Town Centre

My first visit to town centre this morning, the first time for about a fortnight, the occasion being my warfarin test - the decision having been that this should go ahead.

Town pretty quiet, although I did pass maybe half a dozen people heading back up the hill with bags from Waitrose. At a safe distance, naturally.

I was able to inspect the new terrace outside Wetherspoons, sadly without any customers. Hopefully it will look well later in the year when things get back to normal. And when it is busy, we probably won't notice what looks like sloppy finishing of the steps - a pity given the amount that must have been spent. Or, as they say, don't spoil the ship for a ha'p'orth of tar. And digressing, what I did not know was that the ship in question is a corruption of sheep - for which see reference 1 - mainly about something called instrumentation tubing but also including a reference to Sandvik, presumably the same people as the up and coming manufacturer of saws for carpenters when I was very young. Competing strongly with the proper native brands like Spear & Jackson: good blades, but plastic handles, which last my hands have never been very keen on.

Several trolleys about, but I resisted the temptation to tidy up. That will have to wait, at least as far as I am concerned, until things calm down a bit. And sadly, this does threaten the end year target of 500 trolleys. In any event, it looks as if I shall be busy in the Autumn.

The surgery was on a proper war footing, front door locked and entry by ringing on the back door. I didn't see any other patients, although the three receptionists sounded busy on their phones. Furthermore, I passed the test on this occasion, which means I am in the clear until well into May, which is a long time off.

Grape Tree, my supplier of brick dates, was closed when I left the surgery, so no dates - with us being down to two bricks now. The young lady who often serves me was there and perhaps she was planning to open later, but that did not amount to an essential journey. Waitrose, my usual supplier of bread flour, was open with a queue outside of maybe half a dozen people. But I was never much good at queues and we do have the flour from Carr's (of reference 2) to be going on with. So didn't do that one either.

And so back home to brick removal action.

PS: I suppose I never reached the sheep, because one does use tar on boats, not to say ships, at least the wooden walled ones. Both for painting and for caulking. And Simenon talks about the stuff in his passages about canal life.

Reference 1: https://www.valve-world.net/blogs/73/a-haporth-of-tar.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/flour-supply.html.

Threes

Yesterday evening we finished what I think is our third viewing of the 1967 BBC version of the Forsyte Saga, all 26 episodes of it, glowingly written up at reference 1. With an extra viewing for BH who took in the original at the time it was first transmitted, and when it was the subject of earnest discussion among fellow candidates for A level in GCE English, on the upstairs of the bus to school.

It did us quite well for a third viewing in around two years of a fifty year old, black and white original. Quality black and white, rather than the rather unreliable colour of the same period.

One of the twists in the plot is the lady first right forgiving her husband, the gentleman second right, for lapsing with his former (unconsummated) love, the by then married lady (with a young child by her husband) fourth right. As it happens, something of the same sort happened in the story just noticed at reference 3, with the detective lady forgiving her fiancé for lapsing with the menopausal lady. In both cases the forgiving ladies blame the other women, both bad, albeit in rather different ways.

Another curiosity was quite liking the series, while disliking more or less everybody in it. The only decent people seemed to be the servants - and that was probably only because we did not get to see so much of them. The snap above, turned up by Bing, includes the upstairs part of the cast needed for the second half of the series. Downstairs out of sight, as is proper.

PS: and another three in that after a blank Sunday-Monday, a trap was sprung for a middle size mouse Monday-Tuesday, making a total of three mice in the series. Pretty little animals, even if they are a pest near houses. With Joey's help we will get there in the end.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forsyte_Saga_(1967_TV_series).

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=forsyte. The main event looks to have been in the middle of 2018. I can't find any record of purchase in Amazon, so perhaps it was a fiver for the box from Computer Exchange (presently closed to personal shoppers).

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/token-lady.html.

Token lady

Vol.VI of the collected works is a collection of short stories from the period between the first and second series of Maigret stories - observing here in passing that Maigret retired at the end of the first series, retired to the point of having tidied up a nephew in difficulties with the milieu in a case taken after his retirement, a case in which Simenon could generate a bit of interest by pointing up all the difficulties arising from trying to do police work from the outside. I think the second series starts in medias res. I will no doubt find out in a few days.

Short stories which I have mostly found a bit tiresome. Maybe, in origin, the sort of thing that would have been published in a newspaper or a magazine - but too short for me. One's brain goes to all the bother of engaging in a new story and then it is over: I like a bit more return for all that effort at the beginning.

But at the end of the volume we have a short collection called Nouvelles Exotiques, in which the stories are a little longer and have the added piquancy of being set in foreign parts, mostly in the French African colonies of the time, full of louche expatriates with too much time on their hands and who take too much drink. Otherwise, reference 1.

This story is set on a small British ship, taking both cargo and passengers, which runs between Tahiti and Australia. A French pair take on the leading roles, which enables Simenon to make a bit of fun at the expense of his caricatured English, including a milady of menopausal years who is rather too inclined to take her pleasure with young men from the lower classes, of the wrong colour even, who cross her path.

But the real novelty is that the amateur sleuth in this story is the young lady of the French pair. The first and only time that Simenon allowed a lady, never mind a young lady, such an important role. Well fairly important. Amounting to a bit of feminine intuition - this despite her unmarried state - plus a bit of eyelash fluttering. Fluttering in the past at the young man who is the secretary of the governor of Tahiti, on the strength of which she flutters her eyelashes at the young telegraphist on the ship, to get him to send a telegram to the secretary. On which the secretary digs up the necessary and the job is done, without our needing to leave the ship.

Milady has falsely claimed that her jewels were stolen while she was on the ship to avoid public scandal at their having been stolen in the margins of a peccadillo in the margins of a louche night club in Tahiti. She is allowed plenty of rope by her husband (a minor ambassador somewhere in South America, absent for the duration), but not public scandal.

PS: a new to me phrase, arising when the passengers of our ship are sitting around in the saloon, a bit suspicious and cross with each other: '... on se regarda en chiens de faïence'. Which I thought rather good.

Reference 1: L'Enquête de Mademoiselle Doche - Simenon - circa 1944. Being one of the Nouvelles Exotiques in Vol.VI of the collected works.

Cups and crosses

I quote from Archpriest Sergey Uspensky of reference 1: 'I won’t even consider this reason as a possibility of infection transmission because I firmly believe that the Body and Blood of Christ cannot be a source of transmission of any deadly infection. And the reason for this is not only my faith but also my practical life experience of many years of ministry'. Dated 26th March.

I got to this gentleman as a result of being shown a picture of a service at Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg by MSN News on starting my laptop this morning. From the Guardian. From someone described as Peter Kovalev/Tass, presumably a real news photographer working for the TASS agency. In any event, searching for him, turned up the present photograph.

First thought was that all those old Bolsheviks must be tutting up on their clouds. All the work that they put in to stamp out faith and superstition from Mother Russia. Nearly a century of state sponsored atheism was not enough to kill them off.

Second thought was that the Russians are a few weeks behind us on the pandemic curve, and it is only a bit more than a fortnight ago that we went to the theatre - so I had better not be too sanctimonious about their going to church yesterday. Even so, a pity that they have not learned from the mistakes of others.

Third thought was about how bad things have to get before the state has to start bearing down on this sort of thing. How do we balance what we are pleased to call the freedom of the press with the state's take on the common good? How do we bear down, given that the Internet is diffuse by design? Do the Chinese have a point when they talk about a redesign, a rebuild?

Reference 1: https://www.fort-russ.com/. I know nothing about this outfit - but this first sample is not too promising.

Reference 2: https://tass.com/. A news agency which seemingly dates from more than ten years before the revolution. Whereas I had always thought it was the voice of the revolution.

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/ultimate-outing.html. Thursday, 12th March.

Bricks

A lazy day on the bricks today with just over two heaps, that is to say 36 bricks or 4.788km. Along the way establishing that seven bricks in a row is about as many as I can count just by looking at them. There is scanning action with eight.

Lazy, because I was duty chef for lunch, lunch which took the form of macaroni cheese with boiled crinkly cabbage. I had to take a lot of liberties with the recipe in the usually reliable Radiation Cookbook, as I thought it had got it largely wrong. For example, they suggest what I thought was far too much cheese, more by weight than the macaroni. But it served to remind me of the ingredients needed and the ratio of fat to flour.

Nine ounces of macaroni proved more than the two of us could manage in one go and seven would probably have been enough. Balance due to hit the microwave tomorrow.

PS: on the trap scene, this morning we had one trap sprung, one small dead mouse, cleanly killed, and two traps untouched. We will keep going until we draw another blank.

A very short history of computing

This by way of a preamble to a post to come about the much discussed question of cookies, prompted by the article at reference 2. I proceed by way of a series of scenarios, very roughly in chronological order of appearance, starting in the mid 1970’s, about the time I arrived in computing, not then called IT. A history which focusses on the relations between individuals, now often at home, and large, central computers in data centres – and concludes that we do indeed need cookies – or some equivalent device.

A time when most computers were in governments and large corporations and spent a lot of their time processing administrative records of one sort or another, for example birth registrations, bank accounts and insurance records. Records which were often created by data entry clerks, fast and accurate, but not needing to know much about what they were doing otherwise. Since which time, the pen-pushing, knowledgeable clerk, once running in large herds like the buffalo, has become an endangered species.

A half century during which the price, power and performance of central computers, storage, communications, terminals and personal computers has changed beyond all recognition. With the shifting relativities of these components shifting the balance of power backwards and forwards, rather as changes in the relative prices of steel and concrete shift the designs of large buildings.

During which time the complexity of the software running on this equipment has also increased beyond all recognition. No one person can even sketch out the whole of it any more – and is only kept manageable at all by subcontracting lots of work out to standardised components.

Figure 1

Our first scenario, left in the figure above, is a mainframe computer, perhaps something like an ICL 1904 running George III. Such a computer is capable of running quite a lot of programs at the same time. But very roughly speaking, these programs have their own code and data areas, fixed for the duration of the run, and do not talk to each other. They are all running independently – although once a program has stopped and has released its data, that data might be re-used by some other program. All the knowledge and all the work is in the one place.

Figure 2

This is illustrated in the figure above. Our program and its data have been loaded into segment [α, β] of memory in the computer, which might, in those days, have run to 100,000 of our bytes. Sometimes, this would have been a large proportion of the memory available, sometimes a small proportion. But whatever it was, it was fixed for the duration of the run. The program ran by executing one instruction after another, keeping its place by means of a pointer, called a cursor, until it executed a stop instruction. Which may have not happened, at least not in reasonable time, in which case the operator had to intervene, from on high, as it were.

In this example, the cursor is at A and the instruction is to use the data at locations B, C and D to compute something to be put in location E. By default, the cursor then advances one step to F, but exceptionally the instruction may be to set the cursor to somewhere else, say to G, usually instead of writing some data to location E.

But whatever the case, the program’s cursor must stay within the brown area and the program may only address data within the blue area. It is as if the rest of the computer, not to mention the rest of the world, did not exist. Although, that said, things did go wrong from time to time.

Our second scenario, right in Figure 1 above, marks the arrival of the database, a complicated program in its own right (program 2), which enables other programs (in the example above, programs 1 and 3) to share data, to use data from the same data store, at the same time. A data store which might, for example, contain the all the pay records of the 80,000 or so John Lewis partners. This program will include mechanisms to stop a second program interfering with data being used by a first. It will also include various mechanisms to help with data quality, security and integrity. In due course, Microsoft’s SQL Server became a popular (and cheap) database program.

The knowledge of and work on our payroll is still in one place, but it has been divided between two programs, with program 1 sometimes described as front end processing and with program 2 sometimes described as back end processing.

Figure 3

Our third scenario, left in the figure above, marks the arrival of teleprocessing, the connection of possibly large numbers of display screens – dumb terminals in the jargon of the time – to a central program – sometimes called a TP monitor. These dumb terminals might be in the same building as the central computer but might be some way away, sometimes in another country. The central program is up and running more or less all the time, while the dumb terminals connect to it as and when.

The activity and status of each dumb terminal is held at the centre in what is here called local data; one lot of local data for each dumb terminal. Knowledge and work is still very largely with the centre, even though we now have users on the periphery.

Figure 4

The display of the dumb terminal would often be green on black, perhaps something like the figure above, although this particular example looks to be taken from a stand alone personal computer, with which we are not concerned here. The display was generally character based with no fancy fonts and no pictures, arranged in lines and fields, for example the name and department of the person concerned. The end user would interact with the central program by keying stuff into those fields. Plus one or more special fields in which the user could enter instructions about what the central computer was to do next.

Figure 5

Our fourth scenario, on the right in figure 3, marks the arrival of the personal computer, a terminal which was not dumb at all and which could do rather more than display simple data from a central program. Part of this was to do with efficiency, at a time when communications over a distance were more difficult and expensive than they are now. An intelligent terminal could take on a lot of routine formatting and checking of data coming in from the user that would otherwise need to be going up and down the line. And burning up the then scarce central resources. Part of this was expressed by downloading special programs called clients to the personal computer, clients whose job it was to drive the interaction between the user and his personal computer and between the personal computer and the mother ship.

The job of keeping track of what the user was up to at any particular moment in time was shared between the computer at the centre and the local computer. But the overall effect was a transfer of both knowledge and work from the centre to the periphery.

In the beginning, a lot of these personal computers were built by IBM and the displays were very rudimentary compared with what can be done now, with Figure 5 above giving something of the idea. While now, most of these local computers run under Microsoft’s Windows software, the prototype for which was paid for by said IBM and which provides a well-known and stable environment within which others can run their own programs. A sample of which is provided by Figure 7 below.

Figure 6

Our fifth scenario marks the arrival of the Internet and broadband connections all over the world, at least the developed part of the world, with huge numbers of personal computers connected to central computers, from both homes and businesses.

A context in which it became difficult for the centre to keep track of what the periphery was up to, a difficulty which was resolved by the invention of cookies which were kept in-between times on the personal computers, out on the periphery, but sent along to the central computer for the duration of each transaction with it. Cookies which are analogous to the state variables and control variables which one might have in a standalone program in Visual Basic. One example of the sort of thing that these cookies do is to hold one’s basket while one is shopping. Another is to hold one’s credentials to access some central computer, to reduce the number of times you have to present them. To which end, my understanding is that the location and content of cookies are deliberately obscured to make it harder, certainly for the common or garden user, to spoof them.

Another innovation was the use of HTML messages – plus other widgets and wheezes – to describe the pages to be displayed on personal computers, including here the spaces, the fields, in which users might be asked to enter data. This meant that there could be a rich user experience without the personal computers needing to know anything much about it or needing anything other than general purpose tools, tools which often come as part of Windows and Office. No need to download and manage clients, which by the end of the twentieth century had become a major drain on the resources of IT departments.

Figure 7

Figure 8

Note that the unit of display on the personal computer is the page, which may be far too big for the screen in question. The solution here is, as necessary, to add horizontal and vertical scroll bars, although this becomes clumsy with the very small screens on hand held computers, aka mobile phones. Furthermore, individual elements of the page may have their own scroll bars. So, in the example above, we have a result from the Google search engine, run from within Microsoft’s Edge: the page returned has a vertical scroll bar and the subordinate element right has another. Not sure why Titian’s Venus of Urbino gets into the results of an inquiry about his Bacchus and Ariadne – but there is fun to be had by twisting one’s head to the right and looking at it sideways.

The box diagram which follows (as Figure 8) is not very accurate, but it does try to suggest the complexity of what is happening on the personal computer, with many layers of software, with all kinds of complicated connections. Furthermore, the distinction between data and code has become very blurred and the code has become very dynamic, a far cry from the relatively tractable world of scenario 1 – although it seemed quite complicated enough at the time.

In principle, Microsoft have access to all kinds of more or less private information, suggested at the bottom of the red box. Who knows what they do with it and who they share with it. In any event, knowledge (and power) has been transferred from the periphery back to the centre, while leaving the periphery to do a lot of the work. The grunt work.

Note also that the design and construction of these complex systems is largely incremental. Which means that a lot of the design and a lot of the actual computer code is quite old. With some of this last being old to the point where maintenance is very difficult, if possible at all. Witness the peak in demand for heritage IT contractors at the time of the scare about the millennium bug, that is to say back in 1998 and 1999. Also Lieberman on the evolution of the head, last noticed at reference 1.

Figure 9

Our sixth scenario, the last, takes things just a little further. To a world where the Internet is connected to big computers, little computers, personal computers, mobile phones and all kinds of other devices – all talking to each other in a more or less controlled way, in which any one transaction can be thought of as being along one of the lines suggested above.

Note that a large computer talking to another large computer is not that different, at the level at which are talking, to a large computer talking to a small computer. It is just that there is more at stake and more is done to protect the integrity of the transaction involved.

A still shorter history

In the beginning, a program ran on just one computer, it did not talk to other computers and there was a clear separation between data and code, with each occupying a fixed segment of computer memory during program execution and with the code segment only being allowed to address the data segment. It was very clear where the code and data were, what they were doing and who owned them. This was suggested by Figure 2 above.

Now, while the principles are still the same, the facts on the ground have become hugely more complicated. The distinction between data and code has been blurred. The concepts of location and ownership have been blurred. One computer needs to know about, to keep track of what is happening on another. And while one might fret about what the cookies that follow get up to, what they are used for, they are very necessary. The mother ship does need to know what all those personal computers out there on its periphery are up to if it is to play its proper part, its intended part.

At the moment this is done with cookies, sufficiently complicated to be subject to their own standards. This is addressed at reference 3. It may well be that someone has cooked up, will cook up some other way of doing the same job – but it seems that any such other way is going to raise much the same issues.

In two sentences, the IT which joins us together has become enormously complicated and cookies are an essential part of that. The trick is to make sure that they are used, rather than abused.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/more-pivot-table.html. 

Reference 2: Google plan to lock down user data draws fire from advertisers: publishers warn ‘self-serving’ move could entrench search group’s dominance – Madhumita Murgia and Alex Barker – 2019. That is to say somewhere in the FT world on November 14th, 2019.

Reference 3: HTTP Cookies: Standards, Privacy, and Politics – David M. Kristol – 2001. A little long in the tooth, but there is a lot here from one of the inventors of the cookies we now have.

Afternoon tea

BH was slated to have tea somewhere grand with her two sons to mark her 70th birthday. Tea which was, on advice, postponed and replaced by a Devon cream tea hamper at home. Or to be more precise, a sturdy cardboard box, better suited to today's delivery arrangements.

A cleverly packed affair with a country design on the box involving, rather incongruously to my mind, a couple of buzzards circling in the distance. Not the sort of birds I would have associated with afternoon tea, even in Devon, where they are reasonably common.

The clotted cream part of the tea came in a plastic tub, might have been frozen at the time of despatch and was wrapped up in various insulating materials. Eight ounces of the stuff for four scones; yellow crust on top, thick and creamy underneath. Rather good.

Strawberry jam which, unusually, involved more strawberries than sugar.

The scones were described as a cunning hybrid between an English sweet scone and a Devon split, this last being a more bread like, yeast rising recipe. Whatever the case, they had done us well - as to my mind sweet scones are tricky things to deliver in a café or restaurant, being all too likely to arrive at the table stale or crumbly.

Plus substantial biscuits, a modest supply of chocolates and two kinds of tea. The chocolates were held over for today, BH took Earl Grey with milk and I took Earl Grey with lemon, having previously taken enough tea with milk for one day.

Not quite the same as somewhere grand, but a pretty fair substitute in the circumstances. Arranged at rather short notice too.

People with names

A few days ago now, prompted by reference 3, I turned up my copy of reference 2, while yesterday I got to thinking about names, as noticed in reference 1. With author of refence 2 and the subject of reference 3, one Claude Lévi-Strauss, perhaps being at the peak of his fame around the time I was at university, around fifty years ago now. A chap who was keen on dressing  up his thoughts about mankind in mathematical clothes. And died at the grand old age of 100, a little over ten years ago. While I had guessed a year or so.

Some thoughts on names, on waking this morning, follow.

Figure 1

We have a tribe of humans somewhere, sometime, who organise their world on the simple lines suggested above. Live members of the tribe are real people, with names. Dead members of the tribe were real people who used to have names. Most dead people gradually fade away as those near them forget, and as their deeds and works fade and are forgotten too. Anyone else is an alien, and there is no need to give aliens names at all.

There is a caste of priests in the tribe, who look after the rules which follow.

So what is in a name? Where here we mean a proper name, a name for an individual which is unique in some sense. We return to this important matter after a few more preliminaries.

Our tribe have language and they have lots of common nouns, used to classify the things in the world around them, with the important ones being organised as is suggested in the figure that follows. Note that while there is no suggestion that flowers are better than trees, or vice-versa, there is a suggestion that the five classes of vertebrates are ordered, with mammals having the highest status and amphibians the lowest. Note that a taxonomist might quibble both with the term ‘class’ and my choice of classes; all of which being something of a moveable feast.

Our tribe is organised into families. A family consists of at most one husband, at most one wife and zero, one or more unmarried children. Children leave their natal family on marriage, by that act forming a new family. The life of any particular family runs from the time of marriage until the death of the last surviving partner, the death or marriage of the last unmarried child, whichever is the later. The priests might well keep records.

Our tribe is quite advanced, does understand about private property and some families have possessions. In life, a family may give possessions to some other family, possibly a family containing one of their own children. But any possessions there may be at the death of the family revert to the tribe. Something else for the priests to look after.

Three part names

Figure 2

The figure above shows the repertoire of common nouns available to the tribe for the building of proper nouns, that is to say the names of its members. Proper names are not invented words, in the way of those hopefully catchy brand names invented by Californian advertising agencies, for example the name ‘Panagon’ for a document management system around at the turn of the last century. Such names are, I believe, also known as empty vessels. They have no baggage.

Flowers are things you find in fields of grass or on the edge of woods, while trees have substantial woody trunks, with bark. The two categories are exclusive. The five categories, the five classes of vertebrates are also exclusive. Things which attempt to span categories are regarded as unclean or the work of the Devil and are shunned or worse. Alternatively, some freaks are worshipped as special works of the Lord, as, for example, white elephants are still worshipped in parts of south east Asia.

Figure 3

Everybody has a totem and a lineage.

Everybody in the same family has the same totem.

Figure 4

Men and women of the same totem or of the same lineage are not allowed to marry. Added to which, some combinations of totem are not allowed in marriage.

There is a function totem × totem → totem which assigns a new totem to a couple on marriage. This function is not necessarily symmetric. But there may be some regularities: it might be the case, for example, that the marriage of a couple, both of whom are carnivores, always results in a herbivore. The top right hand corner of an example of the sort of thing we have in mind is given above. Note the inclusion of both water mammals and flying mammals – which might, in a real tribe, be excluded. Land mammals only.

A mathematician might start making graph theory flavoured rules about how such a matrix might be constructed, perhaps rules intended to promote good mixing, or, contrariwise, perhaps to restrict the mixing of upper classes with lower classes. No dilution of blue blood with the other sort, thank you.

A mathematician might also explore exploitation of the further possibilities of Figure 2 above, with my only have scratched the surface here.

At birth, a child takes the totem of the parents and the lineage of the father. A child is also given a given name, that is to say a bird for a male child or a flower for a female child. The given name must be chosen so that the combination of given name, lineage and totem is unique, at least among the living. This combination is called the three part name. One might have a rule that a three part name cannot be re-used until any previous holder has been dead for at least seven moons, with this being something else for the priests to manage.

Within the family, a given name will necessarily be unique. Within the immediate vicinity of the dwelling, this might still be true. But as one gets further away, it is going to be necessary to add either or both of totem and lineage name to avoid ambiguity.

From time to time, lineages will die out, will become extinct. This will happen when the last male member dies. A lineage which has been extinct for twelve moons may be re-used. Re-use of a lineage takes the form of the male children of a couple all being assigned to new lineages. An assignation perhaps marked by a feast followed by a dance. Perhaps involving recreational substances. One more rule for the priests to manage – but they need to be careful not to overreach themselves, prompting a reaction against them from the population at large – and I recall reading once that as a general rule, in the olden days, priestly castes managed to grab about a third of what was going.

Origins

This sort of thing only works if we have a named population to start with. We can move such a population forward as it members marry and have children.

But we say nothing about how such a named population came to be in the first place. This is the stuff of myths of origin, such as that to be found at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and with such myths being found in many, not to say most, cultures across the world.

Overreach

There might be a  different sort of overreach, in that if there are too many rules, not enough people will be able to marry and have children and the tribe will die out. A little modelling is indicated.

Numeracy

People who have number, people who can count, have the option of using numbers for or with names, at least for people who have a natural order. So the French ran to 18 kings called Louis, Louis I through to Louis XVIII, not quite one after the other. Some peoples number the children within a family. An option taken to extravagant lengths in computers where many things are named, are located by saying they are the n-th thing after something else, a something else which already has already been located, somehow or other. In computer speak, perhaps the n-th element of an array.

Conclusions

We have offered a fantasy, a set of rules according to which a tribe might organise itself. We note that the master, Claude Lévi-Strauss, certainly when he first started out on this sort of thing, did not believe that all these rules were driven by a dimly perceived need to avoid incest and the degeneration which was apt to follow. He was much keener on the need to classify and to be organised per se. For itself, not for anything.

But no conclusions so far. We have not yet moved beyond well-informed fantasy.

Maybe the next step is to look at how the caste of priests might be integrated, worked into totems, lineages and families. Or perhaps one ought to look at property?

References

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/brick-scene.html.

Reference 2: The Elementary Structures of Kinship – Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1947.

Reference 3: The Key to All Mythologies - Kwame Anthony Appiah – 2020. February 13, number of the NYRB.

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

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_given_name.

Traps

The three mouse traps set in the garage late yesterday afternoon were untouched this morning. All three still set and un-sprung. Maybe one more night to be on the safe side.

I noticed when taking the traps down, that their action is not very clean, with the wire bar not coming down clean and straight on the wooden striking plate. So maybe, when life returns to normal, time for some new ones - with these ones all more than ten years old and one or two of them possibly more than twenty.

The rat traps are rather more substantially made things, of galvanised steel rather than wire and wood (see reference 1), and much less likely to be needed. So no action indicated on that front.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/rodent-action.html.

Brick scene

48 bricks moved today, 32 in the morning and 16 in the afternoon, which I compute to be 6.384km. Perhaps they ought to score rather more as half of it is gently uphill, say more uphill than travelling south down Longmead Road but less uphill than travelling east up West Hill.

The bricks come in at least three sorts: LBC stocks with frog and at least two sorts of older bricks without frogs. I am starting to recognise individual bricks, and I shall see how that develops over the days to come. But I think I will end up by naming, numbering or lettering them. Emulsion, undercoat or gloss? And if numbering shall it be Roman or Arabic?

Which will make organising my thoughts about the bricks much easier. Which leads to wondering about when names were invented. More or less at the same time as language, or were names a few hundred thousand years down the line?

Meanwhile, three mouse traps set again this evening. Regarding which, we learn that the Siamese cat next door has been bringing in small mice, perhaps juveniles from the same nest, for the last few days. Did we get one of the parents last night?

Grimm tales

ITV3 had taken to interspersing our evening shots of detective drama with lurid and unpleasant pictures of animals in distress from around the world. Mainly, I think, from the donkey people and the RSPCA. However, while I am sorry that there are so many animals in distress and so many humans that cause or tolerate such distress, such advertisements make it less rather than more likely that I will donate any money to the causes concerned. I do not care for my tree to be shaken in quite this way when I am taking my evening Poirot with a drop of something that warms.

I suspect one factor here is that Google & Facebook having siphoned off a large proportion of the advertisers and advertising revenues that used to go to the likes of ITV3, rates have come down and charities can better afford to plug the gaps.

In any event, I feel I am empowered to share this rather grim snap of rodent action. Three (rather than the two advertised) traps set with small bits of crust from home-made, wholemeal bread (which I find works better than the cheese of children's stories): one untouched, one sprung and one successful. Rather a fat mouse to my mind. Perhaps the parsnip that BH found yesterday was not the first.

My guess is that there was just the one mouse, but I shall set the traps again this evening, just in case.

PS: I remember being told years ago, in the margins of some IT conference or other, by a chap who worked for a household-name food canner, that you will never stop rodents getting into large food stores. They will always find a way. And now it is irritating me that I cannot recover the name in question, despite best endeavours with Bing. Sherwood sticks in the mind but they sell meat rather than tins, while Sharwood sells the wrong sort of food.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/rodent-action.html.

When I was old

Georges Simenon started writing just after the first world war and his Maigret writing career ran from 1931 to 1972. During which time something must have happened when he was around 60 and he felt old – with the result that for something over two years he kept a journal, filling three notebooks: 1959-1960, later printed as 120 pages; 1960-1961, 170 pages; and, 1961-1963, 190 pages. June 1960 to February 1963. Don’t know where the 1959 came from.

I think the idea is that these are unedited, handwritten and dated jottings in cheap notebooks (cahiers). Neither reread nor revised after the event. A record of what was in his mind, for good or bad, at the time. A record made at the time, in the way of a policeman’s notebook.

But I think his (second) wife Denyse reads at least some of them and I think another idea is that they will interest his second son, Johnny, in due course. Signs of trouble with Denyse surface towards their end and he finally separated from her in 1964. She was replaced by the housekeeper Teresa, acquired in 1961, who stayed with him until his death, at 84, in 1989.

Despite the talk of their being private, the jottings were published in 1971 or so. My guess is that there will have been at least some editing, not least because Simenon did have some regard for the feelings of his friends – and libel. My feeling, having read elsewhere that Simenon was an energetic manager of the image which reached and circulated in the world, is that these jottings are a complicated blend of fact and fiction. A man who seems to have liked to confuse things by telling various different tales about himself at various different times. Nonetheless, these jottings remain a record of sorts of his shifting moods and fancies.

I came across them quite by chance, in the margins of the purchase which completed my set of the Maigret novels, the Roman numbered Vol.XXVII and Vol.XXVIII of the collected works, noticed at reference 2. These came with Vol.1, Vol.43 and Vol.44 of the other half of the collected works, the Arabic numbered non-Maigret half, with Vol.43 being the subject of this post, reference 1. I first read the book around October last year, but have recently been turning the pages again. With what follows now being a collection of odds and ends, with no attempt to turn them into an essay with a beginning and an end, the sort of thing we got marks for at school. Mainly drawn from my notes of last year – and it remains to be seen whether there is a second read and a new line to take.

A book written at a time when Simenon was very much aware of a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, particularly in Algeria, in the Congo (which Simenon, as an expatriate Belgian, would notice) and, to a lesser extent, in Cuba (the fleshpots of which Simenon had quite possibly visited and sampled in the course of his travels).

The book opens with Simenon’s lifelong fascination with the tools of his trade, with paper, notebooks, pens and pencils. With the office in which one used such things. With a particular sort of students’ notebook with cloth covers, a red ‘tranche’ and ‘papier quadrillé’. Of his having the tools years before he started using them in earnest - a fascination with the tools rather than the substance that I can relate to. Of his haunting of the shops which sold such stuff – shops which still existed in Via San Gallo in Florence when we visited back in 2008, when the Florentines seemingly still went in for sending billets-doux on fancy paper. Possibly scented. All this despite the fact that much of Simenon’s novel writing was done on a typewriter.

Aside: T. E. Lawrence talks of something similar. Of generals who like all the apparatus, all the machinery of high rank. Of Syrians who love to talk of building an elaborate bureaucracy to run their about to be independent country, but who are pretty useless at actually doing anything.

By way of contrast, Simenon says that he dislikes gongs of all sorts. Which did not stop him being rather annoyed that he was not given the Nobel prize for literature.

A great reader, particularly when young. Inter alia, the French, German, Russian and English classics. The Russian, presumably, in translation. But lots of other stuff as well.

Simenon comes across as being very concerned about his relations with his wife and with his children. To keep private time and space in which to be with them, apart from all his social and public activities. This at a time, as noted above, when his second marriage was drawing towards its close. They all get a fair amount of space in these jottings.

And very concerned about the decline of his creative powers as the years crept on. Of his dropping down from ten books a year to five. He writes about how it no longer just happens, how it has become something of a chore, something which has to be worked at. Are more and more rituals, more self conscious rituals being added to buttress up that process in the face of failing powers, of an increased desire, an increased tendency to put the writing off until another day? And something which was not really necessary, as it had been in the past, to provide the dibs to support his fairly extravagant life style.

All that said, in broad terms, the process for the popular novels had always been much the same. First an idea. Then some days thinking himself into the emerging story. The people and places in it. Perhaps the tone of the thing. Then, apart from the occasional misfire, the burst of writing activity, a steady 10 days or so of it, so many chapters a day, usually first thing in the morning. An activity with its own rhythms and rituals. Then a pause. Then an editing phase, maybe half the time of the original writing. Then photocopying and off to his typist – a postal contact rather than a face to face contact – although there is also talk of Denyse doing the typing. And when were photocopiers invented? Off to his publisher. He did not like re-reading his work once it had gone cold, as it were, so not much correction in proof. And then we are away. Denyse could worry about all the editions, translations and adaptations.

I associate to old Bidlake, an eminent artist in Huxley’s ‘Point Counter Point’ who hated the way art trade journalists talked about the decline of his once great powers. Where I can well see how the subject might well hate such talk. Maybe athletes can wind down more easily, more gracefully, with their physical powers going into decline years before their mental powers – whereas with writers it is the mental powers that are the problem.

All this links to his very ambivalent relations to his book trade journalists. He clearly spend a lot of time with them, hosting parties and inviting small groups of them to his house for several days at a time. But he finds that despite sounding intelligent and interested, they mostly have not bothered to read much of his work, they mostly all ask the same questions and end up writing stuff which Simenon feels is all wrong. I think that he felt that he was wrong to bother about what they wrote – but he did. He also wrote about the extent he had become what it was that journalists made of him. The interaction between what he was and what his public wanted him to be. And about his dead friend Gide having once suggested to him that writers, and no doubt other public figures, to some large extent chose the person, the image they wanted the world to have of them, quite early on in their careers – and usually stick to them.

In the margins, he tells us that in his view all men – and presumably all women – are at root pretty much the same, whatever their background and social class. Particularly when they are naked. And one should not judge. He points to the example of a wannabee academician of his acquaintance – academicians being big cheeses in France – who stooped to rather childish, rather low subterfuges to further his candidacy. Simenon was also in the habit of quietly introducing naked women into his late night parties, as he found that the way that men reacted to them was very revealing.

At one point, Simenon tells us that he has very few real friends. At another, that he spends a lot of time with medical acquaintances, medical books and journals. Of which the fact that Maigret’s one real friend is his doctor, Pardon, living a few streets away, within dining range, is perhaps one result. Another being that Maigret is a doctor manqué, having had to give up his medical studies shortly after he started. On the other hand, Maigret was not a skirt chaser, which Simenon clearly was.

There are a lot of Parisian streets in the Maigret stories and nearly all of the ones that I have checked (in my handy Paris Plan from Michelin) are really there, are still there. One might have been renamed for a hero of the resistance. One of them is the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, where Maigret lives for most of the stories. Then towards the end of the present book, there is a sentimental passage about the Canal Saint Martin of between the wars, and the very Buffet lithograph reproduced above. A canal which runs north from the Pont d’Austerlitz, loops round to the east and eventually gets mixed up with the Marne – and part of which appears to have been covered over, at some point, by said Boulevard Richard Lenoir. All testimony to Simenon’s love of canals and canal life, still horse drawn when he was young. According to Wikipedia: ‘Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, running from the Bastille to the Avenue de la République, is one of the wide tree-lined boulevards driven through Paris by Baron Haussmann during the Second French Empire of Napoleon III. The Boulevard is named after François Richard and Joseph Lenoir-Dufresne, industrialists who brought the cotton industry to Paris in the 18th and 19th century. It is the site of a weekly art market and of a bi-weekly fruit and vegetable market that is one of the largest in Paris’ – but no mention of the canal, of whether it lives on underground. Which does seem unlikely. Must try and find a London street which is named after two people, rather than just one. William & Mary Street? Derby & Joan Street?

In sum, most of the time an interesting read. Just occasionally irritating when Simenon bangs on a bit, or protests too much in the words of the Bard. In which connection, it is worth noting that Simenon feels strongly that a writer of novels should not intrude his own, often boring or incorrect views, into his novels. The writer’s business, the writer’s craft, is stories not sermons. Which may be what Simenon tried to do, but it also seems to me that many characters in the Maigret stories include traits of character drawn from Simenon himself, or at least traits which he liked to think he shared, traits which he admired.

And it is also the case that many novels of Simenon’s time are more a vehicle for the views of the author than stories. The stories are just pegs on which to hang views, or mouths into which to put views. War and Peace, to take just one example, is rather marred by Tolstoy banging about the inevitable march of Russian history, without much regard to the antics of individuals. Kutusov succeeded because he just went with the flow.

Also that this can be a book for dipping. One usually comes across something of interest.

PS: I had been quite sure the line about the lady protesting too much came from Juliet’s garrulous nurse in Romeo and Juliet, but actually it turns out to come from Gertrude in Hamlet. Most odd, most irritating.

References

Reference 1: Quand j’étais vieux – Simenon – 1970. Collected works, Vol.43.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/breaking-news.html.

Reference 3: Canal St. Martin - Bernard Buffet - 1956. Lithograph. 22.5 by 14 inches. The snap above.

Reference 4: http://www.trussel.com/f_maig.htm. A site built for those fascinated by Simenon and Maigret. With Steve Trussel clearly being an energetic gentleman, although I have not yet found out anything else about him.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Simenon.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=simenon. Mostly stray mentions, some from over a decade ago. But including some more substantial notices. No doubt plenty more in the blogs that followed this one.

Whoop-Up Drive

The view from where the curiously named Whoop-Up Drive crosses the Old Man River, on the western outskirts of Lethbridge, Alberta. Prompted by the previous post.

Maybe not as much problem with person-person infections as we are having here on the outskirts of London.

Indulgence

Against a private festivity tomorrow, this afternoon I have made an Alberta date cake, probably for the first time since that noticed at reference 1.

I used the recipe from the Whitworth's recipe book again, and at the time of writing I think I got it right this time, doing everything in the right order. A first.

The mix was rather wetter, with its half a pint of water, than I remembered, which was fair enough. But it was also a lot browner than I remembered, which was a bit feeble given that four ounces of dark brown dates might have given the brain a clue. In any event, the scrapings from the bowl certainly tasted fine.

Snapped here fresh out of the oven, still in its tin. It came out of the tin - greased and floured before the off - without breakage, half an hour later. I think the darkening right is an artefact of the light or the telephone, rather than of my culinary art.

PS 1: we have walnuts at home, Californian walnuts in their shells, but were unsure whether they would have added up to the necessary four ounces out of their shells. Luckily, BH was able to buy some shelled walnuts from Sainsbury's when she visited yesterday - that particular home baking item not having been cleaned out. And having seen four ounces of shelled walnuts in the scale pan, I think the answer was no they would not have.

PS 2: still no further ahead with the name of this cake, with the cake shop I emailed in Alberta knowing nothing about it. The only new bit of information is that Queen Victoria's steam yacht on the Isle of Wight was called the Alberta, but we have failed to make any connection with cake. Amused to see that previous searches concerning dates got me into the world of Internet dating agencies.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/tray-bake.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/08/more-cake.html. The email.

Reference 3: https://www.crazycakes.ca/. The people in Alberta who had not heard of Alberta date cakes are still there, at Crazy Cakes, 1102 5th Avenue South Lethbridge, Alberta T1J 0V3. And not only do they not appear to be into the right sort of cake, they did seem to be connected to a scam which promises me an iPhone in return for my bank account details. The second time someone has tried this on me, a someone who has gone to a fair amount of bother to dress the thing up in plausible, Microsoft flavoured clothes.

Rodent action

Following the mouse alert at reference 1, BH found a well gnawed parsnip in her vegetable bin in the garage this morning - the garage generally being a better place to keep vegetables because it is cooler than the house and the bin is easy enough to protect from the frost.

So dug out the traps, brushed them off and left them out to air them a bit, before deploying two of the small ones this evening.

Reference 2 tells us that both sorts were deployed way back in 2007 and I have a feeling that the small ones have been used since then. I also wonder about the time of year, as I have another feeling that mice are generally a late autumn or winter problem, rather than a Spring problem.

32 bricks moved this morning, four groups of eight, the equivalent of perhaps 4.3km. It is getting easier and pleasanter - to the point where I keep making mistakes with the bricks. Moving them down when I am on the up leg, or vice-versa. Forgetting to move one altogether. All kinds of silly errors, which probably mean the count is only right to plus or minus two or so.

PS: it also took me about half a dozen goes to get the file name of reference 2 right. The last of several hurdles was noticing that I had misspelt animals in the original post.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/mouse-revisited.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/12/small-amimals.html.

Flour supply

Further to references 1 and 2, I am pleased to be able to report that our bread flour home supply has now returned to normal, mainly in the form of strong white flour from Carr's, not before heard of. A miller headquartered in the far north, that is to say in Kirkcaldy in Fife, although this particular flour may well come from their mill in Maldon in Essex. The place commemorated in the old English poem, 'The Battle of Maldon'. See references 3 and 4.

This result of BH visiting the Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane for her regular weekly shop, in this morning's irregular older persons' slot. Only one queue jumper, a lady - shamed into leaving the site in short order. Otherwise orderly and Sainsbury's distancing arrangements seemed to be working well enough.

Shelves not in regular condition, but in much better shape than last week. BH may have had to resort to some exotic brands, but her list was pretty much ticked off.

PS 1: I thought that 'carr' might be a word from Ordnance Survey maps, used to describe expanses of rough, wet ground. Checking with OED, a word which is also from the far north, meaning variously an offshore rock, a boggy pond or a stretch of rough, wet ground scrubbed over with willow and alder. The sort of ground which is not good for much except the RSPB. Memory works for once.

PS: 2: for the first time for a week, to make a paper change from online & TV news, we got a Guardian, from Sainsbury's, the tone of which managed to annoy both of us. The front page in particular seemed rather unhelpful, better suited to a paper like the Daily Mail. It might be a while before we bother with another.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/batch-554-suite.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/batch-554.html.

Reference 3: https://carrsflour.co.uk/.

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

Mouse revisited

Coal tits seen in the southern hedge from the (upstairs) study window again this morning. Slightly confused by what appeared to be black stripes down the back, one on each side, but the irritatingly poor RSPB site convinced me that the black stripes were the wings. Irritating because RSPB is a very rich charity and one might think it could spend a bit more on support for arm chair tweeters.

Fritillaries in the new daffodil bed looking well, much better than the daffodils.

A modest bit of gardening, modest because one does not want to work through the available jobs too quickly, followed by a stint of 21 bricks - by the end of which I had abandoned jacket, gloves and scarf. A warm morning.

During most of which stint, Joey, the next door cat, kept a very close watch on the pipe house outside the back door. A few days ago, BH found one of the green plastic pellets, which are supposed to be inside the pipe house, illustrated at reference 1, so perhaps a mouse has made it through the narrow gap still remaining, maybe of the order of a centimetre at the level of the blue air brick, slightly more at the other end.

PS: interval reading presently Delbourgo on Sloane (the chap who invented Sloane Square). First read a couple of years again, now being revisited as a result of being chucked out of BH's bedside locker, where it had been living since. A good read.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/four-legged-friends.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/11/sir-hans-sloane.html.

Google

This morning, Google saw fit to pop into my gmail inbox an advertisement from an outfit called David Nieper, who seem to be into leisure wear for the more mature customer. What do they know that I have missed out on? Do their algorithms know all about lock-ins?

And given that they can make a very good guess at my age, supposing that is that they have not found out what my age actually is, what on earth would they have dug up for me had I been twenty years younger? Or twenty years older for that matter? Mind boggles.

Reference 1: https://www.davidnieper.co.uk/.

Batch 554 (suite)

The bread reported on earlier today was finished by 1715, getting on for ten hours after it was started.

Two large loaves, if not quite as large as they have been - and both the same size, the same weight - despite appearances here. Slightly darker loaf from the top shelf of the oven left, slightly damaged and paler loaf from the bottom shelf right.

Some of the damage is caused by rising up to bump the grid of the shelf above, some of it is caused by bubbles in the dough. Bubbles which, for some unknown reason, seem to be more prevalent in the lower loaf - this despite using a fan oven in which the temperature is supposed to be the same all through the oven space. But the two loaves are both expected to eat fine, notwithstanding.

Left hand loaf via the freezer, as experiment has conclusively proved that it keeps better for the few days it takes to consume the right hand loaf in the freezer than on the shelf. I believe Italians believe in cooking their bread for rather longer, so that it keeps on the shelf for rather longer - but I like the soft English way.

The very satisfactory- if rather expensive - baking tins from Tavistock, first noticed at reference 1, just visible bottom right.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/shopping.html.

More tweet

Following yesterday's buzzard, this morning a kite over the back of Christchurch Mount - a kite which a correspondent had seen not many minutes before over the Horton Lane allotments, that is to say the allotments most recently noticed at reference 2. Nothing like as high as yesterday's buzzard, maybe twice roof height.

The express pre-fab was on the move, with eastern European accents, rather than the German of the pre-fab's supplier. Several other builders out on my circuit around the block, of which I did six this morning, so about 6km. Plus one set of gardeners, one set of dustmen and sundry neighbours, some with dogs, all at least three metres away. One postman (female) and a small number of children, all under careful control.

Very few cars, even fewer bicycles and no delivery vans. Which last I thought odd.

Wind dropped since yesterday and I was on the warm side inside my duffel coat - never mind the snow jacket of yesterday.

And the back patio was hot after lunch - to the point where I needed to cover my hands to stop them burning - all this despite the slight frost this morning, snapped above. Plus quite a lot of twittering and small bird action in the hedge left, that is to say south, but no tweets.

Reference 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eXT60rbBVk. A rather splendid musical offering from another correspondent.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/horton-clockwise.html.

Malden Rushett and one tweet

I thought that walking along the road to Malden Rushett and back (B.280) would be reasonably socially distancing, and so it proved, with my being able to make substantial detours around the few people that I met. I walked on the cycle track provided, while all the cyclists used the road - for which I don't really blame them: the cycle track is not that great and I am not a great fan of mixed use paths.

The junction

Including part of the power supply for south London, heading into town from the sub-station behind the trees, a little beyond the junction.

The pill-box

I came across this abandoned pill-box in the corner of a field a little to the east of the junction, on the northern side of the B.280. Presumably built against the possibility that the Wehrmacht had come through the Mole Gap - although I have no idea if the sub-station - critical national infrastructure now - existed in those days. I would guess not.

Green belt

Looking away from the pill-box, a bit of the green belt which is inside the M25 ring. With continuation of the power supply the other side of the field.

Quite a lot of handsome looking white dead nettles.

Down a track

Quite a lot of bushes in white flower in the hedges, all very bright and cheerful and the snap above does not do them justice. Nor did I get close enough to get identification detail. Maybe blackthorn?

Down the same track, we also had, in a bush, what looked like a very large coal tit. So it may have been something else and has not been scored as a tweet. Plus, under a bush, some sort of thrush, not a sort of bird I see very often - and not enough of this one to know what sort of thrush. So again, not scored as a tweet.

One cockerel out with his wives, about half a dozen of them, but they cleared out before I could get close enough to take their picture.

One field, with half a dozen or so small horses or ponies, the grass in even worse condition than that noticed at reference 2. A lot more brown than green. But they did have a pile of hay instead.

Honeysuckle box - with the mobile struggling a bit with the focus

Past the handsome honeysuckle box, noticed on various occasions in the past. See, for example, reference 3.

Back home, after the luncheon haggis, I thought to doze in the sun for a while, behind the garage, which provided good shelter from the cool north breeze. After a while I tweeted a buzzard circling to the south,  quite high up and quite some way away, probably over the edge of the common. At least, had I seen such a bird out in the country, I would have assumed it was a buzzard without thinking much about it.  The last notice of such a thing here at Epsom is to be found at reference 1. There was also the occasion when we tweeted what we thought was a sparrow hawk on the sheltered drive of a house near us, just about managing to take off with a wood pigeon in its mouth - with Wikipedia including a picture of a juvenile with one, so they are clearly up for it. Can't trace any mention of this tweet, so perhaps a long time ago.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/12/big-tweet.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/horton-country-park.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/05/honeysuckle-box.html.

Batch 554

The 554th batch of what will be around four and a half pounds of wholemeal bread is now in the airing cupboard for its first rise, probably something north of four hours.

Despite the name, the main ingredient is actually strong plain white flour, as one does not need a lot of wholemeal flour before the bread gets rather heavy. For choice the Waitrose special snapped left, from their Leckford Estate and which, to judge by reference 1, I have been using for well over three years.

There is enough flour left in the food cupboard for one more bake, with each bake lasting about a week, and I hope and expect that relatively normal flour supply will have been reinstated by the time that I need some more.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/11/bread.html. A little over 100 batches ago now.

The case of the literary genre

A post which results from chasing the hare which started with music at reference 1.

There are lots of things out in world which we try to analyse, to classify. So animals analyse into species. Chemicals analyse into elements. Ill health analyses into disease. The economic activity of people analyses into occupation, sometimes glossed as social class. The criminal activity of people analyses into statistics of crime. One might attempt to sort all the features of a once glaciated, mountainous area into a short list of typical glacial features, things like horns, glacial troughs, hanging valleys, alps, corries and moraines. All analyses on which a lot of thought and ink has been spent. And certainly in this last case, plenty of features are not going to fit any list very well, be it ever so clever.

Figure 1

Indeed, only in the first two of these examples, are the groups into which we analyse, the species and the elements, reasonably clear cut, with Lavoisier’s effort from the middle of the eighteenth century snapped above. Otherwise, it is much more a matter of taste and judgement, with plenty of grey areas.

In the case of elements, clear cut but close: from the carbon atom with its six protons, one gets to that of the very different nitrogen by adding just one proton, two neutrons (usually) and one electron; or from the gold atom with its seventy nine protons, one gets to that of the very different mercury by adding just one proton, no neutrons (usually) and one electron.  While there is rather more in the way of genetic material distinguishing, for example, a lion from a tiger. That is to say, more absolutely – but who is to say what the story is relatively speaking?

Some people try to analyse feelings and emotions into something reasonably discrete and definite, try to produce a definitive list of same, often mapped onto a circular disc or a square involving the two dimensions of valence – that is to say good or bad – and arousal. Things like affection, anger, hunger, joy, pain and shame.

While here we hark back to the time when people bought books from nearby shops, owned and run by booksellers - and we think of literary genres. A lot of what follows is also applicable to libraries – public or other – and librarians, but our focus here is on those bookshops. Modest bookshops, not like the huge Foyles shop, formerly of Charing Cross Road, where things might well have been rather different.

We assert that the issues raised here read across to other domains, inform those other domains.

We argue from the corner opposite to that of reference 3, which argued in favour of cross-sectional or multi-dimensional analysis of consciousness. We see no inconsistency here, it all being a matter of what one is trying to do.

Figure 2

In what follows, what was the real world of bookshops has been condensed into a simple story to make a point. We do not think that the this simplification destroys the points being made.

So we have books coming from publishers, in through the back, into the stockroom. From there they are moved out into front of shop. Customers come in through the front, find the book they want, pay and leave the same way as they came in. So, much like any other shop.

But how do we organise things front of shop so that our customers can find what they want?
Books and bookcases

Figure 3

All books are printed by publishers. Publishers organise their offering into series, an obscure example of which might be the many volumes of the ‘Oxford History of Oriental Textiles’. Each book has an author and there is usually a large number – thousands – of copies of each book printed. We put aside books which have editors and more than one author and authors who figure in more than one series. We put aside editions and printings.

Figure 4

Despite the complications suggested in the figure above, we suppose that booksellers organise front of shop into cases, with cases made up of shelves. We further suppose that all the cases can be considered to be along the lines of that on the far left in the figure above and that the books in a case are ordered from left to right, from top to bottom. As the word is on the page, at least in all European languages.

Many booksellers, as a matter of experience, wisdom and habit, found it convenient to classify books first into type, that is to say fiction or non-fiction, and then into one of around twenty genres – ‘Historical Romance’ or ‘World War II’ to take an example from each type. Any one genre is either fiction or non-fiction. We suppose that genres occupy the whole of a number of adjacent cases (a case genre) or the whole of a number of adjacent shelves within a case (a shelf genre). In either case, that number may be one.

Figure 5

Books on the shelf, within a genre, are organised alphabetically first by author, then by title. Something like the non-fiction case in the figure above – a case in a bookshop located in an area where a lot of people are interested in the ancient world, by which is usually meant ancient Greece, ancient Rome and their various colonies and empires. A Eurocentric view of ‘ancient’.

Around twenty seems to be a number that works. Customers can look at a list of them by the front entrance and without fuss work out in which genre they are likely to find what it is that they want and where that genre is to be found in the bookshop.

We note that some modern bookshops, perhaps Waterstones, have moved away from this a bit. Most fiction (dimension=type) is kept in just the one genre, in one big alphabetical series, with just a few other fiction genres, like children’s books (dimension=audience) and large print (dimension=format), kept separately.

Twenty genres

Now if one was a literary theorist one might well regard the genres as multi-dimensional, with the first dimension being new/second hand/antiquarian, the second dimension being fiction/non-fiction and with the candidates for the other dimensions being things like best seller status, format, length, place of composition, place of setting, price band, publisher, subject matter, target audience, time of composition and time of setting  – a lot of which dimensions are going to be categorical and unordered, not at all like temperature or age, which can be treated simply as numbers. Note that best seller status is also time dependent, varies with time – a complication which we put aside.

But this is not going to do in a bookshop, where what is wanted is a straightforward, short list of genres, without bringing dimensions into it. Some books might be reasonably assigned to more than one genre, although in practise, a book is assigned to just one genre in a bookshop and customers have to make the best of it. The list is likely to be rather eclectic, with some focussed on one dimension and some on another. There is merit in allowing list to vary from one bookshop to another, to take account of varying circumstances – although there is also merit in all bookshops using the same genres in order to reduce customer confusion.

So we suppose that experience, wisdom and habit have resulted in a list of around fifteen fiction genres which generally work in the book trade and which can be whittled down a bit in any particular bookshop. Perhaps something like: Children, Classic, Collectible, Contemporary, Detective, Drama & Poetry, Experimental, Fantasy, Horror, Large print, Mystery, Romance, Science fiction, Thriller, War and Western. With collectible only being applicable in a bookshop which did second hand. It might be appropriate to raise very popular authors – people like Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Elinor Glyn, J. K. Rowling or Simenon, at least in their day, now past – to being genres in their own right.

Customers are familiar with this sort of list, often displayed at the entrance, and quickly find out in which part of the bookshop they should be looking.

Stocking up

The book trade then looks about for information about their market, their intended customers. Information which is available by area, information which predicts the buying habits in particular areas and which can be used by individual booksellers in choosing their stock, in deciding how much space to give to the various genres. In choosing what sort of a shop they want to be, in striking a balance between stocking a good, broad range of books, so that people can feel they are going to a good bookshop, perhaps stocking books which interest the bookseller and certainly stocking what people will actually want to buy.

They find that age, sex and social class predicts demand by genre pretty well. More precisely that each combination of age, sex and social class has a distinct buying profile, a buying distribution by genre. The combination of age, sex and social class predict genre. And as luck would have it, the decennial census provides statistics about age, sex, social class and area.

Variations in the structure of the population will then drive the sort of bookshops which one will find in any particular area.

So for the book trade, the population is four dimensional. The four dimensions of age, sex , social class and area are enough to do their business. Four dimensions which strike a useful balance, a workable balance between the availability of data and the relevance of data to the job at hand.

A conclusion which depends on their being significant variations in that structure across the country. The interest would be much reduced if that structure was pretty uniform.

Note that the choice of dimensions for population is driven by the job at hand, by the requirement at hand. While there may well be choices which fit a lot of requirements, it is unlikely that one size is going to fit all. We associate to the dictum of computer system designers that design must always be driven by requirement – noting that this was a dictum that we have had trouble with in the past, asserting that good requirements are sensitive to the possible, to the design. A two way stretch.

Note also that coming up with the list of genres is something of a black art.

Statistical footnote

Figure 6a

Figure 6b

As it happened, we failed to turn up a suitable analysis of population by age, sex, social class and area on the Internet. The sort of analysis which we imagined would have been included in one of the printed volumes of, for example, the 1971 Census of the UK. As far as we have been able to ascertain, facsimiles of these volumes are not available online and while a lot of data is available online, a fair amount of work is involving in finding it, downloading it and turning it something presentable in the present context.

Furthermore, the social classes still used in conversation – variations on upper, middle and working classes – have been replaced for statistical purposes by something more complicated based on occupation, with this last further complicated by the growth of self employment, in which occupation is not as neatly categorised and certainly not as well known as it is for most people in employment.

The rather limited analysis presented in the two figures above is drawn from CASWEB, a data service under the UK Data Service umbrella, to be found at reference 5.

Figure 7

While the incomplete analysis above was turned up much more quickly and easily from the US Census Bureau, with the down side that some of the occupational groups are more industry than occupation, let alone social class.

Conclusions

From all of which we draw two conclusions.

First, a list of fiction genres which is useful in the book trade is going to be a rather eclectic list, drawing on a number of the dimensions of analysis that someone of more theoretical turn of mind might be interested in. It is going to be soft in the sense that one person may well prefer one list to another, not like the hard list of the elements of chemistry, about which, there is no argument at all, at least not in the lower reaches. People are not going to agree on which genres some books belong to. The list is not going to be ordered, for who is to say which genre should come first and which should come last? And it is certainly not going to be much like temperature, when one can say that this temperature lies between those two others, that this temperature is greater than that temperature.

Indeed, it seems likely that books are not going to be the only population for which there is a need for some simple classification which supports the needs of its users – with the theoretical purity of that classification being unimportant. Such users might be unimpressed by, uninterested in all the meta’s – as in words like meta-self-consciousness – which crop up in one of the dimensions of reference 2, noticed at reference 3.

Second, the number of dimensions we want to ascribe to some population or other depends on our interest in that population. While some populations will clearly be well described, for most purposes, by some widely supported, small number of dimensions – for a lot of populations this will not be the case. It will all depend on the point of view, on the job in hand.

References

Reference 1: What music makes us feel: at least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures – Alan S. Cowen, Xia Fang, Disa Sauter, and Dacher Keltner – 2020.

Reference 2: Four-Dimensional Graded Consciousness – Jakub Jonkisz, Michał Wierzchoń and Marek Binder – 2017.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/classifying-consciousness-again.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_genres. Writing genres more generally, including things like memoirs, non-fiction and newspapers.

Reference 5: https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/.