Festive pudding

The end of November saw the first boiling of the Christmas Pudding, now deemed to be more important for Christmas than the Christmas Cake. Not least because I am no longer so keen on all that marzipan and royal icing: I would sooner have a Dundee cake or something even simpler - perhaps what is sometimes called a cut-and-come-again cake.

But puddings is very much part of the BH domain, so I had a couple of walks. The first saw a visit to the hole in the heritage wall, which is still a hole, and looks likely to remain a hole while the owners grapple with the planning people and the heritage people over building houses. Or not, as the case might be.

The second found some brand new Christmas lighting, perhaps a candidate for the best decorated house, in the flashing category, on the Chase Estate. But I have to say, strong competition has been mounted since from the other end of the estate.

After which it was home to polish off the bottle of old ale, a small part of which had gone into the soaking of the fruit on its way into the Christmas Pudding. Very good it was too, perhaps reflecting the fact that I was a beer drinker for many years before the wine aberration, if I can call it that, of the past decade.

Plus a go at some of the Waitrose tangerines (originally from Tangiers?) bought earlier in the day. And, as it promised on the packet, they were intense and sweet, much more so than the comparable offering from Sainsbury's. Which is what I like in an orange: the thinking person's answer to a Mars Bar. And which, as explained at reference 12, doesn't score much in the junk food league table at all. It's fresh fruit, so it must be OK. Furthermore, while there are plenty of clemenvillas at reference 13, there is no glucose, no fructose and just one sugar (in the references). Much more interested in other stuff like ascorbic acid. But I do read that '... In addition to influencing the quality of citrus products, citrus bioactive compounds are important in food industry for their nutraceutical effects and health-related benefits in the prevention of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and some types of cancer...'. Much more promising.

The snap above, from the same place, is offered as a brain-teaser.

I can also make a progress report on the tropical granite problem set towards the beginning of reference 1. Or more a lack of progress report - apart from it being fairly clear that the memory was, once again, defective. It all seems terribly complicated.

I start from reference 8, from which it seems that in southern Africa at least you get lots of granite outcrops, not exactly Dartmoor tors, but presumably not that far removed either. On the other hand, you get lots of chemical weathering in the tropics, due, as far as I can make out, to the large amounts of slightly acidic rain, acidic because of the dissolved carbon dioxide. And acid eats granite, rendering it down to a mixture of stuff, but including plenty of silica, aka sand. A lot of this weathering takes place underground and can result in the typically tropical red soils and laterites, for which last see reference 9. Furthermore, this weathering is an important part of the world's carbon dioxide cycle and so probably plugs into modelling climate change. While on underground weathering, reference 6 is both interesting and accessible - and from which the snap below is taken.

Of the other papers listed below, reference 4 is probably the least accessible to the general reader and reference 2 is mainly included as an antidote to all those tropics.

And I did think that the original memory might have been derived from reference 7, but a quick look fails to turn up anything short and snappy which fits, even allowing for a bit of in-brain evolution over the years.

Work in progress. Gemini next?

PS: a correspondent has sent in a snap from the Bluebell railway of the locomotive described at reference 10. Looks to be of the same class, although not quite identical, to the one spotted about this time last year at Victoria Station and noticed at reference 11. The odd thing being that this one looks quite big, while the thing I remember from Victoria Station was how small it looked. The real world is clearly too much for the combination of my optics and my memory.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/festive-lacey.html.

Reference 2: The chemical weathering of rocks and migration of elements in the boreal zone (North-West Russia) - Ekaterina Vasyukova - 2009.

Reference 3: Chemical weathering in granitic environments - Priscia Oliva, Jérome Viers, Bernard Dupré - 2003. Inaccessible without payment.

Reference 4: Rivers, chemical weathering and Earth’s climate - Bernard Dupréa, Céline Dessert, Priscia Oliva, Yves Goddéris, Jérôme Viers, Louis François, Romain Millot, Jérôme Gaillarde - 2003.

Reference 5: Are any granite landscapes distinctive of the humid tropics? Reconsidering multiconvex topographies - Piotr Migoń - 2009.

Reference 6: Physical Characteristics of Boulders Formed in the Tropically Weathered Granite - Mohd Firdaus Md Dan, Edy Tonnizam Muhamad, Ibrahim Komoo, Mohd Nur Asmawisham Alel - 2015.

Reference 7: Vegetation and soils: A world picture - S. R. Eyre - 1963. A school prize for mathematics!

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inselberg.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laterite.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BR_Standard_Class_5_73082_Camelot.

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/dulwich.html.

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/pineapple.html.

Reference 13: Differentiation of juice of mandarin‑like hybrids based on physicochemical characteristics, bioactive compounds, and antioxidant capacity - Mayra Anticona, Maria‑Carmen Fayos, Maria‑Jose Esteve, Ana Frigola, Jesus Blesa, Daniel Lopez‑Malo - 2022.