Monday, 31 January 2022

Undercups

I learn this morning from Maigret of reference 3, that the French talk about undercups rather than saucers. That is to say soucoupes, or less often sous-tasses. The latter being present in Larousse but not LittrĂ©. They also talk of flying undercups. I think that the technical term for this sort of thing is a calque, where two languages build the same idiom - in this case for flying saucers - even though the base word differs. Honeymoon is another example of such, appearing, I believe, in a number of languages. A topic last noticed at reference 4.

Checking with OED, I find that the word 'saucer' has a long history in English, with a saucer starting out as a receptacle for sauce, but generalising to all kinds of other related uses, including, for example, the blood from a blood-letting. And from there to all kinds of things vaguely saucer-like in shape. Plus suggestions from 1776 and 1840 that drinking tea from your saucer was something that the vulgar did, perhaps a working man in hurry. But not a real lady or gentleman. Which is not what I had thought at all.

There is a bit more about this at reference 2, where the story is that drinking tea from the saucer is primarily a Scandinavian or Russian thing - while elsewhere it was more of a class marker, if anything. Posh drank from the cup, prole from the saucer. A post which attracted lots of comments. While I thought that Russians drank their tea out of glasses. Perhaps with lemon.

Maybe there is more to be found out here.

References

Reference 1: Tea Drinking - Konstantin Makovsky -  1914. The painting above: perhaps just a touch fanciful.

Reference 2: https://19thcentury.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/drinking-from-saucers/.

Reference 3: Les Scrupules de Maigret - Georges Simenon - 1958. Volume XX of the Rencontre collected works.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/revivals.html.

Sunday, 30 January 2022

Cinnamon toast

Following the cinnamon pastry mentioned in the last post, that is to say reference 1, I have now tried making cinnamon toast for myself.

Beat a rounded teaspoon of cinnamon into a desert spoon of  butter. That is to say, ready ground cinnamon powder, rather than the raw logs snapped above.

Spread on fresh toast, with the butter above doing a slice and a half of homebrew wholemeal. Reference 2 gives an idea of the size of a slice, maybe half an inch thick in this case. Would have soaked up a lot more butter, if one was so minded.

Not bad at all, but quite delicately flavoured. Maybe it would do no harm to up the cinnamon content a bit.

BH declined, but she reminded me that the Canadians of Ottawa at least are keen on various kinds of cinnamon flavoured pastries, rather more complicated affairs than the Scandinavian cinnamon buns to be bought in central London these days. Plus I think the Canadians do pastries while the Scandinavians put yeast in their buns. A whole new field to be explored.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/to-palace.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/batch-500.html. Finished loaf at the end. The next batch, probably the day after tomorrow, will be batch 641.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon.

To the palace

A bit more than a week ago now to Hampton Court Palace, with the record suggesting that the last visit had been as long ago as last September, noticed at reference 1.

On this occasion, thinking that we might want to take a proper lunch, rather than whatever might be on offer in the Palace, we parked in the station car park, more convenient for return from lunch in or around Bridge Road than return from the Palace car park. Where we learned that the ticket machines in the car park into which you inserted coins, mainly pound coins that is, were all out of order and that what you had to do was something clever with your telephone or go to the ticket office. My Microsoft telephone not being clever in that way, this meant the ticket office. Where the lady behind the window explained that this did not mean her, rather the large machine outside. Which I did manage after a while, managing on this occasion to get our registration number right.

And so onto the Palace and into rose garden which appears to be the subject of major refurbishment, the endpoint of which does not look as if it is going to be the garden of old, specimen roses that it was. Much more mixed up. Including the wicker art which the Palace people seem to be fond of. Perhaps they all grew up to the 1973 version of  'The Wicker Man'.

Onto the Tilt Yard café, where I took a cinnamon and sugar flavoured pastry which was fresh and pretty good, and which would have been even better had they eased up on the sugar. BH reminisced about cinnamon toast which she knew about as a child. And which I thought this morning to be buttered toast dusted with powdered cinnamon but which Cortana suggests is something far more complicated. Perhaps I shall experiment later today, the roast hand of pork to come permitting.

Back at the Palace, onto the Wilderness, where it was a bit early for spring bulbs but there were some daffodils, winter aconites, snowdrops and cyclamen. Our own attempts at aconites and snowdrops failed, my daffodils are not doing very well, her daffodils are doing much better and our cyclamen are doing fine. Pity about the aconites, snapped above, as I rather like them.

Onto the east gardens, where there were very few people and even fewer foreigners. Revenues must be well down.

Sadly, the southern leg of the the east front herbaceous border is mostly being grassed over, the sign explaining that this was necessary to kill off the perennial and invasive weeds. We suspected that this was being a bit economical with the truth, which last probably including shedding a lot of the many gardeners needed to keep the gardens up to scratch - a suspicion confirmed by a trusty we talked to. Will they take them back on when trade picks up? Are decent gardeners - as opposed to spade hands - easy to find?

The mistletoe was doing well. Which I might have mixed feelings about if I was a gardener, if the avenues being infested were my pride and joy. As I understand it, each ball of mistletoe has just one point of attachment, so given a platform, would be easy enough to snip off. Would they grow back and need snipping every other year or so?

One of the attractions was a number of replicas of carriages of old, all of which seemed very large and heavy in relation to the small number of people they carried. Perhaps this reflected the state of the roads and the need to make the carriages more or less entirely of timber. And one of them - made, I think, for the wife to be of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza, had curtains rather than windows, so presumably was both cold and smelly on long journeys.

From there to a bench on the south front, where, coated up, it was quite warm enough to sit and doze in the sun for a bit. Fountain at the river end of the Privy Garden sparkling very well, provoking a wonder about how much power it used. Would not have thought that it was gravity fed, in the way of the much bigger fountains of Versailles of old. All very pleasant.

And so to lunch - and having passed the Mitre Hotel opposite the entrance to the Palace many times, on this occasion we went in, to find ourselves in the 1665 Riverside Brasserie where they did very well for us. I dare say the Mitre has been there in one form or another for centuries, but the Brasserie looked as it it had been the recent subject of a serious overhaul. An overhaul which went to the lengths of having their own special teapots and their own special napkin rings, these last complete with a cod coat of arms. Let's hope that visiting tourists don't pinch more of them than the Brasserie can reasonably stand. There was also a pretty decent wine list, particular if you went for a bottle, which I did not on this occasion. Seemed a bit greedy with BH driving, although in the event I wound up taking two carafes of a Chenin Blanc which amounted to the same thing.

I started with whitebait, BH with a green salad. Whitebait probably microwaved from frozen and served in a mug. Not bad, but more like tinned sardines than they should have been. Maybe that is the price you pay for microwave. No bread, apart from toasted sourdough, probably also served from the freezer. I continue to puzzle about why it is that in this age which is awash with television chefs and cookery books - I read once how many billions of pounds a year they spend on such books in the US - so few restaurants can manage fresh white rolls. A trick which our local Costcutter can manage.

I followed with a shellfish confection involving some kind of pasta and an orange coloured sauce. Very good it was too. While BH was very pleased with her vegetable risotto.

Despite the elaborately presented desert menu, despite being tempted by Tart Tatin but too full, I wound up with some Calvados to BH's Earl Grey tea. They also sold a small selection of good cigars: if it had not been a bit cold by then to be sitting outside, I might had fallen off my ex-smoker's perch! Altogether a very good lunch, both in terms of the lunch itself and the service. I wonder how long it will be before we are back?

Not sure where the Brasserie was in the snap above. We went in the door under the Union Jack, then downstairs. Probably somewhere to the left, possibly in the lower deck of the fancy white extension.

And so back across the bridge to the station. The stage from which we occasionally row visible middle right.

While the once grand public house at the Hook Junction (on the A3), most recently a Wetherspoon's, continues to rot. And presumably will continue to rot until the council agrees with the developer how many flats might reasonably be put on the site.

The only fly in the ointment was my managing to lose the sun hat I picked up between the Brasserie and the car park - a perfectly decent sun hat, almost the same model as I use now. But which did not make it home. Another puzzle.

Home to find that 'Original Sin' - a P. D. James yarn - had turned up. A fat, decently made paperback from Faber. First noticed at reference 3 and on which more in due course. Car park tickets bottom right. My own sun hat top centre left.

The day closed with the police helicopter having one of its long sessions over Court Recreation Ground.

PS: the tributary entering the Thames bottom left in the first of the snaps above, is called the River Ember. Then there is a fork and the Mole enters from above. Then off snap, there is another fork and the Ember enters the Mole from below. Presumably some relic of the layout of these tributaries before the engineers got going on the nearby reservoirs. Any relation of our 'Ember Inn' family of public houses?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/hampton-court.html.

Reference 2: https://www.mitrehamptoncourt.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/saturday-trivia.html.

Saturday, 29 January 2022

Wellingtonia 63

Captured, if that is the right word, from the moving car heading west on the M25 as it approached the junction with the M23. They might be small in Street View but it seems reasonably clear that there are several Wellingtonia on the skyline.

Unfortunately, going around the back in Street View does not turn up anything better, with the snap above coming from the western end of Spring Bottom Lane, looking south. A fine larch to the right?

Thinking that a lot of Wellingtonias started life in the gardens of rich tree nuts, I turned to the maps offered by the Scottish National Library. In the snap above, what is now Spring Bottom Lane runs across the middle, ending at what is now Warwick Wold Road running up into Hilltop Lane. One supposes that Spring Bottom Lane runs east to west along the spring line along the south facing slope. Lots of quarries and chalk pits. But also Rockshaw House, middle left. And the trees in question might well be part of the line of trees running east from the house.

I can't find out much about Rockshaw House, at least I have not yet, beyond the fact that it has a lodge and gate on Warwick Wold Road and that at one time it was occupied by the Gardiner family who gifted the north aisle window to the church at Chaldon, as it happens a church we visited on account of its famous wall painting, a visit noticed at reference 2.

Concluding, I decided that the house may well still exist, even if most of the land has been sold off. With the gates in the second snap above possibly belonging to someone who now owns some of it. A someone who is keen to make his mark. In any event, the house certainly looks to be of an age and style which fits with rich tree nut. Who perhaps made his fortune out of biscuits or out of pies, to borrow a couple of rich men from Agatha.

While the rules committee ruled that I could score just one Wellingtonia. There were very probably more, but they were not going to allow more given that I did not succeed in getting anywhere near any of them, not even in cyberspace.

PS: later on, BH suggested checking in Pevsner for Surrey, brought to us, I now know, with help from the Leverhulme Trust (soap and margarine), Arthur Guinness (booze) and the late ABC Television (commercial television). No trace of Rockshaw House that I could find at all, so presumably, if still extant, judged insignificant. On the other hand, a detail from the lurid wall painting is featured on the front of the dust cover. No accounting for tastes.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/wellingtonia-62.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/05/chaldon.html.

Group search keys: bbe, wgc.

Friday, 28 January 2022

They were her property

This being the title of the book at reference 1, probably brought to me by review or mention in either the TLS or the NYRB. A nicely produced paperback from the Yale University Press with around 200 pages of text and 100 pages of notes and so forth. No pictures and no statistics. The author is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

The book is not intended as a guide to slavery in the southern states in general - although this reader could have done with a bit more such background - rather to demonstrate that white women were not just passive and mainly benevolent bystanders to the institution of slavery, they were fully part of it. And they could, at times, behave just as badly as some of the men.

Jones-Rogers starts by showing that laws about husbands' rights over their wives property did not stop white women being economically active on their own account. Husbands' seeming rights were regularly and routinely evaded. Women could indeed buy, manage and sell slaves.

Along the way she tells us about the use of slave women as wet nurses by their white owners. Or hirers, there being a considerable trade in hiring out one's slaves to work for others.

I learn of the enormous amount of distress and damage caused by the selling of slaves away from their families and communities. Of this threat hanging over their lives; of the selling of children away from their mothers, fathers away from their wives and children. Of the brutal treatment all too often meted out to slaves who did not conform or otherwise perform as expected. Of the trade of slave dealing, by no mean confined to towns and cities, but brought out into the country and onto plantations by itinerants. Conducted on much the same lines as horse dealing, sometimes by the same dealers.

I learn something of the messy aftermath of emancipation in the mid 1860's, of the abuse of the apprenticeship laws to keep many children and young people in what amounted to slavery. Of the difficulties freed people encountered in trying to put their families back together again.

In which connection, I would have liked to have known more about the land settlement. What land, if any, was given to freed people?

But I did learn that slaves were expensive, with prices starting at almost nothing for a young child, some years off being able to work, and ranging up to around $2,000 for a well-trained adult. I got the impression that the slaves constituted a large proportion of the wealth of planters, both large and small, perhaps more than half. I would have liked to have known more about this.

The book closes by telling us about the sanitised accounts of slavery written up by white women, former slave owners, after the event. Accounts which are full of the loving and mutually beneficial relations between owners and their slaves. 

So what I need now is a general introduction to the subject - this readable book having been as good a place as any to start.

References

Reference 1: They were her property: White women as slave owners in the American South - Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers - 2019.

Reference 2: https://www.stephaniejonesrogers.com/.

Fagine

A few days, browsing in Webster's third dictionary of 1971, I came across a very short entry for 'fagine', telling me that it was a volatile narcotic principle present in the husks of beech nuts. Was it the sort of thing that long hairs with beads and living in woodland communes went in for? Or druids on Midsummer Eve?

The first edition of OED did not recognise the word at all. Nor did the 1949 edition of the British Pharmaceutical Codex, despite 1949 being my birth year and so a very good year. A substantial and well made book, about three inches thick. Although I did learn that from the point of view of molecular composition, codeine was almost identical to morphine - but presumably not the same effect, not the same uses. Also that in 1949 anyway, the strongest variety of opium, maybe 16% morphine, came from what was then Yugoslavia.

Various beech nut products were available from health food suppliers, like that snapped above. But that did not advance matters much. I dare say pigs of old ate them too.

All very puzzling, but pursuing the matter this afternoon, Google turned up the suggestion that fagine was more or less a synonym for choline. More precisely: 'an alkaloid obtained from the nuts of the common beech, Fagus sylvatica, later identified as choline'. Where alkaloid seems to be a rather imprecise term meaning 'a class of nitrogenous organic compounds of plant origin which have pronounced physiological actions on humans. They include many drugs (morphine, quinine) and poisons (atropine, strychnine)'.

From there I get to the people at reference 1, and the MeSH (medical subject headings) and the National Library of Medicine in the US. Where it is confirmed that fagine is a synonym for choline, or at the very least, closely related. This despite the fact that reference 2 seems to say nothing about beech nuts nor narcotics. And MeSH itself would probably be repay study: what appears to be a structured, controlled vocabulary intended to be used to apply key words to medical papers, key words which would help researchers find them.

While I had forgotten that I had taken an interest in this very same choline a couple of years ago, resulting in reference 3. With it seeming possible at that time that giving vulnerable women choline supplements during pregnancy might reduce the incidence of schizophrenia in their children. Not something that I have followed up since.

The last piece of the puzzle turned over today, was trying to clarify the difference between the British Pharmacopoeia of reference 4 the the British Pharmaceutical Codex already mentioned and the first edition of which can be seen at reference 5. I believe that both are still in existence, and the story seems to be the the latter is more inclusive, including all kinds of stuff which does not make the cut for the former, but which medical people still want to know about. But the Codex, despite an illustrious history, no longer has any official standing.

References

Reference 1: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/intro_entry.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choline.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=choline.

Reference 4: https://www.pharmacopoeia.com/what-is-the-bp.

Reference 5: https://archive.org/details/b21687390/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater.

A directional fantasy

A post which started with a waking reverie on Wednesday morning just past – but which turned into something more educational.

Let us suppose we have two places on the earth, on the globe, a fair distance apart, far enough apart that the curvature of the earth matters. Let us call them A and B and what we want to do is find a route from A to B. We do not allow A and B to coincide, because then the whole problem collapses.

The idea is that when we pray or when we are buried at A we want to be facing B. The problem is to know where B is, in what direction do we face. For Christians, B is often Rome or Jerusalem; while for Moslems, it is often Mecca.

Direction proper is defined by lines of longitude and latitude. At any point on the earth this gives us north, south, east and west. Intermediate directions are given by making the appropriate angle on the plane which is tangent to the earth at the point in question, in this case A. (1)

We simplify things a bit by saying that the earth is a perfect sphere. There are no hills, no mountains, no valleys and no rivers. At any given point, neglecting curvature, it is all perfectly flat.

We note that according to reference 1, the diameter of the earth is 12,756 km and that the circumference is 40,070 km. With the ratio of the two being close to that important number we call π, approximately 3.1416. We note also that the earth, leaving aside the humps and bumps already mentioned, is not actually a sphere, although it is reasonably close to so being.


A route from A to B generally defined would be any line running along the surface of the globe which started at A and ended at B, a line which was smooth, with no sudden changes of direction, and which did not intersect itself on its way from A to B. Such a route is sketched in the figure above. We might then say that if we look along the start of the route from A, we are facing B. This looking and facing would have a direction, as defined at (1) above. 

The trouble with this is that such a route could start off in any direction we chose and still get there in the end. So we could look in any direction we fancied and still claim to be facing B. Nevertheless, if we were looking along the only road which led from A to B, there would be some sense in it. After all, one can’t go tramping over the hills.

Nevertheless, let’s try restricting our routes to something more reasonable. Let’s say that we only allow routes which are the result of intersecting a plane with the sphere that is the earth. Leaving aside the limiting case of tangency, the intersection of a plane with a sphere is always a circle, so our routes are always parts of circles, the radius of which must be less than or equal to the radius of the earth. 

Any such circle which passes through A and B will define two routes, with one usually longer than the other. We are usually interested in that other, the shorter of the two routes. We can visualise those circles by rotating our defining plane on the axis AB and we can see that there will always be exactly one plane which defines a circle on which A and B are diametrically opposite, which means that the two routes will have the same length.

Note that, as we move along such a route, our direction in the sense of (1) above will usually be continuously and smoothly changing, although not as drastically as it might under the first scenario, illustrated above. Unlike a straight line on a plane, such a route does not have a well defined direction.

However, it is well known that the shortest such route will be found by taking a plane which passes through A, B and the centre of the earth. A sketch of a proof of this is offered below. 

There will be exactly one such plane, except in the case that these three points are collinear and A is diametrically opposite to B with respect to the earth as a whole, when there will be an infinite number of planes and an infinite number of routes of length equal to half the circumference of the globe. We really can take our pick.

Otherwise we might say that we are facing B from A when we are looking along that shortest route. Which depending on circumstances, might be north, south, east or west – or any direction in-between. And the shortest route from London to Vancouver involves flying over the Canadian Arctic – and is a good deal shorter than the route suggested by the Mercator maps which we will come to shortly.

Which all goes to show that one should not make directional rules about praying and burying, unless the two points concerned, say A and B, are reasonably but not too close together. Say more than ten miles but less than a hundred miles.

Geometrical digression

In what follows we suggest lines on which one might prove that the shortest distance between two points on the earth lies on the (nearly always) unique great circle which connects them.

A sphere intersects a plane in a circle and part of that circle is our route from A to B. The centre of any such circle is going to be on the perpendicular bisector of the line AB. Two such circles are shown above. 

It can be shown the upper arc of the small circle is entirely outside the large circle and the lower arc is entirely inside, as shown here. We want to show that the upper arc of the small circle is longer than the upper arc of the large circle, from which it follows that a great circle, that is to say a circle the centre of which coincides with that of the earth, provides the shortest route between two points on the surface of that earth.

We construct an even fan of lines from the centre of the large circle C, chopping the upper segment of the large circle in a large number of equal portions, and chopping the space between the two circles into an equal number of quadrilaterals, leaving aside the triangles at the two ends which are easily dealt with. The bottom two angles of the quadrilaterals are all the same obtuse angle, slightly larger than a right angle.

Such a quadrilateral, ABDC is shown above. Without loss of generality we extend a parallel from C to E on BD, between B and D. CE is then longer than AB. The angle θ is obtuse, so CD is the longest side of the triangle CDE and so CD is greater than CE is greater than AB. Summing the trapeziums, we show that the outer arc is indeed longer than the inner arc.

In the course of which I learned once again how to differentiate the arcsine function – a bit of trigonometry which I had long forgotten.

But this is not the end of the story

[Mercator projection of the world between 85°S and 85°N. Note the size comparison of Greenland and Africa. White for snow and ice, green probably for a fresh water supply]

In the foregoing, we restricted our attention to routes which lay on circles on the surface of the earth and came to the conclusion that, over long distances, direction to take to get from one place to another was not well defined. We now turn our attention to the Mercator projection, a type of projection which continues to be popular, if only because of its simplicity.

And in the days when sailors did their own navigation, it had the big advantage that you could set your course by the straight line between two points on the map – known to sailors as a rhumb line. Keep the ship on a north westerly heading – or whatever – and you will get there in the end. It was not necessary that you could see you destination, the compass was enough. No longer necessary to hug the coast, apt to be a long way round and quite possibly dangerous if the weather turned nasty. For all of which see references 2, 3 and 4, but perhaps 6 rather than 5. Reference 6, from the University of North Carolina, on the French Broad River, gives an accessible explanation of how the Mercator projection works, why it preserves angles and gives us rhumb lines. It also points up Mercator’s achievement in coming up with it in the mid sixteenth century, well before the tools of calculus were available.

With the bonus that I now know that what I had always thought was the Mercator projection was actually Lambert’s equal area projection, the results of which might look similar, but which are significantly different. Mercator’s projection was more complicated than I had realised, more than a straightforward projection from a line or a point inside a sphere onto the surrounding cylinder – although it still suffers from the same defect as all cylindrical projections in that it does bad things in high latitudes where lines of longitude come together. Perhaps I had been misled by thinking in terms of projective geometry.

One way of thinking about this is that if A and B are on the same line of latitude, one can get from A to B by heading east or west, depending on their longitude. One can go round and round in circles. If A and B are nearly on the same line of latitude, this trajectory becomes a helix, spiralling up or down, converging either to the north or the south pole, depending. Rather like the bath water going down the plug hole. But a helix is not a circle, so excluded from the earlier discussion. 

Conclusions

There is clearly a choice to be made if one is at A and wants to face B, some hundreds of miles away and well out of the line of sight. Perhaps the dignitaries of the churches involved need to convene a conference to thrash the matter out. Perhaps on the site of Chalcedon, locale for an important conference at the time of the Monophysite heresies? For which, see reference 7.

PS 1: I suspect that I have posted about all this before, probably in fewer words, although search has failed to reveal it. But the exercise has served to reactivate my schoolboy geometry and filled a gap in my knowledge. And served as a reminder that one does not always know as much as one thinks one does!

PS 2: asking Google Images about the Wikipedia Mercator map of the world included above resulted in a lot of stuff about magic numbers. Still wondering why.

References

Reference 1: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/earth_info.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_map_projection.

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

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_curvature. Where it gets rather too mathematical for me.

Reference 6: https://www.marksmath.org/classes/common/MapProjection.pdf

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophysitism

Vauxhall on sea

[Apartment buildings at Evergrande’s Life in Venice real estate and tourism development in Qidong, Jiangsu province, China © Qilai Shen/Bloomberg]

Or to be more precise, a development called Venice on the China Sea, just the other side of the river from Shanghai. Complete with its own arrangements for generating the power it needs. At least I think it is an actual development, rather than an architect's mock-up. Street View doesn't seem to work in this part of China, so hard to be sure.

A development which is a cause for concern for the developers and speculators concerned. With some explanation to be found at reference 1.

In any event, a veritable forest of tower blocks, which makes what is going on at Vauxhall look very modest. And I associate to the giant council estates put up in this country in the middle of the last century, some of which became rather shabby. For example, the Great Cambridge estate in Tottenham in the borough of Haringey. BH used to teach there and we used to live a few miles up the road in Wood Green. Now, we learned yesterday, the part of London with the very worst mail service for some reason.

PS 1: it would have been funny if Secretary Truss had stepped off her private jet in Australia to be informed by a stroppy immigration official that there seemed to be something wrong with the batch numbers on her plague certificate and asked to step back onto her jet and leave the country. Or go to the quarantine desert island if that was what she preferred.

PS 2: we are not told about the quality of the wash room fittings of the jet. Silver plate for mere secretaries but solid gold for prime ministers? Designed by Lala Little?

References

Reference 1: Oaktree risks showdown with Beijing over Evergrande debt: LA-based asset manager has a secured loan to one of ailing Chinese developer’s star projects - Tabby Kinder, Robert Smith, Naomi Rovnick, Financial Times - 2022.

Thursday, 27 January 2022

Trolley 465

Spoilt for choice outside the creationists' accommodation block yesterday morning, provided one did not mind a trolley from Sainsbury's. I elected to take the unusual trolley, still made by Wanzl, complete with special holders for one's baguette and for one's newspaper, with the yellow handles. Plus the regular holder for one's baby or toddler.

It also had unusual wheels, each wheel being equipped with a pair of what looked like hard plastic discs rather than tyres. Plus what looks to be a black wheel fitted with a lock (not deployed) front left. Returned to the special needs stack. Among the many trolleys there and in the immediate vicinity, just one with the disc style of wheels, which I am fairly sure I have come across before, but certainly not present in significant numbers yesterday.

Heading along the passage to the footbridge over the railway, I acquired beam two, a near twelve foot length of four by two. A beam which looked to be in reasonable condition, although not new and rather dirty. As often happens with such things, it seemed light enough when I first picked it up, but it soon became both heavy and unwieldy. Shouldering it seemed to work best, although I thought better of doing that across the footbridge. But even so, it did make me puff a bit, and I needed a brief rest every few hundred yards or so.

A bit later, on Blenheim Road, I came across a tubular, stretchy blue garment, possibly what is called a tank top for a small person. Not very clean, but it was dry, and slid along the beam made a good pad for the shoulder.

Several rests later, the beam was delivered to our front drive. Later, I wondered about what I would have thought were the much heavier mesh panels which I carried along the rather longer route from Homebase. No mentions of rests at reference 3, despite it being only three years ago.

Beam now cleaned up and stored on top of the balancing beams, on the floor of the garage. Bound to come in useful one day. The beams noticed at, for example, the end of reference 4. Beams which I would not think of carrying, even one at a time, even from the much nearer Travis Perkins. Delivery every time!

Rewarded later on with beef with dumplings. Six for me (four of which are shown above), four for her. Plus the traditional accompaniments. Very good it all was too.

PS: a snippet from the MIT Technology review, about water problems in the US, following that about water problems in Russia at reference 5: '... The United States is, in fact, the largest exporter of water on earth, according to Robert Glennon, a law professor at the University of Arizona and one of the country’s leading experts on water policy. Glennon calculated that during a recent severe drought, farmers in the American West [generally a rather dry place, with a lot of its water being pumped from deep wells] used more than a hundred billion gallons of water to grow alfalfa that was then shipped mostly to China...'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/trolley-464.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/beam-one.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/new-wheeze.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-festival-of-pork.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/watery-projects.html.

Reference 6: The US exports too much of its most valuable resource: At a time of record droughts, American farmers are in effect sending water around the world in food and clothing exports. The lack of regulations is to blame - Alok Jha, MIT Technology Review - 2021.

Beam one

Which is perhaps overdoing it a bit. Rather a fence post found recovered from under a hedge in Ridgeway, on the way back from Epsom Station. 

At the time of recovery, apart from being a bit dirty, it had looked reasonably sound - I just needed to chop the bottom few inches off where a bit of rot had set in. However, when I got around to chopping the next day, or perhaps the day after that, it turned out that the rot had crept along inside, getting along for half way along what had been a six foot post.

The lumps have now been lost under a bush at the bottom of the garden, to provide food and shelter for miscellaneous bugs, while what is left of the post has been added to the stack of useful timber in the garage. Hopefully no longer infectious.

I suppose that this rotting from the inside is more or less what standing trees do when they get old. The outer layers are still alive, are still carrying grub and water up and down the trunk, while the core gets eaten away.

PS: I have been assuming that the post rotted from what was bottom, when it was part of a fence. But maybe it was the square-cut, exposed top soaking up the rain water? Perhaps the better fencing contractors cut the tops of their posts at an angle and put little roofs on them for this very reason.

Wednesday, 26 January 2022

Red meat day

BH had thought that she had bought a bit of brisket from Sainsbury's, destined for pot roast (or something of that sort). But the brisket turned out to be top side, so roast for an hour or so with pot roasting tendencies. Brown, rather than red, as it turned out. This being a little over a week ago now.

And while this was going on, I went on a spin around Jubilee Way, where I found (this being a Sunday morning), the outside of the Lidl headquarters throbbing with work on gardens and car park. I also decided that it was time to pump up my front tyre again. It felt hard enough, but it had taken to throbbing again, so hopefully pumping up (to 60psi or so) will be the answer. Maybe the inner tube is one size fits all and I have managed to get it a bit kinked - but I am reluctant to disturb it as, as often as not, I manage to put a tyre lever through the rubber and patches are a thing of the past. To think that forty years ago I occasionally used to have to repair inner tubes in the dark, in the rain, while sheltering under a railway bridge or some such. Not any more.

[View of Viña Tondonia during the winter of 2005]

But taken with a spot of liquid red for a change, bought from Majestic as Waitrose had little in the way of higher grade red, stopping at £15 or so. Got to push the boat out given how rarely we have red. Majestic obliged, offering bottles costing a lot more than I wanted to spend, but also this 12 year old Rioja, which was about right and came complete with a golden net. Very fine wire, gold coloured and surprisingly strong. And reference 1 spares us arty photographs of mist drifting over vine filled hillsides, offering us a spot of snow instead.

Traditional plum crumble for dessert, made with traditional flour, rather than some confection involving oats. Which last is perfectly satisfactory, but I think I prefer traditional.

BH had been reading a memoir by Dodie Smith, so that provided some of the conversation. Best known now as the author of  'The Hundred and One Dalmatians', but a successful playwriter of the 1930's, 1940's and beyond. Apart from being keen on dogs, she had a second world war conscientious objector for a husband, which made jumping ship to the US convenient. Something which, to my mind, was respectable enough in the first war, but not in the second - but I have not managed to find out anything about his reasons or the circumstances.

She was also Mrs. Maufe's successor in Ambrose Heal's bed. Mr. Heal being a senior member of the team, if not the boss, at the shop of the same name in Tottenham Court Road. And Mr Maufe being a current subject of interest. See, for example, reference 2.

I had not realised, despite going down that end of Tottenham Court road from time to time, that they were still going strong in their big store there, presumably complete with the Maufe extension at the south end. Must be a long time since we went shopping there, as we did from time to time when we were first setting up. I think we bought our cutlery from them. From Germany, rather than from Sheffield, as it happens.

Later on, moved a few bricks. Heard a lot of late afternoon twittering, but no sightings. One moon rising in the north east.

Won at Scrabble for the third time running after what had seemed like a long run of losses, probably no more than three, so that was alright.

Proceedings closed by BH deciding that she did not like the fake cheese, last noticed at reference 4, either. Taken, in her case, in a sandwich. What was left of the packet, well over half, was consigned to the compost dustbin the following morning. Unlike us to waste food in this way, but I dare say the coconut will rot down well enough. Treat for the compost heap - not that there are many worms in it, now that we have largely stopped feeding it meat.

References

Reference 1: https://www.lopezdeheredia.com/indexgb.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/london-necropolis.html.

Reference 3: https://www.heals.com/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/to-leatherhead.html.

Tuesday, 25 January 2022

Watery projects

[traditional activities on the Volga]

Back in 2011, I acquired a book from a charity shop from which I learned about the on-going and long-term problems with water management in the US. For which see reference 1. Ten years on, I find that the Russians, inheriting a lot of water management infrastructure on the Volga - dams, reservoirs and hydo-electric plants - from the Soviet era, from much the same time as that in the US, are having many of the same problems. With the Volga being the Russian version of the Mississippi. 

Plus a stray water fact from yesterday. I was looking into an eminent Australian, Derek Danton, at reference 3, the author of the interesting looking but very expensive books at references 4 and 5, for both of which it seems that one has to pay collectors', not so say antiquarian, prices.

And came across: '... meteorological data had shown that by 150-200 km from the ocean coast rainwater is devoid of Na [sodium] containing marine aerosols, and thus vast areas of the planet are Na depleted...'. Na, a lot of which comes from salt, is rather important for the normal functioning of lots of animals - including mammals - so this results in all kinds of interesting ramifications in continental interiors. You can get its close relative K [potassium] by eating lots of vegetables, but I failed to work out the connection, beyond being reminded that we contain lots of sodium channels and lots of potassium channels - with both being important parts of the normal workings of the neurons in the brain. Inter alia.

References

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/10/st-lukes.html.

Reference 2: The Soviets turned the Volga River into a machine. Then the machine broke: Too many dams have made Russia's most important river dysfunctional. Here's how the mother river can be fixed - Olga Dobrovidova, MIT Technology Review - 2021.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Denton

Reference 4: The primordial emotions: The dawning of consciousness – Derek Denton – 2005.

Reference 5: The hunger for salt an anthropological, physiological, and medical analysis – Derek A. Denton – 1982.

Blind faith

[Amit Elkayam/The New York Times/Redux: Israeli settlers in the illegal outpost of Evyatar, near the Palestinian village of Beita, West Bank, June 2021]

This prompted by the article in the NYRB at reference 1, written around the book at reference 2. The author of the first is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of the second was a French Zionist who lasted something more than ten years in Israel before returning to France.

My parents, in common with many other lefty intellectuals of the 1950's and 1960's of my childhood, had been appalled by what had happened to the Jews of Europe in the Second World War and were very sympathetic towards Israel. They knew all about the Kibbutz movement. Maybe they thought that one of their children would give it a try for a while. But they were oddly blind to the Palestinians. I don't recall either of them ever mentioning them or their predicament. Or the messy birth of the state of Israel. Indeed, the only relevant memory from that period is a comrade from Trinity College regretting that the Communist Party of Israel had split into two, into a Jewish Party and a Palestinian Party - while noting that the Party was one of the last such organisations so to split.

I don't know what my parents would have made of the present article, never mind the book, but I imagine it would have made them rather sad. That a people who had been oppressed for so long had, in their turn, become the oppressors. With the behaviour of some of them not so far removed from that of the Cossacks of the Russian pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century. And, not least because they were atheists, they would probably have deplored the conflation of state, race and religion. That is not where they wanted to be. While Shulman is further saddened that, while many Jewish Israeli's deplore what is going on, very few of them are prepared to speak out or to try to do something about it.

But I shall find out what more Shulman has to say in his book, reference 3, shortly.

PS: gmaps turns up a Beita el-Foka, a little to the south of Nablus, rather further to the east of Tel Aviv. Possibly the same place as in the snap above, but only possibly as I suspect 'Beit' figures in lots of place names. Only limited availability of Street View, but what can be seen looks to be a harsh country in which to be a small farmer: thin, rocky soil and not much rain. In fact, just like the snap.

References

Reference 1: Lost Illusions: Sylvain Cypel’s transformation from liberal Zionist to ferocious critic of Israel - David Shulman, NYRB - 2022. February 10, 2022 issue.

Reference 2: The State of Israel vs. the Jews - Sylvain Cypel, translated from the French by William Rodarmor - 2021.

Reference 3: Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills - David Shulman - 2018. Bought at a very reasonable price from Abebooks.

Monday, 24 January 2022

Trolley 464

Captured on my way down West Hill yesterday, just by the state tree of Kentucky. Also of Tennessee and Indiana, otherwise Liriodendron tulipifera, noticed in these pages from time to time. See references 2 and 3.

A nearly new Wanzl trolley from the M&S food hall, complete with a new-to-me wheel lock, obscured in the snap above. Grey rather than the black of the Sainsbury's wheel locks, but I couldn't say whether it was otherwise the same. In any event, the lock was not deployed.

Returned the trolley, topped up with brick dates at Grape Tree as supplies there were looking a bit low and then continued on my Ewell Village anti-clockwise. Amused that the girl in the more or less enclosed cash kiosk at Grape Tree was dressed for the outside and had an electric fire plugged in behind her. Apparently the draughts coming in from the mall outside were a bit much - this despite the mall being covered and heated - and a favourite haunt of Epsom pensioners who just want to sit in the warm and watch the world go by. But at least there was a plug.

One more rubber band from the Post Office, one rather battered one penny coin. While the small flock of redwings noticed at reference 4 had got a bit smaller and moved on to browse underneath a different tree.

Home to haggis and plum crumble, teetotal on this occasion.

Followed up later in the afternoon by another game of Scrabble, in which my victory was substantially helped along by getting a seven letter word with its 50 point bonus. It being helped along in its turn by my holding two blanks. It would have been a poor showing if I had not been able to make the seven.

On this occasion, unlike the last, I would have lost without the bonus, given that I incurred a substantial penalty when BH when out prematurely. On the other hand it was not a tainted victory. See reference 5, from no more than a week ago.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/trolley-463.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liriodendron_tulipifera.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=liriodendron

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/low-life.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/tainted-victory.html.

Reference 6: https://www.westerncommodities.com/. Grape Tree's date supplier, out in the wild west. We keep meaning to visit, but have yet to make it. Along with the heritage textile mill in the same town.

Sunday, 23 January 2022

Elephant trap

A slightly odd email, but it would have been easy enough to click the email address, just to see what happens. That can't do any harm...

But apart from the fact that I could recall no such transaction, inspection revealed a few oddities. No name after the 'Dear' and no line feed after that. 'Welwyn Garden town' rather than 'Welwyn Garden City' and a postcode that gmaps does not recognise. And no proper company name.

And after the business noticed in the second half of reference 1, I thought perhaps best not to poke around with platform connections.

Message deleted. I now suppose that clicking on what looked like my email address would have allowed some improper code onto my laptop or into my email account. Slightly alarmed by how easy it would have been so to do.

But I suppose also that the main thing is not to click on links in emails from people you have never heard of, be the email be ever so respectable looking.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/low-life.html.

A mess

Moved today by the article in the Financial Times at reference 1 to take a quick look at the Ukraine. A look which produced some maps of more or less unknown provenance but all telling a similar story and three more articles, references 2, 3 and 4. With Moldova, mainly vaguely Romanian but with a complicated history, tucked in at the bottom left, to the left of the pink, in the map above and at reference 5 below.

The next map is about voting in a Ukrainian election, with the Ukrainian flavoured candidate in yellow to the left and the Russian flavoured candidate in blue to the right. And with something odd going on in the middle where the yellow candidate gets well under half. But which fits well enough with the first map, with the recent additions to the east, including the heavy industry of the Donbas of reference 6. While the Don of the famous novel at reference 7, containing plenty of fights between Don Cossacks and Ukrainians is a bit further to the east.

This one is ethnicity.

And this one is language. Taking the legend literally, about whether people speak Russian at all, rather than whether they speak it as their mother tongue, or when going about their daily business. 

And here we are back on safer ground, with nature reserves and with Moldova tucked in bottom left.

All in all, just the sort of mess that we should understand, after our stint in the Indian subcontinent. Or Cyprus, or Ireland, or Iraq. To name just a few of the many places left with problems after the withdrawal of an imperial power.

One might think that the answer is to respect the boundaries agreed at the time of the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991 and to leave the Ukrainians to get on with it - all their problems with governance, corruption and so on and so forth notwithstanding.

This strikes me as a much better way forward than arguing about the complicated second millennium history of the region - as Putin and the others do. Who cares why the Tatars of the Crimea caved in to the Russians? Who cares what this or that saint got up to at about the time we were fighting the Battle of Hastings? And I forget why one of these saints - dressed more like a soldier than a saint - gets to get a statue in our own Holland Park. For which see reference 8.

One might add that the Moldovans have their problems too, with the people living on the left bank of the Dniester having gone for UDI. With about a quarter of the left-bankers beings Ukrainians and another quarter being Russians. And with the Dniester being visible in the last of the maps above.

References

Reference 1: UK warns Moscow is planning to install pro-Russian leader in Ukraine: London takes extraordinary step of naming Putin’s candidate for head of puppet government in Kyiv - Sebastian Payne, Ben Hall, Max Seddon, James Politi, Financial Times - 22 January 2022.

Reference 2a: An article by the Defence Secretary on the situation in Ukraine: Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace discusses NATO, Ukraine and Russia - Ben Wallace/MOD - 17 January 2022.

Reference 2b: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/an-article-by-the-defence-secretary-on-the-situation-in-ukraine.

Reference 3a: Russia and Ukraine: ‘One People’ as Putin Claims? - Andrew Wilson/RUSI - 23 December 2021.

Reference 3b: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russia-and-ukraine-one-people-putin-claims.

Reference 4a: Article by Vladimir Putin 'On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians' - Vladimir Putin - 11 July 2021.

Reference 4b: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donbas.

Reference 7: And Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov - 1925-1940.

Reference 8: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/06/st-volodymyr.html.

Muddling through


A popular economic history, mainly of England from around 1700. Written by a Labour flavoured economist, presently with the ‘Economist’, with some details being given at reference 5. Crudely summarised in the snap above.

About 300 pages of text in 17 chapters, plus introduction, plus epilogue, plus a very modest amount of stuff at the end – not much compared with many books of this sort. And no maps, graphics or statistical tables, although there is a good number of numbers in the text. And we are pointed to a large Excel workbook with lots of good numbers at reference 4.

An easy read, if sometimes seeming a little glib – this last perhaps inevitable given the amount of ground covered. And sometimes a bit humour irritates rather than amuses.

A summary might be that we took an early lead in industrialisation in the 18th century, which stood us in good stead in the 19th century while the rest of the world caught us up.  But relative decline was inevitable, the genie was not going to stay in our bottle – although it has taken us quite a long time to adjust to our new position in the world, increasingly dominated by others. And despite fairly steady growth in our standard of living, we have not come to a very satisfactory position in so far as managing at home is concerned. This book really does suggest that we have muddling through for a long time – in some part at least, because we were learning as we went along.

My own take is that our standard of living has increased a great deal in the last seventy five years and we seem to be managing now. But I worry first about the distribution of wealth, which has been getting worse since the 1970’s. There are too many poor people, too many people with precarious incomes and too many people with far too much money. Second about our living beyond our means, paid for by foreigners with money to spare, money to lend, like oil-rich Arabs. Helped along by the illusion fostered by our media and by those in charge that it can all be had for nothing, without pain. Debts will just vanish in a puff of inflation. Third and last about the illusion that never ending growth, never ending growth in consumption, is a good thing. I believe that in years to come there is going to be trouble on all three fronts.

A few snippets

The first half of the nineteenth century was a pretty grim time for the urban working classes, by then over half the population. Which was reflected in periodic bouts of unrest. All famously and carefully documented by Engels at reference 2. A book I don’t think I have ever looked at, despite my lefty leanings.

People with titles and inherited land in the country held on to a lot of power for a long time, despite land’s shrinking place in an industrial economy.

For a long time, say for more than a century, textiles and ships were our big exports. Both of which shrank to more or less nothing by the end of the 1970’s. I remember a textile engineer explaining to me in a train in the early 1980’s that he was selling textile machinery to the Far East – and that once his customers had learned how to drive it, our textile industry would be finished.

There was long-standing tension between the landed interest which wanted high prices for the products of their land and the industrial interest which wanted the cheap food for their labour force that could be imported from overseas, from places like the US. 

Weldon points up the shifting fashions of economic management. The pros and cons of fixed or stable exchange rates. After the slump between the wars, full employment was the target. After the inflation of the 1970’s, low inflation was the target. The battle between those who believed governments could spend their way out of trouble and those who believed in balancing the books.

We have wasted a lot of treasure on trying to hold to unrealistic exchange rates for the pound. For example, when we came off the gold standard in 1931 and again when we were ejected from the ERM in 1992. That said, there are many people, particularly those in international trade, for whom having more or less fixed exchange rates is a great convenience. There is a down side to floating.

The impression given by the book noticed at reference 6 notwithstanding, we are told in Chapter 11 that Britain was cranking up her war effort from the mid 1930’s. The necessary factories were being put in place. Ramping up aircraft production was particularly impressive, putting us in a strong position at the start of the fighting war.

The Weldon view seems to be that old people have emerged as a large, growing and important group of voters. A lot of them own their own property, a lot of them have decent pensions. They are largely insulated from the vagaries of the economic life of the country at large. But they do care a about their health, the amount of tax they pay on their income, the amount of interest they get on their savings and they are more likely not to like foreigners. They like house price inflation, which makes them feel rich. And old people tend to be more conservative, both in habits and votes, than young people. So something of a divide opening between young and old.

PS: the book is set in Baskerville, one of my elder brother’s favourite fonts. Fonts being just one of the many curious things he took an interest in.

Conclusions

A good read. It will be worth reading it again after an interval.

References

Reference 1: Two hundred years of muddling through; The surprising story of Britain’s economy from boom to bust and back again – Duncan Weldon – 2021. 

Reference 2: The Condition of the Working Class in England – Friedrich Engels – 1845. 

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/rising-and-falling-powers.html. Kennedy goes over some of the same material.

Reference 4: A millennium of macroeconomic data: Version 3.1 - Bank of England – 2016. In folder ABC as BOE-millennium-20220122.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Weldon_(journalist)

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/hitlers-american-gamble.html

Friday, 21 January 2022

To Leatherhead

Last week to Leatherhead for what is, for us, a reasonably rare visit, although BH does use the rather grand Institute of reference 2. And we used to use what was then the Thorndike Theatre, named for Sybil Thorndike, although neither I nor Wikipedia know if there is any particular connection. Rebranded as the Leatherhead Theatre of reference 3 when it lost public funding, presumably along with many other such establishments, back in the 1990's. I think we last visited for something Gilbert & Sullivan, although I have failed to turn up any such thing in the archive this (Saturday) morning.

Back with the present occasion, a rather cold day and Leatherhead town centre was a little bleak, with a rather moribund feel about it. One dead pub at the top of town. Plenty of eateries, not that many shops and not that many people. Footfall, in the jargon of the trade, thin. But, given the odd geometry of the town, perched above the Mole, and the death of the small shop, hard to see what could be done about it. I suppose in time, along with many other small towns, this one will evolve and find a new niche in the world. But how long will it take? I associate this morning to the pictures you see occasionally of dead shopping malls and dead towns in the US: there the world just moves on and leaves the corpse behind. No evolution, just extinction. Bing turns up lots of them, one of which is included above.

We had parked next to the 'Running Horse' by the river, and I was impressed that my telephone managed to register the mist rising over over the water. A passer-by explained that the land beyond was flooded from time to time and that, rather less often, the houses to the left (in the snap above) needed to be sandbagged. Which amounts to an awful lot of water coming down off the Weald, down from Crawley.

We thought about taking lunch at the 'Running Horse', an ancient house with plenty of history, with the name, according to Wikipedia being a Chinese whisper from 'Rummings House', named for the proprietress. Not yet satisfied myself that the snap above is indeed the same as the present building, for which see reference 4. In any event, we decided against and set off instead for the 'Rubbing House' up on Epsom Downs, by the racecourse. A house which was still a pub when we first knew Epsom but which had now moved firmly into what they call casual dining.

I managed to get there without getting lost, and it turned out to be fairly busy. Mainly pensioners like ourselves, some people who appeared to be on lunch breaks and some ladies who lunch. Plenty of staff, all properly masked up.

For once in a while, there was calves liver on the menu, large or regular, so we took one of each, with some dips and flatbread to start. All very good, only faulted by my forgetting to say gravy in a jug on the side. And served by a proper waitress who might, until recently, have come with a little notebook in which to take the order, but who actually came with a small computer. Tapping the order onto the screen took rather longer than the notebook might have done, but then you are buying direct access to the kitchen.

Being quite full, Expresso and Bells for dessert. Expresso being something which I don't take very often, and was a bit disappointed on this occasion. How long before the next experiment? This being about the only context in which I drink coffee, never drinking it at home.

Will such places ever return to lighter desserts, such as we eat at home? Stewed fruit, jellies and things like that. Just a bit of cheese and biscuit, rather than the full Monty. I suppose the view is that people will not pay to eat such stuff out. They want fancy- and they don't resent the mark-up on fancy.

By the time that we had left, the moon had risen over the grandstand. Having looked rather bigger on the day than it does in the snap above. Funny business, vision.

Later on, I thought to try the cheese noticed at reference 5. I thought toasted might be the way forward, and to be fair it did toast, at least after a fashion.

But I was not very taken with the taste. I don't think that we will be buying any more of the stuff. While I wondered whether we would manage the packet we had got. Would thrift triumph over palate?

Matters not improved by the scum rising on the boiling water poured into the toasting tray.

But the liver had been good. Maybe we will be back for more.

References

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

Reference 2: https://leatherheadinstitute.uk/.

Reference 3: https://theleatherheadtheatre.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.running-horse.co.uk/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/fake-139.html.