Magic bullet?

Some weeks ago now, I had an excursion into the world of depression. A complaint which is common all over the world and for which reasonably effective treatment is available. But depression has not been dumped in the dustbin of history, it is still around and there is still plenty of room for the magic bullet. One of which got a place at the very end of reference 1.

So I imagine that there are research laboratories and research teams all over the world, beavering away, trying for find fame and fortune by coming up with the next magic bullet. At the very least, increasing our knowledge of depression, if not actually reducing the amount of misery that it causes.

On the assumption that we have a chemical rather than a talk orientated team, this work must involve at least three components. Scan the catalogue for a chemical worth checking out. Having come up with one, scan the literature to see who else has looked at it and what, if anything, they came up with. Then, if the lights are still green, mount your own trial. This last being the expensive bit. 

So this team, brought to me by Medscape, is from the University of Reading here in the UK, and has been looking at Vitamin B supplements, maybe even the humble Marmite, said to be a good source of Vitamin B. With a downside being that it is also a good source of salt, something that most of us consume far too much of for our own good. The team have reported at reference 3.

Step 1

Vitamin B – or perhaps the vitamin B complex as is was known when I did chemistry, a long time ago now – is involved in the regulation of relevant neural activity, in particular with the important neural inhibitor called γ-aminobutyric acid  or GABA for short. In getting the right balance between excitation and inhibition – disturbances in which balance appear to be involved in various mental disorders, including depression. With, very roughly speaking, the more GABA in the system, the more inhibition. The system is calmed down a bit.

Enough people think GABA is important for lots of GABA supplements to be sold in health food outlets, even though it is not yet clear that it is doing much good. There are even doubts about whether it can get across the blood-brain barrier.

Step 2

Over the last decade, there has been a lot of work on the place of vitamins B6 and B12 in the brain, in particular in neural inhibition in the brain. See, for example, reference 4. Work which was promising but inconclusive, and there was room for another trial.

Step 3

A study involving near 500 subjects – BSc and MSc students – over five years. B6 supplement, B12 supplement and placebo. Quite a good sized sample compared with some that one comes across – with large samples often being neither practical nor affordable. Each subject took his or her medication for around 35 days, after which he or she was assessed.

Assessment by means of a combination of two questionnaires (first two rows in the table above) and eight physiological tests (the remaining rows). A study complicated by COVID and the consequent move online. All these tests are well-established in the field, all thought to be relevant in the present context. 

I don’t know what the last column on the right is about, beyond it looking to be something to do with knowing whether any effect that one sees can be trusted or not; whether it is something real going on or just chance.

SCAARED is a 44 question screening questionnaire for adult anxiety related disorders to be completed by the patient. While MFQ, the mood and feelings questionnaire is a 33-item questionnaire based on DSM-III-R criteria for depression. So the MFQ consists of a series of descriptive phrases regarding how the subject has been feeling or acting recently. Coding reflect whether the phrase was descriptive of the subject most of the time, sometimes, or not at all in the past two weeks. My understanding is that patient completed questionnaires of this sort are widely used for screening purposes. Perhaps on presentation at A&E, at a general practitioner or at a psychiatric service.

Turning to the physiological tests, by way of example, I look at visual contrast detection, some work on which is reported at reference 5. In the figure above, brightness induction is thought to be a function of retinal processing, contrast suppression a function of cortical processing. In both cases the centres are identical but are made to appear different by their different surrounds. The idea is to tweak the surrounds until the centres appear to be identical. There appears to be plenty of evidence that this sort of thing can be affected by depression, and the finding of reference 5 is that brightness induction in the retina is not, while contrast suppression in the cortex is. Suggesting that depression is doing something to the relevant circuits in the brain, rather than in the eyes. With GABA firmly in the frame.

The summary of the results of the present study was that: ‘vitamin B6 supplementation reduced self‐reported anxiety and induced a trend towards reduced depression, as well as increased surround suppression of visual contrast detection, but did not reliably influence the other outcome measures. Vitamin B12 supplementation produced trends towards changes in anxiety and visual processing’. I did not follow the chain of argument from what looked to me like very small differences between the different bars of various bar charts.

Systems

But I was provoked to think in terms of systems. 

By organic standards GABA itself is a relatively small molecule and in the ball and stick figure above we have: GABA = 4×Carbon=black + 9×Hydrogen=white + 2×Oxygen=red + 1×Nitrogen=blue.

However, the systems around it are quite complicated. Bing turned up the graphic above by way of example. Something to do with GABA shunts in fungal processes. While in Wikipedia there is talk of two classes of GABA receptors, which presumably means a lot more different kinds of GABA receptors.

You then insert complicated GABA sub-systems into even an more complicated host system, as suggested in the graphic above, adapted from a systems model of the Flemish economy.

It then seems rather unlikely, at least to me, that by tweaking GABA operations in a one dimensional way, say cranking it up or down, that you are going to achieve anything useful. Maybe you will do some good in one area, but at the cost of massive disruption elsewhere. Systems of this sort are apt to be finely tuned – think of the amount of work involved in working up a power station to operational status – and may not be in very stable equilibria: give them a push and they slide off to somewhere bad, rather than just drifting back to their comfort zone, to their start point.

On the other hand, suppose that, for some physiological reason, GABA activity across the board has been reduced below its proper level. This might cause all kinds of problems, some serious, others not serious enough to register. But pushing it back towards its proper level might well be helpful. The catch here might be that you are only pushing one sort of GABA activity, of the many varieties available and in use across the brain. Which takes us back to the first point.

So I imagine, at the present state of knowledge, it is hard to know what the overall effect of tinkering with one of the many GABA pathways is going to be. You might identify candidate tinkers, but you have to design and execute a series of trials involving real people to know for sure. 

A chancy and expensive business, as drug companies well know: it is the justification for the fancy prices they charge for the magic bullets which do make the cut.

Conclusions

I think I am a bit too old for all the slog and luck involved in poking around in this particular hay stack. You need to be young and hungry.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/a-cure-for-darkness.html. 

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

Reference 3: High‐dose  Vitamin B6 supplementation reduces anxiety and strengthens visual surround suppression – David T. Field, Rebekah O. Cracknell, Jessica R. Eastwood. Peter Scarfe, Claire M. Williams, Ying Zheng, Teresa Tavassoli – 2022.

Reference 4: GABAergic inhibitory neurons as therapeutic targets for cognitive impairment in schizophrenia - Meng-yi Xu, Albert H C Wong – 2018.

Reference 5: Reduced visual contrast suppression during major depressive episodes - Salmela, V., Socada, L., Söderholm, J., Heikkilä, R., Lahti, J., Ekelund, J., Isometsä, E. - 2021.

Sirloin

The sirloin in question was first spotted in the cold room at the butcher's shop on the occasion of the impromptu beef noticed at reference 1. At which point it had three ribs and was looking fairly bright and fresh. That is to say a Thursday. I put in my claim for two of the three ribs on the Tuesday following, explaining that I wanted all the bones left in, in the knowledge that the butcher liked his mature beef without most of its bones.

Collected it on the Saturday after that and despite what had gone before, only just managed to stop him taking the backbone out. My excuse being that I had been distracted by the rib and sirloin, maybe a metre of it, lying entire on his block. The butcher did not volunteer who or what it was for and I didn't like to ask. 

Maybe the Grand Lodge of Epsom was having a Grand Dinner? Grand enough to get all their silver out? On which point I note that conspicuous display of wealth in the form of silver plate and silver cutlery does not seem to be the thing any more, not that I have any first-hand experience of these matters. Expensive car, hot tub or swimming pool in the garden yes, but tableware no. Not like the late Samuel Pepys who was very keen on having lots of silverware with which to impress his guests. His bribe of choice. I note also that hot tubs seem to be quite noisy. We suspect that there is something of the sort of few doors along the road and it seems to involve a refrigerator-like motor running for hours every day.

Or maybe a Memorial Dinner to celebrate the life of a recently departed brother-in-craft? For which see §164 et seq. of the constitutions.

Back with the sirloin, it was small enough to weigh properly at home, rather than using the DIY beam balance, coming in at 6lbs 8oz. Turned up the trusty Radiation Cookbook, where it says that for a joint of this sort allow 20 minutes to the pound, so 130 minutes at gas mark 3, which equals 163C. Maybe a touch less given that we have a fan oven. The same page as for the rather smaller impromptu.

Oiled, tied and guyed for the off. The two guys at the front because there was a slight lean to the joint and I did not want it to fall over. And the cut where the butcher had started on the backbone is visible in the centre of the snap.

Then into the pre-heated oven 10:30. Speared at 12:00. No ooze. Basted. Parsnips added, cut lengthwise fairly small. Oven turned off at 12:40 or so. 

Plated at 12:50. Basted parsnips again. A bit chewy - but they all went. Served at 12:55. Meat pretty good. A touch bloody when first opened but it was cooked, and soon settled down to a brown-grey. A one trestle occasion. For which see, for example, reference 2.

Served with greens (my special request), some genuine sprouting broccoli (not that calabrese which you get everywhere now) and carrots. Plus a spot of the Fleurie from Waitrose, previously noticed.

Ready-made horseradish for those that went in for that sort of thing visible left. While I now remember the days when I used to pickle my own horseradish - the stuff being more or less a weed and very easy to grow if you have the space - with the build-up of ammonia coming close to knocking you out when you took the lid off.  Not much fun really, but I persisted for a while.

In the intervals, some of us tested our IQ on the contraption purchased by the large junk shop in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, a junk shop last noticed at reference 3. One member of the party had the temerity to show off his genius score, but when asked to repeat the feat could only turn in sub-moron, as snapped above.

Out into the garden, where hunting for tadpoles and mosquito larvae in the micro-ponds was good for a bit. As was cracking open acorns, the thing being a smart tap with a brick on one end or the other. The young people present made quite a palaver out of choosing which end was appropriate on each occasion - without caring to hold the acorn while I delivered said taps. I had to do both.

While the sub-moron showed off his pecks by managing to hold a string of eight bricks, pressed between his palms, at least for a few seconds. Something I could once manage, but I am now down to a more modest six. In my day, bricks were unloaded from the large flat-bed lorry at the rate of six or seven, this being years before the invention of shrink-wrapped pallets and when lorries of this sort were the kings of the road. Flat beds, then as now, made of timber, close boarded on a steel frame with planks of two by three inches I should think.

For dessert, a carrot cake, turned out by BH for the occasion.

We did not quite finish the beef for lunch and I was still good for a spot of (fresh) bread and beef later on. Snapped here while I was wondering how many more slices were appropriate.

I think it did the two of us two more meals and a spot of snacking. To be fair, the supply of beef for the last of these meals was getting a touch low. The snap above being taken on day two, that is to say Monday.

The day closed with a chance outing for BH's ancient harmonica, otherwise a mouth organ, probably not a particularly expensive one. I had a bit of a blow, which reminded me of my early days in public houses when there were still a fair number of people about who could play them pretty well. Able, for example, to give the illusion of playing two lines of music at once, perhaps the tune above and the accompaniment below. Pushed out of bars by the arrival of the juke box.

PS 1: Blogger doing a Word and getting a bit tiresome about my spelling and grammar. Red and blue underlinings everywhere, only a proportion of which are errors for correction.

PS 2: it took me a while to turn up the balance noticed above, but got there in the end. See reference 5.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/impromptu.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=trestle.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-island-line.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/sheep-shoulder-day.html. The all-important temperature conversion chart.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-festival-of-pork.html.

Jubilee Way

What with one thing and another, the first trip around Jubilee Way for around a week this morning. Maybe an hour and thirty minutes, so the times are holding up, despite being overtaken by younger cyclists at various points along the way. And even now, their passing does provoke a bit of extra pace for a hundred metres or so.

A first serious outing for the new mitts noticed at reference 1. They didn't stop the hands getting a bit cramped from time to time, but they certainly slowed that down and they did provide some welcome cushioning. Let's hope the cushioning does not get tested on the road - although I am confident that it would be a lot better than nothing. Presumably, if they suit, come the winter, I will need to buy a second pair, with fingers and with a bit more thermal insulation.

Some more caravans have arrived on Fair Green, not as many as last time.

While across the road there was a reasonably serious looking water leak. Not a burst main, but there was a fair amount of water about, a fair proportion of it running down the side of the road. Thames Water in attendance, with their chaps looking down the hole in an interested sort of way while they ate their sandwiches. No doubt we can expect some action in due course.

For the first time ever, Jenny's Café at Hook, opposite the library & community building, was shut, with a piece of A4 pasted to the door. Hopefully announcing nothing more terminal than a family beano for the Bank Holiday or the fermeture annuelle. This last being something that foreigners are quite keen on, and there are a lot of foreigners in the catering trade. From where I associate from the caravans above to the French word forain, the ancestor of our foreign, meaning a person working the fairs, from the days when anyone from more than a couple of villages away was a foreigner. The days when people, particularly ladies, were apt to pine away and die if they were chased out of their village.

Too lazy to cross the road to read the notice.

But not too lazy to stop for this new-to-me format of washer, picked up in Bridge Road. Having passed up on a much more ordinary washer somewhere in East Street. Jar getting quite full now.

From there to the small compost heap to extract the tropical looking tree which has sprouted over the past few days. There had been one a few weeks ago and I had thought about extraction, but never got around to it before it was buried. But on this occasion, BH took an interest, so she now has a baby avocado pear to look after. Sturdy two or three leaf shoot coming out of the large nut, now split open. Some fibrous roots coming out of the nut itself, rather than out of the root below, in the way of one of our acorns or horse chestnuts.

Not the orange that we had thought it was at all. Avocado not having come to mind at all, being a much less frequent purchase than oranges, grapefruit or even lemons.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-trolley-declined.html.

Animal senses

Back at the end of last year, prompted by the Financial Times piece at reference 1, I bought the excellent book of popular science at reference 2. Being diverted down other paths, it has taken a while to read it, but I now have – and have found lots of thought provoking material about some curious senses packed into an accessible package. Mostly highly developed or specialised versions of sense that we have ourselves. Also having previously provoked the posts at references 3, 4 and 5.

A book of around 300 pages organised into twelve substantive chapters sandwiched between some introductory stuff and some closing stuff. Each chapter takes a curious animal as its starting point and are mostly in three interleaved parts: the animal with its interesting sense, a person who has lost the equivalent human sense and science soap. Tales from the daily lives of working scientists. Quite a lot of jumping between story lines, much as in a television soap. Which can also irritate after a while. 

A book which covers a great deal of ground, the sort of thing which can absorb a huge amount of fact checking. Probably best to do some of one’s own before putting too much weight on any one fact.

Unusually for these days, the book is made in England, rather than somewhere in the far east. Also unusually for a book of this sort, the decision was made to include no pictures, other than having a drawing of the relevant animal to introduce each chapter. I read somewhere that ‘Caroline Church is a scraperboard artist, and the perfect illustrator to approach if you’re after something with a vintage engraved look to it. Her imagery is ideal for packaging that has a traditional feel, she’s an expert when it comes to conveying atmosphere and fascinating results can be achieved when her historical scraperboard style is applied to modern themes and subjects…’. Scraperboard being new to me and catching my eye as something between the linocut and the woodcut. A sample is included above. So not a lady who specialises in animals, but she still does a pretty good job here.

So we as exemplar animals, the peacock mantis shrimp through to the duck-billed platypus – with a stuffed specimen of this last to be found in a corner of Beaney House of Art and Knowledge at Canterbury, for which see reference 6. But rather than attempt a quick canter through the twelve chapters, I shall start where I ended, with a primer on our senses generally, with the tabular summary ventured below.

At the level of receptors, animal nature is fairly conservative. Most animals make use of the same basic machinery, the same repertoire of receptors: the chemistry is much the same throughout the animal kingdom. So, for example, all animal eyes use the same chemical devices to convert light into electrical energy.

Then, the traditional identification of five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – five senses which some Christians, with their well-developed sense of sin, map onto five kinds of sin – is not really enough, there is other stuff going on. So, for example, some animals – including at least some humans – can detect the earth’s magnetic field and use it to give them a sense of direction.

Then, leaving aside the question of sensing what is going on inside the body, there is the question of what sort of external stimuli we can sense, consciously or unconsciously. In evolutionary terms, chemical receptors might have been first, with each sort of receptor tuned to one sort of chemical. A lot more sorts than the modest number of receptors for different wavelengths of light, although trickery is possible and sometimes a receptor can be set off by some chemical other than that nature originally intended.

Some senses can do action at a distance, so human eyes can detect objects which are miles away and human ears can hear natural noises which are tens of metres away, and unnatural or unusual noises which are a good deal further away than that. Some senses, like touch, need contact and some, like sensing heat, that is to say thermal radiation, are in between.

Some senses, notably the eye, can detect the direction from which the stimulus came. In the case of humans this sense is so well developed as to enable the production of images in the brain.

Some senses only work when the level of background noise is very low. So the sense of direction which uses the earth’s magnetic field, is drowned out by the electrical clutter in a modern house. Detecting prey by their electrical emanations probably only works at the bottom of rivers, the bottom of seas where ambient electrical activity is very low.

All of which I found fascinating. And it was easy enough to chase up more information from the Internet when I want to dig a little deeper. No index, but notes and references keyed to each chapter. And the names of important players, important enough for search engines to bite on.

The book closed by emphasising the plasticity of the brain, the way that, for example, blind people tend to have better hearing and a better sense of touch that sighted people. This not being the result of better machinery out on the periphery, but the brain adapting to the loss of one sense by giving more resources to others. This allocation seemingly not being fixed by our genes, fixed from birth.

A few highlights

In Chapter I, after learning something about the peacock mantis shrimp, I learn that different people sense things in different ways at different times and places. Their sensors are perhaps tuned a little differently. The ambience might be a bit different – say different light or shade. Top down processing might be a bit different - say the tendency to see what we wish for or what we are used to, all of which might well vary from person to person. So I might see a black headed marsh warbler while you might see a crumpled fast food wrapper.

The suggestion from reference 7 snapped above being that maybe Van Gogh had slightly weak red reception, which means that he would turn up the red content of his paints, thus giving us what we see on the left, while what he saw was we see on the right, with the red content of the flower centres toned down a bit.

So we can have bottom up changes of a modest variety and rather grosser changes arising top down. But looking to the middle ground, whether we can reverse black and white, permute the primary colours or rotate the colour wheel, options floated at reference 3, is another matter.

Chapter V starts with vampire bats, which surprised zoologists with the amount of support offered by these bats to each other, family or not. A very cooperative lot. The chapter goes on to talk of the importance of something called slow touch, otherwise a stroke or a caress, enabled by things called C tactile afferents, afferents which seem capable of more or less directly eliciting pleasure or pain, sometimes in error, sometimes because of mutations in something called the SCN9A gene, otherwise the sodium voltage-gated channel alpha subunit 9. So a sense which is closely bound up with a pair of feelings. Some go as far to argue that these afferents are what drive, what enable, humans to be social animals, to get along in large groups. A lens through which to explain what it means to be human.

Chapter VI tells of a giant catfish which can taste with its facial whiskers and its skin as well as with its mouth. With the first two having one channel into the brain, and the third another, making it likely that there are different processing arrangements. Seemingly including the remote detection of the location of tasty prey. A wheeze which presumably only works for a water animal.

Chapter VIII tells us something of pheromones, chemicals which many animals use to guide or even direct their behaviour, particularly their reproductive behaviour. Chemicals which many animals can detect at very low concentrations and at some distance. Direction that need not trouble higher brain centres, given that the nose, unlike the other senses, has direct access to the lower brain. In can, in effect, just tell us to get on and do something, without troubling consciousness with the matter. There is some evidence that humans respond to such smells.

There is also some evidence, that the smell of a human comes close to being a genetic fingerprint, a unique identifier. Humans can, in consequence, tend to choose mates which are as genetically different from themselves as possible, thus bringing some new genes into the mix and largely avoiding children winding up with two copies of a bad recessive gene. All kinds of interesting possibilities. I associate to a comedy I once saw on television talking of the need for our aristocratic families to breed out every few generations, to pull in a few wild cards from the village, to avoid breeding problems.

While Chapter X tells something about spiders, their sense of time and our sense of time. With a lot of the material here being lifted fairly directly from reference 8. The idea seems to be that life is dominated by the cycle of the solar day, now, on average, very slightly less than 24 hours. So living organisms, particularly large and complicated animals which contain lots of molecular clocks to regulate, to manage, their affairs, set those clocks by the sun. Take the sun away altogether and the synchronisation of all those clocks starts to fail, with sometimes serious results. As can too much messing around with time zones. It turns out that this setting makes use of an additional photoreceptor on the surface of the retina, often still up and running even when the host is otherwise blind. With the result that these blind people are advised to spend time outside, in natural light, to help keep their clocks in order.

Lastly, somewhere along the line I came across reference 9, the opening substantive page of which is reproduced above. Hopefully I will do better than flip a few pages.

Conclusions

A good read. Strongly recommended.

For myself, nothing on how all the material collected up by the nervous system is organised for projection into consciousness, with my vote sticking, at least for now, with topical, that is to say with the material on a patch of cortex organised in much the same way as a picture on a piece of paper. But thinking about all the different kinds of material offered by the present book might give me a handle on some appropriate, general-purpose format. Maybe the layers of LWS-R of reference 10 are the answer. Maybe time for another look at reference 11.

PS 1: at one point I took a look at the puffs on the back of the book, all very gushing as one might expect. And not really in the same terms as I have been thinking about the book at all. First thought, this is all a lot of rubbish. Second thought, give some time to these other points of view. Maybe there is something in them!

PS 2: the grammar checker in Microsoft’s Word has been particularly irritating on this occasion. It is often useful, but I must learn how to turn it off.

References

Reference 1: What the platypus could tell us about climate change: The COP26 delegates would do well to look at the world from the perspective of animals – Jackie Higgins, Financial Times – 2021. 23rd October.

Reference 2: Sentient: What animals reveal about our senses – Jackie Higgins – 2021.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/on-seeing-colour-some-science-fiction.html. 

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/two-sorts-of-fake-vision.html. 

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/knowledge-without-sensation.html. 

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/03/beaney.html. 

Reference 7: Art, interpersonal comparisons of color experience, and potential  tetrachromacy – Kimberly A. Jameson, Alissa D. Winkler, Keith Goldfarb – 2016.

Reference 8: The rhythms of life: what you body clock means to you! – Foster, Kreitzman – 2014. Being the Physiological Society’s annual public lecture for 2014. Short and accessible.

Reference 9: Animal eyes – Michael F. Land, Dan-Eric Nilsson – 2012. An open access book.

Reference 10: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html. 

Reference 11: The Merging of the Senses – B.E. Stein, M. Alex Meredith – 1993.

Signé Picpus

Yesterday evening we happened to watch Rupert Davies in the ancient BBC version of Signé Picpus, a Maigret story which references 2 and 3 suggest that I have read at least twice before. I may have nodded off a bit, but we got to the end and I had not got much of a clue about what I had just seen. I was able to reconstruct the beginning and the end, but there seemed to be a large hole in the middle. So I turned up the hard copy to try and fill some of the gaps.

In the meantime, the story remains that I rather like these old adaptations, made at a time when Simenon was still around - and while the producers like to slap on the Parisian colour, the stories had not yet become the costume dramas they have become since. Just an hour long, which suits quite well these days, two hours being quite a chunk out of an evening. Someone has got around to issuing the whole lot on DVD, but at £60 or so, I have not yet fallen - although a £1 an episode, £1 for an hour's entertainment is not that bad. Less than I often pay. However, with a new smart telly on the horizon, we shall wait and see whether Britbox can do the business.

Puzzle 1. One bit they seemed to have got wrong was translating 'tanche' as roach, which I understood to be a small fish which you might catch in a  net and fry like whitebait. Whereas Collins is quite clear that a tanche is a tench, a fish which can grow to more than half a metre in length, which likes still, turbid water and which can be eaten - although is not much eaten these days. People not hungry enough. Which does not seem quite right, so checking further, I find that I was wrong about roach, which turn out to be a common river fish, ranging in size up to around half a metre, smaller than the tench but presumably quite eatable. Perhaps the BBC translator thought that tench was a mistake, that for once Simenon had been a bit careless about his river facts, and settled for roach instead.

The French for this sort of roach being a 'gardon', with Littré describing it as a small freshwater fish.

And maybe I will get to the pike of references 2 and 3 in due course.

Puzzle 2. Simeon makes quite a lot of the recreational scene on the rivers to the east of Paris, particularly the Seine and the Marne. Lots of riverside bars, al fresco dancings, restaurants, villas and hotels. The weekend scene for lots of Parisians through the middle part of the year. Lots of bridge and goings on. And this BBC adaptation evokes the sort of thing that comes to my mind rather well.

However, when I ask Bing about 'riverside hotels marne isle de france', all he seems to be able to manage is a whole load of hotel booking sites. No real attempt to parse the query, to do what I asked for at all - something that irritates me when I am looking for a hotel in this country. Google does slightly better and turns up references 4 and 5, a bit grander than the sort of thing that I had in mind, but at least the hotel is on the river, even if the river is a tributary of the Marne rather than the Marne proper. While the snap above is the right river and there are what might be weekend homes on the other side, but not much in the way of hotels and restaurants. Maybe Parisians don't do that any more.

But the puzzle is, why don't we do the river scene much at all? I suppose there is a bit out Henley way, but that is for toffs and bankers. All a bit fancy, rather than ordinary Londoners out on a beano. Maybe Hampton Court was a bit nearer the mark fifty years ago.

Is the answer all to do with the fact that we are much cooler and that we are a small island? So we tend to do seaside, with Londoners of old flocking to places like Southend, Margate and Brighton. Seaside hotels, gin palaces and piers. Met the same need, but met it in a proper English way. None of this French nonsense.

PS: while I was posting this, an email turned up from the ancient tree people at reference 6. People in whom I might take a serious interest if I lived a bit nearer. Today, inter alia, they advertise the work of a photographer called Beth Moon, also into ancient trees. But she seems to have protected her copyright very carefully, with very little in the way of good quality reproductions of her photographs having leaked out to the free part of the Internet. Not like people of her sort in this country at all, who mostly let out a good number of tasters. I think the snap above was taken from the foot of a very old Wellingtonia, or giant redwood as they have it in the US.

References

Reference 1: Signé Picpus - Simenon - 1941. Volume XI of the collected works.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/pike.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/picpus.html.

Reference 4: https://www.le-moulin-de-pommeuse.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.le-moulin-de-pommeuse.com/le-parc/. The pictures.

Reference 6: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org/.

Out of sequence

The general idea is that substantial posts appear in their proper order, with that at reference 1 counting as one such. Which can mean, that posting is as much as a fortnight after the event. Whereas odd and ends, such as that at reference 2, usually get posted much closer to their time. I suppose the relevant difference is that the latter can be knocked out in some spare moment, without any serious preparation, while the former require quality time. Some of them are even prepared in Word, rather than being typed straight in, the Blogger draft capability notwithstanding.

So according to the foregoing, the present post should have appeared before that at reference 1, actually occurring three or four days previously, just about a fortnight ago. Hopefully, a rare lapse.

The now usual drill: garlic, onions, tomatoes (I don't approve of tinned tomatoes for culinary purposes. They taste of tin to my mind), celery. Small potatoes, sausage. Served with tubular pasta and salad. With the salad in a large bowl with North African pretensions. There is a tall lid to go with it, a lid which does not usually appear on the table, although it does get cupboard space in the kitchen.

Oven gloves probably from Lakeland, the Epsom branch of which closed some time ago. A useful shop, although with a lot of floor space for the trade that they were doing. Now vacant, with Côte wondering whether to take up their option after all. Tricky time for them - along with many others. We hope they will, as we have had some good meals with them, on the first occasion, as I recall, in Canterbury.

Stew taken with a spot of what the man at Majestic thought was a superior offering from Villa Maria people, an outfit first introduced to me by the staff at the Tooting Broadway branch of Wetherspoons. Seaspray. It was fine, and it was certainly a lot cheaper than the bottle that I had at first thought to buy. Enough cheaper that I bought two rather than one.

On closer inspection, it appears that there were some mushrooms after all. I must have buried them when I added them to the pan, to speed things up.

I usually take my salad after the stew and pasta, either after the first or the second go at it. Miniature water melon for dessert visible top right. Not quite as good as the real thing, but a good deal more convenient.

Of late, I have taken to using an entire sausage in one of these stews, all 300 grams of it. One consequence of which is that there is often enough for us to get a proper second meal from it, rather than snacking on the leftovers, saving BH a job on the day following.

The scene looking south east in our back garden in the middle of the afternoon. I may have been taking a little something on the garden bench - a garden bench which has served well, being well over 50 years old now, having survived my mother's painting the endangered tropical hardwood with white gloss paint in the course of one of her manic phases. Now pretty much all scraped off.

From the left, the leylandii, then something with fierce thorns and then the hole left by the oleander. Reminding one how mature shrubs are very hollow; all front. This one still home to various birds and bats, all the local cats notwithstanding. Then the firethorn, then the yellow buddleia looking rather unhappy. Much better now, having been treated to both washing up water and rain. The product of a cutting taken maybe twenty years ago from a bush in a holiday cottage in mid Wales, quite near the source of the Severn and with a small tributary of the Severn running through the back garden. A cottage which I remember as being full of all kinds of stuff and with a rather damp feeling about it. Plus more or less derelict farm yard outside. Nut tree right, a tree which delivers plenty of nuts, but nuts which we very rarely get to eat as the grey squirrels strip them unripe. I suppose they must get something out of them or they would not bother, but not then fit for our consumption.

PS: it so happens that Bastides is set to ride again today (that is to say Sunday, what is says at the top notwithstanding), to be knocked out in the margins of bread batch No.661.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/an-evening-out.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/learning-french.html.

Reference 3: https://www.cote.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/02/canterbury-cooking.html. Memory serves on this occasion, even if the notice is very brief. Could hardly be less so. Canterbury being a place we should go back to. Our nearest proper cathedral, now I believe, out of scaffolding.

Wellingtonia 92

A virtual capture on the People's Park in Berkeley, CA. The story of which started in with a block of distressed housing which the University of California wanted to knock down and use the space to build some much needed student accommodation. A story which started in the 1950's but only really got going in the late 1960's, by which time students in the US and elsewhere were having lots of protests, fuelled by the US intervention in Vietnam, an  intervention which blighted the lives of tens of thousands of young conscripts from the US - and which killed a great many more Vietnamese.

But it started for me with another email from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. An email which I find a little distasteful. Partly because of the whiff of pyramid sales about it, partly because I prefer my philanthropy not to be so entwined with marketing and consultant speak. It may work but I don't like it.

An outfit which appears to share its address with the Chronicle of Higher Education, that is to say 1255 Twenty-Third St. NW Washington, DC 20037. A little to the south west of the Du Pont circle which I came across one evening in the course of what was perhaps my last excursion to the land of the free. Named, I believe, for an eminent admiral of that name.

Poking around turned up this snippet about pets, drawing attention to the need for philanthropic action in the pet department. I believe there is a whole small hours television channel devoted to such action, possibly called 'Animal Rescue Cops' or something like that.

While poking around the sister publication turned up the People's Park. A place which turns out to have a long and illustrious place in the annals of protest.

Protest which appears to have got fairly serious at times to judge by the pictures turned up by Bing, one of which is included above. Not the way we do things on this side of the pond at all.

From where I get to the Wikipedia article at reference 4. From which I learn something of the tangled history of the place. I also get the latitude and longitude, which is processed by gmaps into the snap at the top of this post. What looks very like a giant redwood, otherwise a Wellingtonia, in its native land, albeit not very healthy looking. The twin trunk in the middle, to the left of the palm tree.

Bing did not oblige with a close enough shot to be absolutely sure, but it does look very much like one. Scored.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/wellingtonia-91.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/fundraiser.html. The first outing for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Reference 3: https://www.chronicle.com/. Some of which is pay to view.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Park_(Berkeley).

Group search key: wgc.

Trolley 526

Having just declined the litter filled trolley from Sainsbury's once again, trolley No.526 was picked up in the Kokoro passage. Returned to the M&S food hall the other side of the road, where I found that it was not a size used there. Maybe it had somehow got to Epsom from elsewhere, perhaps the little shop attached to the BP garage on the Dorking Road, maybe a kilometre away. Perhaps a little shop which keeps longer hours than the big shop in Epsom.

Having entered through the back of the store, exited from the front, to find another M&S trolley, this time a proper one, albeit rather wet. Returned it to find that the first trolley had already been taken by a shopper, spotting her with it on my way out. Given that the first trolley was an alien and the second one was collected from less than fifty yards from the front entrance of the store, it seems right to score the two as just one.

Noticed the leaves on the rather sickly looking trees outside Wetherspoon's on the way. In clusters, small, thin and slightly shiny, a bit like the leaves on our bottlebrush bush, a variety originally from Australia. So I imagine adapted to dry conditions, which might be why they had been planted there after the death of their predecessors. Which does not agree with the story reported at reference 2 - but who knows?

Called in the fruit and veg. stall (off snap to the right) on my way out, falling for two tubs of pink plums, something like Victoria plums but not labelled such, and a pound of fancy dates, sold loose. The lady selling them explained that the thing to do was to replace the date stones with walnut meats. Very tasty she said. Can't see me bothering though. A stall which seems to have a bit of a thing for dates as they often seem to have heaps of boxed dates of unusual brands, perhaps from Jordan or Iran.

I got a lot of plums for my money, two tubs turning out to be rather more than I expected, and so far they have all been both ripe and sound. Satisfactory rather than good and I expect we (or rather BH) will end up stewing a good portion of them.

Back by way of Hook Road and Manor Green Road, where I noticed a young tree with similar leaves to those noticed in town. A tree which had been there a few years, was still rather small and the leaves were not much bigger than those in town. Maybe trees which modulate the size of their leaves according to conditions? Sounds a bit of a stretch but not, I suppose, impossible.

While on the registration plate front, I clocked up No.22 (lots of them), No.33, No.55 and No.66. But not No.44 and certainly nothing any nearer to No.36.

Following the letter noticed in the postscript to reference 3, a lot of activity on the Thames Water front, with what appears to be several meter teams on the go. Let's hope that the cover of this meter tube ends up rather more level than appears above.

While outside our own house, the streak of mud arising from our new meter running down the edge of the road, has not been washed away by the recent rain. Maybe, short of taking a brush to it, it is going to take months for nature to take its course.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/trolley-525.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/notre-dame.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/stuffing.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

An evening out

Last week our first evening excursion for a while, what with the plague, the summer break and the move to afternoon rather than evening entertainments.

An excursion to ASK, in what I think was still a branch of the NatWest bank when we moved to Epsom, after which it did a stint as the Old Bank, a place we used to visit on Friday evening before moving on to somewhere more salubrious to eat - this being in the days before public houses felt they had to serve food. On the other hand, they did turn the music up at around 20:00 to remind us - despite our still being of working age - that it was time to make way for their proper customers. And then there was ASK Italian. Probably the place in Epsom in which we have eaten the most meals out by quite a long chalk, now that Café Rouge has given way to Cappadocia, thus resetting the meal counter there.

ASK appears to have been founded by a family already firmly established in the catering trade. There does not appear to be any connection with Italy and, not caring to engage with any of the many family history operations, I have failed to find out where the family, once called Kropifko, might actually have originally come from.

So off we went down West Hill, passing a group of (probably under-age) young men carrying supplies back up the hill for some kind of a beano. BH explained that this was probably something to do with the fact that it was A-level results day. Seemingly a national event - which I don't recall it being in my time.

ASK was quiet enough when we arrived, and we had our choice of table, but it got steadily busier over the couple of hours or so that we were there and was doing pretty well by the time we left. Including a family party behind us which included some rather forward young ladies, young ladies who seemed to be able to find plenty of excuses to parade up and down the restaurant.

We got the impression, possibly quite wrongly, that there had been some kind of freshening up of the décor. Including a rather more successful version of the mixed tables and chairs motif that we had noticed at our last visit to the Tilt Yard Café at Hampton Court Palace. See reference 6.

The freshening up included the little stand that our mixed starter came on. We speculated about where one would go if one was Mr. Ask and wanted, say, 500 of them. Would you have had them made up or did you just trot along to your restaurant furnishings warehouse, perhaps located somewhere in the Midlands. On the outskirts of Solihull?

To follow, pizza for him and fish for her. All very satisfactory. 

We decided that we were defeated by these serious looking deserts, and settled for something wet instead. Grappa for him and Earl Gray for her. Except that the young waitress did not have a clue what grappa was, so I settled on Jameson.

Possibly clueless, but very young, very pleasant and cheerful, and she was rewarded with my pocketful of real coin, picked up somewhere or other. The first time that I have tipped in a restaurant in the old-fashioned way since before the plague. Mostly just gets lost inside the service charge and click to pay. I wonder what the staff think about the change?

Slightly surprised outside to find the shiny new meat wagon (meat that is, not wrongdoers) parked up in the market place. I had not thought he did the Thursday market (this being a Thursday evening) and his next appearance was not due until Saturday. Does he actually keep his meat in the lorry? Does the refrigerator run 24 by 7? Was the driver taking a little something in Wetherspoon's before setting out for whatever Friday market was on his schedule?

From there, we thought to take something on the new Wetherspoons terrace, to find a substantial queue of very young people, mainly girls, waiting to get in. The very cheerful security man on the door explained that all should be well in five minutes or so - but that was too much for us and we moved onto the Marquis across the road - which was busy outside but quiet enough inside. Lots of young people and the usual scattering of slightly disreputable looking older men.

Here we wondered where the décor consultant would have sourced three dozen pink plates from, of various sizes but fairly well matched otherwise. Up on a wall behind us. Perhaps a hundred years or so old.

And so home. No moon to be seen, but alternatively entertained on the way by a rather pretty three year old bitch. Rather yappy and noisy - but, oddly, the noise stopped as soon as we got in front of her.

The only ill effects of all this being a slight wooziness in the morning, rather more so than if we had eaten and so forth at lunch time.

References

Reference 1: https://www.askitalian.co.uk/.

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

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Kaye. The patriarch.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kaye. The son, one of the founders of ASK.

Reference 5: https://www.azzurrigroup.co.uk/. The vehicle.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-dry-court.html.

A trolley declined

Passing through the Kokoro passage from the Station Approach end yesterday morning, I found that the stack of trolleys of reference 1 had gone, apart from a Sainsbury's trolley, now rather full of fast food litter. It was already rather warm, so I decided against clearing it and walking it along to Kiln Lane.

Instead, carried onto Fudge's cycle shop in Upper High Street to inquire about palm guards to provide some protection to the hands in the event of their hitting the road - which might be messy given that I am on warfarin. I felt sure that I had seen cyclists wearing gloves with palms but no backs. The chap in this shop - the second at which I had asked - didn't know about anything like that, but he did offer what he called mitts from Specialised: padded palms, no fingers and ventilated backs. It seems that the idea was to cushion the palms against the handlebars, thus protecting the blood supply to the hands. And to be fair, I have noticed the circulation in my hands grinding to a halt when on the Jubilee Way run, needing a bit of rubbing, flexing and shaking to bring them back to proper life. Sold. We shall see how I get on with them. Will I bother to wear them at all?

I was rather surprised to find that I could spend more than £10,000 on a bicycle, with the most expensive one featuring a battery which would probably get me up Box Hill, a feat I might just about have managed fifty years ago, but would not think of attempting now. Nor would I care to come down, not being keen on downhill speed on a bicycle. Looking closer, I found that lots of the bicycles on display came with batteries - and I remembered that one does see quite a lot of them on the roads these days. Would have been considered unsporting fifty years ago.

A lot of the cycles on view were from either Brompton or Specialised, but they also had a few from Trek - with lots of gears and looking nothing like the Trek road bike that I have been using for more than a decade now. It suits me and I dare say it will do until I retire from the road. Unless, that is, I move onto a battery assisted tricycle.

BH was temporarily absent on a farming expedition (see reference 2), so back via Costcutter to get some of their rolls for lunch. Plus a Guardian. Two of the rolls went into the construction of excellent fried egg sandwiches, leaving the third in reserve. The Guardian provided some entertainment, but also included a fair amount of padding.

I then inspected the mitts more closely, to find that they had been made in Vietnam. Complete with double gel, ergonomic design and scientific testing. Almost as much flannel as you get on packets of food at Sainsbury's.

PS 1: I might say that my road bike doesn't look very much like this one either. A snip at £3,000 or so. The sometimes all-knowing receipt folder does not reveal what I paid, but I do feel sure that it was in hundreds - say less than five - rather than thousands.

PS 2: ask gmail, and after a bit of poking about I turn up an exchange from 2006, about the time that I retired. No receipt, but it does suggest that I paid something more than £750. All those extras that I needed, like mud guards. So rather more than I had thought and rather longer ago. 

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/trolley-525.html.

Reference 2: https://www.bockettsfarm.co.uk/. Bit of a cheek describing it as a working family farm. Small visitor attraction yes, working farm no.

Reference 3: https://fudgescyclestore.com/. The Upper High Street store, not the one which has appeared on the Harrow Road, on the other side of the river.

Reference 4: https://www.specialized.com/gb/en.

Learning French

In the course of rereading the excellent reference 2 - not now sure why it came down off the shelf - I come across this interesting bit about the French language.

This bit of the discussion about national thought being organised under three heads. First, the big old countries trying to homogenize their populations, getting them to speak and dress the same. To have the same laws, the same weights and measures. Centralist nationalism. The French after the revolution. Second, ethnic or cultural communities scattered across a number of states, trying to bring together the parts. Unification nationalism. The Kurds now. Third, the old empires trying to hold together all kinds of different peoples and groups. The different peoples start pushing for national independence, for the freedom to do their own thing. Separatist nationalism. The Ottoman empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Which brings us to Henri Grégoire who wrote a report for the French National Assembly in 1794 explaining that French was the lingua franca in just 15 of the 83 départements. There were 30 or so regional languages. And of the 28 million people in France, only 3 million used French in the ordinary way, in their homes and streets. 6 million struggled in French and another 6 million did not do French at all. The relatively new départements might have smashed the old regions, as intended, but there was clearly still plenty of work to do.

And while the Comité de salut public was in the chair, attempting to promote diversity in these matters was apt to be construed as treason, with possibly fatal results. No surprise that education was gathered into safe, central hands, away from those of the church and other meddlers.

PS: the 28 million above checks out with Wikipedia. I am reminded that in the 200 years from 1800 to 2000, the population of France something more than doubled. While that of Great Britain grew by a factor of around six. Contrariwise, that of Ireland has not changed that much over the same period - still around five million - but that is a story dominated by the catastrophe of the famine in the mid 19th century - and complicated by the split into two parts.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/12/napoleons-new-years-party.html. A previous outing for the picture snapped above.

Reference 2: National thought in Europe: a cultural history - Joep Leerssen - 2006.

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

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=leerssen. Previous outings for Leerssen. Quite a long time ago now.

Impromptu

A few days after the chicken just noticed, off to Horton Country Park at 09:30 or so. A Thursday morning. Rather early for us but we hoped to get a modest stroll in before the heat of the day came on.

This being some days before the blackberries noticed at reference 1, we kept an eye out. As it turned out we did not see very many, but we did see a few bilberries - or at least that is what I think they were. See reference 1. Present in the snap above, but probably not visible, even when you click to enlarge.

The good news was that we were more or less in shade all the way round, so heat not a problem. Some veteran runners, men and women. Quite a lot of mums with children. Some cyclists - but not enough to be a bother. The grass in the fields used for grazing horses looked a bit parched and bare. Most of the horses looked as it they had been retired and were a bit scruffy, but by way of contrast there was a string of polo ponies, very smart with their rich, short clipped coats. They also seemed rather small to be carrying the sort of noisy Surrey types (with booming voices) who played polo: perhaps that is why each player needed a string of them. And perhaps they needed to be small so that they were agile: you couldn't expect the sort of shire used to pull the visitors about at Hampton Court Palace to be turning on a pound coin. So a compromise between agility and strength. Maybe their playing life is quite short.

A mystery tree at the half way point. Complete with a convenient bench to admire it from. We thought perhaps relics from some young persons' camping activity in the field adjacent.

While I think this was what might be called a tedder, a contraption for turning newly cut hay so that it dries for baling. Probably not much call for it this year.

More or less on the spur of the moment, on to the butcher, looking rather the worse for wear after his COVID booster, not having had any trouble before. As luck would have it, he did not have much in hand, but he did have a matured fore rib, just the one rib that is. Before his time, I would have been a bit sniffy about the old beef, brown and cracked on the outside, but having had one from him (noticed at reference ), I was game for another.

As it went into the oven. Tied and well oiled with rape seed oil.

As it came out.

Details: one bone. 3lbs 9oz. 90 minutes at Mark 3? Plus resting? Chart at reference 5. Mark 3 equals 163C. In the oven at 11:45, rather later than intended. Basted around 12:45. Skewered and turned oven off around 13:10. Left meat in to rest. Spot on, as it turned out. Damp and grey through brown rather than pink and oozing.

Served with a profusion of vegetables, it being hot and their needing to be used up. And with courgettes back in vogue with us. Perhaps they are about it being a hot summer. Taken with some more of the Fleurie noticed in the previous post.

The first shift did about half of it. I went on to lose at Scrabble by an embarrassingly large margin. And I had thought that I performed OK with wine taken.

Left over vegetables blended with some water the next day to make soup, helped along with a beef stock cube from the cupboard and some brown stuff from the beef itself. Rather good, though I say it myself.

Cold beef with salads followed.

Finally polished the beef off on the Saturday, leaving enough room for both miniature foreign water melon and giant English plums. Both from Sainsbury's, both rather good.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/blackberries-one.html.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/beef-without-backbone.html. This is the sort of place where the string noticed at reference 4 tends to go...

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/trolley-525.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/sheep-shoulder-day.html.