Title

Halifax has pulled out of the title deed storage business, so a few days ago around 4lbs 11oz of title deeds arrived at our front door. 35 by 25 by 5 centimetres, something more than 4,000 cubic centimetres. So a million such parcels - supposing that to be how many Halifax were holding - would occupy 4,000 cubic metres - 10 by 10 by 40 metres - amounting to a fair sized shed - and weigh in at something more than 2,000 metric tonnes, with a metric tonne not being much different to one of our tons.

The job of looking after all this stuff appeared to have been contracted out to Iron Mountain, people whom I knew of from my spell in in records management. See reference 1.

Contents

I think I had been expecting a single ancient document, tied up in red ribbon, decorated with various seals and signatures. And there was some of that in among the great old bundle of stuff, stuff which perhaps in aggregate traces back our title to our house into the mists of time. The earliest date I came across was 1783 and I also came across two Mr. Chases, the estate we live in being known as the Chase Estate. So I now suppose that they once owned the land. Speculators of old?

Organised into three bundles. In ascending order of size: our title to the house (front), the people from whom we bought the house (back) and, in the middle, a fat miscellany of papers about the people before them.

One wonders how much one would have to pay a solicitor's clerk to wade through all this stuff and produce an intelligible summary. Would the answer be to scan it all in - which would cost a bit in itself - and then hand the job over to AI? Who in the meantime has learned how to read ancient legal manuscript. Then the last lap couldn't be that much worse than Acrobat knocking out helpful summaries of long documents to save one the bother of reading them.

Some details

In no particular order.

The most recent document was an imposing affair, tied up with white string and stamped with a large red seal, called a Charge Certificate from the Land Registry, dating from the time of our arrival in 1988. This contained a few fairly straightforward entries in the Land Registry - plus an imposing conveyance from 1931, tied up with green ribbon, written out in black italic manuscript, complete with ornamentation which would not have disgraced something that you might have found in a monastery library of old.

Another green ribboned conveyance from 1946. In among which I find a clause which restrains us from digging gravel, chalk and so on from the back garden and from the making of bricks. Who could enforce such restraint now?

Various papers related to the Eagle Star Insurance Company from the early 1980s.

A declaration about something or other from a former next door neighbour. Typescript with lots of initialled, manuscript corrections.

A fat bundle of paper from 1935, tied together with an imposing brass paper fastener, called (in fancy italic) an abstract of title. This appears to be a typed history of the ownership of the property, starting in 1783 and possibly conveying the land to the Chase brothers in 1905.

A conveyance of 1935 which appears to be from the builder, a Mr Uden, to the occupier, a doctor at the West Park Asylum, now a housing estate, for a consideration of just over £1,000. At that time our house was called 'Lissadell', a name I do not think I have come across before. But Wikipedia is ahead of me at reference 2. An Irish doctor perhaps? The Atlas Assurance Company was involved in this transaction - and Wikipedia only manages a very short entry for them.

Various searches. These mostly seemed to be solicitors asking the local authority what it knew about the property. But one, from 1935, involved the Land Registry.

A 1935 or 1946 supplemental to the abstract of title. Another brass paper fastener, not quite so imposing as the last. A document in neat but modern manuscript. No attempt at fancy italic. What appears to be another copy of the abstract of title, with the same two dates.

The last bundle of papers appears to concern the people from whom we bought the house. Starting with a rental agreement from the 1960s between them and the then owner. Fifteen guineas a week. The last fat document was another abstract of title, this one dating from 1960, at about which time the then owner appears to have died in occupation.

I am reminded that processing all this paper was how solicitors made their money in the olden days. Their golden goose, as it were.

Destination

My understanding is that title deeds of this sort have now been rendered obsolete by the Land Registry, notwithstanding which Halifax tell me that they are important and should be kept in a safe place. So I have tied them up with laces left over from retired trainers and shall find a suitable hiding place for them - leaving skipping them to our heirs.

References

Reference 1: https://www.ironmountain.com/en-gb.

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

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

Reference 4: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/03/a-good-result.html. The last outing from my trusty brand of trainers. Which I believe are made in Vietnam.

Diagrams bearing gifts

The title of this post arises from remembering about a one-time colleague who used to talk about non-information bearing diagrams. The post itself being a development of references 1 and 2.

The snap above being derived from a figure in the appendix of reference 3, reference 3 being a doctoral thesis which looks again at the myth described by Lévi-Strauss at reference 4. What exactly is the structure that Lévi-Strauss and his followers were so keen on?

The starting point

The starting point is an ideal population, quite unrealistic in various ways, but maybe informative in other ways.

We suppose that we have a closed, finite population containing an equal number of men and women.

Everyone is married monogamously, with all men marrying their mother's brother's daughter; MBD in the jargon of anthropologists, often contrasted with FZD, father's sister's daughter. Cross-cousin marriages.

Every marriage has exactly two children, one girl and one boy. There is no infant or child mortality, and all these children grow to adulthood, to marry and have children of their own.

In this world, everyone has exactly two parents, one sibling of the opposite sex and four cross cousins, two on each side, two of each sex. No parallel cousins at all.

Note that in this diagram, all the marriage links from women to men go from left to right. This is not the case in the FZD version, where they alternate as you go down the page. The two cases are different; there is more going on than a change of labels.

For present purposes, this ideal population has the important property that it can be mapped, through time, in a reasonably simple two-dimensional diagram or array, an example of which is snapped above. Each row represents one generation of the population, with successive generations going down the page. We suppose that people are tidy and that they all have both their children when they are twenty years of age, thus avoiding the generational drift of the real world.

Looking forward, I see no reason why the rectangular sheet above should not be joined back on itself to form a vertical cylinder, thus closing the population without any loose ends. Although the top of the cylinder does bring us up against the creation stories, previously noticed at reference 5.

The next step: clans

We next suppose that our population is divided into exogamous clans, with clan membership being inherited through the mother. So siblings are always in the same clan, husband and wife are always in different clans. Two such clans, the red and the blue, are marked on the snap above.

Slightly different, property such as land (perhaps in the form of hunting rights), is held by men but transmitted in the maternal line, from a man to his sister's son. Making the male blue diagonal a line of inheritance, keeping the property in the clan, if not the family. Plenty of societies have been studied where this particular relationship is important, perhaps as important as that between father and son.

One issue is the number of clans, often a power of two. But is that just human tidiness: what about seven, a number which crops up all over the place, in other contexts?

Another issue is whether it is possible to appropriate to express rules about marriage in terms of clan membership rather than biological descent?

Suppose then that we have seven clans: yellow, lime, apple, sky blue, royal blue, black and purple; in real life likely to have been named for plants or animals. With the rule being that a yellow lady must marry a lime man, a lime lady must marry an apple man and so on. Forgetting all about this kinship business, it being much easier just to track clan membership, which is always that of the mother.

[to be completed]

Tilings

The snaps above were constructed a little laboriously in Powerpoint, although things were made a little easier by using the 'select objects' feature. Furthermore, the lining up started to fray a bit as I went along. I did not turn up a suitable 'snap to grid' feature, such as one would expect in a mainline drawing package such as AUTOCAD or DRAWBASE - this last being the one that I am slightly familiar with.

What I wanted, after the event, was a single tile that I could paste all over the slide. The tile would indeed tile the slide. Such a tile is highlighted in blue in the snap above, a tile which includes the links but not the three people bottom right, two men and one woman.

With this snap illustrating a bit of tiling. If one had a big screen, one might stick four such tiles together to make a super tile.

Problems

In the real world, both men and women may have zero, one or more partners during the course of their life, rather than exactly one. More often in the case of men, more than one at a time. Some anthropologists talk of group marriages. Not to mention extra marital partnerships.

In the same way, a marriage might result in zero, one or more children, which might or might not be split evenly between the sexes.

Including all this on a two dimensional array, never mind one as neat and tidy as those above, is challenging - as can be seen in the second half of reference 2.

Variation in age of marriage and in birth intervals causes more problems in that generations re no longer neatly separated out. Generations works in the immediate vicinity of a nuclear family, as seen from inside that family, but goes downhill rapidly as one moves away from that.

In the case of the cylinders above, one can make an effort by joining up the two ends of the rectangle one gets on paper or on the screen with an offset. But apart from providing mathematical curiosity, I am not sure that it helps much - although there is the paper at reference 6 - which I believe is an attempt to deal with the fact that, certainly at one time, in Aboriginal Australia, men were commonly ten or more years older than their wives.

One might argue, and I believe Lévi-Strauss does argue, that such diagrams represent an ideal, towards which a society might drift. There might be a tendency or desire to do things that way, even if one falls rather short. And it certainly true that in a stable population, neither growing nor shrinking, the average number of surviving children needs to be close to two.

It might even be the case that people like the idea of such neat and tidy arrangements, not so much because they are useful but because they are pretty; attractive and interesting.

Conclusions

Another illustration of both the attraction and the limitations of two dimensional models.

Further material which might be developed to go along with that at reference 1. What does such a model tell us about what goes on on the ground?

From where I associate to an economist of my student days telling us that mathematical models provided a useful peg on which to hang a discussion of the real world: how well they described the real world was another matter.

PS: it so happens that, in parallel with this post, I have been reading a short story - reference 7 - by Galsworthy about the perils of decent people being stuck out in the wilderness, more or less by themselves, for too long. Mining people in this case, rather than anthropologists doing their field work. I dare say plenty of such stories came out of British India where we were very thin on the ground, once you got away from the big cities, but all I can think of at the moment is Galsworthy's contemporary, Conrad, at reference 8. Maybe Somerset Maugham?

Google adds some checkable bibliographical detail. And reminds me that old Jolyon Forsyte from the 'Forsyte Saga' gets a walk-on part.

While Gemini gets into quite a muddle, although he recovers well as I correct him. I thought his near closing sentence was rather good:

'... Galsworthy leaves the reader with the unsettling thought that Pippin’s death was an act of surrender rather than a mistake. He couldn't find the "words" to anchor himself to the world of the living, so the silence simply claimed him...'.

And he drags in the tors of Dartmoor yet again, which I once asked him about - and which he does not seem to be able to let go of. Perhaps this is his idea - not that unreasonable, if a little heavy handed - of making conversation.

Perhaps I will check this one properly and, inter alia, try to work out whether he has access to the text or whether he is relying on secondary sources. He is certainly doing a good deal more than making it all up.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/a-thought-experiment-on-forensic.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/more-clans-and-marriages.html.

Reference 3: Structuralism and "The Story of Asdiwal": A Re-analysis of a Tsimshian Myth – Darcee L. McLaren – 1990. 

Reference 4: The story of Asdiwal – Lévi-Strauss – 1960. Being the (famous) Lévi-Strauss take on a myth from the far north west of British Columbia.

Reference 5: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/03/clans-and-marriages.html.

Reference 6: Aranda and Alyawarra kinship: A quantitative argument for a double helix model – Denham, W.W., C.K. McDaniel, J.R. Atkins – 1979. Which Denham, leaving aside Denham Grove, was previously noticed at reference 2.

Reference 7: The silence - John Galsworthy - 1901. In 'Caravan', previously noticed. See, for example, reference 9 below. A very good, if chance, buy!

Reference 8: Heart of darkness - Joseph Conrad  - 1899.

Reference 9: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/galsworthy.html.

Group search key: aibadsk.

No dignity yet

Just over a week ago to Parliament Square for a demonstration to mark the undignified death of the bill to allow assisted dying, killed off by a handful of obstructive peers. Probably not hereditary peers but certainly not elected either.

It remains something of a puzzle to me why, in a country where more than 550,000 people die every year, we make such a performance about allowing the couple of thousand or so who might want to speed up what can sometimes be a very unpleasant business, to get on with it. Our governing classes, the great and the good, make a great parade about allowing us to live our lives how we choose - but for some reason that eludes me, get terribly exercised about allowing us to die how we choose. This despite the population at large having been massively in favour for a long time. But see references 1 and 2 below for a more careful take on it all.

Fame also eluded me, hidden somewhere in the vicinity of Lloyd George, first statue on the left, in the snap above.

But to  start at the beginning, I woke up quite early and thought why bother? Lost cause for now. But an hour later, fortified by the morning cuppa, I was good to go. A quick breakfast, gathered up my 'Dignity in Dying' sun hat and my Stockholm folding chair and took the (BH) offered lift to the station. To be greeted on the shiny new Arterio trains by a stream of irritating announcements. When will someone with authority get through to them and get them turned off, or at least calmed down?

Two lots of railside laburnum, not quite the same as the arch at Hampton Court, but bright and cheerful in the early morning. Some hawthorn.

Out at Waterloo to walk across Westminster Bridge, it being a day of tube strikes, and while there probably were tubes running, no idea up top how many and it was a long way down. Plus, as it turned out, the Jubilee Gardens were looking very well, even if there were no starlings on this occasion.

Ukrainian flag at something close to half mast over the Inland Revenue (formerly HM Treasury) entrance to GOGGS in Parliament Street. Flagpole visible right in the snap above, lifted from Wikipedia at reference 3.

Demonstration a bit half mast too, despite the Dignity in Dying people putting a good face on it. Maybe a couple of hundred of us. The good news is that the issue is not going away and we will be back for another round. Maybe even persuade the Government to invoke the Parliament Act - invented in 1911 to bash obstructive Tory Lords into line. I might add that Dignity in Dying is much more a party matter than I had realised, with Labour and Liberals strongly for and Conservatives strongly against, free vote notwithstanding.

We had photography and speeches to keep us busy, with some of these last being quite moving. A stirring reminder, from the coal face as it were, of why we were there.

Apart from my Stockholm chair, quite a lot of sticks and wheelchairs were to be seen. Some fags and some dogs. Once again, rather more ladies than gents.

Having arrived at 09:00 on the dot, all done by noon. I got the impression that there was a booking system in operation, with the next demonstration starting up as ours wound down.

Along the way I was reminded of the demise of the fine cafeteria and cloakroom which used to be run in the basement of Central Hall, with the public now being restricted to a very inferior facility in a corner of the building. I dare say the old facilities are still there, but only for paying guests. No more public service, even from the Methodists - who seem to have vanished from reference 4, but who live on at reference 5.

Serious security at the entrance to St. James's Park.

But I am pleased to be able to report that the public house and the Bullingdon stand in Storey's Gate were still alive and well, both facilities having served from time to time in the past, even if the former now only opened at noon. Hardly a proper pub at all. But, hopefully, I will be back on the Bullingdons before too long; perhaps not on a strike day, which rather strains the system.

Strolled back over Westminster Bridge, not getting free of the crowds until I was more or less across, and on into Lower Marsh, below Waterloo Station, pinpointed on the snap above.

I had thought to take lunch at the noodlarium, last noticed just over a year ago at reference 6, but sadly, both it and its grander parent were closed down and boarded up. The street market of old was reduced to a few fast food stalls and it all seemed a bit run down.

Settled for the Duke of Sussex, last noticed in connection with Sir Thomas Buxton, but noticed and visited at reference 7, just over two years ago. House now part of the Stonegate empire, also noticed in these pages from time to time. 

Been made over since I was last there, now more for eating than drinking, but the layout of the public bar had been retained. On the other hand, the pool room, through the door left, had been turned into a dining room. The splendid hundred year old sanitary facilities had vanished and one now had to climb upstairs, most of which was flats rather than the hotel rooms of the Wellington, on the other side of the station.

Furthermore, some of the customers appeared to be off the booze, at least at lunchtime. I think I heard something about Guinness Zero,

Perfectly respectable burger, if a little dry, with sauce on the side, as requested. Taken with a spot of Proper Job, another bitter from the far west which has a serious presence in the Home Counties. See reference 9.

And so home to Epsom. Through train, so no RPPL.

Home to admire my ancient copy of the Buxton memoirs, getting on for two hundred  years old, as previously noticed and to which I shall return in dur course.

References

Reference 1: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathregistrationsummarystatisticsenglandandwales/2024.

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

Reference 4: https://www.c-h-w.com/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodist_Central_Hall,_Westminster. Our churches clearly had lots of money for big capital projects in the second half of the nineteenth century - and one could no doubt write an interesting paper on where all that money goes now. Half to care homes and half to animal charities? I believe that the RSPB has plenty of money with which to buy land.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/temple-of-law.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-pub-crawl.html.

Reference 8: https://www.thechaptercollection.co.uk/duke-of-sussex-waterloo.

Reference 9: https://www.staustellbrewery.co.uk/our-beers/proper-job.

A thought experiment on forensic structural anthropology

Thoughts arising from my poking around in references 1, 2 and 3, in the course of this morning's rather warm Screwfix circuit. There had been a suggestion that Levi-Strauss was so busy looking for some important inner meaning that he did not see the outer meaning, sitting right in front of him. Matters which were last raised at reference 4 and to which I shall return.

Suppose I run an experiment in which I test a large number of people, using a statistically respectable population and a statistically respectable sampling procedure.

In the experiment, each subject is sat in a quiet room, by him or herself, and asked to recite a series of positive numbers - that is to say integers - to a computer, for a period of ten minutes. Provided they speak clearly, they can go as fast or as slow (within reason) as they like, use whatever numbers they like. Maybe a series of a small number of hundreds of numbers. Maybe a few persistent souls would just say the same number over and over again. Or perhaps some short sequence over and over again. Probably making a few mistakes. The ambitious might attempt something much more complicated.

I then analyse all these series using a battery of tests to be devised. My opening hypothesis is that there will be a tendency for the series to go up, for one number to be bigger than its predecessor. There will also be a tendency for one number to be the next number after its predecessor, that is to say 17 is often followed by 18. The line of least resistance for the brain.

In the event, I find that people, for these purposes, fall into seven robust categories. No doubt about it, these categories do exist. Maybe I go so far as to confirm this using some other populations, perhaps then finding that while the existence of these categories is robust enough, their distribution varies significantly from one population to another.

How do I then persuade someone to fund some fundamental research, my myself in the lead, from a comfortable chair, into the fundamentals underlying this fascinating phenomenon?

PS 1: I should add that counting silently to myself, counting the paces, is a device I sometimes use when walking up a hill which is proving a bit much. Sometimes deliberately, but more often it just happens of itself. One of the aforementioned categories might involve the conscious start point, with my belief being that more of this counting goes on more than I am consciously aware of. 

I associate here to the counting of young children, which is apt to move forward in leaps and bounds once they start to get tired of it.

PS 2: some rather different thoughts from Bing are snapped above. Amazing the stuff that query engines, aka AI, can come up with. While under the 'images' tab there were lots of skulls.

PS 3: much later, during the second Screwfix circuit (yesterday's whitebeam above): once we have cracked this one, we can move onto to the much more complicated and very different two player version. That is to say each experiment involves two subjects, who take it in turns to say a number. Experimental protocols to be developed in due course.

References

Reference 1: The story of Asdiwal – Lévi-Strauss – 1960.

Reference 2: Lévi-Strauss – Leach E R – 1970, 1985.

Reference 3: The elementary structures of kinship – Lévi-Strauss – 1949, 1969.

Reference 4: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/more-clans-and-marriages.html.

Group search key: 20260429.

More S&K

That is to say, more steak and kidney from the Waitrose meat counter: beef top rib plus sheep's kidneys. Perhaps not quite enough kidney (one bag) for the amount of beef (a little more than one kilo).

After consulting the precedents at references 1 and 2, I decided that an hour and a half should be enough, start to finish, adding the kidneys at around the half way point.

The beef was chunked, floured and put into the pre-heated oil at 12:00. No water added at this point; just a little rice water being added to the gravy later.

Removed some the core of the kidneys in the course of coarsely cutting them up. Added them at around 13:00, by which time the beef was not far off cooked. I might say that the kidneys were rather more attractive out of the bag than they were in the bag.

At around 13:20, drained the liquor off the meat, roux'd up some flour in some oil and combined the two to make a fine gravy. Gravy poured over the meat and the whole brought back up to heat.

Rice and greens prepared and cooked in parallel. While BH had stewed some apples - with cloves - the frozen blackberries having been finished off some months ago now - earlier in the day.

On the table at 13:35, just five minutes late. Plus a drop of Fleurie, also from Waitrose.

On the plate, where it all did very well.

Enough of the steak and kidney was left to serve the next day, with just a little vegetable stock needed to thin the gravy. And enough left-over gravy to have on bread a bit later on.

PS: we did not pick blackberries to freeze last year, but intend to resume this year.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/cook-of-day.html. February.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/steak-and-kidney.html. January.

Fake 198

Fake 198 is a pocket on a tweed jacket. The sales assistant did not think to remove the tacking that shut all the pockets and when BH got around to untacking yesterday, she found that this pocket was not a pocket at all. A fake, very much in the way of a lot of architectural trim which echoes building practise of some bygone era.

The jacket came from a shop which was more or less opposite the Grand Temple of the Masons in Great Queen Street, although, as far as I know, Masons, when on the square, always wear black suits or black jackets with striped trousers. The name of the shop is presumably a deliberate - if curious - echo of the once famous asset stripper, Slater Walker, of reference 1. Web site of the shop at reference 2.

A jacket which, rather than from anywhere near the River Tweed (in the far north), actually came from Portugal.

A shop which rather aped a gentlemen's outfitter of old, say the Lester Bowden late of Epsom or the shops which were cut from the same cloth and which were once to be found in Trinity Street and King's Parade in Cambridge. Don't know if they are still there, but they were past their prime by the time I got to know them in the 1980s. Sadly, the aping did not run to the little books with carbon paper in which the sales assistants - mostly knowledgeable, older men - recorded their sales. Or to the older men come to that.

While just this morning, I read something about an expat who lives in Bangkok, who has made a lot of money out of trading in aviation fuel and crypto money, which last some people might call fake money. Money which is driven in some large part by the desire of criminals and others with hot money to be able to hold and move money about without it being visible to the authorities, not least the policemen and the taxmen. An expat who has given money to various causes, but a great deal to Reform UK - with Farage having been, as I believe, another commodity trader. See reference 3.

I learn also that the expat is related in some way to the R. C. Sherriff who provided the entertainment noticed at reference 4.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slater_Walker. I had forgotten that it went bust in the mid 1970s, a going bust which led to criminal charges.

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

Reference 3: Farage's mystery money man: Who is Christopher Harborne, the crypto billionaire bankrolling Reform UK - Tom Burgis, the Guardian - 25th April 2026.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-hopkins-manuscript.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/fake-197.html.

Group search key: fakesk.

Tulips at noon

This being notice of a visit to the tulips of Hampton Court a week or so ago, with this notice having commenced pretty much at noon.

A cool start to the day, although it became warm and sunny later. Light jacket, light sweater, scarf, sun hat and sun glasses turned out to be spot on. Just right for bench life in the sun.

There were tubs of tulips spaced out along the drive - with the tulips themselves looking well enough - but I thought the tubs were a lapse of garden design: the tubs were too widely spaced in too long a drive, in which they were a bit lost.

Furthermore, the scaffolding wrap, which had been advertised as emulating, after a fashion, the original height of the main gatehouse, seemed to have stalled. Had there been some hitch? Maybe the Health & Safety people had not been sufficiently consulted? No proper risk register in place? See reference 1 for previous notice.

Once inside, plenty of other tulips to be seen. Some past, some passing and plenty at their best.

Some sprinkled about some larger beds. Some masses, often a central rectangle of one or two varieties with a contrasting border.. Some mixed plantings, as snapped above. A generally high standard of both tulips and their planting.

A noisy infant enlivened my wait for my bacon bap, it being our custom that BH does the shopping on occasions of this sort. Bacon bap pretty good, if a little over-provided on the bacon front. There did not seem to be any current buns, hot-cross or otherwise, or scones - which I might have taken otherwise.

On through the wilderness, where the daffodils were largely done, and from there to the laburnum arch, not quite in full swing.

In fact, a little patchy, with various repair works underway. Works which will take a while to come to fruition. I guess you have to be a proper gardener to know how to manage these things, when you can get by with regular maintenance and when you need to dig up and start over.

I associate to my father's cordon apples, planted in the late 1950s, which were rather neglected in the 1970s and never really recovered - at which point I dare say I would probably have done better in the 1980s to start over, rather than attempting to nurse them back to health. As it turned out, we were  not there for that long, so perhaps nursing was the right answer for us after all, as I dare say the next people just ripped them all out anyway. At least we got some apples: Amongst which I remember the James Grieve, the Blenheim Orange and Ellison's Orange, this last the one with the distinctive aniseed taste. For which see reference 2, from towards the end of allotment life.

A laburnum flower.

Followed by a fairly lengthy spot of sun-lit bench life. I may have dozed off.

Some rather splendid tulips in a bit of what was left of the once memorable herbaceous border, running along the eastern side of the palace.

We often wonder whether border needs to lie fallow under grass for a bit, or whether the grass just reflects the lack of gardeners - or perhaps the money to pay them - although I believe that, as at Wisley and Polesden Lacey, there are volunteers as well as payroll gardeners.

The Long Water, which gmaps reveals to be getting on for a kilometre long. The slightly carelessly edited section of the Palace website which might have said how long, did not, but it did tell me about the Longford River, an aqueduct dug for Charles II to fetch in water from the River Colne at Longford. From which the name of Long Water is derived, with just reinforcement from its considerable length.

The notice of apple maintenance above reminds me that the then Duke of Edinburgh made the management decision to cut down the ailing avenues of trees down both sides of the water and start over. Which looks well enough now - but I believe that there was a lot of discussion at the time.

The Longford River, as snapped from Wikipedia. The Long Water will probably be visible bottom right if you click to enlarge.

With the original now mixed up with Heathrow Airport and the Duke of Northumberland's River - part of which runs across the southern boundary of what is now the airport.

Before arriving at Bushy Park, and from thence down to the Palace. I wonder if the water was used for domestic purposes - perhaps including drinking - as well as garden purposes?

A small section of my conversation with Gemini about the Longford River and its uses. The answer appears to be that it was fit for washing up and washing floors, but not for drinking. Drinking water was piped from Kingston in something called the Coombe Conduit, for which see reference 4 - from which I learn that the lead pipes involved - some miles of them - were maybe three inches external diameter and two inches internal. A great deal of lead - which Gemini adds up to between 200 and 300 tons of the stuff. Perhaps I will check his sums later.

He has the length of the Long Water at 1,200 metres.

Back on the day in question, the south side of the Long Water was the closing section of a pink clad walk for Breast Cancer, the same pink, as it happens, as is favoured by Dignity in Dying (to be reported on shortly).

They were entertained on arrival by a band of drummers, complete with a very energetic lady drum major. I thought maybe no drum majorette, but yes steel drums, BH favoured something Japanese.

Some of the tulips in Fountain Court. The tubs worked rather better here.

The 'wrap' from the inside.

All in all a fine visit. With plenty to do next time we are in the area.

Onto to our usual cafe for tea and sandwiches. In my case, I was pleased to find that they could do an empty baguette to go with my overfilled ham sandwich, thus making two sandwiches. The ham might look a bit chunky, but I thought it was rather good.

Out to find a Tesla car next but one to ours, all sealed up and containing a dog. This being mid-afternoon on what had been a warm day. The lady in the car next to ours was rather concerned about it, but there was nothing we could do, short of forcing a door or a window, and the dog in question was alert enough and did not appear to be distressed. So we let it be.

PS 1: it so happens that on this very day, I had been reading about the display of dress and jewels of both the men and the women of the court of Henry VIII, that is to say very much the time of the Palace. With the King himself leading the way. It seems that this display was at a pitch which would be considered rather gross these days; we like our conspicuous consumption to be a bit more tasteful, the example of POTUS over the pond notwithstanding.

I seem to remember from my school days that the crime of Cardinal Wolsey, the builder of the Tudor part of the Palace, was to go too far, with his display rivalling that of the King.

From where I associate to the King having a wrestling match with the French King. A serious match which must have stretched diplomatic protocol a bit. I liked Gemini's phrase about not leaving alpha males together for too long. POTUS and his chum Musk spring to mind.

PS 2: I was interested to see the piece at reference 7. The sort of eventuality which is very likely to get legal given the amount of money involved. Good for the lawyers, bad for the customers of John Lewis who will end up footing a chunk of their bill. At least it is not one for the government, who have plenty enough on their plate as it is.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/03/wilderness.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/09/googled-out.html.

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

Reference 4: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/coombe-conduit/history/

Reference 5: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-swerve.html.

Reference 6: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare – Stephen Greenblatt – 1980.

Reference 7: London landlord sues John Lewis in click-and-collect dispute: Owner of Brent Cross shopping centre argues that 47-year-old lease entitles it to a cut of John Lewis’s online sales - Philip Stafford, Alistair Gray, Financial Times - 2026.

Three trolleys

Yesterday was a day of no less than three trolley sightings, involving four trolleys, none of which were returned in the old way.

Starting with one from Sainsbury's between the underpass and Screwfix. Just over a year old and already in the hands of Wanzl Service.

The whitebeam was looking very white.

I had thought, from a little distance, that the flowers had not fully opened but I was wrong. 

The telephone could not manage the flowers in full sunlight, but it did well enough on the ones above, zoomed on my laptop, to know that there are five petals. Not so sure about the number of stamens: ten would have been neat, but I did not get further than nine - certainly not to the point of knowing whether it was always the same numbers. But one can see how one might get carried away in one's study, with a magnifying glass, rather in the way of the stamp collector. Proper old-style country parson stuff, before they changed sex and became social workers.

Sunday lunch, inter alia, involved a very fine apple pie. Just like grandma used to make. Blue and white enamel plate from China, rather than from Poland, from where I think they used to come in the distant past.

Gemini is on the case. Ever so easy just to take his neat little stories at face value, without bothering to check - bearing in mind that he does make mistakes, like the rest of us. But he does confirm the Polish angle, possibly a derivative (in my brain) of having once seen the film 'Schindler's List'.

My mother had a plate very like the one we have now, also used for the occasional pie, and it now seems likely that hers did indeed come from Poland. BH's mother ditto.

Later on, on the second circuit of the day, I came across a small flock of starlings grazing on Clay Hill Green, maybe a dozen or more of them. Birds which were common enough when I was young, but I don't see them on the ground in Epsom very often. Much more frequently in London - for example in Borough Market, as previously noticed at reference 1.

Followed by two more trolley sightings in Station Approach, a one and a two. All from Marks and Spencer. The one was almost brand new, having only been made in February.

PS 1: the previous day, we celebrated the flowering of the fine hawthorn in our road; fully up to the standard of Horton Lane.

A celebration which took the form of a beverage inside the Marquis, the fine Wetherspoon's terrace across the road being full, it being a sunny afternoon. Not a lot of warm beer on offer - or being consumed - although my Doombar (shades of the Shambles off Portland) was fine.

But they did very well on the non-alcoholic drinks for ladies, serving up a very pretty confection of various bits and bobs. And the barman - very young - seemed to know how to make it without having to consult the recipe - so presumably they sell a few of them.

The lady in question was very well pleased. Not cheap, so a win-win situation; just as a trade - in this case credit card coin for beverage - should be.

PS 2: I associate to the Goodwin Sands, also the site of many wrecks, but named for Earl Godwin - the father of King Harold - who once owned them. 

Gemini thinks that this is just a story and that the sands have not been any use for farming for thousands of years. But he gets a bit carried away when I mention the connection back to Portland. Very exuberant.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/cheese.html.

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