Fed

The bird feeder went up about a week ago (as noticed at reference 1) and this morning I saw the first great tit. Rather tentative as he or she vanished as soon as I appeared in the kitchen.

I also offer a snippet from Maigret which struck me yesterday afternoon.

He asks a witness to a stabbing in the street - the sort of thing which was apt to happen several times a week in Maigret's Paris, usually some some settling of scores among thieves to which the authorities did not pay all that much attention - whether the assailant was wearing a hat.

It seems that at the time and place in question, generally speaking and heavy rain notwithstanding, young men did not wear hats while old men did. The inference here being that the presence of hat was evidence of age. While now, here in the Home Counties few people - men or women - wear hats at all, apart from young men with hoods and young women with woolly bobble hats in the winter - or silly hats at the races. To think that in the 1930's the bowler hat was the mark of a foreman on a building site.

It struck me first that this would have made the hat a useful disguise for a young man, although that usefulness would have been discounted by its providing grounds for suspicion in the event of its being found out to be a disguise.

And second, that the presence of a hat would probably encourage the witness's brain to find other signs of advancing years, signs which were quite possibly not really there. The unconscious brain would take on the 'assailant old' hypothesis and see what else it could dig up in favour. Maybe it requires conscious intervention to push back and see what could be dug up against.

Clearly matters to be borne in mind when watching similar stuff on ITV3.

PS: New Year's Day, after a spot of what Maigret sometimes calls 'Calva' and after getting a bit further into the story at reference 2, it occurs to me that Simenon was much more interested in the press and its interactions with crime and with the criminal justice system more generally than was Agatha. Which perhaps reflects his background as a cub reporter, his penchant for publicity and her preference for a more private life. But perhaps also the news value of crime as a generator of newsprint in the days before the television cameras took over. Simenon, to that extent, is a more balanced expression of his time than she was.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/feeding-time.html.

Reference 2: Maigret et le Tueur - Simenon - 1969. Page 39, Tome XXVII, Éditions Rencontre. Capitalisation of 'tueur' seems to vary a bit from place to place: maybe the French are not precious about that sort of thing.