Nostalgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Add peach segments and simmer for around 8 minutes.

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

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

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

Entertainments

Last week to Hampton Court to inspect the royal beans and to sample the magic garden.

Parked in the station car-park which was quieter than expected on this fine sunny morning and which is a lot cheaper than parking in the Palace proper. With the added bonus that we noticed a rowing boat on the river and thought to go rowing ourselves. As it turned out the hire boats were blue fibre glass replicas of the brown wooden skiffs of yesteryear, while the brown skiff which we had seen hailed from the Ditton skiff and punting club, a hundred yards or so downstream of the bridge, Surrey side. Brown skiffs so wooden that they have elaborate wooden thole pins rather than the usual steel swivels. And this morning I was rather surprised to read at reference 1 that people really do punt in this part of the Thames - which I would have thought was a bit deep. Maybe it is wise to hug the bank.

Hands getting soft these days, but just about got away with an hour's rowing. One paddle steamer with propeller assistance. One large barge with outsize anchors under the bows, painted a bright yellow. The anchors looked big enough to hold a full sized ship, but a crewman claimed that they really were needed when one wanted to stop two or three hundred tons of barge in a hurry. Not convinced at all, particularly since there was a matching propeller mounted on the poop.

Next stop the Royal Cabbage Patch, where I was pleased to see a decent size broad bean patch, successively planted, as is proper. A touch of broad bean nostalgia, it getting on for ten years now since I packed them in. See reference 2.

After which we made it to the fairly newly open Magic Garden, fairly full with happy young families this warm & sunny Sunday morning. A Magic Garden which turned out to be very tasteful; the finest children's playground that money could buy; the sort if thing, I imagine, that the likes of the Beckhams are apt to have put up at the back of their country houses. Perhaps not Abromovitch who, as far as I am aware, does not go in for family life. I suspect a fair amount of maintenance work will be needed to keep the place up to the mark, so it will be interesting to see how well it wears. I dare say that it will prove a useful addition to the take at the Hampton Court Experience, but I remain a bit uneasy, being more comfortable with a good wide strip of blue water between Merlin Entertainments and Historic Royal Palaces.

Lunched at the café in what had been the kitchen area of the palace in Tudor times. Pie and pease pudding followed by a slice of something called Elizabeth cake, this last with a yellow fruit jelly in the middle rather than the raspberry jam more usual these days. All very good.

Lots of blossom in the wilderness: chestnut, lilac and ornamental fruit trees.

Laburnum arch (illustrated) not as good as it had been on previous years because a fair bit of it had been replanted in the course of the last couple of years. Few more years to go before they are full on again.

Spectacular tulips in the beds along the semicircular path between the east front and the long water. New avenue along the long water coming along well. Pudding trees looking well in the bright sun. Privy garden with all its greens touched up with red and yellow. All in all a splendid day for such a place.

Aeroplanes slightly puzzling in that there was lots of take off but no landing. It is not as if they have just the one runway at Heathrow and have to take it in turns.

Reference 1: http://dittons.org.uk/.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=broad+bean+campaign.

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Nostalgias

Being the record of a bright fine day in London - as it turned out - we had take our folding umbrellas by way of a talisman - with plenty of nostalgia, none of which, strange to say pressed any buttons with BH.

First, we had a piece of home made ironmongery on a bicycle parked up in Cavendish Square, a tubular steel version of the wooden contraption I had on my bicycle some forty years ago now. Very useful for carrying a full load of vegetables - cabbages and suchlike - it was too.

Second, over lunch, we were able to observe a concrete skip going up and down on a building site across the road. Which took me back to the days when I knew about concrete and skips were containers used to crane lift wet concrete from mixer lorry to mould. Tapered containers hung by a hook from the top and with a trap door at the narrow bottom end. The days when skip meant concrete, not a container to be parked on one's front drive while one's neighbours filled it up with their household rubbish.

Third, on the way back, we were able to take a look at the outside of Treasury Chambers, home to my labours for many years, mostly, I am pleased to be able to say, before it was refreshed and converted to open plan, complete with a cafeteria which did salads, quinoa and vegetarian options. There was even a happy few months during which I was able to take impressed visitors out onto the roof - a wheeze sadly rumbled and barred by the premises people.

In between, we fitted in a Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert. A very young looking Vilde Frang on the violin and a more mature Aleksandar Madžar on the piano, giving us Bartók's Violin Sonata No, 1 and Schubert's Fantasy in C, D934. Both unknown to both of us, but which turned out to be two of the most powerful and emotional pieces we had heard for a while. Helped along by Ms. Frang's excellent stage manners.

Out to lunch at the nearby ASK, an entirely satisfactory middle-of-the-road establishment, complete with the friendly and efficient young staff from continental Europe which one has come to expect. Plus entirely satisfactory Sauvignon Blanc from somewhere in Italy. Lightweight pizza good. My only down comment would be on the bread which came with the olives, bread which, while fresh enough, was rather salty and rather undercooked, at least for my taste.

Out to wander down towards Green Park, popping into Nain Carpets on the way, where we were able to find something to replace our ageing dining room carpet. We also heard tales of woe from an independent carpet seller, up against exorbitant rents, unreasonable business rates and the big stores: a hard life it seems. So hard that he had even thought of emigrating to one of the vacant premises at Epsom, near the not long opened Metro Bank. But there were some very nice carpets, some of them way out of our class.

Across the Park and into St. James Park, spotting on the way what looked to be a couple of buzzards high over the Charles residence. But they vanished before I could be very confident about the tweet - not ever having seen such over central London before. Tavistock yes, Corfe yes, but not London. Lots of coots but no pelicans.

Down the large & flashy steel & concrete hole onto the Jubilee line, from where we made it to Earlsfield for a round of the aeroplane game. Plenty of cloud, mostly above the flight path, but the best I could do was a couple of ones. A disappointing finish to a good day.

PS: a factlet from Nain Carpets: Saudis are not into carpets. They like flashy cars and flashy bathroom furniture but resent paying good money for carpets. This despite my recollection from the 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' that the arabs from Al-Hejaz at least, now part of Saudi Arabia, were keen on rugs, not least for praying on.

A feeling without a name

There are serious people about who put a lot of effort into naming, listing, arranging and classifying the various drives, feelings and emotions that they can experience, maybe a hundred or more of them, without, to my mind, bringing such lists and classifications, interesting though they are, to a satisfactory conclusion. It is not even terribly clear what counts as an emotion or what the differences are between a drive, a feeling and an emotion: there is a whole range of different things going on here, with any one category you come up with fading into some other category at the margin. What sort of things are elation, pride, nostalgia and pain? In what, if any, sense are they the same sort of things as fear or disgust? What sort of thing is it that the Japanese call ‘amae’: a feeling or a sort of behaviour? See reference 1.

But at least it seems to be fairly clear that most people the world over do anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Some people regard these as the basic emotions, combinations of which give us all the rest, rather like combining the base vectors of a vector space. Some people try to get computers to recognise these basic emotions in other people – and, indeed, animals – by looking at their faces, an enterprise kicked off by Darwin as long ago as 1872.

Something else that one can do with emotions is to qualify them with prepositional phrases. One is sad about the death of the cat. One is happy about this year’s apple harvest. Such phrases often identify the cause of the emotion. Or, less often, the location: one has a pain in one’s left foot. Or, more complicated, one is angry with Jennifer about the extravagant claim form she submitted last week. Alternatively, one is just angry, without being terribly clear why. And while might be thirsty for blood, one might just be thirsty.

This naming and qualifying make it much easier to talk about these things, to deal with them or to share them. If someone talks about being angry, I have some sense of what that someone might be feeling.

Some people do this with music, thought by many to have direct access to the emotions part of the brain. So back in 1936 or so, Kate Hevner came up with near 70 descriptors which can be associated with music; descriptors like sad, triumphant, playful and tender. But in my case, while I often (perhaps more often as I get older) get emotional about music, perhaps to the point of being close to tears, the emotion does not have a name. I am not sad or happy, I am just being emotional. I have been moved by the music, but without a label of that sort being appropriate.

I associate here to the notion that one of the functions of tears is to offload psychoactive substances which have accumulated in the brain and which need to be got rid of.

I leave aside the complication that I might judge the music to be, for example, sad, without it making me feel sad. Or that whatever I feel is more to do with my perception or knowledge of the performer or the composer than with what has been composed. Or that my feeling is more a product of my own mood at the time than of the music.

Sometimes, in the case of music, the emotion is so intense that I have to switch off – not to the extent of holding my hands over my ears, but certainly removing my attention from the music by an act of will. From where I associate to the rather theatrical sounding performances of Mme. Verdurin at the (fictional) musical soirées described by Proust. In her case, sublime music triggered neuralgia, a seriously unpleasant complaint which for present purposes might be thought of as a relative of migraine. Which performances, I am able to say with a little help from google, are all explained on and around page 218 of volume 2 of the Random House edition of 1932 of the Scott Moncrieff translation of ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ (thought by some to be superior to the original).

The word theatrical being significant because there are serious people who believe that some part, possibly a large part, of our emotional experience is the result of a computation; of computing, for example, that this or that situation is sad, and so we feel sad. Perhaps even that in this or that situation we ought to feel sad, and so we feel sad. Giving a name to the experience is important, is an important part of the experience. There are core affects, a basis if you will, grounded in physiology, in the need to maintain homeostasis (loosely, the myriad & delicate chemical balances needed to maintain mammalian life), but what we mostly feel is a confection of some of those core affects, a confection engineered by learning, language and belief. What we feel, the subjective experience, is not just a product of our brain and body at a particular time and place, it is also a product of the past, expressed in memories of one sort or another. A product also of the human liking for classifications and categories, for choice small ones that are easy to work with. Human brains seem to like to work with classifications, seem to like rules like ‘if A is a B then C’ or ‘if A is a B then do C’.

One of these core affects might be nothing more complicated than a number; positive for pleasure, negative for displeasure, or perhaps unpleasure, a term used by psychoanalysts, a mere mathematical negative of pleasure. Another might be arousal – and I have seen a diagram which maps all the commonly named emotions onto a two dimensional plot with these two quantities for axes.

Which brings me back to my point that the feeling with which I started out does not have a name. It resists classification, even placement on the pleasure/unpleasure axis, although I can go for a high value for arousal. I have not assimilated this sort of feeling to one of the common names for such things - which failure does not seem to fit with the idea that a feeling is as much a construct of the ego as a product of the id, that one only feels an emotion when one knows that one is: how can one possibly know anything much about something with no name?

I should add that I also have feelings when listening to music which can be named, when one feels that naming is appropriate. But I am concerned here with the case where it is not, which certainly happens to me quite often.

But one can certainly know something. I am reasonably sure that one can know a good deal about, for example, tigers before one gets around to giving them a name. What is a lot harder, in the absence of words, is sharing that knowledge with someone else.

One can say that one had this feeling at such and such a time at such and such a place. One might be able to tie it down, to give a fictitious example, to the entry of the second violin at bar 46 of the third movement of Op.130. One might attempt to describe the feeling to someone else who had been there and one might feel that there was some sharing, that the two of you were, to some extent at least, feeling the same thing, feeling in the same way. And if one was musical one might talk about the cunning beats, tones and intervals which precipitated the feeling. But one has still not named the feeling - although Aldous Huxley writes somewhere of such talk being useful for pick-up purposes at concerts, at least back in the 20’s of the last century.

For me, such feelings can come on quite suddenly, triggered by something like the entry of the second violin. Only triggered, note, in the context of the piece as a whole; just doing the highlights does not work nearly as well, if at all – and I imagine much the same can be said of highlights in football matches: take the highlights from the lowlights and the magic is lost. But, in the case of recorded music at least, one can do the whole thing over again, and the feelings can be repeated – with the catch that the feelings usually fade with repetition. Sometimes they get back their original strength if one puts the music aside for a while, perhaps a few months.

Thinking of the way that different cultures have words for different emotions, rather in the way that different cultures have different ways of doing colour, perhaps one could name this emotion or feeling in a useful way. It is just a question of whether enough people are interested in this particular sort of feeling to be worth giving it a name? Or is it more whether most people are simply content to assimilate it to some pre-existing category?

I dare say that any such naming would change the experience so named over time. Not that that would be a good thing or a bad thing, but there would be change.

I dare say also that one could write a similar story about any activity on which one was keen – say watching football or playing golf. Even coarse fishing. Even work. Certainly the archery mentioned at reference 3. Anything which one takes seriously enough to be emotionally engaging or arousing.

PS: I associate now to my favourite classification effort, that of occupation and with the result in the UK in the late 1960’s called CODOT. Mentioned in blog from time to time and illustrated above. Thinking as I type, what could one say about the interaction between the naming of an occupation and the occupation itself? There often would have been such interaction, if only in employment agencies, employment regulations and training arrangements. I close with the observation that the penultimate entry of volume 3 of the CODOT manual, on page 494, is that runt of the theatrical litter called a stage hand (CODOT code 991.30). Aka flyman. With the ultimate entry being for anything else not thought of in the 1,000 or so pages that had gone before. I don’t think the shrinks are ever going to match it.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Dependence. A source for amae.

Reference 2: Music, Language and the Brain - Aniruddh Patel – OUP 2008. My source for Kate Hevner.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/a-quandary.html.

Clarinet

Last week to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Jerusalem Quartet with clarinet for the second half and just about a month since we had last heard them. See reference 1.

Slightly unsettling episode in the afternoon when we learned from a parcel delivery driver that he got around 50p for each package that he delivered, working his own van from a base in somewhere like Leatherhead. A 50p that was held down by regular recruitment drives to get people prepared to work for such rates. A story which left me feeling a bit guilty, to the point where I thought that maybe I should tip each driver who got as far as knocking on the door a flat rate of a fiver - a proceeding which was not going to cost £20 in an average week. Maybe have a supply of fivers to hand by the door. But despite the guilt, I have not yet laid in a supply of fivers.

We then got caught in a heavy shower on the way to Epsom Station, the first time such a thing had happened for quite a while. Luckily we were prepared to the extent of having folding umbrellas with us.

The 1719 train out of Epsom was surprisingly full, a story which continued with a busy Vauxhall and a full tube train. Out to no rain and to picnic on the chairs conveniently left outside BHS in John Prince's Street. Chairs which may not be there for that much longer.

Onto to Wigmore Hall where we had the same burly gentleman on the door as last time, but unlike last time the hall was only around half full. Which was a puzzle as it was a perfectly respectable middle of the road programme - and I had thought that the Brahms clarinet quintet would have been popular.

The Beethoven Op.18 No.6 quartet continues to grow on me. I seem to like it better every time. Bartok good and Brahms very good. This last, I think, the best that I have ever heard it. And Kam's stage manners were much more attractive than those of Collins whom I find a bit full of himself. See reference 4. Her off the shoulder dress served, inter alia, to remind me, once a tyro of the clarinet myself, what a shouldery business playing the clarinet was. Along with the scissor wielding hairdresser, another trade which must be good for the shoulders. On the other hand, I did wonder whether having a dress which was tight around the chest did not interfere with breathing, particularly important for a musician who blows. But presumably not, as her web site (at reference 2) suggests she likes this particular sort of dress.

Audience made up in enthusiasm for what it did not have in numbers, enough to earn a short encore.

Treated on the train home to the sight of a large lady in summer clothes supping on a litre tub of yoghurt. At least she had remembered to take a spoon out with her, something we have yet to remember in connection with the rather hard ice cream that they sell at the Wigmore.

Further irritated by reading about some large sculpture to do with bees at Kew Gardens, whom one suspected of falling down the visitor attraction hole, rather in the way of Wisley. Nostalgia for the days when these places were botanical gardens. And by British Gas treating us, its customers, as if we were children, with advertisements featuring things called Gaz and Leccy. See reference 3.

PS: in the course of checking up on tyro (from the Latin), I find that, amongst other meanings, a toller is also a sort of small dog used for decoying ducks.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/jerusalem.html.

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

Reference 3: https://www.smartenergygb.org/en.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/clarinet-collins.html.

OneDrive

A few days ago, OneDrive stopped uploading pictures taken on my telephone to my 'Camera Roll' folder on OneDrive - a convenience I have got used to. No more need to plug the camera into the PC and do the upload by hand. The upload can sometimes take a while, but it always gets there.

Until a week ago when it didn't. Today, I decided that I had waited long enough and that something had to be done. First stop, google, who connects me to some elaborate Microsoft advice about all the things one can do to sort out synchronisation problems on OneDrive. Life too short for that one. Second stop, the usually helpful people at BT. Oh no sir, that is almost certainly a telephone problem and we can't help you with that. The 'T' in our name is a complete misnomer. We only do your proper computers, devices that we can see over the wire and take charge of. Third stop, the O2 shop in Epsom, where, after a short wait, one of the people there had a poke around, doing various stuff which I did not know about, finally pronouncing that a photograph he had just taken had indeed been uploaded by OneDrive. At which point, thinking I had had my fair share of his free time, I thanked him and left.

Once home, I took a number of pictures of the triffid in waiting, one of which is included above. Triffid in waiting in case the one featured at reference 1 - and rather a lot of other posts - keels over after flowering. Some plants do. As this one may, under the combined attentions of the radiator below and the light above - the light above being necessary for me to be able to make out the keyboard. Overhead light behind me no good at all. With thanks to a bric-a-brac stall in Bridport Market, run by an older long-hair, for the carving at the right.

It may be that OneDrive will now behave itself for a bit. But a painful reminder of how much time & energy sorting out these kinds of problems can soak up. A pang of nostalgia for the days when I lived in the warm glow of a corporate IT operation where all software changes to one's PC were controlled and where help was always available. None of this Microsoft updating their stuff whenever they see fit, which is where I am now. Cheap and convenient, but not 100% reliable; they have an awful lot of balls to keep in the air these days and they don't always get their updates 100% right.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/growth.html.

Birdman

The occasion for our visit to Bognor was the 38th International Birdman, a competition held each year on the end of the pier and intended to promote the little-known sport of free-flying - that is to say, flying off the end of piers without the benefit of an engine. We attended on the second of the two days. Sitting a little to the east of the pier, we had a fine view of the proceedings, with visibility helped along with a Celestron monocular. A small flock of seagulls was in attendance on the water, as were sundry rescue boats.

We focused on the dressing up class - the other two classes were for more serious attempts at flying off the end of the pier - with the prize perhaps going to a lady from Kentish Town, something to do with the teaching of mathematics and who has charitable interests in Africa in same, who was dressed up in a large confection made of small orange balloons, along the lines of Leonardo's design for a helicopter.

The first warm-up act was a display by a team of drum-majorette style dancers, young ladies of various sizes, shapes and ages. Some of them were young enough for smiling and dancing at the same time not to be possible and some of them may have had a travelling background - but in any event they did rather well.

The second warm-up act was a display by an eight strong team of Tiger Moth biplanes, mostly flown by past and present pilots for the RAF, for BA or both - including one past captain of a Concorde. A display which not only provided a good dose of nostalgia, both for ancient flying machines and for the Battle of Britain, but was much improved by the Tiger Moths being both slow and quiet; you actually got to see them without being deafened.

Various other goings on around the margins, including the rather splendid inflatable dog, illustrated.

PS: there was also a small helicopter, the sort of thing you can buy from Maplins, hovering over the proceedings, presumably taking pictures. I was impressed with how it could keep station in the fresh westerly breeze. Perhaps that is all down to some cunning on-board computer coupled to a motion detection accelerometer.

Reference 1: http://www.birdman.org.uk/cgi-bin/page?Welcome.

TLS

Buying flour in Waitrose the other day, I fell, once again, for a TLS. Nostalgia, I suppose. And, as it turns out, not a particularly good number.

Off to a bad start with a review of a philosophy book from OUP about the finer points of whether or not Sherlock Holmes exists. A £25 contribution to a debate which has been going on for years, perhaps ever since Holmes was invented, towards the end of the nineteenth century. A review which did nothing to revise my poor opinion of the endeavours of today's philosophers.

Things got slightly better with a review of a book about the lives and times of marine mammals over the last 50 millions years or so. I learned that being a land mammal was easier as air does not conduct heat as well as water, but being a mammal was such a good thing that they learned to do it in water as well as on land. Sadly, I could not find anyone who would sell me the book for less than about £50, so it will have to wait until it gets remaindered somewhere.

And then we had a fictionalised version of the lives of James Joyce and his family from one Frank McGuiness, a writer of plays, an adapter of plays and a professor of creative writing at University College, Dublin, a place where he studied pure English as an undergraduate. Which piqued my curiosity, but no longer appears on the curriculum: perhaps it is code for not spending time on Gaelic, which one might of had enough of at school, where I believe it is compulsory. In any event, as an avid collector of Joyce memorabilia (see, for example, reference 1), I fell for the hardback version. No doubt I shall report in due course.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/earwig-redux.html.

Reference 2: https://www.myucd.ie/. Turn your sound well down before you try this one.

Circus two

The circus itself. An operation with a stronger branding than I was expecting with blue trim to the tent and a blue livery for more or less all the rather impressive trailers, generators, tractor units and such like. One tractor unit had a rather impressive towing contraption on the front - maybe something to do with hauling tents up. Caravans for the artistes being the only exemptions.

With tents playing to my fascination with twine and rope mentioned at reference 1. Apart from that and from nostalgia for my school days when I used to go camping with tents, I think some of my interest in tents, shared with sailing ships, is that the workings of a tent are all on view. One has the tent cloth, the poles, the pegs and the ropes all worked into a contraption which can be put up, lived in (or visited at a flower or vegetable show) and taken down again, a contraption in which one can see all the workings, where everything has its place and role. Unlike most modern buildings, even many of those billed as functional. Steam engines come close.

And Fantasia have moved into the 21st century to the extent of their being plugged into the ticketing operation at reference 2 - an operation which appears to be mainly into popular music up and down the country.

I associate to the 1930's novel about the circus life from Gollancz, picked up some years ago now in the Wetherspoon's library at Tooting, which explained, in the margins of a tale about a chap who was a wow with circus horses and prospered, that circus people were the top of the heap when it came to travellers. Above fair ground people, above tinkers and well above people who just travelled.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/trolley-54.html.

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

Dining

Last night to a pub which used to emphasise the family part of its job description - family dining - but which is now putting more emphasis on the dining part - without going quite so far as the public house in Ewell where the sign advertises crustacea among its other delights. There was talk at the bar of both Whitbread and Enterprise, so it is possible that the pub was once part of the Whitbread empire, then moved to Enterprise and has now found a home with Character Inns.

Not for the first time, looking at the rather odd website for Enterprise (reference 2), one wondered what the Tories were thinking of when they thought that smashing the brewers' grip on public houses was the way forward. I suppose they were looking for a world populated by the likes of Character Inns (reference 1): there seem to be plenty of such small pub chains about but I have no idea what proportion of the market they have - it can't be that big with the likes of Enterprise and Wetherspoons knocking about. I suppose also that I am indulging in a bit of older person's nostalgia for the public houses of old, public houses which were never going to make it into the third millennium.

Back with fine dining, we did not do so well. The ambience was fine and dandy, but the grub was not.

BH went for the mussels and got a large plate of mussels in a thin white sauce, a chunk of white bread and a small bucket full of some kind of instant chips. Overall concept of meal good, but let down by execution. The bread while fresh enough was very ordinary. The mussels were quite small inside and near half of them failed to open - in our book not a good sign. They were left.

The plate the mussels came in was decorated with swirls of a sweet brown goo which I think is called balsamic vinegar: the cooks that work the dining business these days seem to be incapable of serving a meal which does not involve the stuff. Perhaps it is a European Union thing, since that is where, I imagine, most of them come from - although probably not on this particular occasion.

I went for the pork steaks, to be served on a bed of mashed potato with mushroom sauce and seasonal vegetables. The pork was quite good, but was actually pork belly and I was rather irritated to have had it described as pork steaks. The sauce was fine but there was rather too much mashed potato, which palled a little as one worked one's way through it. The seasonal vegetables were very bad - small dabs of red cabbage, what passes for broccoli these days, carrots and peas. Much worse than is usual in such places and I suspect that in this case they had been lying around in a bain marie for hours. It is quite beyond me why such places can't just have a pile of crinkly cabbage lying around, and simply drop a handful of it in boiling water each time an order comes around. I also had a small dose of the sweet brown goo. Once again, overall concept of meal good, but let down by execution.

There was a variety of desserts available, including something complicated, something of which just one of the ingredients was Eton Mess. To think that it was only a short time ago that Eton Mess was the must-serve dessert of the moment, a tribute to the Bullingdon Boys of reference 3, rather than just an ingredient in something else. We passed.

Drink: satisfactory, reasonably priced. Decor: junk yard timber with a scatter of bits and bobs.

There was an adjustment of the bill in favour of the missing mussels.

And I should add that on our first visit to this establishment we aimed rather lower and did, as it happens, much better.

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

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

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/bullingdons.html.

Beans

Pleased to see that the nut-loaf gang at Totnes are growing some proper beans, that is to say broad beans - although one wonders how many, if any, of this rather modest planting will end up on a table, never mind the table of the planter.

First noticed sighting since that at reference 1. Slight pang of nostalgia for my own, very much larger, plantings of broad beans, back in the days of allotments. The fine smell first thing in the morning and, from close to the ground, the sight of something rather like some exotic forest. Rather more information about all that than you are apt to want at reference 2. But you can always whizz about using the side bar.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/winters-tale.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=broad+beans.

Group search key: tna.

Arts & Crafts 2

Another tit-bit from the MacCarthy biography of Eric Gill, last mentioned a couple of posts ago.

In the form of a book plate, sufficiently recherché that he has the foot of the young lady straying out of her proper domain, which is fully above the lower border. With Gill being so back to basics, anti-art-establishment and all the rest of it. Too careful a craftsman for it to be a mistake.

But he is in good company as a quick whiz around the Sainsbury's wing of the National Gallery would reveal, with plenty of stuff straying out of the proper domain. The earliest example of such a thing that I know of is from around 500BC which, as luck would have it, I was able to turn up on this occasion, having failed on the last two or three times that I thought of it. See exhibit 1989.281.62, a Greek pot in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. See also reference 1.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=1989.281.62.

Reference 2: The Archaeology of Nostalgia - John Boardman - 2002. Not Gombrich, the first person I think of in this sort of connection.

Reference 3: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1989.281.62/. In the first of the additional views, the stables of Poseidon, one of the manikins can just be seen on the far right, climbing out of the upper frieze.

Seagull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second fruits

Heading west over the bridge at West Ewell yesterday I passed a young mum with a couple of children, one of whom was busy picking blackberries, of which there looked to be lots.

Then this morning, going the same way again, I was reminded of them and went on to check how things were down Longmead Road, where there also seemed to be plenty of clumps of fruit, if not as well stocked as the first.

All things considered, quite enough to make a trip out late this afternoon worth the bother. Which it certainly was, as I picked just about two kilos in just about an hour, all from this one spot on the eastern approach to the bridge.

A few comments from passers by and two young men, probably on their way home from work and looking foreign to me, joined in for a few minutes, in what struck me as a slightly furtive way. I kept an eye on my bike, which was not locked. Older person's paranoia?

But at least, despite the humidity and the threatening sky, I did not get wet. And we have not had more than a very light drizzle for a few minutes all evening. Not so far, anyway.

PS: off snap to the right are some small blocks of flats, not many feet at all from the blackberries. I think when we first came to Epsom, this station yard was a sort of garden centre, specialising in big pots. And before that I dare say it was a builders' yard, one of the proper builders who were scattered over the suburban land in the olden days. A proper builder who had an office you could visit, who would give you a written estimate and who would use his own, time-served tradesmen to do the work. And not a van anywhere to be seen. Older person's nostalgia for a non-existent past?

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/first-fruits.html.

Hunt the aloe

Last week to Wisley to search out their aloes. What did there flower look like?

Pleasant bright, week day morning, butterfly festival not long started, so although we arrived quite early, say 1030, we were already onto Visitor Car Park 2 and the ex-Ghurkas who provide management were being kept busy.

Made our way direct to the large green house, already throbbing with camera buffs snappng away at the butterflies with impressively sized cameras. A plus of which was that the easiest way to spot an interesting butterfly was to follow the converging lines of sight of a bunch of them.

There were also lots of aloes and a lot of them were in flower. Illustrations to follow.

One small boy was extremely excited by the waterfall, the main one with a two feet wide sheet of water sailing over the five metre drop. He couldn't contain himself and every adult in range was enjoined to come and see this wonder. His parents pleased rather than otherwise.

Out to make our way up to the alphine houses to see how they were doing. One quiet, but the other, the one usually stocked with pots, was very colourful with small daffodils, crocuses and other stuff. A very handsome display.

Outside there were a small number of snowdrops out. Other bulbs, hellebores and camelias on the move.

Back down to the cafeteria to find it in a bit of a state due to impending rebuilding. The handsome display of pampas grass and such like outside dug up for the same reason. Reduced to a meal which was not up to their usual standard and, to add insult to injury, was served on paper plates. Not very good value. But there was some compensation in that it was warm and sunny enough to eat it outside, away from the crowds of children, cute enough in small numbers, but there are limits.

Quick visit to the library where the sell-off continues and I managed a book about South African flowers for a fiver. But we left with a vague sense of nostalgia for the passing of the old order. A sense that perhaps Wisley had become a victim of its own success and was in danger of losing an important part of what had made it one.

On exit we came across a couple of US style school buses. We were told that they had indeed been imported from the US and were part of a small herd which operated out of Chertsey. I had thought that this is a taste of the future: a public service contracted by Runnymede Council to the UK arm of a US bus operation - one which looks to include Greyhound among its brands. But closer inspection suggests that perhaps the parent is actually the UK operation, rather than the other way around, so not quite as bad as it had looked.

No doubt the new president will be keen to promote proper US companies getting a fair crack at this sort of thing as a quid pro quo for our PM getting a twice yearly photo opportunity with him. Anything less and she will have to settle for the waxwork set up around the back, rather than the real thing.

On the roundabout below our (Esher Common) exit from the A3, we found our first daffodils out of the season.

PS: last recorded visit mid November and noticed at reference 3.

Reference 1: https://www.firstgroup.com/ (the UK operation).

Reference 2: http://www.firsttransit.com/ (the US operation).

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/hall-of-fame.html.

Group search key: tfa (for home aloe)

Group search key: tfb (for away aloe)

Lawrences

Over the  years I have given quite a lot of time to Lawrence, as revealed by a quick perusal of previous blogs. See references 1, 2 and 3. Perhaps the interest is weakening with years. Mostly D. H. Lawrence, but also T. E. Lawrence, the St. Lawrence River and others.

Various mentions of the biography of D. H. Lawrence by Brenda Maddox. A fat, no less than two inches of it, but a rather cheaply produced biography, which last was a pity, at least in so far as I am concerned, being sensitive to such matters. I don't particularly mind a book being printed on cheap paper, but I do mind poor design. I do like the production of the book to be good of its kind, to have made the best of whatever the circumstances or budget might have been.

This book I read rather more than a year ago and at the time I found it good to learn something about a famous writer whom I still read from time to time. And about whom I had known very little, apart from his Huxley period (with Maddox being a bit down on the Huxley connection for some reason). All part of my drift away from the books of my youth to the books about those books, something I rather looked down upon at the time - or, in the words of Lawrence himself at the top of reference 2, 'never trust the artist. Trust the tale'.

So, regularly ill from youth, with his first bout of pneumonia at sixteen. Maddox treats us to lots of consumption yarns.

His uncle killed his son in some squabble about who got the last egg for breakfast, and Lawrence also was prone to occasional, sudden and violent rages.

He euthanased his mother, to whom he was devoted, when she was near dead of cancer. A more relaxed time in such matters in some ways than it is now, despite what we might like to think.

He was good around the house. He liked sweeping and dusting. Fixing shelves. Doing things in the garden. Good with children – to the point where we might be a bit uncomfortable in these days of child abuse. On a good day, very good company. An excellent mimic and very funny in other ways too. Very good at working a party.

He spent some years living as  a lodger in a terraced house – along with a couple and their children. All very promiscuous and claustrophobic compared with what I have been used to, more or less for all of my life. Excepting only a short period – a few years – between parental home and marital home.

Lawrence partook of the common hobby of the early 20th century of copying paintings, in his case doing it by squares. He believed, and I agree with him, that you can learn a lot by copying, Or, for that matter, by doing jigsaws. Despite what some arty types say to the contrary, banging on about the value of so-called original creation.

Lawrence was quite quickly successful as a writer, and after his years as a teacher in Croydon, say less than five, never had any trouble making his living at it. And he was quickly taken up by arty types, by the literary lions of his day, as a genuinely proletarian writer - including that well known translator from the Russian, Constance Garnett.

And so it went on. But the biography was marred by being too long and by too much rumination about the seamy side of Lawrence's growing up and of his married life. I associated to the cartoon strips of Bretecher of the eighties, strips which I did not care for at all, although BH rather liked them. See reference 4.

With the result that I was left sensitised to that side of things, and when glancing at the book the other day with a view to cull, I almost immediately had an adverse reaction and settled for cull. It is now in a large sack of books in the garage, awaiting my next visit to the large paper and cardboard receptacle at our local tip. The current view being that attempting to recycle my cast offs in some more respectable way is not worth the bother, with too few people still reading the sort of stuff I am chucking out. If the book has strong associations of one sort or another, it is composted in the decent privacy of the back garden - otherwise, the tip.

The result of all of which being, that while I still own quite a lot of (printed) books by Lawrence, I now own few if any about him.

PS: I dare say Lawrence would not be best pleased to know that he is now best liked for his tales of the Nottinghamshire of his youth, any more than Hardy was best pleased for being best liked for feeding our nostalgia for a vanished - and largely invented - past of bucolic bliss.

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

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=lawrence.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=lawrence.

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

Cube

During the course of the visit to the BBB noticed at reference 1, I had been told about the wonders of the nearby white cube, of reference 2, so the next day I thought that I would give it a go. An old Etonian who had chummed up with the likes of Damien Hirst and gone on to do wonderful things in the world of modern art. With a converted warehouse in Bermondsey and a converted sub-station in Mayfair. Not ever having been to Bermondsey, I thought I would give that one a go.

Off to a good start, with a splendid display of pink hollyhocks and pink roses in a garden in Meadway, on the way to Epsom Station. At the station, two ladies with silly hats for Ascot.

Alighted at Waterloo, pulled a Bullingdon from the ramp and pedalled off to Tyers Gate in Bermondsey, a journey, including getting slightly lost, of some 22 minutes and 9 seconds. Heading south from London Bridge I missed my turning and took in the Roebuck and the Bricklayer's Arms roundabout, places last visited five years ago and noticed at reference 3. Why was there just the one bricklayer? It seems a bit unlikely.

But then I found my way into Bermondsey Street, a regular hive of activity, with lots of gentrification, lots of converted commercial & industrial buildings and lots of what, at least, had been affordable accommodation. Lots of dinky little eateries and drinkeries. A fine rose garden, snapped above, off Leathermarket Street. I found the cube but, sadly, found that I had missed my day and it was closed while they put up the next exhibition.

So back to Tyers Gate and pulled another Bullingdon, or quite possibly the same one, and pedalled off down Snowfields Street, past Guy's Hospital and onto the Blue Fin Building next to the Tate Modern.

Called in Gail's Bakery for a spot of lunch, with a rather chewy sour dough roll for main course, full of salad, green goo and mozzarella. Rather good, much better than the sultana scone (served with butter and jam) which followed, which was fresh enough, but rather heavy. For some reason scones, easy enough to cook at home, always seem to be difficult in a commercial setting.

Interesting clientèle, including a lady who showed no embarrassment at all at the huge amount of mess being made on the floor by her baby. No attempt to clear it up when she left. Another lady with a splendid pleated skirt down to her ankles, decorated with wide vertical stripes in pastel shades. A splendid skirt, but she was, perhaps, a little too large to show it off at its best. The music was rather too loud, but it took some young city gent type to have the wit to ask them to turn it down. Wetly, I had just put up with it.

Onto the turbine hall in Tate Modern, very nearly empty, in which state I always find it very impressive. On this occasion, complete with some elaborate, arty noise, the product of what must have been dozens of loud speakers hung up at intervals along the walls. Rather interesting. There can't be many spaces as good as this one for a sound installation. Although that said, we have heard some good things in what used to be the Duveen sculture hall at Tate Britain.

Followed by what I think must have been a first visit to the tank rooms since they had been refurbished, with an interesting mixture of old and new concrete and a strong smell of concrete. A range of modern art installations, including rather a good one in the largest tank, consisting mainly of concrete balls, rope and more arty sounds. I associated to the time when I had puzzled about the best way to make a concrete ball - with grinding the thing down from a cube counting as cheating. Sadly I seem to use the words 'concrete' and 'ball' rather a lot, so it is going to take a while to track the relevant entry in the blog. Maybe I will get around to checking after breakfast.

Altogether a good visit, my first visit to the Tate since I allowed my membership to lapse, getting on for a year ago, but with the blog revealing a visit to Tate Britain in October 2016. Something else to check after breakfast.

A third Bullingdon from Bankside and so back to Waterloo, managing on this occasion to take the pole position on the ramp.

Tube to Tooting Broadway and into Wetherspoons for a spot of Villa Maria, Sauvignon Blanc, this being the place where a cheerful barmaid introduced me to the stuff, now bought in dozens, most recently from Sainsbury's, having found them to be cheaper than Majestic Wine, rather to my surprise. And you get the Nectar points, with, as they say at Tesco's, every little bit helping. Talk of potatoes, of computer power supplies and of a singer by the name of Nellie Mackay. Some friendly dispute about how exactly she spelled (spelt?) her family name.

Outside, at the bus stop and on the bus, perhaps the wine was talking, but I had the comforting sense of everyone pulling together. Everyone determined to put a good face on things, to be nice to each other, without regard to colour or divine affiliation, and to somehow pull through our current difficulties.

A spot of nostalgia as the train pulled into Wimbledon for the independent café which used to be where the stand-up Starbucks now is on platform 8. A place which sold weak tea and shrink wrapped rolls, all very cheap and entirely adequate. A place which used to be very handy when one needed a spot of something to soak up some of the drink taken.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/barrowboy-banker.html.

Reference 2: http://whitecube.com/.

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

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

Group search key: wcb.

The spy who stayed out in the cold

Prompted by the recent attempted murder, I started pondering about the life of spies, with my first thought being that I would find living a lie rather uncomfortable. Living my life pretending to all those around me that I was something that I was not.

Second thought was of the serried ranks of fictional spies. From the glamour of James Bond, through Harry Palmer and onto the rather grotty life of field agents in the stories of le Carré. Then of all those tales of derring-do from the North West frontier, of chaps who could speak a dozen indigenous languages and pass for a native in half of them. And who might be experts on the magnolias of Bhutan for good measure. Think of the stories of Buchan and Kipling – not to mention those of Lawrence of Arabia.

Third thought was to try a thought experiment. A thought experiment which is expressed here in terms of the Russians spying on us, but it might just as well have been the other way around. I don’t suppose that there is all that much to chose between us as far as this sort of thing is concerned.

Let us suppose that I am a middle ranking official in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. A regular man from the ministry, complete with bowler hat, mostly concerned with developing policy, in conjunction with the man from the RSPCA, about the quality of life and the end of life treatment of loch farmed trout.

It also so happens that I have no associations with the commies, the trots, the paddies, the animal rights people or anyone else of that sort and so I have a good quality security clearance. I have good access. Nevertheless, I am known to be a bit of a leftie. Quite possibly vote for people like Corbyn and Abbott.

So one fine day I get seconded to the secretariat of something called MISC13, a secretive committee which is formulating fisheries policy in the light of Brexit. Something which the Russians, for reasons best known to themselves, find absolutely fascinating. They are prepared to go to considerable lengths to get onto the inside track.

So they arrange for me to be caught with my nose in a line of white powder while in the scantily dressed company of a young lady who is known to our authorities as a member of one of the Russian security outfits. Caught with my hand in the till as it were. So with all the care & cunning described by le Carré, I slowly get reeled in. For modest doses of candy from time to time, I give away bigger and bigger secrets from MISC13. No way out now and there is even talk of MISC14.

The question is, how much lying and unpleasantness does my treachery involve me in?

To all my friends and relations there was no change. I remained an obscure civil servant working in some obscure ministry. Never was much given to talking about my work as I was much more interested in the progress of my model railway.

Which turned out to be rather helpful to the Russians, because, as is well known, railway buffs love taking pictures of their trains and swapping them with other buffs. So the Russians got one of their chaps to join the same club that I belonged to. They gave me a supply of cameras which looked very like mobile phones but which were certainly not connected to any network which might be monitored by our authorities.

All it then needed was a bit of privacy in which to photograph the documents passing through the secretariat of my committee. They gave me some very helpful training about how to do this without attracting attention to myself. Secrets of the craft mean that I cannot say more than that it worked – and that I was able to swap snaps with my new found friend at the club for many years.

So to my colleagues also there was no change; I was just pushing paper about and moaning about the size of my desk (or whatever) in the time honoured fashion and my modest consumption of candy remained hidden from their view. And even if it should be picked up in the course of my security clearance being reviewed, it could probably be passed off as a minor vice which they did not need to trouble themselves about. And there was certainly nothing in the way of odd sums of money turning up in my bank account. Perhaps just a promise that they (the Russians that is) would look after me if it all went pear shaped.

My train club carried on pretty much as before, but there was now a fly in this ointment. My club had been rather sullied by being mixed up with the stolen photographs and my Russian minder was all too assiduous in his attendance, although, to be fair, he fell short of 100% attendance, which would have been a bit conspicuous in a newcomer. I thought about going to another club, as well as my regular club. But they are not that thick on the ground and I would be a bit conspicuous going to a club other than that which served my area of residence.

And even going to the pub was not quite the same as it was. I got a bit paranoid about people watching me and about spilling the odd bean in my cups. There was definitely a fly in this ointment too.

Still and all, not as bad as I had thought it might be. The worst bit is probably not the lying – explicit or implicit – but the having to live with the thought that there might be a slip up, that I might be found out. The Russians might tell on me for some obscure purpose of their own. The leakage of what was supposed to be secret might get too blatant. Or I might get mixed up with some exchange deal which went wrong. The trick is to keep the worrying under control, while maintaining a proper level of care & vigilance. But no real worries there as the Russian shrinks had checked all that out before they went after me.

So treachery yes, impossible to live with, probably no. And anyway, who could possibly get excited about a bunch of fishing secrets?

But how would it be later on, perhaps when, late in life, one has gone into exile; betrayed and lost one’s mother land, one’s mother tongue for ever? Perhaps wallowing in the maudlin nostalgia of the expatriate, for ever waiting for the arrival of the day’s Daily Mail. All for a moment of weakness and a few pieces of silver? I think that I would have regrets.

All in all, a dirty (if sometimes necessary) business.

I should add that, since my day, the open plan offices of the MISC13 secretariat have been fully tooled up with CCTV. Even moving a document out of range of the CCTV is a security breach and I would have had to have packed it all in anyway. Maybe even moved to the Isle of Wight, far away from the world of loch farmed trout and all its attendant problems.

PS: as it happens, I have just read that the Duke of Wellington used intelligence officers to scout in front of his lines, perhaps even into the lines of his enemies. But they always wore their full uniforms and trusted to the quality of their horses to get them out of scrapes. No skulking around in disguise for them.

Cogito ergo sum

Introduction

This being a remark attributed to one René Descartes, said to have first used it getting on for 400 years ago, more or less ‘I think therefore I am’. A remark which I have bought into in the sense that I think it self-evident that one is conscious (in the sense that interests me) when one says so. Allowing here a certain amount of latitude as to exactly how one does the saying.

A typical case would be my naming the pot of jam sitting in front of me. ‘That’s a nice looking pot of jam there. Perhaps I should have a go at it’. In such a case it is clear that I am conscious and that I am conscious of the pot of jam. The visual stimulus of the pot of jam has been captured, wrapped in a verbal inner thought. Many would argue that such consciousness involves, includes, a sense of self. And the same sort of thing might be said of other stimulae, for example the sound of church bells drifting in through an open window of a summer evening – a sound which for me evokes Sunday afternoons spent as a child in a place called Hemingford Gray.

Both are the sort of normal experience which I think that Hurlburt’s DES (descriptive experience sampling) is quite good at capturing. The normal experiences which account for a good chunk of our waking life and which any model of consciousness needs to be able to explain. See reference 4.

It is also true that we do not report on most of our consciousness. If there is a break in the stream of consciousness, perhaps because of one of Hurlburt’s bleeps, we can usually report on what was in consciousness at the time, with the business of reporting probably interacting in some way with the business of being conscious, with the act of reporting disturbing that which is being reported on. But most of what passes through our consciousness does just that, leaving little or nothing that we can recall or report on later. To which extent, the stream of consciousness essayed in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is a work of the imagination rather than of report. See, for example, page 743 of the standard (Bodley Head) edition.

All of which introspection can lead us into an elaborate taxonomy of the different kinds of consciousness, a taxonomy in which it is all too easy to get tied up in knots.

For which reason, the once tidy notion that consciousness is usefully defined by the ability to report on it, is challenged in the interesting, accessible and open access paper by Victor Lamme that I came across the other day (see reference 1), a paper which suggests that we might do better to do away with definitions of consciousness which depend on the vagaries of subject report and to rely instead on something more dependable, something electrical or chemical which can be reliably measured. Something which might well turn out to be strongly correlated with – but not to coincide with such subject reports.

Some more complicated examples

There are certainly lots of tricky cases, borderline cases. Cases in which it is easy to get tangled up, cases which generate the elaborate taxonomy mentioned above. Including cases in which the nice straightforward reports of the two examples just given are not going to be available.

Perhaps the savage in the jungle would skip the verbal inner thought and go straight to desire. He would want the jam and would move, more or less immediately to get at it. Rather in the way that my horse, supposed to be carrying me along the road, would spot and reach down for a tasty looking clump of grass, nearly shooting me over his neck in the process. In both cases we have something which sounds like consciousness, but there is no contemporaneous verbal report in the case of the savage and no report at all in the case of the horse.

MacGahern talks in one of his novels about a mother sheep who is sad at the loss of her lamb, a lamb which she forgets about in a couple of hours or so and the sadness passes. With the evidence of sadness having been recognisable signs of distress in the mother sheep. Here we have a report, albeit not a verbal report, of a candidate emotional state. But how do we know, how can we be sure that we are not projecting our own conscious feelings in such a situation onto the sheep?

From where I associate to two places. First, my telephone writing all kinds of anguished messages to its internal log about some trouble caused by a botched software update from Microsoft. Not so botched as to stop the telephone taking pictures, but botched enough to generate the anguished messages, visible to the cognoscenti of such matters. Second, having moments of consciousness which are so fleeting that I have forgotten about them a few moments later. Never to be recovered, except in the case that Fernyhough tells of, the case that one is carrying a regularly snapping camera, from which images one can recover a lot of what would otherwise be forgotten moments of consciousness. See reference 2.

In which connection, Lamme points to the link between the sort of consciousness on which one can report and memory: one has to be able to hold something in working memory for long enough to be able to report on it, to enable the time consuming motor activities of reporting to do their stuff. No memory, no consciousness.

Then there are the people in what is called a locked in state, who may well be conscious, but be more or less unable to report the fact. Perhaps not even to the extent of doing Morse code with their eyelids – sometimes the last voluntary motor action to go. Perhaps only to the extent of doing Morse code in the brain which can be, more or less, detected with an fMRI scanner or an EEG machine. Morse code in the sense, for example, of think of a game of tennis when you want to reply yes to my question and think of an elephant when you want to reply no.

One can devise experiments in which babies or monkeys, neither of which have language, can demonstrate awareness of images on a screen by pressing buttons. I dare say one can train a variety of other animals to do this sort of thing: certainly birds, perhaps fishes. Perhaps the octopus with its rather unusual brain, a token invertebrate? But in such cases, how sure can one be sure that the experimental subject is having the same experience that I would have? After all, one could no doubt program a clever but unconscious computer to behave in the same way.

There is much less doubt in the case of the locked in people, although it seems likely that they will not remember being questioned if they were to wake up a little while later. Rather as we do not always remember what we first experience when coming around from an anaesthetic – although we might have seemed fairly normal from the outside. But such failure to remember after the event is not the same as a failure to report at the time, even though both failures are, inter alia, failures of memory.

One can devise experiments which demonstrate that while adults may not be consciously aware of this or that stimulus, their brains certainly are. With some of the experiments which Lamme talks about involving presenting subtly different images to the two eyes and then seeing what turns up in the brain. And then, back in the early days of cinema, there was the scare about subliminal advertisements, hidden in the films, which induced us to buy Coca-Cola in the interval without our ever knowing anything about them.

In a similar vein, one can devise experiments in which a hand seems to be aware of something that the brain is not conscious of, at least not in the ordinary way. Or in which the hand of which the brain is conscious is the wrong hand.

Rather different is the workshop, where I might be working away on a mortice and tenon joint, perhaps part of a door or a table that I am making. Working away with arms, hands and eyes, with plenty of interaction between afferent and efferent traffic – but when one is working well, there is usually no inner thought, the work just flows. One is conscious in the ordinary sense of the word, one has to be to do this sort of work, but one is only conscious in the sense which interests me here, with a sort of self-consciousness perched above the temporarily suspended action, from time to time. Most of the time it is not like the pot of jam at all.

Or different again when I am, perhaps driving from Epsom to Swindon for a meeting, and get to Swindon to find that I can remember nothing of the journey, having been thinking of the forthcoming meeting the whole way. Presumably if one was interrupted while in such a state, the report would be the same: no recollection of driving, plenty of recollection of meeting. Is it relevant that the business of both thinking in words and reporting is single threaded? One cannot have two lots of thinking going on at once, one cannot report on two lots of consciousness at once because one only has one talking apparatus. See reference 5.

Red herrings

One can make mistakes. One can think that one is conscious of a thrush pecking for grubs in the grass in front of one, when actually what one is seeing is an empty crisps packet blowing about in the wind. Or one can devise more or less elaborate experiments which reliably induce mistakes. But I think that this particular case is a red-herring. One might be mistaken about the object of one’s consciousness, but one is certainly conscious of it.

And one can lie about what one is experiencing. Also a red-herring, a complication which does not change anything important.

More interesting is the different way in which different people might report what must, in many respects at least, be the same experience. Neither person is lying and both are describing whatever it is from their own point of view; it is just that the two points of view differ. That is not to deny that the one might be right and the other might be wrong – but that is not the point of interest here.

Models

Forty years ago lots of people were busy building complex computer systems, perhaps to process a payroll, perhaps to produce the retail prices index. The style at that time was to model the requirement, in terms of both process and data, and to push that modelling down until the necessary computer programs and system sort of emerged at the bottom. A top-down process.

As time went on, computers came with increasing amounts of built in data, process and function. It started to make sense to complement the top-down design with a bit of bottom-up implementation. Leverage the tools that were by then available, rather than starting from scratch every time, in the old way.

While here, the situation is different again. We already have a working system, the conscious brain, and the task is to reverse engineer it, to work out how consciousness works. To which end we have the subjective experience and can model that from the top down – with Freud being an eminent exponent of this approach, background in nerves and neurons notwithstanding. One of the points of such modelling being to reduce the complexity of a system to something more tractable, more predictable.

While at the bottom of the heap we have neurons, synapses and the chemical and electrical soup that they live in. We know a good detail about the detail but get rather lost in the complexity which results from the numbers - so one tries to model structure, function and process, from the bottom up. And with the fine new tools now available for peering at brains, lots of people are doing just that.

With the grand plan being that top-down meets bottom-up in some pleasing way – rather like the two halves of a big bridge growing towards each other and meeting in the middle. See references 8 and 9 for previous musings on that front.

Against this background, I think that I am in the top-down camp, while Lamme is proposing putting more emphasis on bottom-up.

Conclusions

There are complications with the top-down approach. The fact that most of what we think of as consciousness is not reported. And when there is report, there is the interaction between the report and the subject of the report. The need to involve memory and understanding. The need to rely on the testimony of others, to be able to relate that to one’s own testimony.

But I remain satisfied that consciousness of the ordinary sort on which the subject can report is a good place to be; it is the touchstone of what is it to be a modern human being. Let’s try and explain, model the easier examples of this phenomenon and then move out to the more tricky examples, examples perhaps involving sheep, babies and monkeys. Furthermore, I believe there is a core phenomenon, exemplified by the pot of jam, for which there is a unitary explanation, an explanation rooted in anatomy and expressed in terms of chemistry and electricity which would go a good way towards explaining the subjective experience – and which could then be extended to the tricky examples.

I am not satisfied with the sort of short cut, the focus on bottom-up which seems to be being suggested by Lamme: here is a likely process and we define consciousness as being its result. Out with NCC (neural correlates of consciousness) and in with RP (recurrent processing)! In which, Lamme appears to be using the phrase ‘recurrent processing’ where Edelman before him had used the phrase ‘re-entrant processing’. Or perhaps it was the other way around. See, for example, reference 6. But for both, the elixir of conscious life. That said, the difference is one of degree rather than of kind, with my position being that we are not yet far enough forward with the top down model to want to take the eye off the subjective ball.

In the top down model that I am working on, the idea is that there has to be an image of the pot of jam in the brain, there has to be a process scanning that image, arousing the neurons involved, and there has to be a process scanning the scanning process, a notion which will probably be supported by some kind of duality between data, that is to say images, and process, both of which are expressed by the firing of patterns of neurons. With the most recent salvo in this campaign to be found at reference 3.

PS: I notice now that both of the two examples given at the beginning involve feelings, in the first case desire, in the second nostalgia. Leaving aside the sheep who followed a little further down, I wonder whether can one have feelings without this sort of conscious awareness of what is going on, without being able to report on the cause, or at least the object? The answer to which may well be yes as I recall reading – I forget where – of people experiencing emotions for which the cause never reached consciousness – and then there is the business noticed at reference 7.

Reference 1: Towards a true neural stance on consciousness – Victor Lamme – 2006.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/madeleine-moments.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/layers-and-columns.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/progress-report-on-descriptive.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html.

Reference 6: Second nature : brain science and human knowledge – Gerald Edelman – 2006.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/the-persistence-of-anger.html.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/more-meeting-in-middle.html.

Reference 9: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/meeting-in-middle.html.