Neapolitan Kitchen

Last week to the Neapolitan Kitchen, the first visit for a while, probably since February of last year, although I do not seem to have posted on the occasion, despite diligent search in both the relevant blog and the old-style cardboard calendar with pictures chosen by somebody else.

I did not recognise the crew, although the manager might have been the same. At least one waiter came from Romania, from somewhere which I could not catch some way to the west of Bucharest, more or less the only place I can name there. The menu and wine list seemed to be the same, so I was able to get a fine bottle of Greco di Tufo, not widely available in this country. Partly because it was this very restaurant where I discovered the stuff.

Food as good as ever, in my case bruschetta, followed by pizza, followed by tiramisu. Pudding wine and almond biscuits. They still seem to make their own bread, pizza dough and tiramisu, which last was very good indeed. Bruschetta soft and sweet, how I like it, rather than crunchy, how I don't.

Restaurant seemed to be doing OK this Saturday lunchtime with at least two family parties with children. Hopefully, having been here for a few years now, it will survive. Known to the older inhabitants of TB as the King Billy, otherwise King Willam IV, a place I visited occasionally. The place has been opened up a bit, but still, recognisably and pleasantly, a converted pub.

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

Reference 2: http://www.enodelta.com/azienda/. They have an e-shop but it is not clear whether they would deliver to the UK. Furthermore this particular wine seems to have gone awol.

This year's entry

Last year there were a number of fine fungus fruiting bodies to be found on the Horton Clockwise, notably that at reference 1.

I now understand that that illustrated left has been entered by its owner (the local council in this case) for this year's competition. A little late on parade compared with last year's winner, but it may well be a slightly different variety, working to a different timetable. Or maybe we can blame climate change or the funny weather we have had this summer.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/chicken-of-woods.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=fungus&max-results=20&by-date=true.

Tree care

Last year I noticed municipal tree care, Lambeth style, at reference 1.

This year, there is something of the sort on Chantilly Way, here in Epsom. Rather more elaborate planting than Lambeth, with strimmer protector at the bottom, feeding tube up the side, the business. The line on the ticket here though was not to phone someone if you were worried, but rather, in the dry spells, to give the young trees a couple of buckets of water yourself.

As it happened a young mum was coming up the road with two small children, no doubt headed for one of the expensive houses on or in what had been the Long Grove Hospital, and carrying a large plastic bottle of water - perhaps a couple of gallons or so - down from the nearby Tesco Express - and presumably rich enough to disdain tap water.

My thought was that while she might trudge up the road with water for her, it was rather unlikely that she would trudge up the road with water for the tree. She did not look the sort. I could not think of the right sort of comment to make, something which would encourage without irritating, in the few seconds which were my window of opportunity, so I held my peace.

The tree looked healthy enough but I am clearly not cut out to be a tree warden as I completely failed, at the time, to notice the browning on the trunk, clearly visible in the illustration. It looks as if someone or something has been scraping the bark - so presumably not from the sort of family which would trudge about with water.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/tree-care.html.

Skate board park

The abandoned skate board park mentioned it the last post. Or is it some kind of complicated den for Wolf Cubs? Or a training ground for red setters?

Group search key: npa.

Wrong Nonsuch

Last week for a morning visit to Nonsuch Park. Not paying attention, I followed the road to the baker at Cheam, rather than the road to Tooting, and we wound up in the northern car park, the one near the big house, rather than the southern car park.

This meant that we walked around the park the wrong way, but this had the up-side that we penetrated into the southern quarter of the park, beyond the made up path which runs between the southern car park and the site of Nonsuch Palace. For notice of an expensive model of same see reference 1. A southern quarter which we had never visited before, rather wild and woolly, but was said to be home to the site of the once excavated banqueting house said to have been attached to the palace proper. We found a large raised area, surrounded by a three feet brown brick wall, illustrated, which we thought might have been the place, but there were no plaques and no-one to ask, so we don't know. There were some rather odd grey concrete posts, quite new, tapering to about two feet in height, but we don't know what they were about either.

Heading back to the house we did come across an excavation - but on closer inspection we decided that this was a skate board park which had gone wrong and had been abandoned.

Back at the house, the café was busy with special needs, mums and babies, but the hard pressed Polish serving girl managed tea, coffee and some sort of raspberry jam frangipane, this last rather good. The very same café where we first learned about the Ripieno choir, very good, but whose last two concerts we had to miss for some reason or other. See reference 2. Hopefully we make the next one.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=nonsuch+palace+model.

Reference 2: http://ripienochoir.org.uk/.

Group search key: npa.

Frou Frou

At reference 1 I alluded to the fact that a Russian reading about a seagull might read in a different way, might experience that reading in a different way from an Englishman. Our experience of seagulls is extensive and includes lots of sea. Seagulls live beside the seaside, at least on the whole. Seagulls is Butlin's. Whereas a Russian, particularly a land locked Russian from the interior, hundreds of miles from any holiday capable seaside, might more usually, if not exclusively, experience seagulls beside the lake. A lake side bird rather than a sea side bird. An example of a cultural difference complicating the business of translating - with that particular adaptation largely avoiding the whole of this particular business.

Since then, we have been watching an old BBC adaptation of 'Anna Karenina', another Russian story (see reference 2), far and away the longest of the four adaptations which we now own, a chuck out from Epsom Library, and yesterday we got to the episode where Vronsky crashes out of a steeplechase with a broken horse.

The adaptor explains that what happened was that Vronsky applied the whip before the fatal jump when he should not have, causing the horse to change pace and footing at the wrong time, thus getting over the obstacle but crashing on landing, breaking her back. We also get the no-longer dashing but almost tearful Vronsky explaining to Anna, a little later, how this has been something of a life-changing event for him.

Now it is a long time since I have read the novel, but I did not remember this lot. I just remembered being rather puzzled by it all and moving on - there not being anyone to hand to ask at the time - and I did not think to pursue the matter later.

However, while I no longer have a paper copy, I do have a Kindle copy and Kindle comes with a search feature. I am able to call up all twenty or so occurrences of the phrase 'Frou Frou', all fairly close together and closing with the bit where Vronsky walks away from his about-to-be-dead mare. The only explanation we got was that Vronsky had shifted awkwardly in the saddle as the mare went over the last obstacle and I do not think the matter is mentioned again. We cross over onto the lengthy Kitty track, omitted from the adaptation.

So the adaptor has taken liberties. He has retained the all-important rider error but otherwise he has floated away on fancies of his own, unlicensed by the text. But is he justified by the fact that the Russian audience of Tolstoy's day would mostly have had long and intimate knowledge of horses? They would know how a serious horseman would feel about his horse and would know all about the sort of things that could go wrong in a race of this sort. They didn't need all the i's to be dotted and the t's to be crossed - but we do. So given that the television adaptor does not have the benefit or option of footnotes in the way of an Arden Shakespeare, he has just done the best he can in the space (and budget) available.

I associate to the novel of Trollope in which the pretty young heroine climbs into the trap and drives it ten miles up a country lane to succour a troubled neighbour, rather in the way now that she might climb into her car for the same purpose. She certainly knew enough about horses to be quite confident about driving a pony and trap a good way from home; something I would not care to do, despite my hours of riding lessons as a child.

Time to consult an expert.

PS: reading on from this incident I was reminded of what a good writer Tolstoy is and what a good book this is. Any television adaptation is going to be a very feeble substitute.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/seagull.html.

Reference 2: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075476/.

Trolley 48

On a recent outing, yet to be noticed, we came across a large Sainbury's trolley at the eastern end of the footbridge connecting Epsom Coaches with West Street. It not having been convenient to collect it at that time, despite its record breaking dimensions, I went back today, only to find that it had gone missing.

But there was a consolation in the form of two trolleys in the path running up the side of the main Sainsbury's building towards the footbridge. Pending enquiry with the trolley rules committee, I am scoring the two trolleys as one - the point being that the relevant rule says that one can only score trolleys which have left their home site. With this path, while quite possibly a public right of way, quite possibly also part of Sainsbury's land, even if it is on lease. We need a ruling.

I might say in passing that, since I commented on the litter on and around this path at reference 1, someone has had a go at it. Very much better this morning.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/trolley-47.html.

Reference 2: the trolley rules committee is to be found at http://www.trc.co.uk/.

Hedgerow fruit

We have had three campaigns down Horton Lane now and have what must be getting on for a gallon of frozen blackberries in the freezer - the technique being to freeze them spread out on baking trays and then to bag them up when frozen. Excellent for tarting up cooking apples over the winter.

Plenty of berries to be had down Horton Lane, with plenty of variety. Those illustrated being one of the more hairy varieties.

Size was not everything as we found that one variety had small berries, but they were firm and easy to pick - so perhaps a better bet than a variety with big but squishy berries.

Those on the western side of the lane, those getting the morning rather than the afternoon sun, seem to have ripened a week or more before those on the eastern side. Now a little past their best.

All this hedgerow lore in one post!

Margins

More margins from 'La Guingette à Deux Sous', last noticed at reference 1.

I open with a périssoire, according to both context and Larousse, a kayak. And according to Larousse a derivative of périr, to perish. Perhaps kayaks were so named for the number of fatal accidents in their vicinity. Perhaps, less drastically, named humorously for their instability and general fragility. I suppose we talk of death-traps without always meaning it too literally.

Next a laissé pour compte, in this particular case of a hat left on a shelf out the back of a hat shop, something which had been ordered but then not collected or paid for, for some reason. In a limbo land between being charged up to someone's account and where? In any event, I have not been able to come up with a neat English equivalent.

And just before that we had a prisoner in a condemned cell moaning about not being allowed to smoke. I wonder if we were petty in this particular way when we used to hang people?

And while looking up laissé in Larousse, I noticed that the word for grouse was lagopède, literally hare foot. Google obliges with good illustrations of the feet of both grouse and hares, and while there is a vague similarity, it is not much more than that. Furthermore, the hare has four toes pointing forward while the grouse has three - just the sort of distinction that taxonomists get very excited about - with, for example, the even-toed ungulates being called the artiodactyla. All deflated a bit by Collins-Robert alleging that the French for grouse is grouse - but then it is well known that some dictionary compilers can't resist translating a word by the word itself, even when the justification is flimsy - with the compilers of the Harrap's dictionaries being particularly bad in this respect.

But maybe the connection is quite different: I was reading only yesterday that the keepers of deer stalkeries like to keep the hares down as they mess up the stalking - I suppose that the stalkers put up hares which alert the deer to the presence of stalkers. Or at least to the possibility of a presence, quite enough reason to run if you are a deer. So maybe one could concoct some story about grouse and hares.

Lastly, from the garden rather from Maigret, although Simenon does use the phrase of a hurrying Maigret, we have ventre à terre, said of something or someone running very fast, but also describing very well the forward movement of our visiting black cat when it is sliding forward to spring on a squirrel or a pigeon - and always missing in our experience. A cat which is mentioned here from time to time. For an early, if not a first, mention see reference 2. Again, I have not been able to come up with a neat English equivalent.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/vocabulary-time.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/trauma.html.

Cycles

Various cycling incidents to report from a recent Horton Clockwise.

First, I emerged onto the sidewalk on our very own, quiet suburban (estate) road, was walking along and had turned to talk to a neighbour, when I found that two adult males - maybe between thirty and forty - in smart casual clothes were coming up behind me, on cycles, on the same sidewalk. No bells or alarms that I was aware of. No excuse for being on the sidewalk that I could - or can - think of. I stepped aside without thinking to bellow or block.

Second, on Horton Lane, we had a rather older cyclist, fully hatted and lycra'd, pedaling fast south, while his head and eyes appeared to be fully engaged, eyes down, by whatever it was he had up on his mobile phone, held for the purpose with his left hand.

Third, on Chessington Road (Ewell), we had a teenager showing off his skill at cycling with his front wheel well up and off the ground. He appeared to be more or less under control, and the road was quiet but he was weaving about a bit. A bit awkward for any motorist in the vicinity - who stood every chance of being blamed if said cyclist lost control and swerved under his wheels.

All in all a good illustration of the poor cycling manners - and lack of concern for others - that the present fad for cycles has brought out.

And then on Longmead Road we had another teenager - quite possibly from the sort of family the Guardian would call poor white and quite possibly not having had the benefit of a proper unbringing - who thought it was cool to tear up and down on a motorcycle which sounded as if it had been tuned up to make as much noise, stink and smoke as possible. A pain, but then I thought that he was that hopeless that this was the best sort of strutting that he could manage - and young males do need to strut, even in the best of families. Not up, for example, for cheering along his football team in TB, never mind actually playing the game.

Elephants

A few weeks ago I learned about the unusual brain of the elephant, a brain which includes an outsize cerebellum, quite possibly in order to deal with the large amount of nervous traffic needed to control the thousands of muscles in the trunk.

Then this morning, by chance turning over the pages of Burton's handsome 'Mammals' (see reference 1), I learned about another aspect of the elephant's brain and also something about its chewing teeth.

The aspect of the brain was its lack of symmetry, with the result that most elephants prefer to use their right tusks for important jobs like digging holes, in much the same way as most of us prefer to use our right hand for important jobs like holding a hammer. The result, in the case of the elephant, is that the right tusk is generally a bit shorter than the left tusk.

The something about the chewing teeth was that the elephant, according to Burton, is born with four sets of six chewing teeth, one set for each side of each jaw, with at least four of each six dormant at birth. These six teeth gradually move forward, through the elephant's life, with the two at the front at any one time doing all the work. The very front one eventually wears and then falls out, with the action moving onto the next two. Eventually the elephant runs out of chewing teeth and starves to death. One might think to deal with this by offering a less fibrous diet, but then, I dare say other parts of the alimentary system might start to complain.

PS: I remember while typing this an allegation - I cannot now think from where - that the chewing teeth of Egyptian pharaohs, that is to say the back teeth, were worn down to the gums by the time that they died. They could not cope with the amount of fibre & grit in the coarse bread which made up a good part of even aristocratic ancient Egyptian diets - and they had no arrangements for replacement at all.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dalhousie.html.

The rocks of Earlsfield

I woke this morning to worry about the rocks of Earlsfield (see reference 1), a worry which I now share.

The colour scheme of this novel garden furniture is grey and cream. Assuming that it is left out of doors all the time, within a few months the rocks will become home to various lichens, mosses and such like and will no longer be a smart cream. Worse still, various forms of animal life may well take up residence.

Now it may well be that the manager of the Leather Bottle will find this offensive. Perhaps the managing décor consultant (outside) at Young's will find this offensive. Perhaps she is called Mary Portas, although I have not checked at reference 2. Part of the deal may be that she cannot own up to it. So what is to be done?

A crude answer would be to apply a pressure washer or a steam hose, but I do not think that would do terribly well. It would not restore the rocks to the uniform pristine creamness which we saw and loved. What I think is that the tables will have to be dismantled, the rocks taken out and scrubbed all over, with the empty cases perhaps pressure washed. This should perhaps be done once a month and thus avoid altogether any unsightly build-ups.

PS: look for MDC(O) in the Young's office directory.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/earlsfield.html.

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

Nostalgia

I made the mistake last week of buying four large peaches (for the modest sum of £2) from a stall in Epsom Market which I should have remembered went in for cheap, showy and not very satisfactory fruit. In this case the peaches were ripe enough and the first one was quite eatable, but I decided that the remainder would be better cooked.

Part of this was a wave of fruity nostalgia. When I was a child, we used to bottle lots of fruit from the garden: apples, pears, plums, cherries, gooseberries, raspberries and peaches. I expect that blackcurrants were considered a bit strong for bottling and that they mostly went for blackcurrant jelly - something I was partial to as a child - and a format which avoided a lot of tedious preparation. Buying in was not thought of. Huge consumption of preserving sugar, in those days somewhat cheaper than the ordinary sort, and coming in sturdy brown rather than flimsy white bags.

The peaches were a white fleshed peach, especially bred for the English climate, and when they were good they were very good indeed. The only catch was that this tree swung between glut and nothing much at all. Bottling was one answer to glut, although a rather labour intensive process involving peeling and stoning the peaches - with, from a child's point of view - a very large number of peaches being needed to fill the sort of kilner jar that we used. But the product was again very good indeed, almost as good, although rather different, as fresh. And quite different from the yellow peach segments one commonly gets in tins.

The tree was probably the Peregrine featured at reference 1. A variety which must have been self fertile as we only had the one peach tree. I don't think we used to net it, although we did net the nearby morello cherry tree which was rather bigger. Black fishing nets from Lowestoft, nets which at that time I was able to mend with the approved knots. Note: do not be misled by google: morello cherries are good for both eating and cooking.

First step peel the peaches. If one has a peach in top condition it is possible to just pull the skin off with a small knife; with these peaches it was more a matter of peeling them like an apple or a potato. But they were large enough that this worked OK. The trick was to cut them in half before peeling, just twisting to separate the two halves - that way the removal of the stone and the cutting of each half into four segments did not result in peach mush.

Second step boil up two ounces of sugar in about three quarters of a pint of water, in a saucepan big enough that the peaches would just fit in a single layer.

Add peach segments and simmer for around 8 minutes.

Leave to cool to room temperature and eat. Not bad, somewhere between the bottled peaches of childhood and the tinned peaches of sainsbury.

PS: do not put stewed fruit in the refrigerator. They might keep longer there but, to my mind, destructive of taste and texture.

Reference 1: http://www.unwins.co.uk/peach-tree-peregrine-pid2567.html.

Earlsfield

Last week to Earlsfield for lunch, that is to say just about a week ago. A trip to town to see all the pretty people, with Earlsfield being better supplied with same than Epsom.

Wandered towards Tooting in the expectation that something suitable would turn up by the time that we got to the Leather Bottle, once a quite decent Young's pub, now an eatery. While, as it turned out, the first item of interest was a low flying four engine jet, a jet which appeared to be approaching Heathrow at a much lower angle than usual. Was something going on which meant that the usual approach path was not available? We will never know.

The Leather Bottle was home to a very cheerful Jamaican barmaid and a clutch of the sort of people who used to live in Earlsfield before the pretty people arrived and who probably used to use the nearby George IV, which once sported a sea food stall outside on Friday afternoons, lovers of dog racing and horse racing inside, but now a Tesco Express. We decided that we were not attracted by the rather ordinary pub-grub menu: fish & chips, sausage and mash (with fruity gravy all over the ensemble), something to do with duck, something to do with beef and so on. We thought that we would rather go to a Wetherspoons if that was what we were going to eat.

Their case was not helped by a large truck filled with ready meals pulling up outside, just as we arrived, for the weekly delivery of same: a tasteful and appetising medley of boil in the bag and microwave. Or perhaps it was a daily delivery.

So back to the Carluccio's just by Earlsfield station, where we were attended to by a very frisky young lady from somewhere in Europe. Great fun and very good at her work. At one point I caught her in a mirror, coming around a pillar and who, spotting a party who needed attention, got her face, posture and attitude looking right before bouncing smartly up to them. It only took a second or so, but it was amusing to catch her in the act. BH remembered such action from her days at Butlins.

Meal and wine good. Block of tiramisu factory made but good, not soggy, which for me is the main thing. That apart, nothing fancy and reasonable prices. There was some confusion about coffee, which was resolved by my saying that madam would take coffee from Milan as that was nearer than Naples. To which the waitress replied that she thought that sir did want another bottle of wine as it was Saturday and one let one's hair down a bit on Saturdays. I settled for a glass of pudding wine.

The restaurant seemed to be a destination for young families taking gran out for a treat, with one party of such having a long conversation about some aspect of caravan life. They were behind me so I cannot be sure, but perhaps they were another relic, like the chaps at the Leather Bottle, of the Earlsfield before the pretty people.

Back to the station to manage a couple of twos at the aeroplane game before our train came in. During our ride I told BH once again about the chap that I had once met in the Leather Bottle who played the game from the window of his tower block flat - from where he had a good line on planes going down into Gatwick. At the end of the ride we struck up with a small party of very highly dressed & made up young ladies - that is, lightly dressed but heavily made up. It seems that they had been to something called a morning rave, such a rave being distinguished by the unusual time of day and the absence of both alcohol & drugs. These last were mentioned in an entirely matter of fact way as the most normal thing in the world. From where I associate now to the stupidity of our drug laws.

PS: the illustration being of the garden furniture out front at the Leather Bottle. Rocks in cages being, it seems, the latest thing. Dearer than chunky wood I should imagine. I remember what there was there before, all parasols and bamboo. I also remember taking a Sunday afternoon cigar among said parasols and bamboo, after having heard an entertaining, if not particularly instructive, talk by one Simon Russell Beale. One of the several occasions when I have been to a celebrity talk where the celebrity in question can't be bothered to talk to the text supplied, finding it much simpler just to trot out his or her standard talk, very lightly edited.

Evening nature

A few evenings ago, we happened to notice a lot of what appeared to be large insects - bee size or bigger - flying around over our back lawn, clearly caught in the setting sun from the west facing back window of our extension. Perhaps they were moths.

Then this evening, at around 2030, when it was nearly dark, a lot of what appeared to be bats. Bats of about the size and (in the dark) something like swallows or swifts in appearance, but flying in rather shorter lines. And we have never had either swallows or swifts in our garden before - although, to be fair, I did see some quite recently in Worcester Park and some more in Nonsuch Park, neither very far away. See, for example, reference 1.

On balance, I settle for the bats of today making a meal of the moths of yesterday.

Perhaps I need one of those bat detectors. Maybe the Epsom branch of Maplins does them.

PS: bats present again this Saturday evening, at about the same time. More bat-like on this occasion in that I thought I glimpsed their distinctive wing shape, not like that of a swallow or swift at all. On the other hand, it might just be a spot of the sort of image enhancement noticed at reference 2.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/tulips.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/joey-not-franklin.html.

Joey not Franklin

After a gap of some years (see reference 1), a new cat has moved in next door. A young, pretty short haired Burman called Joey. Café au lait with black face, ears and other extremities.

He has made friends with another young cat from further up the road, a black cat with very entertaining ways, particularly in the tail department. But he has not made friends with me, not going further than eyeing me from the safety of a bush - and scrambling over the fence when I tried to get a bit nearer. BH says I have to wait for him to come to me.

But if you click the picture to enlarge and look carefully, he is to be seen above the blue pot.

Another example of how the eyes go in for some tricky image enhancement. They know that there is a cat there, so they tweak the image you get to see accordingly - with the cat being a lot more visible in real life than it is in the snap. The Lumia is clearly a bit dim by comparison with real eyes.

PS: the two pots of small red flowers on long stems to the left of Joey are both attractive in themselves and to bees. Covered in them today - as they are on most, but oddly, not all, sunny days.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=franklin.

Vocabulary time

This time in the margins of 'La Guingette à Deux Sous'.

First we have 'tirer une tête', said of a waiter on the terrace of a Parisian café who has lost a regular customer.

For once reference 1 was not particularly helpful, but poking around I decide that it means to pull a bit of a face, to be a bit cross or grumpy. The clue was a quote from Baroness Amélie Nothomb whom I came across back in 2010. See reference 2. From which I learn that out-of-the-box blogger search cannot cope with spelling Nothomb Northomb, which last being how I seem to prefer it. Probably not with missing accents either, but that did not matter on this occasion, the relevant posts being from the time before I had learned how to do them.

Second we have 'accessoires de cotillon', which the context would suggest is the French equivalent of sewing mailbags in prison. But which Larousse suggests are the bits and bobs which accessorise a country dance called a cotillon, while reference 1 leads me to an important 402 page customs document from the European Commission, the top of which is illustrated above and from which I learn that 'les parapluies et les ombrelles qui ne sont - de par la nature des matières utilisées dans leur fabrication - utilisables que comme accessoires de cotillon sont exclus de cette position (no 9505)'. Not very helpful in the present context, but a reminder of how much hay the legal eagles are going to make out of this brexit lark.

Perhaps Simenon is using a bit of jail bird slang for the sort of junk they have you making by way of occupation - perhaps occupational therapy - while in prison. Better than just sitting in a cell. Better than breaking stones on some hot road out in the country.

PS: BH thinks that the barn dance version of the cotillon is probably quite vigorous and might well involve the couples holding something between them, perhaps a hat, a stick or an umbrella, one at each end. Accessories of this sort are allowed on 'Strictly Come Dancing'. Perhaps in French barns they had a tub full of such things from which the lady of each couple could pick whatever took her fancy. Which choice might include not so subliminal messages to her partner about his status in her world. Alternatively, the gentlemen might pick something to present to the ladies of their choice.

Reference 1: http://www.linguee.fr/francais-anglais/.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=amelie.

Shed

The large and handsome shop front at Garsons.

Much the same technology as that which goes into sheds for Sainsbury's or B&Q - with modern steel framed sheds making for large, uncluttered shop floors. No columns to get in the way of shoppers, trolleys or merchandise.

Group search key: gsa.

Apples

The row of Discovery apples. Nicely presented trees with very little disease or damage. Still quite enough, very good, apples left for us.

Just a pity about the waste. No good picking them up as an early apple like Discovery does not stand at all well in the house, never mind lying on the ground in the sun. I suppose they might be good for juicing or cider but would that pay enough to be worth picking them up?

Group search key: gsa.

Runner beans

A view of the runner bean field. Being rather out of practise, and perhaps in too much of a hurry, I picked the beans rather big. Which meant that the first round was rather chewy. For the second round I simply podded the beans and discarded the cases. Being white runner beans rather than purple, they ate rather like large baked beans, less the sauce and sugar. but with a much better texture as they had not been sitting in a tin for months.

Group search key: gsa

Potatoes

There was a piece in the Guardian a few days ago all about how caring parents in California take their children to pick your own fruit and vegetable farms so that their children can learn something about where fruit and vegetables come from. All very cuddly. But what was not so cuddly was that these family friendly pick your own places were islands of civilisation and decency set in miles and miles of commercial operations, staffed up by poor Mexicans toiling away in the heat on the US version of minimum wage/zero hours contracts, perhaps in the very hot plastic tunnels in which a lot of stuff is grown, even, it seems, in California.

This reminded me that we have such a place near us, Garsons, although I do not think I had ever visited it. See reference 1. So off we went, one sunny weekday morning to see how it was.

First stop the potato field where we were told the form by a nicely spoken young lady, perhaps still at school, not from elsewhere in the European Union and set to spend her day sitting in a little wooden shack. Smartly enough painted shack but quite little, possibly quite hot when the sun gets up. The form was that a machine had turned up what they hoped was enough potatoes for the day and we just had to go and pick up what we wanted. Potential for waste looked large, although it may be that the staff glean the fields at closing time and sell off the gleanings in the shop the next day.

Second stop the runner bean field. Beans a little past their best but we took a few pounds. Plus some outdoor cucumbers which were in the adjoining plot.The cucumber plants were growing out of a black plastic sheet and did not look very attractive at all - but the little cucumbers were good - much better than the long ones - with bitter green skins - mostly sold in supermarkets.

Third stop the apple field where we took a few pounds of Discovery's. These turned out to be very good indeed, only just going over when we finished them near a week later. We were reminded how good fresh apples can be, rather than supermarket ones, which with the best will in the world have to be a few days old. The only downer was the large quantity of apples which had fallen, unpicked in the heat and were going to waste. Maybe waste is a fact of life in the fruit business.

Next stop the shop, as large an operation as that at Chessington Garden Centre, and a good deal larger than all but the largest stores on our high streets. Much the same sort of stuff as at Chessington (although rather further for us to travel), that is to say a step up from what you buy in holiday towns but not quite John Lewis.

Last stop, the café, again very similar to that at Chessington Garden Centre. Must have been a dozen or more young people working it, all very pleasant. As were the tea and cake, although I forget now what species of cake I opted for. Maybe it will come back to me.

All of which gave one the impression that the shops and café earned a lot more money than the pick your own part of the operation. Despite the elaborate & expensive arrangements for growing strawberries and cherries.

On the way out our car was checked by a pleasant young man, who did insist on having the boot opened, not content to take our word that there was nothing in it. Must be fun at the checkout at the end of a busy Sunday when people are getting a bit tired and testy.

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

Group search key: gsa

Trolley 47

A Sainsbury's trolley again, captured at the crossing of the exit from Kiln Lane onto East Street.

After returning it, I carried on down the passage at the side of the Sainsbury's building, to find that the passage, once again, was badly littered.

Perhaps it is time I suggested to their customer service people that it is time for another clear up. Or perhaps I should do the clear up myself and present them with the two or three dustbin bags of rubbish that I could probably recover in half an hour or so. Would they give me a little something as a token of their appreciation? Or would I be taking the bread out of the mouths of starving zero hours contract workers?

Bit hot this afternoon, but I might be tempted tomorrow, just for the crack as we used to say when I was small. Something else that wikipedia knows all about - see reference 1 - where I was interested to read that it is really a word from the Middle English which has not been in Ireland for very long, certainly not centuries. And I had thought that the crack was the staple diet of Irish navvies.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craic.

Slug extraordinary

On the path over West Hill, around noon on the 22nd August. As I recall, a warm and sunny day, enough so that I was carrying water.

Between three and four inches long, rather over half an inch fat at the fattest point.

Thinking to be funny, I thought that maybe I should post it as a Leopard Slug and was all set to cod up a leopard flavoured scientic name when I learned from google that it might well be the fairly rare limax maximus, otherwise the Leopard slug. Perhaps a juvenile, as wikipedia tells me the adults are between 4 and 8 inches in length.

If indeed it was one of these, wikipedia also tells me that, for an invertebrate of very little brain it does quite well: 'limax maximus is capable of associative learning, specifically classical conditioning, because it is capable of aversion learning and other types of learning. It can also detect deficiencies in a nutritionally incomplete diet if the essential amino acid methionine is experimentally removed from its food'. Not so well though that it doesn't find itself on an exposed pavement in the middle of the day - regarding which google suggests that the big problem will be heatstroke rather than predation as they are not a favoured food of the sort of large birds you might find in such a context.

As a lapsed friend of the earth (they were too political and spent too much of my subscription on sending me junk mail), I have sent in a sighting report to reference 1.

Reference 1: https://www.opalexplorenature.org/.

New triffid

Following the last post on the subject of aloes (see reference 1), it turned out that BH had another triffid coming along, which has now been repotted and moved to the study.

As can be seen if you click to enlarge, its leaves had also gone a bit brown, perhaps another victim of over watering, but a few days on the study window cill and they are pretty much the proper green again.

Will this one last longer than the six months or so of its predecessor?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/holidays.html.

Holidays

The other day, it being quite hot, my suspecting that the tips of the study aloe were getting scorched and my feeling that it was getting a bit big for this particular window cill, the study aloe was moved onto the patio for a holiday, preparatory to its being moved to a new home in the downstairs front room, where it would get the morning rather than the afternoon sun.

However, as it turned out, the aloe did not get on very well at all outside. Maybe it did not like the slugs (one leaf showed signs of having been bitten by something), maybe it did not like the cool of the night (although this seemed a bit unlikely as a lot of these hot dry places, the sort of places where one imagines that an aloe comes from, are cold at night) or most likely, we managed to over water it. I had thought that leaving it in its pottery pot would be an aid to stability, without thinking that it would also be an aid to flooding, given that the patio plants are watered most summer mornings.

Rather sorry for itself, it has now been removed to the front room to recover. It may be that the main stem is a goner, this last having certainly keeled right over in the absence of the study window to hold it up. Left in the snap above.

Last snap that I can find at reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/plant-life.html.

Describing consciousness

People, some of them eminent, have been trying to describe and classify conscious experience for thousands of years, with the pace picking up in the last hundred years or so. Sometimes pictures have been attempted, as with Dürer's 'Melancholia I' illustrated left; sometimes words, with Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ being a famous example, and scientists are now trying to do one better. And today, my attempt at descriptive experience sampling on myself (DES, see reference 4), prompts me to join the fray.

A lot – but not all – of this turns out to come in threes: three aspects, three qualities and three sub-qualities. A change from the sevens which I usually major on.

First, we organise the world of the consciousness of an individual into three aspects: time, threads and quality. We avoid the term ‘dimension’ as this has an overly mathematical and organised flavour; a precision which is not there.

In what follows, I use the word ‘action’ to refer to something happening in the nervous system, central or otherwise, something which might or might not amount to or make it to consciousness. Something which might take more or less time.

Time

Time is important because consciousness is not instantaneous, it takes time to work – and the view that one takes of any particular bit of consciousness, any particular bit of action, can depend on how much time, on its duration. So for present purposes, I am supposing that we can break a stream of consciousness down into a series of takes, with the duration of a take varying, but typically in the order of a few seconds, with the rest of the description which follows making sense at that sort of granularity. We also allow flashes of action, of the order of tens of milliseconds, available to the brain in general but not usually to consciousness. Flashes are sparse and do not, unlike frames, usually span or add up to the whole of the subjective experience. Frames start at half a second or so and are the smallest bits of action which reliably make it to consciousness. Takes are made up some whole number of frames, sometimes just one, while scenes are some larger grouping of takes. In sum: flashes, then frames, then takes, then scenes –  with the whole being lifted from the world of films, based as that is on the workings of human sight, an important element of our consciousness. Wikipedia knows all about it.

It is unlikely that a sampling procedure like DES is going to hit something like a flash, but, in any event, I think that DES is targeting frames, while I am more interested, at least presently, in takes.

A note of qualification: put simply, we mostly experience consciousness as a continuous stream, the famous stream of consciousness. However, for some purposes it may be necessary to consider the gaps between frames, gaps which might arise in brains in the same way as they do in films: the jump from one frame to the next is not instantaneous. And while I do not see frames as photographic stills, I do see them as being fixed for their duration in some sense. A frame is assembled and then delivered to consciousness where it sits until the next frame comes off the assembly line to displace it. Or pushing the analogy a little harder, we might have a number of assembly lines, all pushing to get their frame into consciousness.

Threads

We have threads because the action in the brain can often be conveniently thought of in those terms, broken down in that way. So if, for example, I am walking along a road, my walking along the road might be one thread, while my thinking about where to go for lunch might be another. Sometimes the breaking down of action into threads will seem a little arbitrary, with there being more than one way of doing things – but the present thought is that that does not matter. There is usually more than one way to skin a cat – or to do something in MS Word – and we do not need to make a fuss about it.

Note that for our present purposes, we do not need the threads to exhaust the action in the brain. We are only interested in that action which has a bearing on consciousness – which consideration excludes plenty. We are not, for example, interested in the detail of the regulation of blood pressure or the regulation of glucose levels in the blood, important though these are for the maintenance of life. Such matters are, perforce, delegated – and most of the time that is fine. We don’t need to know.

In the future, it may be possible to tease out that part of the signal generated by the brain which represents, which encodes, some particular thread. For the moment this is not possible.

Threads are not all equally conscious. In the walking example, one of the two threads will usually be dominant, with dominance perhaps flip-flopping between the two threads in a seemingly random way. We might try to capture this by giving threads a weight, a positive or negative real number, that is to say a real valued function defined on time. Positive for conscious, and the more positive the more conscious, perhaps rather like alertness, a term used by others in a similar context. Zero for on the threshold of consciousness and negative for unconsciousness. I associate to those perspex columns of water containing brightly coloured plastic fishes with near neutral buoyancy, drifting up and down the column. You used to be able to buy them from a fancy-goods bazaar in Kingston but, unusually, I can’t turn anything up in google.

What such a weight does not capture is the idea that one thread might partially or totally occlude another. A notion which is better captured in MS Powerpoint with its ordering of picture shapes (exemplified by the ‘bring to the front’ command) and with its transparency property for shapes. See reference 6.

We might have a second weight, a non-negative real number which tells us something about how much is going on, how complicated the thread is, how much information it carries. So, unlike Tononi (see reference 1), I would give a black spot on a white ground a low weight, but a picture, say ‘The Fight between Carnival and Lent’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (see reference 2), a high weight.

We might even have a third weight, a non-negative real number which tells us something about how much of the thread action is going on in consciousness. In which we are allowing a thread to be part conscious. Going back to the fishes in the column, the top of a fish might be in consciousness while the bottom was not, or rather in the way that fishes in a murky pond might seem from above; tops visible, bottoms invisible. More relevant, a visual thread supporting a verbal thread might be on the edge of consciousness: the broad outline of say, a cow, is available to consciousness but the rest of the cow, perhaps the details of the horns and of the tail, while readily available, are not in consciousness at that particular time, for that particular frame or take.

Going further, one might ascribe all kinds of other properties to threads. To start, one might have dominant mode – is this thread about vision, smell, taste, touch or hearing? And then one might have subject matter – is this thread about cows or tripods? One could go on.

Some threads will persist in the brain for some time, perhaps for the order of minutes or even hours, and being conscious for only some of that time. Others, perhaps corresponding to significant others, might be more or less permanent, but only being activated, or perhaps instantiated, from time to time. Some threads will push out other threads: we can, for example, only have one active speech thread. So we have a natural history of threads.

Summing the first of these weights across threads does not make much sense, but we might sum the second and third to give us person totals. The sum of the second weights tells us how much action we have captured in threads. We note in passing Herculano-Houzel’s observation in her recent book (see reference 5) that the waking brain’s glucose consumption does not seem to depend very much on what the brain is doing, that glucose consumption will only be weakly correlated with this last sum, even if we assume that the action not so captured just runs along at a steady state, not changing much from take to take.

When the sum of the third weights is close to zero, then that person is close to being unconscious – which is not to say that the brain is idle, an idle brain being a dead brain, just that, roughly speaking, there is no subjective experience, no consciousness.

Better than a column of fishes, one might picture the different threads arranged up the page, perhaps in different colours, with each one running in time across the page, something that is easy enough to work up in Excel. Maybe with the threads shown with time-varying fatness, with fatness indicating consciousness or importance. In some future world, one might even be able to wire oneself up to see something of the sort on your computer display, rather as you can wire yourself up and watch your brain waves now. For yet another metaphor, a musical metaphor, see reference 1 again.

I note in passing that some people think that the synchronisation, the bringing together of all the bits and pieces, fragments even, which make up conscious experience is achieved by some sort of carrier wave or circuit, some sort of entrainment – so perhaps the musical metaphor of reference 1, with the various threads held together, in part, by the beat of the music, ties in there as well.

Quality

I turn now to quality, a property which hovers, for the present, between being a property of takes and being a property of frames. Flashes are certainly too small and scenes are certainly too big. Perhaps this will become clearer going forward.

Notwithstanding, for the present I allow just three qualities:

• Absorbed activity (75%)
• Flickering (10%)
• Independent thought (15%).

With one piece of evidence for this being that my DIY DES suggests that good proportion of the sample points in my waking day fall quite comfortably into one of these three categories – with the rough percentages being the numbers in brackets. I would guess that I am high on flickering because I spend a fair chunk of each day walking a regular route on which there is little need or inclination to pay much attention.

Absorbed activity is where the person concerned is fully engaged in some purposeful activity or other, fully engaged to the point where some might say that the person was not conscious at all. A person absorbed in activity is apt to be largely unware of what is going on around him. Examples of absorbed activity include drilling a hole in a wall, making a cake, playing a shot at golf, writing a computer program, chairing a meeting, having a meal at a restaurant, going to a wedding, reading a book, listening to the radio, watching television or being at a theatrical performance of some sort.

Note that an absorbed activity can be either active or passive.

Many people like to add radio or television to an only fairly absorbing activity, in which case their conscious attention might flip-flop between the two threads in an irregular, not so say, random way.

Flickering is what I spend some of my time doing when I am out walking. My attention is flickering from place to place around the scene in front of me, rarely alighting anywhere for more than a second or so. There might be a few vague, verbal thoughts but they do not amount to much. Such flickering is often associated with some undemanding background activity, in my case walking: so one thread for the walking, another for the visual flickering. Perhaps a third, low-grade, verbal thread.

Or perhaps driving on a road that one knows reasonably well and which is not too busy. Or pretending to listen to someone going on about something which one has heard all about before. In the case of a cow, perhaps grazing. While a big cat might just be sitting. In the case of the cow, the flickering is keeping an eye out for predators, while the cat is on the look-out for prey, with its attention flicking to features which the retina is continually flagging up for its attention. Which suggests that flickering might have evolved to help us survive in a jungle full, as jungles are, of both challenges and opportunities.

Third and last, we have independent thought. Independent thoughts are the chains of images in the mind which are not derived directly from the environment, that is to say from the body (the pain in the stomach), from the periphery (the feeling of the hand in the glove) or the outside world (the owl hooting in the garden).  Images which might be thought of as flashes, but much more commonly as frames or takes.

A conscious flash of independent thought is going to occupy the whole of consciousness, while a conscious thread can co-exist with another, generally in a foreground-background relationship. One of the conscious threads will be very much to the fore.

The stuff which makes us human by lifting us above the brute world. That said, this independent thought would often be nothing to do with me or my place in the world; it might be about edifying things like prison reform or membership of the European Union. And while it might not be the raw pain, it might be about the pain in the stomach. Was the pain in the stomach down to the prawns I had for lunch?

Sub-quality

I further split independent thought into three sub-qualities as follows:

• word like – and fairly slow. Roughly speaking, this sort of thought seems to be constrained by the speed with which we can speak out loud. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to make progress, to reason with words. For example, all horses are mammals.
• picture like – and generally fairly small. It is easier to image a daisy than an herbaceous border. And it is harder to image an herbaceous border that it is to say ‘herbaceous border’
• other – for example sound, smell or feel. Or some combination.

In my waking day, my impression is that most of my inner thought is in words, with the odd sprinkling of pictures in the background. Perhaps one thread for the words, one thread for the pictures. Inner thought involves more pictures when, for example, I am just waking up, in the dark. Perhaps it is harder to form pictures in the mind when pictures are pouring in from the outside world – or, at the least, harder to see them.

Closing remarks

There will be times when what I am doing does not fit, when my sample point does not fit neatly into one of the three qualities described above. I imagine a triangle with the three corners corresponding to the three qualities, with the sample points quite strongly clustered around the them, but with others dotted about. I associate to those cluster diagrams you get from people who have done principal components analysis on something complicated to pull out some small number of dimensions.

So, for example, if my inner verbal thoughts become coherent, intense and ongoing, we move to somewhere on or near the line between inner thought and absorbed activity. Is it part of the point of inner thought that there is a degree of aloofness from the thought, a sense of self having the inner thought, a sense which vanishes when we are absorbed – or, for that matter, when we are flickering. Or if my absorbed activity is not that absorbed and my mind wanders off the job, we then might move to somewhere on or near the line between absorbed activity and flickering. And so on.

Standing back a bit, using the terms introduced above, taking in a scene or two, we might see what is mainly a period of absorbed activity, with a few patches of flickering or independent thought. Or what is mainly a period of flickering, with a few patches of absorbed activity or independent thought. A period of independent thought is less likely, at least in my experience, being patchy by nature.

And there are the people who can do than more than one thing at once, like Fran, noticed at reference 3, which in this model is reflected in extra threads, perhaps with unusual weights. There may be times when being able to do that is adaptive, but I also suspect that dividing conscious resources between two activities will result in poor performance in both. So not maybe not always adaptive: maybe it is better to concentrate on running away from the tiger, rather than trying to dream up complicated ways to knock it on the head as one goes along. That should have been done beforehand.

Then there are the people, the relations of Fran, who claim to be able to attend to more than one thing at once. This I have difficulties with, although I am quite happy with people who can attend to things which are not there, which are only there in their minds. A trick which, I understand, that some animals can pull off.

Lastly, I offer some thoughts regarding Hurlburt’s unsymbolised thoughts, the subject of much debate in the academic press.

We allow threads whose function is to block out other threads. So I might tap my fingers energetically to block out something I do not like. Other blocking threads might be devices resorted to by the unconscious, with such threads not having any conscious content, but intended either to block unpleasant thoughts or to block conscious interference in some delicate operation that the unconscious is engaged on.

All of which gives us a device to implement unsymbolised thought. Such thoughts are simply going on in the subconscious as unconscious threads, but the bleep tears aside the veil of the blocking thread, revealing all or part of the previously unconscious thought. So I am conscious that I was not conscious of the thought before the bleep, but after the bleep I know all about it and am able to report both on it and its absence. Giving us the phenomenon of unsymbolised thought.

Going forward, I shall test how this way of looking at things stands up to further descriptive sampling. Can I use it to reliably and consistently code up the way that I spend my time – or at least that part of it which I open up to sampling?

PS: with thanks to Charles Fernyhough, one of whose books pointed me in the direction of Russell Hurlburt.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/another-metaphor.html.

Reference 2: http://www.wikiart.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder/the-fight-between-carnival-and-lent-1559-1.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-case-of-fran.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.

Reference 5: http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com/lab.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/transparency.html.

Transparency

Another bit of preparation for a forthcoming post. A snip from Powerpoint showing one object on top of another, but with a bit of transparency.

Another metaphor

With regard to a forthcoming post, I was trying earlier this morning to think of a suitable illustration for the notion of threads of consciousness. I usually use a picture with the different threads arranged up the page, perhaps in different colours, with each one running in time across the page, something that is easy enough to work up in Excel. The idea is that the threads wax and wane in time, with one sometimes occluding another, perhaps partially or completely. Threads come and go in time. Some threads - perhaps representing a significant other - have a more or less permanent existence, even though they may only appear in consciousness from time to time. At which point Excel starts to struggle a bit and my Powerpoint is not good enough to rise to the challenge.

This morning's brave wave was that perhaps a more convenient metaphor was that of a piece of instrumental music, with the various parts waxing and waning in the way suggested above, but with the whole somehow present in consciousness. Both integrated and differentiated as, I think, Tonini of reference 3 sometimes has it.

A full orchestra would have been better in the sense that it did not come with a small fixed number of threads, but I don't think it would work quite as well on the screen.

Note that there is a separate volume control for each thread.

I am grateful to reference 2 for the illustration, which appears to have been taken from the Beethoven String Quartets offered for sale by reference 1. The opening of Op.135 and a rather better copy than I would have managed with my telephone.

PS: a further thought being that once Deepmind has sorted out the challenge at reference 5, they could try reverse engineering the score of this quartet from a recording of a performance. Part 1: sorting out the threads. Part 2: turning the threads into the sort of score that a musician might recognise.

Reference 1: Dover Study and Playing Editions, New York, 1970.

Reference 2: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://integratedinformationtheory.org/.

Reference 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laUMuPkm7Ow may be helpful. Very respectable quartet.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/bees.html.

Portrait

An early morning anecdote which caught my attention.

It seems that back in the twenties or thirties a then well known sculptor made a portrait head of Osbert Sitwell, a head which at some point was given to the Tate Gallery in Millbank. Somewhat later still, Sitwell was rather surprised when visiting the place to be smartly & ostentatiously saluted by one of the gallery guards.

The guard explained that he knew him well as he had the dusting of him every morning.

Apart from anything else, the idea of someone who gives things to museums actually visiting them seems rather odd now. People who leave things to museums don't visit and I can't imagine that the tycoons and moguls whom I assume to be the usual sort of live donor actually visiting the places: the anecdote suggests a quite different sort of relationship between donor, management and place.

Airing the water

On Friday, two men sitting in a van were pumping water out of the stream down Longmead Road and spraying it back in again. Something to do with helping the fishes to breathe, not that I have ever seen one in this particular bit of stream.

Today, Sunday, spraying operation still in progress, following the sharp showers of yesterday, but with two men sitting in a different van.

Surely they wouldn't stick their testing strip in some particularly noxious part of the stream close Saturday to make sure of their double-time Sunday? Presumably it has to be two men, firstly to allow one to go off on comfort/refreshment/whatever breaks, secondly so that one can mind the other in the event of an industrial accident.

Might not be council men, but one can be sure that the council are paying.

Posts

A snap, taken this morning, somewhere on or near Chertsey Lane, illustrating the damage done by our grass management consultants, who have been contracted to manage the grass verges, to the posts of the softwood post and rail fencing which the developers saw fit to install in said verges.

All very unsightly, and it will not be long now before gaps start to appear.

One answer would have been to encase the posts in some hard plastic, hard enough to take on the plastic flail of the strimmers deployed by said consultants.

Another answer would have been to try to educate the zero-hours contract contractors (did they speak English?) that chopping down the posts was not part of the contract.

Yet another answer still might have been a bit of supervision.

Who knows? When councils have been cut to the bone by the Tories in order to prove how hopeless they are, who am I to moan about something as trivial as the posts decorating some housing estate? Which I don't even live on.

PS 1: further irritated by not being able to track down my previous post on this matter. I shall keep trying.

PS 2: half an hour later: being back from a late lunch, I persisted, The sort of job which one might have taken on in the world of work when back from Friday lunch time down the pub - in the far off days when such behaviour was acceptable, normal even. And eventually I turned up reference 1 - using, on this occasion, the MS Windows search folder facility on my Word back-up copy. It seemed to fit the job better than the search blog feature offered out-of-the-box by google. At least, that was where I was when I found the post in question, with 'strim' turning out to be the key word. Easy when one knows the answer. Posted at a time when I was more concerned about trees than posts.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/dead-trees.html.

Olympic legacy

This picture in yesterday's Guardian caught my eye. The train of thought being how on earth does one cope with what looks like an enormous number of people - near 55,000 of them at a sell out inaugural match at West Ham's new stadium, the newly converted Olympic stadium in east London.

I associate to the lady we heard a little over a year ago at the Royal Institution and noticed at reference 1, a lady who would certainly know how to do the sums which convert number of people and duration of event into capacity of fresh water and waste water systems. Probably also the number of St. John Ambulance people and the number of policemen. And then I wondered about how long it took to empty such a place - associating from there to stories about the tube trains at Wembley, shifting maybe 1,000 people to the train with a train every two minutes after a big match. So answer, not long. Assuming that is, that the Docklands Light Railway can do the same sort of job as the tube network...

While the Guardian is much more concerned about the cushy deal the West Ham is supposed to have got from the government. Not to mention the diversion of much Lottery money from more worthy causes than the London Olympics.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/a-sanitary-engineer.html.

Seagull

Last week to the National Theatre to see the play of this name by Chekov, as adapted by Hare.

I start with a puzzle. The programme told us that 'sea gull' was not the proper translation of the Russian 'Чайка' at all. Lake gull would be better but that does not sound very well, nor does gull alone, so successive translators have settled for sea gull.

Subsequent investigation at google was inconclusive. The Russian word has a number of meanings, of which sea gull is given as one. Other options include a sort of limousine used by senior Russian officials, tea and a terrestrial navigation system. It also seems to be quite a common proper name. The term 'lake gull' turns up the amusing suggestion that you might just as well call them dump ducks for their liking for landfill sites. While the term 'marsh gull' turns up the suggestion that it is an alternative name for a herring gull with yellow legs - and the picture included above left. The common herring gull has grey legs. All of which leaves me with no idea where the programme is coming from. Perhaps the research assistant concerned, wanting to seem clever, got a bit carried away with google after a liquid lunch.

Perhaps also, with sea gull, we are losing the association in the Russian, to a Russian in a Russia with its lots of lakes, of birds over the lake. The sounds of birds calling over the lake. The sight of birds flying low over the lake at dawn or at dusk. We have lost the soft nostalgia for the countryside, with sea gull bringing in the sea side nuisance to take its place. Different for land locked Russians, very few of whom ever do sea side.

Then we have the business of the adaptation. Chekov did not write that long ago and he wrote in a Russian which translates quite well. So why bother to adapt this play, a very good play, at all? What do we add by mucking about with this masterpiece? Not many people these days would ask the Chinese artist knocking out your copy of the 'Mona Lisa' to include a few custom tweaks, perhaps your pet dog in the lady's lap, as this would be seen as not showing proper respect for the Old Master. So why the urge to adapt - with the programme telling us that there are more than 25 adaptations of this play in print, in English alone? Perhaps like the aforementioned research assistant, the producer wanted to seem clever, by going one better than this Old Master?

Notwithstanding, a full house, including plenty of people of working age. Maybe something to do with it not being a matinée. We didn't spot any celebrities, or even any entities, although we did have the consolation prize of a ITV3 stalwart on the stage (see below).

The play started, for us to find that once again the National Theatre had lavished a huge amount of TLC on the set, including on this occasion a lake complete with water, of impressive size from where we were sitting, with the result that a fair bit of the action consisted in splashing about in the water. But they got a bonus point for playing Lotto on what looked very like my parents' folding card table, a table which still graces our front room here in Epsom.

The scene was rather dominated by Anna Chancellor as the older actress, Irina. But somehow she seemed to have a heaviness of person and personality that did not seem to quite suit the role. The only person that I recognised, although not by name, was Adrian Lukis as Dorn the doctor, whom I knew for his regular & sterling service on ITV3 murder mystery drama. What I had not realised until I checked was that he had also been the dashing villain Wickham in a Pride & Prejudice of twenty years ago, at which time he looked a good deal younger and slimmer than he does now. A scene, which once again, was rather too large, either for me, for the cast, or both. See reference 1.

Two things which I still remember did not work very well. Near the start, there is a joke about a village singer and an octave. The producer seems not to have understood that the point was that the joke had been told too often, not that it was not a joke at all, with the result that the joke was lost on me until I re-read it later. Then at the very end, the producer made a regular ceremony of the suicide - which as a matter of suicidal fact may well be spot on, but for me the whole thing dragged on and the impact of the suicide was lost. I thought the original managed rather better. Evidence for the allegation made later over beverages, that adapters of serious plays often fall prey to over-egging things. The adapter can't resist the temptation to add all kinds of twists and twiddles, to make this or that point so much better (for today's audience) than it was in the original.

Sadly, the adapted play rather dragged, despite only running for around two hours - much more me-friendly than the three that seems to be the norm these days. Overall, disappointing.

On the way home, I wondered about why people want to become actors and actresses. What is it that is so wonderful about spending large chunks of your time pretending to be someone else and about spending large chunks of your time in seedy, not to say squalid circumstances? That is to say, drafty rehearsal rooms, dirty railway carriages and seedy digs. Not to mention the usually precarious footing on the crowded ladder to success. It is one thing to enjoy plays; quite another to be in them.

Which thought prompts two confessions. First, as a child at a school which did drama, I knew that being an actor was the thing to be in a theatrical operation. But it only took seconds on the stage for me to realise that I had absolutely no talent for it at all. Second, on this present occasion, I had some trouble deciding whether I had seen the play before or not. It is, after all, a famous play and it seemed likely that I had, but it also seemed quite likely that I was getting muddled up with the very different, if near contemporary, play about a duck by Ibsen. In the end I decided that I had seen it before, because, towards the end, I had the very clear feeling that I had heard the lines about Trigorin not cutting the pages of Trepelev's story before. To be fair to me, both plays did involve large dead birds.

Post play activities included first a reading of a proper version of the play, the translation by Constance Garnett, followed by reading a couple of what Chekov called jests, 'The Bear' and 'The Proposal'. Both very funny and either of which would make a splendid overture to a more serious endeavour. But I had never heard of them before, so they can't be used in that way in this country. However, reading the play proper did remind me what a good play it was, full of incidents, strands and layers, only very loosely held together by the career of the star-struck Nina. Full of interesting stuff about the perils of the creative life, be that on the stage or at the writing table. It struck me, that what Chekov had written was really a dramatised essay, rather in the way that Aldous Huxley used, not very many years later, to dress up his essays as novels.

Then second, there was the Anna Chancellor television version of Mapp & Lucia, this last being a long-time favourite with BH. Not without merit, but not a patch on the Geraldine McEwan version from thirty or more years ago. To an even greater extent than in the play, Chancellor manages to come across with a rather heavy personality, without the far more telling lightness and fragility that McEwan brought to the television role.

PS: despite there being too much cloud for there too be many aeroplanes at Earlsfield, there were a lot of stars to be seen when we got home to Epsom. At least a lot for Epsom, where it is rare to be able to see anything other than the brightest stars. Planets even.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/the-unfinished-journey.html.

Candidates

The Olympics include all kinds of interesting sports these days, but I thought this morning that they are mostly rather human orientated: we need to get more animals involved, to get away from our fixation with humans. So I offer a few suggestions.

Coarse fishing. Once, perhaps still, one of the most popular participation sports.

Game fishing, to provide a bit of class balance to the proletarian coarse fishing.

Horse racing. Another popular sport in many countries. One might argue that the result depends more on the horse than the rider, but we already have the obscure & elitist dressage, a sport to which exactly the same argument applies, so why not the far more popular horse racing?

And while we on obscure & elitist, what about a spot of grouse shooting? Or fox hunting?

PS: and if pole dancing is in, what about cage fighting?

Wiping out the human race

The latest number of 'Scientific American' included a short piece by a professor in the US who specialises in the end of days. Perhaps he comes from the Bible Belt. Lightly edited, the story seems to be as follows.

In the next 10 years, the big threat is unstable leaders in two of the three leading world powers.

In the next 100 years, the big threat is the mess that is likely to be caused by mass migration out of zones affected by global warning. Syrians across the Ionian Sea will seem like a picnic by comparison.

In the next 1,000 years, we will need to watch out for large lumps of rock wandering around the solar system. It is possible that one is on course to hit earth with catastrophic results. The subject of at least one science fiction movie. But maybe we can build the technology we will need to deal with such a lump.

Gap to be filled.

In the next 100,000 years, we will need to watch out for much more serious climate change than global warming. Maybe another ice age is on the way, which would knock out large chunks of the northern hemisphere as we know it today.

Several gaps to be filled,

In the next 1,000,000,000 years, it is likely that the sun, as it grows older, will, contrariwise, get a lot brighter. This will probably boil off the oceans and cook any us of us who might still happen to be around. Probably need to go off-planet to get around this one.

And in around 10,000,000,000 years, the sun will die. But, provided we had found some fine new energy source, we could perhaps come back from wherever we went at the last step. But not sure about what happens to the earth orbit around the sun at this point. Does it matter? Perhaps sailing off across the Milky Way would not be such a bad idea?

PS: I shall try to work up something to fill the gaps with.