Saturday's moan

The flier snapped left turned up at breakfast this morning, possibly falling out of today's newspaper, possibly something left over from yesterday.

Probably an age thing, but I find the promotion of English Heritage as if it were some kind of a cross between British Telecom and Chessington World of Adventures rather tiresome. I remember the days when what are now heavily promoted sites of National Cultural & Heritage Importance usually amounted to small car parks next to bits of ruins in small fields, usually neatly enough mown, and decorated with discrete plaques from the Ministry of Works. Car park charges had not been invented.

The endless quest for fun, education and experience, all in the same package. The idea that a toddler is going to take more interest in Stonehenge that he would in some rock on the beach. The offer of discounts to new members, irritating to old members who are paying at some higher rate - this last having been a feature of BT broadband offers over recent years. Promotion codes as might be offered by the likes of Lands' End or Sainsbury's. Generally signing up to the pernicious but pervasive idea of getting something for nothing.

But then, what should we expect after a decade of government whose faith was built on the mantra of private and profit good, public and service bad.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Works_(United_Kingdom).

Officious

Officieusement being an adverb which turned up in the Maigret story of reference 1. An adverb which caught my attention because it turned out, in this context at least, to have a rather different meaning to the English 'officious'. So Larousse speaks of something which has some kind of official standing, but a standing which is a bit provisional, apt to be withdrawn. So Maigret, who happens to be on the spot, is told to get on with the investigation officieusement, pending the arrival of a proper person, from the proper part of the justice operation, that is to say from the Sûreté nationale, as opposed to the Police Judiciaire, to which last Maigret belongs. While Littré talks of meanings more like our officious.

Otherwise Office appears to be used in its original sense of service, as in, for example, Divine Office, and only describing a place in the case of the place from which service was delivered to the dining room, the place from which the butler operated. The translation of the ordinary English 'office' being bureau, otherwise the name of a bit of furniture, that is to say a desk. Echoed in English by the West Africa desk (for example) in secret services and newspapers. Whereas the Italians do it our way with their Uffizi.

Reference 1: L'auberge aux noyés - Simenon - 1938.

Snippets from the Guardian

Amused to read the other day about one of Queen Victoria's birthday presents to Prince Albert. This one to be hung in a prominent position in the study which they both used in Osborne House.

I had already noticed paintings of the same genre in Albert's part of the house, but not this one, so clearly something to be checked out when we visit the island later in the year.

And then there have been various items about the travails of the new 5G network, said to be fifty times faster than the network we have now. But what on earth is it all for? So that I can stream 'Game of Thrones' onto my telephone at 50 times the usual viewing speed? What about all the coal fired electricity which is going to be needed to pump all these signals into the sky?

At a more mundane level, it seems that there are lots of disputes before our busy courts between the various 5G operators and the various local authorities owning the lampposts from which the operators want to hang their equipment. According to the Guardian, the result of sloppily prepared legislation from a government with no quality time left over from Brexit.

PS: exercise for the reader: how many models were used in painting the painting?

Tavistock day

Last week to Tavistock for our bi-annual visit, a town which used to be very much in the grip of the Russell family, the people who brought you Woburn Abbey, Russell Square and Bertrand Russell.

Yelverton and Dousland

Candles

Some striking candles, that is to say horse chestnut flowers, over the bonnet of our car in the car park at Yelverton. With the bonnet of the car looking far more smart and shiny that you might think from the appearance of the rest of it, decidedly tatty around the edges.

Tower

The tower of the large, 19th century church, built for the then new retirement and commuter village for Plymouth. A much warmer place inside, with a much stronger sense of life, than many of the much older churches in the villages round about.

Sanctuary light

On this occasion we did find the sanctuary light, unlit and blue rather than the much more usual red. The loss of focus being the price one seems to have to pay for cropping the original snap, using as it happens the new snip & sketch gadget from Microsoft. A gadget which has its points, but which is, in some ways, more tiresome than the snipping tool it is slated to replace.

New bell

Interested to see that the new bell, just a few months older than myself, came from Croydon. One might have thought that they could have found a bell founder a bit nearer than that, given all the metal bashing which must of gone on at Plymouth at that time. We thought it better not to use the bell pull hanging down alongside.

Onto the café a little way up the road to take tea and toasted tea cake and where we got into conversation with a newly retired gent. who had charge of his grandson for the day. A very pleasant and talkative gent. who had worked, mainly overseas, on clinical trials for Johnson & Johnson. Then, coincidentally, I happened to read a few days later in reference 1 that this company had been fined of the order of $1.5 billion in 2012 for the misselling of prescription drugs in the US, something which did not come up on this occasion, not getting much beyond the wonders of baby powders. Sounds a lot, but did not make that much of a dent on their bottom line, which was and is considerable.

While today, I read in Wikipedia that the parade of shops in which the café was to be found had had their upper stories removed to make way for the flight path down to the war time fighter station up the road at Harrowbeer. While the church tower was spared.

Waterworks

On to Dousland, where we noticed extensive waterworks behind the place we were visiting. A very large hole in the ground, coupled with some large concrete pipes, these last being the sort of thing used, inter alia, to line the inspection holes for drains on motorways. No-one we spoke to had any idea what was going on. Their drains worked OK and that was good enough. Swallows out front, small, black and white, rather than the blue and yellow you sometimes get.

Onto Tavistock where we tweeted a grey wagtail. There was also a distinctive, robin sized bird with a long pointed beak; one of the few occasions when the beak question in the RSPB bird identifier might have been useful. And, for the first time ever, we spotted a couple of fish from the bridge over the Tavy, maybe six inches long. Lots of midges to feed the fish.

Shopping next, St. Luke's charity shop followed by the tins already noticed at reference 3. The charity shop being the place which had given me my fine new Dannimac raincoat the year before and which on this occasion gave me two luxury shirts at £5 or so a pop. Bargain.

Next up fish and chips, TJ's & LJ's Fish and Chips of Brook Street. A place which serves to remind one that proper fish and chips from a fish shop are a good deal better than can be managed in a public house, although, to be fair, they manage much better now than they did a few years ago. Food technology is coming on - but not to the point of overtaking the real thing.

From there to a first visit to the old cemetery running along the south eastern side of Dolvin Road, across the Tavy. All rather overgrown, but all kinds of interesting shrubs, trees and funerary structures.

Lately master of the Union Workhouse

Something more substantial

Gravediggers' shed

I think we were told that the shed had been the site of a suicide. Back into town, where I failed to find the butcher where it has been our custom to buy white puddings made with groats. A sad loss if it has gone down, but it had been rather a large shop for the trade that they appeared to have been doing. With the butchers around the pannier market having been long gone - but not before I managed to buy a rolled top rib of beef from one of them. See reference 5. I wonder if all the many butchers in Okehampton last time we were there have been driven to extinction?

But we did find BH's family church, St. Eustacius, where we came across the same clergyman's widow that we had met on the last occasion, Monday being her day.

Sanctuary light, lit

Notice the Gills associated with the window adjacent. We seem to have come across a lot of them in this part of Devon, probably nothing to do with the more famous one from Brighton.

Proper, Roman style stone altar

Subsequently, we tried to go to the church at Whitchurch. There must have been one, given the name of the village, but we failed to find it, and carried on instead to the hotel at Two Bridges for tea, owned, as it happens, by the same people as own the main hotel in Tavistock, the Bedford Arms. On the way noticing a half moon rising in the bright afternoon sky.

Unmarked piano

Unable to score the piano in the function room there as the keyboard was locked by a contraption which reminded me of the steering locks used on cars. But the scone was excellent, the best I remember getting from a commercial establishment, and on the strength of that, booked ourselves in for lunch the following day. 

And so back to Holne to take in the late afternoon swallows there.

Reference 1: Saving Normal - Allen Frances - 2013. Page 96 of the Morrow hardback edition.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/06/dsm-5.html. Notice of Frances.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/shopping.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-coup.html. Notice of Dannimac coup.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=downing+pannier. Notice of top rib coup.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/piano-8.html. The fine piano of St. Eustacius.

Stupidity

A picture of the queue of climbers at the top of Everest, taken a couple of days ago. A wait which appears to have killed two of them.

A picture lifted from the CNN website, brought to me by Microsoft telephone, along with the caption: 'this handout photo taken on May 22, 2019, and released by climber Nirmal Purja's Project Possible expedition shows heavy traffic of mountain climbers lining up to stand at the summit of Mount Everest'. Bearing in mind that they are not going up and over, they are coming down the same way as they are going up and it is a wonder that more of them don't fall off.

A monument to the stupidity of human kind: such big brains, which seem to drive us into such awful messes. Presumably also a nice little earner for the otherwise very poor Nepalese - except for those of them that abhor the abuse of their sacred mountain.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/left-for-dead.html. Notice of one of the accounts of a previous traffic jam.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=everest&max-results=20&by-date=true. All the recent posts involving Everest - rather a lot of them.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=sinclair+babbitt+everest. The first ever, rather oblique mention of the matter.

Clutch smells

Our second full day at Hone was a Sunday, so we thought it proper to visit the shell of the burnt out church above Buckfastleigh. A burning out which was not all bad as one result was a new church, with modern plumbing, electrics and so forth down in the town.

Yew one

Yew two

First item was a handsome old yew tree. Next we had the graveyard, grave stones mostly nineteenth and twentieth century, with a small number being military, the sort of thing you get in military cemeteries in France and Flanders. We did not find out how they came to be here.

Hamlyn

With one of the grander ones being that for Mr. and Mrs. Hamlyn, snapped above, with Mrs. Hamlyn surviving Mr. Hamlyn by some 25 years. Note the grey rendering of the tower, much the same as that at Holne.

Stone coffin

We were rather puzzled by this stone coffin, not very large by modern standard, perched up behind its substantial fence. With the perch not looking very new, so not a result of the fire. Lots of bird song for our picnic on a convenient and sunny bench, but no sightings, let alone tweets, crows, pigeons and a few swallows aside.

Steep path

There was supposed to be a long flight of steps down to the town, but all we could find was this rather steep path down to the wrong part of town. And while there was plenty of wild garlic, as snapped above, we failed to find the entrance to the famous bat caves of reference 1, let alone the cave system generally, from which the curious snap which follows is taken, presumably the product of idle hands. Curious enough that Google image search knew all about it.

Phenomenon

At least I now know that there are lots of quite big caves in this part of Devon, which I had thought to be confined to parts up north.

The next move was down to Buckfastleigh, and we wound up going down a steep, narrow lane which seemed to be going in the right direction, but which terminated in a footpath at a place where one might have turned around, had there not been a car parked there already. So it was a case of reverse back up the lane, which given my lack of practise meant a good deal of clutch work and a good deal of unpleasant smell, possibly asbestos flavoured. A smell which hung around the car for some days afterwards, during which I tried to make as little use of the clutch as possible. Luckily, no sign of it no working.

Eventually, we parked up in Buckfastleigh and took a look around, stopping to buy some hard core wholemeal bread and some good looking, but discounted apples from an orgo shop. It remains a puzzle why there were so few shops in the high street of this small town: there was a fair bit of industry on the outskirts so there was work, but precious few places in which to spend one's wages.

St. Luke's

Town house

But there was the new church of St. Luke's and there was this substantial town house, with substantial stone trim on two of its four sides. Presumably now flats.

Sevens again

We also had a line of steel bollards, each decorated with the sign of seven fishes. Perhaps investigation would reveal that these fishes were part of the coat of arms of some once important family.

A glimpse of the green space by the river

The right steps

And so to the millennium green, contrived out of a pleasant bit of space by the river, complete with a refreshment shed, light music and sundry young families taking the air. Plus some pensioners, such as ourselves. We thought that, despite the absence of shops, the place had ambitions along the lines of Totnes, with hair, smells and beads. We also came across the right steps to the burnt out church above, snapped by Google.

Went up them a short way, then branched left, which took us along the top of the allotments, seemingly as much used as pleasure gardens as vegetable gardens, after the fashion of the continentals. Lots of umbrellas, barbecues and easy chairs. One brown rat.

Home to the Sunday Times, sausages from Poundbury and stewed apples from Buckfastleigh. The Sunday Times seemed rather loud after our regular diet of Guardian, and its TV guide made the Saturday offering from the DT seem quite tasteful. Sausages and apples satisfactory, this last despite the apples being well past their best inside, somewhat brown even.

Reference 1: http://www.pengellytrust.org/caves.htm.

Duty done

Further to reference 1, I can now record that my vote for the Liberal Democrats has now been cast - at a polling station where there were, unusually, no political people, just the station operatives.

This despite having remembered that the former leader of the Liberal Democrats sold out to the Facebook Corporation and is now sunning himself in California. A shame mitigated by his being understandably fed-up at being punished for his success in restraining the worst excesses of the Tory administration of his time.

And I read today that the small number of MP's who defected from the Conservative and Labour parties over Brexit were unable to agree to tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats and persist in attempting, counter-productively to my mind, to split the remain vote. The good news is that the Guardian thinks they will soon be swallowed up by the Liberal Democrats anyway.

The bad news is that the two trolleys spotted near Screwfix on the way back from returning trolley 262 have vanished, so no score there. Someone else must be on the trolley game.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/voting.html.