Alladin

The image above, from the devasted Kabul of 1992, caught my eye in today's Guardian. Not just because it was a reminder of another long running and bloody mess, but also because of the Alladin paraffin heater. A sort of fire which was once widely used in this country, probably even made in this country. So how did this one wind up in Kabul?

In our case, two heaters which have appeared in these pages from time to time, perhaps for the very first time at reference 2. Heaters which later made it to the tip. A bit of a shame, but that is the fate of lots of fine bits of engineering. I associate to all the carpentry tools from the 1960's and 1970's which one finds in car boot sales. Not to mention the IBM golf ball typewriter, in it's day one of the best typewriters that money could buy, I once came across at one. A typewriter which would have been nice to own, but consumables and spares would probably have been a problem and the space for it certainly was. Plus it was very heavy and we were a mile or so from home.

References

Reference 1: TOPSHOT - Women in purdah with children and possessions are waiting among ruins 30 April 1992 in the Bala Hissar district of the Afghan capital following continued fierce fighting between rival mujahedeen factions. Although an interim government had been established, the fighting went on. (Photo by DOUGLAS E. CURRAN/AFP via Getty Images).

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2006/11/odds-and-ends.html.

Reference 3: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/photos/douglas-curran. There seem to be more shots from India here than from Afghanistan.

Series IV, Episode II

After an absence of near two years, Polly and her friends are back. Maybe they will make it to the end of the series.

The trolls, mostly off-screen to the left, have on this occasion been rather put in the shade by the zombies constructed for Halloween, two and a half of which are visible right. The ladies have been building a palace, possibly something to do with Barbies, visible in pink behind Polly. While Polly and her friends have been building a troll house, also off-screen to the left. In tasteful red, green, yellow and blue. Proper Duplo colours.

PS: in the margins I learned that 'Donnybrook' as well as being a Dublin suburb just in from Sandymount (which last features no less that twice in James Joyce's 'Ulysses'), was once licensed by King John to hold a annual fair. Along the way the word became slang in the Anglophone colonies - that is to say the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - for a public brawl or uproar. The New York Times, where I first came across the usage, offers the snap above. Nothing in the OED, but Webster's gives the word half a column inch between 'donnot' and 'donor'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/series-4-episode-i.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnybrook,_Dublin.

Group search key: wwwy.

Pumpkins

We have learned today that the young people of Stoneleigh think that it is terribly funny to carve pumpkins who are being sick. While the one on the right also has some dental problems.

Roald Dahl might have been rather a rum cove, but he was clearly right when it came to what young children really like behind closed doors, away from grown ups!

Noises off

About a decade ago we went to a production of Micheal Frayn's 'Noises Off' at the Old Vic, as noticed at reference 1, in the days when Kevin Spacey was still respectable. Then a week or so ago we were tempted out of theatrical retirement to go to a production at the Haymarket's Theatre Royal. A play which has been very successful in its forty year's of life and must have earned Mr. Frayn a good deal of money.

Proceedings started with my having a first encounter with Open Table - having thought that the Archduke on the Southbank might be a problem on a Saturday evening. Some trouble with Open Table, but I got there in the end, to find that while the Archduke was heavily booked, they could fit us in around 17:45, which suited well enough. Just as well that I was able to use my laptop rather than my telephone.

BH, who has two votes in these matters, voted for the No.139 bus rather than the Bakerloo line to Piccadilly Circus. Which resulted in our getting as far as Lancaster Place on the London side of Waterloo Bridge, from where we walked. I forget what went wrong: perhaps it was a change of driver.

We passed what was described as a refugee feeding station in William IV Street, more or less outside when Terroirs used to be. Looked busy.

Then a demonstration in favour of the Palestinians in Cockspur Street, attended by lots of police vans and a handful of geostationary police helicopters - which I have found intimidating, ever since I came across them over Belfast back in the 1980's.

A tuna roll to keep us going from the Pret on Pall Mall East, former grand inside, all looking a bit temporary. A pop-up Pret? Probably something grander in the past, possibly to be something grander in the future. Almost certainly my first visit to a Pret for some years.

Probably being confirmed at reference 2, turned up by Bing fast enough. No.5 used to be occupied by the Society of Painters in Watercolour, now more or less taken over by the Royal Watercolour Society, led for the 20 years straddling the second war by one Sir William Russell Flint, best known for his tasteful soft porn, of which a sample is reproduced above. I believe that they still fetch a good price.

Demonstration still coming down the Haymarket when we came out, more or less filling the road.

Theatre more or less full for this matinée performance and I had forgotten how ornate the theatre was, not least the safety curtain snapped above. A theatre we had not visited since 2017 for a play that I don't think we would turn out for now, although we appeared to have liked it well enough at the time. See reference 4.

I nodded a bit in the first half. BH explained after the event that the first half was supposed to set the scene, to go through the play-within-a-play so that we knew what was supposed to happen when the action really kicked in in the second half. One knew when it was being messed up and laughed appropriately. Failed.

Second half rather better, in that I stayed fully awake, but I was still a touch bored. And I was rather puzzled by the amount of cheering and whooping coming from behind me. What on earth were they getting so excited about? It seemed a bit unlikely that it would be a claque.

There was a good programme, with lots of interesting stuff about the theatre, even if I only got to look at it after the event. Including the programme of the play-within-a-play, snapped above. What it did not do is tell us about the intervals. This being a three act play with one interval after the first act, leaving us wondering whether there was going to be a second interval, which, in the event, there was not.

Quite a lot of large people. Very little dressing up.

Outside, the demonstration was still present, but winding down. Still lots of police and police vans. Helicopters still overhead. All quite good humoured, including quite a lot of young families. Mainly young Muslims, some whites. Leaving their cause aside, an impressive bit of organisation to get so many people on the streets so quickly. Perhaps that is the power of social media.

Strolled down to and over Hungerford Bridge, passing one of Dame Trace's depots of detritus on the way, presumably stored up against her next commission from the GLC or one of the London Boroughs. Local councils do seem to be a very soft touch for these arty people.

Impressive sky to the west. New sewer works right.

Pit stop in the RFH where there was some sort of a film festival going on. Rather more dressing up than there had been in the theatre.

And so to the Archduke, which was indeed quite full. A substantial, reasonably priced meal.

Starting with the white wine, a Condes de Albarei Albarino, just two minutes before our scheduled arrival time. The only other time I have noticed the place it came from - Rias Baixas - being when we took a rather grander wine at an Epsom establishment, then on what is now the site of a stalled cinema redevelopment for Picturehouse, in Ebbisham Square by the library. See references 5 and 6.

Followed by a half chicken for me and a chicken salad for her. Good stuff, but at the top end of what I can manage volume-wise these days. Not getting enough exercise. So I doubt whether we took a solid dessert, although there may have some bread and olives or something of that sort to start.

All very satisfactory. Followed by our train to Epsom.

It may have been the occasion when I picked up at Raynes Park a fat and glossy magazine called the 'New Straits Times Annual', advertising the pleasures to be taken in Malaysia - but taking the form of a series of short articles interspersed with a fairly modest amount of regular advertising. A sort of National Geographic focused on one country. Perhaps the sort of thing that gets scattered about hotel lounges. Lots of heritage, lots of traditional crafts and lots of nature.

In the middle I found a clutch of articles about past funerary customs of Sarawak. One of which was erecting large totem poles - and to do the job properly you had a live - if drunk - slave or captive in the bottom of the hole, to be crushed as the base of the pole slid into it. They also went in for putting the skulls of enemies slain in battle on poles in front of the victor's hut.

I think this sort of pole is called a klirieng and the idea is to put large round stones - presumably taken from a river bed - on the platform at the top.

Perhaps the sort of thing that colonial administrators wrote monographs about in their retirement? Complete with digressions about the various local languages they had taken the trouble to learn during their stay.

PS: in the margins of this post, I picked up the article about syringes at reference 8. It seems that the US gets through around 10m of them a day and is keen to maintain a domestic source of supply. Supply chain resilience and all that. However, the Chinese, thanks to cheap contraband oil from Russia, oil being where the plastic tubes come from, are able to undercut US manufacturers, most of whom have gone out of business, leaving just two. Furthermore, the inspection regime for these Chinese supplies is not that great - not that there have been any complaints. The combination of the workings of the free market and the difficulties of applying sanctions to trade in a joined up but troubled world.

References

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/01/noises-off.html.

Reference 2: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol4/pp226-235.

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

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/10/venus-in-fur.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/02/epsom-at-play.html.

Reference 6: https://condesdealbarei.com/.

Reference 7: https://www.artoftheancestors.com/blog/kelirieng-antonio-j-guerreiro.

Reference 8: What the ubiquitous syringe tells us about US supply chains: Domestically made products like syringes currently cost more than those produced in China - Willy Shih, Financial Times - 2023.

Red migrants

I was please to be prompted by the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, possibly first mentioned in these pages at reference 6, to read the article at reference 1, mainly about planting lots of coastal redwoods and giant sequoias in the north west of the US, to the north of their presently Californian habitat, which may be getting a bit too hot and dry for them to thrive.

The history of moving plants and animals about for conservation or other reasons is a bit chequered - think cane toads - but the story here seems to be that these trees, although big, are fairly harmless. They might grow pretty big, but they are slow breeders and are unlikely to be considered invasive any time soon.

The article comes with lots of handsome pictures from one Richard Mosse, presumably the one at references 2 and 3. He seems to be rather fond of red, with Bing turning up lots of it and with red and orange trees being much thicker on the ground in the present article than green trees. Furthermore, I have never seen a dawn redwood anything like the shape of the left hand one of the two snapped above. The ones you get in Surrey - for example the two or three at Hampton Court Palace - all seem to be much thinner relative to their height. The result of growing two quite close together?

Lets hope the people we read about in the article keep the trees coming. I am content to let the scientists worry about the possibility of their disturbing the ecosphere in slow time.

PS 1: for the record, my own count of Wellingtonia, aka giant sequoias, aka giant redwoods is now standing at 107. A count which has slowed down but which is still moving.

PS 2: after posting this, I came across the picture story at reference 7. Where the bottom line is that by mid-century there are going to be around 2.5 billion Africans, and a lot of them are going to be unemployed young men and women. The Old World had better get on and learn how to respond to ever larger numbers of wannabee migrants - given that it seems unlikely that they are going to want to move to the wide open spaces of Asiatic Russia. Even supposing that they would be welcome there.

References

Reference 1: Can We Save the Redwoods by Helping Them Move: The largest trees on the planet can’t easily ‘migrate’ - but in a warming world, some humans are helping them try to find new homes - Moises Velasquez-Manoff, New York Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mosse. 'an Irish conceptual documentary photographer, living in New York City and Ireland'. Whatever one of those is.

Reference 3: https://www.richardmosse.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org/.

Reference 5: https://www.moisesvm.com/. Right chap, but the site appears to be inactive.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/08/big-trees.html.

Reference 7: The World Is Becoming More African: Part one of a series on how the youth boom is changing the continent, and beyond - in the dilemmas of those who remain - Declan Walsh, Hannah Reyes Morales, New York Times - 2023.

Vanity Fair

[The end of the story. Distressed muffin-man indeed!]

This being notice of a re-read of an old classic, Vanity Fair of reference 1, a re-read which has taken some months, starting in July, having speeded up a good deal in September and finished early this month. A re-read which has served to remind me of the convenience of a Kindle for fat books. For a proper introduction to the book see reference 2.

I had forgotten that the author is pretty visible, with regular interjections about this or that. A lot of which serve to remind the reader of the privileged position of the author of a tale of this sort. Reminders which are much less in evidence in the famous novels – say of Hardy, Conrad and Lawrence - which followed.

One of which is to be found in Chapter 47, ‘Gaunt House’, where a lot of the gossip is said to have been provided by one Tom Eaves, who appears to be a gossip columnist. As it happened, I found this chapter a bit hard to follow, a bit hard to keep track of the various Gaunts and Steynes, but there were two new-to-me titbits. First, the wife of the odious Marquis of Steyne puts up with a great deal in expiation of her fling after marriage with a flame – a French aristocrat – from before her marriage. She also takes to her (Roman) bible. Second, their elder son being childless, their younger son goes mad in his middle years and has to be shut up in a cottage with keeper and straight-jacket – leaving Steyne the father to be haunted by the curse of madness hanging over the family. Which goes some way to accounting for his odious behaviour.

A lot of space is given to the pretensions and the often unpleasant behaviour of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes – together with the parvenus, the wannabees and the hangers on – which is fair enough given that most of his readers probably came from the lower middle and upper working classes. At least there were a lot more of them and literacy was coming on. He reminds us on lots of occasions of the extent to which blood from the west end was marrying money from the east end by the start of the nineteenth century, the pretensions of the former notwithstanding. He also has a spirited go at the custom of presenting ladies at court, a presentation which usually served to make them full members of society. The sort of person you might invite to your parties. I had not thought that an aspiring author would sail so close to the monarchical wind in the first decade of the reign of Queen Victoria – but perhaps this last did not mind the louche behaviour of her immediate predecessors being lampooned. And then, towards the end of the book, we get the pasteboard version at the Court of Pumpernickel, a place with more generals than private soldiers. Prescient chap this Thackery!

I associate to the presentation of Lillie Langtry at court, a real life version of Becky Sharp, not much more than fifty years later. For whom see reference 6.

The portrait of Becky Sharp is kinder than that in most of the screen adaptations. Good looking and gifted but of shabby origins, she makes the best of her gifts to make her way in the world. Particularly her gifts to charm men of all sorts. OK so she is cynical and very visibly on the make, but as she reminds us from time to time, it is all very well to make a parade of virtue when you have a comfortable balance in the bank, with a comfortable income in the consolidated funds. The rest of us can’t afford to be squeamish if we want to get on. She is also good natured and does not get all hot and bothered about things very often.

Ditto, Captain Osborne. A spoilt son of someone who did well in the city, a vain popinjay. But he was also good company and good at the things soldiers are supposed to be good at. He did his duty at Waterloo – having repented of the way he had treated his young wife, even if he had left contrary evidence in the hands of Becky – who eventually put it to good use in weaning the foolish Amelia off her long-dead husband.

Thackery takes some trouble to show us how it was possible, for a while at least, to make a great splash in the fashionable world, without having to spend a lot of money. But it was not done painlessly; there were casualties and innocent – if foolish – people were ruined.

Television adaptations tend to foreground the relationship between Becky Sharp and her rich and powerful admirer, the Marquis of Steyne and the smash which follows Becky’s complaisant and not very bright husband stumbling across what is going on – a husband who had been a dashing young Life Guard, a hero of Waterloo. Which is fair enough, given that a good chunk of the middle of the book does too.

But now, getting near the smash, it all seemed a bit improbable to me that Steyne would have let the whole business run on for so long, to cost him so much, without more tangible rewards along the way. OK, so he was an old rake with plenty of experience of such matters, more likely to wait than a younger man, but still and all. And then that the husband would be so blind and complaisant for so long – although this does explain his fury when he finally learned the truth. I also find it puzzling that Steyne was so angry with Becky after the event, a vindictive anger which followed her for years – this even though, as already mentioned, we are told of some skeletons in his cupboard which go some way to explaining his often vicious behaviour. So maybe what we have is a parable rather than some approximation to the real world.

With part of the story being that Becky, once engaged in the great game, did not know when to stop, when to pull out with her winnings. Perhaps, as well as enjoying the game, her problem was that she was too fond of her husband, middle aged dullard though he might have become. She did not like to cut and run. Unlike her French maid who did very well out of the smash and went off to start a shop in Paris.

A bit further on, we find that Becky has descended to the lower, unsavoury ranks of expatriate life on the continent, taken to drink, gambling and irregular life to the extent that she has spoiled her once fine singing voice. But somehow, having got her claws into the fat and rich Jos Sedley, she gets back into form. It all seems a bit improbable, but it does propel the story to a satisfying and edifying end in Bath.

Odds and ends

We are told at least twice of the younger men’s often loud and boastful doings in the regimental messes of the time. Which the older men, who had done and heard it all many times before, might find rather tiresome, but mostly put up with indulgence. Perhaps the few older men that stayed on were the ones that did not mind.

A smell of Ecclesiastes on the occasion of old Mr Sedley’s death. It does not matter who you are or what you have been, but it is all gone in a few days after your departure. The waters close over the stone thrown into the pond. I remember reading similar stuff in the roughly contemporary Balzac.

A smell of women’s lib here are there. On the waste and worse than can be caused by denying women who want it a proper education and a proper occupation – apart, that is, from the important business of keeping house and raising a family – important business which is not enough for, not suited to, some.

Few of the bad characters are wholly bad, or the good characters wholly good. So Becky, though a schemer is good natured and does not bear grudge. Her husband is both a kind father and (as a young man) a bully and card sharp. Steyne is given an alibi of sorts in the family stain.

There are something over thirty mentions of ‘vanity fair’ in the blog archive, where the unit of search is a month rather than a post. Not that vanity and fair are necessarily adjacent or related and a month can represent a lot of posts. I checked about half of them: lots of vanity publishing, vanity projects and vanity businesses, but very little vanity fair, even less relevant here. A lesson in how searches do not always do what you want. On the other hand, there were only four mentions of ‘thackery’, two of which are not very relevant and two of which are from the present re-read. There is also a confusing tendency to misspell ‘Thackery’.

Conclusions

Despite its age and length, an entertaining and instructive read. Thoroughly recommended.

References

Reference 1: Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackery – 1848. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_Fair_(novel).

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/09/orchard-park.html. The last notice.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/07/kindling.html. The first notice of the present read.

Reference 5:  http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/12/literary-matters.html. Which ends with a strange story about ‘War and Peace’ being inspired, in part at least, by ‘Vanity Fair’. Possibly from a review of the book at reference 7, with the reviewer flying his own kites rather than sticking to the chapters listed here.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-jersey-lily.html. 

Reference 7: https://academic.oup.com/cornell-scholarship-online/book/16995. 

Short rib

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance encounter with some beef short ribs at Ben's butchery in Upper High Street, to be found at reference 1. 2.66kg of them, arranged as four bones. A cut which I had not come across before, but on which Bing offered a wealth of information - including, for example the Wikipedia page at reference 3.

Clearly a candidate for the slow cooking, but the bones did not fit in the Pyrex tub usually used for that, snapped at the top of reference 2, I was not sure about using the rather larger fish kettle in the oven - and so I settled for foil. Not very eco in the sense that we only used the foil once, but BH drew the line as washing it for reuse, the practise of the naval aunt notwithstanding. Into the oven at 115°C or so at 09:30, aiming for 13:30.

The gravy had been started a little earlier 09:15 with the vegetable stock: left overs (including rice), celery, onion and carrot.

Didn't get all that much juice at draining time, that is to say around 12:45, and it was not particularly fatty. Foil removed and parsnips added, moistened with some of the juice. Turned the oven up to 160°C for this last leg.

Plated up at around 13:25, at which point I abstracted some fat from the baking tray to roux up for the gravy. Washed out the baking tray with the vegetable stock. Oven off around 13:35, forks down around 13:45.

The gravy, more or less ready to go.

Along the way cooking and mashing some potatoes (with butter) and cooking the cabbage. Served with some Fleurie from Waitrose, as noticed, for example, at reference 4.

The scene on the lunch plate. I take my gravy in a crater in the mash; BH likes rather more of the stuff.

The scene by the end of the first shift, having done the best part of two of the four bones. Pretty good, although I think it would have been better had it been cooked a little longer.

Mince meat and apple pie to follow. Mince probably cost next to nothing, with Sainsbury's practically giving the stuff away after Christmas. With hot custard made in a saucepan; none of the cold stuff that small visitors seem to like - and which costs a good deal more.

On the plate.

Cold the next day. I was a bit more exuberant with the gravy on this occasion. I think it did for one more day after that, so six meals out of the 2.66kg (including bone), which makes it seem a bit cheaper than at first appears.

References

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

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/first-oxtail-of-year.html.

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

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/stuffing.html.

Some odd and ends

We have had a few brushes with the parking app RingGo this year, as noticed, for example at reference 1. But BH, whose telephone remains firmly in the smart box it came in, was not best pleased to find that they had arrived at the small but useful car park at Fair Green, a couple of hundred yards short of the town centre. For the moment one can still use coin of the realm, but for how long is that going to last?

Then over lunch, we took delivery of a rather cheap flier from some people called the Holiday Property Bond, to be found at reference 2 and promoted by no less a luminary than Sue Barker, celebrity of tennis court and television studio - although, to be fair, while I had heard of her, I did have to ask Bing about her claim to celebrity. It seems that the deal on offer is that you give them £5,000 (or preferably a lot more), then they give you points every year which you can spend on a stay one of their holiday properties - 1,400 stunning holiday properties spread over 30 breathtaking locations. That is to say an average of around 50 to to the location, so presumably clusters of chalets or apartments, possibly in tower blocks. There is also a modest annual service charge. BH once knew a couple which went in for all this and it seems that, depending on the amount of stunning & breathtaking you go for, you might have to accumulate a few years' worth of points to get your week away.

It might well be a perfectly reasonably proposition, but not one which appeals. It's Island Holiday Homes of reference 3 and Brading for us!

Last but not least, this afternoon, I was wondering about what happens when you play two different sounds very close together. Perhaps 100ms apart, perhaps 10ms apart. Poking around, Bing turned up all kinds of Java code to do this sort thing by hand, which was not very helpful. But then the SOS people at reference 4, of Bar Hill near Cambridge, last visited, as it happens, just last month. A place which I first knew when it was little more than a fancy hotel and a large Tesco's out in the middle of nowhere, perhaps fifty years ago now. Whereas now they are graced with some very fine roads, with traffic to match.

And SOS had some very decent tutorial material on this very matter. I stumped up the 89p asked for a download and found that that came with a pointer to a whole of of audio examples, more than a hundred of them, which meant that you could hear what they were talking about. Audio examples which I was able to play, once I moved off the Apple version, which came in the same zip file. Which was very helpful and I might well take another look tomorrow.

The day closed with a spot of GW, Green Label variety. Very good it was too. Not to be confused with the Green Spot from the other island, favoured by some whisky buffs.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/western-closure.html.

Reference 2: https://www.hpb.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://island-holiday-homes.net/.

Reference 4: https://www.soundonsound.com/.

St. John's

A couple of weeks ago, a first visit to St. John's for a while, for five years n fact, since before the plague. See reference 1: our one and only encounter with the Concert de Hostel Dieu from Lyon. Very good they were too.

A day which might have turned out wet, but that was no excuse for failing to find any figs on the large fig tree across the rails from the Waterloo platform. But at least I now know that taking a picture of a tree from inside a train is difficult.

A short snooze on the train, but I managed to get out at Vauxhall and pedal myself across to Smith Square, where I took the penultimate slot. A little early, so I thought a bacon sandwich would be the thing. A sort of early lunch. I vaguely remembered that there was a suitable place in Horseferry Road, which I must have passed hundreds of times over the years but never used.

And so it proved to be. A busy place with a proprietor whom I took to be Italian and who looked as if he had been running the place for years. Busy with both eat-out and eat-in trade. A very mixed clientele: young, old, male, female, white collar and blue collar. Good sandwich, only slightly let down by the bacon being rather salty. Still a little early, so I took a small beverage from the Marquis nearly next door, busy indoors but mild enough to sit outside in comfort.

Into St. John's where I found that they had arranged the seats for a smaller audience. It all looked rather well. The programme being two piano trios, neither of which I knew, given by the newly hatched Azuri Piano Trio. So newly hatched that they do not yet have a website - or at least, if they do, I failed to find it.

The Rachmaninoff starts well enough at reference 2, but somehow I did not connect on the day. I even nodded a bit in the middle. Got on much better with the Brahms.

Out to find lots of big black limousines parked outside the EU building there which houses the Delegation of the European Union to the United Kingdom. Big Mercedes with plates like 'LUX 1'. Plus the odd black transit, perhaps for the more security conscious dignitaries. Big flashy Maserati for the chap from Italy. I never did get to find out what was going on.

Pedalled back to Vauxhall, pondering the options for the second part of lunch. In the end, I got to the top of the stairs more or less at the same time as a train to Epsom so I settled for that. No beverage. No diversions. No Raynes Park platform library. All in all, a very restrained expedition.

PS 1: this morning I read about milk in a review in the NYRB of the book at reference 3. The claim there is that milk is a relatively recent addition to the diet of most people in or from north western Europe, that is to say the people who suffer least from intolerance to cows' milk. That is is not a particularly healthy food - inter alia, very prone to invasion by all kinds of bugs - which has been foisted on us by Big Dairy - working hand-in-glove on this with Big Meat. Getting rid of it would do wonders for global warming, especially if it went hand-in-glove with getting rid of beef - which I assume is the destiny of most of the cows raised for milk. The good news is that the consumption of milk in the US is steadily declining anyway, perhaps a third now of what it was in the 1940's.

Eye catching illustration from Masha Krasnova Shabaeva, with Google turning up plenty more of her work.

PS 2: negotiations about the redevelopment of the site at the corner of West Hill and Station Approach continue, with the heritage people having succeeded in driving the building down from ten stories or so to six. All this rigmarole must add a lot to the cost of the new building, drag out the time line, take away from the number of new housing units and take away from the profit margin - this last being needed for there to be any movement at all. Making one think that surely there must be a better way of doing things. Maybe trimming the claws of Surrey's heritage army while we are at it.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/pergolesi-again.html.

Reference 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeHNHqUYmNE.

Reference 3: Spoiled: The myth of milk as superfood - Anne Mendelson - 2023.

Testing

19:00, Wednesday. I noticed some problems with adding images to posts yesterday at reference 1. With this post being the result of a join in Google maps prompting me to do another test.

19:45. 'Insert image' from Windows 11 laptop still not working. The choices being load from computer, load from Photos, load from Blogger or load by URL. I usually use load from computer, this being the option which is not presently working. Yet to work out how to load one from 'Photos', another Google application. 

20:00. Added an image to Photos on the Samsung telephone. Tried sending it to myself in various ways, but this does not seem to result in anything appearing in the 'load from photos' tab in 'Insert image'.

20:10. From within the new 'Insert image' dialogue, searched Photos for 'October'. Nothing. Ditto 'December'. Ditto '2022'. Searched it for 'May' and got the image above, which I was able to insert, albeit the wrong way up. No idea just presently where or how I might find the original or how it wound up in Photos. But the original is probably the work of the older granddaughter.

20:30. Started to worry about all this crashing around. Was I going to damage something? Was there an alternative?

22:00. Tried to move the action downstairs using the image I started with. But not visible, despite it being in the usually reliable OneDrive and this last claiming to be up to date. But it did turn up after a few minutes and it is included above, using the new 'Insert image' dialogue box in old Windows 10.

The point of interest being that it is one of those places where the join between two chunks of Google imagery actually shows up, on the middle pillar, where there is some duplication. Duplication which was camouflaged by the enlarged pillar now looking rather like its right hand neighbour, which really is larger. I have failed to work out why this pillar was larger than the rest of them: perhaps something to do with some former use of the building. Maybe it was not built as a public house?

At least the two chunks more or less match: occasionally they don't and one gets two quite different images, from two quite different times, from two quite different cycles of refurbishment, depending on the angle of approach. Maybe one day I will find out how Google organises all this.

The point of looking being that this was a restaurant which we used to like and used to use from time to time, but which has changed its name. Probably fairly recently as we only noticed yesterday, on our way to a rather different establishment, the Toby Carvery in Ewell East. And search does indeed reveal reference 2. Maybe we will pay a visit and see what is going on.

Inspection suggests that, despite my positive memories of the place, we last visited around six years ago, as noticed at reference 3. How did we come to miss out?

07:30, Thursday. Been playing with Google Photos, which seems to be quite different from Google Drive, and I have succeeded in loading up a few images. Furthermore, I have succeeded in rotating one of them and including it above using the 'Insert image' dialog box in Blogger.

A snap taken from a wadge of material sent to me by the Labour Party yesterday. Like some charities, you give them a bit of money and they spend a fair chunk of it sending you junk. Not to mention the flashy new membership card with its broken Union Jack. Lets hope their marketing people know what they are doing.

But there was some more good news. Processing this Labour Party and the other material which came in the same post, I have now turned off the thing in the camera on my telephone that was activating QR codes which happened to be in things that I was snapping - like that above. I have also found a decent day view in the calendar on my telephone, something that had hitherto eluded me in the months that I have had it. The answer seems to be to work in month view rather than week view. Click on a day and you get a decent day pop up.

PS 1: a king sized portion of beef from the Toby Carvery. Just to prove that adding the snap previous was not a fluke. A substantial, very reasonably priced meal, plated and priced so that the waitress can do the bill by just counting up the various sorts of plate. A waitress who, I might say, despite being busy, found time to be pleasant and helpful. Vegetables a little tired, perhaps inevitable in a buffet operation of this sort, but including real cabbage. 

PS 2: This morning's Financial Times tells me that a new book by Labour's Rachel Reeves (and a small herd of research assistants) has been a little lax about acknowledging its use of Wikipedia, amongst other sources. This despite the book including a substantial list of sources. To my mind, one should certainly say if one is using Wikipedia, but it is less clear when one ought to check, which can be expensive in time, given that Wikipedia is pretty reliable and I don't catch it out very often. Maybe checking a sample of the material you are using against other sources would be fair.

PS 3: 21:20, Thursday. It looks as if the new version of 'Insert image' has been taken down and we are back with the old one again. For the time being, anyway. With this image loaded from the Windows 11 laptop.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/cricketers.html.

Reference 2: https://ristoranteamalfi.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/dinner.html.

Reference 4: https://www.tobycarvery.co.uk/restaurants/south-east/ewellepsom#/.

Group search key: gge.

Cricketers

A couple of weeks ago we had the door & window people of reference 1 in to attend to our kitchen. They did a quick, neat job and were done in just over half a day, but that did mean that catering arrangements were disturbed, so rather than sink to food delivery, we thought we would walk down to the pond to give the Cricketers a go, a place which we have not eaten at for a while - although FIL used to be rather keen, being an older gentleman, on their red barbecue sauce, containing as it did, plenty of sugar.

So around 17:30 down to the pond in the gathering dusk, to catch, as it happens, a glimpse of ratty. We also found that the viewpoint onto the pond was still blocked with alder and such, despite having mentioned the matter to the ecovols what must be years ago now. But a bit further along, we found that they had found the time to chop a few trees down, suggesting that 'eco' is really a euphemism for playing with chain saws. In these pages, sometimes the chain saw bandits, sometimes the chain saw volunteers. See, for example, reference 2.

And on into the Cricketers, bright, cheerful and pretty busy, considering that it was a Monday.

Interesting take on bread and olives to start. Which we were a bit disappointed with when it arrived, but ate rather better than we had at first expected. The dried tomatoes made a pleasant change.

I thought steak and chips would be safe enough, done the well done side of medium. Not dry, but not dripping either. And so it proved to be. BH was more adventurous, going for the mussels, which turned out to be rather small, from Connemara (on the west coast of Ireland), but quite acceptable. White sauce a little on the thin side. White bread from a factory.

Entirely satisfactory. It did what it said on the tin.

PS 1: after various vicissitudes, since being a simple public house, this one has now fallen into the clutches of Stonegate. See references 3, 4, 5 and 6 below. 

PS 2: a rare glitch in the Blogger software on the Windows 11 laptop. Something very wrong with the load insert image part of the template I use the second time around, having been OK the first time around, earlier in the day. Still very wrong the following morning (Wednesday), so moved downstairs to the Windows 10 machine where the new load image dialog box worked.

PS 3: in parallel, images were failing to load at reference 7, a failure I put down to the relevant cloud servers being busy. Loading OK this morning. But still no further progress with the green witch.

References

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

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=chain+saw.

Reference 3: https://www.pubanddining.co.uk/cricketers-inn-epsom. Part of the Stonegate family.

Reference 4: https://www.stonegategroup.co.uk/. Part of the TDR family.

Reference 5: https://www.tdrcapital.com/. Which I thought was a vehicle owned by the Issa bothers, but it looks as if I have got that wrong. They are all mixed up together, but distinct. But not so distinct that Deloitte did not walk away from auditing the petrol station chunk of the empire.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/11/wheatsheaf.html. First notice of TDR.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/common-sense.html.

Group search key: gge.

Quintet

A fortnight ago now to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Piatti Quartet (plus Tim Lowe on the extra cello) do the Schubert string quintet, D956. Unusually, a Saturday afternoon and actually part of a day showcasing the work of one Joseph Phibbs, a composer who was present, getting on for fifty and comes from a London luvvie family. See references 1, 2 and 3. With the last outing for the quintet being briefly noticed at reference 4, the day after, as it happens, the death of our late Queen. Just about a year previously.

A bad start to this day in that we only realised at the last moment that BH's senior rail card had expired and we were obliged to pay full price - quite a lot more than the rail card price.

And then it was unpleasantly hot when we arrived at Oxford Circus, both below ground and at ground level. On the other hand, there were plenty of summer clothes about, plenty of them quite skimpy, it being by then around lunchtime. We took our customary break at All Bar One, supplemented on this occasion by a slice of yellow cake, quite possibly lemon drizzle cake, this to flesh out the snack in a bag which was to keep us going until after the concert which started at 14:00.

A new to me brand of bicycle, parked up in Cavendish Square. Leased by the month from Swapfiets, the people at reference 7 - not an arrangement that I have come across before. Probably the Power 1 model, less the battery. The sort of pricing which tells me how much I am getting off, but not how much I am paying. Must have a think about who might go for such an arrangement. Who might not mind carrying the battery about when the bicycle is parked.

The bench, just outside the perimeter of the square proper, which has served for light suppers before evening concerts in the past, in the days of winter evening concerts.

A non-scoring harpsichord at the back of the hall. I think the big piece at the back sits on top of the small piece at the front. With the lid included with the big piece. Hall maybe two thirds full at the off.

The concert started with two works by Phibbs, which I liked a good deal better than I had expected. See reference 5.

While the Schubert quintet seemed oddly muted on this occasion, almost a feeling of doom. In particular, a couple of places where the music seemed to be reaching for something, then drew back from making the final pitch to the summit. Was it me, the quartet or the music? If the latter, odd that I had not noticed it before. And my memory was of a generally happy piece.

Afterwards, we needed to get back to ground level to think about options, so we settled for a glass in the Be At One in Wimpole Street, a place which I first used when it was called the Pelican, of which brief notice from more than fifteen years ago to be found at reference 6. With the unusual arrangements in the basement snapped above.

BH had taken precautions and eating at home back at Epsom was an option. With proper vegetables and without goo. But our first thought was that it was time to visit Ponti's, just a few hundred yards away, again. We nearly set off, but second thought was that it might be better to getting nearer home before settling down. Maybe ASK at Epsom? In the end, by the time we had taken our wine and got ourself to Epsom, a taxi and consumption of precautions seemed like the way forward. We shall, no doubt, get to both Ponti's and ASK on some future occasions.

A bit of design, the shopping centre just outside Wimbledon station, which does not quite work. I had been wondering about it for years, but decided on this occasion that the problem was the (fake) flat arches. Together with the lorry ramp middle right and the trim below the windows left, they were too much and the design would have worked much better had there been a simple strip of white concrete. And maybe the ramp would have worked better had the wall been stepped rather than sloped.

PS: on arrival at Epsom, BH found that she could buy a one year rail card over the counter (still present, at least for the time being), thus avoiding the difficulty online with two rail cards for one email address. Not quite such a good deal as a three year card, but good enough.

References

Reference 1: https://piattiquartet.com/.

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

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

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/09/d956.html.

Reference 5: https://www.josephphibbs.com/chamber/.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/06/goose-paste.html.

Reference 7: https://swapfiets.co.uk/.