Odd pinnate 2

More pondering on whether odd pinnate really existed or not, following the rather inconclusive ponderings at reference 1.

But first the self-storage going in to what was the Majestic warehouse, where the roof, the floors and the windows are now going in. Self storage which I now know is 'Big Yellow Self Storage' of reference 2. From which I learn they do both lockers and rooms, and that you provide your own padlock. But I don't seem to get prices without getting a quote - which might get me more plugged in than is appropriate - so perhaps I will have to go in and ask when they open next year.

After which it was time to inspect the alternate leaves of a laurel, with alternate leaves being a proxy of sorts for the leaflets of a pinnate leaf. And the terminal bud might be informative.

It turns out that the general form is much the same as that which featured at reference 1, with the alternate leaves starting quite close together but quickly spacing out to their adult distance and with something complicated going on at the terminal bud.

Big buds in the axils between the leaves and the stem. Presumably ready to spring into life should need arise, through grazing, clipping or otherwise.

And what about the brown spots at underneath the stem ends of the leaves? Are they part of the plant or something to do with some kind of animal? Feature or bug?

Here we have what looks to be the tip of a primary stem, that is to say the bulge between the penultimate and the last leaves, between the blue spot left and the orange spot right, respectively. With the antepenultimate leaf below the orange spot. 

We have what looks like an emerging bud to the left of the bulge, on the blue side. And a lump which is going to become a bud to the right, on the orange side?

Maybe if one was to dissect the bulge under a microscope one would learn more?

More of the same, but from a quite different plant.

A zoom of the tip. Maybe time lapse photography would be the thing, so that one could see how the tip really grows, how the buds emerge from nowhere?

While this privet does not seem to be alternate at all. Maybe opposite with the pairs spiralling up the stem. Must take another look.

Back with odd-pinnate, seemingly clear enough in this case. Where most but not all of the other leaflets are opposite.

But some are near misses; almost opposite. As can be seen to the left of the orange spot. This I have seen before.

And lastly, something completely different. Opposite, rotating 90° at each step up the stem.

To be further digested.

PS 1: a leafy diagram. I think there are a few errors, but useful just the same. Turned up by Bing from Alamy. The original zooms pretty well, but I don't suppose that this copy will. I have learned about stipules, which may protect the leaf as it emerges from the stem, for which see reference 3. Guessing, any bud in the axil develops outside the stipules, but that is something else to check, not yet having turned up a diagram showing both. The distinction between monocotyledon and dicotyledon also seems to be relevant to leaf development, so something else to follow up, starting with reference 4.

PS 2: reference 5 looks helpful too - and looks to link back to phyllotaxis, another hobby horse. Provenance presently unknown.

There is lots of stuff out there - so there are clearly lots of people out there who take an interest in all this.

PS 3: I see from reference 6 that one of the survivors of the energy supply extinction event of 2021-22 is looking a bit wobbly. It remains a mystery to me what value has been added by all these new players - apart from glossy new customer-facing websites and marketing - but then here in Epsom we stick with EDF for electricity and British Gas for gas. The former being French and the latter I know not what.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/odd-pinnate-1.html.

Reference 2: https://www.bigyellow.co.uk/.

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

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

Reference 5: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3488/e126cc530b50c9b1aa53a5dbe23e19b7a3c1.pdf.

Reference 6: Ovo warns of ‘material uncertainty’ over its going concern status: Household energy supplier makes disclosure after failing to meet industry regulator’s capital adequacy targets - Rachel Millard, Financial Times - 2025.

Postage

The book at reference 1, noticed less than a couple of weeks ago at reference 2, has now turned up from Texas. Formerly the property of the Green Bay branch of the library of the University of Wisconsin.

A library which still knows about this particular book, although it does not appear to hold a copy itself any more. And when I click on the open access online link offered I get the snap above. Which appears to be accurate - 'Hydatina' does indeed appear on page 147 - a small rotifer, which are known to Wikipedia today and to science since the late 17th century. But that is it; you don't get any more.

Which reminds me that Morgan, about sixty years old when he wrote the present book, seems to have amassed knowledge of an enormous number of plants and animals in that time, with only research assistants and card index files to help him. An impressive feat.

However, my present concern is postage and packing. The book came in a green plastic bag, with not much more on the outside that a label for the parcel delivery people here in the UK. Nothing about US postage, customs, tariffs or anything else. 

Now Thrift Books looks at reference 8 to be a big operation, so I can only suppose that they package up all their deliveries for the UK - or perhaps Europe - once a week or something  - and stick all the labels on that package. With the recipient just feeding the individual purchases into the delivery service here.

The address of the Dallas branch is '4445 Rock Quarry Road, Dallas 75211' and as far as I can make out from gmaps, this is the huge shed snapped above. Not like the second hand book shop of old at all - nothing like, for example, the one that used to be tucked in beside the entrance to Earlsfield Station. The building also houses something called 'Amazon STX3', so perhaps they have a good chunk of shed. All very anonymous though: no big signs in lights on the roof telling you who they are.

A Texas sized version of our own Longmead Road: sheds on one side, houses on the other.

A sample of the houses on the other side is snapped above. More mixed than those on the Longmead and with a lot more space and trees. But then, it is a very rich country with a lot of space.

Back with Thrift, inside the green bag there was an envelope containing various goodies, snapped above. I have since read in the Observer - quite a decent paper these days - at least this number was - that DoorDash of the red coupon are the people who have just paid some enormous sum for our own Deliveroo, making a fine pay day for the chap who invented it a little over ten years ago. But, oddly, not making a profit just presently, so presumably the people from the US think that they can do better. 

I shall pass these goodies on to BH as she will be better able to deal with them. 

The book itself turns out to be a perfectly decent 1961 reprint of the 1929 second printing. The paper is slightly shiny, but the print quality is good and the many line drawings have turned out well. From the days when people still wanted properly bound hardback books.

And I now know rather more about the Silliman lectures which propelled the production of this book in the first place. I am impressed by the confidence of Mrs. Silliman's family that the works of the Lord would speak for themselves: no need to indulge in crude polemics about his existence. For the man of the house, see reference 9.

Further report in due course.

PS 1: the absence of stickers on the green bag is to be contrasted with the wealth of stickers on a modest parcel - about the size of a half litre bottle of water - which I happened to be sending to Canada yesterday. They more or less seemed to cover the whole parcel. Good job that BH has neat handwriting.

PS 2: I have learned from a correspondent of a new euphemism for getting rid of people in the City. You don't get rid of people, sack them or have savage cuts. You don't even have downsizing. Instead you have RIFs, for reduction in force. So in a big company you might have RIF-1, then a few months later RIF-2 and so on. It all helps to keep the labour force on their toes. I associate to a story about Mr. Moody of reference 11, current when I was there back in the 1960s, that he would parade his men every Monday morning, then walk down the lines inviting some of them, more or less at random, to go and get their [National Insurance] cards, the then current euphemism for sacking people. That kept them on their toes too. 

PS 3: for the benefit of younger readers, National Insurance cards really were cardboard in those days, and, as I recall, folded into three parts and marked out with a year's worth of weeks. The employer put a stamp on - as in postage stamp, not as in rubber - or otherwise endorsed - each week. The employee carried his card around with him from employer to employer. But while he was in employment, it lived in the office.

References

Reference 1: The Theory of the Gene – Morgan, T. H. – 1926.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/some-history-of-science.html.

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

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/gemini-on-plaques.html.

Reference 5: https://www.uwgb.edu/. They do like to gush!

Reference 6: https://library.uwgb.edu/home.

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

Reference 8: https://www.thriftbooks.com/.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Silliman. Probably the right Silliman. I have not been able to work out the connection to the Philippines. Missionary work?

Reference 10: https://www.doordash.com/. Red seems to be their colour.

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/trolleys.html.

Reference 12: https://unitsalcohol.wordpress.com/about-the-units-of-alcohol-site/. A stumbleacross. Which looks like it might be more than an encyclopædiacal compendium of all the units in all the beers you could ever think of.

Jury service

Today we got a missive from the council about updating our bit of the Electoral Register. And it being my birthday today, I know that I am now 76 and perhaps exempt from jury service.

From my background in demography I am also familiar with the concept of a reference date when you ask people how old they are. We used to go to some trouble, for example, to convert age at death to age at the following mid year (June 30th), when population estimates were updated. Or age declared on a census form.

However, the present form said nothing about that, although the date on the letter is a few days before my birthday.

Google was surprisingly uphelpful about the matter. As were the various government web sites that I tried. And the one call centre I tried to phone was experiencing a high volume of calls and you may be waiting some time. Which I was not going to do.

But I had learned that jury service was quite hard work, requiring one, potentially, to put in eight hour days. And be in some Crown Court at an unpleasantly early time of day. And not to fall asleep - which might be construed as the serious offence of contempt of court - which has always seemed to me a bit unfair. It is not something one has control over - although I have read that the better judges keep an eye on the jury from this point of view and take a break when the nodding starts. In any event, I decided that I had done enough public service in my time and went for the opt out.

That is to say going to the website provided for the purpose of amending your entry, up to a point, anyway. But this did include jury service and hopefully I will never be asked and never have to engage with the clerical apparatus of the Justice department.

Oddly, neither BH nor I have ever been asked in the past.

PS 1: I suppose 'engage with the clerical apparatus of the Justice department' is a bit old-speak, this being prompted by an early morning engagement with the computer apparatus of the Highways department. This being prompted in turn by an earlier text message telling me that I had just paid a DART charge - all of £3.50 - when I have been nowhere near DART for ages. Specifically, according to my telephone, since September 2023, when the charge was a much more modest £2.50. Furthermore, when the brain came online, I realised that DART only knows about our old car. Is someone still driving it? Are bad people using the registration number to confuse pursuit by the forces of law and order? So I dug out my credentials and logged on. On the second attempt, I get to the right place and, without much fuss or bother, I am able to delete our old car and add our new car. So hopefully that is that and I can just write the £3.50 off. Not worth spending (now scarce) quality time on.

PS 2: government does not seem to be very confident in its computer systems, or take much pride in them, as they all seem to be described as 'BETA' these days, which in my day meant under construction and likely to be full of errors.

PS 3: a little later: I now have a flurry of emails from DART. They seemed to have twigged that something is not quite right.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Oates. He was away for some time too. Eton and cavalry.

Reference 2: https://pay-dartford-crossing-charge.service.gov.uk/landing. 

Gemini on plaques

Contents

• Introduction

• Introductory story

• Summary of the conversation with Gemini

• The story I have arrived at

• A digression on counting viruses

• Conclusions

• References

Introduction

In the course of reading Benzer’s paper at reference 1, the Benzer who went on to become a scientific eminence of his day, I puzzled about how he could have made pure cultures of viruses – and, given the speed, in the right circumstances, that the viruses can replicate and mutate, about how pure these cultures needed to be for his purposes.

Reference 1 is a paper from the 1959, so written some five years after Watson & Crick wrote to Nature about the double helix in 1953. Prior to the 1950s, genes were thought to be the elementary particle of genetics – and if those genes were to be broken down into smaller entities how were these entities arranged in the molecules of genetic material concerned? Were they arranged in a one-dimensional linear array or were they arranged in some more complicated branching structure, possibly with loops, possibly two or three dimensional? Benzer showed that the small amount of genetic material involved in the many rII mutants of the T-phage he isolated (for which see reference 2) could be broken down into smaller entities, in a way that was consistent with their being coded as a string of nucleotides of the sort proposed by Watson & Crick.

I had come across this paper as a reference in the Wikipedia article on string graphs (reference 3), which were mixed up with the way one approached assembling all the overlapping short sequences one got from  a genetic sequencer into a full-blown chromosome. An old paper. but one which appeared to provide an accessible introduction to the biology underlying these graphs – a sort of graph which, I may say, does not appear in my 2005 introduction to graph theory – although it does in appear in Wikipedia. 

The beginning of this paper is snapped above. Noting in passing that it was communicated to Nature by his boss at the time, Max Delbrück. Perhaps that was the etiquette, the line of command in those days.

Not having any background in this sort of thing, I also went back to reference 4, a reference from the reference 1 which I started with.

In the course of looking at these two papers, it seemed to me that preparing pure strains of the mutant viruses involved must have been an important part of the work – despite the concepts of ‘mutant’ and ‘pure’ not sitting very well with each other: how mutated do you have to be to count as a mutant? At reference 5, for example, we are told that every human child carries about 70 mutations from their parents – mostly from the father – where I suppose they are mostly talking about point changes and deletions.

Digging into this, I found that growing viruses on a lawn of appropriate bacterial hosts in a small dish – perhaps a couple of centimetres or so across - is still an important feature of work in this field. Still very recognizably the same sort of thing that Benzer was doing back in the 1950s. I had turned up the paper at reference 6 and the manual at reference 7, both of which were helpful, but which did not seem to address the business of pure strains. So I thought I would ask Google’s AI product Gemini, to be found at reference 8. What follows is mainly a record of how we got on.

My first impression was that my (paying for) version of Gemini was convenient, accessible and helpful. But he was not infallible and he was not yet as good for this particular purpose as one would expect a good teacher to be.

A field for which a huge amount of material is available on the Internet for large language models to chew on, mostly good but some bad. It is far from clear (to me at least) how Gemini and his colleagues sort out the good from the bad.

I start with an introductory story then go to the conversation with Gemini and lastly summarize the story that I have arrived at as result. Plus a digression.

I might add that I have been using Gemini, and his predecessor Bard, at first reasonably regularly, now increasingly, for more than a couple of years now. They have come on enormously in that time: they have progressed from being a toy to being a tool. Also, that I am not here concerned with the wider merits or demerits of these sorts of tools – with, for example, the huge amount of electricity they are said to consume on their way to making lots of us obsolete, redundant or both.

Introductory story

Viruses are much smaller than the bacteria, the animal or vegetable cells that they prey on. The variety of present interest look something like the creatures in the snap above.

The idea is that the virus lands on the surface of its target and locks on. It then squirts its DNA down from the head, through the tail and into the target cell. 

There, this DNA takes over some of the basic machinery of the host cell and replicates, perhaps yielding several hundred children. It then triggers the production of a special enzyme to destroy the cell wall, thus killing its host and releasing its children to the world to start over. A cycle which might take about half an hour.

A much more destructive parasite than a bacterium, which last might well be helpful rather than harmful.

See references 9 and 10 for a fuller story. 

Google Images turns up lots of versions of the left-hand part of the snap above, a visualisation of a T4 phage, which reminded me of a moon lander or something of that sort, which probably accounts for its popularity, but I forget now where I lifted it from. The more florid version right comes from Facebook. Notice how solid geometry has got into the head.

Summary of the conversation with Gemini

Mainly in the form of my input, italicised in what follows.

In the 1950s, how would someone like Beezer have isolated a pure strain of a virus - in particular a strain of the rII mutant of T4?

Gemini was not bothered by my misspelling of ‘Benzer’, correcting it without comment

Lots of useful information here, including answering the question. Gemini has not just stuck to answering the question asked.

How big were these plaques?

Not being a laboratory person, I had little feel for this work and wanted more. The size of the plaques was a place to start. Gemini provides more information about plaques, without answering the question. Which prompted my next question, which he does answer.

But were they a few millimetres across or a few centimetres? Are the plaques sticky enough that they hold together if you pick up an edge?

And he goes on to explain that the plaques are not like a scab or the sort of thing I get with psoriasis, rather a circular patch of cell debris. For some reason, this took a while to sink in.

It sounds fiddly and time consuming.

This input was not a question, but Gemini provides a helpful response, with some good additional background, nonetheless. Quite like a conversation with a person in that way

But the video was a bit too technical for me. Too much information. I ought to say that, generally speaking, I do not respond very well to tuition by YouTube. Perhaps it is an age thing.

[some time later] Picking up on the T4 bacteriophage again, how long does a single cycle of replication for a phage take?

Gemini stores conversations and you can resume any one of them after a pause. A useful feature.

In this case, a simple answer, backed up with some explanatory material about the lytic cycle, for which see reference 9.

Afterwards, I got in a muddle with mental arithmetic. If one virus becomes 100 viruses in half an hour., what happens in fifty cycles, say a day’s worth? Is this really (10^2)^50 = 10^100? It does seem rather a lot. But today, Gemini agreed with my arithmetic and provided some background – both entertaining and relevant – including the fact that the number in question is called a googol. Bing agrees and takes me to Wikipedia which tells me that ‘… The term was coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta (1911–1981), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. He may have been inspired by the contemporary comic strip character Barney Google…’. 

Gemini knows all about this too. And he did quite well on the follow up on the connection, if any, to the slightly later cartoon characters of Walt Disney,

[some time later] Going back to the plaquing, how could one be sure that at most one virus had infected any one bacterium?

 A perfectly good answer, which I understand better now than I did at the time.

Do the plaques stop eventually stop growing? Or is the trick to stop the process before the plaques get too big and start to run into each other?

Another perfectly good answer. Including ‘… Plaques are typically counted within a specific time window—usually 18 to 24 hours for a fast-growing system like T4 and E. coli—to ensure the best results…’.

Sometimes, two viruses are going to infect the same bacterium. But if they are identical, does this mean that it makes no difference? The point of some of Benzer's experiments was that they were different.

Gemini opened with: ‘When multiple viruses, even identical ones, infect a single bacterium, it's called a mixed infection or co-infection. This is a crucial concept in phage genetics and was the very basis of some of Benzer's key experiments. It's not the same as a single-virus infection, because even with identical viruses, the events happening inside the cell are different’ and went on to tell about what happened when the two viruses were not the same. But he doesn’t explain the last sentence above, which may well be wrong. In any event, I maintain the view that in the unlikely event of a bacterium being infected with two copies of the same virus you would get the same result as being infected with one copy.

In your answer to my first question about this, you told me about a confirmation and purification step. Can you amplify what this means in the case that the plaque in question was actually generated from two, different viruses which could recombine in interesting ways?

Another good answer.

In this case, is not the main goal just to eliminate plaques generated by more than one virus?

I at first thought that Gemini was to be having trouble sticking to my point here, which was that one wanted pure samples of viruses to work with – regardless of how those viruses had been found or made in the first place. But once again, Gemini reads better with more knowledge.

From where I associate to FIL commenting on a pamphlet that I had given him about some aspect of mental health, probably to do with the old-style mental hospitals of his day, saying that it was a jolly good summary for someone who already knew the answer – but maybe not so good for someone who was looking for the answer. But then, he was a teacher by trade.

The story I have arrived at

The key to this work by Benzer is finding a group of mutants of the T-phage that can be distinguished by their response to plating on three different bacterial mediums, here B, S and K. The snap above being adapted from reference 2. With plating being explained at reference 3a.

The plaques are small clear, roughly circular areas on the plate, perhaps a millimetre or so across, where the virus has killed off the available bacteria. You get different looking plaques with different versions of the same virus and there is a good chance that, in what follows, you will pick the sort of plaque that you want.

Step 1. You mix a B strain of bacteria with a possibly mixed sample of T4 viruses. You plate it up and watch the plaques grow; a plating up which involves more or less fixing the viruses in the place where they arrive, they are not drifting about. Concentrations are adjusted so that it is very unlikely that any one bacteria will be infected with more than one virus and that the infected bacteria are well spread out on the plate.

Step 2. You identify a plaque of interest, in this case an rII mutant, and pick off a sample of its virus with a fine pipette. This sample is supposed to be a fairly pure strain, the product of just one virus The number of cycles of replication is small enough that the chances of significant mutation are small.

Step 3. You plate up your sample of virus with the B strain of bacteria. If you get lots of identical looking plaques, you know you have a viable, pure strain.

Step 4. You plate up your sample with the K strain of bacteria. If you get no plaques, you know that you have just one rII mutant. Mutant because you have no plaques and just one mutant because this test is very sensitive and any contamination of the sample with anything else – not least two different mutants recombining to revert to wild type – is going to result in plaques.

A digression on counting viruses

If one had a vial of liquid in which viruses were suspended, diluting that liquid in a controlled way seems straightforward enough, even when quite small quantities are involved, say millilitres rather than litres. So you might know that this sample has twice as many viruses to the millilitre as that sample, but how do you count the viruses in one of those samples to give you a baseline?

I was having trouble with this one too, so something else to try Gemini on.

He was good at explaining why counting them with an optical microscope, perhaps using the hemocytometers of reference 11, was not going to do, and although there are now more or less optical microscopes with the necessary resolution, they do not appear to be very well suited to counting.

One answer seemed to lie in counting the sort of plaques that we have at reference 1, but for some reason I did not press Gemini to explain why this might be, preferring to go my own way, and after a bit I turned up reference 12, the work of another (subsequently eminent) member of the Delbrück team. Where I found:

‘… From the fraction of live eggs in each batch the average number of infecting virus particles with which each egg was inoculated was determined by assuming a Poisson distribution of the particles per egg. This assumption is legitimate in view of the proof previously given in this article that infection of the cells is produced by one virus particle…’.

Poisson distributions ought to be something that I could deal with, so off to Wikipedia again, eventually landing up at reference l, where I find what I am looking for. An article which also loops back to Delbrück. All a matter of putting the question in the right terms.

So, if you randomly infect N cells with M viruses where N is a lot bigger than M, what can you say about the numbers of viruses in each cell? A first approximation is that M/N of them are going to be infected by just one virus, giving you M plaques. But if you need two or more viruses in a cell to generate a plaque, the proportion is clearly going to be very much smaller.

A first approximation which is confirmed by the Poisson theory at reference l, which gives us the required result that when just one virus in a cell is enough to kick off a plaque, relationship between the number of plaques and the dilution of the viral suspension is linear, which is what Dulbecco found at reference 12. Also by Kozikowski and Hahon at reference 13.

All you need to do is to dilute the viral suspension down to the right concentration to get the count in your infecting drop in the right range: small enough for M/N to be small, but big enough for the resultant plaque count to be statistically robust.

All very simple once one knows the answer, leaving aside all the lab work needed to do all this. An answer which I might have been able to get out of Gemini, but I chose to flog away at reference 12. 

Along the way, learning about the natty device snapped above. An adaptation of the Carrel flask used in some of this work in the 1950s, adapted to better control the atmosphere above one’s Petri dish, while leaving the top accessible to one’s microscope. Lifted from reference 14.

Conclusions

The important thing is that, with Gemini's help, I now feel I have a good enough answer to both my primary (purity) and my secondary (counting) question for my purposes.

Gemini can do very well, but you have to hit on the right questions to ask him and sometimes you have to work a bit to get him to stick to the point. He can be repetitious, but that does not really matter.

He will sometimes give you the answer you want straightaway, and you have confidence in that answer, but more often you need to have a dialogue with him. He has got pretty good at following the thread of a conversation.

I have only picked up one possible mistake and one definite mistake.

Interesting that a lot of his material reads better now I have got a better understanding of the matter in question.

PS: I get the impression that this sort of thing is taking me a lot longer than it should, or at least a lot longer than it would have done a few years ago. Maybe it is just as well that I have now got Gemini to help me along.

PS 2: and let’s not forget Wikipedia, which also has a big part to play in all of this, not least because it is the source of a lot of Gemini’s material.

PS 3: along the way, I have learned about Microsoft's Markdown version of Notepad. Hmmm.

References

Reference 1: On the topology of the genetic fine structure – Seymour Benzer – 1959.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_virus_T4.

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

Reference 4: Fine structure of a genetic region in bacteriophage – Seymour Benzer – 1955. Reference 6 from reference 1 above.

Reference 5:  Evolution 101: Mechanisms: the processes of evolution – Understanding Evolution, Berkeley - 2020.

Reference 6: Viral Concentration Determination Through Plaque Assays: Using Traditional and Novel Overlay Systems – Alan Baer, Kylene Kehn-Hall – 2014.

Reference 7: Virology Guide – ATTC – 2025. According to Wikipedia: ‘ATCC or the American Type Culture Collection is a nonprofit organization which collects, stores, and distributes standard reference microorganisms, cell lines and other materials for research and development. Established in 1925 to serve as a national center for depositing and distributing microbiological specimens, ATCC has since grown to distribute in over 150 countries. It is now the largest general culture collection in the world…’.

Reference 8: https://gemini.google.com/. 

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

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_virus_T4.  

Reference 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemocytometer. 

Reference 12:  Production of plaques in monolayer tissue cultures by single particles of an animal virus – Renato Dulbecco – 1952.

Reference 13: Plaque formation by psittacosis virus – Edmund H. Kozikowski, Nicholas Hahon – 1964.

Reference 14: Long-Term Cell Culture on a Microscope Stage: The Carrel Flask Revisited – D. J. Stevenson, D. J. Carnegie, B. Agate, F. Gunn-Moore, and K. Dholakia – 2008.

Cheese pie

It was a cheese day, but a correspondent having supplied BH with a copy of reference 1, I thought I ought to take in a bit of secret London while I was at it. To wit, a chunk of the old London Bridge which has found its way into one of the courtyards of Guys Hospital.

A dull start to the day with the forecast of rain to come, and by 11:00 or so there was indeed rain in the air, although I would not go as far as to say it was raining.

I did not pass any trolleys on the way to the station and I could not see any scaffolding on the flats above once I got there. And having got onto my train, slept most of the way to London Bridge.

From London Bridge into Guys, where I soon found the alcove which had once graced the London Bridge of 1831 - the one built of granite from Haytor, to be found at reference 2. Was it from the small quarry just by Haytor Rocks? A secret which had been rededicated to Keats, who once did a year as an apothecary at Guys. One of those tiresome statues which portray the subject sitting on a bench, on this occasion together with my cycling bag, the one that fits neatly into the front luggage holder of a Bullingdon.

One of the outfits involved in commissioning the rededication in 2007 was the D'Oyly Carte Charitable Trust, which I now know from reference 4 to take an interest in medical welfare. Not just a G&S outfit at all.

There were a number of these alcoves on the bridge, for pedestrians to take a break, have a smoke or whatever. The back of one of them can be seen in the painting above, reference 3. Rather grander than the triangular alcoves they used to work into the much narrower medieval bridges of old.

The arches look very high to me, so I can only suppose the likeness was taken when the river was very low. Or we have a bit of artistic license.

The triangles of the Ouse Bridge of Huntingdon - which might not look very old, but which Wikipedia says is 14th century. Maybe they have been touched up a bit over the years: in any event, they give the idea.

And those of Holne Bridge, over the Dart, near Ashburton. Clearly provincials don't get full-on alcoves.

Ludwig Wittgenstein also did a year during the second world war as drugs porter and ointment maker at Guys. With a copy of his 'Tractatus' being behind me as I type - an edition in parallel translation from the German. A book which I dip into from time to time, but which I believe was serious meat for students of mathematics, logic and philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. I wonder now if my father looked at it or even read it: the sort of thing in which he certainly took an interest, even if he lacked relevant training. I don't think there was a copy in the house when I was a child.

A hospital trolley which has not even made it to the Excel workbook which I now tell about the shopping trolleys which I come across.

Over to Borough Market, where I took a look at the fish stall. Was it a day for a couple of smokies? Sadly, I could only see what appeared to be shrink wrapped smokies which would not be the same at all, so not a day at all.

A bit further over there was a stall with quite a variety of plums, mostly foreign, but also some greengages. I remembered buying some rather overripe ones last year, as noticed just about a year ago at reference 6. Passed on plums altogether on this occasion.

Bought my cheese and then got a bit carried away by some creepers on top of a wall in Redcross Way, on my way to the Bullingdon Stand. How many different plants were involved?

Current thinking is at least three, including whatever it is that is producing the little white flowers. Which Google Images makes the ivy leaved toadflax of reference 7. 

Looks a pretty good fit to me, especially given the rather poor snap I was able to give him, cut out from the middle of that above, in which one of the distinctive leaves is spot on for the first leaf image in Wikipedia, included immediately above. Stems look right too.

The big leaves look to have big stems, so perhaps quite old. But I'll worry about what the other two creepers might be another day.

Pulled a Bullingdon and pedalled over to the Tea House Theatre at Vauxhall to see about lunch. Or perhaps a sandwich or something.

Full performance on the tea front. Rather good tea it was too. Enlivened by light classical musak, not very loud, copies of various magazines and that very day's Financial Times. Made a change to see a print copy.

I was pleased to find that steak and kidney pie was back on the menu, texting BH to stand down any meat and veg. that might have been on the stocks for later on.

It really was a very good pie, much better than might appear from the snap above. Perhaps the best pie to be had in town. Good pastry with plenty of meat - with my only small point being that, if I were calling the shots, I would have used a bit more kidney. Gravy good, with a reasonably delicate flavour, not like the usual stuff you get in such places. Vegetables very good, again much better than the usual stuff you get in such plates. Not least because they were not overcooked. A real napkin made of linen rather than paper.

All of which left me very full, which slowed me down on the stairs up to the platform at Vauxhall. Good job I had texted BH.

Short stopover at Raynes Park, still no trolleys at Epsom - not that I was looking very seriously - but there were some walnuts to be gathered on Court Recreation Ground, from underneath the small walnut trees in the hedge, quite near the vets which used to be the house for the groundsman and his wife. Are the walnuts fit to eat?

Not delved into beer yet, but I have read the Sorokin, a Penguin Modern Classic no less. on which I shall be reporting shortly.

PS: Monday morning: I seem to be dreaming a lot at the moment. This morning I had a pill dream when I first woke, a dream which morphed into a work dream, with what was then the Department of Employment at Watford. Work dreams being a fairly large category in my dream population - although I have stopped counting - maybe 15% of the getting on for 1,000 dreams with recorded content. But then, I suppose work was a large part of one's waking life and it is not unreasonable that it should get its fair share of dreams.

The pill dream was new and slightly alarming. I had just taken two large round, white pills which I had had to crush in my mouth to swallow - fortunately, they did not taste unpleasant. But I was worried that I had taken two in one go when I should have taken the second later in the morning. It was four a day altogether - out of my actual current complement of eleven a day. Then there was the problem of my weekly pill box with four slots to the day, with one of these pills taking up the whole of one of the slots. Was I supposed to be taking them at all? Had I got the wrong person's pills? I even went so far as to consult my notes - in Excel - about such matters. But by the time that I woke for the second time, I had worked out that this was all a dream and that there was no need to consult Excel for real.

Reference 1: Secret London: an unusual guide - Rachel Howard, Bill Nash - 2024. Jonglez Publishing of Versailles.

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

Reference 3: Old London Bridge - Joseph Mallord William Turner - 1794.

Reference 4: https://doylycartecharitabletrust.org/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Bridge,_Huntingdon.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-bent-crane.html.

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

Reference 8: https://www.teahousetheatre.co.uk/.

Reference 9: https://jonglezpublishing.com/.

Chowder

I get around to the kedgeree, the ingredients for which were noticed back at reference 1. Served with some neighbourly squash.

According to OED, the Indian name of a dish made with rice, split pulses, onions, eggs, butter and condiments. From the Sanskrit, via Hindi. The Europeans, when they turned up, substituted fish for the pulses and onions.

The squash was baked, with a little oil and pepper. Not bad at all, but, curiously, the skin was thin and hard, rather like a plastic film, visible at the bottom of the right-hand lump above. Best removed before eating. It might have been better to remove it before cooking, but I'm not completely sure about that, as it does serve to keep the pieces in good shape.

The kedgeree was fine, albeit with the substitution of lightly smoked cod for properly smoked haddock making it a little bland. Stick with haddock when available.

Around half the fish that I had bought was not used, and that went to make a chowder the following day. A watery confection involving, in addition to the fish, potatoes and onions - with the water being initially strengthened by boiling up the potato peelings in it. Probably also some kind of green vegetable, possibly leeks, possibly some sort of cabbage. 

With the fish being augmented on this occasion by a little bacon. The fish was cooked by steaming it in the lidded sauté pan on top of a bed of onions, then flaking it in-situ, the whole lot being added to the potatoes and so forth just before eating. It did rather well.

But before the kedgeree, I had been out to check up on the trolley situation in town - no longer recorded here - and on the whitebeam in the Screwfix passage.

This one with a ripening berry or two.

Google Images still goes for whitebeam, making it a Sorbus, while Wikipedia says that the Sorbus genus has been pulled in and includes just those trees with pinnate leaves, roughly the rowans and mountain ashes, and that the whitebeams are now to be found at reference 3. Maybe the library of labelled images on which Google Images was trained is a little out of date. Not a matter that I propose to look into this morning.

While in the afternoon, I went past the mosque (perhaps properly the Epsom Islamic Centre) in Hook Road, where the new paving, rather bleak when dry, was looking rather good when wet, with the water bringing the stone out nicely. The snap above gives something of it.

A couple of days later, I happened to notice the notice on the hoarding around the site which is to become flats, at the corner of West Hill and Station Approach, noticed from time to time, presently inactive again after the previous building was demolished. So it is now getting on for a year since the builder took possession of the site and we do not yet have any construction, as opposed to destruction.

But pushing on to the creationists of East Street, we did have what appeared to be a van from UCL of Gower Street (in London), outside. What was it doing there? I did not like to ask the driver, who might have thought I was being a bit nosey.

Carcheck tells me that it is a black Mercedes-Benz Viano CDI blue efficiency Ambiente, which is fair enough, with Bing knowing all about such things at reference 4, but, sadly, does not tell me who it belongs to. Need better credentials than mine to get that.

Whitebeam again, this time the usual full-frontal shot from the south west.

While the last puzzle of the day was this low brick wall, on the left after one has passed the Ford Centre in Blenheim Road, heading towards the roundabout. I have long puzzled about why they bothered with the damp course, visible two courses up, which only appeared to serve to weaken it, making it vulnerable to being pushed about by parking cars.

I thought Gemini did rather well on this one. The first part of his reply is snapped above and he concluded with '... In summary, the DPC is there not to save the brick itself, but to preserve the aesthetic integrity and long-term appearance of the wall, particularly the capping, and to ensure compliance with established building standards'. Note his usual bit of warm-up flattery at the top.

PS 1: the Financial Times has been getting into insurance again with the pieces at reference 5 and 6. The numbers involved in these cyber attacks look pretty big to me, which leaves me wondering how many insurance companies are big enough take them on. All that seems to be certain is that there are a lot of these attacks about. And I remember being told twenty years ago by a security type that our (the Home Office at that time) defences were being probed all the time - many times a day - by bad people on fishing expeditions. Is it all down to young male nerds in attics? 

In any event, I would be all for throwing the book at the ones we catch at it. Bang 'em up. They might well have mental health issues, but we can't have them out there, in the wide world, doing that kind of damage to property; we just can't afford it.

PS 2: I close with a savoury from reference 7, which I continue to look into from time to time. Regarding the Hungarian nationalism of the late 18th century, Anderson writes: '... Its first political expression was the Latin-speaking Magyar nobility's hostile reaction in the 1780s to Emperor Joseph II's decision to replace Latin by German as the prime language of imperial administration...'. A decision which, it seems, was rescinded by his successor. All of which eventually resulted in the invention of the Dual Monarchy in 1867. Which, if memory serves and according to Švejk, left the Czechs feeling a bit left out. No opportunity missed for a brawl between the men of the Hungarian and Czech regiments. Brawls which were considered very proper by their officers, at least on the QT.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/more-breaking-news.html.

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

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

Reference 4: https://www.parkers.co.uk/mercedes-benz/viano/estate-2004/22-cdi-ambiente-(2010)-5d/specs/.

Reference 5: Jaguar Land Rover to bear full cost of cyber attack due to lack of insurance cover: Government considers offering support to suppliers including state purchase of car parts - Lee Harris, Kana Inagaki, Jim Pickard, Financial Time - 2025.

Reference 6: The grimdark future of credit risk models: It’s a model and it’s looking good; you want regulatory approval, that’s understood - Daniel Davies, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 7: Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism - Benedict Anderson - 1983, 2016.

Group search key: 20250914, 20250916.

The Dresser

Some years ago now we went to a play called 'The dresser', about which I can remember very little, apart from the fact that we went. An event noticed at reference 1, with the play itself to be found at reference 2. A story about the relationship of an aging matinée idol, now in provincial repertory with his own company, with his long serving and long suffering dresser. 

Then the other week, we stumbled across a couple of films of same on Prime, probably films which one had to pay for. Taking the first one with Finney & Courtenay first. With Edward Fox appearing in both, although not in the same part.

The overriding take-away for me was the dreariness and drudgery of the repertory theatre. The half empty theatres, the grotty dressing rooms, the grotty digs and the continual travelling. You must have been obsessed with the theatre to put up with it. You must be part of, turn in, a fine performance from time to time, to make it all worth while. You must like to spend your time pretending to be someone else. Or is it the business of projecting something to an audience? You like to be able to dominate, to carry an audience?

I am reminded that lots of people, not just the luvvies themselves, are fascinated by dramas which are about luvvies, by dramas which are about dramas. Shakespeare, for example, has plays within plays - and there are lots of other examples. Perhaps one could get a PhD by researching the genre over the centuries?

Both good films, although I thought Courtenay more plausible than McKellen as the dresser. Both by being younger and by not hogging the limelight. At least McKellen could do the distance, while I had thought that he was overdoing it a bit with his combined version of the two parts of Henry IV which we saw at Wimbledon - for which see reference 8. 

I wonder now whether such an actor (as portrayed in the present films) would have had such a long time dresser? Would he have wanted one? I don't think I would, but some aristos keep their body servants for a very long time and some senior executives keep their (equally long suffering) secretaries for a very long time.

PS 1: a tribute to the way that one signs up for Prime for what seems like a very modest monthly subscription, then get sucked into buying lots of films which are not included in the basic package. Well, not quite basic, as we opted for ad-free. Well, more or less ad-free.

PS 2: I associate to Northern Broadsides whom we used to see at the Rose in Kingston. Then one of the few old-style repertory companies still in business, led by an actor-manager. See references 5 and 6. I day say that there is more to be found, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.

PS 3: I was also reminded of a correspondent who had been trained for the world of rep, a world which was dying  by the time that he got there. But he used to be very nostalgic about the nomadic life - grim though it might have appeared in these two films. I associate to reading a magazine interview with a wrestler - probably in the waiting room of an old-style gents barber - in which the nomadic life of a wrestler came across as pretty grim too. Another world that has died. And then there is the world of the string quartet, where there is plenty of provincial, spiced up with the occasional Wigmore. See reference 7.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/10/dressing-up.html.

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

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dresser_(1983_film).

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dresser_(2015_film).

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=northern+broadsides.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=northern+broadsides.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/08/life-in-string-quartet.html.

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/geriatrix.html.