Clocks

Epsom hospital seemed to be keen that its patients knew the time, with both places where I spent serious time containing large wall clocks. Clocks with faces which were much larger than they needed to be when I was wearing my glasses - large enough that I could comfortably tell the time without my glasses. Perhaps that was the next stage, asking me the time rather than my date of birth.

I associate now to the large clocks which sit on the mantlepieces of senior officers in Simenon's Police Judiciare at the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris. A large set of identical clocks, involving black marble trim, made, as it happens, in England, presumably bought up as a job lot by someone in the back office, in whatever they called purchasing units in those days.

I can't presently think of any corresponding feature of civil service life in this country, with the best I can do presently being the cheap hand towel and bar of soap you once used to be issued with. Towels which BH came across in her days at the White Heather Model Laundry in south London, which had a contract to wash them. She remembers that all kinds of stuff - but mostly unwanted sandwiches - used to come with them.

PS 1: neither Google nor Bing know about a White Heather Model Laundry in south London, although they both know about one with a similar name in north London, from where a paper laundry bag has made its way to the archives at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire.

PS 2: this morning saw the arrival of the 'World Energy Outlook 2023' from the International Energy Authority in my inbox, with the first substantive page of this 350 page document being reproduced above. Doing something about the many open cooking fires of Africa, mentioned at the end of the first paragraph, appears to be one low-hanging fruit (to use a bit of jargon from management consultants from the US). With the core members of the authority being the rich countries of the west, but with associate members like Argentina, Brazil and China. Ukraine also present, but most of the other countries which once made up the Soviet Union and the oil states of the Middle East are missing. See reference 2.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Simenon.

Reference 2: https://www.iea.org/.