Waking news

The first item was a dream concerning the decoration of the bathroom in our house in Cambridge. In which the plan was to paper the floor and the walls with the same striped wallpaper and I was having trouble getting the stripes to join up properly at the various joins between wall and wall, between wall and floor.

It seemed to take quite a long time to work out, as I woke up, that this was not our bathroom here in Epsom. And while my dream had got the layout of this Cambridge bathroom right, it quite failed to grasp the mathematical fact that such proper joining up is impossible. It eventually dawning on me that there was a whole field of mathematical endeavour lurking out there.

Great difficulty visualising any of the other four bathrooms I have known over the years. Just the bath in a cupboard in the kitchen of an upstairs flat in Pembroke Road in North London, not far from a small bus garage. But I do remember a public house at the end of Pembroke Road, snapped above, with there being no public house in the snap at all. Was it the white topped building which does not look much like a pub now and which does look as if it is flats, flats in some sort of awkward looking conversion? Perhaps a site visit is called for.

The second item arrived on my PC when I woke it up. It seems that NASA has been reminding us that the chances of a large lump of rock from space crashing into the earth are not that small. We are reminded of the rock which broke up over Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals, in 2013, causing more than 1,000 casualties, none fatal and mostly down to being hit by flying glass from broken windows. While I was vaguely aware of the event, I had not been aware of casualties, let alone a lot of them. See reference 1.

PS: later: continuing to worry about the pub, I eventually realised that the pole in front of the right hand end of the flats was a pub sign, a realisation confirmed by moving Street View around to the side, revealing the name as 'Alexandra Arms'. A name I dimly recall. Quite a busy pub when we knew it, more than forty years ago and there was often singing on Saturday night. A sort of community life which has largely vanished.

Reference 1: https://www.cnbc.com/id/100463175.

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

Country vandals

This being a report of various matter arising in the course of a short visit to Tunbridge Wells.

Grand bags

First stop the Pantiles to see what could be done about failing bread and cheese supplies. Clearly not the right part of town for cheese, the place being dominated by coffee and cake shops, but I was able to get two large white loaves for a pound each. They looked OK and I was assured that they were OK, it was just that business had been slow that day and they were about to shut. They also threw in a very grand carrier bag to put them in. They did wine as well as coffee and cake, but it was not clear why they would do such grand bags. But it was clear that it a bit mean, in the circumstances, not to buy something for real, so I took a couple of pastéis de nata, aka custard tarts at £2.50 each. Rather dear, but BH more than happy with them later.

The bread was pretty good too, well above average, but there was quite a lot of it, so most of it went for toast, with thick white, buttered toast being something of a treat in its own right.

Reject booze

Next stop the secret cellar, to see if they could do any more of the fine Gewürztraminer from Rolly Gassmann they had sold me on a previous occasion, for which see the end of the post at reference 3. And they could: one bottle of the 2013 vintage (not previously tried) and rather more of the 2016 vintage. We took one of the former and enjoyed it that very evening and two of the latter for stock. The shop man was concerned that mixing might not be a good plan, possibly mistaking me for the sort of person who might buy three bottles for the white course for a dinner party. And he was quite right, that mixing might not be good, although quite wrong in that this was not going to be a problem for us.

Passed on both the Chambertin and the Bâtard-Montrachet snapped above, both probably fine wines, but a bit strong for us. And when we have them at all, we go for some fake Chambertin and some other kind of Montrachet. For example that at reference 4 - a timely reminder as we shall be in range of that particular off-license shortly.

Gaviscon

Back the next day to show off my new found bread shop to the assembled party, coming across a heritage chemist's shop, complete with a large box of Gaviscon, as regularly advertised along with other senior persons' products on ITV3. Home from home.

Trolley one

Found the first Tunbridge Trolley in the band stand, but sadly there was no appetite for wheeling it back through town to the nearest Sainsbury's, so I was unable to score it. Furthermore, my telephone was not particularly good at telling me where the nearest Sainsbury's was: good enough for a local but not good enough for a stranger.

From there, headed out towards the rocks to find our second Tunbridge Trolley.

Trolley two

Still no appetite for return and in any event somebody had seen fit to cut the bottom of the trolley out. Extraordinary that in such a rich area as Tunbridge Wells, that someone should take the time and trouble to cut out the bottom of a shopping trolley - which I would have thought was a job for bolt cutters. What on earth was the point? Were the perpetrators drunk enough to think that such a stunt was funny? Do they have drunks?

Heritage bench

Pausing half way to the rocks to admire the bench recovered from the bushes by the Tunbridge version of the Chainsaw Volunteers of Epsom. Now a little fragile, and was probably not going to survive another year being climbed on.

Wellington Rocks

And so to the rocks, with clumps of rocks all over the place being one of the features of the town. Quite big enough to have a serious accident on, so we were surprised that there were no notices. Either forbidding climbing or explaining that any climbers did so at their own risk. Not even a notice forbidding the taking of picnics or the consumption of alcoholic drinks. As it happened, in due course, we were all able to move out in one piece. No damage sustained.

One member of the party just about visible, sat on the far side - who looked much bigger in real life - another quirk of the camera on my telephone.

Back to the house to a very satisfactory and new-to-us recipe for spaghetti Bolognese, taken from the booklet that came with our Creda cooker.

Reference 1: http://www.hattonsrtw.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.thesecretcellar.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/trolley-hunt-2.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/dorset-wine.html.

Reference 5: https://www.visittunbridgewells.com/things-to-do/parks-and-lakes/the-rocks.

Trolley 257

Trolley 257 was an M&S food hall trolley. No lock on the handle, unlike all the trolleys in the stack on return.

Handle slightly bent where the lock might otherwise have been, that is towards the right hand end, looking forwards. Lock forced off at the handle's expense? Seems rather a lot of bother to go to for a pound coin.

Still worried about her IQ

She had been rather put out when we explained that one of her cousins had scored 'genius', albeit once on his seventeenth attempt, and decided to put in a spot of serious practise. Here, on her third attempt, completely absorbed by a passing aeroplane visible through a window to the right of the telephone, that is to say the camera.

Shoe and sock reflecting an ongoing game - or perhaps tussle - about dress code.

PS: the scoring scheme on the white sticker can easily be made out by zooming in on the original snap. Probably not by clicking to enlarge in this context.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/iq.html.

Heritage wall

I had occasion to walk past the flats noticed at reference 1 this morning, and worked out why its north western flank is being protected by a fine new heritage-style wall, visible middle left in the snap, behind the rubbish.

It turns out that this new wall will join up to the old wall, right in the snap, an old wall which presumably fell into disrepair while the site was derelict. An old wall which continues up the lane until it gets to Meadway, when it turns left and south to make the front wall of the properties fronting onto Clayhill Green. An old wall which is made of bricks which are crumbling away and which must cost the owners of said properties a fair bit to keep pointed up - and it would make a lot more sense just to knock it down and start over.

Presumably the heritage people cut some deal with the developers of the flats (Zestan) whereby they were allowed to build the flats if, inter alia, they did something about their stretch of heritage wall. While I sometimes wonder if the heritage people are not just out to spite us out of jealousy or something. Perhaps with all their access to all the secret lists, they can make jolly sure they don't wind up living anywhere with this sort of nonsense going on.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/02/new-flats.html.

Ant attack

In the course of this morning's chalk and talk, we discovered that garden ants do not care to cross chalk lines. They march up to them, poke around a bit, then nearly always go into reverse.

Not obviously scented so who knows what it is that is putting them off.

PS: the juniper behind started off really well in this corner, but now suffers from foxes mistaking it for a lamp post, despite it being quite prickly to the touch. We used to protect it with post & wire, but we got a bit fed up with that and so now the juniper has to take its chances.

GraviTrax

Spent part of the weekend getting to grips with a nearly new to me construction toy called GraviTrax, to which an armchair introduction is available at reference 1.

Elements of both Lego and Meccano, but specialised for the building of more or less complicated runways for ball bearings. Various gadgets to make things more interesting, like a magnet gadget to provide acceleration, perhaps up a runway rather than down a runway. Intelligent readers may be able to spot such a gadget bottom left, in the dormant position with one ball bearing on each side of the magnet, rather than in the active position with two ball bearing on the same side of the magnet.

A well made toy, probably expensive, but provided you have made a big enough investment, splendidly open-ended.

With a sign of the times being that you can buy an app version to run on you telephone or computer. Using this app you can build all kinds of virtual set-ups and then run them - with all kinds of interesting camera angles available for viewing the runs - including a camera mounted on the rolling ball. Maybe a split screen version for when there is more than one active ball? Being an older person, I think I prefer the touch and feel of doing it for real, clever though the app version might be.

Back home, I wonder whether Ravensburger people who make this toy are the same as the people who make the (equally good quality) jigsaws. And indeed they are, as can be checked out at reference 2.

A German company, around 150 years old, based in Ravensburg in southern Germany, on an obscure tributary of the Rhine called the Schussen. Also an odd tributary as most of the rivers in its area flow north into the Danube rather than south into the Bodensee, and from there into the Rhine. Watershed country.

PS: my first encounter with Ravensburger, in the middle of my jigsaw period, is noticed at reference 3. A jigsaw of a large picture I once saw for real in the Jeu de Paume, when it was still an art gallery rather than a media artists' resource centre, and a small reproduction of which still hangs behind me as I type. That is to say, about the same size as the jigsaw. Nicely framed by Heffers of Cambridge, so I must have had it for many years.

Reference 1: https://www.ravensburger.org/uk/discover/gravitrax/index.html.

Reference 2: https://www.ravensburger-gruppe.de/de/start/index.html.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=ravensburger+hampshire.

Reference 4: http://www.jeudepaume.org/.

Inquiries old and new

Not impressed to read in Friday's Guardian that elements of our legal system are investigating around 200 former members of security forces - presumably mainly if not entirely army - in connection with incidents in Northern Ireland dating back to nearly 50 years ago. There was more than a hint that one lot are keen to get on with this as part of keeping Nationalists in Northern Ireland onside while another lot are keen to put a stop to it with a sensible and overdue statute of limitations. Overdue possibly being part of the collateral damage caused by the Brexit business.

While my most recent attempt to find out how the investigation into the Huddersfield shooting of just two years ago is getting on has met with a polite blank. That is to say that my email exchange with the office of the relevant police commissioner was efficient but uninformative. Should I be in touch with Gareth Pierce of reference 2, more usually associated with what I might call the other side?

Not impressed that we should manage to find huge investigative resources to stir up ancient history, but nowhere near enough to investigate part of our recent history - where there might actually be some useful lessons to be learned. About, for example, the hoops that policemen have to jump through before they are allowed to shoot people with premeditation but without warning.

To think that we have been governed by the party which used to be called the party of law and order for getting on for ten years now.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/huddersfield.html.

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

Newsline

Being the fifth and last of the magazines acquired at the end of the outing noticed at reference 1.

Illustrated magazine of 120 pages, with a newsagent's sticker on the back saying  PKR200, about 100 of our pence at today's exchange rate. This one from June, 2018. Given that the sticker is priced in PKR, presumably a newsagent in Pakistan, purchased on a homeland visit by a resident of Raynes Park.

More or less along the same lines as the Herald previously noticed, but with a lot of the copy more or less devoted to the complicated - and sometimes violent - politics of Pakistan. Politics which seem to be dominated by various large and powerful clans, some old, some new, which we might be a bit superior about, but as they point out, not so very different from what we do. Plenty of political clans in both here in the UK and in the US - although we no longer go in for shooting down the people with whom we disagree - perhaps our disagreements are are no longer about the division of the spoils - at least not in such an obvious way.

But also articles about aspects of the lives of those in three of the minorities: Christians, Hazaras and Hindus.

Articles about art.

An article about how Ramazan might be degenerating into an empty ritual, increasingly polluted by the various commercial activities hovering around the margins.

All in all, I come away from these magazines encouraged. Pakistan no doubt has plenty of problems, but its democracy is alive and well and its media are alive and well. So maybe they will pull through.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/kings-cross.html.

Reference 2: https://newslinemagazine.com/. To judge by the snip included above, leprosy is still a live issue in Pakistan.

She

Being the fourth of the magazines acquired at the end of the outing noticed at reference 1.

Glossy magazine of 130 pages, costing PKR300, about 150 of our pence at today's exchange rate. This one from April, 2018.

Lots of pages of mugs shots, lots of pages of hunks and lots of fancy fabrics.

Lots of advertisements for cosmetics and beauty products, plus some other stuff. Even for the odd accessory for him.

A very modest amount of copy and at the end two and a half pages of bridge, half a page on curing leucoderma and a page of horoscopes.

Apart from the absence of flesh, fags and booze, could easily have come from here in north west Asia rather than south Asia.

PS: with Wikipedia telling me the leucoderma, aka vitiligo, 'is a long-term skin condition characterized by patches of the skin losing their pigment. The patches of skin affected become white and usually have sharp margins. The hair from the skin may also become white. The inside of the mouth and nose may also be involved. Typically both sides of the body are affected. Often the patches begin on areas of skin that are exposed to the sun. It is more noticeable in people with dark skin. Vitiligo may result in psychological stress and those affected may be stigmatized'.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/kings-cross.html.

Reference 2: http://www.shemagazinepk.com/.

FHM

Being the third of the magazines acquired at the end of the outing noticed at reference 1. For her, Pakistan.

Glossy magazine without page numbers and without price that I can find. Maybe about 50 pages. Maybe dished out gratis in hotels and ladies' hairdressers. February-March, 2018.

A magazine which goes in for lots of two page spreads of lots of faces, often named, as in the snap left. Perhaps the people so named pay.

Advertisements, not all that many, but very mixed. Cosmetics, accessories, food, furniture, parcels' people, banks and housing.

Lots of fancy fabrics. No Islamic dress that I noticed. Lots of hunks with the 1950's hairdos which they seem to favor.

No copy at all, beyond an opening message about yellow being the colour of the month from the editor, Adnam Faisal.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/kings-cross.html.

Reference 2: https://issuu.com/fhmpakistan. Which seems to include facsimiles of the magazine, consistent with it being a freebie. The source of the snap above.

Herald

Being the second of the magazines acquired at the end of the outing noticed at reference 1.

Illustrated magazine of 110 pages, rather cheap looking paper, costing PKR200. This one from June, 2018.

Some advertisements, but nothing like the glossy stuff in Grazia, noticed previously. For example a family Ramadan deal from OPTP consisting of 8 drum sticks for PKR990. Looks very much like the sort of thing you might get in a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint here. Or a prickly heat soap bar. Or premium cooking oil.

Otherwise, reasonably serious copy. Articles about things like the water problems of Karachi, the effectiveness or otherwise of capital punishment or the silly diet offered by a lot of television channels. Including some comment on the much sought after skin lightening advice offered therein.

I have not seen a Newsweek for a while, but perhaps pitching for that sort of market.

Published by Khawaja Kaleem Ahmed at Dr. Ziauddin Ahmed Road, Karachi, Pakistan.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/kings-cross.html.

Reference 2: https://herald.dawn.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.optp.biz/. For Ramadan and other deals, as snapped above.

Grazia

Being the first of the magazines acquired at the end of the outing noticed at reference 1.

Glossy magazine of 75 pages, costing PKR250, about 138 of our pence at today's exchange rate. This one from June, 2018.

Mainly pictures with a very modest amount of copy, this concentrated on ten hot stories. The third of which was about the acquittal in Lahore, on appeal, of a young man accused of stabbing a young lady 23 times in retaliation for her refusing his advances. Doesn't appear to be much doubt that he did the deed. Plenty of fashion. Lots of faces and fancy fabrics, bit low on flesh by our standards. On the other hand, virtually no head coverings for ladies, very little Islamic dress at all.

Plenty of lifestyle accessories, particularly watches but also yachts and apartments.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/kings-cross.html.

Reference 2: http://www.graziainternational.com/. Presumably the home port. Seemingly part of Mondadori International Business SRL.

Reference 3: http://www.grazia.pk/. The Pakistan branch. Seemingly published and printed in Lahore, under license, by Saif publishing.

Reference 4: http://www.graziainternational.com/edition/pakistan/. Or should it be this one?

Death duties

According to Wikibooks: 'In the United Kingdom, Death Duty was first introduced as a tax on estates in England and Wales over a certain value from 1796, then called legacy, succession and estate duties. The value changed over time and the scope of estate duty was extended. By 1857 estates worth over £20 were taxable but duty was rarely collected on estates valued under £1500. Death duties were introduced in 1894, and for the next century were effective in breaking up large estates' - an effectiveness one might question given the post at reference 1. This prompted by my continuing to read the book about emperors noticed at reference 2.

It seems that the Romans had death duties too, all those centuries ago, but levied them in a rather different way. The prose is sometimes a bit dense and I would not pretend to have got to the bottom of the matter, but it seems that the Imperial Purse did very well out of bequests and confiscations. At times, an important part of its revenues.

The former worked by more or less forcefully suggesting to the rich that they could do worse than to leave all or part of their estates to the emperor.

The latter worked by confiscating the estates of all kinds of convicted criminals (with the emperor being in charge of the definition of same) and the estates of all those who failed to leave wills or who left wills which were ruled invalid for one reason or another (emperor in charge again). Perhaps a rich man was trying to leave money to his young wife, married in contravention of some marriage law or other. At present, this all has a rather capricious and arbitrary appearance, and must have made the emperor very unpopular among the upper classes. The lower classes and the army might have thought it was great.

Given the classical education of our upper classes, and hence of the founding fathers, perhaps one of the drivers for the separation of powers built into the US constitution.

I am also reminded of our own medieval kings, who made quite a good thing out of being the wards of rich orphans. And for all I know, there may well have been Roman-style abuse of the law of treason, given that the titles and estates of all those convicted of treason were forfeit to the Crown. And Richard II did confiscate the (extensive) estates, if not the titles, of Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/toffs-old-and-new.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/records-old-and-new.html.

Antiquarian researches

Back at the end of February, we came across (what I now know to be called) a long case clock in the foyer of our hotel, made by Smallcombe of Essex. An occasion noticed at reference 1. I have now got around to trying to track down Mr. Smallcombe, starting in the collectibles department of Epsom Library. Started off with failure as I was looking at the wrong sort of collectibles and had to get the assistant to find the catalogue number of the clock department, which was then turned up in the aisle next door to where I was looking. Lots of books about clocks in general, including what looked like the Stanley Gibbons of the clock world, Britten's Old Clocks etc.

Britten's

A guide which mainly consisted of a catalogue of 25,000 clock makers, amongst whom Mr. Smallcombe was not to be found. So one can only suppose he was a late entry to the field. And I was surprised at how many of them there were. Perhaps the big manufacturers only swept into the field at the end of the nineteenth century with it being something of a cottage industry before then. Perhaps also a bit of a side line or hobby for mechanically minded jewellers or horologically minded mechanics.

None of the other clock books included him in their indexes, but then, they were  mainly about collecting, restoring and conserving, rather than the minutiae of the clock trade more than a hundred years ago.

Google then turns up reference 2, which may be some sort of successor operation, but a website which does not seem to include a history page.

On the other hand, Google does turn up various auction and ebay records. One of which follows, with a face with the same style of face - in particular corner - decorations as the one in Ryde.

Auction one

So perhaps Mr. Smallcombe of Essex was really a repro man from the early 1900's, along with all the people making fancy brown word furniture at that time. With his collaborators at Old Charm still going strong with Wood Bros of Ware (reference 5). The hey-day of the Lea Valley furniture business, the London end of which we used to be slightly familiar with.

Auction two

And there the matter will have to rest for the moment. Until, perhaps, I develop a real interest in clocks. Perhaps via my ongoing fascination with the all important escapement mechanism. For which see the stray mention at the end of references 3 and 4. And at some point I did go as far as turning up a helpful paper from Pisa.

Escapement

I forget what the provenance of the paper was, but it was the first paper about the workings of escapements that I had come across that I could manage, at least scan with interest.

PS: in which connection, I have not found peering at the medieval clocks exhibited (at ground level) in some churches very helpful. Lots of ironwork, lots of wheels and gears, but nothing very escapement like. Perhaps with more knowledge, I would have known what to look for. I do remember now that escapements come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some very crude.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/wight-one.html.

Reference 2: https://smallcombeclocks.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/shopping-lists.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/more-trios.html.

Reference 5: https://www.woodbros.co.uk/old-charm-furniture/.

Parkhouse

The programme

Back to the Purcell Room last week to hear another of the Parkhouse concerts, last heard getting on for two years ago and noticed at reference 1, with which this concert appears have shared a programme designer. With Parkhouse being a memorial trust which encourages young chamber musicians, with the prizes coming in the form of concerts at respectable venues. This being the third concert given by the Amatis Trio, the winners in 2015 and web-sited at reference 2.

Very similar format to the previous concert, with a new work followed by two trios from the central repertoire. I suppose in passing that in the days when composers lived in some large part by the sales of their music, that trios were popular, being a format which provincial amateurs could readily aspire to. Maybe I would find hundreds of them out there if I started to poke around - although probably less than ten in my ten feet of vinyl.

Moorlands from Andrea Tarrodi. Op.87 piano trio from Brahms. Op.66 piano trio from Mendelsohn.

Heritage wiring

Started the evening my admiring the heritage wiring in and around the canopy over the stairs leading down to the barriers and exit. Not sure that we have much live wiring of this sort left in our house, but we do have plumbing. Which the surveyor who looked at the house for us thirty years ago told us would probably eventually cause problems. But having held on this far, perhaps it will see us out.

Bullingdon stands on the ramp at Waterloo completely full at 1845 or so, as were the small stands in Concert Hall Approach. A few riders circling hopefully. Always a bit of a pain at the end of your journey to be scratching around for somewhere to put your bike. But presumably servicing the Bullingdon network, presumably a heavily subsidised operation, is not immune from austerity. I note in passing that Boris scores the bikes as a feather in his cap, although they had been kicked off towards the end of Ken's time as mayor. Still, it might not have been his idea, but it did come to the boil on his watch, so the feather is reasonable.

Six police vans parked up in the road beneath the Hayward Gallery. Probably something to do with demonstrations in Parliament Square.

Concrete

Not a flattering snap, but testimony to the fact that I rather like all the concrete around the QEH part of the South Bank Centre. It takes a lot of stick, but I believe it has and will continue to stand the test of time much better than all the stuff rushed up in the City and in east London over the past few years.

Missa Solemnis on in the main hall, the QEH, so quite a lot of people wandering about in formal attire, some choir, some audience. I took my beverage leaning on a covered grand piano at the back of the concourse area, so while I was glad we did not have music there on this occasion, they presumably do sometimes.

Plenty of squatters squatting and informal meetings going in the concourse area, taking up a fair proportion of the available seating, but no obviously very poor people. They certainly all seemed to have their laptops and mobiles on the go. I suppose that these last would count as essentials in benefits speak - and rightly so. A relatively cheap way to keep the 10% of people at the bottom of the heap in touch with the rest of the world.

The Tarrodi started off with just the cellist on the darkened stage and I was just starting to think that it did not sound quite like just the cello when the pianist appeared, after which I noticed the violinist lurking in the doorway at the back. Eventually we had all three on stage in the ordinary way. I wondered whether the long cello notes seeming to gradually morph into violin notes without any clear break was part of the plan. I found it slightly distracting.

The Brahms was billed as romantic, but it came across to me as more playful, in a virtuso sort of way. While the Mendelsohn, written more than thirty years before the Brahms, struck me a superficially similar, but somehow managing to strike a more solemn, a more serious note. In any event, I preferred the Mendelsohn.

The pianist used a foot operated iPad for the second and third works.

I think the encore was Gabriel Faure's  'Après un rêve', Op.7, No.1 of 1878, roughly the same time as the Brahms. YouTube suggests arrangements for piano and cello or piano and violin, but my memory was that we had all three instruments - not that my memory for the recent past is very reliable these days. In any event, very suitable encore music.

Overall, interesting, but a little outside my comfort zone. On the up side, confirmed in my very positive view of the trio as a format.

Platform library at Raynes Park open, but it had not been restocked from the day before, the day of the haul from Pakistan, yet to be properly reported on.

PS: reading the programme on the way home, I did not recognise the names of any of the 13 Parkhouse award winners. Partly, no doubt, my lack of exposure to trios. Perhaps also to trios being kept busy at festivals and smaller venues. Perhaps they do corporate entertainment?

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/trio-sora-with-feet.html.

Reference 2: https://www.amatistrio.com/.

Data protection

A few months ago, I had a moan at reference 1 about the difficulty involved in trying to carry out a routine legal cum financial transaction here in Epsom.

Still in Epsom, time to have a moan about what was sold as a consequence of the data protection act.

BH has a mobile phone under contract with a well known provider with a shop in the Ashley Centre here in Epsom. A phone which she does not make very much use of but which she wishes to retain. Move from monthly rental to pay-as-you-go seems to be indicated.

I go into the shop concerned, where they will only barely talk to me because I am not her. This despite the fact that I am paying the bills and I bought the thing in the first place.

And then, even if she came into the shop, with the mobile phone they sold me, it would be more than their jobs were worth to talk to her about contractual matters. Data protection, quack, quack, quack. To do that you have to phone up customer services.

Aren't you customer services, sezzaye to this young lady, one of several doing nothing, in the otherwise empty shop. Well. Ummm. Why don't you phone up customer services?

It seems quite likely that I would have got the same nonsense had we been with any other provider. Perhaps it is all about making sure we keep our monthly direct debit up and running. Quack, quack, quack was all smoke screen.

I might have got quite angry if the monthly amount involved made a bigger dent in our monthly budget than it in fact does. Calm down by thinking of all those private equity outfits and pensions funds that you are helping along.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/legal-and-financial-services.html.

Fake 67

An entrance to a very city style courtyard, round the back of the Vinotec operation noticed at reference 2.

Some part of the Google operation in the red building, its sign being blocked by the young tree coming into leaf.

Faked for the fake strap work moulded onto the outer surface of the black pillars. I forgot to check but I expect the pillars are fakes too in the sense that what you see is casings rather than structural pillar. They might even be concrete inside. Who knows?

The pillars themselves work quite well, but the architectural detail man did not get the junction between the pillars and the ceiling right. Plain butt not good and some sort of modest trim is needed, as his Victorian & Edwardian predecessors knew perfectly well. I suppose he could pull the pillars out of some pattern book, but trim required some thought and he was not paid enough for that.

As it happens the last fake, noticed at reference 1, was about pillars too, or at least pilasters.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/fake-66.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/kings-cross.html.

Trolley 256

An M&S trolley captured outside Viceroy Cars at the start of West Street. Returned to the food hall, as usual, via the Ashley Centre.

Variation 2 in Fi thigh

This time we went for fillets of thigh rather than fillets of breast. Not as pretty, but significantly cheaper, and as it turned out one did not notice the difference in the finished soup.

No chou pointu, but some finely chopped left over vegetables instead: rice, carrot, parsnip and cabbage; maybe a cup full altogether. Didn't care to bother with the blender for such a small quantity, and as it turned out chopped was fine. The carrots, for example, were in small enough pieces not to disturb the pale colour scheme.

There was between four and five pints of the finished soup, of which we left around a pint for another day. More specifically, for my lunch today.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/variation-1-in-b-barley.html.

Arran and its houses

The Guardian ran a full page yesterday about Arran and its houses, more particularly all the houses needed to house all the people who service the thriving holiday and retirement homes industry, an industry which is soaking up a big chunk of what housing there is. A problem which those familiar with holiday areas nearer home - such as big chunks of Devon and Cornwall - will recognise.

My first thought was for council houses. If the Tories under Thatcher had not forced councils to sell off their stocks of council houses, there might now be rather more of them than there actually are to be let to deserving locals. And to the extent that was practical and reasonable, funded by taxation of said holiday and retirement homes industry.

Second thought was that I had no idea how much of what council housing departments used to do has been taken over by housing associations. Is the volume up or down? Is the demand up or down?

Third thought was that there is probably not much other industry in a place like Arran. They need the money that all those holiday makers and retirees are bringing in.

I suppose the answer to this sort of problem in the US, where council houses are for commies, is to say let them live in trailers, for which they do have plenty of space. A solution to which some of the good people of Arran do appear to have come to. A solution which has also cropped up in early evening ITV3, in the form of run down caravan parks in seaside areas being colonised by various forms of low life.

While in Arran, something called the Arran Economic Group is making a start.

Word of the day

I came across a splendid new word in reference 1 this morning: 'vétille', in the context of Maigret apologizing for troubling an important man at his home with a bit of nonsense, something that was probably nothing. The sort of important man who would not, in real life, take tea with either Mr. or Mrs. Simenon. For which see reference 2.

Turning to Larousse, we have, in addition vétiller, vétilleux and vétillieuse. To amuse oneself with trifles, a gentleman who does a lot of this and a lady who does a lot of this respectively.

To which Littré adds vétillard and vétillarde, more people who spend quality time with trifles. Adds the sense of pedant to vétilleux, adds adjectival uses to vétilleux, for example, as in a pettifogging task.

All this from the Spanish diminutive for a ribbon, that is to say vetilla from veta. With Littré not being confirmed on this point by Linguee (snapped above), which talks of the noun being a vein, a streak, grain (of wood or stone) and of the verb being our veto. With Portuguese not allowing the adjective at all. Perhaps I need to consult a proper Spanish dictionary.

I also learn that the approved designation in Littré for all these silent double ells is 'll mouillées'. With mouillées, literally dampened, being a word used by Simenon to describe a criminal who get his hands dirty, particularly with violence against persons, or more often the sort of criminal who takes care to leave that sort of thing to others. I seem to recall from James Bond books that Russian spies talked of wet affairs in the same sort of sense. With the dreaded Smersh being empowered to conduct wet affairs. As indeed was James.

Reference 1: Maigret hésite - Simenon - 1968. Being the first of two stories in Volume XXVI of the collected works.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/toffs-old-and-new.html.

Dead post box

A letter box near us which has been felled in the last few days, possibly last night as there are stories of young people coming home in cheerful mode well after us older people have gone to bed.

Badly positioned as the sun on the telephone made it hard to see what I was doing, but it does look as if the base of the pillar was quite badly rusted and it would not taken much of a push to get it down. Notice also how the galvanising on the mainly red steel box throws the paint off.

We shall be running a street book on the number of days before something is done, with one option simply being the cancellation of this particular box. There are others within a ten minute walk or so.

PS: daisies not up to the standard of those at Tchibo, noticed in the previous post. No idea why not.

Spring flowers

A fine display of daisies - and other stuff - outside the Tchibo building in Blenheim Road.

Off camera to the left is a half full builders bag of rough sand which has been there for some time. Maybe today would have been a good day to collect a few buckets, sand being stuff that we need from time to time.

Reference 1: https://www.tchibo-coffee.co.uk/.

A rosy story

This morning, BH retailed a story about roses she had picked up from somewhere, to the effect that in the beginning all flowers were called roses and primroses were so called because they were the first roses of the year, that is to say the first flowers. A plausible enough story, but with the morning newspaper being yet to arrive, I thought to check.

OED devotes around a page to primroses and starts by confirming that the word does indeed come from the Medieval Latin 'prima rosa', literally the first rose. There is also talk of primula, primerole, primerolle and primorose. With the primose being a sort of primula and with primula being a diminutive form of the Latin for first.

It devotes rather more than three pages to roses and starts by reporting that much the same word is used in most European and Scandinavian languages. So presumably a word from our  past, perhaps from some extinct common ancestor of the top two fifths of the language diagram at reference 1, the part in yellow, Irish down of Old High German Gothic. Maybe lob in the green section on the grounds that the Russian for rose seems to be rose flavoured. But not the purple section as Sanskrit does not know about roses. Which just leaves the blue section hanging on for another day. Sadly, the word 'rose' does not appear in reference 2, the source of the diagram, at all.

Nothing in OED about it ever having been a term for flowers more generally - although there is plenty about various flowers with rosy names which are not roses, like the Christmas rose, the rose of Sharon and the rose of Jericho. Not the same thing at all.

Much the same story in Larousse, but I do learn that the stripey rosewood is from a tree of tropical America, again nothing to do with roses. As it happens, I have long owned various carpentry tools substantially made of rosewood, but I have never bothered to enquire how such stuff came to come from the roses in the garden. I was also reminded that while 'rose' is the regular word for pink in French (with pink being the name of another sort of flower in English), we tend to use 'rosy' when we are not using 'pink'.

Littré, as one would expect, is rather stronger on literary and poetic uses of the word.

Nothing further added by my elementary Latin dictionary, first published in 1891, from the pen of that eminent classicist, C. T. Lewis, of the famous Lewis & Short family of dictionaries. Google knows all about them. Perhaps Bullingdon Boris has one on a shelf somewhere.

So the part of the BH story about the derivation of the word primrose is confirmed. But the rest of it is unproven. We don't know the circumstances in which the primrose came to be known as the first rose and there is no evidence supporting roses starting out as flowers more generally.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/aryans.html.

Reference 2: Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis - Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall, Andrew Garrett - 2015. Open access.

King's Cross

Last week to King's Cross to hear some of Bach's Cello Suites, No.3 and No.5 on this occasion. That once rough & seedy area which is now getting seriously gentrified.

The programme

A bright but cold day, with the first entertainment being a leaf eating pigeon across the tracks from our platform at Epsom Station. It appeared to be gorging on all the bursting buds it could reach: perhaps birds feel the need for fresh vegetables after the winter, just as we did before the invention of all-year-round greengrocery.

Then we had four or five rather manic young cyclists, all hyped up after what we supposed was their jaunt up Box Hill and then on their way home to Earlsfield. Long time since I would attempt Box Hill. Maybe forty years ago I might have given it a go.

Concourse piano

The usual long walk from the Victoria Line platforms out into the station, passing the piano above on the way. Not sure what the deal was: maybe it is there all the time and people just walk up and play it. This chap seemed to know what he was at, as did his successor some hours later.

By dint of reading the instructions, we actually found the best way out, heading directly towards the canal, rather than walking up the whole of York Way. Partly for this reason, we had a little time in hand so called in the new-to-us Vinotec for a spot of refreshment. A busy bar in the flashy new King’s Boulevard.

Vinotec - publicity shot

A place which had a fine wine list, for a restaurant never mind a pub, and we decided without further ado to dine there after the show, booking a table just in case. With the form with the wine being that if a group of you ordered a bottle, they poured the whole lot out on delivery, going through a bit of a performance to make sure that all the glasses were filled to exactly the same level. Not a form that I had come across before. Not a form that would always be appropriate, but I suppose you could always cancel the performance.

The wine

They could also manage a nice drop of white by the glass, a 2017 Kerner from Alto Adige. Quite by chance, from the same stable as the stuff noticed at reference 5, bought in the wine shop in Bridge Road, across the road from Hampton Court Palace - which I hope is still up and running as we have had some good wine from them over the years. Maybe the odd cigar - in the olden days that is.

Cranes one

Fine display of cranes outside, including natty little painted robots marking the floors of the lift shafts. By the time they are finished there will be much less light and the place will be much like any other big office development in central London. But there will still be the canal, on this day sporting a small work in Dame Trace's 'Detritus' series.

Detritus

A case of art imitating life, as she had done a really good job of imitating a coot's nest. See reference 6 for a previous encounter with the series.

Into the hall at Kings Place to find ourselves next to a lady from Portland, Oregon, the place, as I explained to her, that was famous in this country for the production of badly behaved ice dancers. She explained that it was not nearly as cold there in the winter as it was in her native Chicago. She was also as dismayed that roughly half of the voters of the US had voted for Trump as we were that roughly half the voters of the UK had voted for Brexit. With neither the Democrats nor the Labour Party yet having presentable candidates for the top job next time around. She may even have been what we call Old Labour over here. More stamina than us, despite being of much the same age, as she was there for the day, all three shows of it, more than we are good for these days.

Coin, whom I do not think we have come across before, did us really well, and the venue suited the music really well. With the two suites nicely broken by a couple of lighter pieces, very roughly contemporary with the suites. Both suites very affecting: it is really rather odd how what is more or less a single stream of not very fast notes can be so affecting. On a technical note, I think that he told us the he had to retune one of his strings for the second suite, and part of the point of the lighter pieces was to settled the retuned string down, before moving onto the main course, as it were. Plus there were four bits of what look like metallic trim on the four corners, a bit like flowers. Don't recall seeing such before.

Audience enthusiastic and we thought it likely that there were a fair number of his groupies there.

Arthropod art

We inspected the arthropod art on the way out, complete with instructions about not touching the art, let alone climbing into it. Which we thought a pity. It looked very sturdy and a small child would have thought it great fun. And if it wasn't very sturdy it should have been; it certainly looked expensive enough, even without the premium for original art. See reference 7 for an earlier sighting.

Back to Vinotec to dine. Fairly busy, although they would probably have let us in without booking. A bottle of the Kerner mentioned above. Sour dough bread with olive oil - with sour dough not being my favourite bread, but this was good of its kind. Two roast chicken dinners - very good. The best pub Sunday roast we recall having had. Half a roast chicken, slightly rolled, on top of a little mound of much better vegetables than is usual on such occasions. Including some genuine sprouting broccoli. Including rather superfluous, but adequate, Yorkshire puddings. A take on Bakewell Tart for dessert, taken with a red pudding wine (a small dose of red proved OK on this occasion), a bit like a port, but called Galateo from Banyuls. Possibly a Coume del Mas Galateo - 2017, as sold by the Hedonism people in Davies Street, people whom I have not visited for a while. Wine good, tart satisfactory, but they made the mistake of serving it with a very thick cream, when something much lighter, more syllabub like, would have been much more suitable.

Service good, plus we had a lady climber next to us who provided some additional interest. At least the sort of lady that assists at rock climbing walls and goes rock climbing in the south of Spain. I was able to air my mainly armchair knowledge of such matters, helped along by the Kerner, until she made her pretty excuses. After she had claimed to be able to do nearly one eight finger pull up.

But cream apart, a very good meal and should occasion arise we will go there again. Sadly I forgot to visit their well-stocked off-license. Maybe in the margins of the next trip to the cheese shop?

Crane two

Crane three

Pity about how distorting the fish-eye lens on my telephone is. Maybe someday someone will write the code which takes the distortion out. Thinking with my fingers, such code sounds well within the bounds of possibility these days. Or is it a question of processing time? We have to wait until telephones pack more power?

Better buskers than usual around the station. Entertainingly modern tunnel along the way, the sort of thing you expect at an airport rather than a railway station.

Fine sunset in clouds to the west, between Vauxhall and Wimbledon.

Scored a minus one on aeroplanes at Wimbledon, with just the one, going the wrong way, looking to have taken off from Heathrow and heading east, rather than heading west into Heathrow. Which reminds me that I need to review the rules against the possibility of there being changes to directional preferences. See reference 8.

Magazines

Scored an alpha plus at Raynes Park, with a splendid haul of English language magazines from Pakistan, on which I shall report separately.

Cello's metallic trim

PS: asking Bing for 'cello antique coin' didn't do much good, turning up lots of money. But 'cello antique christophe coin' did the business, turning up the snap above, very probably the very cello used on this occasion. Metallic flowers - or whatever - visible if you click to enlarge.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/06/suites-suite.html. The last London suites.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/surprising-cello.html. The surprise Ashburton suites.

Reference 3: Bach Cello Suites - Jean-Guihen Queyras - April 2020, Milton Court. Possibly the next suites: an ambitious format, but there are two escape opportunities should need arise.

Reference 4: https://www.kloster-neustift.it/en/. The wine.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=praepositus. The first cousin of the wine.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=trace+detritus+couper.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/04/more-aret.html.

Reference 8: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/fortean-times.html. The haul which included the Heathrow consultation document - 'Airspace and Future Operations Consultation Document - January 2019 - which talks, inter alia, about directional preferences. Not previously heard of.

Russian wine

A couple of weeks or so ago, I had enjoyed a glass of Chardonnay somewhere and so thought to buy a bottle of the stuff from Waitrose, paying a bit more than I usually pay for our Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc, our regular, bread and butter tipple. With the stuff in question coming from the Russian River Valley in California, from the people at reference 1. With the Russian River being a substantial river running north to south, more or less following Route 101 - or perhaps vice-versa - before emerging into the Russian River State Marine Conservation Area. A river which had been renamed for one Ivan Aleksandrovich Kuskov.

The notes to our wine on the website include the phrase 'soft and complex', which I thought quite inappropriate, finding it rather aggressive and full-on. And 'plush mouthfeel' was a gem. All that said, the wine went better with the apple pie than with the roast - with Cortana getting the message and focussing on the pie rather than the bottle. A proper pie with a top and a bottom, the sort of thing which I believe is still popular in the US and can still be bought from some of our cafés in Epsom. Perhaps not from those fancy cake shops at the Green Park end of Piccadilly.

Perhaps a reminder that there was a place in the world for the red wines which I no longer drink.

PS: three days later: the second half bottle went down this evening without food, rather better than the first half went down with. Having lasted out the three days after opening pretty well, which is not always the case.

Reference 1: http://www.freibrothers.com/. Notice the selection of chunky, artisanale boards carrying the snacks. Board life is not just a UK phenomenon.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_101.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_River_%28California%29.

Reference 4: http://cultinfo.ru/en/museums/municipal-museums-in-vologda-region/totma-museum.php. Which includes the house which Kuskov died in. Another reminder that people moved around in the olden days, more than we always remember to give them credit for. Another such reminder being the way that Anglo-Saxon kings from England were apt to pop off to Rome for a spot of absolution.

Variation 1 in B barley

Having made chicken soup with chicken a few days ago, noticed at reference 1, yesterday we were at it again.

BH pays a dawn visit to our local Costcutter and comes back with two chicken breasts, a packet of pearl barley and a pack of button mushrooms. Very impressed that our convenience store stocks relatively obscure stuff like pearl barley - when she could not find the stuff in our Tier 1 Sainsbury's the other day. But then, she alleges that stores like Sainsbury's make it a habit to hide low value-add basics in obscure corners in the hope that you will buy something high value-add.

The variation being the use of pearl barley rather than spelt. 6 ounces of it, cooked separately, for about an hour and a half altogether.

Chicken breasts rather than a quarter chicken, so no call to mess about boiling up the carcass, simply cubing the meat before starting to boil it up, or, at least, to simmer it up with the celery and onions.

The other tweaks were a portion of chou pointu, added just before the off, and around an ounce of left-over boiled rice.

Which all did very well yesterday lunchtime. Having fresher mushrooms helped rather than hindered. And the left-overs will do for a soup course today.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/chicken-soup-with-chicken.html.

Philadelphia

Quite recently, I had occasion to check whether Philadelphia was named after some biblically important place in the near east, or whether the name had been invented by earnest founding fathers with a classical education. At that time, my recollection is that I failed to get to the bottom of it and failed to find any near eastern connection. Perhaps I was just unsatisfied with, unconvinced by the line in Wikipedia that 'Penn named the city Philadelphia, which is Greek for "brotherly love", derived from the Ancient Greek terms φίλος [or] phílos (beloved, dear) and ἀδελφός [or] adelphós (brother, brotherly)'. Wikipedia also explains that at one time, apart from Native Americans, there were a lot of Dutch and Scandinavian people knocking around the area. Before it was given to Penn that is - who, to be fair, tried hard to be fair to the Native Americans.

Then this afternoon, while waiting for the cheese scones to cook, I was idly turning the pages of  my atlas of the Holy Land, mentioned at reference 1. To find that what is now Amman was once called Rabbath Ammon and was also once called Philadelphia. Also that it was located near the head waters of a substantial tributary of the River Jordan. All this was quickly confirmed by the Wikipedia entry for Amman. Digging deeper there is another Philadelphia in Asia Minor, or at least there was at the time of St. Paul.

So while it may be true that all six Philadelphias listed in my Britannica atlas are in the US, as are the top hits turned up by Bing on the search key 'philadelphia', with 'philadelphia near east' doing no better, the atlas of the Holy Land yields two more. And now that I know the place is in Jordan, gmaps turns up the right place for the search key 'philadelphia jordan'. I can only suppose I did not previously think to look in the index of the atlas of the Holy Land - with hindsight, an obvious enough place.

PS: although, to be fair, the question of what the big Philadelphia was named for remains open, still not being convinced by the Wikipedia story retailed above.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/books-from-honiton.html.

More heavy reading

Despite best intentions, I never got around to looking at, let alone reading, the Brexit agreement that PM May cooked up with our partners in Europe. Much easier just to look at the pictures in the reports about people squabbling about the report, people who had probably not read it either.

And today we have another such document, of roughly the same length, that is to say the redacted version of the long awaited 'Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election'.

Oddly enough, when I go to the Justice Department website at reference 2, while I can find the Attorney General's remarks on the occasion of the release of the report to Congress, that is to say to Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, I failed to find the report itself. Perhaps I have caught the sun, of which there is plenty here at Epsom today.

For that, I had to turn to the CNN website, from where I was able to download a copy, made available for the convenience of readers at reference 3. All 137Mb of it. And to think that it is not that many years since moving around and accessing a document of these dimensions would have been a major operation in its own right.

So far, all I have been able to do so far is admire the thorough ways of the redactors, who have marked each bit that they have blanked out with a reason for the blanking out. Very thorough people these lawyers in the US. And very literal I recall reading somewhere, perhaps in connection with their investigations into the affairs of President Clinton: never mind what the words were meant to mean, what do they actually mean. But I offer a snippet by way of an appetizer:

'The Trump Organization and the Crocus Group, a Russian real estate conglomerate owned and controlled by Aras Agalarov, began discussing a Russia-based real estate project shortly after the conclusion of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Donald J. Trump Jr. served as the primary negotiator on behalf of the Trump Organization; Emin Agalarov (son of Aras Agalarov) and Irakli "Ike" Kaveladze represented the Crocus Group during negotiations, with the occasional assistance of Robert Goldstone'.

Fascinating stuff. Notwithstanding, I expect that this report is going to go the same way as the Brexit agreement, that is to say down the memory hole (for which see reference 4)  - and I will continue to rely on the pictures in the reports about people squabbling about it.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/brexit-blunder.html.

Reference 2: https://www.justice.gov/.

Reference 3: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AvPvDT7vzzpQhN9Fo5YZggGA8eK4Jw. Later: hmmm. Maybe we have hit a limit in OneDrive. The link hasn't yet failed, but it hasn't yet loaded either.

Reference 4: Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - 1949. Published, as it happens, just four months before my arrival in the world.