Then down Garratt Lane on a bright clear afternoon, to find an interesting bit of renovation. That is to say a double fronted, two storey town house which was being given a new front - half an inch of polystyrene insulation board finished off with a thin layer - not much thicker than a thick coat of bonding - of facing bricks, presumably made especially for this sort of job. Which was being done neatly enough, but which left the newly skinned masonry pillars to the bay windows looking rather odd. You can't make them an inch fatter all round without disturbing appearances. At which I must remember to take another look on my next visit, by which time it should all be finished.
Not yet clear how the two new layers were attached to what was there before.
Got to the Oxfam shop to find various offerings of interest, and I settled for three inches of petit Larousse illustré from 1986, for £2.50, to add to my petit Littré, my Harrap and at least one other. With the Larousse being a sort of hybrid between a dictionary and an encyclopedia, with small pictures for the words which respond to that sort of treatment. The acid test were hêtre and chêne, words which I am always getting muddled up and with which Littré is very little help.
Now I have the idea that it is better for me, when reading the likes of Maigret, to use the Littré, a French-French dictionary with something of the OED about it, than to use Harrap which does French-English, but which is apt to give one one word translations of French words, translations which are not always helpful in the case of obscure words with several meanings, perhaps not mapping very conveniently onto English words. While the catch with Littré is that one can end up chasing hares around in circles, rather than getting the translation needed. So the other morning, for example, I looked up tisser to be told that it was all to do with chains being mixed up with trames with a bobbin. Perhaps it was a bit early in the morning, but I could not make head nor tail of this and was reduced to getting Harrap to tell me that tisser was to weave. At least I now know all about warps (up and down), wefts (back and forth) and woofs, and that warp is a very old word, originally meaning to throw - perhaps that is where the Star Trek usage comes from. I suppose it is only to be expected that very old words are used to describe this very old technology.
I also know that there is a French word prescription which is about the bit of law which says that if you have been sitting on something for a long time, no-one can come and take it off you. Also that there is another bit of French law which says that no crime has been committed if a son defrauds his own father.
At which point Larousse scored a bull's eye by including little pictures of the leaves of hêtres and chênes, instantly clearing away the muddle while preserving the letter of the law that one should not, if one can possibly help it, use Harrap. Sold to the man in a duffel coat. I shall report on how well it catches on here in Epsom in due course.
All this was followed up with a discussion about how being in the trade, or going to a lot of theatre, affected one's appreciation of same. My position being that too much knowledge may not be improving. Rather than experiencing whatever it was the playwright was trying to put across, the too experienced theatre goer could all too easily get sidetracked by carping about this or that detail of the production. About how actress X was not a patch on actress Y back in 1949 and completely fluffed her very important silence in the third scene. Not quite the same thing, but I also remember my older brother telling me once that he did not bother much any more with actually listening to his favourite music because he had it all in his head.
Despite it having been a clear afternoon, the sky did not seem terribly clear on the way back through Earlsfield, although I did get a confirmed sighting of Jupiter and two possible sighting of aeroplanes, one low and one high.
Following which I was rather irritated by a headline in somebody else's Evening Standard about the huge burden older mothers were putting on the health service. Checking their web site this morning, the article underneath the headline appears to have been about how expensive it was to care for older mothers and their children, mothers too old to be eligible for fertility treatment here in the UK and who had gone abroad to get it instead: 'a top doctor today sounded an alert over the “huge stress” placed on the NHS by older women having babies'. Top doctor pictured above. Now I am not so keen on this sort of thing either, so I can only suppose that the irritation was a combination of drink taken and the mismatch of the size of the headline with the size of problem. It is not as if the numbers involved are very large.
Evening closed with my first ever sighting of a customer in Doddle, the parcel collection point which has been set up outside Epsom Station. Hitherto without customers whenever I have passed. Maybe it will catch on, but someone must be investing a good bit of money in it in the meantime.
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