After Halloween

The day after Halloween, I did a Middle Lane circuit, with the first item of interest being a bone lying on the verge on Manor Green Road. Google Images rumbled it straight away this afternoon, whereas I had to tap the thing with the end of my walking stick before I was sure. BH thought it rather too realistic to be in good taste.

It being a first Sunday of the month, it was food market day, combined on this occasion with collectibles, and together they put on quite a good show, including the apple man from Kent, a real farmer for once, probably the people at reference 3. But I was not carrying a bag and was not greatly tempted by him or anyone else.

But I was rather struck by these two gadgets fixed to the wall of our branch of NatWest. Both no doubt useful things to have in an emergency, but it looked to be quite a palaver to get the key codes with which to unlock the things, involving a location code in very small type and phoning 999. One can see why access needs to be restricted, but one wonders whether the emergency would have expired by the time you get the thing open. Perhaps the O&M men from NatWest have done time trials and thought that it was OK.

Serious trenching to do with a new plastic gas main (yellow with narrow red stripes running lengthwise) going on at the East Street end of Hook Road. Still odd that they have shut the junction for months, but they only seem to be digging trenches for weeks.

The hollyhock in East Street is still hanging in there, despite it being the beginning of November.

We even had a new shoot a little to the left.

A bit further along East Street, a fire thorn containing a lot of twittering. Despite which, I failed to see any action. I would guess sparrows.

Rounding off with the Screwfix whitebeam.

It might also have been the day of a young lady with a very inquisitive black or dark brown Labrador. A dog which was insisting on inspecting everything in sight and doing a lot of smelling and marking along the way. And had its nose more or less to the ground the whole time. Given that humans do not generally go around smelling things the whole time, I thought perhaps the canine origin of the term 'nosy'.

PS: today, I took in more of reference 1, reading of the strong affinity between boiling and rotten. Lévi-Strauss cites the example of 'pot pourri', which once meant a sort of stew made with mixed meats and mixed vegetables, stewed very soft.

Gemini told me that the phrase was lifted from the famous Spanish stew 'olla podrida', with there being some debate about whether the 'podrida' was just the Spanish for 'rotten' or whether it was a corruption of the nearby word for powerful, the stew being something for the rich rather than for the poor.

Bing knew all about this stew while BH remembered that it had something to do with Pepys. I could not find it in either companion or index.

But Gemini could.

He was right about the dates, but wrong that I would find it in the index under a different spelling. And while it did get an entry in the glossary at the back of Volume No.9, there was no cross reference.

When I pointed this out, he explained that the index was much stronger on people, places and theatres than on food.

From which I deduce that while he had access to a full text, he did not have access to either the indexes or the companion to the canonical edition from Latham & Matthews. Almost human.

In any event something to try. And like risotto, it looks to be one of those recipes with lots of variations. One of which is to be found at reference 2. Maybe the chick peas with pork, once widely available from tubs on the bars of Tenerife, is a relative. I used to like the stuff - to the extent of once growing some chick peas on my allotment.

References

Reference 1: Le Triangle Culinaire – Lévi-Strauss – 1965.

Reference 2: https://www.spanish-food.org/meat-stews-olla-podrida.html.

Reference 3: https://www.surreymarkets.co.uk/bessborough-farm/. Bing fails to compute on 'bessingdon apple farm kent', but Google gets me there. Their website seems to have expired but they do do Facebook and they look to be into local markets.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/10/bil.html. The only reference I could find to chick peas on the allotment in the archive. And it took me some geekery to get this one, given the misspelt file name.

Group search key: 20261101.

More left over rice

Clearly on a roll with left-over rice, as following the supper dish venture noticed at reference 1, we had another one today. This one a little more elaborate and rather closer to the proper recipe for risotto. Maybe Italians use variations on this dish to use up left-overs too: it seems to be fairly robust.

Fry some extra-thin bacon from Sainsbury's in a little butter. Allow time to separate the bits of bacon, sliced so thin that this is fiddly and takes a while. Add a finely chopped onion. Cook gently, with the lid on for a while.

Add left over yellow swede, brown rice and white cabbage. Add some fish stock (made with fish) and some chicken stock (made with cube). Cook gently, with lid off some of the time, to get consistency right: damp but not wet.

Add some cut-up and peeled mushrooms and some left over cod loin.

Simmer for a bit and serve. Once again, just the one portion snapped above. Even better than last time.

Another left-over, in the form of the Screwfix whitebeam, gathered up in the course of a Middle Lane circuit earlier in the day. Bit of a wind, and some rain in the air, but it was not actually raining.

PS: Tuesday: when I play the animal game, I do not have a good supply of mammals for the letter 'Q'. In fact, just the one, the quagga, which I now learn is extinct, so not really within the rules of the game at all. So I was doubly pleased to come across the quoll at reference 2 this morning. For which see reference 3.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/left-over-rice.html.

Reference 2: Rio Tinto creates ‘kill zone’ to halt cane toad invasion: Mining group building ‘firebreak’ in Western Australia designed to stop invasive species reaching Pilbara - Nic Fildes, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoll. 

Group search key: 20261102.

Flat files

[Mayline - Stacor Cole, Safco Flat File Cabinet 5 Drawers for Drawings, Maps, Blueprints (Serviced) - In 10 baskets - Price: £463.59+. Turned up by Bing on the clue ‘flat file’]

A bit of tutorial material associated with my ongoing attempt to fathom Lévi-Strauss’s use of simple diagrams and mathematical jargon at reference 1.

When I was young, I had a lot to do with what we then called flat files. A flat file was a series of records of fixed length and fixed format: all the records were about the same sort of thing and had the same format, that is to say they were organised in the same way. Very much analogous to the form that you might fill in for some bureaucratic purpose. An example might have been records about deaths in England and Wales during 1974. Such files were often large and held on magnetic tape – and a magnetic tape reader was then the size of a walk-in refrigerator.

To be distinguished from hierarchical files, often a two level hierarchy, for example persons within households. One would have one sort of record about households, another sort of record about persons. From an analysis or a computing point of view, a much more complicated object to deal with.

While a lot of the data in a flat file was properties like age (numeric) or sex (categorical), the rules also allowed for count fields like number of pets or number of stays in hospital in the last ten years. Such counts would mitigate the absence of a hierarchical structure which would better accommodate said pets and visits.

Such flat files were rather like the Excel worksheets which came some years later, although, at least in the beginning, a flat file could manage a lot more records – perhaps hundreds of thousands – than Excel could manage rows.

An example

 This example of a worksheet being extracted from reference 2, with the rows being all the different species, sub-species and hybrids of oak tree, more than 800 of them. A classification; much more the sort of thing that Lévi-Strauss would take an interest in.

Note that while the display is fixed format, some of the fields contain variable length text. A flat file of old would have to fix a maximum, which while simple to process, can be expensive in (white) space.

I would fault the worksheet in using more the one header row at the beginning. There are also some footnotes at the end. One can see the need, but Excel works much better when there is at most one header row and nothing tagged on at the end.

One possibility with this type of file is sorting. If one has columns corresponding to the identifying properties of, in this case, oak trees, one can sort on those columns to give something which is not that far removed from a hierarchical tree structure, the sort of tree structure that a taxonomist might come up with. Or the binary key for identification that a botanist might come up with.

As it happens, the file shown is sorted alphabetically by name and there are not enough of the sort of properties needed to provide useful structure – but one can cheat by choosing one of the various taxonomies which are provided.

The project

One can then view the Lévi-Strauss project which is the subject of the paper at reference 4 as an attempt to come up with enough properties to enable comparative analysis of all the cooking vocabularies around the world.

Where properties are preferably binary, but otherwise mostly categorical with a small number of values. He also allows:

• A property to be absent. Some properties are only relevant in parts of the vocabulary

• The value of a property to be unknown or not stated

• The value of a property to be qualified. 

So one might have a property called heat, which is present or absent, with the optional qualifier being the source of the heat: charcoal, wood, oil, gas or whatever. I duck here the debate about whether one can be cooking if one is not using heat.

Binary properties might be mapped onto good or bad: that is to say one value of the property is mapped onto good, the other onto bad. Although such mapping might depend on context: if one is overheated, hot is bad – while if one is very cold, heat is good.

Any given cooking word can then be described, in large part, by the values it takes for those properties.

So we might have it that: fry╞ cook(heat=present fat=present water=absent container=present(frying pan)).

Avunculate

This came up at reference 3 and is described more generally reference 4.

The snap above being taken from a worksheet version of the avunculate figure there, a worksheet which lists all the permutations of the properties available. With ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ being a shorthand for the usual relationship between the pair identified in the corresponding column heading – aka the meta-data – of the worksheet.

The figure at reference 3 is not exhaustive, but the hypothesis is that all the permutations which are not excluded do in fact occur somewhere in the world – albeit some with greater frequency than others.

The point being that this worksheet provides support for systematic investigation of the worldly variation in such matters. It is not the particular permutations which are important in themselves, rather the choice of properties (and their values) defining a particular group of customs. A group comparable to the ‘semantic field’ – exemplified by the word ‘cooking’ – used by Lehrer at reference 5.

One can examine all the permutations and see which ones actually crop up – and why.

One can examine the extent that the hierarchies implicit in various sort orders correspond to the corresponding field vocabularies of the peoples of interest. To the things that anthropologists think important.

The diagrams, such as the culinary triangle of reference 5, are not much more than a bit of trim.

Something which data analysts in IT know all about when they design the relational tables in the (relational) database supporting an application on a computer – with the relational table being another variety of the flat file, albeit a rather powerful – and now ubiquitous – one. What SQL is all about.

Conclusions

We suppose that human brains are pretty much the same everywhere. We have not been around for long enough to there to have been much divergence.

The basic drives to survive and to reproduce are the same everywhere: the drives for food, drink, shelter and so forth. Maybe you get the Freudian ego, id and superego and their derivatives everywhere.

We suppose that the facts of cooking physics are pretty much the same everywhere.

However, the environment and context of cooking vary a good deal. For example, the sort of food that is available and the sort of cooking technology that is available. Not all people, for example, have pots (for boiling) – something that Lévi-Strauss himself draws attention to in the short paper at reference 6 – rather complicating his focus on boiling food.

Language varies a good deal too, although linguists have worked hard to uncover universals, under the hood, as it were.

All of which means to me that the supposed Lévi-Strauss hypothesis that there is a set of cooking properties which are both efficient and sufficient for the analysis of the cooking vocabularies of the world is interesting. It would be interesting if this were so, but it is not obvious (to me anyway) that it is so.

And where such a set of properties would sit in the chain of causation is another matter. To what extent would we be conscious of those properties and able to articulate them to a skilled investigator?

Exclusions

The foregoing does not address the business of mappings and transformations more generally, more mathematical flavourings, also important in the world of Lévi-Strauss.

References

Reference 1: The Jealous Potter – Lévi-Strauss – 1985, 1988.

Reference 2: International Oaks - The Journal of the International Oak Society – 2018. No.29. Contains 'Updated Classification of Oaks: a Summary – Béatrice Chassé – 2018. Floraoddmenu_829, 830a, 830b.

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/wilcken-on-levi-strauss.html. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avunculate. Plenty of Lévi-Strauss here!

Reference 5: Cooking Vocabularies and the Culinary Triangle of Lévi-Strauss – Adrienne Lehrer – 1972.

Reference 6: Le Triangle Culinaire – Lévi-Strauss – 1965.

Aldermaston

[CND demonstrators leaving Maidenhead on their march from London to Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Berkshire, 1958 (Getty, via the Independent)]

When I was young, perhaps in the Lower Sixth at school, I went on an Aldermaston March, an event organised by CND, to protest in favour of unilateral disarmament, which I think amounted to getting rid of our (very expensive) nuclear weapons, intended to deter the Russians from invading or otherwise interfering in some drastic way. Aldermaston was the home, near Reading, of the Atomic Warfare Research Establishment, in the lead on these weapons, subsequently privatised as AWE Nuclear Security Technologies. For all of which see references 1 and 2. And I was quite surprised this morning to find that the CND still existed and had a website at reference 3.

Not too sure about the dates now, but I don't think we started in London. And I do remember my elder brother getting hold of a shabby, duplicated typescript about the fairly secret thing called RSG 6, which caused a lot of fuss at the time. One of a string of government bunkers intended to hold the country together after the Russians had bombed us back to the Stone Age.

At the time, the UK still had the trappings of a great power, even if the substance was fast draining away, and unilateral nuclear disarmament, while largely symbolic, might have made a difference. Probably not any more. In any event, we failed to convince anything like enough people that we were right.

So all rather a surprise to find, on our return from Chippenham, that Aldermaston, or rather Aldermaston Wharf, was also an important place on our canal network. Had there been some cunning plan to move our bombs by water, hiding in plain sight, as it were?

There had been an early start at the Angel, with BH fortifying herself for the journey to come with a Pot O'Porridge. Today, I find reference 5, but I fail to find the pot.

I had a conversation with Gemini, the start of which is snapped above. It seems that the likes of Bidfood, the sort of people who probably supply the Angel, often get people like Mornflake to do them a special. The name might be special and the weight (53g) is down from what you would get in a supermarket, but the colours and ingredients are right for regular, original Mornflake. It is also possible that in my note, I took liberties with the name, no doubt to be found on the other side of the pot. Point taken.

I took a bacon sandwich. And we then moved into the scenic route home, that is to say A4 rather than M4. A route which worked well on this occasion. Plenty of places with enough going for them to support a City Break - although the railway lines appear to be more Paddington flavoured than Waterloo/Clapham Junction flavoured - with the former not being very handy to Epsom.

I associate this morning to a previous occasion, going the other way, when we stopped at a pull-in with a very fine show of pyramid orchids. Finding which is left as an exercise for the reader.

The first item of interest was what looked like the huge Lansdowne Strand Hotel of Calne and reference 6. Right on the main road, quite a small town. What on earth was it doing there? I did have a vague memory of an aristo Lansdowne who did his money on gambling and horses. It turns out from reference 7 that this is an old - and clearly persistent - confusion. Not a rake, rather a very rich (protestant Irish) peer and politician who also had a huge estate - Bowood - in Wiltshire. Which explains the name but not the size. But that will have to wait.

Past the White Horse, the first time for a while.

Through Marlborough, now open to traffic, a place with a very large market place running through the middle of town and a very large school at one end. We even saw what appeared to be uniformed girls from the school. Times have clearly changed.

A fine Wellingtonia just past Hungerford, already noticed at reference 8.

And so, quite by chance to Aldermaston Wharf, the name having caught my eye and it being convenient to turn off. Lots of water to be seen in gmaps, as snapped above.

With the canal side of things being in the hands of the ABC Leisure Group of reference 9. The goto-people for this stretch of the canal?

Had this one done time as a tripping boat, with an observation cabin forward and a bar aft?

A couple of hire boats in rather better shape. Some fancy looking houses on the other bank. How much is their value reduced by their views of trade and industry? And holiday makers?

There was also a one room museum with a car-boot-sale style collection of memorabilia, some canal flavoured. There were photographs reminding me what a major undertaking building these canals in the first place was. With the recent restorations being a major undertaking too. Something which would require a lot of money and enthusiasm: I would imagine that restoring old railway lines for steam traffic would come in rather cheaper.

We paid for our parking while taking tea and sausage roll, this last being the sort of thing I imagine one might buy in Greggs: one was quite enough for the two of us. While the tea came with pot, teacup and saucer and all the trimmings. BH takes decaff on these occasions.

After which we picked up the M4 and headed for home, to take our picnic there. A bit of slowing down as we changed over to the M25, but nothing serious. Leaving enough time for a spot of botanizing later, as noticed at reference 10.

PS: a little later, Gemini explains that the hotel in Calne grew to its present huge size when the Bath-London road trade boomed: the coming of the railway might have killed it off, but a combination of factors kept it going. But it is still a bit of a wonder that it lives on: maybe the Lansdownes are still rich enough and sentimental enough to keep it on at a loss. Part of this conversation is snapped above.

But not so rich that they could afford to keep their house on. See reference 12.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldermaston_Marches.

Reference 2: https://www.awe.co.uk/about-us/our-history/our-history/. Not working this Monday morning, although it was yesterday. Hopefully our deterrent is more reliable. A little later: back in business.

Reference 3: https://cnduk.org/.

Reference 4: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/cow-chop.html. Previous notice of our trip to Chippenham.

Reference 5: https://www.mornflake.com/shop/pots/.

Reference 6: https://lansdownestrand.co.uk/.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/lansdowne.html.

Reference 8: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/wellingtonia-139.html.

Reference 9: https://abclg.com/.

Reference 10: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/back-to-screwfix.html.

Reference 11: https://www.awe.co.uk/.

Reference 12: https://bowood.org/. The hotel might survive, but the house is now a luxury hotel spa and golf course. Plus gardens and park. The odd Wellingtonia?

Left over rice

Having ventured into the world of risotto at reference 1, the presence of mushrooms in the refrigerator and left over (boiled, brown) rice on the side, prompted another go yesterday afternoon. That is to say, Friday afternoon.

Knob of butter into the sauté pan. Add most of a finely chopped onion. Failing to find the loose pepper for properly aromatic pounding, some ground black pepper from a natty contraption from Sainsbury's. Natty in that you buy the grinder and the pepper in the one package. Put another way, the top of the pepper pot has been stretched into grinding.

When the onion is soft, add the left over rice and a little water.

Simmer down to the right consistency. Add chopped mushroom stalks. Add a knob of Gubbeen, perhaps half a cubic inch. A little later add peeled and cut up caps. I don't usually bother with peeling, but it seemed the thing to do on this occasion. 

Stirring occasionally. Lid on most of the time.

Serve. With one of the two portions snapped above - and although I say it myself, I thought it did pretty well. One would not want too much of the stuff, but a portion of this size was fine.

PS 1: a bit later I picked up on the piece at reference 5. A tale from New York of the free market at work on greed. I dare say the same sort of thing goes on here in London, but maybe we manage with less noise.

PS 2: while the Google ad-server has gotten around to noticing my interest in Yellow Box, with the advertisement snapped above arriving in my mail this morning. A month since I last mentioned them (at reference 6), so quite a lag.

PS 3: from a correspondent. Flamingos over Montpellier.

Not all that many pixels left after they have been through the Google sausage machine, but hopefully the flamingos are visible if you click to enlarge. Heading from right to left. Bit more flashy than the skeins of geese we get from time to time over Stamford Green.

Google Images' observations on the matter.

While gmaps offers plenty of lagoons. It all hangs together...

A former correspondent once took the time to take in some bull fights in nearby Beziers, bottom left in the snap above. He had been a bird watcher when young, but he never mentioned flamingos in his context.

PS 4: Sunday morning: I woke up this morning thinking about these flamingos, prompting a short conversation with Gemini. He tells a good story, summarised in the snap above. Given the amount of work that appears to have been done on all of this, it should not be difficult to check, although I doubt whether I shall take the time.

But I did go so far as to ask Bing about the '2001 study led by Henri Weimerskirch on Great White Pelicans', on which clue he turns up the relevant paper in Nature. Reference 7 below. Abstract:

'Many species of large bird fly together in formation, perhaps because flight power demands and energy expenditure can be reduced when the birds fly at an optimal spacing1,2,3, or because orientation is improved by communication within groups4. We have measured heart rates as an estimate of energy expenditure in imprinted great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus) trained to fly in 'V' formation, and show that these birds save a significant amount of energy by flying in formation. This advantage is probably a principal reason for the evolution of flight formation in large birds that migrate in groups'.

I learn that my connection with Nature is not what I thought it was, as if I want more I have to pay. One more thing to be checked. In the meantime, I share a few other snippets.

While breathing is synchronised (in small integer multiples) with flapping or stepping, the heart is not, at least not very much.

Birds are into mechanical efficiency, which means that there is a steady phase shift as you move down the line. Soldiers are into synchronisation, for which sound is a start - the sound of the big bass drum - but for which sight is much better. Singing can be helpful here, particularly when it is dark.

Quite a lot of work is done with special birds in wind tunnels, where it is easier to fit the monitoring gear.

Brain now in gear for the real work of the morning!

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/09/chicken-dinners.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/a-visit-to-town.html. The last Gubbeen on record.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/show-off-time.html. What appears to be the first Gubbeen on record. Probably some kind of birthday celebration.

Reference 4: https://www.gubbeen.com/. They also make knives.

Reference 5: What killed Weil Gotshal: Partners were stunned by the realisation that a profitable 95-year-old firm with 1,200 lawyers could be felled by a string of departures - Kaye Wiggins, Oliver Barnes, Sujeet Indap, Amelia Pollard, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 6: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/09/screwfix-monday.html.

Reference 7: Energy saving in flight formation - Henri Weimerskirch, Julien Martin, Yannick Clerquin, Peggy Alexandre, Sarka Jiraskova - 2001.

New cooker

For the record.

The lower oven, the one with the fan, in our eleven year old Zanussi ZCV66000WA cooker, gave up in the middle of baking apples, intended for our lunch yesterday. We thought that the likely cause was loss of heating, which is supposed to be supplied by two elements mounted inside the side panels. We thought that we had lost one of these elements before, with part and installation costing of the order of £150.

I blamed the wear and tear on the elements caused by regular baking of bread, which requires the fairly high temperature of 225°C.

First problem was to find the model number of the cooker, with which to communicate with cooker people. It was not printed on the outside or anything like that, but after a while we found a ticket inside the door to the upper oven, snapped above. Much easier to read on the telephone than with the naked eye.

Second problem was to find the paperwork. Again, after a while, BH ran it down. Not that it told us a great deal.

Third problem was whether to mend - which we thought might cost around £250 - or to replace. And as far as I could see on my telephone replacing like-for-like was no longer an option, although there seemed to be plenty of second hand ones knocking around on eBay and elsewhere - the snap above being taken from an auction house, rather than our house.

The decision was to pay a visit to the branch of euronics up at Tattenham Corner, people with whom we have done entirely satisfactory business in the past. It not very many minutes we had bought a 'AEG CCX6530ACM Free Standing D/Oven with Ceramic Hob', not identical but very close to the Zanussi. Plus installation and removal of the Zanussi. All very neat and tidy.

The only downside was an oven clock which we neither needed or wanted. But at least we have hand operated knobs which go round and round.

A little later, I got back home with a Comet, picked up from town. Carrying a half page advertisement for the very shop we had just used.

We also learned that the long running 'Jolly Boatman' saga, noticed in the pages from time to time, usually in the margins of a visit to Hampton Court Palace, was still running. The developers say that all the delays have damaged the arithmetic and that they need to cut provision of car parking spaces. The residents say tough. The saga has been running for 40 years now, a showcase for all that is wrong with the way we manage urban redevelopment. Apart from anything else, it is a lot of asset which has not been making any money - or anything else - apart from being an eyesore that is - for a very long time.

A little later still, I thought to make inquiries of Gemini about the whereabouts of Zanussi. I now know that both AEG and Zanussi are Electrolux brands, with Zanussi having lost out in a bout of brand rationalisation. Electrolux itself is Swedish, which I did not know either.

PS 1: it looks as if we made similarly short work of buying the Zanussi in the first place. For which see reference 3. Its subsequent repair is noticed at reference 4, a bit more than four years ago. It turns out that I did find out about Electrolux at that point, but had forgotten. Wouldn't even think of attempting installation of a 2,500W heating element now!

With Gemini's subsequent response to my supplementary being snapped above. For Udinese Calcio, see reference 5: it looks as if they are playing Rome tomorrow. Needless to say, Gemini can tell me all about that too:

'... When Lamberto Mazza took over Udinese in 1981, his ambition was to turn the modest provincial club from Friuli into a European powerhouse, effectively backed by Zanussi's balance sheet. The climax of that gamble came in the summer of 1983, when Mazza stunned world football by signing Brazilian superstar Zico for billions of lire....'

PS 2: on another subject, I have been taking an interest in a supposed Oriental Arborvitae up on Meadway. I was quite surprised to find this morning that, from a distance, it had turned quite brown. Much more brown than it appears in the snap above.

Presumably some sort of aftershock of the drought - having already noticed that some of our deciduous trees showed the first signs of trouble some weeks after the heat and the drought broke.

PS 3: and on yet another, the JDT vacuum excavator was blocking our road this morning. Presumably, having packed up and moved on, they have had to come back to address some problem or omission. Which must be expensive for them.

References

Reference 1: https://www.euronics.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.electrolux.se/.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/zanussi-or-bust.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=oven+element.

Reference 5: https://www.udinese.it/.

Reference 6: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/more-platycladus.html. Oriental Arborvitae.

Cow chop

This being notice of our visit to Bowden Hill, after our visit to Box, a little to the west. A visit built around taking lunch at the Rising Sun, a place last visited just about three years ago. Time still flying!

The car park adjacent was being extended, but there were still fine views to the west, over the Avon valley. Vale of Avon? Avonvale?

We were sat in the sun lounge style extension out back, with what appeared to be an even newer extension adjacent, and most of us kicked off with a spot of 2023 Sancerre from Roland Tissier, via Corney & Barrow. For which see reference 5 - from which I learn that it should be paired with Crottin de Chavignol.

Followed by a prawn cocktail, all the thing when we were little, but coming back into fashion. Quite often on offer. In this case, quite a decent portion.

Followed by what turned out to be a mistake, described as 'Cote de boeuf with Dauphinoise potatoes, roasted tenderstem, garlic portobello's red wine & mushroom sauce'. The beef might have been grown on their own farm, but it was tough, full of gristle and badly presented. Rather overpriced considering.

Much better value to be had at Waterloo, as noticed at reference 6.

A pity that I had not thought to take my trusty folding Laguiole in with me. I could have casually fished it out of my (tweed) jacket pocket, wiped the blade on a napkin, and started slicing up the meat with it, no trouble at all, gristle and all. All this under the eyes of the startled waitress.

It never crossed my mind on this occasion, although it went with me to work at the Home Office most days, when I used to lunch off fresh bread from a baker in Strutton Ground, taken with a little butter. And in those far off days, it never set off the alarms inside the Star Trek style entry portals. I wonder whether it would now? It might even be an offense to have such a thing in your pocket in a built-up area without a proper license.

I also remember that, years ago now, the blade of this knife was a centimetre or so longer than was permitted in hand baggage on Eurostar and I had to quickly stuff it into my suitcase, out of harm's way. It went on to assist in the preparation of bread and sausage on the banks of the Seine. They also checked for such things before you were allowed into Sainte Chapelle. Returned on exit. But then, as I recall, it is located right in the middle of the justice complex on the Île de la Cité. Also as I recall, I was a bit disappointed. A bit old and shabby. But see reference 16 for some fancy images.

Rather more chips (aka roast potatoes) than we needed, as it turned out. The little yellow brick at the back was the other potatoes. Sauce untouched.

BH was rather happier with her veggie choice, pumpkin and sage ravioli.

No apple brandy to be had, from Somerset or anywhere else. But we did learn that a new team had taken over since our last visit. I suspected that the emphasis had shifted a bit from foodie to turnover, but I may be being unfair.

Out to inspect the handsome gothic revival church of St. Anne, just along the road, to be found inside reference 7, open on this occasion, unlike the last.

Amongst other decorative features there was a ceiling light which was a miniature version of the one at Buckfast Abbey. See, for example, references 12 and 13.

Both the angle of the one in the middle and zoom suggests to me that the candles are real, but it is hard to be sure. I refrain from asking Gemini.

These two panels nicely illustrating the decline and fall of our Established Church. Starting with a series of MAs from Cambridge, probably mostly with Greek and Hebrew, with just a sprinkling from the other place, down to a lady from the St Albans and Oxford Ministry Course. Lt. Col (temp) Giles Royds Brocklebank DSO, MC, MA excepted, who looks to have had what was euphemistically called a good war. The quality of lettering looks to have declined too.

Had we been there a week later, we would have turned out for this one. It looked like a good programme.

They look (at reference 15) to be quite busy people, with at least two concerts in Kings Place in Kings Cross. Evenings, so we won't be making it.

A general view of the church.

A curious building, across the road from the church, a little down from the lodge for Bowden Park, the gates to which were firmly shut.

A building in a fine setting. Not a Wellingtonia. which would have been nice.

I was impressed, this was before I had looked at reference 7, that Google Images was able to say what it was and what it did: a sort of early modern bit of water treatment for the spring water used to supply Lacock Abbey at the bottom of the hill, maybe a mile away. A conduit house, of which there are quite a number scattered around the country. I associated to Combe Conduit of reference 8, noticed earlier in the year at reference 9. That conduit involved substantial lead pipes and ran for about three and a half miles, including getting across the Thames, presumably on the river bed. While BH associated to the open conduit of Cambridge, sponsored by Mayor Hobson. Interestingly, all three date from roughly the same time, that is to say the end of the 16th century, the beginning of the 17th century.

My first thought had been that it housed some kind of family memorial, but soon decided that it was a bit plain and blocky for that, even allowing for the blocking up of doors and windows.

Presumably in this case it was a matter of nice judgement where to put the conduit house: high enough to give the pressure to push the water down to Lacock, low enough to catch the spring water.

Google Images started well.

But he wobbled a bit on my supplementary, seemingly losing the thread of the conversation. Notwithstanding, a good effort overall. I dare say I could have managed without him, but it was a lot quicker and easier with him. Maybe one will come to miss the chase? 

Back at the hotel, the rickety stairs mentioned at reference 11: when you stamped your foot on the floor you set up a resonance in the black bars. Gemini reminds me that the proper name for these last is balusters, sometimes spindles, probably from such balusters often being decoratively turned on a lathe. But not here.

PS 1: I had thought that I had taken apple brandy from reference 3 in the course of our previous visit. But reference 1 explains that while on the menu, it was not behind the bar. That had to wait until we visited the Coach Makers Arms in Marylebone, as noticed at reference 3, before we reached out to reference 4. Good stuff.

PS 2: usually when I lose something, as I did on this occasion, it turns out to be much longer ago than I had thought. Contrariwise, the visit to the Coach Makers was much more recent. So there I was, digging down to before the plague - before I thought of this year.

PS 4: one Jennifer Bean has been in touch about erectile dysfunction. In the form of a comment on a post in psmv4, a post which starts: 'This prompted by an email arriving in my in-box a few weeks ago about a young lady who has hearing problems and who is nearly blind – but who want to be a doctor...'. Maybe this sort of comment is generated by a rather dumb algorithm from some dubious office block on the Thai-Myanmar border.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/chippenham-and-beyond.html. 

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

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/kozhukhin.html.

Reference 4: https://somersetciderbrandy.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.sancerre-tissier.fr/.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/dissonance.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowden_Hill.

Reference 8: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/coombe-conduit/history/.

Reference 9: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/tulips-at-noon.html.

Reference 10: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101363959-the-conduit-house-lacock.

Reference 11: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/beam-engine-failed.html.

Reference 12: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=laguiole. I have had it for a while!

Reference 13: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/buckfast.html.

Reference 14: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/golden-rings.html.

Reference 15: https://www.islastringquartet.com/.

Reference 16: https://www.sainte-chapelle.fr/.