzling, but it eventually turned out that OneDrive files which had been present when the laptop was last used but which had since been deleted, had been reinstated. OneDrive files which had been present when the laptop was last used but which had since been updated elsewhere, had been errored. The old file, decorated with a red spot in Windows Explorer, stayed on the laptop. And if one was not careful the old file got copied around OneDrive generally, wiping out the subsequent updates. And just to keep me on my toes, there were a dozen or so extra files with the word 'Mobile' tagged onto their names, files which I shall probably end up deleting.

Hard to be sure, but I don't think this is how it used to work. I think that when OneDrive Central was presented with a device that it hadn't seen for a while, it just copied down anything that was either absent on that device or which was present but had an earlier date than the one it had on its copy. Copy down new and amended files. Delete deleted files. Which arrangements suited me just fine.

As it is, I have had to mess about correcting the 20 or so files by hand, correction which is both tedious and error prone. Luckily, not being a very trusting sort of chap, I had taken a copy of everything before getting the laptop down from the roof.

Not what I pay monthly subscriptions to these people for at all. Productivity tools are supposed to be productive. Perhaps I shall revert to the old ways of doing things, when it was all under one's own control and one was not relying on other peoples' undocumented and so unreliable algorithms. In the meantime, it remains a mystery why Microsoft are not able to publish a proper guide to, proper documentation of OneDrive, seeming to rely instead on chatter on user forums to occupy that space. Maybe the cost of proper documentation would make a nasty dent in their bottom line.

PS: with all of this having been compounded by sundry internet connection problems on the returning laptop, with the connection needing to be poked at regular intervals.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/onedrive.html.

Fake 33

Included in the roll of fake honour on two counts.

First, we have the tin lid of the jam pot masquerading as a bit of cloth cut out of an old check tablecloth and held on with a rubber band. As it  happens we have the green version of this very check on our own table.

I ought to say that we did not use to go to this amount of bother when I was young, leaving that to the exhibiting ladies of the WI. We just used rounds of cellophane, from a packet supplied by the kitchen department in the basement of Eaden Lilley - which, according to Wikipedia may still live on in St. Ives.

Second, we have the label masquerading as something which Mummy actually wrote out and stuck on with her own fair hand, when quite clearly it has been mass produced, untouched by human hand, Mummy's or anyone else's.

Public art

Churches seem to specialise in commissioning really ugly works of art, with the sculpture to the right of the snap being just one example. Although to be fair, the thing to the left is not that hot either.

St. Pancras church, of Upper Woburn Place, built to much the same design as the church built at much the same time outside Waterloo Station. Big classical porticos both.

Group search key: bca.

Rising Sun

A pub which, despite the grand exterior, was once rather dingy and shabby, on the corner of Euston Road and Chalton Street. Known at that time as the Rising Sun. The place where I learned to play bar billiards in my first year at the London School of Economics, at that time taking in undergraduates.

A game which once held fond memories for me, probably because I could play after a fashion, something I never managed with real billiards, or even pool.

Group search key: bca.

Stopcock

This being phase 3a of the new main cold water stopcock project. Main contractor: British Gas. Principal sub-contractor: Dyno.

Otherwise the part of the job where I replace the roof of the channel down the side of the ceramic tray of the down stairs shower. The channel which accommodates the cold water intake and which is full of polystyrene widgets against the cold. The roof which had not been moved for 25 years and had got stuck. That is to say that I was unable to move one of the two screws holding it in place and was reduced to demolition. Maybe if I had moved the screws every five years or so, just to keep them sweet.

Luckily I had a suitable piece of brown wood, a relic of a piece of north London brown wood furniture, possibly originally made in one of the factories down the Lea Valley. West African mahogany which really is brown, rather than the rather more common stained pine.

A reasonably complicated shape, but it is now, having been cut into place, swinging in the breeze while the (very smelly) undercoat dries. Its blue predecessor is visible behind.

By my current standards, a reasonably major operation, taking up a good part of the morning.

Crane

The real reason for visiting Kings Place was the tip-off that there was going to be a very fine crane in action up York Way that Saturday morning.

Hopefully this snap, taken in very bright sunlight, gives some idea. Possibly one of those from Liebherr at reference 1. Do I have to go back to the antique crane noticed towards the end of the post at reference 2 to get a crane which is made in the UK?

With just the one snap, one had to choose whether to go for the jib or the cab and I settled for the jib. Maybe I should have stretched to two snaps for the better flavour.

Reference 1: https://www.southerncranes.co.uk/mobile-plus-80.php.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/pensioners-outing.html.

Group search key: bca.