Trolley 221

Captured by the telephone exchange in East Street and returned to a busy stack at Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane. The sixth gentleman worked out that the right thing to do was to take the trolley he wanted from me, rather than take another one out of the stack.

On the way home a redwing with a touch of green about it in the bushes at the downstream end of Longmead Road.

And a quirk of memory down Manor Green Road. I have been trying, without much success, to memorise the number of a car there. So yesterday, I tried saying it over and over in my head, eventually committing it to OneNote under Shostakovich.

So today, I was approaching the car, maybe fifty yards short of it, and I started, without thinking about it, rehearsing the number in my head.

The only catch was that when I got to the car, I found that I had got one of the numbers in the first group of four wrong and transposed two of the letters in the second group of three. The OneNote version was wrong too, in a slightly different way.

What I hope is the right number has been filed under Shostakovich and we may have occasion to find out whether I remember the filing better than the number in due course. In the meantime, it is intriguing that approaching the relevant spot should prompt recitation in this way. A mechanism related to that underlying the trick of associating things to places along a route used my memory athletes?

Then, later in the day, there was a further twist in the trolley story at reference 1. Supplies of New Zealand needing topping up, I parked behind Majestic Wine, a car park which they share with Office Outlet, formerly Staples.

As is usual, there was a clutch of other peoples' trolleys stacked up behind the dustbins out back. But then there was a legitimate Majestic Wine stack and a legitimate Office Outlet stack, and the trolleys in the second of these looked very like the one declined in East Street. And they were made by Seigel. While it had not crossed my mind that there might be trolleys from either company out on the streets; they had not entered my calculations at all.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/siebel.html.

Tyres

Monbiot has an anguished article in today's Guardian about exporting car and lorry tyres to be burnt in India. And I recall reading about a huge tyre dump fire somewhere in Canada, which seems to be perpetual. So why don't we just bury the things in land fill sites and put them to the useful purpose of locking the carbon underground?

Do tyres decompose over time and release all kinds of unpleasant stuff into our aquifers? One would not have thought that carbon and hydrogen by themselves would cause a lot of bother.

The quick response from Bing is that it takes tyres around 50 years to decompose, but nothing about what they decompose to.

Maybe I will get bored later this afternoon and have a proper dig. Maybe even ask Google.

Fail to compute

Awake enough to notice them, awake enough to fetch my telephone, but not awake enough to compute the shadows. Where were they all coming from?

Deep mid-winter

Deep mid-winter here in Epsom. No more snow last night, but quite a heavy frost.

While we understand that north America is having rather more serious weather - which according to the BBC has nipped across the Arctic from Siberia. No doubt President Putin has installed some serious windmills to help it on its way.

Cold

On a cold, overcast day last week, we thought to pay a visit to Hampton Court Palace, according to the record, the first time since last September, with the annual membership breaking even at around two visits a year. See reference 1.

Plenty of space in the station car park across the river, but getting a ticket out of the parking machine turned out to be a major operation.

The corner site, between the station and the river, given a wash and brush up at the time of the bicycle business during the Olympics, as noticed at reference 2, seems to be on the move at long last with a notice about a hotel, housing and other stuff being pasted to the hoarding. A notice which gave the impression that the rather handsome, old style railway station is to be replaced by a block of something or other. We shall be sorry to see it - and all the space that goes with it - go. Not a good result.

Into the free part of the Palace Grounds, to find that the roses in the rose garden had nearly all been seriously cut back, down to within a foot or so of the ground. All a bit drastic but I daresay something that needs to be done from time to time to keep the rose bushes in reasonable shape.

Daffodils

Very few daffodils to be seen in the wilderness, rather more cyclamen, snowdrops and winter aconites.

Spring flowers

And so on to the Tiltyard Café, where we found that my favourite tarts, Maids of Honour, were missing. Let's hope they come back: dear, but good.

Into the Palace proper, to be annoyed once again by all the silly noises (aka sound effects) with which the place had been decorated. We do not see head to head competition with Disneyland being a proper part of the business of a serious heritage operation like Historic Royal Palaces - but I dare say they have got some smart new business man in charge who has other ideas. I associate to the knowledge that at one time the director of the Royal Parks in London used to be an eminence from the gardening world - while fully expecting that he is now just another business man on the make. But then, the Deputy Chief Royal makes a great deal of money out of his grocery brand, so who am I to complain?

Some of the rooms seemed very cold and some of the trusties had been issued with personal heaters, to supplement their smart red overcoats. Electric oil filled radiators rather than heritage one bar electric fires, as occasionally spotted in Ely Cathedral.

As usual, we took in the Cumberland Gallery. Another peek at Cupid and Psyche. Another peek at the Gainsborough, for which I am getting my taste back. See reference 3 for a not very good reproduction: the colours all seem a bit sharp to me. Not to mention the Rubens-Snyders of the earlier post.

Hinge

Curious hinge in the panelled room featured, I think, in the favourite of reference 4. Was it original or was it an attempt to keep an old door in one piece?

Foot of pilaster

I thought that the detailer had been a bit lazy with the foot of the pilaster above. Faking a pillar is fine, a well known and popular device, but the trim should not stop in quite such a blatant and visible way when it hits the wall behind. A hitting which needs to be blunted, softened somehow. Particularly when one had more, contrasting trim to the side, as here. BH was much more interested in the selection of the favourite's dresses which had been put on show.

Asparagus

Snapped for the folded linen asparagus which reminded us of the chocolate asparagus someone had given BH for Christmas. See reference 5. We also wondered, probably not for the first time, about the laundry arrangements. Did they have to be dismantled to be washed? Had Mr. Dyson come up with a special vacuum cleaner with which to suck the inevitable dust off?

Fireplace one

Fireplace two

We admired the extravagant fireplaces in the W&M part of the palace, with the second of the two above being particularly odd. Including irritating visual effects on the wall and what I thought were recorded fire noises from the grate. Perhaps they should go the whole heritage hog and have real fires in the grates? Using heritage logs from the park outside? The trusties would no doubt be glad of a blaze, but I suppose the health and safety crew might have something to say about it.

Pie and mash in the café near the old kitchens. Pie satisfactory but the mash, as I recall, rather spoiled by having too much milk or oil added to it. Entertainment provided by a robin hopping about on the lookout for scraps - this being some way from the nearest outsides.

Seagulls

Out to admire the long water, slightly frozen, with lots of seagulls parked up on the ice. And looking rather spectacular when, from time to time, they all took off in a cloud before settling down again. Thought once again that the trusties got the trees right here, chopping down all the old ones and replacing with new. I recall there being a lot of discussion at the time, almost as bad as Brexit, with one camp punting for brutal renovation and the other camp punting for kind renovation. The brutals, as can be seen above, won.

Window tax

One might have thought that the Royal Family would have been exempt from window tax, so unless they were showing solidarity with all their window filling cousins, there must have been some other reason for filling in all these windows. Perhaps one of the many make-overs. I suppose every new queen wanted to make her mark on the place, rather like new headmasters in schools, or new ministers in ministries.

Ugly car

One of several very ugly cars in the car park at Hampton Court station. Why do people buy such things? Do they work on the principle that any notice is better than no notice, in the way of some advertising agencies?

And so home. I forget what we took for tea on this day.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/palace.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=lycras+tarting.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/02/diana.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/favourite.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/festal-cheese.html.

Group search key: hca.

And we thought we had problems

Presently reading a rather depressing article in the latest number of the NYRB about the large numbers of re-education camps which have been built in Xinjiang, a central Asian province of China, originally colonised by the Qings in a relatively benign way in the 18th century.

Camps which appear to hold more than half a million Uighurs and others. Nearly all adhering to a benign variety of Islam and clearly regarded by the (Han) Chinese as a threat.

Ask your search engine for 'shawn zhang uighurs' or try reference 1. Lots of information about this in obscure parts of the public domain, not least on Google Earth.

Reference 1: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-expose-chinas-network-of-re-education-camps/10432924.

Reference 2: https://www.abc.net.au/news/. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Their version of the BBC?

Siegel

The trolley with a name beginning with 'S', mentioned in the previous post, has now been revisited, with the name turning out to be 'Siegel'.

It took a little while to track them down but I think we may now the story. The Siegel brothers split off from Wanzl in 1955, which they had helped found a few years previously, to form Siegel Brüder GmbH & Co. KG Draht- und Metallwarenfabrik. Subsequently they expanded into Poland. They then ran into trouble and the German operation was taken back into Wanzl in 2007 and the Polish operation spilt back off to become Produs, who supplied the history. While Wanzl supply Sainsbury's.

All of which fits in quite well with this being a Wilko trolley.

But on reflection, I didn't think it right to return it, as the trolley appears to be mixed up with the refurbishment of the Mexican style eatery (with Elvis tribute options) which used to be a proper old style public house, the Plough and Harrow, when we first arrived in Epsom. Almost on private land, which is something of a no-no, although we have not yet had an unambiguous ruling on the point from the rules committee.

PS: Bing alone was not enough and I had to invoke the power of Google to get this far.

Reference 1: http://www.produs-ss.pl/en/historia.

Reference 2: http://www.produs-ss.pl/.

Trolley 220

An embarrassment of riches today. I passed on a couple of trolleys in the passage. I passed on a trolley a bit further along on the grounds that I could not work out who it belonged to, beyond eliminating Sainsbury's because it was not a Wanzl trolley, rather something beginning with an 'S' - a something which I remembered so wrongly that I cannot now trace it.

But I did fall for these three, parked outside the University of Creation residence in East Street. Alternatively, outside the building site next door where demolition is now complete and foundations are going in.

Quite a lot harder to wheel three trolleys than one, particular on some of the rough stretches on the way to Kiln Lane. But scored as one as they were captured as one and returned as one.

Somewhere along the way passing yet another trolley, but I let than one go for now.

Mars bars

My latest communication from Transport for London.

Perhaps I ought to suggest that they translate the number bottom right into Mars Bars. Presumably less than one in my case.

I also wonder how much the calorie burn varies from person to person, from time to time. I tend to push a bit, which I would have thought would push my burn up from the average.

PS: pleased that it was not faked up as a personal communication from the chief executive of the Bullingdon Bike Line. Rather more modestly signed as from 'The Santander Cycles Team'.

Tuesday's word

Now around two thirds of the way through the book first noticed at reference 2, in the middle of the tenth story therein, 'L'Amiral a disparu'. The admiral in question being a chap who had done time as a kitchen hand on a passenger liner and was now, in retirement, gracing his little country town in the south of France wearing the distinctive hat of an officer of the merchant marine, hence the nickname.

With kitchen hand being the translation I have settled on for aide cuisinier. Someone not very high up in the kitchen hierarchy. But see reference 3 for a French-Canadian take on the phrase.

The word which really got me going this morning was paquebot, which I have taken to be a large ship, carrying passengers and mails, after the fashion of, for example, a Cunard liner. Or indeed the Canadian Pacific liner I sailed on as a child.

With paquebot being a straightforward theft from the English 'packet boat', often abbreviated to 'packet'. With the packet originally being a small package of secret government documents on their way to Ireland, then a colony of England. Since then we have moved onto diplomatic pouches, these days often, so I understand, taking the form of an ordinary shipping container. Possibly with out of the ordinary seals.

We tended to use the phrase 'mail boat' or 'liner' for the same purpose, with 'line' getting a very large entry in OED. The first meaning for line as a noun is all to do with the flax industry, while the second meaning is the one we want, with the 22nd sub-meaning being 'a regular succession of public conveyances plying between certain places; e.g. the Cunard line … the White Star line'. This last being of Titanic infamy. By extension, the company owning those conveyances.

Liner has its own entries, with the 8th sub-meaning of the second meaning being 'a vessel … belonging to a 'line' of packets'. Alternatively, a battleship fit to sail in the line. A side of things, I suppose, the French did not want to draw attention to, having lost the Battle of Trafalgar.

In sum, the French have focussed on what is carried, while we have focussed on the carrier and the rather geometrical flavour of 'line'. Who is to say which is the better approach?

PS: an excursion into 'mail', reveals a moderate entry, but with five nominal meanings and four verbal meanings. The third nominal meaning covers the current use of the word, wending its way from parcel, as in the modern French malle, through to what was in the parcel, that is to say the mail. First meaning being to do with chain mail armour, the second with tax, the fourth a sort of coin and the fifth a relation of mall as in Pall Mall. A relation also of the modern French mail, inter alia a place where you might play boule, and with the French having a quite different word for the post.

Reference 1: Le Petit Docteur - Simenon - 1943. Volume VII of the collected works. It is explained somewhere, in French, but I have yet to sort out to my satisfaction why some of Simenon's non-Maigret detective stories are brigaded with the Maigret stories.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/marple-in-french.html.

Reference 3: https://emplois.ca.indeed.com/Emplois-Aide-Cuisinier-Aide-Cuisinière.

Fake 56

Last week to Bourne Hall to hear about the future of Epsom and to contribute to that future, a variation on the focus group theme. Or perhaps the group therapy of the last years of my life at work. Maybe ten people from the council there, including the chief executive officer and her chief operating officer, maybe forty people from the borough. As one expects at such gatherings, more older than younger, but a good sprinkling of the latter. Including two city boys in my group, one of whom was deep into the modelling of tricky derivatives - not what one would expect from someone who was economist rather than physicist trained. Plus someone who knew that ING, noticed at reference 4, took on Barings' sommelier along with their paintings. An old retainer who did not like the idea of a stranger taking over his cellar?

The venue was the fine theatre come dance hall in the basement of the Hall, last noticed at reference 1. On the way out I asked the chaps on the door about how much it was used and they said plenty, which I was pleased about. It would be a pity for it to stand empty, one month to the next.

The format was introductory talk, break out into five or six groups, each with its own council facilitator, each with its own topics to think about, then report back from groups and wind up. Flip charts, post-it notes, pens and paper. Coffee, tea and biscuits. I thought it was a well run affair: it is not easy to do this sort of thing and I thought they had a good crack at it. One of a number of events they are running under the banner 'Future40' to help them build their strategy for the future. My group's topic was housing and it was good for me to be reminded that there are lots of different - and entirely reasonable - views out there about how to tackle such things. Different views which our elected representatives and their officers have somehow to turn into policy.

The big driver seemed to be that the population of the borough was set to grow by 20% in the next twenty years. Most of this was ageing population, some of it was lots of births. Oddly, it was expected that there would be a small fall of numbers of people in early middle age; perhaps people with growing families who not afford the bigger accommodation they needed while staying in the borough. Which was rich in average income but even richer in house prices.

Plenty of recognition in the group that the detached and semi-detached estate houses of the sort that I live in are probably not the way forward. They take up too much space and plenty of young people do not want the bother of gardens.

I entered two pleas. One for the council to allow the footprint of the retail part of town to shrink, in line with the long term decline of town centre shopping. Essentially the same point as was made at reference 2. Two for the need for accommodation for young people. Essentially studio flats (a fancy name for the bed-sitters of my young days) but with the addition of some communal facilities and a modest dose of supervision. An affordable place for young people, possibly with problems, who have either flown or been pushed out of the nest. A new take on the hostels of old, when for example, some of the big London stores provided accommodation for all the young people they had sucked into the big town from their native provinces. I don't suppose either plea will make the cut.

And I did not care for the rather growth and competition tone of the whole business. We want Epsom to do better! We want Epsom to attract more people! We want Epsom to attract more businesses! Speaking for myself, I would be quite happy for the borough to stand still and I have no ambitions to drive either Leatherhead or Ashtead to the wall. A tone which rather echoes, to my mind, the desperate scramble for growth and for more which seems to be a feature of our society. A desperate scramble which certainly delivers various kinds of progress - say in the technical side of health care or in the variety of food available in our big supermarkets - but which is starting to run up a large bill in other ways.

But that said, as I said at the outset, a well run affair.

Moon not up to much at exit at 2030, not a patch on the day previous.

Following the notice at reference 3 and being on foot, I thought to go into TB for the first time for a while. Open. Wine cheap and drinkable. Quite busy with a darts match. Maybe twenty of them and ten others, not bad for the middle of a Monday evening. And I even got to sit at what had been my regular stool at the bar in the olden days.

PS: faked because the chief executive used the snap above for her opening shot. I got our facilitator to send it to me afterwards and Google image search revealed that the precariously perched boat had probably been added to the picture by a drop of Photoshop. The point of the opening shot, which Google suggests has plenty of track record in presentations, being that this was how it felt to be a local authority, trying to weather the storms of austerity, the shifts and shakes of central direction.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/06/pianos.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/planners.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/trolley-216.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/heritage-saturday.html.

Peg-It

The young lady mentioned in the post before last. For some reason she declined her cottage pie - a first - and insisted on cold custard instead, custard which has to be yellow and which, to my mind, smells very strongly of vanilla.

After that, she wanted out, but BH diverted her with our ancient Peg-It, a boxed game from the 1950's, almost certainly sourced from a charity shop, a car boot sale or a jumble sale. Intended as a slightly more sophisticated version of noughts and crosses or five in a line, but which served very well today as something with which to makes lines of coloured pegs. And then put them all back again. And then make some more lines. A game which I pleased to report lasted for longer than our lunch.

I also had occasion to think that not only are most restaurants pretty useless at simple foods, they are also pretty useless at seconds. With the drill usually being that one has to order one's dish all over again, which is usually more than one wants, even supposing that one has not gone off the boil by the time that it turns up.

Trolley 219

An M&S food hall trolley captured in the passage by TK Maxx.

Removed fag end from basket and wheeled the trolley through the busy (mid Monday morning) store, rather than wheeling it around through the Ashley Centre entrance where the trolley stacks are.

Gave it to a grateful older gentleman who was grappling unsuccessfully with a pound coin and the lock of the trolley at the top of the stack. For some reason, my trolley did not have a lock at all, despite looking reasonably new.

Green concerns

A house near us is having problems with the floor of one of the rooms on the ground floor, problems which mean that the floor needs to be taken up and its foundations attended to. Taking up means, in this case, ripping out large amounts of substantial, old-style pine floor boards, substantially sound. Ripping out means, in this case, doing so much damage to the boards that they are only fit for chip board or the paper mill.

Next step is to load them all up into a skip, along with all kinds of other builders' rubbish.

It is possible that the timber will be sorted from the masonry at the waste transfer station taking the skip, and put to some use - but I rather doubt it. Dumped entire into a land fill somewhere seems much more likely.

And this from a caring, green community in a reasonably affluent suburb.

While I remember, from the demolition days of my youth in the late 1960's, taking the much lower grade floor boards out of terrace houses up north somewhere, taking them out carefully enough that they could be sold on for so much a foot.

In defence of the reasonably affluent suburb, one ought to add that timber in an anaerobic land fill is quite a good way of capturing the carbon. It will last forever - so we are achieving something. While I associate to a story about a McDonald's beef burger which survived in recognisable form at the bottom of a landfill for some impressive number of years.

All of which reminds me of the complexity of the ebbs and flows of the world of eco green.

PS: one useful by-product is a long plank to be walked by a visiting 2 year old.

Birthday boys

Last Sunday to the Wigmore Hall for another concert from the Endellion's 40th season. This one, it seems, on the anniversary of their very first rehearsal. Haydn Op.73, No.3. Bartók Op.17. Beethoven Op.131. The three masters of the string quartet according to what the first violin told us at Dorking, many years ago now.

A cold evening, with much talk in the media about the forthcoming eclipse of the moon, due to be visible at Epsom around 0500 the Monday morning following. But it seemed rather milder by the time we got to Cavendish Square, with our bench being available, so we took our picnic outside while we admired the moon, already quite high in the sky.

Rather a nice programme, including some photographs of the quartet through the many years, two visible in the snap above and some with a lot more hair than they sport now. We were able to entertain ourselves by working out who was who, perhaps helped along by it being the end of the bottle, so we had done well on the wine in the Bechstein Room. Up to a full hall, decorated with flowers that looked rather summery to me, considering that it was mid-winter. They also included some which BH explained had been dyed green. We also had celebrity in the form of Andrew Marr and his wife in our very own row, with he being rather shorter than we expected.

Some nicely pitched words from the first violin at the start of the first half, from the cello at the start of the second. Music all splendid, including my managing the lack of gaps in Op.131, probably because I knew about them in advance this time, having clocked the hyphens in relevant part of the programme. We also got a rather jolly take on 'Happy Birthday' by way of encore - which, or something very similar, I think we had heard before.

Cock & Lion very quiet at the time of the interval, that is to say around 2030. A good thing when one is on the run, as it were.

Out to be puzzled by the height of the full moon, but eventually worked out that the moon at the time of an eclipse in mid winter would be as high as the sun in mid summer. As it happened, we did get to look out of our window at 0500 the following morning, when a rather hazy moon was visible through the clouds, vanishing shortly thereafter. But we could not tell whether than was cloud or eclipse and went back to bed.

On the other hand there was a very fine, very large full moon low in the east at around 1800 later that Monday. Much more impressive than its early morning effort in the west.

PS: checking up our celebrity, we find that he is married to a daughter of Lord Ashley, lately an eminent resident of Epsom. Inter alia, being deaf for the second half of his life himself, a campaigner for the disabled, and honoured by the Gallaudet University noticed at reference 4. But he did not give his name to our Ashley Centre, that honour going to an earlier Miss. Ashley. See reference 3.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/failure.html. An earlier notice of the moon.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/sacconi-one.html. What looks to have been the last outing for Op.131. Further remarks about gaps here.

Reference 3: http://www.epsomandewellhistoryexplorer.org.uk/AshleyCentre.html. A good site for Epsom history, even if the shot of Ashley House does not bear much resemblance to what can be seen in Street View.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=Gallaudet.

Trolley 218

The trolley on the right has been in the stream for a few weeks, not fished out partly because the basket has been bent and Sainsbury's may not want it back. Indeed, the red and white tape visible on one of the struts might well be the mark of condemnation by the chief trolley jockey - but with the trolley so condemned somehow escaping back into the real world.

While the trolley on the left was on the other side of the stream at noon yesterday, at the wrong end of my walk, so I did not rescue it there and then, and in the stream this morning. Luckily I was able to retrieve it without the aid of grappling iron, rope etc - and without falling in.

Soon cleaned off and trundled around to Sainsbury's, to find a fire engine just pulling out - without bothering to pull down the shutters on all the interesting bits of kit on the near side shelving. I thought about rushing after it waving my arms to catch their attention, but decided against.

Then on the way back to town, I passed a young lady who did not care to have simple slashes in the legs of her jeans and had opted for something rather like pulled thread work. Quite complicated patterns, quite neatly done. So either she or her mother had spent some quality time on them - or some quality money.

Week seven

Growth continues, with the first flower buds now clearly separated. No sign, however, of a second inflorescence, despite careful inspection of the other half dozen or so mature shoots. Shoots, for want of a more suitable word. Stalks? Branches? Foci of growth?

Group search key: tfd.

Early snowdrops

A little early for snowdrops, but last Sunday we thought we had better check whether global warming had reached the snowdrop world and get ourselves to Nonsuch Park. Bright and clear by 1000 and off we went, with me sporting my red skiing jacket just in case the wind got up. A fine jacket which has never been on a ski slope, although I have to admit to it having been near one.

Crows

Plenty of cars in the Stoneleigh-side car park that we usually use, with plenty of crows in attendance. Maybe they know that people means dropped food, even at this time of year. The park itself was looking very well in the bright winter sun, with the frost just lifting. Plenty of dogs and plenty of joggers out on the various paths.

Fungus

The park contains quite a lot of old trees and quite a few of them had come down or been taken down over the past few months. Fortunately, someone has been busy and there are plenty of young trees coming on to replace them.

Herald Copse

Snowdrops coming on well at Herald Copse, perhaps a couple of weeks off their peak. Just the one dog owner being a bit insensitive about where he allowed his dog to go - and following it into the copse.

Cabbages

Fine show of ornamental cabbages around the corner, with their colours seeming very bright. The sort of thing which were - and perhaps still are - popular in contract window boxes in central London. By which I mean window boxes that you don't bother to plant or water yourself, finding it more convenient to get some contractor to supply, maintain and water.

Fake?

Not altogether sure what was going on here, with a row of what looked like filled in windows. But filled in a long time ago as the buttresses have clearly been there for quite a long time to. Perhaps change of use rather than window tax, as featured at reference 2? Clearly something for a closer inspection next time.

New readers may not know that five hundred years ago there was a palace at the southern end of what is now the park, while the present house is in the middle of the park, with the council struggling to find a sensible use for it. The Nonsuch Volunteers do what they can to help to keep things going and are now open every Sunday, not just high days and holidays, so we were able to take another look at their splendid model of the palace, construction of which had been supervised by the chap who led the excavation back in 1959. The post which first talks of this model, at reference 5, talked of folly, whereas on this occasion I thought of Marx's surplus value. A society in which most people had a very low standard of living and in which common people left little material trace, but which could find the money for such an ostentatious and expensive palace. Not to mention all their ridiculously fancy clothes, not here on display. In their defence, they did recycle the building materials after around a hundred years. Were the Tudor aristocrats and parvenus the people who came closest, in our modern era, to the people who are very rich now?

A palace in roughly two halves, with the end when the work was done, kitchens, stables and the like, being built of stone, while the display end was timber framed. With the fancy decorative panels so framed being made of a very hard variety of fast-setting plaster. The lump on display looked very like stone to me.

We also took in the circular or octagonal game larder of the present house, at least from the outside. Occupying what had been a courtyard.

PS 1: according to Wikipedia: 'The 1959 excavation of Nonsuch by Martin Biddle was a key event in the history of archaeology in the UK. It was one of the first post-medieval sites to be excavated, and attracted over 75,000 visitors during the work. This excavation led to major developments in post-medieval archaeology'. See references 3 and 4.

PS 2: some time later, visiting the modellers at reference 6, I find that another of their bigger projects was a model of the Auschwitz concentration camp for the Imperial War Museum near Waterloo Station: 'the model represents the arrival and dispersal of a trainload of over 6,000 Jews from the Berehovo ghetto in June 1944'. Not sure about the propriety of this myself, so I hope they took proper advice before commissioning the model.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/snowdrops.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/fake-52.html.

Reference 3: Nonsuch Palace: The Material Culture of a Noble Restoration Household - Biddle, Martin - 2005. Oxbow Books. £60 or more from either Abebooks or eBay. Too strong for me!

Reference 4: The Gardens of Nonsuch: Sources and Dating - Biddle, Martin - 1999. Garden History.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=nonsuch+model.

Reference 6: http://www.modelhouses.co.uk/.

Trolley 217

Captured on the south side of East Street, between bus stops. Perhaps abandoned by an inhabitant of one of the houses on this stretch, just short of what used to be the King's Arms public house.

A public house which has been closed for some time now. One assumes the owner of the site cannot agree with the council about the division of spoils of redevelopment. At one time a Youngs house and the last Youngs' tenant was pushed out, as I recall, by unrealistic rents. Unrealistic in the sense of what a public house could reasonably pay, presumably rather less than a block of flats, the comparator that the accountants at Youngs would use.

I associate to stories of old-fashioned business men in provincial towns hanging onto freehold assets for reasons of sentiment and standing, long after they had stopped providing a decent return. A time and place where sentiment and standing had a higher rating than the books of the accountants.

Texture nets

At reference 1 we gave some thought to the shape nets of LWS-N, leaving the texture nets which go with them for another day. Since then we have come up with various challenges.

First, we have the division of labour between shape nets and texture nets in the case of the image of folded cloth included at reference 2. A case where I think Leonardo was clearly interested in the ways of folded cloth and how they might be captured in chalk on paper. A version of what we believe must go on in the brain of an attentive observer when building the subjective experience of such cloth; the value added over and above a dumb collection of pixels. And not only the division of labour, the detail of that labour.

Second, we have the same work to do with the images of surfaces of flesh and fruit included in the present post. A picture of Pythagoras advocating vegetarianism from the early seventeenth century, by Rubens (flesh) and Snyders (fruit), about a century later than the Leonardo. Another case where the artists were clearly interested in the ways of flesh and fruit respectively; a rather scientific interest in the appearance of these things, and the capture of those appearances, as well as the place of those things in the world of men. A picture from the Royal Collection, spotted yesterday morning in the Cumberland Gallery at Hampton Court Palace.

Third, we have the flesh of Veronese, spotted this afternoon in the National Gallery. More particularly, the four large paintings making up his allegory of love, particularly the back of the faithless lady. From a few decades before Pythagoras.

With both the second and third including a good dollop of folded cloth to tackle, once we have made some progress with the challenge of the first.

So, once we have worked out how texture nets are going to capture the experience seeing red, gone a bit further with (for example) reference 3, we have some work to do.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/making-shape-net.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/seeing-triangles-in-dots.html.

Group search keys: srd, hca, wgb.

Disposal

Following the notice of Shaxson at reference 2, I needed a couple of inches in the extension bookcase for him, and my eye lighted on the two books snapped left.

Witney was a serious monograph about the gradual colonisation of the Kentish Weald by the Jutes and their pigs in the Dark Ages. A bit of local history which I found interesting back in 1976, but not looked at for years and unlikely to be looked at again.

Conneau was a memoir from the white side of the sharp end of the slave trade in West Africa. Again interesting at the time I bought it, but again, not looked at for years unlikely to be looked at again.

With the help of the trusty mattock, both now in Compost Heap No.2 and Shaxon is installed in their place. But I don't suppose he will last as long as either of them.

I wonder if this hanging onto things, in this case books, which are well past their sell-by date is a common trait of collectors? When does it count as hoarding? How far does one have to go for it to count as an obsession?

PS: Amazon suggests that Witney might have been worth selling. Abebooks suggests that Conneau was probably not.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/disposal.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/city-boys-episode-2.html.

Another one that got away

A Sainsbury's trolley in the arch at Vauxhall Station which also contains a Cycle Expressway (quite hairy during the rush hour) and a Bullingdon stand, the one where I had just parked up.

Sadly, I was both a bit tired by this point and not altogether sure where the new Sainsbury's was, the old one in Wandsworth Road having been demolished in favour of something else - so I left it. A pity as it would have been the first out-of-Epsom capture for a while.

At least I now know that the new Sainsbury's is more or less at the same place as the old one, maybe 500 yards from the stand. But I think I would have found it a bit of a long way.

Group search key: wgb.

Fake 55

After dealing with the moon last Friday (see previous post) off to the 'Plaice to Eat' for a fish supper, a place with which we have been well pleased with in the past.

Presented with sliced wally, pickled onions, bread and butter on arrival. Haddock and chips for me to follow, cod, chips and salad for BH. Washed down with tea, although alcohol was, I think, available. All very good and the quantities were about right. Much better than the pub equivalent, although this last has come on in leaps and bounds over the years, and is usually quite acceptable, if heavily coated.

We wondered about how the fish was delivered: fresh or frozen? I thought probably frozen, given the appearance of the grey sideline of my haddock. Whatever the case, the haddock had a good texture and tasted fine.

Potatoes almost certainly fresh, as I quite often pass the potato delivery lorry parked outside, taking in what always seems to be a good number of sacks.

Faked for this arch over the more traditional windows. Thin slivers of brick glued onto a wooden backing and painted in gloss. There used to be a lot of it from the Cypriots who lived and restauranteured in and around Harringay Green Lanes in the 1970's, so perhaps it is a Mediterranean thing.

Followed up with a spot of the Picpoul at the Marquis, which was quite busy with young people, some of them clearly on the lookout. Perhaps it was what used to be called a pickup place. But there were also some older people, so a good mix overall. Near thirty year now since I thought to make the place my local, in the days when it still had an old-fashioned brewery tenant and his wife running the place, long since retired to the seaside.

And nearly home, nearly scored a three at the aeroplane game in our very own road. Not sure now why it was nearly, but that is what the note says. Most likely because I lost the first aeroplane, although it should still have been there, after I had snagged the third. One has to get all three in one sweep of the eyes for it to qualify.

Reference 1: https://www.facebook.com/plaicetoeat/. One supposes that for a small business, a Facebook page in a cheap and easy alternative to setting up your own website. With the open access being something of a two edged weapon: you get the fair comment but you also get the rubbish. But see reference 3 below.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-philanthropist.html. The last documented visit appears to have been in 2017, although reference 3 suggest that we also visited in February last year.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/prezzo.html. The website included in this post does not seem to exist any more. Perhaps there was a change of ownership, even though there has been no detectable change of format.

Failure

There was a very spectacular moon, shining through a hole in the clouds over Epsom last Friday evening.

A moon which the telephone could not really cope with, getting some suggestion of the interesting colour of its halo but losing all definition of its shape and losing the hole in the clouds, this despite using the zoom feature. With the hole in the clouds being perhaps twice the apparent diameter of the moon. I suppose it could not cope with difference in light intensity between the light of the moon and the dark of the cloud. Which seemed to mean that the hole in the clouds, somewhere in between, vanished. Lost in translation.

But it did acquire some kind of an echo, below and slightly to the left, not present in real life at all.

Whereas, when in bright sunlight, when snapping a very bright scene, invisible on the screen, it seems to manage quite well, producing a very acceptable snap. Provided, that is, that one has guessed the right direction in which to point the telephone.

City boys: episode 2

Some people tell us that the financial and legal services industry (FLSI or Flossy for short) centred in the City of London creates wealth for the rest of the country. Other people tell us that Flossy extracts wealth from anyone in range – including all the people in the rest of the country. The two lots probably agree that there are financial and legal services which we do need, which any modern economy needs in order to function: the difficulty arises over what they do with the rest of their time.

A journalist by the name of Nicholas Shaxson has written the book at reference 1 all about it, previously noticed by me at references 2, 3 and 4. A proponent of the wealth extraction rather than the wealth creation version of the story. This post is the result of my having, after some time, gotten around to finishing the book.

An easy enough read, with introduction, eleven short chapters and a conclusion, although the tone is irritating at times and it starts to feel a bit stodgy, shrill and repetitive by the end – at getting on for 300 pages of journalism. For those wanting an even easier read, there is the introductory reference 5.

I offer a few snippets, in no particular order.

Many large companies operate with a stack of holding companies arranged on top of them, a stack which might have as many as ten layers. Curiously, many of these companies will have the same address, while at least some of them will be registered in some haven or other – some haven which is light on regulation and taxation and heavy on secrecy. And with the mere existence of these stacks providing an impressive amount of confusion and secrecy. With the only purpose of these complicated arrangements, apart from earning fat fees for the people who set them up and run them – being the evasion of both tax and regulation by the principals.

In which connection I learn about the theft of Panama from Columbia and the invention of the shipping haven (aka flags of convenience), which eventually mutated into the tax haven. A country which I had thought to be a small place, but which actually has a third the area of the UK, just about the size of Ireland. A substantial, if rather hot and hilly place.

Limited companies are useful in this context. Private equity companies, themselves exempt from the regulations and reporting that go with being listed (private means private), so organise things that they can strip all the loose money out of the limited companies that they have invested in, that they own, while making sure that all the debts stay inside. Sometimes even going so far as to get the limited company to borrow the money to pass upstairs, under some cover or other. With the magic words ‘limited liability’ meaning that if these debts go bad, they do not greatly disturb the private equity boys (limited liability means their liability is limited). All of which sounds to me very like the asset stripping which was all the thing in the days of Slater Walker, in the late 1960’s of my lefty youth. With the Walker in this particular duet going on to become a Conservative Cabinet Minister. While the firm went bust, so not such a great proposition.

Another much abused dodge is the trust, which provides much secrecy, confuses ownership and generally defeats both taxman and regulator. Abuses which resulted in much anti-trust legislation in the US after the great Wall Street Crash, legislation which has been steadily unwound in the present century. With Shaxson reminding us of the use by Northern Rock of a small, north of England charity (charities being a specialised, public interest form of trust) to do with the Down’s Syndrome as a fig-leaf to cover up some of its more unusual goings-on.

Flossy is very keen on fee generating mergers and acquisitions (aka consolidations), with the result that monopolies are doing well. One only has to look at Microsoft, Google and Facebook, all of which have effectively monopolistic grips on very big markets, to see that monopolies are a good thing. And the Sage of Omaha (aka Warren Buffett) is very keen on them, seeing them as reliable generators of shareholder value.

We are reminded that Jean-Claude Juncker got to where is today by building Luxembourg into a world class tax haven. But diehard Brexiteers should remember that this trick works much better in a very small country than in a middle sized one. While, in the meantime, London does its bit with its lawyers and accountants putting their imprimatur onto all kinds of shady goings-on which they should not be mixed up with. According to Shaxson, US regulators, at least before the arrival of Trump, used to get quite angry about the lax standards on this side of the pond.

We are reminded that Flossy sucks in far too many of out brightest and best. The brightest and best who would, in the olden days, being doing more useful things like brewing better beer or building better bridges. Or governing some remote part of India from a donkey.

And just to show that I am not obsessed with Flossy, I note that she has a little sister called the management consulting industry, another parasite sucking wealth out of the rest of the world, in particular out of the once proud public services of the United Kingdom. With the big four accountancy firms being both very big in this world and very bad at spotting big, bad apples – which one might have thought was their proper business.

Both the Conservative and the Labour parties got very excited about the private finance initiative, one of the dirtier deeds of these management consultants, dressed up as a wheeze to bring private sector flair into dossy old public sector services, but really a wheeze to get government spending off balance sheet – and with payback deferred mañana. The catch for rest of us being that this eventual payback is huge, with the result that the services in question cost perhaps three times as much as they would have, had they been financed in the usual way, by long term, low interest government bonds.

Shaxson makes an entertaining parallel between the attempts of civil servants to manage PFI contracts and those of Soviet central planners to manage the Soviet Union.

He airs arguments for and against corporation tax, coming down on the side of the fors. Which is where I am: abolishing corporation tax in favour of more income tax might, in a perfect world, be morally neutral, but in a world where many people work hard to avoid paying income tax, corporation tax is a useful backstop.

Last but not least, he reminds us of the large amounts of big money going in to respectable sounding institutions like the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, the very people to which hollowed out government departments have to turn to for advice. I associate to the large amount of money poured into lobbying (in various guises) by the tobacco industry in an effort to stop government meddling with that market.

Conclusions

The book is not very attractively produced and has plenty of faults, but it does confirm my prior belief that this country would do a lot better if Flossy were to be significantly cut back. And Bing turns up plenty more of the same on the search term ‘financial services crash parasite’ – this being the source for reference 5.

More positively, an interesting, if sometimes tiresome read. Will many of the city boys be moved to read it, to learn the error of their ways?

I am also prompted to wonder, not for the first time, whether this whole edifice is not a cunningly disguised way for Flossy to charge exorbitant commission on the flow of money, some decent, some dirty, into the UK. The flow of money which provides the fuel for the whole business, the flow which keeps the standard of living of all the mugs just about high enough that they don’t complain about the rather higher standard of living of the very important Flossites. But it is not sustainable: eventually we will have sold everything that can be sold and the inflow will turn into an outflow. But Flossy will be OK because she will be able to charge commission on that too.

References

Reference 1: The Finance Curse: How global finance is making us all poorer – Nicholas Shaxson - 2018.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/juncker.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/11/city-boys.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/distribution-of-good-things-of-life.html.

Reference 5: https://www.independent.co.uk/. A decade on from the financial crash, we are still suffering its long burn - Ben Chu – 2018. Available by search on the ‘Independent’ website.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/11/city-boys-episode-1.html. Just to round things out. Naming conventions not quite all they might be.

North Pole

In the early days of the Bullingdon system, I had ambitions to reach all four poles of the system, that is to say the most easterly, southerly, westerly and northerly stands of the system, making some proper allowance for its changes in coverage, whatever that might be. Without checking further than reference 1, my recollection is that I made the West Pole and the South Pole and nearly made the East Pole, but never really attempted the North Pole. This has now been sorted out.

A damp and dull start to the day, but bright and clear by the time I ventured out at 1100 or so, having dealt with cutting my right hand index finger on a sharp bit of brown bread crust. Always a pain these sorts of cuts.

No working Bullingdons on the ramp at Waterloo at midday, which I thought was a bit poor, but I was able to get one from Concert Hall Approach 2, and made it to Drury Lane in 8 minutes and 37 seconds. Having engaged on the way with a lady, riding what seemed a lot lower than me, but with handlebars equipped with a gadget to hold her mobile phone in navigation mode. With the route to follow being superimposed on a street map. Sadly, not all fine and dandy for those of us who do need reading classes but who don't wear varifocals.

Nipped into the cheese shop in Shorts Gardens for my usual supply of Poacher, where the chap who served me was not exactly a master with the cheese wire. Nevertheless, he claimed that breaking a wire was more or less unheard of, so perhaps this specialist cheese shop buys better quality wire than the people at Waitrose, where breakages were common, at least in Epsom, back in the good old days when they sold loose cheese rather than ready meals.

Then back to Drury Lane to pull a second Bullingdon to take me to Castlehaven Road in Camden Town in 22 minutes and 25 seconds. A regular memory lane job, taking in Southampton Row, Eversholt Street and Camden Town, all places I have known well and frequently cycled at various points in the rather distant past. All rather different, but all very busy. Both diverse and vibrant, with the Camden Lock Market area being a lot busier than I expected on a weekday (Thursday) lunchtime. With the North Pole being just by Camden Lock railway station, with the picnic park snapped (aka Castlehaven Open Space), just to hand.

Rewarded by a rare sighting of a regular goods train, quite long, heading north. And commuter trains, quite like the ones I use, but coming with pantographs, not something we see south of the river.

Back into town, with due allowance for the one way systems en-route. Another memory lane job, with it being part of the route I used to cycle from Wood Green to Aldwych in the late 1970's. Plus a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in a decommissioned church. Plus a fancy looking gothic revival church somewhere in Somers Town, but it was not convenient to stop. Plus a lady down at a junction, with various people in attendance. Plus she was smiling, so not necessary to stop. There seemed to be lots of blue lighting going in, all three services, but not down to her.

Back down Holborn and what seemed like a very easy glide across Waterloo Bridge, compared with the pull the other way a few hours previously. Back up the ramp to take the pole position, after moving the competing vehicle illustrated. Let's hope our mayor gets around to revoking their license: we don't need several bike hire systems cluttering up our already cluttered streets, particularly since these new ones have no control over where bikes are left and maintenance arrangements which are probably feeble compared with the Rolls Royce Bullingdon operation. Notwithstanding which, I had had a few issues with my key during the day, so I hope that it is not wearing out.

I made the journey back in 30 minutes and 49 seconds, which I had thought was 49 seconds inside the supplementary charge zone. Maybe it only clicks in when you hit the 31 minutes. Maybe I get frequent rider concessions.

Conditions must have been better at Clapham Junction this time, at 1400 or so, than last time (reference 2). An instant two followed by a couple of good fours. Plus a big, low flying moon, around half grown, to the east. Not much more than 90 degrees round from the sun, which did not seem enough, but the unaided brain couldn't cope with the geometry involved, couldn't compute. Plus two train spotters. I thought about, but did not get around to trying to convert them from trains to aeroplanes.

PS: talk of low flying reminds me that I ought to start taking my sun glasses on trips like this, with the sun having been troublesome at a couple of big junctions.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=west+pole.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/chopin-preludes.html.

Chicken soup

At the end of the post at reference 1, I mentioned e-number soup.

Today, I invented a new version, switching the e-numbers - that is to say the packet of Knorr chicken noodle soup - with real chicken, 250g of breast flying under the Duchy Originals banner at Waitrose. I would have preferred Waitrose's own but that came in 500g portions, which was more than I needed.

Chop chicken into cubic centimetre lumps. Add to around half a litre of boiling water. Add two finely chopped onions and three finely sliced stalks of celery. Simmer for half an hour.

Towards the end of this time, collect up second hand rice and mashed potato and bring to the boil in their own couple of pints of water. About five minutes before luncheon, add left over white cabbage, already slivered as it happened. Transfer chicken, onion and celery from the first pot into this second pot. Add half a dozen button mushrooms, stalked and quartered. Serve with brown bread.

Very good it was too. No need for Knorr-numbers, salt or pepper.

PS: brought down slightly by using the tainted rice of reference 2. But not a big problem.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/abbey.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/smells.html.

Distribution of the good things of life

I was shocked to read in yesterday's Guardian that the 25 richest people in the world own as much as the poorest half put together.

If we allow the richest people £50 billion each and the poorest half to amount to 3.25 billion people, that says that the poor people have, on average, something less than £400 each. Which I find entirely plausible.

What I do find surprising is that the world is still going round. How long will it be before all the poor people decide they want a bigger share of the cake? How much strutting and preening at Davos do they have to watch on Facebook before they reach for their pitchforks and machetes?

I am also reminded of an observation by Shaxson in the book noticed at references 1 and 2, to the effect that seriously rich people have got everything and done everything. All that seems to be left for them is getting still richer, with that getting preferably being spiced up by doing it at someone else's expense. With Mr Gates and his wife being honourable exceptions. And with my own more considered thoughts working their way through the press.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/11/city-boys-episode-1.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/11/city-boys.html.

Reference 3: https://wealthygorilla.com/top-20-richest-people-world/. My source for the £50 billion figure. Not sure how respectable they are given: '... About us: Wealthy Gorilla was founded in 2014 by Dan Western, as a website to help motivate and inspire others to improve their own lives, and live life on their own terms. Isn’t that what we all want to achieve? Since then, Wealthy Gorilla has grown over the years, and become one of the leading self-improvement blogs on the web. We’re currently receiving over 2 million views every single month, and have over 200K social media followers, and 200+ authors have been able to share their content on our platform...'.

Impenetrable irritation

Sacks, in his book ‘Awakenings’, noticed at reference 1, talks about the autobiography of one Leonard L, in which I tried to take an interest but failed, with neither Bing nor Google turning up any trace, other than reference 1. My copy of which is a nicely produced paperback from the University of Minnesota Press, from Thrift Books for $2.99 according to the sticker on the cover, but actually $13.61, with the difference being, in part at least, the postage from Reno. With Thrift Books being some kind of an umbrella under which we find Sierra Nevada Books, operating just outside of Reno, in the lee of the mountains to the west, home to a series national parks and national forests, running north and south. With just a hint of Amazon being stirred into the mixture for good measure.

A book which I find rather difficult, a book which might be what one calls post-modern or deconstructional and which certainly includes both Derrida and Foucault in the index, although Freud figures larger than either of them. According to the puff on the back: ‘Ira Livingston’s reading of Romantic and postmodern texts – from poetic and scientific works to films and dreams – reveals surprising code shiftings within and among them. The resilience of Romanticism, Livingston argues, lies in not enforcing a single “master narrative” but in orchestrating these fluxes’. A puff which I find as impenetrable as the book so puffed, which seems entirely appropriate.

Chapter 5 is entitled ‘Fractal Logics of Romanticism: Rhythming’, with the fourth and last section therein being entitled ‘Parkinsonism, Romanticism, Postmodernism: Neurology as Ideology’, which turns out to be a reading of the Sacks book, which is presumably why Bing turned it up in the first place.

I did not get much from a first reading of this last section last night, beyond a sense that the present writer (Livingston) found both Sacks and his book rather irritating, but I did rather better this morning, getting glimpses of real content among the clouds of words.

We start with Mr. Parkinson himself, a London apothecary and doctor at the turn of the 17th century, an Enlightenment type taking an interest in all kinds of things, for examples Jacobins and fossils. He even has some fossil beans named for him, as well as the more famous disease. I quote from reference 6, turned up by Bing: ‘… But the name of Parkinson in the world of geology and his skill and ingenuity in dissecting the weird fossilized creatures of bygone days was still remembered. The curious fossil beans found in the clay of the Isle of Sheppey, which had so fascinated him and which he thought were those of the cocoa plant, had been named Pandanocarpus parkinsonis by Brongmart and Nipadites parkinsonis by Mantell, and there were others too…’. See references 4 and 7.

More famously he was able to abstract from the symptoms of various people wandering the streets of London the disease which we now know as Parkinson’s; an impressive feat of observation. While Livingston tells us all about how diseases are as much a mirror of their times and of their inventors as something real with an independent existence, and talks in a rather disparaging way of poking around in bodies to find an anatomical analogue for a disease so identified. He neglects to mention that we have in this particular case found an anatomical analogue (the substantia nigra, at the bottom of the brain proper) and, to my mind, he fails to acknowledge that science mostly works; Derrida, Foucault and company notwithstanding. It does deliver the goods; it does get us to the dark side of the moon.

But he has a point in that some medical diagnoses are very much a product of their time and place. I recall reading once that French doctors saw all disease through the prism of the liver, while German doctors saw all disease through the prism of the heart. And then there are the passing fads of diagnosis of mental illness – which brings hysteria, multiple personality and satanic abuse to mind – and perhaps autism and the autism syndrome will be consigned to the same bin in due course. Medicine is littered with the corpses of problems which were once thought important.

We then get an anecdote drawn from another of Sacks’ books, about coming across a lady with Tourette’s syndrome in a New York Street, a rather florid and extreme case to judge by the article at reference 5. With Livingston being interested in the way in which the ladies’ bizarre echoing of the appearance of the people around her interacted with those people in a bizarre two way process. I associate to receding mirrors.

Livingston then has a pop at Sacks’ account of a president’s speech, then at his magpie-like gathering up of fashionable bits and pieces from 1970’s science in ‘Awakenings’ – stuff like relativity, chaos, attractors and limit cycles. After which we move onto the film of the book, and Livingston has some sport with Sacks’ fascination with his visit to the world of luvvies which resulted. Perhaps Livingston was jealous that nobody had ever accorded him that sort of attention. He observes that ‘… By the same token, one might say that professional intellectuals are most often those who must continually immunize themselves to ideas, those whose training is designed to protect them from the danger that living ideas poses…’. Which smells of class envy to me, the envy of someone who went to a university from tier three rather than one from tier one – although all I can find out on that score is that he got his PhD from Stanford, which I had thought of as a tier one place.

He accuses of Sacks of building his picture of Parkinson’s and then putting words into his patients’ mouths which conform to that picture. He complains about the way that the film simplifies the story, such as it was.

I have learned that Robin Williams, the actor who plays the Sacks figure in the film, is, as it happens, famous for his Tourtettic performances.

Some of Livingston’s sport arises from Sacks’ comments in later editions of his book about Williams’ portrayal of this Sacks figure. Which is, I suppose, fair enough, but I would think that one is going to be interested, more interested than anyone else and one is all too apt to get a bit carried away pondering about such a portrayal. Perhaps the trick is not to commit such ponderings to print, where they become fair game for critics.

Livingston moves on to calling the genome project a con game and wondering about whether well intentioned professionals have done more harm than good in their work with Parkinson’s patients. Perhaps if he ever had the misfortune to get the complaint he would get to know the answer fast enough.

In the meantime he closes with Rolando P.’s last words, a plea to be left alone to die in peace. Where here, Livingston does have a point, that sometimes the professionals go too far, that they lack the sensitivity to know when to stop. But his point would have been more telling had it been made in terms which were both easier to understand and more moderate in tone.

It remains to be seen whether I shall try to tackle any of the other parts of this book. I did try starting at the beginning, but that really was impenetrable to this amateur.

PS 1: for some reason, I had thought Ira was an earnest young lady. Whereas actually he is a professor of poetics at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. And clearly well read. See reference 3.

PS 2: I do not pursue the line of deconstructional exploration concerning exactly how an Internet search engine came to connect me with this book. Who was manipulating who?

PS 3: Leonard L. and Rolando P. are two of the twenty patients, clinical sketches of whom make up the core of Sacks' book.

References

Reference 1: Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity - Ira Livingston – 1997.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/awakenings.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_(name).

Reference 4: Ethnobotany, phytochemistry and pharmacology of Podocarpus sensu latissimo (s.l.) - H.S. Abdillahi, G.I. Stafford, J.F. Finnie, J. Van Staden – 2010. Neither Bing nor Google had heard of Pandanocarpus parkinsonism, other than in the context of the present book, but Google did turn up something for Nipadites parkinsonism. Google also asked whether I actually meant Podocarpus, a tree found in various places in the southern hemisphere and which contains Parkinson’s disease relevant chemicals. The subject of this paper.

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

Reference 6: James Parkinson (1755-1824): A Bicentenary Volume of papers dealing with
Parkinson's Disease, incorporating the original ‘Essay On The Shaking Palsy' - Macdonald Critchley with W H McMenemey, Francis Walshe, Sir J Godwin Greenfield - 1966.

Reference 7: https://ukfossils.co.uk/2012/01/24/warden-point/. A fine place for fossil hunting, looking not unlike the blue lias cliffs at Lyme Regis, another fine place for fossil hunting. The source of the snap above.