Haas

Earlier in the week to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Pavel Haas Quartet. Schubert's Quartettsatz in C minor D.703 and String Quartet in A minor D.804 (Rosamunde) and Dvořák's String Quartet No. 14 in A flat Op. 105. Last heard about a year ago at the event noticed at reference 1.

BH had to resort to dumpster diving to get a Metro, the regular supply at the entrance to he station having dried up.

Journey to Vauxhall made tiresome by our sitting across the gangway from a couple of young engineers from Atkins, one of whom complemented his sloppy, feet-up seating with rather foul language, with his conversation liberally sprinkled with expletives, rather in the way of some adolescents, which he was not. They both seemed to be very interested in questions of rank, with Atkins seeming to have a well defined grade structure, just like the military or the civil service, going on about the grades of their various colleagues until the expletives dried up when the other one got off at Wimbledon.

Journey to Oxford Circus on the tube included a young lady sitting on a mobility device. First thought was that it would take a bit of oomph to do such a thing: I would worry about get stuck somewhere without enough stair-free options. Second thought was that she was sitting on something rather like a bicycle seat, on a pole rising up from the device's platform, with no back rest or anything like that. Which I thought odd. If one was damaged enough to need to use a mobility device, would one not need a back rest too?

Uneventful picnic in Cavendish Square, although we did wonder about how they managed the interaction between the handsome mature trees above (mostly London plane) and the car park underneath. Columns of earth going down through the car park? Picnic consisting, in my case, of bread (wholemeal), cheese (Poacher), dates (Grape Tree) and water (Thames Water, now owned by I forget whom. Perhaps someone or something gulfy).

In the hall, more A4 notices stuck up, mainly white on a red ground. Someone in the front of house team has got a new printer to play with. Hopefully he or she will tire of it soon.

Small sunflowers in the hall proper, along with some white and green. BH not at all happy with the left hand version, ruling them untidy and the work of the apprentice. I thought she was being a bit harsh.

I got on well with the Schubert. To the Cock & Lion in the interval. Not to get on so well with the Dvořák after the interval, which was new to me and which seemed a bit scrappy, although BH liked it well enough. I wondered if I would have got on better had the order of service been reversed, with new Dvořák first and the better known Schubert second. I seem to have got on a bit better with the neighbouring Op.106 noticed at reference 2.

On the way home, read about a tornado in a suburb of Ottawa called Dunrobin, which inspection later revealed to be not that far from where my cousin lives in western Ottawa. Say less than ten miles. Don't get tornadoes anywhere near Epsom. See reference 4.

And as it happens, an accidental coda to the business with Sullivan, with D.804 using material from the Rosamunde noticed at reference 3.

PS: the business of the cello tail piece noticed at reference 2 is still with me. With the brain still associating to the wrong quartet (Pavel Haas) rather than the right quartet (Škampa), unconsciously making use of the unhelpful Czech connection. An error which must be firmly lodged there.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/06/smith-square.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/sacconi-two.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/sullivan.html.

Reference 4: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/egan-after-breathtaking-tornado-dunrobin-awakens-to-prospect-of-long-slow-recovery.

Watergate

Now

A snap of the original Watergate, in Victoria Embankment Gardens, before the people in Washington (DC) got going.

Then

Google turns up this painting of how it would of looked when it was the river entrance to York House, one of the ducal palaces which used to line the Strand. 'York Watergate and the Adelphi from the River, London, by Moonlight, Henry Pether (1800–1880), Museum of London' from Art UK at reference 1.

I am sure I have snapped this gate before, but it is left as an exercise to the reader to find it. For now, anyway.

Next time, I must read the notice attached to see if the thing has been moved at some point. Long way from the river now, as embanked.

Reference 1: https://artuk.org/. Art UK is the operating name of the Public Catalogue Foundation, a charity registered in England and Wales (1096185) and Scotland (SC048601). Supported using public funding by the Arts Council England.

Group search key: ksa.

Builders' merchant

When I first knew Endell Street (in Covent Garden), it contained a well stocked ironmongers cum builders' merchant, complete with ladders and buckets stacked up outside, serving all the small builders who use to serve the area at that time.

Now vanished, but maybe it was this place, said by Google to once have been a timber merchant. Grade II listed building to boot.

Group search key: ksa.

Street art

Overhead street-art has appeared in Whitecross Street, to complement the street-food

Group search key: ksa.

Nymph

The grieving nymph draped around the memorial to Arthur Sullivan. Rather smaller than I expected and with a posse of winos firmly ensconced on the bench off-camera to the left.

For a four year old snap from a slightly different angle see reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-luke.html.

Group search key: ksa.

Apple

One of the four apples from Neal's Yard Dairy.

Possibly the best apples I have had this year, tasting really crisp and fresh. Start to go a bit by day three when I had the last of them.

Group search key: ksa.

Nordic Bach

Last week to St. Luke's for a spot of Bach from a pianist from Iceland, one Víkingur Ólafsson.

A sunny, breezy and cool morning; cool enough that I remembered to take a scarf.

Female fashion statement from Japan on the Waterloo Concourse: black leggings (or perhaps boots) to just above the knee. Clear fishnet stockings to upper thigh. Black shorts and so on up to the head. Very fetching.

Pulled a first Bullingdon to do Waterloo Station 1, Waterloo to Roscoe Street, St. Luke's in 19 minutes and 40 seconds. I conspicuous violator: white, thirty something, scruffy, perhaps in some kind of creative employment.

Restaurant in Whitecross Street busy. Manager out back, familiar waitress out front, with two more newbies. Bacon sandwich fine, bread a little pale, so perhaps they have changed their baker.

Somewhere along the way I came across two bicycles with stretched front parts, something like a delivery bike of old (the ones which were really heavy to pedal) but with a long low basket. Low, I suppose, to keep the centre of gravity down, possibly battery assisted but I did not think to look how the steering worked. Was the front wheel at the front, or in the middle, as it were?

St. Luke's churchyard full of foodies eating street-food from the stalls and vans in Whitecross Street. Eating it out of single use plastic tubs - so they might have been foodies, but they were not ecos. Maybe in a year or so, the market inspectors will be checking up on that sort of thing - assuming we still have market inspectors when the Tories have finished smashing up the big state.

St. Luke's itself pretty full again. A very varied programme from Ólafsson, a regular cornucopia, a lot of it new to me. I enjoyed it more than I had expected, usually preferring to have my programme in bigger lumps. In introducing his encore, Ólafsson explained how he found traces of Bach in everybody who followed, so he thought it appropriate to suggest how Bach had built on what went before him, by giving us Bach's transcription of an oboe concerto by Marcello. Rather good. Wikipedia knows all about it, as can be seen from reference 1.

Pulled a second Bullingdon to do Finsbury Leisure Centre, St. Luke's to High Holborn , Covent Garden in 17 minutes and 59 seconds. Rather more violators down Clerkenwell Road. From High Holborn a short walk to the cheese shop, on this occasion to be served by an English girl. Plus I bought some fine apples, possibly Charles Ross, around 10% of the price of the cheese, by weight.

Crown looked a bit busy and noisy to me, so strolled down to Gordon's where I have been meaning to pay a visit for years. A famous establishment which I might have used half a dozen times in thirty years. Splendid choice of wine if you wanted a bottle, not bad it you wanted a glass and I settled for an Australian Riesling. Sat out on the terrace where some foreigners were eating, drinking and smoking all at the same time. Those were the days!

Then, in honour of the read noticed at reference 2, along the Embankment Gardens to inspect the Sullivan memorial there. One forgets how pleasant these gardens are, with all their exotic plants and memorials. Including, for example, a small memorial to Buxton's Camel Corps - including its large Australian contingent. But then they did - perhaps still do - use camels in the outback in the glory days of exploration.

Then, finding myself at the river entrance to the Savoy went in there to admire the fine ballroom, where I was gathered up by a pleasant young lady and dispatched upstairs in an ancient electric lift, said to be the first such installed in London. Red plush, brown wood bench and reproductions of posters for G&S operas. From their into a high tea flavoured restaurant from where I was directed to the American Bar upstairs.

This turned out to be very art deco, very Poirot. Lots of flunkies, one of whom sat me down and gave me a menu. Service very slow, and the place started to fill up while I waited. Eventually I collared a flunky and placed an order for wine - good and about three times the price it would have been at a public house, which I thought fair enough. Nice line in nibbles. Lots of security cameras, much the same red globes as you get on tube trains.

Got talking to the lady next door, about my age, on her annual month's holiday in Europe from her small winery in Irvine in California, with sundry family members, then absent. Much stronger on the wine small talk than I was, and her theory was that tasting hundreds of wines in the course of a day at a wine fair was nonsense; the palette would give up after five or six. A sentiment with which I completely agreed, rarely making it beyond that number in the beer fairs of old before I settled down to one that I liked. For a contrary view see reference 3. A plus was that she was a proper customer rather than a walk-in like myself, and her conversation lifted my standing with the flunkies.

The conversation touched on Germany and Germans, and I alleged that at one point there was serious talk about making German the official language of the US, which she thought was a bit far fetched, despite the massive influx of Germans from the eighteenth century on and suggested that I check when I got home. Which I did, to find that I was indeed wrong, although there was some truth behind the error, in the form of a proposal that government documents should be translated into German. While now, after two wars with Germany, there is not much spoken German in the US, although there are maybe 50 million people who claim German descent. Certainly one comes across plenty of German sounding family names, not least General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.

Another customer sported lots of white hair tied back in a short pony tail.

Brisk head wind as I strolled back over Hungerford Bridge. Good thing I had remembered my scarf on this occasion.

A little later, struck by the huge amount of rubbish by the gas holders as we pulled into Epsom. Presumably the work of our travelling friends, for whom there was a public campsite nearby. Public to the extent that you were allowed to use it if you came from the right family but not otherwise. Or so the respectable town gossip has it.

No rubbish to be seen in the satellite picture offered by Gmaps at reference 51.337105, -0.2635278, despite the only dates to be seen being 2018. A huge amount of rubbish to appear in six months or so.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oboe_Concerto_(Marcello).

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/sullivan.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/wine-shipper.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_States.

Group search key: ksa.

Bugs

I stumbled across this object in our roof space this morning, lying on the ceiling joists, but which was probably hanging from the rafters at the time we bought the house, around thirty years ago. Perhaps to try and deter the wasps which occasionally nest under the eaves.

Some sort of rather granular plastic, presumably impregnated with something called Vapona from Shell. Or at least was, no smell at all now, unpleasant or otherwise.

BH vaguely remembers the brand Vapona in connection with the fly papers of old and it clearly still exists, in the form of an irritatingly mobile website at reference 1. From which I gather that it is nothing to do with Shell any more, rather swallowed up in Henkel, a US chemicals consortium. To be found at reference 2.

Reference 1: http://www.vapona.com/en/home/products.html.

Reference 2: https://www.henkel.com/.

Detail men

À propos of the sad case of allergy poisoning reported in yesterday's papers (some two years after the event), I wondered what, if anything, those wannabee leaders of men, Messrs. Johnson and Corbyn (the crow) would have to offer to the debate about the various responsibilities and duties of those concerned. The person with the allergy, the friends and relatives of that person, people selling fast food, people selling other food, the food regulation industry and so on.

Given the large  numbers of allergens that seem to be at large these days, I declare some sympathy with the people selling fast food. I also remember the days when FIL, a coeliac, had a lot of trouble being sure that food that he was buying did not involve gluten. A far cry from the menus at Wetherspoon's which now flag up such matters. His solution, a lot of the time, was to carry food which he had prepared at home and which he knew enough about.

While I have enough to do this morning getting a laptop which I do not use very often back into working order, with the current problem being lost associations between file types and applications. A problem which seems to be connected with the rolling updates from Office 365, updates which do not roll with laptops which one does not use very often...

Sullivan

I have now finished the book about Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan last noticed at reference 1. A collaboration between the composer's nephew and a professional musical biographer, an easy read, entirely suitable for the moderately interested amateur.

Of both Irish and military stock, with a grandfather who shipped out with Napoleon to St. Helena. A grandfather who had occasion to save Napoleon's heart from rats during an interval in the embalming of his body. A father who became something important in the world of military bands. And who cared enough about his musically precocious son to get him a musical education which he could not really afford.

An education which started out in the Chapel Royal and finished with a scholarship to the conservatoire of Leipzig, founded by Mendelssohn and then a place of some considerable repute. Sullivan then started to make a living composing a variety of music, some of it being performed at the Crystal Palace, then at Sydenham in south London and, inter alia, an important music venue.

In 1867, he took off with George Grove, the inventor of Grove's musical dictionary, to hunt down the lost score of Schubert's Rosamunde, D.797 (Op.26?), part of Grove's effort to promote Schubert in England. A hunt which took them to a music publisher in Vienna and from there to a relative of Schubert's, one Dr. Schneider, with the elusive score finally being hunted down in the back of a dusty cupboard.

Then some years composing more songs and light operas, achieving considerable musical and social success (lots of famous and/or titled friends and acquaintances), with the famous twenty-year partnership with Gilbert starting in 1878 with H.M.S. Pinafore.

An interesting business, with it clearly being important that the librettist, that is to say Gilbert, should as well as knowing his own business, should also have a good understanding of the business of the composer, an understanding which would translate into songs that would set well to music. And a willingness to pull things around a bit to that end.

Sullivan was a hard & fast worker and, reading between the lines, something of a fast liver with a taste for society, socialising and the races. Someone who dashed about composing here, conducting there and meeting a prince somewhere else. The Kaiser, it seems, was very fond of the First Lord's song about polishing the door handle, the one including the line 'And I polished up the handle of the big front door'. Someone who could work through the night, through considerable pain on occasion, and who perhaps wore himself out to die at the relatively young age of 58. Sitting up there on his cloud, perhaps disappointed that he did not come to be remembered better for what he called his serious music; he had wanted to be more than a successful writer of light opera.

Altogether, an interesting read which has earned its place on the shelf, next to the DVD of 'Topsy Turvy'.

PS: Sullivan wrote lots of hymns and other church music, with the one that I know being 'Onward Christian Soldiers'. The only song that I tried, 'The Lost Chord' on YouTube, a tremendous phenomenon in its day, struck me as a very maudlin and sentimental affair - but perhaps that was what the Victorians (up to and including the queen) wanted. Perhaps it also catered to the big market for songs suitable for amateurs at home. A market which Schubert had played to before him. A market which has all but vanished before the onslaught of recorded music.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/falsoid.html.

Reference 2: Sir Arthur Sullivan: his life, letters and diaries - Herbert Sullivan and Norman Flower - 1927.

Winterreise

Last week to the Wigmore Hall to hear Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès give us the Winterreise. The former we hear from time to time, but the record suggests that we had never heard Adès before - I did not even know that he was a successful composer until after event, when I looked him up.

As it turned out a windy evening, with some rain.

Annoyed by a talkative girl in the train, a girl who would have been nice enough looking if she had more dress sense (or perhaps one should say trouser sense, with her sporting some rather garish purple trousers), but who did not seem to draw breath for talking until she got off at Wimbledon or so. Not quite loud enough to hear much of what she was saying, but quite loud enough to be intrusive and irritating. There must have been something about her particular voice, because the chattering of some ladies, otherwise much the same, is not always irritating.

The tube seemed very hot and it was a relief to get out at Oxford Circus to make our way to Cavendish Square for our picnic. Where, with the evenings drawing in, we only just finished before the locking-up man made his rounds.

The performance was being recorded, which meant we had a cluster of microphones hanging down from above and a couple in front of the singer - a singer who spent a lot of his time with his chin well down, looking from where we sat as if he were talking to the two microphones. We shall never know whether this was indeed the case.

A very attentive pianist, who turned the pages of his own music (Bostridge managed without) and who kept a very careful eye on his singer, only letting himself go a bit in his more colourful passages.

Bostridge put in a very stagey performance, very expressive with a lot of movement. A tendency, for example, to bounce up and down in time to the opening bars of the accompaniment, while he was waiting for his entry. Some digging of fingers into the palms of his hands. I was very struck with how close it all was to acting, how he was turning in a performance of a role, something which, up to a point anyway, he could turn on and off as if it were a tap. Faking, even. Something made obvious by there being words, but I suppose it is much the same for any intense musical performance. Performance of something which has a prior existence, was not being made up on the spot, for the occasion. Perhaps not the back of the second violins in an orchestra, but certainly the second violin in a string quartet.

I had my now usual trouble deciding what to do with the words. I tried following them for the first couple of songs, but decided - once again - that I was missing too much by not watching the action. Hopefully, if we keep on coming, the words will somehow sink in and I will start to get something more like full measure. I sometimes think I should take the trouble to memorise them, but I rarely think that that is actually going to happen.

But I did get enough of the words to think that they were very male words. Perhaps if I did memorise them, I would no longer care for the female version. See reference 2.

All in all, a fine performance. Although not good enough for some people behind us, who did not think much of the rendering of the last song of the cycle. While I think that sometimes it is quite an advantage to be easy to please in these matters and I often wonder how much professional consumers of art - critics and their kind - lose by excess of knowledge.

Just caught the late running 2123 at Vauxhall which was good but once on-board completely flummoxed by a complete change of format of the calendar on my telephone. Not unusable, but a complete change which took some minutes to get the hand of. Fortunately, by the next morning, Microsoft had thought better of it and the calendar had reverted to its original condition. This in the context of deciding not to go to Oxford to hear a bass version of the Winterreise in a couple of weeks time from Messrs. Holl & Johnson. Maybe if we had been going there anyway, but as it was, far too much time and expense given that we have plenty of music here in London, on the spot as it were.

At home, BH told me that the song she liked the least was the 16th out of the 24, Letzte Hoffnung, the last hope. A rather jagged affair, rather unsettling, which Bostridge in his book (reference 3) sets against of contemporary interest in probability and chance. He also points up something which it is easy to lose sight of, so far from the time and place where the songs were written, the ambiguity as to whether we are on the outside looking in, the inside looking out - or what? The element of irony and ridicule hanging over the whole business.

PS: we speculated afterwards how many Winterreise's Bostridge had done in his 30 years or so on the boards. Our guess was around 150, once every couple of months or so. Our guess also was that Bostridge kept a diary of them, so at least he knows.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/05/winterreises-old-and-new.html. We do not seem to heard Bostridge do the Winterreise before, with this staged version appearing to be the nearest thing, rather more than two years ago.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/winterreise.html. The most recent Winterreise, a female one, getting on for a couple of months ago.

Reference 3: Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession - Bostridge - 2015.

Trolley 161

Captured, the first for a couple of weeks or so, the Sainsbury's side of the West Street footbridge over the railway.

Do we want to be tight or loose?

This being prompted by an article by one Michele Gelfand on the front of the Journal section of the Guardian of Monday 17th September, 2018. Seven years after the publication of what might be called the founding paper (reference 1). A Monday morning space filler! Entertainments along the way include references 2 and 3.

Gelfand appears to be a media-savvy academic from the University of Maryland. She also appears to attract a noticeable amount of funding from defence flavoured institutions – something which one was more aware of twenty or thirty years ago than one is now. See reference 4.

She appears to be the inventor, or at least the propagator, of tight-loose (TL) studies. That is to say the study of countries, states and provinces organised by looking at their position on the tight-loose spectrum. Tight being lots of rules, lots of acceptance of rules; loose being much more open and sloppy. I quote:

‘Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures are the opposite. In the US, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to arguing loudly on the street. By contrast, in Singapore, gum is banned, streets are pristine and jaywalkers are rare. Or consider Brazil, a relatively loose culture, where arriving late for business meetings is more the rule than the exception. In fact, if you want to be sure someone will arrive on time in Brazil, you say ‘com pontualidade britânica’, which means ‘with British punctuality’. Meanwhile, in Japan, a tight country, there’s a huge emphasis on punctuality – trains almost never arrive late. On the rare days that delays do occur, some train companies will hand out cards to passengers that they can submit to their bosses to excuse a tardy arrival’.

She argues first that position of this spectrum has considerable explanatory power; second that different positions on this spectrum bring different costs and benefits; and, third that any particular place’s position will often be explained by history or justified by circumstances.

She tells a good story – but stretching it to cover the Brexit vote here in the UK – a matter which she probably knew was very important to the Guardian and its readers – was stretching things a bit thin. Nevertheless, I was sufficiently impressed with it all to find myself a copy of reference 1. But here the impressing stopped and I was disappointed at what I thought was the poor standard of presentation and the apparent banality of some of the associations.

We start with the work of anthropologists on what used to be called primitive people, where there does indeed seem to be an association between tightness of institution and high levels of threat, of one sort or another. The theory has promise. And I associate to the sprawling, brutal and rule-bound empires of the Austro-Hungarians (see Švejk), the Russians (both Romanov and Soviet varieties) and the Ottomans (see Armenians). All empires which might be said to have suffered from agoraphobia on account of their size and lack of natural boundaries.

Figure 1

In the present exercise, covering 33 nations, TL is measured by means of questionnaire, with about 200 filled in for each country, the content of which is illustrated at Figure 1 above, but while the authors had clearly done quite a lot of work to come up with this questionnaire (described in the supplementary material), I did not ferret out the method of selection of respondents or the way in which the questionnaire was administered, both presumably online. The outcome of this part of the work is summarised at Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 (more legible if you click to enlarge)

I thought alphabetic presentation was unhelpful here and that descending or ascending tightness might have been more helpful – going so far as to move the thing into Excel for the purpose myself, an operation which took perhaps half an hour. Together with some narrative accounting for the oddities therein. For example, the top six being Pakistan (tightest), Malaysia, India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway and the bottom six being Brazil, Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, Estonia, Ukraine (loosest). While what was West Germany is right in the middle.

We then got a rather dense section which I think purported to show how TL score was related to all kinds of indicators about history, society and economy. It is suggested, for example, that tightness is associated with more law and order and more church. Quoting a little loosely: ‘in tight nations there are more police per capita, stricter punishments, and lower murder rates and burglary rates and overall volume of crime. Tight nations are more religious, with more people attending religious services per week’. I felt that they could have made this section a lot more accessible than they did.

Nevertheless, the story does seem to be that there is some interaction between the personalities of people and the institutions of the countries in which they live. The TL score, as it were, pervades the life of a country, from top to bottom, from distal (glossed as foreign affairs) to proximal (glossed as home affairs), 24 by 7. There is hope for those of us on the left who hope for a similar interaction between collectivist personalities and collectivist institutions – like state run schools and railways. Bearing in mind the counter example of the Soviet authorities failing to drive the deity into extinction or even disuse in near a hundred years of institutional denial. A counter example perhaps countered by the observation that deviant religion can sometimes be a reaction to harsh, colonial or otherwise unpopular regimes – thinking here particularly of Ireland and Poland.

With the paper ending on a rather platitudinous note. I quote the closing words:

‘… Such beliefs fail to recognize that tight and loose cultures may be, at least in part, functional in their own ecological and historical contexts. Understanding tight and loose cultures is critical for fostering cross-cultural coordination in a world of increasing global interdependence’.

I associate to unkind colleagues in a branch of government through which I once happened to be passing, who would talk of  ‘all motherhood and apple-pie’, when taking a pop at someone else’s work.

But the upside was all the interesting by-ways which I was prompted to explore, reminding me that the nominal subject or conclusion of a paper is not always where one gets the benefit. Some papers can do rather badly on the first count and do very well on the second; despite appearances the authors have done good work!

Furthermore, one can only admire the pluck and energy of someone – presumably Gelfand – who drives through the collation and analysis of statistics of this sort from so many different countries. Just think of all the team work involved. Just think of all the definitions of population and murder one has to grapple with – with four or five definitions of population in the UK alone. One shudders to think there how many there might be when it comes to murder.

References

Reference 1: Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study - Michele J. Gelfand, Jana L. Raver, Lisa Nishii, Lisa M. Leslie, Janetta Lun, Beng Chong Lim, Lili Duan, Assaf Almaliac and others – 2011.

Reference 2: Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals - Robinson, W.S. – 1950. A classic attack on the then all too prevalent practise of making inferences about people from analyses of areas.

Reference 3: The Big-Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives - John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. – 1999. A history of the widely used ‘Big-Five’ model of personality and the elicitation of that personality from questionnaires.

Reference 4: https://www.michelegelfand.com/.

Detailing

Across the road from outside the Cock & Lion. I thought the building snapped was very striking in the early evening light and I also thought that the stone detailing was very good, very fit for purpose. As good in its way as that on the west towers of Westminster Abbey and on County Hall - both of which I used to enjoy on the way to work at one time or another.

Can't see the stuff going up now wearing as well. But then, perhaps it won't have to, as the developers will be wanting to knock it down in fifty years, rather than the hundred or more which used to be the norm in busy towns.

Group search key: nda.

Face stuffing

Face stuffing from Uber on the platform at Oxford Circus. Setting us all a bad example.

Group search key: nda.

Staier

A week or so ago to the Wigmore to hear Andeas Staier, seemingly the first time for seven years or so, with the last time noticed at reference 1.

A bright, pleasant evening, but quiet in the station so I was able to get served by a person. Onto the train to be entertained by a youngish man, say around 30, with full beard and moustache which were clearly the subject of prolonged grooming, every day I should imagine. A regular Poirot type. But the formal facial hair was contrasted with relaxed sports wear, with suit on a hanger aside.

On into Cavendish Square for a pigeon free picnic.

On into the Cock & Lion, where I was pleased to find that they sold Chablis and Sancerre by the glass. I opted for the latter. Mild enough to be able to sit outside, away from the loud televisions. Together with someone smoking genuine Camel cigarettes. Can one still buy such things from Davidoff's in St. James's Street? The people who used to do jolly good own brand cigars?

Wigmore Hall pretty full, with the occasion being recorded for Radio 3, although I was pleased to find that, half a dozen pendant microphones apart, the Radio 3 people kept themselves out of the way, unlike at St. Luke's where one has rather too much of a good thing. No microphones in the piano on this occasion, something one does see from time to time.

Audience and clapping management spot on. Clapping at the end of each half. Decent pause between pieces.

Concert also spot on. Two impromptus (D.899 No.1 and D.935 No.2). Some musical moments by way of higher grade stocking filler. Late sonata (D.958). As good as it gets - with the sonata probably helped along by my knowing it quite well now. So a puzzle why there was some audience leakage at half time.

While I made a return visit to the Cock & Lion for a spot of Black Label. Where I learned that the barman had been doing twelve hour shifts for a week and it was not impossible that he would be doing some more the week following. Not yet known as the new roster had not emerged from management. I was reminded that after a longish spell of that sort of thing in my youth, I wound up with a bout of glandular fever.

Out to admire rotating laser lights in the sky, just to the Hyde Park side of John Lewis - where the canopy refurbishment was complete, no bat facilities visible. See, for example, reference 2.

There had been some talk behind me from some  young cognoscenti about Forte Pianos, something which subsequent investigation shows that Staier is clearly into. But the one on the platform said Steinway, despite having what I thought was a slightly harsh tone, a tone which I thought suited the occasion well. And there was nothing in the programme and nothing yet in replay to my query to the box office.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=leaking+staier.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/bats.html.

Group search key: nda.

Note for the record

Cakes without ale today, that is to say cheese scones. Made, for once in a while, mostly with real cheese, Lincolnshire Poacher, from Neal's Yard Dairy. Although to be fair, it was a piece taken from the rind end.

Plenty of cheese and butter, but no sugar and no eggs, so probably a bit less of a calorie hit than seed cake.

12.5 scones of which one was left for later.

Cakes and ale

Not ale, rather a bottle of Italian wine procured from the wine shop noticed towards the end of reference 1.

We had first thought to return to Bachmann's at Thames Ditton, but in the end we settled for BH cooking a seed cake, something we used to have quite often years ago, partly on the grounds that it would be better than anything Bachmann's could do, partly because it could be made in less time than it took to drive to Bachmann's and back.

Both wine and cake turned out very well, with more than three quarters of both of them done at a sitting.

Oddly, I can't find the wine in question at reference 2, search for all of 'campostatano', 'campania' and 'falanghina' drawing a blank. Sold to us on the grounds that it came from the same part of Italy as the Greco di Tufo which we like, but which they could not, on this occasion, supply.

Also oddly, I can't find any reference to either of us having made a seed cake in the last decade. Several references to thinking about making one, but then ending up making some other sort of cake, most often a Dundee cake or an Alberta date cake.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/palace.html.

Reference 2: http://www.thevineking.com/. Eric Vaal trading as the Vineking.

Snap of the day

Not from Bing on this occasion, although I continue to take a look there from time to rather from Canada, via the NYRB.

The work of a Canadian photographer called Edward Burtynsky. The place being Youngor Textiles, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China. The time being 2005.

A far cry from the satanic mills of Manchester and Lowry, which places like this have presumably replaced.

PS: with Burtynsky being generous with his work, with this one anyway, it being available to download from his website. Just 375Mb or so; perhaps you have to pay if you want museum quality.

Reference 1: https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/.

New arrival

I noticed a new arrival in East Street this morning, appropriate for the Lord's Day. Judging by their website, they may be a Korean derivative (or derogation?) from the faith of the Nazarene. Otherwise the 'World Mission Society Church of God'.

Notice the steps up to the narrow entrance, a bit of castle-keep physical security entirely appropriate for the building's former use as a County Court, or something of that sort.

Reference 1: http://www.watv.org/.

Getting it wrong

The other week in the Economist, we had an interesting article by a journalist and a tip about an interesting paper from a trio of east coast academics – references 1 and 2 respectively – both about the merits or otherwise of collaboration in the pursuit of knowledge. From the pair of which I offer the thoughts following.

I start with the curious phenomenon, known as the wisdom of the crowd, where many trials, tests and experiments appear to suggest that taking the average of many peoples’ guesses about things like the weight of the cow or the number of smarties in the jar gets one surprisingly close to the right answer. Lots of stuff about this out on the Internet, much of it in the realms of journalism and popular science – with reference 3 being a founder member of the genre – but unread by me. All of which is to be contrasted with the madness of the crowd, documented many years ago at reference 5.

Examination of this wisdom results in two qualifications. First, the guesses need to be independent, one person should not know about the guesses of other people. Second, the guesses need to be unbiased estimates, otherwise they will average out to the wrong answer. If these two requirements are met, the wisdom is no more than a restatement of the well known law of large numbers.

Lots of work has been done on the first requirement and on the way that mutual knowledge disturbs the working of the law of large numbers. I have come across very little about the second requirement.

Another line of inquiry is more about finding the answer to more complex questions. Questions to which there is apt to be no right answer and where it is hard to know how much credence to give to any particular answer.

In these circumstances, working in isolation is not a good approach. Different people go at things from different points of view, bring different skills and experiences to the question, and pooling all that is apt to produce a better result than any one person could produce by themselves. Reference 2 further suggests that the best result is apt to be produced by a good mixture of working alone and working together, with too much of either one being bad.

Bartleby does a decent job of summarising all this and then goes on to consider the needs of creatives, who work best alone, and the need for leadership. Groups do need leaders – not joint leaders and not triumvirates – with the failure of the triumvirate in charge between the first two Caesars being a famous example.

Further inspection has revealed considerable industry in academe: the stakes are high and there are lots of people out there trying to build the magic bullet for taking difficult decisions.

Industry in which personnel departments and executive search committees rightly take an interest, with the ability to extract, articulate and exploit the wisdom of the collective clearly being something worth buying into. All bundled into that ubiquitous and annoying phrase ‘must be a team player’.

References

Reference 1: When teamwork works – Bartleby – page 59, The Economist, September 8th, 2018

Reference 2: How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer – 2018.

Reference 3: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations – James Surowiecki – 2004.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds. An article about reference 3.

Reference 5: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841. Plenty available on ebay for less than £5. Alternatively a facsimile of an original can be found at DPLA (https://dp.la/), from which the illustration above is taken.

Reference 6: Log or linear? Distinct intuitions of the number scale in Western and Amazonian indigene cultures - Dehaene S, Izard V, Spelke E, Pica P – 2008. Relevant here for its connection with the wisdom of crowds and included here for its playing to my mathematical background.

Supplementary

Since posting at reference 1, I have had occasion to sit in front of a brick wall for a few minutes. Not the actual bit of wall snapped left, but a bit of the same building, the former Assembly Rooms from Epsom’s days as a spa town, around the back, and I was able to try our hand at counting courses of bricks.

My bit of wall was in better condition than the top half of that illustrated, more like the bottom half. Around 25 courses were visible through the window, from where I was sitting.

Much easier to count, as one might expect, when the pointing was in good condition, with smart, clean lines, with good contrast.

There was a tendency to count in threes. The eye seemed to be able to get hold of three bricks at a time in a reasonably reliable way.

The bricks were close enough for there to be binocular effects, unlike Vauxhall Tower, which too far away for that sort of thing to be relevant.

When moving the eyes from course to courser without counting, I was conscious of something going on in the mouth department, rather as if there was some counting going on in the unconscious and it was quite close to being articulated out loud.

There was also a tendency to mark the beat of the counting by nodding the head slightly, rather as if one was listening to a piece of music. The sort of thing that can irritate in a concert hall, when you are sitting behind it.

Moving the eye down the rows of bricks in a stepped and controlled way, but not doing anything else, was easy enough. Doing it at a steady pace helped. Counting, but not doing anything else, was even easier. Doing both at the same time was another matter, but again, doing both at a steady and synchronised pace helped. I associated to the business of blending two long strands of RNA (?) together to make a double helix of DNA.

Another wheeze that helped a great deal was following the herring bone of the alternating position of the long bricks, as indicated in Figure 2 above, enlarged and adapted from the lower half of Figure 1. A rhythm generating wheeze not available at the tower.

Tiles on walls or floors is much the same as bricks in walls. But there is a clear size effect, with doing big things a lot easier than doing small things. Where big and small are probably about angular dimensions rather than linear, absolute lengths. So I find that with these two snaps, the counting of which is not that far removed from doing it in real life, the counting is lot harder with the first than it is with the second. Maybe the fovea can be contained within a large brick of the second, but spans several bricks of the first, so in this case fixation is not good enough. Or maybe there are limited resources, and if too big a proportion is put into sorting out the bricks, or whatever, there is not enough left for counting and task management.

Supplementary digression

In English it is OK to count up to around a hundred in this way, after which even saying the numbers silently starts to be too intrusive, too time consuming. French being somewhat different, being more into twenties than English, so OK only up to around seventy. Latin is written rather oddly, but I forget how it sounds. When one hits a limit of this sort, one might want to mark the periods by dropping a marble into an urn, or some other device of that sort, not requiring ocular attention.

While for slow counting, one might do away with counting altogether and just drop marbles into the urn, doing the actual count in slow-time, after the real-time business of scanning the windows, bricks or whatever. I have yet to try this to see how it goes.

In other cases, in particular where one wants to classify as well as count, five bar gates, as illustrated above, can sometimes be helpful, although they do require attention to be shifted briefly from whatever it is that is being counted to the bit of paper on which one is making the gates.

While for fast and irregular counting, perhaps passengers piling off a jumbo jet, a clicker is good. Pressing a clicker does not take too many brain cycles away from marking each successive person crossing one’s imaginary line, such imaginary lines being the modus operandi of the better sort of survey operative everywhere. With a modern clicker not just counting, but able to record a timed sequence of clicks, which would take us off into a quite different world.

Conclusion

There is a motor and rhythm element to successful counting, the successful binding of the tracking of the courses of the bricks with the eyes to the counting with the mouth. When things are going well, maybe one is binding together the two synchronised but almost autonomous streams, rather than alternating between them, with this last making much heavier demands on scarce working memory. Separately synchronising two more or less independent streams of activity to the beat is much more economical – both in real-time and in learning-time – than synchronising them to each other. And I dare say the beat would be visible in the brain waves you look at with an EEG machine, if only one knew where to look.

Perhaps if I practise, I will find myself doing these counts unconsciously, as I have already noticed (at reference 3) when climbing stairs at tube stations.

All of which accords with other stories that I have read about the binding together of different strands of information about one and the same thing needing the support of consciousness. Maybe not a causal relation, but at least another behavioural correlate.

I also associate to stories about the importance of music when a body of men is using a capstan to raise the anchor of a man-of-war of old or when a body of men is marching. Presumably some of this is about synchronisation and some of this is about raising the spirits of possibly tired men generally.

Reference

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/shopping-lists.html.

Reference 2: http://epsomandewellhistoryexplorer.org.uk/EpsomSpa.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/on-counting-variations.html.

Worried of Epsom

The political news in and about this country (the UK) being rather depressing, I offer the following suggestion.

It would be in both May's and Corbyn's interests, and more important, the interests of the rest of us, if they were both to allow their MP's a free vote on matters Europe. With the result that we would be able to do a sensible deal on Europe.

May would get to stay Prime Minister and her loonies on the right would be blocked.

Corbyn would get to avoid an election which he would probably lose and would get to avoid getting off the fence about Europe, where he feels comfortable, while still doing the decent thing. He might even acquire the aura of a serious politician.

Surrey open day

Last weekend it was heritage day in Surrey, so we took the opportunity to take in some sights between Little Bookham and Effingham - this last being notable for being the end of the one of the railway lines which serves Epsom, and for one particular occasion when I was stuck there, so tired that I lost vertical hold on the canopy planking.

We started by parking in the car park for what appeared to be a fancy girls' school, occupying what had been the big house in the area, with the owners moving into the home farm adjacent.

School buses

A school which was well equipped with mini buses and which was surprisingly smart inside, at least in the vicinity of the headmistress's office and reception; not like an institution at all. However, not approving of such places, we beat a hasty retreat to the ancient barn next door, seemingly once the tithe barn belonging to the nearby church, of which more below.

Corner of ancient barn

A large and ancient barn on which, by the look of it, a great deal of money had been spent. It was not clear to me how they were going to get it back, although it did seem to function as a sort of higher grade village hall and they did do weddings. They also did tea and cake, so we took that in the handsome grassed court yard adjacent, once, by the look of things, the stable yard.

Next stop the small but ancient church of All Saints, Little Bookham.

All Saints

The remnants of the arcade of the south aisle clearly visible in what is now the outside wall. The second such aisle, removed in the second half of the fifteenth century. The church was also notable for its hatchments (according to OED a corruption of the word achievements, as in Black Prince at Canterbury Cathedral, as noticed at reference 2) and for its scratch dial. A new-to-me sort of small sundial built into the side of a suitable window to help the priest keep proper time.

Yew entire

Yew detail

Ancient yew in the yard to complement the ancient church, with impressive looking certificates attesting to its being of the order of 1,300 years old, that is to say some hundreds of years before the conquest.

The next church, St. Lawrence, just a short walk along the Bishop's Walk, so named for it being thought to be the part of the route taken by the medieval bishops when checking up on their churches, a checking up which involved something of a procession. Litter, sumpter mules, outriders and all?

The lady rector was in residence when we arrived and was able to tell us about rectors and vicars, with the latter being subordinate to the former. Also that the endowments attached to churches, big ones for good livings and small ones for bad livings, still existed after a fashion, but the income all went into one big pot, and all priests are now salaried, probably in much the same way as civil servants with salary scales and annual increments. This church was once in the gift of Keble College and several recent rectors had been graduates, perhaps fellows, of same.

Her lady assistant told us about the church and sold us the jam noticed at reference 3.

Periodic tiling of floor

The floor of the church played to my current interest in periodic tilings - that is to say tilings which repeat like wallpapers - an interest which arises from their possible use to express textures in the texture nets of LWS-N and which is being fully serviced by the substantial reference 4. Being coloured is, in this connection, quite wrong as texture nets are used to express colour, they do not have colour in their own right.

Bell keys

An interesting contraption underneath the spire, once used to ring the bells, with the hooks above connected to wire bell pulls which disappeared up into the ceiling. Unclear how one could ring a large bell with such a small contraption, given that the usual form was strapping bell-ringers swinging on large ropes.

We also made the acquaintance of an interesting chap who had just come home after 25 years or more overseas. He had been paper boy for the village, then did twenty years in Germany then five years at the Singapore end of the Malaysian peninsular. His English sounded more German than Surrey and his wife (not present) came from one of the large islands further east, perhaps Borneo or Sarawak. He avoided telling us what he was doing in all these places, but he did know all about the white rajah noticed at reference 5. His story was that the Brooke family did well there, got on well with their charges. Perhaps as white men from far away, they were better placed to hold the ring between the various - often feuding - communities than a local. Rather like the magistrates brought in to hold the ring for a year in places like Florence, a custom I learned about in the course of the visit noticed in the vicinity of reference 6. Possibly called the 'Podestà'.

Catholics

The last church of the day was the Catholic Church of our Lady of Sorrows (reference 7), made possible by the generosity of someone who had made a good deal of money out of railways in South Africa, a colleague of Rhodes, the chap who is supposed to be being struck out of the record at Oxford on the grounds of now being considered to be an undesirable. Handsome interior which reminded us of the rather newer, Anglican church at Weston Green, Esher, regularly visited in connection with the Ripieno Choir.

Devotional reading

Devotional reading provided by the Catholic Truth Society. Must be a very Tory shire to bother having a pop at the commies in this particular way.

Pie pub

Took lunch in a large public house named for the chap last mentioned at reference 8. A public house which included an odd smell of wood fire (odd because there was no fire) and several locals, actually drinking at lunchtime. We took chicken pie with sparkling water, pie which was not bad at all and came with vegetables which were surprisingly good. The small, nicely cooked carrots, for example, might well have actually been prepared on the premises. Cheerful waitress. Mysterious bit of marble in the background; presumably salvage from somewhere or other.

Legion

Coming out, we came across the British Legion Hall, up for sale. A facility too far in a village which mainly seemed to consist of very grand houses for people who made or had made their money up in London? Note ashtray outside: lots of ex-servicemen are heavy smokers, so did the smoking ban mark the end of their road?

Redevelopment

A rather larger batch of rather newer buildings up for a redevelopment. It looks as if they have been able to make up a good size parcel of land, just the thing for an even newer estate. Or was there something wrong with the first one?

PS: we learned later that the current headmistress of the Manor House School has a background in physical education. This may explain the fleet of mini-buses, needed on sports' afternoons to take the away half the school's teams off to their various fixtures.

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

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/sewing.html. The achievements were subsequently visited at Canterbury a month or so later.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/secret-state.html.

Reference 4: Tilings and Patterns: an introduction - Branko Grünbaum , G. C. Shephard - 1989. Abridged version.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/sheepstor.html.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=Via+San+Gallo.

Reference 7: https://www.effinghamandfetcham.org.uk/.

Reference 8: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/haig-two.html.

Brexit factor

An advertisement which rather annoyed me at Earlsfield earlier in the week.

An emotive appeal involving the notion that additives to food are bad. Hot and steaming milk, fresh out of the cow in the sun-lit field is good. Tapping into the same vein, the same streak as gives us similarly bad feelings about scientists, experts and ruling classes of all sorts, all those people who are always telling us how the world works and how we should behave. And who nearly always get it wrong. Or who are mostly on the make for themselves. Part, to my mind, of the whole welling up which was given an opportunity to express itself in the Brexit vote.

Part also, to my mind, of the similarly emotive move away from immunisations.

I was annoyed that an advertiser, presumably staffed up by educated people who should know better, should pander to this sort of thing. In this case, the idea that adding stuff to food to make it healthy and wholesome is bad. Perhaps they should all be posted off to some place where food is neither healthy nor wholesome - for ten years or until they see the error of their ways and do a bit of public humiliation and recantation, in the way of some of our eastern friends.

The fact that this advertisement is not actually about milk at all and might conceivably be read as being ironic (à la Corbie the Crow) is beside the point. The punters are not going to take that on.

Also annoyed that we have yet another advertiser peddling the notion of a free lunch. Something else that we have far too much of. On which point see reference 1.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/guardian.html.

Group search key: nda.

Secret state

The secret state is revealed.

Despite having handled bottles and jars for many years now, it took until yesterday for the full extent of the secret state to be revealed to us, with discrete codes being included in the base of same, all the ones which we checked, including a bottle of wine which claimed to have been bottled in Italy.

A row of dots, rather like the dots used in Braille, perhaps amounting to ten bits of information. So with 2^10 amounting to just 1,024, not a great deal, but enough to track place of manufacture or approximate date of manufacture. Or time of day of manufacture. Or the state of the planets at the time of manufacture.

Are the cunning bar code readers used by the likes of Waitrose cunning enough to read dot codes as well as bar codes?

What on earth do they want this information for?

PS: this particularly lurid looking jar was sold in aid of church funds for St. Lawrence of Effingham. Not a bar code reader to be seen anywhere. But for what it is worth, the St. Lawrence who was roasted to death and who is in consequence the patron saint of cooks and grill hands.

Drinking fountain

A few days ago, at reference 1, I noticed a not very grand drinking fountain in a very grand part of London.

This is our Epsom version, presented by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association. Grand enough to accommodate two levels for beast drinking and an annex (right) for human drinking, but nothing like as grand as the truly metropolitan ones, in what used to be the LCC area.

But it seems that memory, once again, is defective. Taking a look at reference 2, I find that the sort of trough snapped above is pretty much standard issue throughout the home counties, although there are some double length ones in central London. The grand ones, with polished pink granite and tasteful statues are all drinking fountains, only really intended for humans.

And thinking about it some more, I think that some of them still dispensed drinking water when I was a child, say fifty years ago.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/plastic-cups.html.

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

Camper van

Around three years ago, a rather scruffy camper van took up residence in Blenheim Road, a little to the north of Screwfix. It may have been a VW camper van, it was certainly that sort of size and shape. It was there some months, looked rather squalid, seemed to attract lots of rubbish and may have housed one or two migrant workers. See reference 1.

Today, we have an upgrade, parked just around the corner, outside the shiny new Ford Centre. Not in the first flush of newness, but a very substantial camper van for all that, with purpose built, articulated tractor unit. The sort of thing sported by the senior staff of travelling funfairs and the larger circuses.

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

Two freaks

It came to my mind this morning, on the second cup of matinal tea, that Ancient Athens and Victorian England were two freaks of history, both occupying transient places in the scheme of things, with transient importance out of all proportion to their physical size.

On the basis, in both cases, of trading empires. In the case of Athens, the result of convenient location on the western perimeter of the Aegean, in the case of England, the result of convenient location on the eastern perimeter of the Atlantic. Both places having fine harbours and neither place being so hot and steamy as to inhibit manufacturing and commercial endeavour.

Perhaps we in England, or rather in the UK, should bear in mind the subsequent fate of Greece in our dealings with the rest of the world.

I was moved to get out the newish-to-me Times Atlas, first noticed at reference 1, to see about the Aegean, snapped above. I was reminded of the rather large and pretentious type faces used in the first few pages. And I learned that in 1895, when the atlas was first published, it was actually manufactured in Germany, then considered to be the leading country in matters cartographic. Which I found surprising, given our lead in navigating the world, the invention of longitude, chronometers and so forth. Germany was clearly on the up and up!

PS: Athens is to be found, just to the right of the centre fold, just below the middle. Not such a superior atlas that they bothered to do away with the centre fold, in the way of the atlas which had been bought a few weeks previous and noticed at reference 2. Not so up and up.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/bank-holiday.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/books-from-honiton.html.