Letby

Last year, I commented on the troubling Letby case a number of times, albeit usually in the margins of something else. Most of these comments can be found at reference 1.

While on Thursday, in Waitrose, I was surprised to see a lurid front page headline in the 'Sun' proclaiming gross miscarriage of justice. I wondered what sort of lurid headlines swinging the other way there had been over the years.

Neither Bing nor Google were terribly helpful, although they did offer the image at the top of this post, which I have lifted from Musk of all people. While in the snap above, the Mail and the Express are rather more prominent than the Sun. Maybe Murdoch, despite his love of revenue had lurking doubts? Twinges of conscience?

I stand aside to let someone else with more time to spare to look into to the Sun's record on the matter.

Just noting in passing that the attractiveness of the mug shots varies inversely with the stance being taken. Some of those accompanying miscarriage articles have her being really quite attractive.

And I remain glad that it is not up to me: I do not think I would sleep easy. With potus just whacking out an executive order on a whim, in the margins of some show at Large-on-Marr, not really being the right way forward.

Rather more cheerfully, I close with a trailer for DIY to come. All the rain we have been having has made our fine bifold garage doors stick, to the point where one might do oneself or the doors an injury opening and closing them.

So late yesterday afternoon, I readied the safety harness I use for taking down the heavier door. Minor adjustment needed. All ready for action later this morning. Maybe I will get to deploy the bench plane, which has not seen active service for a while?

A younger carpenter would no doubt spurn such contrivances, but I prefer to mitigate the risks involved in something that I do not do very often. While Blog search revealed in seconds that it was last deployed six years ago, on Christmas Eve of all days. I might say, that I have not had to touch that door since.

While outside, we had a fine view of Jupiter rising over the full - or perhaps fullish moon. I did notice a red tinge, but failed to draw the appropriate conclusion and had to check with reference 3.

Was the telephone really resolving the planetary disc on this occasion? No sign of the red that I am claiming for my eyes.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=letby.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/door-up.html.

Reference 3: https://www.timeanddate.com/.

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

The dirty family

[Roger was going to marry Amorette’s elder daughter until pushed into suicide, which opened the way to bad Malik, who actually preferred the much more attractive but under-age younger daughter. Later, he  marries his weak brother off to the attractive daughter – whose own illegitimate daughter goes on to fall hopelessly in love with her half-brother. Maigret is peremptorily summoned from retirement by the Matriarch after her suicide, when she finds out what has happened. Bad Malik claims friendship with Maigret, with whom he was at school for a bit. Well into the story, he also buys up the weak widow as a way of making things awkward. Lots of money matters swirling around to make up the mix]

All this arising out of watching a good Maigret adaptation on television last night. I was pretty sure that I had read all the Maigret stories at least twice, but this adaptation sparked no memories at all – this despite not nodding off at all. The first time such a thing has happened.

Some background

Georges Simenon might have been a good writer, a writer who probably made more money out of detective novels than our own Agatha Christie, but who also had a dodgy war record. With this story being written just before he decamped from France to the US – having arranged for his brother to decamp to the Foreign Legion, to be killed in what was then French Indochina. Georges never lived in France again, although he did visit often enough. 

Some of this money came from film and television adaptations, with an early English effort being the Rupert Davies offering from the early 1960s described at reference 3. Around 50 roughly hour long episodes altogether, offered in chunks of 12 or 13 at a very reasonable price by Amazon Prime, having been more or less unavailable for a long time. They have kept us busy television-wise for some months now.

From a time when television had not long been invented and when ordinary people still read books at home and still talked about those books, which I now think may well have affected what they wanted from television. The hey-day of our library services?

While the Gambon and Atkinson versions are around 90 minutes the episode. About which I might say that we like the first but not the second – which is too modern and too complicated for our taste – this despite being a costume drama – which, of course, it was not at the time of writing – with much the same being true of Agatha Christie. It also takes considerable liberties with the original stories, liberties which I don’t suppose Simenon would have allowed in his lifetime.

When the stories were written, they were more or less written in the present, that is to say the 1930s and 1940s. Mostly set in and around Paris. By the time Gambon got going in the UK, they had become costume dramas. Davies was in between, with BH telling me that the ladies fashions were very much early 1960s, that is to say when the programmes were made, rather than when the stories were written.

I did not see any of the Davies stories at that time, there being no television in our house. Television was what other people did. In the sixty years since, they have almost become the costume dramas we know today.

It is hard to be sure now, having spent quality time with Maigret, but I would have thought that someone without that background would have found it very hard to work out what was going on a lot of the time, on as single viewing, which would be all that was available to most people. No DVDs or streaming back in the 1960s. Maybe back then television being new,  people still had the old habit of conversation and they expected detective dramas to be difficult, to give them something to talk about afterwards. 

Digging up the text

As it was, I was puzzled by not remembering this story at all. For the previous episodes, maybe 25 of them, I had either known straight away or it had come to me during the proceedings. Furthermore, for once, BH worked out what was going on (in the adaptation that is) far faster than I did.

The titles of adaptations are often very different to those of the original story, as was probably the case here. 

Alternatively, maybe the BBC had used some short story which had appeared in a newspaper, but Simenon had not thought worthwhile to publish it in book form at all. I had no knowledge of such a thing, but it does not seem that unlikely that there are some such. 

So the next step was to run down the story, which turned out to be easy, getting to reference 1 in no time at all. And a copy was sitting on the shelf. The first story in volume XV.

I then wondered how long ago it was that I had read the story. How good an alibi did I have for having forgotten it?

This took a little longer, but after a red-herring at references 5 and 6, I ran it down to reference 7. The vital clue being the word ‘chenil’, a relation of our word kennel, but here more yard than kennel, the sort of thing you might keep a small pack of dogs in, in the grounds of a hunting & fishing type’s country house. So the answer is getting on for ten years ago. I think it quite likely that I never read it again. Quite a reasonable alibi!

Other angles

A long time ago I was told a story according to which, while we and our media get excited about sex scandals, the French and their media get excited about people fiddling their tax. Although plenty of this last goes on in both places and, sadly, is more or less respectable. I have no idea whether it is a bigger problem in one place or the other.

In Simenon, we often hear tell of small farmers and businessmen, out in the (pre Second World War) country side, bunging local officials to turn a blind eye to matters of this sort. Rather less often of swindles in higher places.

And I dare say that Simenon himself was no slouch when it came to tax fiddling.

In any event, this may account in part for the ‘take’ of the BBC on a story originally written for the French market. The shift to the incest angle – done without that word actually being used – at the expense of the financial shenanigans, both within the family and with the rest of the world.

Then, for a long time, say in the 1980s, we had serial dramas on television, say in the 1980s, say six episodes of an hour each. Then we moved to 90 minute dramas in one go. While here we have more or less free-standing stories of 60 minutes each. But linked by central characters and genre, rather in the way of the ‘Archers’ on the radio. In any event, the extra half hour in Gambon gives a lot more space to put in some of the Simenon ‘colouring in’. Which I believe was a large part of why he was so successful. He was very good at evoking milieux which most of his readers would have been unfamiliar with, for example the life of canals, barges, canal people - and canal horses. Things which Simenon was clearly fond of, getting quite nostalgic about them all.

Other matters

In the story, Maigret has retired to his country cottage for two years when this case comes up. Still at work for the BBC.

In the story, much is made of the use of the second person singular. To tutoyer or not, a matter of some subtlety and much social importance for the French. A matter which Simenon is clearly interested in because it comes up in a lot of his stories. Hard to do in English, on the screen, so more or less omitted by the BBC.

I failed to turn up a potted explanation with search, but Gemini offers the snap above. Not bad, even if he does have trouble with the concept of ‘ten lines’. He also made a bit of a mess of dealing with my thank you message, which I use to signal the end of a conversation.

As well as a lot of material on canals, the story offers a fair amount about woods at might, wood pigeons and poachers. All omitted by the BBC.

The circus which comes into the Davies version, is a place called Luna Park, in Paris, in the story. Closed for fifteen years at the time of writing.

Trivia

Both we and the French talk about grand parents. But while we talk about big children, that is to say grandchildren, they talk about small children, that is to say petits fils and petites filles. Makes sense, although it does not accord the grandchildren the status commonly accorded them by grandparents, certainly in this country.

Conclusions

We have a story and at the end of it we have two dead bodies, both suicides, and no crime. There is nothing for the police to do, nothing the police can do. So the matriarch takes the law into her own hands. Which is all very well, but when it comes to trial, all the dirty washing that she so wanted to keep within the family, is all going to come out.

A reminder that lots of bad stuff happens which the law cannot deal with. And even if you try, given our Anglo-Saxon predilection for the letter of the law, not caring to give judges or juries the discretion to interpret waffly, high flown statements of intent, there are always going to be awkward corners which your law has not addressed.

The trick is to try and make the likelihood of those awkward corners actually happening – or being contrived to happen – very small. This story, after all, is very improbable in the cold light of day, but it did make for good viewing.

Sadly, I failed to find out why I had forgotten the whole thing - but I expect that it will stick for a bit now. Maybe I will work out about the forgetting overnight.

PS: the next morning: I can take some consolation in that I got last night's episode - La Nuit du carrefour - in seconds from the off. It was given away by a giant family Bible, roughly the same size as my copy of the Book of Common Prayer. There is also the thought that a clue to this whole business might be the fact that BH worked it out so much faster than I did. Maybe my problem was the relationship subject matter? The stuff of ladies' light literature, aka chicklit?

References

Reference 1: Maigret se fâche – Georges Simenon – 1945. Rencontre.

Reference 2: The Dirty Family – Rupert Davies, BBC, Amazon Prime – 1963.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_(1992_TV_series).

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_(2016_TV_series). 

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

Reference 6: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/08/they-say-that-little-knowledge-is.html. 

Reference 7: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=maigret+retirement. 

Reference 8: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/02/tuesday-trivia.html. The chenil angle more or less confirms the linkage; with no other appearances in the archive. See pages 76 and 92 of reference 1.

Mendelssohn

Our first outing of the year to the Wigmore Hall was at the unusual time of 15:00 on a Sunday, the draw being quartets by Dvořák and Bartók from the Motus Quartet, part of the European Chamber Music Academy showcase for 2026. The latter I think we have come across before, but the Motus Quartet were new, young and enthusiastic. A quartet which may have a big presence on the Internet and an Instagram account, if not their own website. But there is reference 1.

Odd how different the first violinist, right in the snap above, looks from the front than from the side than when left on the stage. Took me some seconds to convince myself that it was the same person.

By the time that we arrived, the programme had morphed to Mendelssohn Op.48 No.2 and Bartók string quartet No.4, which last we had quite likely heard in the distant past from the Endellion Quartet at Dorking Halls, a regular haunt for some years.

It was a day when waves were washing over the trains at Dawlish, something which caught BH's eye as she used those very trains to get to school for a few years. Furthermore, we could not make our minds up as to whether to go via Oxford Circus or Bond Street. And then there was the question of what refreshment to take and where. In the end, we settled for the canteen at the top of Oxford Circus John Lewis for before concert.

There were lots of cars parked on Meadway, on the way to the Eclipse car park. What on earth were they doing there on a Sunday? Annoying if you had paid a lot to live there, a lot of the houses being pretty big. And a Waitrose trolley on Station Approach and lots of swelling buds at Raynes Park on the way. An unusual trolley in that it had no maker's plate fixed to the side of the basket, but almost certainly a Wanzl.

There was also a substantial train of VTG tanker wagons heading into town at Clapham Junction.Rail freight is still alive! For which see reference 2, from which I learn that the rather long and shabby wagons in question were probably 'TEA-L: GLW: 101.6t  Tare: 25.6t Capacity: 102m3 Length: 18.3m  Bogie: TF25'. On which search key, both Bing and Google turn up some quite decent images, one possibly captured between Vauxhall and Waterloo, but all too small to be useful here.

Rather hot in the advertising tunnel which one passes through on the way out of the (very busy) tube at Oxford Circus, but not as bad as it has been in the past.

I had forgotten that there was some quite respectable art on the side of the John Lewis building, by no less an eminence than Barbara Hepworth. Quite a handsome building too, for a shop. This morning, I associate to the shimmering tiles on what was the Debenham's building a bit further down and noticed, for example, at reference 3. I used to be rather fond of them.

I was struck, not for the first time, by what a large and grand facility the canteen on the fifth floor of John Lewis was. It must have cost a lot to put in and a lot to run - and it attracts an interesting mix of customers. Some of whom do not appear to be shopping.

BH was entirely happy with her tuna baguette but I was not entirely happy with my rather larger ham and cheese baguette. Good quality ingredients, but far too many of them, including a smear of brown goo which reminded me of Branston's. Would have been much better had they just put the ham and butter in the baguette and left it at that.

There was one young chap in a hoodie sitting on the veranda outside, with his laptop and a coffee. Perhaps the deal was that he was permitted, provide that he sat outside and did not get in the way of customers who were paying rather more for their seats.

We also had a whole new sort of trolley. Nothing like it at the Epsom Waitrose. Maybe the Kingston John Lewis?

A whole new hole in Wigmore Street. Doesn't seem very long since the last one.

For once, along with lots of other people, we used the cloakroom at the Hall. Too many coats, bags and sticks for comfort in the stalls.

A few rows in front of this there was a chap who looked very like the now-retired first violin of the Endellion Quarter, possibly with a young protégé - the sort of thing that I imagine retired musicians go in for,. Perhaps it varies: some taking to growing vegetables and never wanting to see an instrument or a concert hall again, some taking to teaching and so on. Whatever the case, this one looked to be travelling incognito and would not especially have wanted to be reminded of his days playing to Dorking Halls.

The concert was lively enough, even if not really my thing and, as it turned out, not a very good time of day. A bit betwixt and between. And outside the cloakroom afterwards there was a middle aged chap, quite well dressed, rolling a cigarette in preparation for exit. The first time I have seen such a thing, although one does see people smoking outside in the interval often enough.

We headed for the GBK outlet outside Waterloo Station, which suited the occasion well enough. And, for me, they managed quite a decent burger without mayo - and all the other stuff you are all too apt to get in other places.

Plus s couple of quite decent bottles of a light beer from Hawkstone, people I had not heard of before. Furthermore, their glossy website at reference 4 left me rather unclear as to what the business amounted to and where it was based.

But shock horror. Gemini explains to me that it is one of Jeremy Clarkson's vehicles, a chap whom, from what little I know of him from newspapers, I find rather unpleasant. Will I opt to avoid the brand in future? Despite it being the best of the bunch at the rather convenient Waterloo GBK - for which I am now the proud owner of a discount card, valid until close today.

The parquet on the floor was much larger than the domestic variety and looked quite old. We wondered, unsuccessfully, what the place had been before. Perhaps a bar? My guess would be that Gemini would fail on this one, but would offer advice on where one might go to find out.

The seats in the concourse area at Waterloo seemed to have been thinned out, so we opted for Raynes Park. Plenty of stuff in the platform library, but nothing for us.

Waitrose trolley had not moved from Station Approach, but it had found a friend.

A perfectly decent outing, but I think we shall avoid 15:00 starts in future. Don't fit into our day very well.

References

Reference 1: https://cselloakademia.hu/motus-quartet/.

Reference 2: https://uk.vtg.com/products-and-services/fleet.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/brahms-and-dressing-gowns.html.

Reference 4: https://hawkstone.com/.

Pork sausages

When we first moved to Epsom, more than thirty years ago now, there was a shed called Porky White's from whence came well known sausages and other pork products. You could buy the sausages, converted into superior sausage rolls - bread rolls that is, not the stuff sold by Greggs - sausage rolls as in ham rolls - on Derby Day at the Marquis of Granby - if you got there early enough that is. We even patronised the shed occasionally.

BH has been buying sausages from Sainsbury's called 'Porky Lites' for some time, and I had thought it likely that one of Sainsbury's suppliers had bought the use of the name. But quite wrong: we had some of these sausages today and it now appears the the old firm has moved onto bigger things. Organic growth really does exist. 

See references 1 and 2.

Housewives

Lunch was further enlivened by a discussion about housewives who do not live in houses, of which there must be a lot these days. With 'homewives' sounding terribly clumsy, if more accurate. Maybe married ladies living in flats prefer to go out to work? To get out of the house?

Checking with OED later, I find that house is a very old word, of old German rather than old French orgin, rating more than four pages - which I can assure readers is a lot, even by the standards of OED. And that excludes all the pages that follow of compounds and derivatives.

So we have a building for people to live in. 

A building housing some trade, for example a brewhouse or a lighthouse.

A building housing animals or goods, for example a henhouse or a warehouse.

A building housing monks. A usage later moved to universities and, later still, schools. 

A boarding house attached to a school. A boarding house for working men, such as existed when I first started work. Now largely vanished.

A building for housing members of Parliament and such like. Hence 'House of Commons'.

More obscure, probably obsolete, a household. But we did talk of the 'House of Windsor' or the 'House of York (that is, the one that got whopped in the Wars of the Roses).

A twelfth part of the heavens, as known to astrologers and fortune tells.

And it gets better the deeper one gets. No doubt, eventually, I would get to housewife, the original of 'hussy'. And a close relative of 'husband'.

Housing type

I then thought to ask Gemini how many people lived in flats, with the start of his answer being snapped above. With the house dwellers - remembering that the units here are buildings rather than people - being far more numerous than I expected.

In response to a further prompt, he goes on to explain why one might think that flat dwellers were more numerous than is actually the case and offers some comparison with nearby European countries.

Gemini's answer, seems to agree fairly well with that I got, only slightly more slowly from ONS. Taken from the 2021 Census.

All of which is reassuring, if not what I was expecting.

Bread

Time to take the bread out of the oven. In which connection I am pleased to be able to report that I now find the alarm clock on my telephone almost as easy to use as Gemini.

Proper proof reading may come later.

References

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

Reference 2: https://www.porkywhites.co.uk/about.

Reference 3: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/housingenglandandwales/census2021.

Pork sandwiches

I have  long been a fan of bacon sandwiches, best served on factory white - but today, quite by chance, I learn of pork sandwiches - otherwise bifanas - from reference 1. I suspect that they will be too complicated for my taste - rather in the way of most burgers - but I ought to give them a go. Something to ask about in the Estrela bar in Vauxhall next time I am there.

It seems that Portuguese food, long established in Little Portugal between Stockwell and Portugal, is riding the wave of foodie fashion, at least if the Financial Times is to be believed.

Fishing

This in the margins of learning from a correspondent that the GDP of University College London (UCL) is larger than that of the UK fishing industry, a factlet that I was supposed to be checking - but got diverted  Are we, for example, including the attached hospital? I did get as far as turning up reference 2.

If true, another example of how nostalgia trumps facts on the ground. To be fair, it is still the livelihood of a fair number of people and it was, until fairly recently, a big part of our national life.

Back in the days when lobsters and oysters were both food for the working classes. The upper classes were not so keen on them at all.

More Galsworthy

Things have now moved on since reference 3, having remembered about and put my hand on reference 4 - a post which stands the test of time pretty well, even though I say it myself. A book which has survived all the culls since.

The point being that Garnett - the subject of reference 4 - was the literary midwife to both Galsworthy and Conrad - with the former have met the latter when the latter was first mate of a clipper sailing from South America. The start of what proved to be a long friendship.

I also have some chapter and verse on the unsurprising fact that Galsworthy's writing draws a good deal on his own life. Including the marital affairs of both Galsworthy himself and those of his father. With the former having started as a barrister and the latter having been a successful London solicitor. Some readers will recall that the Forsyte family included lots of soliciting.

References 

Reference 1: Portuguese food is stepping into the spotlight in London: It’s the once-overshadowed cuisine’s time to shine in the UK capital, with buzzy openings, packed-out old-school spots — and the mouth watering bifana sandwich now a breakout star - Tomé Morrissy-Swan, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 2: UK fishing fleet stares into a bleak future: An industry that welcomed Brexit feels betrayed - Gordon Smith, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/a-dream.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/01/midwife.html.

A dream

A dream last night about an examination, the sort of thing one might have sat in the late 1960s, with an examination paper containing perhaps a dozen questions, of which good answers to two or three would get you through.

This was rather a long examination, with the dream being clear about it running for three and half hours. At the end of which, I had been sitting for too long and was rather uncomfortable. I suppose this last reflects my sitting capability now, rather than that then.

I found the examination paper itself rather a mess and I could not work it out at all. But I did manage answers to the first two questions. Quite short answers, together only occupying around two sides of A4. Which, according to my recollection this morning, was not the size of paper that I used during examinations at that time. Perhaps foolscap - a size of paper which my father made a great deal of use of, being something of a scribbler on the side. 

And I made the common mistake of not taking the first half hour to study the examination paper before starting to write. All to apt in real life to result in one's making a bit of a mess of things, of not doing nearly as well as one should have. Except, that is, that part of what the examination might be testing is one's ability to organise oneself properly under stress. At least, that is how a prospective employer might look at the matter, more interested in that than, say, your knowledge of the organisation of an orchid or of the history of ancient Iraq, fascinating though they both might be in themselves.

In the dream, I had made this mistake and had failed to understand what the examination paper, a thick wadge of many pages, was mostly about until it was far too late. Whether I had passed or not was a bit touch and go.

Galsworthy

Moving on, I had been reading my Galsworthy short stories (of reference 2) the day before, stories which vary greatly both in their length and in their subject matter, at least in their settings, than I remember from my holiday reading in December.

Furthermore, there did not seem to be any coherence in their order, all just jumbled together. But this morning, I turn to the forward (written by the author in 1925, in Algeria of all places) and the contents pages which follow.

A modest forward by someone whom I suppose by 1925 had been successful. Some interesting thoughts about how a writer should stick to himself, rather than bending overmuch to the whims of the marketplace. Thoughts which go well with financial independence! For which see reference 3 - which also explains why Devon crops up in quite a lot of the stories.

But he also explains that the 50 or so stories are paired, so that both stories in the pair are, in some sense at least, about the same thing, but with one written before 1914 and one written after. All this becomes much clearer, after the event as it were, when I consult the contents pages.

I close with a bit of trivia. One of the stories, very short, is built around a Japanese quince in one of those garden squares that one gets in west London, say Kensington.

Aha, think I, I know all about Japanese quinces. We came across one of those recently at Wisley. And a very handsome small tree it was too. Poking around this morning, I find that the name is used both for a bush and a small tree. The former is now, a hundred years later, common enough in suburban gardens. I think I have grown one myself, without knowing what it was called. And the latter is probably what is snapped above - downloaded before I had learned that there were two plants to chose from.

And while we have indeed come across some interesting small trees at Wisley, with names involving 'Japanese' or 'Japonica', the quince is not among them.

There is a quince to be found at Hampton Court, noticed at reference 6. And I believe there is quite a prolific bush behind our next door neighbour's front wall. 

And so to breakfast.

PS: yesterday was a fish supper day and there was some cod left over. Which combined with some left over potatoes (plus an egg for binding) made fish cakes for breakfast this morning. Turning over not that clever, but the cakes were pretty good. The Waitrose apple juice left was pretty good too: not over-sweet like so much of the apple juice offered for sale. In fact, their bottle did not mention added sugar at all.

References

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

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/galsworthy.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galsworthy. No mention of Algeria here, but the man's comfortable birthplace is included above.

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

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

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=quince. Just the one mention in all the years that psmv5 was running.

Compost

The compost dustbin was getting heavy, the advice was no serious lifting and BH was getting restive. She may even have been thinking of availing herself of the council's food waste disposal service. Action of some kind was clearly indicated.

Eventually it dawned on me that the answer was divide and rule. Tip the dustbin over a bit and transfer the contents to a bucket, one bucket at a time. One bucket did not qualify as serious lifting, nor did carrying it up the garden. With the result after the first bucket snapped above. 

A touch of spring along the way.

A possibly inappropriate hat, all things considered. But the sun was low and I needed something. I associate to the piece in today's Guardian at reference 1, brought to me by chance by Microsoft. Hopefully McEwan has more followers than our new Archbishop - who, as a former (senior) nurse, one might have thought would have known better, but who actually swings the other way. Maybe she has the voice of the Lord in both ears.

At the end of the job. An adult version of spot the difference?

Much easier and much quicker than I had thought. This despite the black sludge at the bottom of the dustbin. Council now stood down.

I rounded off the morning by clearing up a few more leaves. I also took the opportunity to tidy away the bricks left over from the brick walking which started up during the recent plague and carried on for some time after that. See, for example, reference 1.

Reward came in the form of two of my favourite dishes for lunch: potato pie followed by bread pie,. this last made with white bread and served hot - a dish we used, when we were younger and I was still eating white bread, to take quite often. And very good it was too.

So it was good to have one on this occasion. Quite different hot than cold, although this last does pretty well and it was all done by close. Didn't do very well with the snap though.

References

Reference 1: Ian McEwan calls for assisted dying rights to extend to dementia sufferers: The author, whose family has been impacted by dementia, says provision in living wills could clarify intentions when a person declines to the point they are ‘alive and dead all at once’ - Ella Creamer, Guardian - 2026.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/a-year-in-bricks.html.

Still more Scrabble

Proceedings started with a good augury: a bright and clear half moon, high above the back garden. Drifting in and out of what must have been high cloud. Although, despite tapping to focus, the telephone did not manage this half moon, with zoom only yielding a round white blob.

The very next game after that noticed at reference 2, we broke the 600 barrier again. I also happened to win by a comfortable margin. The rules committee have been consulted about whether it would be appropriate to raise the reporting bar.

I did rather well with 'quinine' scoring both singular and plural forms, snagging the triple word bottom left along the way. BH was not very happy with this at all, having had an 's' all along, but had not scored the conversion on the grounds that words denoting materials like 'gravel' or 'sand' do not have plurals. Something that one learns at school very early on.

She was not impressed by my argument that the rule does not apply when, for example, one is talking about the different gravels one gets from the various gravel pits scattered around the Thames flood plain, that is to say the flatlands to the west of London. So I might, as the manager of a concrete plant, say that 'of all the gravels that we have bought recently, the ones from Feltham Wash were far and away the best'.

Longman's, the dictionary we presently use for these purposes - just 5lbs worth from RPPL - had the word down as a noun and did not say anything about the plural form. Neither did the rather longer entry in OED, although it did say that it was also the name of plants - seemingly not the same plant - in the US and in Australia. Merriam Webster goes even further, allowing the use of the word as a verb. All of which tends to support the use of the terminal 's'.

As does the use of quinine in various forms, as in quinine sulphate, quinine tri-nitrate or tincture of quinine. But BH was not having any of this. Or the different brands of generic quinine one might get over time from the Pearl Pharmacy in Epsom High Street. An outfit that shops around.

Some people play the rule that to be allowed a word has to be in bold face in the chosen dictionary to be allowed, without regard to any qualification like 'foreign' or 'slang' which might follow. This has the advantage of simplicity, but rather goes against the spirit of the rules in not allowed derived parts such as 'runs' and 'running' from 'run'. Which we believe disturbs the distribution of the tiles, computed to allow such derivatives. In any event, a rule we do not play.

I associate to the difficulty of making rules watertight, even in a context as apparently simple as this. There will always be room for lawyers to make money when greedy people are pushing and shoving over a contract - be it ever so simple - provided only that there is a reasonable pot of gold at the end of the tunnel.

And talking of pots of gold, I was amused to read about a swindle yesterday (at reference 3) which was very like that described by Galsworthy a hundred years ago and noticed at reference 2. From which one deduces that the chairmen of large companies taking commissions on the side, unbeknown to board, shareholders or creditors, is a well-trodden path.

I close with something more benign. Regular readers will know about my interest in petals, last noticed at reference 4. The idea being that the number of petals of any particular sort of plant is genetically determined and should not vary much in the field and hedgerow, if at all.One might think that the same is true of the size and form of the navel inside a navel orange, seemingly common at this time of year.

One might think also that all the oranges in a net bag from Sainsbury's come from the same batch, the same variety from the same grower. Both variety and grower will vary from time to time, but all the oranges in any one bag should be the same. Except that in this particular bag, while the size and external appearance of the oranges themselves were all much or  muchness, the size and form of the navels inside varied considerably, from almost absent to maybe an inch in diameter and mostly inedible. Which suggests that genetic factors are very much disturbed by environmental factors. 

The oranges themselves were pretty good. 

Something else to try out on Gemini? Perhaps after breakfast.

PS 1: notice how some trick of the light has brough up the 'R' middle left on the Scrabble board.

PS 2: in among my morning post. Not my favourite colour, but then I suppose that they were not to know that.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/more-scrabble.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/more-first-impressions.html.

Reference 3: First Brands creditors claim ‘two-man’ firm enabled founder’s brother’s fee windfall: Helios Strategic Advisors is latest firm drawn into scandal over bankrupt US auto parts maker - Robert Smith, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 4:  https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-real-cheese.html.

Group search key: 20260127.

Names and numbers

A story which was motivated by an interest in how names, nouns and numbers came to be – and then came to evolve into what we know as writing. An interest which came to centre on what is now Iraq. There were other places where writing evolved a long time ago – Egypt, China and northern India – but probably rather later and, more importantly for me, there is a lot more readily available information about Iraq. A lot of it seemingly the work of German scholars past and present. Not to mention Agatha Christie’s second husband.

I shall come back to where I got to writing from in due course.

A story which starts with a large population of humans with language, but without writing or anything much in the way of near-writing. This last being the sort of thing to be found at reference 1 and an example is snapped above. But we do have kingdoms of various sizes, pretty much the nation states, pushing and shoving, squabbling among themselves, that we have now.

We also have central facilities like armies, temples and granaries. The economic foundation of these states is agriculture, specifically grains such as maize, rice, barley and wheat. Which means that most of the population is necessarily spread quite thinly over a large area. 

I associate today to once reading that temples, generally speaking and in these sorts of places, managed to absorb about a third of the available resources. Important for keeping the workers quiet and happy, if not particularly well-fed or healthy. Also a separation of powers, something that those studying state institutions today spill much ink over.

Circumstances are such that organisation and communal activity is needed: we are not in a world of sturdily independent farmers living on their land with their families without much need to interact with anyone else. One needed communal activity, for example, to manage the water in the lower reaches of the great rivers of Iraq. Managed well and you got lots of food, but not something that worked on an individual basis. Such states existed in various parts of the world between five and ten thousand years ago. 

We then think about how to model this world for present purposes and we start by distinguishing two sorts of entity, the public node and the private node. Some of these nodes will represent, will be, a single individual. In the case where a node represents more than one individual, one of those individuals will be head of node, otherwise head of household.

As things stand, more or less all such heads will be male – but I don’t think that gender is presently an issue.

Households are mostly quite small. From where I associate to the extended Cossack households of the first volume of ‘And quiet flows the Don’ (reference 4) – but also to the factories full of women textile workers, all more or less slaves, said to be have been run by the Mycenaean kings some time after writing was invented in Iraq.

Nearly all public nodes will have exactly one parent, with just one node at the top of the heap. Emperor, general secretary, dictator, autocrat, king or whatever. That node will have children. Other nodes may have one or more children.

In what follows, we are mainly concerned with public nodes.

Most nodes are associated with places, with locations. Most people do not move around much. And fields do not move at all.

All of which suggests to me a big tree structure, with lots of nodes and levels – the sort of thing snapped above – but, given the primitive machinery available for communication – very few child nodes to the parent node. There have to be few enough children that the parent can manage them without the help of pencil and paper. From where I associate to our army of fifty years ago, which had a similarly dense command structure, albeit for rather different reasons. And from there to an old war film, probably from the US, in which a British private would not obey the orders of a stray US officer: he would only obey ‘his officer’ – who was not on hand to sort whatever it was out.

Roughly speaking, commands trickled down the structure, information trickled up. Produce mainly trickled up, to feed central functions, but there was also provision for trickling down in emergencies. Agriculture might be a good bet in the long run, but there could be difficulties in the short term. Maybe the odd Noah’s flood.

It would be interesting to put some numbers on such a tree for some of the ancient civilisations that we know about. I believe, for example, that in ancient Iraq they ran to around five agricultural layers, that is to say without counting central nodes like granaries and armies.

However, as soon as we start moving food about from one node to another and storing food, there will be theft – theft which has been about for much longer than humans. Think, for example, of the thieving behaviour of nesting rooks: pinching twigs from a nearby nest might well seem a better option than going off to get one’s own. We also need management: the king, for example, needs to know when to move grain from one place to another. Has he got enough grain to last out the winter to come? Will he need to move his army to keep the lid on some region of dearth?

[Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression]

One way to attack all this is put known amounts of food into sealed containers – which might be pots, jars or rooms. One does the sealing with blobs of wet clay, with opening the container involving the breaking up of the then dry clay. While at the time of sealing one can mark the clay – marks which tell those concerned what is contained, how much there is of it and who the responsible official was. Notice how civil servants got going a long time ago! 

Aside: accountants claim this job too and I believe this factlet is used to liven up their training.

Originally the official would have been identified by rolling his cylinder seal across the wet clay, with these seals being about the size and shape of the cork of a wine bottle and which are more fully described at reference 3. In this context more a role than a name.

And so we had the beginnings of names, nouns and numbers. Probably hundreds if not thousands of years before anything which could properly described as writing, let alone the west-conquering phonetic alphabet. Derived, as it happens from the slightly earlier Phoenician alphabet, which was not phonetic at all as it made do without vowels. The similarity of the two words is presumably a coincidence.

Aside: part of the cylinder seal system was that they were expensive to make, to carve out of stone, making identity theft both difficult and expensive. Another advantage of these seals was that they could accommodate a large amount of variation: they were not bound by a limited repertoire of names – with repertoires of given names, at least in some cultures, being very small. Maybe as small as tens rather than hundreds.

Conclusions

A story which I find convincing. This is probably the place where writing and literacy started out.

I remember that I once went to a lecture at the British Museum where a visiting Iraqi scholar told us something about cuneiform. It was a badly prepared lecture, but I do recall that he told us, in reply to a question, that not all cuneiform was accounting. There was more literary stuff – possibly dreams – as well – albeit from some thousand or so years after my story. We were also generously supplied with wine at the end. This being while I was still in the world of work. 

A story which one might think had some bearing on the contents of consciousness, a long-time interest of mine, but I have yet to work out exactly what that might amount to.

Which reminds me that I once owned the book at reference 6 – but not reading it – about how the northern European renaissance in the 16th century shaped the educated man’s sense of self. Maybe I will now get around to reading it. I might also say that it took the power of Gemini to run the book down.

PS: the image of the cylinder seal further up came from Wikipedia. The original came from the British Museum, who provide the freebie above, but you have to register and pay if you want a good quality image. How much, I have not troubled to find out. The National Gallery, as I recall, is more relaxed about such matters.

While Google Images turns up this much higher resolution image from reference 5. From which I learn that the Wikipedia image is not quite the same as that from the British Museum; some of the details, for example the spears, are missing. Reference 1 talks of there being a lot of minor variations on themes, and I have not done enough to know whether what we have here are slightly different images of the same thing or images of slightly different things. A little knowledge, as they say, can be dangerous.

I should add that reference 5 is an interesting and accessible read, concerning the same city that is the focus of reference 1, albeit a few thousand years later.

References

Reference 1: Archaic bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East - Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow, Robert K. Englund, Paul Larsen (translator) – 1993. 

Reference 2: [not used]. 

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

Reference 4: And Quiet Flows the Don – Mikhail Sholokhov – 1928.

Reference 5: https://chameleonfire1.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/gilgamesh-and-civilization/. 

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

More Scrabble

Following the match reported a few days ago at reference 1, a return match which turned the tables. I won by a modest margin and we broke the 600 point barrier.

I started off rather slowly, with far too many vowels, going so far as to turn in all my tiles at one point. And BH scored a remarkable coup with 'quiz' middle right. Nevertheless, I had enough lesser coups of my own to stay ahead.

Longman's being quite forgiving with words like 'ho', 'ha' and 'er'. Much more so in that regard than OED. On the other hand, it excludes lots of proper, but obscure old words which have fallen out of use.

A day which started with my first (slow) walk over West Hill - finding that most of the trolleys we had passed on leaving the station the previous evening were still there - and which had ended at Stamford Green Pond.

Two swans back on the water and two Egyptian geese on the grass. A modest number of other geese, ducks, coots and moorhens round about, on and off the water. Which was a bit lower and a bit clearer than it had been and I thought I spotted some fish sign.

PS 1: one of the trolleys, from Waitrose, was distinguished by having no maker's or seller's plate on the side of the basket. It had what looked to me like new wheels, so perhaps a Wanzl trolley which had passed through the hands of a refurbisher.

PS 2: interesting piece in the FT this morning, Tuesday, about the Ukraine at reference 2. From which various more or less stray thoughts arise.

First, Kushner being in a position of power is a piece of gross nepotism. On the other hand, he appears to be active, able and doing good work on the Ukraine. And from Trump's point of view, he gets stuff done for which he (Trump) has neither the energy or aptitude - while being completely dependent on Trump for his power and position. He is in no position to rock the boat in the way of Burnham or Streeting here. Is it any wonder that our politicians like to delegate power to special advisors and civil servants, rather than doing any real work with what are supposed to be their colleagues?

How long ago is that ministers did any real policy work themselves? One gets the impression from the novels of Trollope that they still were in the second half of the nineteenth century.

From where I jump to Farage. Should he reach No.10, who would do the work for which he has neither the energy or aptitude? Is he going to be invaded by immigrants from the Conservative Party?

Second, Putin may be using the war in the Ukraine to soak up the blood and energy of large numbers of hard-to-employ young men from the wilds of provincial Russia, who might otherwise get restive with the prevailing poverty. And the cold of Asian winters. One might have said the same thing about the UK with the young men of Wales, Scotland and Ireland around 1800.

From where I jump to Trump and his ICE. Soaking up the energy of large numbers of hard-to-employ young men.

Maybe we need to be pouring money into training young people.

References

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

Reference 2: In Ukraine, it’s all about the land: Trilateral peace talks seem promising, but territory remains a major obstacle - Gideon Rachman, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 3: https://www.ice.gov/. 

Cheese

I had been subsisting on canteen cheese and supermarket cheese for some weeks, so Friday past it was time for a trip to London Bridge to get in some of the real thing, the stuff to be found online at reference 1.

All things considered, we decided that the thing to do was to avail ourselves of the car park at our end of Court Recreation Ground, saving ourselves about half the walk to the station. A car park with two interesting features. First it was free, with just a 10:00 bar to keep out most of the commuters. And second, the former park keeper's house which had been sold off to one of those private finance outfits which run nearly all our veterinary surgeries - this not being something that bothers me, not being into pets, but I understand that there are quite a lot of people who are are not very happy with the change of tone from the olden days. Probably without thinking to what might happen to our health services if they get pushed down the same road.

A veterinary surgery which is perfectly visible on the Internet, but which does not seem to have its own website, with the best I could do being reference 2.

Then with the help of Gemini, who tells me what name to look under, Companies House gives me the choice above.

Picking out a likely looking one, I land on the outfit above. Seemingly a status which means that they do not have to file much information at all, although a dozen or more partners are listed, one of whom sports the title 'Dr'. We are told that they are to be found in Seymour Street.

Somewhere near Marble Arch. No dogs here thank you. Some people called Waterlow Nominees Ltd get into the mix too, but at this point I break off the search. Not very conclusive at all, but certainly consistent with the theory I started with.

Readers are invited to check whether I have been barking up the wrong tree.

Back with the cheese, we strolled down to the station and caught a train to London Bridge in good order.

On to a quiet Borough Market, quiet that is for a Friday lunchtime, through to Park Street and bought our regular kilo of cheese. I suppose 'my regular' would be more correct, as BH does not much care for the stuff and prefers to make her own arrangements in Epsom.

Surprised to come across quite a lot of starlings, in among the pigeons grubbing about. Presumably the place is busy with rats after dark.

Zoom not much good, being dominated by imaging artefacts, but there is no doubt in my mind that they were starlings. Common enough in my primary school days, relatively unusual in Epsom. But see, for example, reference 3.

By way of lunch, I had picked Café François off gmaps, in Borough Yards, partly on the strength of the visit noticed at reference 4, but also because Stoney Street ran into Park Street, where the cheese shop is to be found. However, my expectations turned out to be quite wrong, with Borough Yards much more modern and fancy than I was expecting and the café much more Instagram than Terroirs - with which last I had thought it might have had more in common, given the short food menu, the rather longer wine menu and the French flavouring. Notwithstanding, we went on to have a good lunch.

One of the features of the place was luggage racks behind wall & window seats, tubular steel contraptions, rather like what you get in trains. But very convenient for us with our winter coats, walking sticks, cheese and so forth. Not a convenience I remember coming across before.

Most of the staff came from much further away than France, and we did not notice anyone actually from France at all. The restaurant area was pretty full, although, despite being in the middle of London, it was more pensioners and tourists than workers. 

Noting in passing, that there was the same mismatch of branding and counter staff in the stalls in the market - a lot of the branding being French or Italian and very few of the counter staff being anything of the sort.

So to one side we had a party of middle aged ladies from up north, to the other a young couple from Swansea, visiting relatives in Redhill. The young man sounded very English, but it turned out that he was a geography lecturer at Swansea University who sometimes lectured in Welsh - to rather small classes - and who also contributed to Welsh language services on radio and television. He also did remarkably well with the chocolate mousse; all you can eat for a tenner.

Back with our own meal, we started with bread and a confection of leek and cheese. Both good, the bread particularly so. Even better than that which one used to get from said Terroirs. (That at the successor operation, Soif, near Clapham Junction, was not nearly so good, although the place did well enough in other ways).

The leeks. Maybe the topping would have been better a little less crunchy: less of a danger to crowns and fillings.

For our main course, we opted for the special of the day, Chateaubriand, a dish we first took in a place caller Caspers, alleged to be a vanity operation in Epsom, bankrolled by someone's father-in-law, but also a rather good restaurant. I might say that I remember their Chateaubriand being a lot better than the present one. Also a place which allowed the smoking of after dinner cigars, this at a time when most restaurants had banned such things.

Been closed since before I gave up work and the best I can do today is the passing mention at reference 7. We have had nothing as good ever since.

This one came with chips and a side salad, which I augmented with more bread, not wanting to waste this splendid opportunity for hot meat sandwiches. The side salad was more or less flavouring free, which suited me just fine.

The steak knives were rather silly, looking the business, but actually being completely blunt. Not fit to open bananas with, let alone steak.

But there was plenty of meat, it was nicely presented and it was very tender - which meant the lack of edge on the knives did not matter. All of which suited BH just fine too, being on a low meat diet presently and preferring her food not to be too chewy.

But it also came in a lake of very powerful gravy, to my mind very much the sort of thing that you get in places like Wetherspoons - where they have the good manners to serve it in a jug without having to remember to ask them. At least here, I could shake most of the stuff off before I transferred the meat to my plate. Meat which I thought was a bit light on flavour. Not properly aged Scottish beef from nearby Ginger Pig at all. Or, indeed, for that matter, from Rob the Butcher of Epsom.

They kept trying to take the salad away, but they gave up in the end.

I passed on the aforementioned chocolate mousse, but went for the rather more modest éclair, which seemed to be something of a speciality of the house. Rather good. Rounded out with the traditional Earl Grey for her and Calvados (no choice, but perfectly acceptable) for him.

The view outside, not long before we left. Luggage rack just visible. Wall art rather better than the sort of thing that is presently infesting Epsom.

I can't resist mentioning the washroom that I visited, a very extravagant affair catering to all comers. With one feature being old-style water closets, complete with chains. My father would have been delighted, as he delighted in jokes of all sorts about that sort of thing. Not uncommon, I am told, for gentlemen of a certain class of that time. Before the second world war, that is.

Sadly, BH visited the wrong one, and missed all this. Not the same in the telling.

Fine view of the Shard outside. And, oddly, the market was much busier when we left than it had been when we arrived, despite a fair proportion of the stalls having closed in the meantime. I forgot all about investigating bread without sour dough and with malt and/or fruit - perhaps because I had expected to be disappointed. On the other hand, I could have had an entire rabbit (skinned) for £9, which I thought was very reasonable. Must go back soon and see if they are still there.

PS: I have ignored the email inviting me to review my visit. I neither provide nor consume such things.

References

Reference 1: https://lincolnshirepoachercheese.com/.

Reference 2: https://www.veterinarycentral.co.uk/veterinarian/262809/wingrave-veterinary-surgery#google_vignette.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/trolley-600.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/korean-lights.html.

Reference 5: https://www.cafefrancois.london/.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=soif.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/puligny-montrachet-off.html.