A Kreutzer festival

Regular readers may have noticed a lot of Kreutzer, either because the Beethoven violin sonata has been performed a lot in recent years, or because I had a bit of a crush on it. something I do with pieces of music from time to time. For another example, the Beethoven Op.18 No.4 string quartet. With further evidence of this crush being the length of the hit lists at references 1 and 2, although the post at reference 3 is probably more relevant to the present post.

So what with that and the successful outing noticed at reference 4,  we were drawn to the programme illustrated left.

Started off badly with a lot of low cloud at Clapham Junction and the best I could do from the train was one aeroplane, disqualified because it was flying the wrong way.

Got worse when we arrived at the Festival Hall, to find that they were having a water emergency, with a Thames Water pumping station having fallen out of line. It did not seem to affect the neighbouring restaurants, but all the public toilets in the hall were shut and the building was partially evacuated. I was both surprised that just the hall would have been affected and, given that it had been, that they kept the building open. Presumably these days they have well rehearsed incident plans for events of this sort, plans which have been vetted by the appropriate authorities, and the plan did not call for immediate evacuation. We nipped down the Archduke were they accommodated us - although they may have got a bit grumpy by the end of the afternoon. Then a young chap in one of the shops in the hall thought he was going to be able to shut up for an hour or so and pop off for a smoke, but BH soon faced him down.

Worse still, when we found that the art work, noticed for the second time at reference 5, was missing.

Into the hall itself, where the seating arrangements were much the same as for the Kurtág, although there were rather more people and there was no screen between the artists and the body of the hall - which I thought would matter, but in the event did not. Once things got under way one was more or less unaware of the hall beyond.

But underway is putting it a bit strongly, as I found the whole thing rather bitty, with the musical performances being broken up by a rather slight play, a slight play which had not all that much to do, as I found out afterwards, with the Tolstoy short story. The play was for two voices, with the male voice - Samuel West - being the partner if not the husband of the playwright - Laura Wade. With Wade being  unusual in that her wikipedia page - she does not run to her own web site - listed her unpublished as well as her published work. The play was in two halves, the first being the version of the story in which there was no adultery and the second that in which there was. Or vice-versa. An interpretation which a literal reading of the story allows, but which I think improbable. With play being inserted between the movements of the two pieces of music. As I say, it came across to me as rather bitty, despite strong performances from both voices.

There was an attempt to address the interesting question of the intimacy which will arise between a man and a woman - who are not married to each other - playing a piece like this sonata, but I think it failed. I think they might have done better to be less ambitious, and to have done just the sonata. Perhaps played it in a sort of master class format in the first half, and then just played  straight through in the second half.

Not helped by our sitting next to two young girls, maybe 8 or 9 years old, whom I think were the daughters of our pianist for the day. Two young girls who were far too young for concerts and far too young for the subject matter, with the result that they fiddled and fidgeted all the way through. Not too bad for me being one across from them, but I think the older lady behind them was very put out. I think in France she would have had words or worse, but in this country it is not done to discipline other people's children when their own parents are about.

The programme told us that the performance was part of a series in memory of the late Sir Claus Moser, which caught my eye, as he was the chap who signed the handsomely produced letter, complete with a fancy die-stamped lion & unicorn at the top, which announced my arrival in the civil service back in the 1970's. Despite the friendly tone of the letter, no doubt a form letter which was the work of his outer office, I never got to meet him, although I did get to meet his deputy and eventual successor, Sir John Boreham, on several occasions.

For the first time in a while, perhaps helped along by the glass of Piquepoul taken in the cabin above platform 1 at Waterloo, I stood up for a young mother in the unexpectedly crowded train home. It usually, these days, being the other way around, certainly in tube trains where there are plenty of well trained young ladies from foreign.

Back home, I turned up the story again, to find it not as bad as I had remembered. Twenty pages of rather tiresome preaching about the role of women in the world (obviously important to the chattering classes of the day), forty pages of story (told after the event, from the point of view of the murderously jealous husband), then ten pages additional preaching, with my not bothering with this last on this occasion. But the story, once you got there, was rather good, amongst other things a portrait of the sort of urban middle class life which must have been well known to many of the original readers back in 1890, ten years after 'Anna Karenina' and twenty after 'War and Peace'.

PS: in the margins of this post I have established that google search is accent blind while blog search is not. In blog search, 'Kurtág' is not the same as 'Kurtag', although, as a consolation prize it is the same as 'kurtág'.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=kreutzer.

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

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=candyman.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/kurtag-kafka.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/myth-rituals.html.

More meeting in the middle

The other day I talked (at reference 1) about meeting in the middle in the context of bridges. 

Now, this is also something that one does in the context of brains. One looks at the insides, all the billions of cells in the brain and tries to work up and out. Or one can look at the outside, perhaps from right outside with a scanner, or from the inside, as a person with subjective experience might, and try to work down and in. To try to figure out what would be necessary to generate what one sees; a process sometimes called reverse engineering, something that far eastern engineers – Chinese, Japanese or Korean – are said to be very good at – they want the product, while we are vain and want the glory. With the hope that the two ways of doing things are going to meet in the middle.

A more tractable version of this problem is to try and figure out how an image from the internet which is displayed on your telephone is put together. This problem is illustrated above, where I have gone to the BBC website and right clicked something to bring up the html code, with the result that the stuff on the right hand side describes most of what I see on the left. Which, as can be seen, is a reasonably complex business.

A more tractable version still is to try and figure out how the Powerpoint slide that you see in the conference room or lecture theatre is put together. What might you find if you inspected the pptx file which underlay what you are seeing? What would have to be there, at least in some sense, for you to be seeing what you are?

In the present post, I focus on just one feature of Powerpoint, the jump within document.

We consider the Powerpoint file as a stream of characters. We suppose that this file can be broken into a series of segments. A header segment, followed by a series of body segments and finished off with a trailer segment, where a body segment might either be a slide segment or an information segment. With the distinction being that while both slide segments and information segments are necessary, what you actually see is mainly specified in the slide segment, with a one to one correspondence between slides that you see and segments. We are vague about what the information segments might do and about how many of them there might be. But I feel sure that they are there, rather like all the padding in DNA.

The header segment will contain data about the presentation as a whole, for example the name of the font to be used by default, in the absence of any further specification. The trailer segment might contain some statistics, like the number of slides, which can be checked against the rest of the file. Integrity checks, just to make sure that something has not gone wrong during construction. And if you look very hard at a slide segment you might be able to find some of the words that you see when the slide is displayed, just as if you look very hard at the right hand side of the illustration above, you might be able to see some of the words which appear in the left hand side. It will probably help if you click to enlarge.

On a Powerpoint slide, there will often be words as well as pictures. Some of the words and phrases will be in blue underline, with the convention being that such a word or phrase marks a hyperlink: if you – or the presenter – clicks on it, you will be taken through hyperspace and deposited somewhere else, in the case with which we are here concerned, somewhere else in the same Powerpoint presentation.

So what we do now is speculate about how this might be done.

From errors in such links that I have turned up in the past, one possibility is that the link comes in the form of an integer, either positive or negative but not zero. In the case of a positive number, jump forward so many slides, in the case of a negative number jump back so many slides. In the code, this might be expressed as something like ‘… {anthropomorphic:-432} …’, where anthropomorphic is the bit which is to be displayed in blue underline and minus 432 is the jump number to take you to the definition of this interesting sounding word, first seen some hours previously. Curly brackets and colon are then special characters which are either otherwise forbidden or subject to special treatment, special treatment which I shall not go into here, beyond saying that you could ask google about escape characters.

A problem with this implementation is that while it is easy to insert such a link while in edit mode, such links need to be maintained. Every time you insert a new slide or delete an old slide, Powerpoint needs to check for any such link which that insertion or deletion affects and adjust it accordingly, adding one or subtracting one. If you delete a whole bunch of slides it needs to do something slightly more complicated. My suspicion was that Powerpoint was sometimes getting this wrong, a supposition which would have accounted for the errors in links that I was getting in my rather large Powerpoint, then running at more than 1,000 slides. Maybe the problem was that Powerpoint, for some reason that one can only guess at, only allowed such numbers to have at most three digits, with strange things (which standards people sometimes rather kindly call implementer defined) happening if you went to four. Such things do happen in the world of bits and bytes, for what at the time seem like perfectly good reasons, however silly it might look when it goes wrong.

Another possibility was that Powerpoint assigned every slide, as it was created, a unique reference number, a number which would not be reused (allowing reuse is apt to cause complications) and which would be included in every slide segment. Your link could then be in the form of a reliable, absolute address rather than an unreliable relative address. The pain would come at execution time: instead of just nipping backwards or forwards through so many slides, Powerpoint would, potentially, have to search through the whole file to find the address in question. Which, although this seems a bit unlikely these days, might take a while in the case of a very big presentation.

So one makes an index. One includes a table in the header segment which maps one from absolute address to slide number. One includes another table which maps one from slide number to absolute position in the file, the serial number of the character in the character stream which makes up the file. In the olden days, this might have been the actual address on a disc unit, the track and segment numbers, if I have remembered the jargon aright. Then, given the reference number of the slide you want to jump to, you get the slide number from a search of the first table, a rather quicker business than a search of the whole file, and you get the absolute position from a search of the second table. And off you go.

Leaving someone else to remember to generate new reference numbers when you copy and paste a slide in presentation edit mode, rather than just copying the old reference, along with the rest of the old slide.

Which is all fine and dandy, but you now have a much more complicated piece of machinery and there is a lot more to go wrong. There is a lot more code for Microsoft to look after, and to test, every time a significant change is made in any other part of the system, just in case there was some unexpected & untoward interaction. Or side effect as they say in Big Pharma.

Yet another possibility is that rather than relative slide number, the link is itself an absolute position in the file. Hopefully, Microsoft did not select this one.

An even more exotic possibility is that the link contains a search term rather than an address. So when you go to jump, Powerpoint executes the search term – for example find the slide which contains the words ‘red’ and ‘apple’ – and takes you to the first such slide that it turns up. Hopefully there is only one such. The up-side of this one is that you avoid the need for obscure reference numbers, reference numbers which will almost certainly confuse some poor sap of a maintenance programmer, some years down the line.

And no doubt, if I gave it a bit more time, I could come up with other possibilities.

The lesson which I draw from all this is that even in this seemingly simple example, there is plenty of scope for complication under the covers. It is hard to work out from what one sees from the safety & comfort of the lecture theatre what is going on under them. So people who want to work out brains, beware!

The good news is that there are usually errors, and from the errors one can sometimes get a handle on the machinery; errors are often a lot more revealing about what is going on inside than normal workings, with normal workings often, by design, doing a very thorough job of hiding what is going on inside. Good news which people who look at brains exploit to the full.

PS: it is, of course, always possible that the file which underlies a Powerpoint presentation is not organised by slide at all, rather by feature. First it keeps all the letters from A thru M, then it keeps all the letters M thru Z, then the numbers, then the special characters, then the rectangles, then the ellipses, then the text boxes and so on. And then assembles a slide from all these bits and pieces when it is needed. Just in time, as the supply chain jargon goes. Which, I believe, is roughly the way that the brain does things.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/meeting-in-middle.html. 

The art of fielding two

In this case, the business of catching thoughts, rather than that of catching balls.

Now, back in August, I made the acquaintance of descriptive experience sampling, reported on at reference 1. My interest continues, with my now having clocked up more than 500 sample points since I started.

One of the things that has come up is fleeting thoughts. In the context of sampling, this means being very conscious of having had a clear verbal thought just before one becomes conscious of the bleep, but that it has gone by the time one tries to capture it in OneNote. One no longer has any idea of what it was about or where it popped up from, never mind what it was.

Something similar happened this morning, when I was lying in bed waiting for my second cup of tea (items which are counted and rationed these days. Got to watch the caffeine intake, never mind that of tannin). I had this very clear but fleeting idea, but the moment I paused, it vanished, never to be recovered. Beyond it being clear that it had been.

A bit of experience which will never be captured for the record.

In the case of sampling, there is clearly a good deal of interaction between the sampling process and what one is thinking about, as indeed noted back at reference 1. One response to which might be that what one is capturing is conscious experience, it does count, however it got there. But with the worry here being that what gets there is not typical, not representative of what happens in the unspoilt, naïve world where one does not take notes.

So does the bleep make conscious some thought which would otherwise have remained quietly unconscious? Does the process of trying to remember what the thought was, turn it into words which were not there in the first place – although, in my own case, I am fairly convinced that I do do a lot of my thinking in words. Do we have a psychic version of Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle at work here? The bind that you cannot know about something without disturbing it – a bind that the better sort of anthropologists have known about for a long time.

While in the case of lying in bed, my first thought was that one is only going to have thoughts of this sort when nothing much else is going one. These fleeting thoughts are very quiet, and will only be heard in a quiet environment, without lots of extraneous chatter. Contrariwise, when I am bleeped when I am out walking, I am quite often very confident about having had a very clear thought, perhaps, even, a very important thought, about something when the bleep breaks through, but a thought which vanishes before I am able to capture it, particularly if I delay or otherwise fumble the capture.

Which all adds up, to my mind, to one more bit of evidence for the notion that consciousness is more than a matter of on or off. There are degrees of consciousness. And as well as there being degrees of consciousness at the person level, there are degrees of consciousness at the individual thought level. Thoughts can make it all the way to up the surface of the murky pond that is our brain – or only some of the way.

From where I associate to Hurlburt’s unsymbolised thoughts, perhaps, if rather floridly, like the fat carp lazily swimming around the round pond in the privy garden at Hampton Court Palace, their backs just about breaking surface from time to time. But there is method in their madness: they always swim around the perimeter in a clockwise direction. Perhaps there is some asymmetry in their nervous systems which leaves them always wanting to turn left. A bit like us being right handed, rather than left handed.

PS: with the bit of experience which does not make it to the record, being lost in the mists of the brain. No doubt it was the result of something or other and no doubt it went on to feed into something else: there is some determinism at that level. But it is beyond the wit of man to recover it from the chaos of signals in the brain that follows. But then think of the different sort of chaos which might result from remembering everything, pointed up at reference 2. I associate here to the paper files which used to be kept by large organisations, files which ought to be a deliberately constructed story as much as a rather random assembly of documents about something, documents which by some chance or other made it to the filing clerk. Random documents are a useful check, but what we really need is a good story, made at the time, if we are to make sense of the past: storing everything is helpful, but storing stories is better. Mothers who talk plenty to their young children know all about this. See, for example, reference 3.

Incidentally, as far as I can make out from OED, store and story are different words, although story may be a relation of history.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/remainder-shelf.html.

Reference 3: Culture and Language in the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory - Robyn Fivush and Katherine Nelson – 2004.

Friday trivia

Walking up behind a gang of litter pickers working Horton Lane this morning, I passed maybe half a dozen bottles and tins and plenty of other litters of various shapes and sizes, down in the bottom of the hedge, well the council side of the boundary with Horton Golf Club and well within range of a council litter pick. Where was the ganger-man?

Perhaps I ought to suggest to whatever outfit the litter picking operation has been contracted out to, that the pay of the litter pickers gets docked according to weight of litter picked up by the ganger-men sweeping up behind them, to the benefit of the pay of these last.

Better news at the golf club itself where the starlings were in residence in the rather moribund oak tree, just inside their entrance. In full voice.

Then back home I was able to check up on various further finds in Simenon's story 'Liberty-Bar', mentioned previously at reference 1, among other places.

First up sidéré, the same root as our sidereal, literally perhaps star-struck, but not really as strong as that. Perhaps surprised, caught unawares would be nearer the mark here, although Larousse talks of stupefaction, being struck dumb. Even of it being a psychiatric term for the temporary suspension of motor and emotional activity as the result of an affective shock - while I don't think Simenon had anything so drastic in mind at all. Oddly, Littré had very little to say about the word at all.

Then we had cacahouètes, which I thought might be peanuts, but that I had better check, to have Larousse tell me that they were the fruit of the arachide. So off there to find that it is nothing to do with spiders, rather the humble peanut plant, complete with a helpful picture. A native of Brazil, presumably taken to Africa by the various well-meaning people colonising Africa. Perhaps, in this case, north Africa as we are talking of an Arab street hawker.

And last we had ras, from whence our raze and razor, but with all kinds of other interesting meanings and usages unknown to us Anglos. For example, the sort of flat or raft used for maintenance alongside ships. A king in Ethiopia. Or raser les murs for when one is struggling to find a decent night club after having taken some strong drink. Perhaps from the tendency of such people to hug the walls when walking the streets at night.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/libational-cups.html.

The art of fielding one

Reading a book of this name this morning, I was struck by the observation which I now share.

To the effect, that when one is a division one baseball player, one is paid to do the business - in this case, catching a fast moving, hard ball at close range - a hundred times out of a hundred, game after game. Artistry comes a very poor second to reliability. Unlike writers who were allowed the use of the waste basket.

Which lead me off on the trail of classification. Which callings are in the reliable bin and which are in the arty bin?

To some extent, original artists, like painters, as opposed to artists who perform the work of others, like pianists, are in the arty bin. They can work away, producing work after work, but only allowing those out into the outside world which they think are worthy. The rest go into the incinerator - more reliable these days, when you can't be too sure who is riffling though your waste basket when you're not looking. Is it the chap from Murdoch's Newscorp? Or is it some PhD student from some important university from the mid west of the USA?

But not altogether, as some writers, for example columnists for newspapers, have to perform more or less to order. OK, they are allowed a bit of waste basket, but they do have to knock out their sixty six square inches of copy, every day, 2300 sharp.

The existence of the waste basket was one of the things which attracted me to computer programming, being a fairly accident prone person. One can beaver away at a computer program until it is right, chucking away hundreds of mistakes along the way. And when it is right, it performs right every time, it is very reliable. It might even be artistic if you have a flair for it. Although, I should allow that while one chucks away mistakes, it is just as hard to chuck away chunks of code as it is to chuck away chunks of writing. One gets far too attached to the stuff which, after all, is only pouring out of the sub-conscious. It is not as if the real you had all that much to do with it.

Once again, clearly time for breakfast.

New season at St. Luke's

We had had a rather odd statement from the building society masquerading as a bank, that is to say that once proud mutual, the Halifax Building Society. The money looked OK, but they had printed a mysterious six digit number down all the gaps in the withdrawal column. We had tried their call centre, somewhere in the UK by the sound of it, but they had no idea so I though the best bet was to try a branch in central London, where they might be a bit more knowledgeable than in here in the provinces.

So off to London Town. Off to a slow start with the Southern ticket machines at Epsom station slowed right down in sympathy with their semi-striking staff.

Took a Bullingdon off the ramp at Waterloo to find Stamford Street as busy as ever, then over Blackfriars Bridge to find the new cycle way good most of my way up Farringdon Street. I thought that the average standard of cycle road manners had improved a bit; maybe all the bad publicity about same is starting to sink in. Maybe young cyclists actually read such stuff.

Hoping to find a branch of Halifax pedaled all the way to Old Street, which is further than I usually go, and which turned out to be awash with big building sites - but no branch of Halifax that I could see. Back to the Market Café in Whitecross Street, full at around 1215. No ladies, apart from one new-to-me waitress, which was unusual, with the place usually getting a sprinkling. Bacon sandwich well up to its usual standard, with some office ladies arriving during its consumption. Recognised, possibly reproachfully, by the manager, after an absence of some months.

Somewhere along the way I discovered the natty new voicemail interface on my camera, although I failed to find it again the next day. Natty when you are there, not so natty when you are not.

St. Luke's pretty full and the irritating lady from Radio 3 went through her irritating chat performance, even asking silly questions of the pianist half way through. The Wigmore Hall does rather better in this department and usually, if not always, suppresses such stuff. Perhaps as an older and grander venue, they pack a bigger punch with these media people.

The pianist was from Siberia and looked much younger than his twenty five or so years, as if he was still at school. Perhaps what this is really saying is that I am getting older. In any event, he was young enough to have quite diffident stage manners; not quite got the knack of it yet.  As it turned out, I did not much care for the program, a medley of Tchaikovsky and Mozart, although there were some fine passages. A reminder that medleys are not really my thing; I can't change aural gear fast enough to get much out of them. There was also a rather nice encore, a short piece which had been assigned to Mozart for a long time but which was now assigned to someone else.

Out to pull my second Bullingdon of the day at the Finsbury Leisure Centre behind the church (and next to some ecological power plant, noticed before) and off to Commercial Street, Shoreditch, otherwise Spitalfields Market, to find a cheese shop we had found out about at Terroirs (of reference 2) called Androuet, which turned out to be more of a café catering to the financial services trades than a cheese shop. But they did sell cheese and they did sell me what turned out to be a very good Camembert, with a delicate rather than the ammonia tinged flavour of some cheaper brands.

On the way I had passed a young lady carrying a small suitcase and pushing along a large open topped cardboard box which appeared to contain all her worldly goods. I assumed she was a student moving into this term's student flatlet. Also the first undergound convenience which I had seen for quite a long time: I had thought that they had all been converted to other uses, leaving the convenience trade to the private sector, who do such things so much better. Also a very flashy looking Mercedes sports car, with a new-to-me matt black finish and no less than four exhaust pipes. In fact the whole Spitalfields area was awash with young people with money and shops for them to spend it in. It has clearly come on a bit since we were last there, to see an subcontinental fashion show as I recall.

Third leg Norton Folgate (never before heard of, somewhere near Liverpool Street Station) to the Hop Exchange, helped along with directions from a helpful taxi driver and passing, for once in a while, 'Dirty Dick's', last mentioned at reference 3. There was nowhere handy to drop the Bullingdon so I was not able to go in.

The Comté at Borough Market was a little old for me, so I settled for some Beaufort, similar but very good. Also rather strongly priced. The young lady, quite possibly French, had the nerve to correct my pronunciation of Beaufort, but she redeemed herself by being able to direct me to a shop which sold English cheese, a shop which turned out to be a large and very impressive branch of Neal's Yard Dairy. Not seen so many truckles in one place for a long time. I was a bit concerned that their Lincolnshire Poacher might have been a little old, but back home it has turned out to be fine: the lengths one has to go to now that the Epsom Waitrose no longer does proper cheese.

Wound up the proceedings with some excellent apples from the Chagworth Valley people: some Coxes and a couple of Chagworth Beauty or some such. These last being large, shiny, red & green apples. A little sharp, but very good indeed: I was sorry back in Epsom that I had only bought two of them. A much better result than that noticed at reference 5, almost exactly a year ago.

Fourth and last leg of the Bullingdon from the Hop Exchange where I had recently landed to the top of the ramp at Waterloo from where I had set off earlier in the day. Positions one and two taken, position three broken, so I had to settle for position four, having completely failed on the hunt for a Halifax.

PS: the Guardian, by way of having a pop at Lord Bullingdon the other day, reported that he had spent one of his first days at the Foreign Office, poring over Palmerston's maps in the map room, dreaming about the glory days when we dispatched gun boats to bash foreign parts at the drop of a top hat. Bit rich for someone who is nearly a foreigner himself.

Reference 1: http://pavelkolesnikov.com/.

Reference 2: http://terroirswinebar.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/boxed-set.html.

Reference 4: http://www.chegworthvalley.com/.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/tea-ceremony-1.html.

Meeting in the middle

Yesterday's Guardian had a striking picture of the last segment being hoisted into place between the two halves of a new bridge across the Firth of Forth, with the thus completed central span of this cable stay bridge earning a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

As far as one can tell from the picture, the left hand span did indeed meet the right hand span, from where I associate to an M5 bridge over the River Bredon, north of Tewkesbury, where something went wrong and one side was a few centimetres adrift from the other. Presumably problem solved with a bit of screed.

Perhaps things are a bit easier now, with much fancier theodolites available to the supervising engineers, no doubt linked to big databases by satellite.

Newspaper pictures do not scan very sharp, so I turned to google, who could not find the picture at all. Maybe it was only available to Platinum Subscribers to the Guardian - of which I am not one. But it did turn up the picture above which does get across the idea that one needs to meet in the middle. And the concrete segments or cells from which the (unknown) bridge in question is made, do look much the same as those in the Guardian's picture.