First communion

The butcher in Manor Green Road happening to have a likely looking pack of oxtail earlier in the week, this afternoon we took our first oxtail of the season, that is to say since March, an occasion noticed at reference 1.

More or less the same drill. Two large onions coarsely chopped into the bottom of the dish. Place the oxtail on top: two large, three medium and made up to about a kilo and a quarter with some small pieces. Put lid on. Cook for 10 hours at 100C. Basted and drained at the 7 hour mark. Basted again at the 9 hour mark. And again 15 minutes before the off, at which point it was drained for the last time.

Meantime cook 5 ounces of Tesco's easy cook brown rice, a rice with a good deal more husk left on it than they do at Sainsbury's. Takes half an hour to cook rather than ten minutes, but rather good. Much more like the stuff we used to get from Neal's Yard forty years ago, when they operated out of a real warehouse, with sacks, left over from the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, at that time not long closed.

And cook around a pound of white cabbage, a change from the usual crinkly cabbage.

Taken with the wine given us by the people at Majestic, as per reference 2. A touch better than our usual stuff. And according to the manufacturers website: 'the picturesque Taylors Pass Vineyard is located on the north bank of the meandering Awatere River in Marlborough. With soils ranging from silt over gravels to stony gravels, the vineyard consistently produces ripe and full flavoured fruit. The nose offers aromatics of ripe gooseberry, lime, passionfruit and grapefruit, whilst the palate is complex and layered with ripe tropical fruit and subtle minerality, typical of the Awatere Valley. This wine is gently structured with acidity providing balance and length. The wine will gain further texture with short term bottle age'. Hmmm.

Plus there must be something wrong with my palette. Several times recently we have drunk wine described as dry, as this one is, which does not taste at all dry to me, more rich and fruity. I think I would know that it was white blindfold, but not dry. Is my failing that I do not care to drink white wine cold?

Wine flannel aside, all very good, but given the very modest amount of water and fat drained off during the proceedings, I think I should, on this occasion anyway, have added a little water to the oxtail at the outset, maybe half a pint. The product would have been a little softer.

Dessert in the form of late raspberries. OK, but very much end of season. Not much punch left in them.

Not a cheap meal at all, with the oxtail coming in at around £15, with just a couple of the small pieces left to snack on later this evening. We could probably have had steak for that - not that either of us are much good at cooking the stuff. Partly because we don't do it very often - not for years in fact - but also because we do not have a proper grill. A proper, full strength gas grill with a proper volume control.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/oxtail-four.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/irritation.html.

Trolley 172

Captured at the same place as trolley 163, a capture noticed at reference 1.

Not much left of the building with yellow steel, behind the black hoarding, off snap to the left, with the most conspicuous remain being a tall slice of stair and lift well. Presumably the strongest part of the building.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/trolley-163.html.

Jumping to conclusions

This morning, I came across a phrase, from the beginning of a case in Maigret (reference 1), when everything is still something of a muddle, 'Un clou chasse l'autre' (page 250), which I read to mean one clue coming in fast after another, all something of a muddle indeed. Aha, I thought. The French 'clou' for nail is clearly the origin of our word 'clue'.

I get some support for this from Larousse, which tells me of various meanings and uses for the word. Lines of nails, for example, were used to mark crossings on roads (clouté) before the invention of white lines. One supposes that one used rather large nails for this purpose and that one was then able to follow the line of nails. By extension, one followed one clue to the next. But no support from Littré.

Not to be put off so easily, I turn to OED, in which I read that 'clue' is a corruption of 'clew', a very old word, not French at all, meaning, among lots of other things, the ball of thread with which one finds one's way out of the labyrinth. Hence Agatha's sort of clue and nothing whatsoever to do with nails.

Perhaps as a consolation prize I can claim some convergent evolution? That Simenon, who probably knew the English word, was happy to use the French word with a similar intent?

Reference 1: Le Voleur de Maigret - Simenon - 1966 - Volume XXIV of the collected works.

Kilogram

Last week back to the Royal Institution to hear about redefining the kilogram from Michael de Podesta of the National Physical Laboratory.

Evening started with a puzzle about cold legs, in the form of a young lady in a hurry who overtook me on the way to Epsom Station, who had long legs, was wearing extremely short shorts and did not appear to be wearing any tights. In which case, one might have thought that she would be cold, but BH assured me on return that fashion & flaunting beats cold every time when you are under 25. As it turned out, for all her hurrying, the young lady caught the same train as us seniors.

Then, stuck in a line of people who were not moving down the left hand side of the down escalator at Vauxhall, it struck me, perhaps for the first time, that as long as the escalator is full, once the line has stopped moving down, it is not going to start again. For that, one has to wait for a big enough gap to open up that the person at the top of the gap can walk down without being blocked before he or she reaches the bottom. Elementary queueing theory I suppose, fashionable when I was small, but not something which I ever took up.

A new route from Green Park tube to the Institution, which meant that we took in this former public house which had been redeployed as some kind of shop. Once a Charrington house, purveyors of a pale session beer which I used to rather like. A house which is well known to Bing and called the 'Duke of Albemarle', which put in more than three hundred years, from 1685 to 2006. Licensed to one Henry Last in 1862. I dare say there is more out there if I were to give it a bit more time.

Stopped off at the Goat, but failed to notice that Quickie had returned until it was too late. But what I had instead was entirely adequate.

Kilograms had sounded good from the prospectus and had attracted a good crowd, but for some reason we had been relegated to one of the ground floor lecture rooms. The first time we had not been in the historic lecture theatre in the round, the one illustrated at reference 2.

The speaker was an experienced man, something of an ambassador for science, but for me at least, he got it all wrong: good material, badly presented. I think he fell between the Scylla of talking to schools and the Charybdis of talking to students of physics. Which was a pity, because the whole business of making standards for measurement is a fascinating business.

He wasted ten minutes of his hour or so on his own private system of standards, with the various units mostly being given the names of ladies from his family. A private system which might of done good service in a talk at a school - but which did not do so here.

He failed to do a decent job of summarising the seven standards and the move to definition in terms of fundamental constants, things like the speed of light and the Planck constant. Rather better at conveying something of the flavour of the business of international standards, with first class copies (of, for example, the standard kilogram), second class copies, third class copies and all the myriad committees. And I was interested to hear about the importance of utility in adopting these standards. In theory, one could manage with two or three, or perhaps even one, standard - but it was much more convenient and useful to have seven. Which also had the merit of playing to our collective fondness for that particular number, noticed here before, on several occasions.

The young lady half of the young couple sat next to us at the back of the room persisted in chatting with her young man on and off, which I found rather tiresome. To the point, for once in a while, of giving her a gentle poke and asking her to shut up. Which to be fair to her, she did.

I would have done better had I done a bit of preparation, perhaps by reading the article at references 2 or 6, but that is not supposed to be necessary for public lectures of this sort.

For a change, to the Civil Service Club off Whitehall, a place I had been taken to once or twice in the past. On the way, our taxi driver held forth about the iniquities of the new rules about new taxis which meant that the likes of him had to stump up around £65,000 for a new hybrid taxi, rather than the £45,000 of what one had before. Certainly sounded rather a lot to me.

Civil Service Club quite a decent place, more CIU than pub, with cheap drink, cheap food and cheap beds. Will I stump up the £50 a year which would buy me membership? Will it draw me away from the not so far away Terroirs? See reference 5, but beware of irritating noise.

Reminded on the way home of the Charing Cross route to Waterloo East, rather quicker than walking across Hungerford Bridge. But one does miss the opportunity to visit the Archduke.

Reference 1: http://www.npl.co.uk/people/michael-de-podesta.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/more-counting.html.

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

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/fake-47.html.

Reference 5: http://www.civilserviceclub.org.uk/.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_redefinition_of_SI_base_units. 'The proposal can be summarised as follows: there will still be the same seven base units (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela). Of these, the kilogram, ampere, kelvin and mole will be redefined by choosing exact numerical values for the Planck constant, the elementary electric charge, the Boltzmann constant, and the Avogadro constant, respectively. The second, metre and candela are already defined by physical constants and it is only necessary to edit their present definitions. The new definitions will improve the SI without changing the size of any units, thus ensuring continuity with present measurements'.

Reference 7: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-was-avogadros-number/. By some happy chance, I came across this article shortly after getting home from the lecture. I forget why.

Group search key: kga.

Abuse of colour

To my mind, the three primary colours have been allocated to the three emergency service, an allocation which seems to run more or less across the world. Red for the fire service (or fire and rescue service as they now like to be called), blue for police and green for ambulances. With white and yellow trim being used to round out the branding of their vehicles.

So I don't care for these colours and stripes being appropriated by others, in this case the people who come to mend your boiler and fix your dripping taps. Visually confusing, a confusion which might slow down one's reactions in an emergency, like getting out of the way of a fire engine.

Trolley 171

A Sainsbury's trolley captured on the Sainsbury's side exit to the tunnel under the Waterloo line by Screwfix. While I was snapping it, I was passed by a substantial lady on a bicycle who said something about all this urban detritus. Of working age, so I don't suppose it had ever crossed her mind to return such a thing to its proper place herself.

The front was a bit dented, as if whoever had taken it had thought that it would be clever to ram the thing into a lamppost - with the result that it would not stack properly when I got to Sainsbury's. Perhaps a trolley jockey will take it around the back of the shed at some point.

For which euphemism, see Thomas the Tank Engine.

Jigsaw 10, Series 3

A few weeks ago I was given a heritage jigsaw, probably dating from the 1950's, and over the past few days I have been doing it, revisiting (and perhaps reviving) a hobby which expired just about four years ago, with the last recorded puzzle being noticed at reference 1.

Sold from its charity shop as having two pieces missing, positions thoughtfully marked on the picture on the box, but which turned out to have just one piece missing. Perhaps someone had cut out a replacement piece, not something I would attempt myself, partly because it would take up too much quality time, partly because I don't think that I would make a very good job of it. Not even very sure how exactly I would go about it in the absence of a range of suitable gouges with which to do the cutting.

One feature of this puzzle was the absence of a proper picture of the completed puzzle, just the rather crude line drawing of it on the front of the box. So one had no ready made clues about colour. On the other hand, it was a painting rather than a photograph, which I have always found a lot easier. But a painting which does something odd with the second tier of the west front, the bit with the large window. Something odd which makes the two flanking walls with crenellations look as if they are angled side walls, when actually the whole thing is flat, in the plane of the puzzle, just a few feet back from the first tier, the tier with the three front doors.

Given that there were lots of long, straight cuts in the interior of the puzzle, it was not easy to separate out the edge pieces, so I did not proceed by assembling the edge of the puzzle, which, as I recall, was my usual line of attack. Rather, I started by assembling the sky line of the cathedral and then worked down.

Lots of long, straight cuts also meant that the growing jigsaw was very fragile, not all nicely tied in together in the way of a modern jigsaw, in which most pieces have three or four of the four sides tied in. All too easy to sweep a chunk off the table onto the floor with one's cardigan or elbow.

On the other hand, lots of pieces had acutely pointed corners of distinctive shape, which made them relatively easy to pick out of the heap. Except when they were so narrow and fragile that they had broken off, so one could spend some minutes looking for a non-existent piece.

At some point, I noticed the narrow white stripe at the bottom of the puzzle, which meant that I could, after all, quite easily sort out the bottom of the puzzle and start working up.

Sky last, but small enough in terms of the number of pieces involved, not to be the long-winded affair it can sometimes be. Only modest recourse to sorting the remaining pieces by type.

Maybe half a day in time, spread over three days. About the right time for me: it absorbed me for a while - and then I finished it before I got bored.

PS: the pastry cutter like dies used to cut jigsaws are usually made with long thin strips of metal, one of the two edges sharpened for cutting, laid one way, connected up with a lot more short strips running the other way, all pegged down to a piece of thick wooden board and together amounting to a more or less rectangular grid. Having taken a good look, I would not care to say whether the long strips were vertical or horizontal, but readers, if they were to click to enlarge, might take a view.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/11/jigsaw-9-series-3.html.

Climbing

To balance the books, with the young lady at reference 1 getting the odd outing these days - although, to be fair, the young man on the right was outed at reference 2. This one snapped somewhere in the New Forest.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/flis.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/new-toy.html.

Irritation

I have been trying to master the first verse of 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' from a book supplied by BH. A book which has the bright idea of jiggling with the horizontal alignment of the lines of print, possibly by associating each letter with a small random movement either up or down.

Which is fair enough for the nursery rhymes themselves, printed in a large font on widely separated lines. It serves to nicely soften the block of words against the illustration, without much affecting legibility.

But on the page at the front where it tells you about the edition, the publisher and all that sort of stuff, in much smaller type, it is both pointless and irritating. An insult to all those centuries printers put into making their product as legible as possible.

Missing shop

A striking shop window, No. 62 something, somewhere in the vicinity of the Oxford Street end of Marylebone Lane. A shop which I cannot now trace, with the various clues fed to Bing and Gmaps not delivering the goods. While Google image search's first hit was Wickes, on account of their selling windows. Then Wikipedia on windows more generally. Plus various images of other shop windows, quite similar in colour mix and brashness, but wrong.

Something to be checked out on our next visit.

Grappa

Last Sunday to the Wigmore Hall to hear the new-to-us Quatuor Voce. Beethoven Op.74 followed by Ligeti String Quartet No.1 followed by an encore which was something to do with soothing the oxen marching around a well, drawing the water, somewhere in Egypt. This last by way of an encore. The draw was the Beethoven, but as it turned out we liked the other two pieces well enough.

Ligeti not completely unknown to us as we had done something as far back in March 2009, then a cello sonata in March 2015 and another cello sonata (possibly the same one) in December 2017. But no sign of a string quartet, No.1 or otherwise.

Amused at Epsom station by the poster right. I don't know much about Simon and Garfunkel, apart from their being barely on speaking terms these days, but I had not thought that brass bands came into their act.

Less amused on the train when we sat near a couple of young men, perfectly decent, but who having what seemed like a rather loud conversation about some aspect of sport. The sort of conversation which is fine if you are part of it, very irritating if you are just within earshot of it. We decided to move to the other end of the carriage.

Spent the journey wondering about the Post Office boast that their banks were to be open on Sundays. With ordinary banks steadily closing branches down because they are not doing enough face-to-face business, how is the Post Office, which has also been steadily closing branches down over the same sort of period, going to manage on a Sunday? From where I associate to the days of the Post Office Savings Bank, useful when I was young, because using your Savings Book, you could draw money from any Post Office in the land, whereas banks, even supposing one had one, were apt to be a bit difficult about dodgy looking young people anywhere other than at their own branch, where the books were kept.

There were some Police Community Support Officers in the Vauxhall tube concourse handing out folded yellow cards about hate crime, crime which includes anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents, as well as crime motivated by intolerance of difference more generally. Although thinking with my fingers, maybe a lot of this is not so much about the people who are different as about the angry young men who need some channel for their anger - with their not being too particular about what channel. So out in the country, people who hunt foxes would be fair game. See references 1 and 2.

Got to All-Bar-One in Regent Street to sit down next to a couple of young women who were talking earnestly about some aspect of work. Almost as irritating as the young men, but we did not move a second time. Only one pot of smarties on this occasion.

Into Wigmore Hall, where the twin flower arrangements were very pale green in tone, with large green somethings, possibly green anthuriums. Set off with a few touches of colour. BH approved.

Sat behind a middle aged, middle income couple, the husband part of which spent most of the concert trying to read the sports part of the Observer. Wife part just fidgeted in various other ways. All in all, not at all clear why there were there; it was not as if they were tourists or holiday makers, taking in a bit of culture to fill out the space between breakfast and lunch.

But the concert was very good. Furthermore, it was in the right order from a hearing point of view - although had the Ligeti been listed second rather than first in the brochure from which I made the booking, I would probably not have made it, being rather conservative in such matters. With the quartet going in for rather effective rhythmic standing up at one point in the Ligeti. The cow piece which followed was a version of a piece written for the lute, I think based on an Egyptian folk song, originally used to calm the oxen while they marched around the well, drawing up the water. A piece which was rather moving and which made good use of silence and quiet. Being surprised, once again, a quiet a full concert hall can be when the musicians go about it the right way. With the quartet seeking out all kinds of connections and very much following in the ethnic-music-collecting footsteps of both Dvořák and Bartók . See reference 3. See Hamza el Din: 'Escalay'.

Quick shot of sherry and then off to the Caffé Caldesi, not visited since the beginning of last year. See references 4 and 5. Being surprised this morning at how long ago this last visit was, considering that we eat in town reasonably often, probably once or twice a month.

Warm enough to eat outside, unusual for the second half of October, but we settled for the quiet interior.

The menu seemed to have got a bit shorter since we last saw it and there was no Greco di Tufo, so we settled for a wine from the Alto Adige instead, which was entirely satisfactory. Cantina Toblino for the curious, with the printing having lopped off the bottom of the relevant line of print. See reference 6.

Bread, olives, lasagne, salmon (for BH), spinach (with the advertised chilli) tiramisu. All very satisfactory. Bread better than average.

Washed down with a couple of shots of grappa, with my being upstaged by the probably Italian waitress who offered no less than three sorts. I saved some face by asking for yellow rather than white, a trick I learned in Ryde. By way of a reward it turned up in a rather splendid glass. See reference 7.

Service good. All in all a very satisfactory meal, only slightly marred by a party next to us, made up of two girls, expensively turned out in matching red coats, and two older people on grandparent duty, if not actually grandparents. With the two girls being tiresomely pre-adolescent and making it abundantly clear by their behaviour and body-language that they would have far rather have been somewhere else. We might all have been there in one or other capacity (or both), but one can do without the families of others!

Lots of pretty people running around outside. Some, looking a little left over from the night before, only managing a walk.

Down the hatch at Bond Street to make a nice connection at Waterloo. Home and dry outside, if not inside.

PS: the Pacific Standard Time of this blog does not seem to know about winter time, so the start of the day has receded from 0800, back to 0700. Whereas all right thinking, Greenwich time people think that the start should be 2400=0000. So this post scores to Sunday, whereas a post the same time yesterday would have scored to Friday.

Reference 1: https://cst.org.uk/.

Reference 2: https://tellmamauk.org/. Beware of the unsolicited noise.

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

Reference 4: http://caldesi.com/.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/02/debutante.html.

Reference 6: http://www.toblino.it/vini/muller-thurgau-trentino-cantina-toblino.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/yaverland-continued.html.

Trolley 170

A common or garden Sainsbury's trolley, captured outside the Rifleman at the top of Hook Road.

Couldn't be too fussy about the snap with a very bright, low winter sun behind me.

When I got back to the main trolley stand outside the front door at Kiln Lane, they were down to just one trolley of this size, probably the most popular. The first time such a thing had happened, there usually being dozens, if not scores, of them stacked up there. Maybe the trolley jockeys were at some meeting or other. This being late on a Saturday morning.

Trolley 169

A Wilko trolley, captured in East Street, just by what was, and perhaps still is, the telephone exchange.

Much smaller than the regular size from Sainsbury's. And only the third Wilko trolley ever. See reference 1.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/trolley-146.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/trolley-149.html. Near miss.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/03/one-that-got-away.html. Near miss.

Platform

Further developments at the house which parks interesting cars, last noticed at reference 1.

At some point in the last week or so the lady-blue Range Rover morphed into a dark blue Range Rover without registration plate. But lady-blue is now back, together with one of those platforms you use inside shops, ballrooms and the like when you need to fix the lights - or the Christmas decorations.

Which confuses the quest to find out what the person responsible does for a living.

PS: I first came across much posher and more compact versions of such platforms on the gaming floor of Ceasar's Palace.

PPS: by later Saturday afternoon, the lady blue had morphed into the Bentley and the platform was being used to white wash the outside of the house. A part solution to the platform problem - the other part being why would one bother to hire such a fancy bit of kit for a paint job on one's house?

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/tree-three.html.

Reference 2: https://www.caesars.com/caesars-palace.

Fake 47

At the time we arrived in Epsom in the late 1980's there were a number of drinking clubs, of one of which I was a  member for a while, earning me a CIU card which I made occasional use of in my travels about the land on government business - for example to the club at Neath, near DVLC, once an important hub of the Welsh coal industry. A rather sleepy place in the middle of the afternoon, just a few pensioners, rather surprised to see me, all suited and booted.

Another one was the Comrades Club, originally for ex-servicemen, but by then mainly serving professionals and semi-professionals working in town who liked to take drink in the afternoon. But the large premises were too much for that declining business and eventually, amid some acrimony, they sold out to a hotel chain.

Now

A hotel chain which has seen fit to decorate their façade with pilasters, after the fashion of the fake nineteenth century buildings to be found at Poundbury (vide supra). We wait to see how they finish off their bases. Will they leave them hanging in the air?

Then

Google has not yet sent round their camera car, so I was able to recover the club as it was from Street View. A large detached house, festooned with single storey sheds, probably all in rather delapidated condition inside. Town Hall - brown brick with chimneys - visible right in both snaps.

PS: vide supra not terribly appropriate here where it is intended to mean see an earlier post. Literally see above, which is fine in a book where what one has just read is indeed above. But not so fine in a blog which is organised the other way around, with later posts above and earlier posts below.

Weather report

Clear sky and moon high in the west at 0750, Saturday morning. Moon just past full, waning from the left, the side away from the sun.

First frost for a while, with the extension roof very white and the part of the lawn nearest the house fairly white. The back of the lawn, either in range of the low early morning sun or in the shelter of the trees at the back of the garden, clear.

Still no action on the bird feeder hanging off the garage - which we never got around to taking down this year and which has been at half full for months. Unlike those at Holne which got plenty of visits, if only by rats and mice.

And so far this morning, no bird action at all. Perhaps the cold is keeping them inside their bushes.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/parke.html. I think I must have got a bit about the rat at the end of this post wrong. We did see a rat on a feeder on the day of our arrival at Holne, but I cannot now find the alleged post about it.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/04/winters-tale.html. It seems that it was more than two years ago that I was fussing about which direction the points of a crescent moon pointed. Am I about to start fussing again?

Trolley 168

Captured this morning on the path leading out the back of Sainsbury's, leading to the footbridge over the Waterloo flavoured railway line out of Epsom. Once again, wheel lock present but not deployed. Once again, no obvious reason for it to be dumped just here.

For some reason this winter half-term has proved trolley productive.

It also resulted in my making my way home by way of the tunnel behind Screwfix, rather than by way of Ewell Village, the proper route home from East Street, when on the Ewell Village anti-clockwise.

Trolley 167

Captured on East Street this morning. No obvious reason why it should have been there.

Homity

Following the homity pie from Totnes market, noticed towards the end of the post at reference 1, BH got around to making one today. Slightly more complicated recipe, not involving mashed potato, the primary ingredient at Totnes. Both looked and tasted rather good.

To my surprise, not to be found in 'Food in England', the 'Boston Cook Book' or 'Cuisine Familiale', although all three books included various kinds of vegetable flan, with fillings usually involving eggs and onions or eggs and leeks (but not both, as was the case today). Not to be found in OED either, not in the first edition anyway.

Absence from the first and the last of these may suggest that it was indeed an invention of hungry Land Girls during the second world war, rather than traditional Devon fare, both these theories being current in Epsom.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/sailor-bill.html.

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

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Cooking-School_Cook_Book.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2016/01/truffes.html. By coincidence published by Éditions de Montsouris of the Rue Gazan, while the current Maigret, noticed at reference 5, takes place around the next door Parc Montsouris of reference 6. The publisher seems to have expired.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/maigret.html.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Montsouris. But in error to the extent that the Parc des Buttes Chaumont is hardly due north of city centre. Not often that I catch Wikipedia out.

Orientation

We have been thinking about what LWS-N does about orientation. Does it matter if the field of consciousness which it is hypothesised to generate, rotates?  Does the subjective experience always include a sense of which way is up? A sense of where the self is relative to what is being experienced?

In the course of which we remembered about an art installation which involved lots of plastic sheeting, where the idea was that one’s whole world had become a uniform sea of a uniform colour, say blue. Maybe, when one is in such a world, one does know what colour it is, say blue, but one would be hard put to say exactly what blue. Maybe, some people would lose any very strong sense of what colour it was at all. Maybe, if the thing were properly organised, one would also lose any sense of what was up and down, where the horizon was.

Figure 1

Which led onto to thinking about how we might code for colour in the texture nets of LWS-N, with the trick being to find some way of coding something into our texture nets which was more or less equivalent to the RGB coding for colour built into packages like Microsoft’s Powerpoint, illustrated above, with the left and middle panels being the two options for action you have when you want to change the colour of the interior of the star right. The way that the middle panel works is not terribly intuitive, at least not to us, but the RGB answer in numbers is clear enough.

We note in passing that colour for humans is by nature three dimensional, which makes coding for colour by a single real number, by a single real valued property of our tiles, rather difficult. Thinking here of things like area, diameter and aspect ratio. One might have negative for blue and positive for red, but where does that leave green? It can be done, but it does not attract.

We also note in passing the transparency option at the bottom, a useful device offering something not unlike seeing a fish swimming about in the water below. Which feature, as we have described elsewhere, we think to offer by means of layers, on which some early thoughts are to be found at reference 4.

Remembering always that the whole point of LWS_N is that is self-contained; somehow it does colour of itself, draws colour out of the void, without reference to anything else. With a well known story about the Deity pulling this trick off to be found in the Book of Genesis and a rather more succinct version in the Gospel according to St. John.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Rather more succinct maybe, but also more obviously wrong. It sounds well, but the word was not the beginning: of the 5,000 million years or so that the earth has been around, the word has only been around for the last few hundred thousand – if that. Perhaps a Jesuit would argue that the potential for words is always there, but they only become visible from time to time, from place to place. While we would argue, although it is not particularly relevant here, that consciousness also came before the word.

But coming back to earth, see reference 1 for entry into the world of LWS-N generally, reference 2 for a previous stab at the problem of colour in that context.

Frames of reference

For present purposes, we neglect the binocular and the complications of binocular vision of things more or less in front of the nose.

We can use the anatomy of the body to define the direction in which the (untwisted) body is pointing, is facing. The body direction.

We can use the anatomy of the skull to define the direction in which the nose is pointing. The head direction.

We can use the anatomy of the eye to define the direction in which we are looking. The eye direction.

These three directions are the same in the case that the body is held straight and erect, the head is straight on the shoulders and the eyes are centred in their orbits – which does seem to be the preferred position, with there being a strong tendency for the head to follow the gaze and for the body to follow the head. We like to tackle both prey and predator head on, as it were.

The eye has three pairs of eye muscles and three degrees of movement, not just two, and the eye can rotate about the line of sight. Which rotation we can use to define eye vertical.

We can use the anatomy of the skull to define up and down with respect to the head, roughly the line up from the point of the chin to the bridge of the nose. To define head vertical.

We know there is an absolute vertical, defined by the force gravity at the surface of the earth. Near enough absolute for present purposes.

For us, at least for a lot of the time, these three verticals are the same. This is less true of, for example, arboreal animals like chimpanzees. It is also true that many things of interest exhibit a rough sort of bilateral symmetry about that vertical.

All these complications notwithstanding, we suppose that for the purposes of consciousness, of the subjective experience, there is at most one direction and at most one vertical – derived in some more or less complex way from the foregoing – and from other inputs. Which is a simplifying supposition: the actual experiences of, for example, looking at the television while lying on one’s side or trying, while out walking, to work out where one is from a map which has not been turned so that it is in the right direction, seem to be something more complicated. Noting here that the second of these example dates from well after the evolution of consciousness. Versions of the first probably well before.

So the visual field, for example, as expressed by one or more layers of LWS-N, will be orthogonal to the direction and orientated to the vertical.

Recap on fields

The proposition is that the subjective experience arises from the field generated by appropriate activation of the neurons underlying the shape nets and the texture nets of LWS-N. In particular, for present purposes, by activation of the tiles of those texture nets. A field which, for present purposes, might be considered to take vector values over a disc in the plane.

For present purposes we gloss over the complication that the subjective experience arises in time, is a function of that field over a short interval of time Δt, around time t.

For present purposes also, it is not relevant that we have supposed consciousness to be organised into a discrete succession of frames, of the order of a second each in duration. Frames which are not necessarily fixed or constant, but there is a compilation process which builds, more or less from scratch, each successive frame. The concern here is with what goes on within the span of a frame.

We do not require the map from field to subjective experience to be one to one. We allow that many fields, perhaps only differing in detail, might result in the same subjective experience, that there might be lots of pairs of fields which subjects – in so far as one can test such things – would find it hard to distinguish. They would report, at least after the event, that they were the same.

Figure 4

We also imagine our patch of cortical sheet as approximating to a disc. And our field generated by that disc as being something like a flying saucer in the plane of that disc. Strong (absolute) values in the middle, weaker at the periphery, effectively zero not much further out.

Figure 5

We suggest that this field is completely self-contained, that it contains whatever is necessary for the conscious experience without recourse or reference to anything or anywhere else. Nor does it interact in any relevant way with any other, ambient fields, say the earth’s magnetic or gravitational fields. Or brain waves emanating from some other person. Or the ether. Although we do recognise that some animals, particularly birds, are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, and that the involvement of consciousness with that field is, in consequence, theoretically possible. See reference 3.

So, notwithstanding the birds, we are led to propose that our field would generate the same subjective experience whatever its orientation with respect to the real world, to up and down, to north and south, to east and west. Any rigid transformation would do. And replication without mutual interference or interaction, were that possible, would result in two identical experiences.

We believe that it follows from this invariance of the experience under rigid transformations of the field, that there would also be invariance of the experience under similar transformations of the underlying data on our patch of cortical sheet.

So what about colour?

Coming now to the business of coding for colour, suppose we had a scheme for coding colour into the shapes of the tiles, the minimal polygons, making up our texture nets which went something like the figure that follows.

Figure 6

Hitherto we have focussed on shape: triangles, squares and pentagons. Or perhaps triangles, squares and hexagons. Or perhaps lines, triangles and circles. But now, by way of example, we focus on orientation: vertical for blue, neither for green and horizontal for red. With the assumption that there is a subjective distinction between, for example, a fine vertical grating and a fine horizontal grating, with vertical and horizontal being defined for our patch of cortical sheet along the lines we have indicated above

We have some function C which classifies the tiles of a texture net to exactly one of four groups: vertical, round, horizontal, void. So in the illustration above the left hand squares go to round, the vertical rectangles top middle go to vertical, the horizontal rectangles top right go to horizontal and the miscellaneous stuff bottom right goes to void. The small square is too small to qualify, the thin rectangles are too thin to qualify and the other stuff is either ambiguous (the quadrilateral middle left) or perverse (the star bottom right).

We have a function A which gives the area of a tile.

The elementary colour of a point in the interior  of a tile is given by the area and colour of that tile.

The value of a colour is a non-negative real, with both large and small coloured tiles giving a value of zero, with a positive maximum somewhere in the middle. If on a boundary where there is agreement about colour, then the average. Otherwise void.

The integrated colour of a point is given by weighted sum, the two-dimensional convolutions (using some wavelet or other) for red, green and blue. The activation processes which deliver the field of consciousness, do not necessarily do convolutions, but the neural firing implied by those processes integrates up to a field which amounts to the same thing.

This scheme clearly depends on orientation. Somehow, in generating the subjective experience from the tiles suggested above, something knows about which way is up.

Figure 7

In the illustration above we suppose we have left a large collection of qualifying vertical tiles and right a very similar collection of qualifying horizontal tiles . Now it is reasonable that when both collections are present, that one should experience a difference between the two. At the very least, the experience should register the discontinuity at the boundary down the middle. But how can just one of them, in isolation, be so distinguished?

Put another way, one can see that, say that red and blue are different when together, but how is red different from blue in isolation?

Why should the experience not be invariant under rigid transformations of the plane, as suggested above?

Furthermore, with eyes shut, subjective experience of say sounds and smells is more or less invariant under movements of the head, which one might suppose take the shape nets and texture nets of LWS-N with them. So rigid movements of the field do not change the experience.
One way to deal with this might be to have an orientating layer; a layer whose only purpose is to give us up and down, to qualify the other layers with up and down.

Figure 8

The trouble with this scheme is that while it serves to tell us the orientation of up and down, it does not distinguish up from down.

Figure 9

So here we deploy activation, which had been kept in reserve. We have a source of activation in blue, bottom left, and a sink of activation in red, top right, with the most visible flow of activation being up, at least on this rendering. But what about left and right? A texture net has been constrained to be planar, so we can’t do left and right at the same time as up and down, at least not in the way of Figure 9. Do we do left and right with yet another layer?

Figure 10

Not necessarily. Maybe something like Figure 10 above would do, organised a bit like the picture scanning lines of a television screen. With the blue arrows giving us vertical and the red flow across the field of vision, from left to right, giving us horizontal east.

Figure 11

Another alternative might be something not that far removed from the compass card illustrated above.
One might argue that, in an experience which is in large part two dimensional, given up, innate knowledge of clockwise and anti-clockwise might serve to give right and left respectively. However, not being entirely convinced, we have chosen a compass card which has a large icon for north and a smaller, different one for east. Hopefully that suffices.

Figure 12

A less whimsical alternative would be to build on the square bar codes now used in many industries, bar codes which, in order to readily carry information, are oriented by the three special corner squares, with the absence of a corner square bottom right marking south west. Which given that the computer knows about clockwise, is enough for it to know which way up the code is supposed to be.

Figure 13

A device which could be included in the corners of any layer for which orientation is important, rather as pictures of archaeological artefacts commonly include a ruler or measuring rod. See reference 5 for the context of Figure 13 above.

Layers which would qualify the experience as a whole in a way that means that the left hand part of Figure 7 can indeed be distinguished from the right hand part, a distinction which is preserved when either the data or the field as a whole is rotated. We do not go into how we know, or whether we need to know, that this layer is orientation; we leave that for another occasion.

However, when all is said and done, all these extras seem a bit contrived. They may well exist, at least some of the time, at those times when we are conscious of our orientation, but we think it more likely that colour will be coded up in some way which does not need them. Perhaps something involving the size or shape of tiles, rather than their orientation. To which we shall return in due course.

Conclusions

We have suggested that the subjective experience, that the consciousness generated by our field does not change when that field is moved about – rotations and translations – and that this has implications for the way in which the world around is coded up, in particular for the way in which we code up for colour, something which is locally the same in all directions.

PS: wanting to check where the compass card of Figure 8 came from, I asked Google image search. Dismal failure on this occasion, with it suggesting couple on a tandem bicycle.  Bicycle wheel yes, but why tandem? Why couple? While I think the answer should have been to do with the Library of Congress. And a further oddity later, with Microsoft on my telephone thinking, for some reason, that the date of the picture was July 2025.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/an-update-on-seeing-red-rectangles.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/coding-for-colour.html.

Reference 3: Chemical compass model of avian magnetoreception - Kiminori Maeda, Kevin B. Henbest, Filippo Cintolesi, Ilya Kuprov, Christopher T. Rodgers, Paul A. Liddell, Devens Gust, Christiane R. Timmel & P. J. Hore – 2008.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-ship-of-line.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/10/fossil-flint.html.

Group search key: srd.

Fake 46

Just about two years I noticed our hard pressed government bunging £7.5m at a pile up north called Wentworth Woodhouse (reference 1). A place which once thrived on the basis of the coal under, which paid so much better than the farms over. The same stroke of luck which propelled the Sitwells of Renishaw and elsewhere to fame and fortune - with Sir Osbert Sitwell, much noticed here, being one of the last of the Sitwells who could still afford to live in the style of 1900 or so (reference 2).

So I was interested to see a write-up about the place in the heritage part of last Saturday's DT - where I learn that the £7.5m chipped in by you and me, that is to say the government, is pretty small beer when set against the total cost of restoration estimated to be of the order of £200m. And I had thought that the £7.5m was a bit strong. Will our friends from Saudi Arabia be helping out?

One of the wheezes the restoration trust is exploring is B&B. For so many pounds a night - say £250 for two for bed and breakfast - you get to pretend to be a noble lord - or at the very least a successful iron master or mill owner - for a night. Which prompts one to think about just how far the fake is going to be taken.

For £250 a night, do you get butlers in penguin suits, footmen in striped waistcoats (Simenon seems to think that this is a mark of true class) and maids in white caps & aprons? Porridge, kedgeree, kippers and devilled kidneys served from whacking great silver serving dishes. Silver plate at a pinch. Fancy cutlery. Noble lords and ladies at table with you - with conversation with them being a chargeable extra.

Would guests be expected to dress up too? It only seems right, in which case one might to have fit out one of the outbuildings as the dressing up department. Seamstresses, hairdressers, beauticians, massage parlour, the works. Maybe a MacDonald's for the children - can't expect them to like the stuff just mentioned.

And afterwards, horses to ride, woods and gardens to stroll in. Ponds and rivers to fish in. Fly, naturally. Home farm with deferential farmer's wife ready and waiting to show you her dairy.

Or perhaps for the same sort of sum, you can dress up and pretend to be a footman or a maid during the day and whoop it up in a grand, old-style beano in the servants' hall at night. Accordion. Dancing. Barrel of the finest beer sent down from upstairs. Probably more fun than fine dining.

Or perhaps for corporate hugging sessions, you can do a block booking and go in for full-on dinner in the state dining room. Dinner on the finest Spode. Brandy, cigars, whist and billiards after. Flirting in the conservatory. You might need to tweak things up a bit, maybe hire the odd resting actor (probably cheaper than real noble lords), so that dinner can count as a performance and so be exempt from the rules about smoking.

So perhaps the organisers at Wentworth Woodhouse need to go out to North America where this whole business of re-enactments is well established. There is, for example, a working village re-enacting life in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Ontario, on the north bank of the St. Lawence River, described at reference 5. As Sir Simon Jenkins once pointed out, during his days as Chief Heritage Officer at the National Trust, we should not be sniffy about what they get up to over the pond. Or at Disneyland for that matter.

In the olden days we were not always so sentimental and possessive as we are now about grand houses which were no longer needed. Nonsuch Palace, just up the road from us here at Epsom, one of the grandest houses of its day, was sold on for architectural salvage and building materials less than a hundred years after it was built. Not much more left now than the park which bears its name. And the £40,000 worth of model of reference 4.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/heritage.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/08/facades.html.

Reference 3: http://periodpiecesandportraiture.blogspot.com/2013/04/wentworth-woodhouse.html. The source of the image, said to be from the mini-series 'Wives and Daughters', which somehow passed us by. With this scene apparently set in Wentworth Woodhouse.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=nonsuch+house+mark+madonna. Where I wasn't even sure it was worth spending out on a model, never mind on the house itself!

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

Trolleys 166a, 166b and 166c

A bit deeper into the same trolley-yielding alley as yesterday, a good collection of Waitrose and Marks & Spencer trolleys.

I was not going to do both sets, so settled for the two Waitrose trolleys, which became three as I snapped the two. The third being delivered by an older lady, probably on her way to one of the bus stops outside the station, with no more shopping than a half full plastic carrier. I wondered why she had bothered with a trolley at all, but BH explained over lunch that this was probably a discrete take on the zimmer frame. Too proud to use one overtly, a shopping trolley made a reasonable substitute, particularly when there was shopping to contend with, as well as defective hands, arms, feet or legs.

Chained together, wheeling the three as one was not a problem, although I suppose it might have become one had it been 1,000 yards rather than 100.

Only scored as one, naturally.

License to whatever

I continue to work through reference 2, last noticed at reference 1.

This morning, I started to read about the collective delusion which fired up the first crusade, from west to east, in the eleventh century.

Mackay reports that one feature of this delusion was the belief that one would be absolved from all manner of sins by appearing in arms before Jerusalem - which meant that one could commit all manner of sins on the way there. So the armies of Christ, as they worked their way east, were accompanied by even larger retinues of loose women, publicans, bookmakers and other entertainers than was usually the case.

Rather in the way that native Americans were allowed much license between taking their battle vows & dying in battle and Kamikaze pilots were allowed much license between signing up & taking their final dives. Or even ordinary soldiers due to go over the top in the first world war.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/associations.html.

Reference 2: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841.

Trolley 165

This one from the alley running off to north west of Kiln Lane, behind the East Street houses to the right. Gmaps reference 51.339541, -0.257157.

I settled for the trolley on its side, to the left. Wheel lock present but not deployed. And no big deal to remove the litter before I returned it to the main trolley stand just by the main entrance.

A third trolley is just about visible left, the first time I have seen a shopping trolley without wheels. Judging by appearances, probably removed in a decent way rather than just smashed off, although it was not clear whether such wheels would be any good for DIY trolley making, whether they would have fixing lugs which DIY could handle.

Trolley 164

Captured in the alley by T K Maxx, the one with a bench for resting indigents. At least it was such this morning.

Returned to Waitrose, where a passing lady rescued me from the chain and lock mechanism, revealing that there was no £1 deposit to recover in this case.

Flis

Similar absorption in the duck weed covered pond in the back garden would have made a better snap: bottom up, head down, arm stretched down into the weed infested water - but the telephone was not to hand at that point. And even if it was, my appointed task was to collect the weed being fished out of the pond, not to mess about with my toys.

Next problem: do ducks actually like to eat the stuff? I believe that it is full of all kinds of interesting nutrients - which means that there is little left for anything else in the well-shaded water below.

Orff

A week or so ago to the Royal Festival Hall to hear, for the first time, Carmina Burana, a work of which I had long been aware but had never gotten around to hearing.

As it turned out, a warm evening, although the cloudscapes were interesting, suggesting that trouble might be on the way.

We joined the train at Epsom along with a very cheerful party of twenty something young ladies, dressed very high, already fairly well oiled and with two more bottles of wine being dealt with on the journey to Waterloo. It was quite early and we were interested to know where they planned to kick off properly, but the young lady I asked did not seem to understand (or to care) what I was asking, so we did not get to know. The Waterloo concourse also seemed very noisy, not helped by a loud busker doing his stuff at the Thames end.

Into the Hall for our picnic, to find that the suspended art work had been refreshed. At the time I thought it was rather silly, with the stuff at reference 3 (from a couple of years ago, several refreshes ago) being more my sort of thing, but I am getting used to it.

The Poulenc 'Stabat Mater', involving, inter alia, two harps, was very good. The BH choir count was 141, the first time that I have known her do such a thing. I failed to complete. Interesting to hear a large choir, a change from our usual diet of Ripieno, and from where I associate to my late father's observation, in connection with a Mahler symphony, that 100 violins playing quietly is quite different from 10 violins playing loudly.

The Orff 'Carmina Burana' was interesting to have heard and included some good passages. And lots of percussion and flute. But I am not sure that we will be going again.

The small number of male altos (aka counter-tenors) were brigaded with the much larger number of female altos (aka contralto, my mother's voice). While the treble contingent from Tiffin School had to do a lot of sitting for their small amount of air time in the Orff. They also had to wear slightly comical striped blazers, very like the one's worn at my secondary school.

The baritone solo for the Orff was Simon Keenlyside, who managed to look rather embarrassed about being there at all and had a rather off-hand manner. He also reminded me of the smoking & drinking ghost writer in the episode of Morse called 'Second Time Around', who may, in that episode, have been called Reardon. Be that as it may, this chap could certainly do the business. While the soprano, Louise Alder, went in for still & statuesque when she was sitting out. She also had very high heels, so it was perhaps just as well that she did more sitting than standing.

Being in row G meant that we were very close to the action, which was good for centre stage, but one could not take in what was going on around the orchestra without moving the eyes around, if not the head. With taking one's cue from the conductor being a not very satisfactory substitute. Not doing that many orchestral concerts it is not a big deal, but maybe sitting a few rows further back would be better.

As it was, our neighbours in row G were a couple of a similar age from Richmond (aka outer Kingston), who knew all about getting to the various London venues from the suburbs. They also knew rather more about the location of the various Festival Hall festivities than we did.

Interested to see from the programme that Sir George Fistonich, the founder-owner of the Villa Maria operation, responsible for our day to day tipple, is a proud sponsor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The chap snapped below.

Se references 1 and 2.

Afterwards, got to Waterloo just in time to catch a train which would take us to Raynes Park - with just catching meaning that I got on in the ordinary way, while BH only got on because a muscular young man pulled the doors apart for her - after which she got on to some subdued cheering, looking rather pleased with herself. Raynes Park platform library shut when we got there, but there did not look to be much there anyway.

Back with Orff, a little research after the event revealed that he was a reasonably unusual composer and that this work, very popular in Nazi Germany, made him a great deal of money. He went through denazification, getting away with it, albeit with tarnished reputation, which meant he could continue to enjoy the royalties and live to the ripe old age of 86, having got through four wives.

Quoting loosely from Wikipedia: 'Carmina Burana is a manuscript of more than 200 poems and dramatic texts mostly from the 11th or 12th century, although some are from the 13th century. The pieces are mostly bawdy, irreverent, and satirical. They were written principally in Medieval Latin, a few in Middle High German, and some with traces of Old French. Some are macaronic, a mixture of Latin and German or French vernacular'. One can see why this would have been entirely acceptable to the Nazi artistic authorities, playing as it does to their roots in a heroic Germanic past while largely avoiding the church. And none of that racially unsound, modern nonsense about it.

Reference 1: https://www.villamaria.co.nz/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/irritation.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/08/art.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/11/vespers.html.