A moan

Regular readers may have worked out that I have a spreadsheet of the all the Maigret stories, built from my Rencontre collected edition, augmented by the BBC series starring Rupert Davies.

One of the worksheets contains a list of all the stories - probably excluding a number of short stories which never appeared in book form - to be found in the Rencontre edition. So 77 stories running from1931 to 1972, an average of getting on for two a year. One row or record per story. With the present interest being the rather tricky story at reference 1, to which I shall return in due course.

I wanted to look at the Maigret production over the years, eventually arriving at the chart snapped above. Showing the initial rush in 1931, followed by a gap through most of the 1930s, followed by a steady stream of two or three a year.  Maybe Simenon had by then got a bit bored with Maigret, and just did them for income and relaxation.

But I found that I could not just do a chart on the data as it stood. Nor could I do a chart from a pivot table derived from the data as it stood. I had to give a count of one to all the real records and create an additional dummy record for every year with a count of zero. Further fiddling about to make sure that the text 1931s got grouped with the number 1931s. And then I got a pivot table from which I was able to produce the chart above, in which the initial spurt followed by the ten year holiday is clearly visible.

The present story, set in Maigret's retirement, comes a few years after that.

Maybe I need to consult an Excel expert.

PS: I remember that back in the 1980s, shortly before spreadsheets were invented, or at least shortly before I knew about them, I had a tabulator in which one specified the rows in one's table as (meta) data in its own right, quite separate from the data proper, and where one would not have had this sort of difficulty. The Microsoft default seems to be the lazy way of doing things, deriving the rows of one's table directly from the data itself, which, as here, is not always the same thing at all.

References

Reference 1: Les Mémoires de Maigret – Georges Simenon – 1950. In Volume XV of the Rencontre collected Maigret.

Galsworthy

Some time ago, wanting to read a particular story by John Galsworthy, I bought the second volume of his collected stories, collected under the name 'Caravan'. For which see reference 1.

I am not now sure why, but I did not read any of the other stories at that time. I did, however, take the book with me on my recent excursion. Reading all of it, quite quickly.

Most, but not all, the stories are in solidly upper middle class settings in England. Perhaps the milieu in which Galsworthy felt most at home. Perhaps that was what his public wanted. The word 'Forsyte' occurred once, although I believe that there is rather more of it in the present volume, presumably the left-overs from his well known saga.

Some of the stories are about the unpleasant behaviour of some of those middle classes during the First World War, people who did not have to fight themselves, but who could come down hard on young men who did - and who had failed in some way. People who, on this account, were thoroughly unpleasant - and I dare say that there were plenty of them. Perhaps people without children of their own, getting so pointlessly killed.

Sadly, at some point, some water got spilled on the book, which while not fatal, left it rather badly damaged, and on return home I thought I might as well go for the collected edition. This has now turned up, a decently produced hardback edition, probably a 'popular' edition, of 900 odd pages, undated but probably from around 1925. Around 55 stories of varying lengths written between 1900 and 1925. So just about a century old.

From Clearwater Books of Norwood and reference 2. Not only was the book very reasonably priced and in good condition - rather better than the one it replaced - but it came with the finest wrapping that I have come across for a long time. With the outer wrapping being proper bookseller brown paper. Someone, who knew what they were doing and had gone to a bit of trouble. Once reasonably common practise, now rather uncommon. A pleasant bonus!

Then while looking for an illustrative image, I came across the copy snapped above. A signed deluxe version for some very large multiple of what I paid. Something that I have never been particularly interested in: what I want is what is sometimes called a 'reading copy', which is exactly what I have got. With pages that stay where you put them without having to hold them down with something.

And while the image at the top is not the actual book, it is another copy of the same book, from the same edition.

A fine start to a new year in books.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-apple-tree.html.

Reference 2: http://www.clearwaterbooks.co.uk/.

Declared old

The orders of bag and bottle, noticed at reference 1, were both, in some sense at least, elective. There was an element of choice about it. But there was nothing elective about our being declared old today, an election efficiently organised through the people at reference 2 by our general practitioner.

So we now have four gadgets to help us move around our house, one of which is snapped above. Installation was quick, clean and neat and I have only found one snag among the four gadgets, a snag which I can attend to myself in due course.

And while the declaration may not have been elective, at least we can both pretend - on the quiet that is - that these things are really there for the other!

And while, for the moment, I may make a parade of not using the stair rail, the installation engineer assured me that it no time at all I will be wondering how on earth I managed without it.

PS 1: the wall right above is brightened up by a reproduction of a landscape which has been there for many years, I thought this morning post-impressionist French, but failed to bring the name of the painter to mind and desultory search with Bing failed too. But then, rather unexpectedly, the name 'Derain' drifted quietly into mind. I was not very convinced about it at all, but it was worth a shot, and I fairly quickly turned up references 3 and 4. State of denial has been restored!

PS 2: the original lives in Switzerland, in the rather flashy looking gallery at reference 6. But not flashy in the way of, say, the National Gallery, in that you can't search their collection and download decent reproductions for free. Indeed, on this occasion, I failed to find it at all.

PS 3: and at the Financial Times, I thought that the piece at reference 7 has got it about right - even if it rather neglects all the good work done by the men in blue suits after the second world war. Even if it diagnoses rather than prescribes. To think that I was once a wannabee blue suit myself; to the extent of occasionally patronising the fine suit shop called Lester Bowden, now a branch of Gail's. A shop where the staff were not fresh out of school and could still tell your size by looking at you.

References 

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-keeper-of-bottle.html.

Reference 2: https://millbrookhealthcare.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/09/derain.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/memory-block.html.

Reference 5: Vue de Martigues - Derain - 1908. Zurich Kunsthaus.

Reference 6: https://www.kunsthaus.ch/.

Reference 7: The impotence of Europe’s governing elite: From Brussels to Moldova, the men in blue suits know they’re in trouble. But what are they going to do about it - Simon Kuper, Financial Times - 2026.

The real cheese

Our return to regular food continued yesterday evening with a batch of cheese scones. The first of the two trays being snapped above.

Prompted by the thought that my cheese scones were usually a little undercooked, the second tray was given an extra few minutes, quite a lot considering that the usual cooking time is only around 12 minutes. They turned out a lot browner and tasted rather different, with the different taste rather growing on one. But a difference which vanished when the scones had gone cold. Maybe next time I will aim for the middle.

All done by breakfast this morning.

And I was surprised this morning to find that the last batch was as long ago as mid-October, as noticed at reference 1. I would have thought some time in November.

And while I am on, the matter of counting petals has cropped up again. That is to say how much variation in the number of petals was there for plants of a given species, say the buttercup or the apple. My starting point having been that for any given species of flowering plant, this number was genetically determined and was highly conserved. The question now being, how highly conserved? See, for example, reference 2.

Then in the margins of another matter, noticed at reference 3, I acquired a copy of the old but famous text at reference 4. From Oliver & Boyd, who, when I was a student, still had a shop near Dillons, off Gower Street. At that time, as I recall, a specialist in medical texts. No doubt long gone.

Turning the pages the other day, I came across the diagram snapped above. Not Fisher's data, but clearly people were worrying about this more than a hundred years ago, by the looks of things turning up a simple logarithmic relationship. I doubt whether I would have got that far under my own steam.

But I am prompted to wonder whether, somewhere out there, someone has compiled lots of statistics about all this. Will I be able to run them down?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-snack-for-thursday.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/trolleys-933-934-935-and-936.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/unlikely-crimes.html.

Reference 4: Statistical Methods for Research Workers – R A Fisher – 1934.

Live

PSMV5 having had a good run, it is now time to close it down and move onto PSMV6. Partly due to my old fashioned prejudice about letting things run on for too long and getting too big.

Best to close down old material and secure it, that way any accidents there may be with new material are contained. From where I associate to an accident with OneDrive which resulted in damage to a number of recently amended files, but none to older files.

A down side is that search is confined to just the one blog. One has to know roughly when whatever it is one is looking for was posted. Although, that said, as the author, I do have a workaround for that one.

Gemini helped with one of the details of the move. Much quicker than groping around in the regular help systems.

PSMV5 ran from 2021 to 2025.

PSMV4 ran from 2018 to 2021.

PSMV3 ran from 2016 to 2018.

PSMV2 ran from 2012 to 2016.

PUMPKINSTROKEMARROW ran from 2006 to 2012. The name seemed funny at the time, invented over a well lubricated Sunday lunch, not long before I gave up my (deer infested) allotments, not long after I retired a little early from the civil service. But by 2012 the abbreviated form seemed like a better idea.

The snap at the top of this post gives the very first posts on PUMPKINSTROKEMARROW. Before I became as loquacious - or as verbose - as I am now.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/. 

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/.

Test 02

This being after some minor fiddling with the template. I did not like the blue and I found that I could make the blog a bit wider. I had thought the left and right hand portions of the screen had been reserved for advertisements - should I want to go down that road - which I don't.

Plus a few snaps from the back garden, on our return from having spent Christmas and New Year elsewhere.

Curiously, the oak tree has now lost nearly all its leaves, but most of them, rather than sitting on what is supposed to be the back lawn and blocking the sun, have blown out to the margins, including here the garage where quite a few have blown in. Furthermore, there seems to be a tendency for fallen leaves to gather in heaps. No doubt something to do with the air flow.

And the micro-ponds are now full, something they have not been for some months now, with my having stopped filling them up from the tap. Left to myself, I dare say I would let them go now, maybe planting pampas grass in the holes. As things are, I do enjoy the plants in them but they are more bother than they are worth.

The dwarf cyclamen down the bottom are making a better show with their leaves than they did with their flowers..

The bluebells, also down the bottom, are poking through, rather early. Maybe a January frost will have them.

Our No.2 Christmas tree from Sainsbury's did not make it indoors this year. Maybe getting a bit heavy to move about anyway. It looks quite well where it is, but is it destined for one of the pond holes?

The jelly lichen doing well too.

Our first proper meal for a while. Including a turkey mince meat loaf and a good dose of stewed celery.

An hour from the off, melt an ounce of so of butter in the saute pan. Add the celery.Add a little water, maybe a quarter of a pint. Half an hour later, add some onions. Ten minutes from the off add the carrots and a tomato (to provide a little more colour). Very good it was too. Something that we have not done for a while.

An excellent wet complement to the rather dry mince meat loaf -  the turkey mince being a very low fat quantity.

Followed up with a little light gardening. That is to say clearing up the twig fall with the new-to-me litter picker from Blenheim Road. A good deal more effective than the one that I had bought previously from Screwfix.

Furthermore, there did not seem to have been any further fox action in or around the big compost heap. The tyres and boards - a tyre is visible left - seemed to have protected the vulnerable spot. I wonder now how near the surface of the heap roots from neighbouring trees have grown? Last time I dug out the small heap, the were a lot of such roots, spread more or less through the whole of the bottom half.

My first guess was adventitious roots, but checking suggests that the term I am looking for is fibrous roots. See reference 1.

And so closed my first day back in the garden. Maybe back in the street on the day to come?

References

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

Test 01

This to test the inclusion of unusual image files in a post. But this one a regular PNG.

This one a regular JPG.

This one a GIF file.

This one a WEBP file.

This one, an AVIF file, would not load, although it is easy enough to convert to a JPG with the Snipping Tool, presumably with some loss of resolution. Maybe the answer is that you can load the files that appear by default in the 'Insert Image' dialogue, the ones described as 'Custom' bottom right. Anything else will not load.

This one, a BMP file. No idea now why it is in this particular format, for which see reference 1.

This one, a Microsoft Edge HTML document, would not load.

A map of Kew gardens, described as an Acrobat file in File Explorer, would not load as an image.

An Acrobat document of the ordinary sort would not load as an image.

A document described as a PRN file, generated by print to file, would not load as an image. Indeed, I failed to open it as anything sensible at all.

Bottom line seems to be regular image files only, which is not unreasonable. 

Not got to the bottom of what click to enlarge does, which seems to be a bit unpredictable. Maybe image files include something about preferred display size. Presumably most image files are (more or less) organised as arrays of pixels which can be mapped in a natural way onto the pixels of the target screen, which may or may not be big enough. What happens then?

The BMP file above, for example, clicks to occupy the whole width of the screen on my laptop, while the GIF file only occupies the middle of the screen.

PS 1: the print file which would not load came from printing a small Powerpoint document. I had also tried printing to Acrobat (PDF), an option which was offered during the Powerpoint print dialogue, which I was told would work on a sample basis, after which I had to pay Adobe something, but that just hung. I did not pursue the matter.

PS 2: this blog is not open for business. The blog which is currently open is to be found at reference 2.

References

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

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/.