Sunday, 3 September 2017

Bognor five

The last thing to report from Bognor is the matter of the pie, it having been pie night at the hotel on the last night that we were there.

Bad start with a full-on and entirely unnecessary 'have you got a reservation' performance, for a hotel dining room which was busy enough but by no means full.

Then things started to look up when I was able to reserve the last steak and kidney pie. But when it turned up, it was not a patch on the turkey pie which we had taken earlier in the summer, at the Bugle in Brading, and noticed at reference 1. To be fair though, it was a proper pie with both top and bottom and it did contain a fair amount of steak and kidney.

But the pastry was dry, thick and heavy. And the gravy which was needed to soften it up a bit was very dark and rather sweet. Not much like the gravy which I used to make in the proper way, rouxing up the dripping from the roast.

And no cabbage, not having thought, on this occasion, to play safe and bring my own. This being the place where I had done just that on a previous occasion.

A rather disappointing meal, but helped along by another drop of Chablis 2014 from Laroche.

PS: we wondered about where the pie, which had been cooked in its own little pie dish, had come from. It seemed a bit unlikely that the hotel would make them up themselves; much more likely that they had overdone the microwaving a bit. On the other hand, if it came from the freezer, why would there be a last one? Did they come from the celebrated pie people at reference 2? In any event, on our next visit, we shall look them up. Illustrated above.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/fragonard-fail-aka-yaverland-five.html.

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

Bognor four

Our penultimate full day at Bognor was actually spent at Littlehampton, on the other side of the Arun. Another town which turns out to have a fine esplanade, with a fine new concrete corner dividing it into two sections, one running north along the eastern bank of the Arun, back into the old town, the other running east along the beach. I did not think to take a picture at the time, but the aerial photograph which follows gives the idea, with the pale triangle roughly in the middle being the fine new concrete corner. The wild and woolly beach that we visited on a previous occasion visible bottom left, underneath the golf course. See the end of the post at reference 1.


Lots of people about, this being a fine but not particularly hot Sunday. One of the stall holders told us that the place was often packed out on hot days.

We started out by heading east along the esplanade, with first stop at a piece of public art which doubled as seat and climbing frame. Just a bit of fun, not making a point or a statement about anything and body parts nowhere to be seen. Most refreshing. The shoes are my own, as regular readers will know, Merrells from Cotswolds. 



Second stop at what looked a marine version of a cabbage, but I don't suppose that they are actually related.


By which time it was getting on for lunch time, so we headed back to the corner and hung a right up the Arun. 


Even more gulls were sitting on the roof when we first approached this stall, which turned out to be a wet fish merchant rather than a chipper. But we pushed on and found a large chipper with indoor, outdoor and takeaway departments, from which we got some fine fish and chips. The indoor department also included a fine brown wood model of H.M.S. Victory, about six feet long and made in Mauritius from plans sent there for the purpose.

Lunch done, we pushed on into town, past the other boat, noticed at reference 2, where there was, as one would expect of a town which built ships for Henry VIII, plenty of older housing, some of it in Surrey Street. Was there any connection with the Earl of Surrey who was unluckily beheaded at the very end of the reign of Henry VIII on a charge of treasonably quartering the royal arms. The Earl was, it seems a rather vain scion of the Howard family, now headquartered up the road at Arundel, a scion who carried his vanity a bit too far on this last occasion.

Also a lot of new building, so we wondered whether the town had been bashed around during the second war. But what accounted for the long standing gap below? Surely a development opportunity for someone?


Once in town we ran down a Sainsbury's where I was able to buy bread and kabanosi against the projected evening picnic. Can't manage two full-on meals in one day any more. Kabanosi turned out to be not bad, not great, but not involving either chicken or cheese which was good.

All in all, not a bad place at all, reminding us somewhat of Topsham, some way further down the coast, on the Exe rather than the Arun. If Bognor comes unstuck for any reason, maybe we will wind up here instead.

PS: I find that google maps provides much higher resolution and generally better quality aerial photographs than bing maps, at least of this bit of Littlehampton. So the aerial photograph above comes from google. On the other hand, Windows 10 has the nice feature of automatically saving screen shots to OneDrive without having to mess about with pasting them into something like Paint and saving them by hand.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/companion-piece.html.

Microsoft

This morning I came across a pleasing feature of the edge & bing world called 'pictures of the week', a collection of striking photographs from around the world, none of which I had come across before. Although BH knew all about the one included left.

Perhaps at some point in the future, when nobody actually cares any more, some anthropologist will write a learned paper about the strange & mawkish behaviour of the English with regard to the late lamented princess.

Perhaps there are busy anthropologists somewhere deep in China, far from western eyes, doing it already.

PS: in fairness, I should add that I once came across an adult white male, somewhere near Seattle, who told me that he had made one of his bedrooms into a shrine to said princess. Luckily, he told me in time, before I had got under way on the subject. So not just the English.

Saturday, 2 September 2017

Auto save

Microsoft have been twiddling with their save options, twiddles which, as a 365 customer, just turn up. Probably some time after I have deleted the email which would have told me about them.

OneNote abolished save some time ago, with every keystroke onto a note being saved without one every having to do anything. No save or save as. And given that I only use OneNote for fairly ephemeral stuff, the sort of notes which I might have scribbled into my Filofax in the olden days, this works for me. Much more bothered about my lack of understanding of how OneNote organises & synchronises the data than about its saves.

Then, more recently, the little notices about things being uploaded to OneDrive vanished from the bottom of Office screens. Notices which used to come with save actions, and notices which I quite liked. Not yet being entirely confident that OneDrive is doing what I want or expect, I liked to get these notices. Vaguely reassuring.

And now they have implemented Autosave in Excel and Powerpoint. Turned on by default, but there is a turn off option. I have yet to read the small print, but I think the idea is that your changes are being saved continuously, every so many seconds when you are active. But not so continuously that you don't need to click on save before exiting.

Not sure about this one yet. I sometimes get into something of a muddle with one of the Office applications and the best way forward seems to be to revert to some previous copy of the file and start over. A previous copy which will not exist if they are doing autosave. And my quick peek at their versions feature was not reassuring.

Furthermore, Excel now has a habit of saving itself, even when one does not think one has amended one's workbook. In the olden days, if you looked at a workbook for some reason or other and then closed it again, the date-last-amended listed in properties or Windows Explorer was reassuringly unchanged. This is no longer the case.

Perhaps I hanker after an arrangement whereby I can save as I go along, in case of small accidents. But then I have a check document back into a versioned document store when I have finished for the day, with none of the versions ever getting lost. Without having to bother with including a date-stamp in the document name. That is to say, a document manager. That would protect me against big accidents.

Or perhaps I have to sweat through one of those (usually tiresome) online tutorials that Microsoft publish. If only I could find the right one, without having to spend quality time on looking for it.

Hunting

I noticed in this morning's DT that the National Trust is having trouble with both the anti-hunting and pro-hunting lobbies. I think the trigger has been their decision to publish what amount to advertisements for hunts on their website. This makes the pro-hunting people cross because they think that is opening the door to the sort of anti-hunting people who disrupt hunts. Never mind that the hunts in question do not involve foxes. Or that there is a plague of urban foxes. Or that foxes are not particularly cuddly when it comes to killing their own prey.

I think it a pity that the National Trust can't stay out of this sort of thing, although as a big landowner that may be difficult. It is bad enough that their mission is creeping into the world of visitor attractions without them getting into veggie politics and worse.

I then thought that as a vaguely democratic but probably reasonably sleepy organisation, they are wide open to attack by bands of paid up, single issue activists. They pay their dues, swamp some usually yawn-loaded county or regional meeting and get all kinds of tiresome resolutions passed - which HQ then has to do something about.

Just like the Corbyn crew have hijacked the Labour Party.

It will be an even bigger pity if all the people like us who buy into National Trust for heritage - built, garden and natural varieties - but who don't want to have to bother with meetings, have to start bothering with them.

PS: I noticed the other day that Greenpeace has been admonished for its unruly behaviour at sea. The sea going equivalent of what the hunt saboteurs get up to on land. About time too. Not that I have got much time for all those whale meat eaters in Japan either. Not to mention the Aleutian Inuit (aka eskimos).

Friday, 1 September 2017

Final report

Following the interim report at reference 1, by the time we came back from Bognor, around the 22nd August, the remaining nuts were rather unappetising.

Most of the nuts were empty apart from some fibrous brown material and dust. Some contained fat maggots. Some contained rather shrivelled nuts. A few contained decent nuts.

So the nuts which had started out OK had either been eaten or had shrunk away. The first problem might be why nuts you buy in shops have usually been kiln dried, a process which maybe kills both eggs and maggots, the remains of which are perhaps not noticed when you eat the nut some time later. The second problem might be why most commercial nuts are grown in hot countries, or at least countries with hot summers, where they ripen faster and have lower water content, and so shrink less on both counts. Oddly, I do not remember maggots in nuts from childhood at all: raspberries and peas yes, but not nuts. Also oddly, it was only this morning that YouGov was asking whether I went in for gathering food from hedgerows. I think this was in the context of a list of rather unusual hobbies - but I have no idea who would have paid them to ask.

All rather off-putting, so the remaining nuts, maybe half of what I picked in the first place, are now in the compost heap.

But I thought I would ask google about nut pests, and the most comprehensive summary comes from the government of Ontario, although both Oregon and Australia express interest. Filbert worms and filbert weevils both look quite like our maggots, but neither pest seems to come to Europe.

Sadly, the IX International Congress on the Hazelnut, held in Turkey, clashed with our visit to Bognor Regis. But hopefully they will publish their proceedings in due course, one of the RHS libraries will get a print copy and I will be able to bottom out the matter of the maggots.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/nut-report.html.

Reference 2: http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/12-009.htm.

Reference 3: http://www.hazelnut2017.org/.

Building works - or not

A bungalow was demolished down Manor Green Road recently and the snap left shows the rather rough block work of the foundation of the house that will replace it. Will the work now go with a swing, from start to finish and sale?

I wonder because there are several stalled works in our general area.

A major extension to a house at the other end of Manor Green Road, an extension which included stripping all the rendering off the existing house. Scaffolding now removed without the rendering having been replaced.

A small block of maisonettes replacing a couple of caretaker houses next to Blenheim High in Longmead Road. Roof on, but no doors. Not sure about windows. But work has been stopped for a few months now.

A new house on the western approach to the bridge over the railway at Ewell West. A sloping flat roofed affair. Work stopped for a few months now.

The redevelopment of an old house and outbuildings down Court Lane, not far from Court Rec. The old house had been slighted (to use a word from our Civil War) but, again, no further work being done last time I looked.

Then there was a house at the bottom of our own road. Another major extension, stalled for months, but now finished off.

One assumes some combination of customer, builder and banking problems.

PS: see also reference 1 for a previous but recent notice.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/massive-extension.html.