Piano 71

Piano No.71 was captured in the church of St. Cyriac in Lacock, Wiltshire - Lacock being a curious place to which I shall return at the proper time.

The church was a curious place too, probably getting through far more tourists than communicants. In any event, this piano looked a touch shabby and I have been unable to trace 'E Price & Sons'. I have not even found out whether Price was a music shop or a piano manufacturer, with the closest I got being the lapsed offer of one for 99p at reference 2 - and even that required the power of Google rather than the humble Bing.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/piano-70.html.

Reference 2: https://picclick.co.uk/E-Price-And-Sons-Upright-Piano-183571519963.html.

Group search key: pianosk.

Piano 70

This Yamaha Clavinova was captured in the course of a recent visit to the church of St. Andrew, at Ashburton. A church we have visited several times in the past, but not recently, and as far as I can make out, this piano has not been scored before. 

There were visits to Ashburton before the scoring of pianos kicked in towards the end of 2018 and it is possible we did not visit the church again since then, what with the plague and moving out to Holne, rather than staying in Ashburton. But I have not put in the time needed to check properly.

I can, however, turn up the scoring Clavinova at reference 3, which, leaving aside the different colour, looks to me like a different model to the present one. Perhaps there is a whole range of them.

PS: this snap arrived here by way of sharing it with my newly discovered Google Drive, visible to both Samsung phone and Microsoft laptop. Not quite as convenient as OneDrive, certainly different, but getting there. And hopefully more secure. The only catch being that O2 have already warned me about my data consumption and I may be needing to move up from my (newly arrived) 3Gb a month. Maybe I need to take a look at my O2 account...

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/piano-69.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/piano-1.html. The first piano.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/piano-19.html. Another Clavinova.

Group search key: pianosk.

Balanced score card

[The gorse on Holne moor. One of Samsung’s lesser efforts: on the day the moor looked a much brighter yellow]

A collection of odds and ends from our recent expedition to the west country. 

Usually on these expeditions, we do not make it to the seaside to the east. Torbay and all that lot. Just a bit too far for it to be a good day out for us, given the much nearer attractions of Dartmoor. But, on this occasion, quite by chance, we made it to Charmouth on the way home. A fine beach and a fine sunny day. There was even a car park where one could pay in coin of the realm, rather than having to interact with some app and some computer or other. Someone has told BH that these apps are rather a pain, there being a lot of different car park management companies, all with their own app. Not just a question of getting to know one of them. Of trusting just one of them with one’s banking details.

We failed to make it to the Honey Bakery with its antique, once coke fired oven, at Horrabridge. We decided we did not need more sugary cakes, the speciality of the house. Last noticed at reference 1.

We did make it to Ella the Baker at Ashburton, to find that after thirteen years of running a bakery out of the front room of a shop, she had hung up her apron. But she had been replaced by Briar, who apart from changing the exterior paintwork from blue to brown, was or were carrying on the business along much the same lines. We took four small white tin loaves. Very satisfactory, with each loaf, taken with either butter or cheese, doing me about a meal. See references 2 and 3.

I had thought to pass on white puddings at the Bidder the butcher at Yelverton. But when it came to the point, I fell for four groat puddings, sliced, fried and taken with white bread for breakfast over the days following. Very good they were too. 

In the margins, I noticed some large beef bones on his block, on which subject the butcher was very firm that one never took entire sides of beef, they were far too big and heavy. Quarters were the thing and they were quite heavy enough, say about 200lbs. He was only a fairly young chap so perhaps he did not know about the olden days - while I feel sure that I have either seen sides of beef in butchers or seen pictures of same – and a few minutes with Google did turn one up, included above, although to be fair to the present butcher, quarters did seem to be a lot more common. While a Godfrey is still to be found at reference 4.

Food supplies were further bolstered by a very satisfactory Savoy cabbage obtained from the Tesco’s at Axminster. Not something that has been much in evidence in Epsom this year, reference 7 notwithstanding.

No progress with car registration plates, with No.37 continuing to evade capture. In fact, it was a very lean week altogether with nothing between, say, 31 and 55, both endpoints inclusive. And not much after 55. Some consolation in the form of this foreign duplicate, a Fiat, in the car park of Buckland Abbey, the house bought with the plunder of that well known pirate, Sir Francis Drake.

Further consolation in the form of a fine display of buttercups at the same place. But not sufficiently tempted to venture inside, National Trust membership card notwithstanding.

No Wellingtonias scored, but some, some sickly, were seen in the distance. And one dead one was noticed at reference 5.

A small number of church pianos have yet to be scored.

A small number of fakes have yet to be scored, mostly from Faketown, aka Poundbury. With one such to be found at reference 8. With fakes being turned up here long before the series was formally constituted in 2017. For which see reference 9.

We did not make it onto Holne Moor to hear the cuckoos, but we did hear some from nearby Venford Reservoir. We also saw various kites, a buzzard and sundry unidentified raptors. The most recent kite was tweeted flying over the Bronze Command Unit, this last visible left in the snap above, taken at the Moto service area near Reading. Leaving one wondering whether National Highways are only allowed to attend Bronze incidents or whether they do Silver and Gold too. Plus a work of natural art in the foreground and an array of charging points back right.

This brick was captured in the margins of Venford Reservoir and has now been added to the collection back at Epsom. Quite heavy as bricks go.

Two hornets captured in our cottage, a shed conversion outside Holne, on the road to Hexworthy. Something over an inch long. The upturned glass over and sheet of thick paper under technique worked well. The first (left) was pretty moribund until the sun warmed her up on the table outside. Helped along with a little sugared water. The second (middle and right) was much more active and shot straight off when released. As a result of a chance encounter from a couple of people from the Animal and Plant Health Agency – having a day out to meet the bee keeper at Buckfast Abbey – we learned that these were fertile queens emerging from hibernation, intent on building a new nest.

We did not make it to the Church House Inn at Holne, now open, or to the Forest Inn at Hexworthy. The first establishment being of interest because of complications arising from the church having some interest, the second because we once ate liver and bacon there, not something to be found in much pub grub. While I did not find the Wetherspoon’s in Chippenham and I did not make it inside the Three Crowns in the same town, on the grounds of noise inside and the number of smokers outside. But perhaps I was right not to intrude on Steve & Linda’s last day. Or perhaps I was just a bit old for this class of establishment. For which see reference 6.

Last but not least, we came across two items of social media garbage. The first concerned various brands of fake butter – stuff like ‘Utterly Butterly’ – and how some of them contained a great deal of plastic. Garbage which thrived on the knowledge that the chemical formula of one of the ingredients was superficially similar to that of a plastic. The second concerned management and quality control of the soft boiled eggs supplied each morning for the Royal breakfast. I suppose this one thrived on an amusing plausibility.

For much earlier examples of this sort of thing, see the famous book noticed at reference 12.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/dining-out-west-part-one.html. 

Reference 2: https://briarbakery.com/. 

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/04/ashburton-highlights.html. Possibly my first visit to Ella.

Reference 4: https://www.godfreys.co/. 

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/system-failure.html. 

Reference 6: http://threecrownschippenham.co.uk/index.php/diary. 

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/shoulder.html.  

Reference 8: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/fake-71.html. 

Reference 9: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/08/fake-1.html. It took me a little while to turn this one up, ‘fake 1’ being a poor search key. In the end, I thought to search the archive for ‘fake-1.html’, which did work. The group search key, ‘fakesk’, which would otherwise have helped a bit, only having been invented quite recently.

Reference 10: https://www.pestlock.com/what-happens-to-wasps-and-hornets-in-the-winter/. 

Reference 11: http://apha.defra.gov.uk/apha-scientific/index.htm. 

Reference 12: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-last-outing.html.

System failure

Back in 2015 I noticed at reference 1 a fine Wellingtonia in the churchyard of St. Andrew's church in Ashburton. But this was before the Wellingtonia system kicked in the first summer of the plague, that is to say June 2020, for which see reference 2.

Sadly, when we visited the church a few days ago, we found that the tree had been removed. The lady doing the flowers in the church thought that it had been diseased and had had to be removed on grounds of safety. A removal which had made it to television, but a removal which has left no trace on the Internet that I could find. 

But I did chance upon an image of a large tree being taken down in ten feet sections, with each section being lifted out by mobile crane. A proceeding which one might have thought would require some care from the crane driver; care to take the weight just at the right moment. Not clear how a crane would have got close enough here, with the tree being much closer to the church than the road.

The rings were quite countable, but I could not muster the energy on this morning to count them. A failure I shall no doubt regret.

In any event, a Wellingtonia which was not scored at the proper time and cannot be scored now.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/04/more-devon-churches.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/wellingtonia-1.html.

Raspberry jam

When I was young, we used to make raspberry jam out of raspberries and sugar. Guessing, it took maybe 12 ounces of fruit and 12 ounces of sugar to make 16 ounces of jam. There was certainly a lot of boiling down until you got to the gel point. No idea whether the sugar came from sugar cane or sugar beet, although we may well have used the slightly brown cooking sugar, then (not now) rather cheaper than table sugar.

While over the past week we have been entertained by the labelling science which has gone into a pot of St. Dalfour raspberry spread, St. Dalfour being the people at reference 1, although I dare say there is some big food combine lurking discretely in the background.

First, for some reason it is called spread, rather than jam. Perhaps because it only contains 51% raspberries by weight. Perhaps getting past 50% is important. Perhaps because it is rather runny and nowhere as deep in colour as the homemade stuff used to be on a good day.

Second, they are very concerned to tell us that no unnatural sugar has been included in the mix, by which I think they must mean the sort of sugar you make from sugar cane or sugar beet. Perhaps the fact that glucose is said to be worse for us than fructose has something to do with it.

But the bit that really amused me was that when you get through the small print, not only is the spread fortified with sweet grape juice (British wine makers do something of the sort to bring the home grown grape juice up to brewing strength), but it is given its real lift by adding date juice, just about within the umbrella term 'fruit juice'.

The spread itself is not bad, particularly on white toast, but it does have an oddly sour after taste. But then, I dare say BH only bought it because it was being discounted at Sainsbury's.

PS: Bing suggests that St. Dalfour is a company which started in 1984 and now operates in more than fifty countries and that there is a HQ operation at 'St. Dalfour International Incorporated, 175 SW 7TH St Miami, FL, 33130-2992 United States'. But Google does not recognise this address and I can't find a corporate website. So who knows.

References

Reference 1: https://www.stdalfour.com/.

Life at the coal face

[Starbucks Reserve Roastery. The fancy end of the Starbuck operation: this one in Chelsea, Manhattan appears with bugs and mould in the piece noticed below. Bing suggests that we also have such places in the smarter parts of London]

This being prompted by a piece in the NYRB (reference 1) about life at the coal face in the US. That is to say the various industrialised and computerised service industries which have taken the place of the coal mines and satanic mills of old. Industries like Starbucks, McDonald’s and Amazon.

The bottom line is that life at the coal face is pretty grim. I share few snippets.

Starbucks, owned by a man who is very rich, works hard at keeping the unions out of his business. And, if necessary, simply closing outlets which do manage to unionise. The idea that working with unions to improve work and work places might just possibly be a win-win presumably has not crossed his mind.

About a third of the US workforce as a whole make less than $15 an hour, that is to say, £12, against a UK minimum wage of just over £10 an hour. Worse if you are female, black or a single parent. Demographics associated with, as it happens, a greater dependency on tips.

Amazon warehouse employees might be on their feet for 11 hours a day. Pun apart, my own legs would no longer stand for it.

Churn is high in these industries. Presumably there are plenty of newbies willing to give it a go. It can’t be that bad. Phrased another way, plenty of newbies desperate to make a few dollars for their food, clothes and rent. One side effect of which is making it harder to unionise.

Sick leave seems not to be taken for granted in this part of the US: throwing a sickie is not the option is was sometimes said to be in, for example, the mental hospitals of old in this country.

There is plenty of labour relations law in the US and there is a National Labour Relations Board (NLRB, to be found at reference 2), but Amazon and their kind seem to be able to handle all that. One wheeze is the franchise, widely deployed by McDonald’s. And it helps that a good chunk of the workforce is undocumented, which I read to mean that they are what we would call illegal immigrants. People who might have been living in the US for years, but who are not in a position to make a fuss.

Traditional unions are struggling, a gap which is being filled, in part, by various other kinds of activity. The outfit at reference 3 is one such, focussed on getting the minimum wage raised from $7.25 to $15.00, coupled with a thinning out of all the exemptions and exceptions.

It seems that progress is being made. But it is all a bit slow, a bit piecemeal. When will enough of us work out that the people who fill our coffee cups (as it were) deserve decent working conditions too? Work out to the extent of paying for them?

PS 1: as it happens, only yesterday, I read in the Guardian of changes at Pizza Express here in the UK, whereby in a number of their outlets which are quiet in the afternoon, the rank-and-file, front-of-house staff are stood down – potentially losing quite a lot of hours a week – leaving their managers to hold the fort until the evening shift comes on – without extra pay. With service charge being a further complication here: the service charge is added to the bill automatically, but managers do not participate in the service charge fund. So to where does that chunk of the receipts go?

PS 2: I am also reminded of the difficulty which we in the UK, along with much of the rest of the western world, have with migrants and immigrants. From which comes the thought that when you make something illegal which lots of people want to do – like recreational drugs or gambling – serious crime will surely follow. And lots of people in poor countries want to move to rich western countries which might not be very welcoming – but which do offer opportunity. So the serious criminals will move in to facilitate such movement. For a fee, naturally.

References

Reference 1: The fight for fair wages – Willa Glickman, NYRB – 2023.

Reference 2: https://www.nlrb.gov/. 

Reference 3: https://onefairwage.site/. 

Reference 4: One Fair Wage: Ending subminimum pay in America – Saru Jayaraman – 2021. Hopefully I will get around to this one.

Grolier

Yesterday, in the course of a break taken at the very conveniently located Holiday Inn at Solstice Services on the A303, I happened to notice an encyclopedia, about twenty volumes of it, occupying two of the sections of one of those room dividers favoured by the public areas of larger hotels, often used, inter alia, to hold books, plastic pot plants and what the French call bibelots. The sort of stuff you suspect of being bought by the cubic metre from some huge warehouse full of same, located in some industrial estate convenient to the motorway network.

It so happened that, prompted by watching a chunk of a drama about nasty goings-on in the land of the midnight sun, I had looked up the Sámi (of reference 4) in our Chambers Encyclopedia at home, a resepectable encyclopedia dating from the early 1960's. Rather to my surprise, no entry for the Sámi. So here was an opportunity to try again. But extracting the volume for 'S', still no Sámi. BH helpfully suggests that maybe I should try for Lapland in the volume for 'L', Lapps being a rather derogatory Swedish name for the Sámi, not longer used by decently woke people. And there they were, occupying about half a column.

Turning back to the beginning of the book, I found that it also dates from the 1960's, so one wondered how exactly it wound up in the Holiday Inn. Presumably, another warehouse full of such stuff. The publisher was Grolier, now swallowed up by Scholastic, and according to Wikipedia was once strong in the door-to-door encyclopedia business. Which was exactly what this one looked like: decent enough, but cheaply printed and lacking the rather grander editorial wrapping of a Chambers or a Britannica.

I associated to my two days, back in the late 1960's, as a door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias for a rather dubious outfit called Merit, preying rather successfully on the more worthy inhabitants of council tower blocks in and around London, the ones who were keen to better themselves and their children by whatever means they could. The task being to persuade them that buying a large encyclopedia from a company they had never heard of was the way forward. Part of the patter was a story about how they had been especially selected for participation in an important exercise in market research. In my defence, I can say that I was no good at it and did not last very long.

PS 1: the very thing is snapped above, lifted from Abebooks.

PS 2: rather US flavoured. BH learned that the way to refurbish a lawn was to sprinkle seed and fertilizer on the snow during the winter and just let it percolate down to the frost-broken ground, all ready for the Spring.

References

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

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

Reference 3: https://www.scholastic.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi.