Trolley 403

Three Waitrose trolleys captured from a new stash in one of the car parks between Station Approach and the High Street, discovered the evening before. Three being enough to push in a busy High Street, the M&S food hall trolley was left for another occasion -  or another trolley man.

With these three, the Waitrose stack was full to overflowing, poking half a metre out into the walkway. Perhaps a miscalculation on the part of their trolley man, as one might have thought that the shop would be busy, late on a Saturday morning.

Rewarded at home by a day of the sausage, that is to say eight Cumberland sausages from the butcher at Manor Green Road. Fried for about half an hour in rape seed oil (lid on), served hot with boiled potatoes (skin on) and crinkly cabbage. Five and a half of them went that way. Date slice for dessert. A further half was grazed in the afternoon and the last two were taken with mustard and brown bread early evening. English mustard, made up from powder in the old way.

And although I say it myself, cooked this way, over a low heat, the sausages did not stick. Sausages sticking and their skins being torn being the bane of my childhood - when cheap sausages were fried in lard without a lid.

Note that cold, the sausage meat was a deep red, rather than the grey of lesser sausages. Probably something to do with having meat in them, as well as fat and rusk.

PS: the butcher told me that Cumberland might have been where this type of sausage was invented, but as far as he was concerned it was the name of a recipe.

Reference 1: https://www.masterbutchersepsom.co.uk/. Slightly out of date in that the butcher illustrated on the front page has now retired. But the shop lives on under new management!

Trolley 402

An M&S food hall trolley captured in Station Approach, outside the Co-op there. Complete with one empty bottle of wine, one sturdy tumbler and sundry other items of litter. It not being clear from which public house the tumbler had been taken, it has now been consolidated onto our own tumbler shelf, above the hatch, in our own kitchen.

A bit of context

There are around 550,000 deaths a year in England and Wales, that is to say around 1,500 a day on average, rather more in the winter. Most of these are going to be older people.

So, of this total, I find around 25,000 among those aged 65 or more, where the underlying cause of death is given as pneumonia or influenza. Say, in round numbers, 75 a day. And around 90,000 among the same cohort where either of the same two complaints is at least mentioned on the death certificate. Again in round numbers, 250 a day.

All this and more turned up by Bing at the Office for National Statistics at reference 1. More or less all of it downloadable as Excel workbooks onto your own PC.

PS 1: I also remember the days when pneumonia was known as the old man's friend. Better to be carried off by pneumonia than to die a lingering death of something far more unpleasant. But that was before Dignity in Dying was invented. Or much in the way of palliative care.

PS 2: later: quite by chance I read this afternoon in the book by Delbourgo noticed at reference 3 that Isaac Newton spent a lot more time on Biblical computations than planetary ones. With one such computation being that the world would come to an end in 2066. One wonders whether he had plagues (prominent in the Book of Exodus) or climate change in mind?

Reference 1: https://www.ons.gov.uk.

Reference 2: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=delbourgo.

Artemis

A week ago to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Artemis Quartet give us Haydn, stocking filler and Beethoven. That is to say, Haydn Op.20, No.2; Widmann String Quartet No.7; Beethoven Op.130 with Grosse Fuge, Op.133. No encore as is proper after this last. Although I do recall a quartet doing a comic version of 'Happy Birthday' after something similarly if not identically heavy - which worked rather well to break the tension. But I can't find the occasion just presently.

A Scottish version of Artemis

An overcast evening with a cool breeze. Vauxhall tube station crowded. Tube train crowded. A lot of advertisements in the tunnels at Oxford Circus from British Airways about the delights of holidays on West Indian islands - a form of holiday we are going to need to bear down on as part of bearing down on climate change. How long will it be before it is thought a bit naff to boast in the bar at the golf club about your latest jaunt to such an island?  In the way that it eventually became a bit naff to boast in a men's bar in Kampala about your latest rape. And will we be offering the islanders any compensation for the loss of what one imagines is a large part of their income?

A sprinkling of party dressed young people among the shoppers on exit to the street.

An indigent with a fully loaded trolley had taken possession of our bench on the north west corner of Cavendish Square so we carried onto the hall, where the Beckstein Room bar was shut, so we had the place more or less to ourselves when we started our picnic. Although we were amused while we tucked in by a regular - regular in the sense that she is as often as not there when we are - getting really cross when some German thought to make free with her Financial Times and concert programme which she had left on a seat while she went off on some errand or other. Newspaper and programme recovered, she flounced off to a nearby seat to do the crossword.

One of two arts

On the way in it had not been busy and the art noticed on the last visit was still there, along with another, off snap to the left. So I had a play. The story seemed to be that if you stood on of the little figures on one of two slots at the front of the stage a bit of music was played, presumably different piece for each figure. And if you wanted more, you could put another figure on the other slot. Mildly entertaining, perhaps intended for children attending for outreach during the day? Sadly, even the power of Microsoft cannot recover the text back right which probably explains all about it.

The programme

A publicity shot

An excellent concert, with the Widmann being just about long enough; a piece which seemed to contain speeded up versions of well known snippets from Beethoven quartets.

The violinists alternate, a democratic if unusual arrangements. While the Dutch cellist sported a dark top which appeared to have vertical stripes and which managed to be both subdued and flashy at the same time. BH thought Fortuny, and a quick peek at their website suggests that this was quite probable. But not the top with horizontal stripes in the snap above. A brand only known to me for the dresses that Proust's narrator is in the habit of trying to buy Albertine with - unsuccessfully, as it turned out, expensive though they no doubt were.

Furthermore, the fingerboard of the cello appeared green when the light caught it in the right way. Clearly some freak of human colour vision. Or perhaps the brand of lights used by the Hall. Still furthermore, something unsightly has been done with her hair in the course of cutting it into the background. Perhaps Photoshop is not always the miracle it is cracked up to be.

Cock & Lion for a half time drop of Jameson, as is presently the custom.

On the way home, not impressed that the man guarding the gates to the escalators at Vauxhall tube station did not appear to be wearing a uniform. A form of clothing which ought to be mandatory for public duties of that sort.

Just the one aeroplane at our stopover at Earlsfield.

TB empty, lights down but not out when we passed in our taxi at around 2245. So perhaps being difficult about bar stools is not the only failing of the new management. See reference 2.

PS: prompted by the fiddliness of hearing aids and the ubiquity of mobile phones, even among pensioners, I continue to wonder why the people that sell hearing aids don't sell an app to put on your mobile phone with which to control the thing. Without having to fiddle about with little buttons. A gadget which would be very useful in concert halls.

Reference 1: https://www.artemisquartett.de/index.php/en/.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/trolley-379.html.

Trolley 401

This trolley being tweeted rather than captured. A new-to-me mini trolley at Wilko, otherwise a slightly adapted basket with a couple of small wheels at the front. Back home, I find that BH knew all about them.

On the way there, I passed on the same side as the Thames Water tanker chugging away at the start of East Street. It is now dug in, in the sense that they have dug a small trench across the sidewalk, popped the three inch pipe in the trench and backfilled. Dug in for the long pump.

While before I got to the trolley, in the course of stocking up on date bricks at Grape Tree, I noticed that, judging by the number of bags there, they were selling lots of large bags of something called yeast flakes. Apparently a vitamin B supplement, consumed by using the flakes to thicken soups and stews. Not sure about that one, give the rather foul smell of fresh yeast. Notwithstanding, reference 1 tells me that something very similar is favoured by some as a topping for popcorn. And more of a food than a supplement.

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

Fake 102

This higher grade fake was snapped yesterday evening in the cultural basement of Kings Place, otherwise the Guardian building in York Way, next to Kings Cross.

Fake, because what looks to the casual glance like a solid oak table top from a normal viewing position is revealed to be something more complicated when one takes a peek underneath.

Higher grade, because it has all been quite well done, with the underneath looking pretty good too.

I want to be a university teacher

There is a piece in the latest number of NYRB about the dire state of the teaching profession in US universities.

Undergraduate numbers

Teacher numbers

The story seems to be that there has been a long squeeze on unit costs - that is to say costs per student - and this has translated (as in other sectors) into higher salaries and standing for senior staff and lower salaries and standing for junior staff, with well over half the latter being on some kind of zero hours contract, scrabbling around to make ends meet.

At the same time, the number of people who want to make careers in universities - either in teaching or research - hugely exceeds the number of jobs available. In my day, the sector was growing rapidly and there were plenty of jobs available for able people who wanted them - but this no longer seems to be true in the US, with recent PhD's from fancy universities chasing jobs all over the country. A problem which particularly afflicts the humanities. I was slightly irritated by the tone of entitlement in this story, as if people with recent PhD's were somehow entitled to comfortable jobs in universities, perhaps after the fashion of the comfortable lives of the fellows of the colleges of Oxbridge, taking tea in their fellows' gardens during long summer afternoons.

While the idea that university is a great leveller up doesn't seem to work either. Posh kids go to fancy universities, while bog-standard kids go to bog-standard universities. Nearly everybody stays in the same social class in which they arrived in the world.

And as an aside, the UK is held up as an example of how things can be even worse, with our obsession with testing and measuring everything in sight. And if it doesn't turn a profit, dump it.

I thought to turn up some statistics to see what support there was there, and in a brief look at the admirable reference 1, I did not find much. Numbers of undergraduates appears to have peaked around 2010, while numbers of faculty have continued to rise, with the proportion of part-timers actually falling. So while the prospects of a university post for someone with a postgraduate degree in Sanskrit Studies probably are dire, maybe we should take the rest of the story with a pinch of salt, pending deeper digger at reference 1.

PS: I think the term 'enrollment' means total student numbers. That is to say, not just the number who enrolled for the first time in the year in question.

Reference 1: https://nces.ed.gov/. The national centre for education statistics.

Trolley 400

Trolley 400, from Sainsbury's, was captured in an alley off East Street, probably on private land, between the Kiln Lane turning and Fairview Road. The building left may have once been the local Red Cross place for wheel chairs and such like; a point on which I need to consult BH, who has a better memory for such things than I.

Returned, along with another non-scoring trolley picked up by the alley side of their building. Both stacks by the front entrance pretty full, so they must have been quiet on this cold, wet day.

So I have made my intermediate target of 400 trolleys by the end of February. Now the push for 500 by the end of December. The half millennium.

On the way down to the West Street bridge, tweeted a covey of some kind of thrush, probably redwings as there was a flash of green and red.

PS: later: thought by BH to be Red Cross, on points, following Street View on the big screen downstairs. Looks about right, looks to be in about the right place, but not a light bulb moment at all. She points out, quite reasonably, that it is well over ten years since we last visited the place on Red Cross business.

Facebook

I was rather annoyed this morning - annoyed of Epsom even - to read that Facebook are planning to provide unbreakable communications facilities to all comers - all comers who will include a small proportion of criminals and worse.

I believe that governments need, on occasion, to be able to read communications and that it is wrong for large and very profitable corporations like Facebook to block that need.

And as far as the privacy gang is concerned, I would say that we have to trust our elected governments to do this sort of thing. Properly managed, government access to communications is far less of a threat than the ability of said criminals and worse to use platforms like Facebook to do their thing, completely out of sight. Facebook not providing such facilities will not stop them doing their thing, but it will make it harder. Hopefully, too hard for a lot of them.

Governments have been intercepting, opening and reading mail since mail was invented. Ditto telephone conversations. And reasons of state have been around since states were invented, reasons which are still around in the age of the Internet.

Publishers of the printed word - like newspaper proprietors - have long had to take responsibility for what they publish. And if they get it wrong, they might well be damned.

So the Facebooks of this world have got to start taking more responsibility for what they do, for what they are enabling - or eventually they will be squashed.

PS: and it is no part of Facebook's business to provide facilities for dissidents in places where governments are not trustworthy, for one reason or another.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/making-statement.html. The point at which I abandoned this particular ship.

Forests at sea

Prompted by a piece in the Guardian a couple of days ago about how the giant kelp forests in the coastal waters off Tasmania are dying off, had a quick look this afternoon. With these forests, growing to perhaps 50m in height, a good reason to go in for underwater swimming - although it seems unlikely that I will ever make it. These forests must be very impressive when one is in among them. How much like being in a mature forest of pines or cypresses?

From reference 1, I learn that these huge plants are, despite appearances, not really (vascular) plants at all, rather a form of brown algae. But part of a family which make up a large chunk of marine biomass - at least they still do just presently.

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

More pivot table

This by way of follow up to the post about pivot tables at reference 1.

Shortly after that post, I was moved to remind myself about writing programs in Visual Basic. In a couple of hours I had 145 lines of code, a single subroutine, which seemed to do the job, to convert my weight text column in pounds and ounces to a numeric column in grams. From ‘5lbs 9.5oz’ to 2537.28.

Confident enough that I did not bother with any prior analysis and design, I started out with the premise that I had a text field which was likely to start with a number, give or take a few leading spaces.

The next assumption was that this number should be followed by some variation of ‘lbs’.

At each stage, I wrote the results out to a neighbouring column. Peered at the two columns until a decision emerged from the depths about which wrinkle in the results to tackle next.

After a while, I had code which did the job. I even went to the bother of adding a third column to hold the weight rounded to the nearest hundred grams, expressed in hundreds of grams.

Which gave rise to various thoughts about the coding process. At least, about this one.

It was evolutionary, rather than top down, which meant that half way through the process one realised that there was a better way of doing things – but that it was a bit late, short of starting over. A better way of doing things which might have involved a different way of organising the problem, perhaps a few subroutines taking on bits of the work, rather than just the one – and breaking out these subroutines would have made checking and testing rather easier. On the down side, the overheads of having those extra subroutines and passing data between them all.

It also meant that the coding was opportunistic. It sometimes made use of bits which had been put there with one end in mind for some quite different end. I associate to Lieberman in reference 2 talking about the complicated way that function interacts with structure during the evolution of the head, with all  kinds of odd bits of pre-existing structure being co-opted for odd bits of new function.

Which added up to the code being good enough, rather than perfect. The code coped well enough with the data that was there, but would quite probably break if some new sort of data turned up, some new way of doing things which this coder did not know or think about.

I would add that crashing through the problem like this, without preamble or forethought, is not recommended, certainly not for problems which are significantly bigger. It might or might not come right in the end, but there are apt to be some travails on the way. Not best practise – but then, evolution wouldn’t know anything about that.

After the code, I moved onto the chart, where I found that things were still not quite right, with the business of pivot tables not bothering with codes that are not there cropping up again. So the chart of the left is rather distorted by there being codes missing between the two peaks, peaks which are real enough in themselves.

I dealt with this by hand correction of the chart’s input data, that is to say the pivot table tabulated far left. Copy the table to a new part of the worksheet, using paste special to strip out all the pivot table stuff, add in the missing rows and replace the blanks with ‘NA’. Which yields the chart on the right.

A reminder of the rather different problem of the appearance of charts of this sort being very dependent on the scales chosen.

PS: I may say that the two loaves of batch 550 turned out very well, having lost a total of eleven ounces in the cooking, and that batch 551 is now under construction.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-perils-of-pivot-tables.html.

Reference 2: The evolution of the human head - Daniel E Lieberman - 2011.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/no-spatburgunder.html. The last notice of reference 2, from a quite different angle.

Sand

As noticed at reference 1, I have been eying up two bags of sand left by a gatepost in Manor Green Road for some days now. This morning, one of the bags was definitely starting to drift out onto the sidewalk and it was only a matter of time before some animal broke in and the sand starting spreading about. No use to anyone.

So I went bag home, fetched out the barrow and fetched the sand home. It turned out to be two more or less full bags, although one of them had been opened. So our sand heap under the leylandii has been nicely topped up, to the point of needing to top the parapet back up.

In the course of which I tweeted a coal tit in the next bush, making a distinctive ticking noise, with the ticks perhaps a couple of seconds apart. Unusual for me to be able to connect a tweet with a twitter.

Back out to see if today was the day for the 400th trolley, to find that the Ashmore passage was definitely empty. No trolley to be seen anywhere in the vicinity. Or anywhere else in town centre.

But it was the day for tankers, as Thames Water now have two tankers, one large and one small, at the start of East Street, plus a man and a van. No further sign of builders.

Cockerel calls from somewhere near the small field at the bottom of Stones Road, the field noticed at reference 2 and which runs to a small pond in gmaps. Who knows whether traveller or resident is the fowl man.

The largest rat I have seen for a while in the stream, near the culverts bringing water from the far side of Hook Road, at the top of Longmead Road.

Expedition rounded out with a further brick, very slightly chipped at the corner, from the permissive skip. But clean; no call for the bolster on this occasion.

PS: I continue to wonder at the absence of coronavirus cases from Russia, with its long border with China, albeit in a remote part of the world. Perhaps the Siberian cold is an effective barrier, as suggested at reference 3. On the other hand, it seems all too likely that the Russian authorities would keep a firm lid on any such cases for as long as they could get away with it. Hopefully for ever.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-haul.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/01/horselet.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/charging-up-hill.html.

Macbeth one

As a result of watching the Blessed/Lear DVD noticed at reference 1, we got onto the people at Guildford of reference 2, to whose production of Macbeth, in the Holy Trinity church at the top of Guildford's High Street, we went about ten days ago. A play which I last saw at the Young Vic about four years ago, not very kindly noticed at reference 3. Some of the snaps below from Matt Pereira of reference 4.

Blessed as Lear at Guildford?

Holy Trinity stage being used for a wedding

A cold and wet day, a bit late off, because while I had thought to put on my bright red snow jacket from Animal no less (of reference 5), bought for not-skiing in Savoy, I had forgotten my scarf. This meant we arrived a touch late at the station but still managed to jump onto a train leaving at the right time from what might have been the right platform - but which turned out to be going the wrong way. A quick bit of virtual white-boarding and we elected to get off at Ewell East, rather than proceeding to Cheam.

Ewell East

The result of which was that we were able to watch a train coming through which did not stop at Ewell East but which had stopped at Cheam. Not that this made any difference to the eventual arrival time at Guildford. But it did mean we spotted the handsome pair of chimneys, another feature of coal life at British Rail last noticed only a few days ago.

We noticed that Surrey County Council were helping with the maintenance of this marginal station, properly the business of Southern Railways. Presumably deemed to be in Surrey's interest so to do, to keep the place open, with stopping trains.

We wondered about the derelict station in Epsom's Upper High Street, visible from the train. Why had someone not repurposed it? Perhaps for a coven of train-spotters? Perhaps as a train-spotters' heritage centre?

Lots of primroses and some small daffodils at Effingham Junction, a place where I once got near stranded, late at night, as a result of falling asleep on my train. Not a good place to be actually stranded at.

Arrive at a rather wet and windy Guildford to, for once in a while, take something sold from a shed on the platform as a Cornish pasty, in the shelter of a suitable wall. But it was hot, nourishing and reasonably priced. BH was also able to take a paper cup of something sold as tea.

Leaving the station, we scored the fake noticed at reference 6, before proceeding to High Street. Which we ascended, with our eye out for somewhere to eat after the show. Access gushingly denied at Positano, but, quite by chance we landed on the very satisfactory Shardana of reference 7 instead, another Italian establishment, of which more later.

Arrived at the church, where we got through the quaintly amateur ticketing process. Church pretty full, with a lot of children, presumably 'doing Macbeth'. I chickened out of getting the cover far enough off the grand piano at the side to score it. Probably be OK if the church was not in use. But I did notice that the chandeliers had been properly hung: regular readers will recall that the improper hanging of the replica of the Barbarossaleuchter at Buckfast Abbey has been a source of some irritation.

The play was put on by a cast of eight tier two professionals on the area in front of the screen in front of the chancel apse, with a selection of junk, large and small, used to build the set. All of which made the notice asking us not to put drinks on the font to the side of the church look a bit silly. Quite a lot of stuff to move before the service the following morning.

There was a certain amount of cross dressing, some of which also looked a bit silly. Fresh faced girl of twenty playing the hardened warrior by putting on a black beret and waving an assault rifle? But, to be fair to them, the Globe nearly always failed pretty miserably at getting thirty-something, sofa types to pull it off as serious people - at least in the ten years or so that we patronised the place.

Three witches

View of setting

I am sorry to say that the play did not altogether come off for me, with there being a certain amount of nodding in the first half. Which meant that quite a lot of important scenes had either been cut by them or by me. Got on rather better in the second half - but they failed to deliver much of the menace. They also failed to take advantage of the luvvies' smoking dispensation. Perhaps they were too young to have ever smoked enough to care.

Perhaps it is something about the place. Some years ago we were at the same church for a talk, from a world expert, about the work which led to the authorised version of the Bible or the book of Common Prayer, I forget which - either way a topic which is interesting enough. But I still missed a good part of it through nodding.

A Weston by marriage

On the way out we came across this memorial to a Weston by marriage. That is to say a pseudo-Weston of Sutton Place: according to Wikipedia he was really a Webbe who happened to inherit the place and take the name. After the first world war, it fell into the hands of a succession of rich foreigners, with the present incumbent being an Uzbek oligarch, one Alisher Usmanov. One of the few stately homes within range which has not been taken over by the National Trust and public access to this important bit of national heritage is more or less zero.

The wine

And so to Shardana, which appeared to be run by a family from Sardinia. And despite outward appearances, a smart, comfortable space inside, pleasantly busy by the time we left. Bread good. Lasagne good, if a little saucy. Tiramisu not so good. Wine good. Discussion with the waitress about white and yellow grappa. I asked for yellow, she smiled nicely and brought white. Which was fine. All in all, a good meal and we shall be back if occasion arises.

Out to just make the 1858 which suited nicely.

PS 1: we wondered about the connection between Shardana and Sardinia, similar looking words, and Wikipedia confirms that there is indeed a link at reference 8. Albeit a bit tenuous.

A famous breed of fire engine, somewhere in Foreign

PS 2: somewhere along the way we were reminded of the once famous firm of Dennis of Guildford, inter alia, once responsible for many of the world's fire engines. Also quite a lot of buses.

PS 3: presumably on the strength of the Animal brand being mentioned above, Google has got around this morning (Thursday) to including an advertisement from Animal at the top of my 'promotions' tab in my email box. Dream on!

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/blessed-lear.html.

Reference 2: https://www.guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2016/01/mcpanto.html.

Reference 4: http://commercial.mattpereira.co.uk/.

Reference 5: https://www.animal.co.uk/. Not clear about the reported connection with H. Young (Operations) Ltd [GB].

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/fake-101.html.

Reference 7: https://www.shardanarestaurant.com/.

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

Trolley 399

A Sainsbury's trolley, captured at the entrance to the British Gas site off East Street, I think the one that includes what look like a couple of disused gas holders. Where something was going down as a concrete mixer wagon was in attendance.

Front wheel lock present, but not deployed. I suspect Sainsbury's of having given up on these locks, with far fewer of their trolleys seeming to sport them. But see reference 3, from when I was taking more interest in the matter, at the back end of 2016.

Returned to the stacks at the Kiln Lane site, from where I took a new route home. Tweeting a thrush in some bushes on the way.

Back in Manor Green Road, the permissive skip (of reference 4) had taken a new load of masonry rubble and I was able to retrieve another brick, with one corner just slightly chipped. There was a loose pile of what looked like entire bricks next to the skip, perhaps intended for reuse or resale, and I thought better of having one of those.

On return, celebrated by a visit to Majestic Wine, where for our sauvignon blanc I broke half way out of the Villa Maria mould - at around £8 a pop - to try the new-to-us Waimea of reference 1 - at around £10 a pop. No reason for this particular brand, one of what seemed to be dozens available at the price, but the theory is that if Majestic charge more, it ought to be better. We shall see. On the downside they no longer had their own brand Calvados smelling of cider and I had to settle for something fancier from the Jean-Roger Groult of reference 2, who claims to have collected gongs for the best Calvados in the world in 2014 and 2016. Once again, we shall see.

PS: this late spurt means that I am back on course to make 400 trolleys by the end of this month. Making 500 by the end of the year still plausible.

Reference 1: https://www.waimeaestates.co.nz/.

Reference 2: https://www.calvados-groult.com/en/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/12/trolley-security.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/fake-97.html.

Trolley 398

Another M&S food hall trolley from the Ashmore passage - this one with no Wanzl badge that I could see. Perhaps you only get such badges on the larger trolleys.

The trolley behind the railings, first noticed at reference 1, has become something of a fixture. Hopefully I will get to meet the owner one day, to chew over pros and cons.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-near-thing.html.

Trolley 397: the finale

This smart new trolley from the M&S food hall was returned this morning - and I was impressed how much better the sidewalks are for trolleys between home and M&S - that is to say Manor Green Road and West Hill - than they are along East Street. Perhaps the residents of the former are more apt to complain and get a better service.

We note for the record that M&S buy their trolleys from Wanzl, who seem to have got a very strong on the classier end of the shopping trolley market. One is tempted to buy shares, but asking Bing for the share price turns up nothing - and that together with the Wikipedia entry suggests that Wanzl is a private company, perhaps still largely owned by Wanzls.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanzl_(company).

Toast

For the first time in a while, we made some toast with one of our heritage, telescopic toasting forks this afternoon, probably acquired at a car boot sale at Hook Road Arena. Heritage because they are more or less identical - in my memory at least - to the fork used for making toast at family gatherings, on Sunday afternoons, at The Thorpe, in Hemingford Grey. Around sixty years ago now, a time when it was still a village cul-de-sac, rather than a dormitory housing estate - mostly built on a field once owned by the owner of the fork.

The toast was made with some interesting ryeish-bread, sold sliced and said to be from the Netherlands. A very fine grained, smooth sort of bread - which, as it turned out, made rather good toast. Served with butter and honey. We were joined by various dolls, animals and cushions.

A bit fake, as this fire is more for appearances than heat, and not as hot as the real gas fire used at The Thorpe. A fire in which the gas jets played up a complicated, white ceramic fireback which soaked up the heat nicely. Nevertheless, this fake did make toast - and one was glad enough of the long spoon, as it were.

I had thought that I had come across such a gas fire with such a fireback not that many years ago, and posted it, but not a trace to be found this evening.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/suburban-bliss.html. A fake from before the time at which the series of fakes was inaugurated, as can be seen at reference 2.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/08/fake-2.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/12/memory-lane.html. A visit to The Thorpe. But no mention of toast.

My mobile, my doctor

Back in 2016-2017 I had a brush with something called Descriptive Experience Sampling, a technique for gathering information about what I call frames of consciousness, developed by one Russell Hurlburt. See, for example, reference 1. I have since wondered, on and off, how one might do better.

Then yesterday, in an email from the Kurzweil organisation, I was pointed at the 2015 study which can be found at references 2 and 3.

Leaving aside learned comments about statistics, surveys and methodology, it seems to me entirely likely that you could train a mobile phone to detect depression in the owner. In this case, it seems that the authors had a pretty good stab at it using no more than information about where the mobile phone was and about when it was being used, information which could be uploaded to the central database by app. In which connection, mobile phones have the great advantages of being connected, sophisticated devices which most people want to carry around with them, more or less wherever they are and whatever they are doing.

It occurs to me that it would not take much to add lots more to this basic information, with the consent of the owners, while avoiding intruding on the privacy of those with whom they are in contact, if not communication.

One could, without much difficulty, add information about stuff like air temperature, body temperature, blood pressure and heart beat rate. Indeed, I believe that there are plenty of joggers and worse out there who already do something of the sort.

One could analyse the speaker’s voice for signs of his or her emotional state. One could analyse word frequencies to the same end – which would not require the central computer to know anything about what was actually being said – which might worry the subject, the speaker.

One could do something with knowledge of the websites to which the mobile was connected. And for how long. Or perhaps the search terms which people feed into those websites.

Perhaps one could make use of knowledge of the micro-movement of the mobile, derived from the on board gyroscope, as apposed to the macro-movement, the location data.

One could certainly add something like Hurlburt’s random bleeper, to sample the subject’s state of mind. This would be something of a departure from the model so far, in that it would require the subject to actually do something, rather than just quietly collecting information in the background. But I am sure that there are plenty of people out there who would be happy to participate.

All in all, one could collect huge amounts of information about people, their state of being and their state of mind. And I imagine that there are plenty more people who would not mind this being done to them. Who might well regard it as contributing to science, as indeed it would be. Or at least, should be.

And if they checked the box for social worker, they would not be too surprised if a social worker turned up on their doorstep, worried about their state of mental or physical health.

Should we be worried?

PS 1: one comment about methodology might be the use of the one side of A4, PHQ-9 questionnaire at reference 4 to self-screen for depression. Does one really get useful results from such a tool?

PS 2: in the margins, I have learned all something called Craig's Lists, important as a listings service in the US, notionally not-for-profit. Something which, it seems, Judge Judy has known about for a long time.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/progress-report-on-descriptive.html.

Reference 2: Mobile Phone Sensor Correlates of Depressive Symptom Severity in Daily-Life Behavior: An Exploratory Study - Sohrab Saeb; Mi Zhang; Christopher J Karr; Stephen M Schueller; Marya E Corden; Konrad P Kording; David C Mohr – 2015.

Reference 3: https://www.egr.msu.edu/~mizhang/papers/2015_JMIR_MobileDepression.pdf. Open access source for reference 2.

Reference 4: http://www.cqaimh.org/pdf/tool_phq9.pdf. From Pfizer Inc. - who, I dare say, sell important anti-depressant potions.

A troll?

A clutch of comments on my blogs has suddenly appeared in one of my email boxes, in foreign, so I have no idea what they say, if anything. From a shiny new blogger with an empty profile.

Perhaps what they call a troll on the news. A new experience for me - and let's hope it does not become tiresome.

PS 1: note that Google clearly knows how old I am, perhaps how healthy, and thinks I am a proper target for advertisements for funerals. Is whoever is paying for them getting their monies' worth? Does Google aggressively target people who might pay for such, real toe in the front door stuff? Or do the marks just come to them?

PS 2: I need to check up on whether a word like 'Google' counts as plural or singular for the purposes of declining verbs, pronouns and such like. Does the mixture above count as error? Does anyone younger than I care about such stuff these days?

Reference 1: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/72057/11-swindling-slang-terms-grifters. For entertainment about marks and others. I thought it best to check.

The haul

The haul, not very visible in the previous post.

One estate agent's pole, slightly used. The removal of the four broken off screws took a surprising amount of force: perhaps I should have used a nail bar, delightfully known to the French as a pince-Monseigneur.

One length of chain, the sort of thing slung along lines of short posts between front gardens and sidewalks. A sturdy chain which should add value to a variety of children's activities. It would, for example, make a fine enclosure for a selection of farm animals, perhaps pigs.

One double bag from BT. Filled with sand and used to hold down the temporary signs used to mark works on sidewalks and roads. One of three that I have been eying up, but I found two rather heavy, even with a pole to sling them off. Not helped by the occasional gust of wind. A bag which takes my total to three. Something else to add value to children's games.

I have also been eying up a couple of bags of sand left by someone's front gate post in Manor Green Road. One unopened, intended to be used underneath the bricks and stones used to pave front gardens. One about half full. I full sure they have been left there in the hope that someone will carry them off, and our own little stash of sand, kept against an occasional need for the stuff, is running low.

Trolley 397

Nothing in the usual places yesterday (that is to say Sunday) morning, although there was a vegan market in the market square. A vegan market which appeared to be mainly devoted to selling replicas of things like fish fingers, pasties and pies. Had I thought it polite to take a photograph, I might have scored something as a fake.

I picked up a couple of bits on the way, so was glad to come across this trolley at the corner of Manor Green Road and Lower Court Road to put them it. They were getting a bit heavy.

An M&S food hall trolley, now in our back garden, where it may provide some entertainment today, perhaps an excursion to see the ducks, and which will be returned tomorrow.

The perils of pivot tables

This morning saw the kneading of the 550th batch of bread in the nine years I have been doing it, that is to say since early 2011. Nothing unusual about it, beyond the dough being a little damper than usual and there being a marked change of texture (for the better) during the short pause in kneading for the first weighing. It also lost about half an ounce of its 5lbs 9.5oz by the time of the second weighing, presumably evaporation of that much water.

But I was prompted to try a pivot table, a feature of Microsoft Excel last noticed at reference 2, selecting for the purpose the 'weight of dough' field, with the results snapped left, legible if you click to enlarge.

The first oddity is the length of the resultant table, the result of the weight field actually being a text field, mainly expressed in pounds and ounces - for which see reference 1. Excel, quite properly, has sorted this text field alphabetically for the purposes of presentation of the pivot table - but a sort which does not present ascending weight.

Which confuses the chart on the right, although the two clusters around 4lbs and 5lbs are fair enough, with today's batch in the middle of the latter cluster.

The second oddity is the number of records found, 539, 11 short of the actual number. This looks likely to be the result of Excel dropping those rows for which there is no weight recorded, not even a bit of text saying not available, this despite it being pedantic about including '(blank)' as the last row in the table.

I sometimes toy with the idea of writing a bit of code to convert this text field to a numeric field with grams, but somehow never get around to it.

In the meantime, let it all stand as a warning, following that somewhere in reference 2, about the need to do some system analysis and design before embarking on data collection. Which in this case, might have resulted in the existing weight of dough column being rendered in numeric grams and in an additional weight of dough column, rounded to the nearest 10 grams, for the purpose of pivot tables in due course.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/house-of-lords.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-sort-of-pivot-table.html.

Trolley 396

Captured in the Ashmore passage. I had to put the Waitrose trolley at the other end of the string for convenience of wheeling, the M&S food hall trolleys being slightly smaller.

Waitrose regular stack also empty. M&S regular stack non-empty. And while M&S had a very poor selection of spirits, Waitrose could do both Bells and kippers - which last might have come from Craster but which were some way from being red herrings. Yellow herrings more like, at least from the skin side. But the Saturday girl who served me, hoped that I would enjoy the rest of my weekend with a fervour that almost convinced one that she meant it. A for effort.

Home to Quiche Lorraine for lunch (bacon and egg flan to Brexiteers), served with potato salad (potatoes, half an onion, clove of garlic & a moderate amount of Heinz) and green salad; stewed apple with blackberry to follow. Rounded out with some peanuts in their shells from Waterloo Road. Very good they were too, even if we did not boil them for twenty minutes and then serve them with salt, as suggested by the vendor, very possibly from the Chinese community here in Epsom.

PS: later, we wondered about peanut hygiene.Years ago, when we last used to buy peanuts in their shells in a regular way, they had nearly always been lightly cooked, which we assumed to be a hygiene thing to kill off any lurking bugs. This despite the fact that the market in the middle of Cambridge used to sell uncooked, unshelled peanuts in the early 1960's. This despite the fact that uncooked peanuts tasted much better - but to get those you had to buy plastic packets of shelled peanuts, often mixed with raisins. While the present peanuts have not been cooked and have a distinctly organic look about them. They might actually once have been in the ground, as one of their names suggests. This light cooking is also a feature of foreign hazelnuts - kiln dried being a phrase which comes to mind - and don't taste anything like as good as fresh hazelnuts can taste in consequence. Probably a matter best not pursued.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/a-day-at-library.html. A previous mention of aforesaid kilns. Another day, as it happens for visiting an academic library, as per reference 2. Something I almost never did when I was a student, and then not for the books.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/courtauld-second-campaign.html.

Trolley 395

Having, I think for the first time ever, having traversed the footpath heading south from over the footbridge over the railway at the bottom of Ewell's West Street, all the way to its exit into Fairview Road, just short of East Street, I captured this trolley between the Fairview Road and Kiln Lane turnings.

By way of a change returned to the empty regular trolley stack outside the Sainsbury's front door, via Fairview Road. They must have been busy, late this Saturday morning.

Back down East Street, where at the Hook Road turning, we still had the Thames Water pumping away outside our strip club. Someone must be paying Thames Water a lot of money, with pumping about to enter its second month. See reference 1.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/waterworks.html.

Spring is coming

This clump of celandines down the Longmead Road was looking well this morning. Much further ahead than the ones at the bottom of our garden. Perhaps these last being in among a lot of trees and bushes makes a difference, absence of most of the leaves notwithstanding.

The House of Lords

The House of Lords, sometimes lauded for its moderating influence on some of the more daffy stuff sent up by the Commons, has also, from time to time, been a redoubtable bastion of reaction. Think, for example, of the Reform Bill and independence for Ireland and India. So I was interested to come across another example of the latter.

The occasion being a dip into the collection of titbits of French history first noticed at reference 1, a dip which turned up a titbit about measurement filed under 1875.

It seems that the metric system of measurement was given a big push by the French revolution, with the revolutionaries being keen to sweep away all the measurement junk left over from the Middle Ages. But Napoleon, keen in principle, saw that forcing the pace on suspicious country people was not worth the candle and backed off. Getting their young men to join his armies was much more important.

The metric system was eventually adopted in France in the 1830's.

There was a big push to go international in the 1860's, but the UK law to this effect, passed by the House of Commons, was rejected by the House of Lords.

But then, after the French were smashed in the Franco-Prussian war, it was thought best to give the French a harmless consolation prize and what became the BIPM of reference 2 came into being at Sèvres, in what is now in the south western suburbs of Paris. The same place as the posh pots of reference 3. Metric went on to rule much of the world, but the UK remained on the side lines with its inches, feet, yards, poles, chains, furlongs and so on.

We finally got on board as part of joining the European Union in the 1970's. But perhaps now we will be able to get out from under this particular bit of offensive, continental tutelage. Rees-Moggers, notate bene.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/metermorphosen.html. Readers are left to work out why this post is called what it is for themselves.

Reference 2: https://www.bipm.org/en/about-us/.

Reference 3: https://www.sevresciteceramique.fr/. The source of the snap above, a pot made in 1810 to celebrate the first Napoleon; the Théière Miniature.

Charging up the hill

I was struck by a picture in today's Guardian of Chinese horse policemen charging up a hill to keep some remote community posted about the status of the coronavirus. For all the world like a Chinese re-tread of some John Wayne movie.

Google failed to find anything like it, although it correctly identified the snow and came up with a lot of snowy images with a very similar colour mix. While I failed to find the picture on the Guardian website, and I have had to be content with my mobile's take on the hard copy and a very inferior version of what seems to be the same picture taken from the Daily Mail website - although to be fair to them, they may have degraded the public domain version of the digital image for commercial reasons.

I associated to an observation from one of Scott's expeditions to the Antarctic (more than a hundred years ago now) to the effect that common colds and such like ailments couldn't take the polar cold and that the expedition in question was more or less free of them. Perhaps coronavirus doesn't play the same game.

Pork soup

We thought today that it was time to have another go at pork soup, a dish which has fallen somewhat into abeyance, having once been a regular item - some evidence for which can be seen at reference 1.

Start with three pints of water, eventually made up to four pints.

At 1000, add four ounces of pearl barley to the cold water to soak for a bit.

At 1145, add four sticks of celery, one large and one small onion. Bring to the boil and simmer for a bit.

At 1215, add about 12oz of Irish pork tenderloin, coarsely chopped. Continue to simmer.

At 1250, add two large leeks, sliced crosswise. Bring back to the boil and continue to simmer. The leeks were an accident due to operational problems in the white cabbage supply chain - but in the event they worked very well. Better, we thought, than the savoy cabbage which was option 2.

At 1300, add six button mushrooms. Caps halved, stalks chopped. Plus a few left over potatoes. Small, with their skins on.

Served at 1305 it did very well, with perhaps two thirds gone at its first outing. No bread taken on this occasion. Rounded off with left over plum crumble.

PS: the snap is of a fine show of daisies snapped this morning at Tchibo corner on the Blenheim Road on the Longmead estate. They were doing really well and they clearly like the shelter and sun under these south facing windows. And checking, I discover that Tchibo is a German company into a lot of other stuff besides coffee, which is what I know them for, at least in Germany. Founded in the year of my birth. See reference 2.

PPS: checking some more, I find that I have noticed daisies here before, more or less at the very same spot, at reference 3, last April. And just around the corner from the pyramid orchid of reference 4. What is it about having coffee in the air?

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=pork+tenderloin+soup+cabbage&max-results=20&by-date=true.

Reference 2: https://www.tchibo.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/spring-flowers.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/mystery-flower.html.

Courtauld: second campaign

Lat week I followed up the first Courtauld campaign, noticed at reference 1, with a second, more successful campaign.

The record

An overcast morning, with a strong possibility of rain. Storm Dennis was on its way. Past lots of fly posting by the heritage people about the proposal to convert two houses at the top of Clayhill Green into a housing estate.

The site of the proposed housing estate

The two houses being the large one top centre in the snap from gmaps above and the small one, built at the bottom of the garden of the large one, bottom centre. The very heritage, leaning brick wall just visible to the left. A wall so old that the bricks crumble under the attacks of the weather and the mortar falls out. With the jumble top right now part of the flats noticed, for example, at reference 3. I wondered how much had been spent to get the proposal to a state in which it could be looked at by our planning committee - which led to the estimate of some tens of thousands of pounds. But who carries the risk that it will all come to nothing? Whose money is being speculated? A speculation which earned the front page headline 'conservation consternation' in our free newspaper.

I captured the trolleys I had spotted the evening before, as noticed at reference 2. Pausing to admire the fine new raised terrace being laid outside Wetherspoon's. A regular explained that it was all being paid for by Wetherspoon's and that it would make a fine place to sit out on on a summer's evening. Pint and perhaps fag in hand. Maybe fags will be banned from the new terrace, and one will have to decamp to one of the other benches being scattered about the market place?

Manufacturing

On the platform, I was pleased to see from this sticker on the bottom of a camera pole that we were still able to make things. In this case in a former coal town in west Wales called Ammanford, presumably an anglicisation of something Welsh.

HSBC on message

I was also pleased to see that HSBC is spending a lot of money to promote a more inclusive attitude to origins.

Somewhere along the way to Waterloo, I was able to admire a track-side shed, built in brick with a corrugated asbestos roof and a substantial chimney, about the size of a large garden shed and graffitied on one side. From the days when coal was a free-good with British Rail with great piles of the stuff everywhere. And I remember once, seeing a much smaller track-side shed, about the size of an outdoor privy - but still including a substantial chimney. Never worked out what the point of it was, stuck out in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere.

From Waterloo to Shorts Gardens to stock up on cheese. The usual couple of pounds of Lincolnshire Poacher, plus a spot of something called Durras. In the shop, as on the website at reference 5, it looked a bit holey, which to me is a good sign.

Wheel cakes from Bing

Over the road to visit Wheel Cake Island in Seven Dials Market, a newish and new to me venture, where I bought three of their cakes, three different flavours (of perhaps fillings), hot off the stand, not unlike but rather smaller than that above. I wasn't sure about their durability so I ate one on the spot, and rather good it was too. The other two survived to be enjoyed by BH later in the day.

From down to the Aldwych and the Courtauld Institute. Where the first thing to report was fashion week, seemingly being celebrated in or in the vicinity of King's College. Swarms of press people, fashion people, young and old. Lots of very peculiar clothes. All right on top of the very stand where I wanted to park my Bullingdon, which I proceeded to do, to amused glances from all and sundry.

Tried to get into the Insitute through the main entrance to King's, the quickest route to its temporary home in the basement, but a zealous security guard wasn't having it. A mere member of the public was not allowed on the grounds of the college - so I had to walk around through the Somerset House entrance, which perhaps added fifty yards to my journey. By way of a contrast, the Institute was very welcoming and I found myself in the right part of their basement stacks without having to leave my name, my passport or anything else. And do please free to photograph anything that takes your fancy. Light might be better over there.

The first page of the article of interest

A view of the stacks

A traditional specialist library, with all sorts of stuff about art. Including what I wanted. Read on the spot and photographed for future reference. Another tranche of data about the Barbarossaleuchter, including the fact that the copy at Buckfast was more a replica of what it was, than what it is, a lot of the original decoration having been lost over the years. Confirmation that the hanging and placement of the corona was deeply significant - and the perhaps they had been a bit careless with that side of things at Buckfast. Maybe a next step is to see what the people at Buckfast can tell me about the replication.

Wind was getting up from the wrong side of Waterloo Bridge, but I made it across without incident. Visited Smith's for the Guardian (and the regular Friday checkout girl) and M&S for a spot of festive fare and so home to a St. Valentine's Day dinner, taken in our case at 1800 sharp. I might say that M&S Waterloo Station seemed to have a better selection of wine that M&S Epsom.

The wine, from M&S

Haggis with boiled vegetables, Durras with biscuits, a little chocolate. All good. And washed down with a Pouilly-Fumé, possibly an M&S own brand, but entirely acceptable. Possibly rounded off with a spot of Bells.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/courtauld-first-campaign.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/trolleys-391-and-392.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/zestan-rules.html.

Reference 4: https://www.altron.co.uk/index.html.

Reference 5: http://www.durruscheese.com/.