More home affairs

That is to say, picking up from reference 1.

By Wednesday morning, Manor Green Road was still closed, but it looked as if Thames Water had done the tricky stuff and had subbed back-filling the hole to SQS Services. In fact, they must have a contract with them, as SQS was last spotted on a similar errand back in March and noticed at reference 2.

The hole had been filled to within two or three inches of the surface and one of the men was doing something technical with what looked like a small jack hammer. Maybe he was testing the compactness, although there was none of the bouncing up and down I would have expected. And I don't suppose he was smelling for gas as this was a water job. But he was taking notes. They were not speaking English and it did not seem the moment to ask.

A significant looking water hole a few yards beyond the wagon.

I decided I did not need something that warms to warm me up for my haircut.

At the other end of Manor Green Road, more or less outside Costcutter, a pendant to the hole at the pond end. With a fair bit of water pushing up through a crack in the tarmac, marked here with the traditional orange spot. When will they get around to it? Has it been reported? Will I bother to check on the Thames Water map of reported leaks?

Home to baked cod. Very good it was too. Rounded off with the last of the neigbourly apples, lightly stewed with a few cloves.

All the vegetables were from Sainsbury's, but the more exotic ones started life, as it were, in Morocco.

In the afternoon a spot of word entertainment in the course of looking up 'astringent'. The OED entry was supported by a quote from 1620: 'It is astringent, and therefore effectual to stop the laske'. Which prompted a very minor digression down that road.

Being too lazy at that point to go downstairs for volume 'L' of OED, I asked Google instead, with the result snapped above. Don't know now why I focussed on 'leak', but Google was able to cut through that, giving me the first meaning as the answer. It validated the quote, which fitted with the rest of astringent, on which I shall be reporting further in due course. 

I then did get to go downstairs.

Looking to the left, Middle English from the AI assistant not a very good gloss for old French. Misspelling not a very good gloss for variant spelling. And he missed the Dutch meaning with the fishy example, the horse usage still current at the end of the 19th century and the figurative uses. 

And you can't have a dialogue with the AI assistant in the way that you can with Gemini. On the other hand he can do pictures, as has been noticed in these pages.

More curious meanings to the right.

I wonder now whether Gemini would have dug more of this up than the AI assistant. How much access to the first edition of OED did he have? Does the much more recent second edition cover much the same ground as the first or does it leave lots of the old stuff about Old Middle English out? Did the compilers of he second edition have access to the same army of compilers, perhaps no longer living quietly in vicarages deep in the country, as the compilers of the first edition?

Sometimes one feels that Gemini's access to its sources is rather second hand, that it knows all about such and such a book, but is a bit stuck when it comes to quoting chapter and verse, perhaps except in so far as it involves famous quotes which got into the stuff which he had hoovered up.

Contrariwise, back at reference 4, I had felt that Gemini really did have access to the film in question. If you asked him about what was going on 53  minutes and 30 seconds in (as clocked by Amazon Prime), he was on the case. At least so he seemed.

A short circuit this morning, but enough to notice that the street art on the Screwfix underpass had mostly been cleaned up after the attack by the competition, noticed at reference 3. With this snap taken the other way from the one there.

Home to lunch and after that to make my first booking with Airnb. Which involved installing a new app on my telephone and a fair amount of faffing about to establish my credentials. But I think I got there.

Shortly after that my elderly HP printer suddenly stopped working. Restarting the host PC did not do the trick. And the printer is so old that I can no longer load the printer assistant from HP which might have assisted. But Copilot came to my rescue stepping me through what for me was some rather deep geekery, deep in the System32 folder, deep in the C: file structure; the sort of folder which I ordinarily keep well clear of. Furthermore, Copilot was near word perfect in the sense that the steps he outlined worked, nearly word for word and, as it turned out, quite near enough. Printer now working again. 

In the past I have struggled with instructions from fora, usually far from word perfect and usually not very helpful. So 1 was impressed with Copilot this afternoon.

A last circuit to check on the hole, now awaiting the final layer, promised for tomorrow.

Captured in town what might be the oldest trolley for a while, made by Wanzl in November 2007. It was looking a bit tired, but it was still perfectly serviceable. Returned to the stack at M&S.

While there was no change in the leak at the other end of the road. Presumably in the same main, running the length of the road and installed around 1925 when the road was first laid out.

Not there in 1910 or so according to the map above, with what is now Manor Green Road probably then the footpath marked with orange spots.

But arrived by 1930. While Pound Lane has been downgraded to the path along the edge of the recreation ground that it still is. And I have now worked out that the double line to the west of the road is the stream which runs into the stream which still runs down Longmead Road.

So it looks as if the water main is of the order of 100 years old and wearing out.

The bread situation had meant that I had topped up with a couple of ciabatta loaves from M&S to tide me over before the new bread arrives tomorrow afternoon. Hand cut, whatever that might mean, from dough which has been fermented for 16 hours. Presumably they do that at some factory and deliver the dough to stores for final bake-off each morning.

Whatever the case, I thought the bread pretty good for shop bread. Almost the white bread of old. Taken in my case with cheese and onion.

Quite dear at £2.25 for something over 200g - an amount I have to compute rather than read off the label. But I don't mind paying for white bread that I like, not so thick on the ground given the plague of sourdough which has yet to work its way through the system.

PS 1: a possible aperçu this morning, carrying two fairly full cups of tea up the stairs. If I tried too hard, it all went pear-shaped - but if I just kept my mind blank and my gaze on the two cups, regularly shifting focus from one to the other, it (in words that BH might use) just flowed. All was well, and I got up the stairs without spilling any of the tea.

The aperçu being that conscious control would be useless in this context. Conscious control was far too slow to be able to organise, to orchestrate or even just to help out with the complicated muscular activity needed to get up the stairs in this way. The many billions of neurons - perhaps in the cerebellum - could not wait for conscious processing to help. They needed to get on if one was going to make reasonable progress up the stairs.

I think I have talked before about how I get on better holding a cup in each hand, while BH prefers to put both cups on a tray and do it that way. Plus I remember talking to a nurse who was with me on this one, preferring not to use a tray. Is this a matter that the chap formerly known as a Prince, said to be keen on having flunkeys with trays about his person, would be able to add any value? And what about the trays with dozens of glasses of (cheap) sherry deployed on Sundays at the Wigmore Hall?

Contrariwise, when one is in pain, one does think about individual movements. One slows right down to try and move while generating the minimum of pain, possibly trying to manage without some of the muscles that one would ordinarily use for the movements in question.

Clearly something to mull over with tea No.2, never quite as good as tea No.1.

PS 2: I associate to a story about the very large cerebellum of an elephant being fully occupied when the trunk was being used, perhaps to pick up a peanut. A complicated limb with lots of muscles which soaked up a lot of brain power. While I think the octopus has gone for rather different arrangements, with much more parallel, distributed processing. From where I further associated to the title of the two volumes at reference 5, very well known in their day. Once owned by me, perhaps still owned, but I never got further than dipping.

PS 3: the Thames Water map mentioned earlier. Maybe the houses with numbers are the ones that have come to their notice in the past for one reason or another. There is also a blue flag very roughly in the right place, but right clicking does not produce enough information to know exactly which or what leak is being flagged. Enough! Someone else's problem.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/home-affairs.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/temple-of-law.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/near-house-bound.html. For the avoidance of doubt, a quite different water hole.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/french-affairs.html.

Reference 5: Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition - David E. Rumelhart; James L. McClelland - 1987.