Binding problem

Checking the record has revealed error creeping into the blog, that is to say the meal noticed at reference 1, combined a meat course from one occasion with the sweet course from another. An error which started with the Microsoft failure to synchronise OneDrive across my telephone and laptop. And which was propagated by inadequate checking on my part: the necessary information was available but I didn't turn it up in time.

A version of what those who work on the nature of consciousness call the binding problem, which goes roughly as follows. All the various input to the conscious experience get sprayed all over the brain in the course of being processed. So how does the brain put it all back together again for the subject to experience a coherent whole? Or in this case, how does the brain link the memory of the front end of this particular meal to that of the back end, given that it stores front ends involving meat and back ends involving sugar in different places.

Onto seconds by this time

The meat that actually preceded the mince tart was a shoulder of lamb, and the day started with its being weighed in at 6lbs 6oz. I worried about its being in the oven before I set off around Long Grove Park, making a total cooking time, including resting, of around 4 hours. And as it turned out, it was certainly at the well done end of the range, but fine. It did us very well.

Jubilee Way had been abandoned in favour of Long Grove Park because it had snowed quite heavily that morning and there was still quite a lot of the stuff on the road: I thought cycling might be a little foolhardy. So off on foot, with the first call being Stamford Green, where there were lots of people, mostly young, and lots of snowmen, mostly modest in size, say around three feet high. Nothing like the eight feet of pinnacle I once made on our front drive in Norwich. And all the young people were so happy to be messing about in the snow that social distancing rather went by the board.

Pressed on into the Manor Park estate where there was some more of the same. But Long Grove Park had been shut on account of the herding on the skatepark there, so I swung to the left of the park, trudging through some reasonably deep snow, before emerging on Chantilly Way and so home.

In time to sweep the snow at the front of our house: drive, front path and sidewalk. I think I may have been the only person in the road to bother and in the event the snow had gone in 48 hours or so. Nevertheless, if it had melted then frozen again it would have been nasty underfoot. As one neighbour pointed out, when we were young, sweeping the snow was de rigueur, like washing the car on a Sunday.

Close-up

And so onto the roast shoulder of lamb. Presently much preferred to roast leg, which we rarely cook quite right. Shoulder much more robust. As ever, with brown rice and boiled vegetables. Followed by the tart of reference 1 and taken with the Pierre Précieuse of reference 1. Including, towards the end of the bottle, a smear of brown sludge, not before noticed. Rounded off by a spot of Majestic's cheaper Calvados, the one that sometimes tastes of cider.

A pause, followed by sweeping the snow of the back path, the one used for brick walks. Followed by Scrabble, where we failed to make a combined score of 500. Not good at all.

Followed by a spot of hundred year old T. S. Eliot: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 'Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service' and 'The Hollow Men'. Didn't understand it, but two impressions stuck. First, it all seemed terribly desolate - even though Eliot himself did not serve in the first war, despite being of military age, probably because he was a US citizen in the UK at the time. Second, a lot of the vocabulary would, I imagine be a bit tricky for young people of today. It was a bit tricky for me, and I like to think that I have a pretty good vocabulary.

So the second of the three poems opens with a quote by Marlowe. The first line is the word 'polyphiloprogentive', a word which I think must have been invented by Eliot and which does not appear in OED. While 'philoprogenitive' does and means a taste for producing children - which I suppose on a good day one might work out for oneself. 

The first line of the second stanza is the first line of the gospel according to St. John. Which I suppose you might know if you go to one of the faith schools popping up around the country (and paid for by taxpayer money). 

Painted by Perugino

While the first line of the third stanza talks of the Umbrian School, of which Perugino was an important member. Famous for the jigsaw to be found at reference 3. Which took longer to find than it should, as the first three posts of 2013 are missing from the archive. Can't see any good reason for this, so probably finger trouble.

I close with 'Sweeney', from the close of the same poem. According to one Dr Oliver Tearle: '... The figure of Sweeney features in several poems by T. S. Eliot: ‘Sweeney Erect’, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ (where we find him in the bath in the final stanza), The Waste Land (where he gets a passing mention), and the play, Sweeney Agonistes, a sort of jazz-drama which Eliot sadly abandoned, though he reprinted two scenes from this experimental piece of modernist theatre in his Collected Poems. Eliot uses the character to explore life among the ‘low’ of society: people who work in, and frequent, brothels, dive bars, and the like...'. Which all seems very appropriate for a chap who became a good friend of James Joyce.

Moving on, what was left of the shoulder did three day's cold, served, as ever, with boiled vegetables. And on the third day, there was still a portion of the savoury meat, from the fore-arm, just beyond what passes for an elbow on a sheep, to take with bread and tea later in the afternoon.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/gammon-plus.html.

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

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/01/christmas-special-dismantled.html.