The morning in our hotel started with our noticing this window, going down the impressive stairs previously noticed at reference 1. The receptionist claimed not to have noticed it before, but I assumed some kind of privacy feature, such as that we achieved in our own house with a sticky backed plastic film - film which was expensive but which might have lasted thirty years. The oddity was the larger bubbles bottom right.
A zoomed version.
On the basis of which Google Images confidently assures me that most of the bubbles are beads of some kind of silica gel, which are supposed to be locked inside the perimeter of the double glazing unit and which are intended to absorb any stray moisture which might otherwise cause condensation. This unit - and all the others in this particular sash window - has broken down, water has leaked into the unit, and the beads have floated free. Contrariwise, the larger bubbles at the bottom are also water.
There is a digression about our sticky black plastic film, back at Epsom.
Then, not completely convinced, I feed the relevant part of this first story back into Gemini. He agrees that there are pellets, but what I could see was water droplets formed by condensation after the unit had broken down and the pellets had saturated. The large bubbles are simply small bubbles which have aggregated.
The inner faces of the hollow metal bars framing the double glazing panel are perforated to suck the water vapour in from outside, while holding the beads inside. I think I may have noticed such perforations before, without working out what they were.
Maybe I should phone the receptionist up and ask her if the droplets vanish during the day when everything warms up? She was quite the chatty type.
I feed the key part of the Gemini story back into Google Images, in the form of an image, which he can deal with. But he is quite unabashed and spins me a yarn about an optical illusion which he had oversimplified. A plausible - if erroneous - tale, given the long chain of optical processes and events which deliver the droplets to the screen of my laptop.
The rest of the yarn.
BH doesn't believe a word of it. She says that what appear to be drops of water or bubbles of air are something much more purposeful. So hung jury of two for the moment.
The troubles that you can have at an unassuming provincial hotel before breakfast!
While this afternoon, I have been wondering to what extent the troubles of the world can be put down to the need to absorb the energies of young men without enough to do, without opportunity or proper employment? This might take the form of enrolling them in armies, militias or security outfits, who keep themselves busy keeping the rest of the population in order while they skim off the cream. Or perhaps exporting the problem by making trouble overseas. Or both. Or perhaps enrolling them in organised crime outfits, mostly into industrial scale operations with recreational drugs.
Are we really so sure that all this crime is better than just letting people snort in a more-or-less controlled and healthy way? Especially if they have not got anything better to do.
Maybe I will have a go one slack afternoon at identifying countries around the world with large pools of such young men. A job for Wikipedia or a job for Gemini?
PS 1: I associate to my childhood reading of Rider Haggard's 'King Solomon's Mines', in which he talks of the Zulus needing to have a serious war from time to time, to kill off or otherwise cool down the excess supply of belligerent young men. Or is my memory playing tricks?
In his rather gushing way, Gemini agrees with me.
While in response to a supplementary, he explains that the currently received view has moved on. The Haggard view was a fiction used to justify our invading Zululand - with the grain of Haggard truth being the need to stop people marrying too early; a form of birth control. There was only so much land.
I believe that, until relatively recently, the average age of marriage in Ireland was quite high. Perhaps for the same sort of reason.
PS 2: a bit later, I was rather shocked by the piece at reference 2. Cage fighting might have been around for a while, but it used to be a rather unsavoury underclass of young males which went in for it, in the margins of places like Southend. Now, in the US, it seems to have moved mainstream, with special ring-side enclosures for the rich and famous: '... On other nights, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and David Ellison occupy these seats; so do cabinet secretaries and US senators. President Donald Trump is a regular...'. Not to mention Testosterone Teg's attempts to bring live-streaming to executions, preferably by firing squad. Where on earth are we headed?
References
Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-other-island-part-i.html.
Reference 2: How Trump’s America fell in love with UFC: For politicians, celebrities and tycoons, the brutal Ultimate Fighting Championship has become a vote-winner and money-spinner like no other - Anna Nicolaou, Financial Times - 2026.
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