Faits divers

An ancestor of our current mother in-law's tongue flowered back in 2012, an event noticed at reference 1. A plant properly known as sansevieria trifasciata but also as mother in-law's nose. In French they pluralise to langues de belle-mère  or couteaux, with this last being knives. The point being that our current mother in-law's tongue is coming into flower and that the flower shoot had to be nearly a foot long before we noticed it, yesterday evening. This despite passing it many times every day.

While according to Wikipedia, the plant was renamed dracaena trifasciata in 2017 and is native to West Africa. Another plant with lots of common names. A member of the asparagus family, although one would not think so to look at it. But West Africa makes a change from Mexico.

Not such good news from the FT, with a long article about a botched project to deliver software to the nation's sub-post-offices, more than 10,000 of them. A saga which has been running since the mid 1990's when the government of the day awarded a software contract to ICL-Fujitsu - a team which I came across in the Home Office about ten years later. In my very limited experience, a company which had a lot of good people, but which was rather good at bolting all kinds of extras onto what had been intended as a fixed price contract. Extras for which they were the only possible supplier. Anyway, it seems that around ten years later a cut down version of the original vision had been installed, a cut down version which was turning up lots of false positives for fraud. False positives which made a lot of heart ache and trouble for a lot of people - with the bonus of jail for some and expensive settlements for others. Eventually the Post Office admitted that something was wrong and settled. Although from what I can make of it, more than four fifths of what looked like a substantial settlement was eaten up by the lawyers. Hopefully the Post Office has learned some lessons from all this. While we should perhaps ponder about the merits of private prosecution, still available in this country, a left over from the days when more or less all prosecutions were private, with the relatively rare crimes against the state accounting for most of the exceptions. Things like burning down a Royal Dockyard or blowing up the Houses of Parliament. But a tool which can be abused by big companies when fighting small companies - or private individuals.

In their defence, I dare say it is true that there is plenty of fraud in the sub-post-office business, fraud which the Post Office has to work hard to keep on top of it. Indeed, I believe that one of BH's forebears was a travelling investigator for the Post Office. And I dare say that in those days, Post Office investigators had lots of powers more normally associated with police forces.

And dog vomit fungus has appeared in the brick compost bin at the bottom of the garden, the one I need to empty and refurbish over the next couple of weeks. Last noticed, a little more than a year ago, at reference 3, although not, in that occasion, in our own garden. Pretty stuff, despite the name, which I now know to be wrong, the proper name being dog vomit slime mold. With slime molds being, as a I recall, a very ancient form of life. See references 4 and 5.

The last item was a sighting of what looked like a buzzard circling low, a little  to the west of the petrol station a little to the south of the Malden Rushett crossroads. This on the way to the purchase of a Bosch vacuum cleaner intended to reduce the labour involved in sweeping up this year's fine crop of acorns. And if that fails, there will always be the leaves to come.

PS 1: I am reminded that Wikipedia haven't tapped me for a donation for a while, a tapping I usually respond to, believing Wikipedia to be a very valuable public service. What's going on?

PS 2: later: going through the online palaver to register the vacuum cleaner was as bad as trying to assemble flat pack furniture. But at least it seems to be done - even if I have had to disclose my address and to use an unnecessarily complicated password.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/10/tongue.html. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malden_Rushett. A protuberance of the London Borough of Kingston, sticking some miles into Surrey. No idea why Kingston hung onto it, unless it was part of what I believe was a plan to grab Epsom too.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/vomit-mould-again.html.

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

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