After Halloween

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rounding off with the Screwfix whitebeam.

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

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

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

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

But Gemini could.

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

Group search key: 20261101.

More left over rice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Group search key: 20261102.

Flat files

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example

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

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

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

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

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

The project

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

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

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

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

• The value of a property to be qualified. 

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

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

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

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

Avunculate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exclusions

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aldermaston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

Reference 3: https://cnduk.org/.

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

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

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

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

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

Reference 9: https://abclg.com/.

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

Reference 11: https://www.awe.co.uk/.

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