Devon countryside

Devon being a county where I have spent a fair bit of time over the years, I noticed the piece at reference 1 about a mine there; a place called Hemerdon Mine, a little to the northeast of Plymouth.

Ordnance Survey search has not heard of the place, nor anywhere called Hemerdon, anywhere near Plymouth. I added the orange spot later, just off the B3417.

However, perusal of the map later did turn up various Hemerdons, a little to the south of the spot. So on the map, but not visible to search.

Gmaps found it straightaway. Tungston West marks the spot, with something called 'Walkies at Hemerdon', seemingly in the middle of a field full of solar panels, just below it.

An area which appears to be full of mines, open cast and otherwise. So whoever took the picture at the top of the post must have been very careful with his camera angles. I associate to the Riverford people, also in Devon, at reference 3. Another picture with a careful camera angle.

I associate to the Lake District, another place with both lots of outstanding natural beauty and lots of old mines. Lots of spoil heaps.

PS 1: Gemini thinks that Tungsten West thinks that this mine is a big deal - and our government appears to agree with them. Maybe the heritage people will just get pushed aside on this one. 

I dare say it helps that the price of tungsten has risen - although a quick search did not turn up a decent, free source. But there is reference 7.

He also told me all about why OS struggles with the names of small places. I guess it is just not realistic to expect OS to be able to compete with Google in the search department. Nor is it in the business of providing a commercial directory, a sort of Kelly's with a map attached. In any event, I shall study Gemini's report more carefully in due course.

I learn the 'Tungsten West' on gmaps is the front door, as it were, while 'Drakelands Corner', a little to the east, is the facility shown in the opening snap. The long white chute is the giveaway.

I thought I had heard of Wheal Florence above before, but it now seems that there is more than one mine with this name - and that this one is probably not the one I had heard of. See reference 4.

PS 2: I have now taken a look at OS naming conventions, as described at reference 8. The business of trying to tie down names in a properly official, organised sort of way. Gmaps is content to be more fuzzy. The term 'white man's burden' comes to mind. There is also the play built around mapping in a turbulent Ireland noticed at reference 10.

And the business of layers. There are more layers in the OS central database than are made visible in their Landranger maps, or in the online consumer product built thereon. But that still leaves the awkward gap between what you can see on those maps and what you can find by search.

References

Reference 1: UK backs Devon tungsten mine in effort to secure critical mineral supplies: National Wealth Fund invests £71mn in project to produce metal used in aerospace and defence industries - Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times - 2026.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/riverford-farm-kitchen.html.

Reference 4: https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MDV12647&resourceID=104.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whim_(mining). Crops up in the previous reference.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly%27s_Directory.

Reference 7: https://tungstenprices.com/. 'Tungsten has the highest melting point of any element at 3,422°C, nearly double the density of lead, and hardness rivaling diamond as carbide. Its price has outpaced gold, silver, copper, and oil combined over the past year'.

Reference 8: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/governance/policies/geographical-names.

Reference 9: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/resources/os-names-policy.pdf. A properly bureaucratic version of reference 8.

Reference 10: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/translations.html.

There be water in the pond

We have had only a trivial amount of rain since the most recent wave of heat broke, and none in the last few days. But this morning, somehow, there was water in Stamford Green Pond. Where had it come from? Had something sprung a leak upstream, up on the Common? 

The snap above, from late yesterday afternoon is a bit inconclusive, even under zoom. The black stuff in the middle was just mud, but maybe there is a sheen of water - although I think I would have noticed at the time if there had of been any water.

But this morning, no doubt about it at all. Oddly, very few birds, when there had been quite a few moorhens, young and old, on the mud the day before.

Aside: an irrelevant puzzle has been the absence of dead fish. I had thought that there were fish in the pond, but perhaps the casualties get hoovered up pretty quickly.

A lady on the next bench did not know anything about it, but she did know that filling from the tap, as it were, could introduce an unhealthy amount of chlorine into the pond. We certainly get a whiff of chlorine from our taps from time to time - but not from the pond today.

There was also an extravagant display of flowers in a row of planters along the wall of the Cricketers adjacent, the first time that I had noticed them, although BH tells me that they have been there for a while. They must take a bit of watering in this heat, but if there is an automatic watering set-up which has leaked, I would not have thought that it would have leaked as much as this - even supposing that the water in the pond is only an inch or so deep.

While by this afternoon, a bright green algal bloom.

And while we are on leaks, the day before yesterday, Sunday, there was this fine head of grass in the middle of an otherwise parched verge not very far from where we leak. A recent leak or an active leak? It is in the right sort of place for a water meter.

I talked to Gemini about the matter, and his line is that the most likely explanation is an upstream leak in or around the houses on the Common side of the pond. A smell of chlorine would be a positive indicator, but one that dissipates pretty quickly. And instant algal blooms are a normal response to wetting a dried out pond - hopefully not Cyanobacteria, aka blue-green algae.

The pond did not appear on the Thames Water map of reported problems - quite a decent map, I thought - and so I have reported it too them. All quite sensible and efficient so far.

PS 1: Thames Water were on the phone within a few minutes of my report. Most impressive!

PS 2: Wednesday morning: I have now had a nil report from Thames Water. Nothing going on, nothing to report. Hmmm: my money is still on a leak to the south.

While BH points out that the name suggests that there was a ford at some point. Maybe immediately to the north of where the pond now is, centre in the snap above. With the water draining north, towards Longmead Road at that point. There is a large cover at the corner immediately to the west of the pond, I dare say covering a junction of some sort.

References

Reference 1: https://www.thameswater.co.uk/help/report-a-problem#/view-and-report-problems.

Group search keys: 20260823, 20260824, 20260825.

Taxing Shein

In his book about India at reference 1, Wilson has a lot to say about the collection of tax on land and of tax on trade, this last often being called Customs Duties.

Duties which, incidentally, were a major source of revenue for governments here in the UK prior to the invention of things like income tax and VAT. This bit of information arising from my reading of Church last year, an accidental find at the Bugle (now closed) in Brading on the Isle of Wight. See reference 2.

Matters all stirred up by idle perusal of the piece at reference 3.

A ruler may see charging tax on goods leaving the country as a perfectly legitimate source of revenue. He and his country want a share of the possibly large amounts of money a trader might make by buying their goods at the prevailing market price, perhaps denominated in gold or silver. And then selling them on, somewhere else, for a massive profit.

A ruler may also see charging tax on goods entering the country as both a way to raise money and as a way to protect local industry, deemed to be important for one reason or another. He might, for example, want to keep our blast furnaces going, just in case we need to build battleships in time of war when imports might dry up. So he puts a whacking great tariff on steel.

The ruled might, however, take a short view, preferring cheap goods today to security for tomorrow. But that is not the issue at hand.

These days, welfare concerns are apt to added to the mix. Are the plants or animals being imported dangerous? What about food standards? What about cruelty to animals and/or people? Or women?

We now move from theory to collection, which is where things start to get messy and lawyers start to make lots of money.

In the olden days, the model was fairly simple. You had a seller who sent a parcel to a buyer. The parcel, going out or coming in through some port provided the unit of taxation.

But things were kept in proportion. Small parcels, moving around in the postal system were likely to be exempt. Although I remember from childhood, parcels from Canada arriving with large white Customs stickers on the outside, in essence, forms to be filled in by the sender, so there must have been some control. Perhaps a declaration that the parcel contained some old books, rather than a consignment of diamonds.

In the US part of the regulation of all this was something called Section 232 and another part something called Section 321.

Section 232 gave the President wide discretion to put punitive tariffs on imports which he deemed to be a challenge to national security. On which last, he or she had the first and last word.

Section 321 gave exporters exemptions from Customs (and other) duties on shipments worth less than $800.

With the arrival of computers and e-commerce, exporters and their lawyers had a fine old time devising wheezes to maximise the applicability of exemptions. Rulers, needless to say, hired their own lawyers, who, inter alia, made hay out of making the rules ever more complicated in an attempt to defeat the wheezes.

Most other countries, beside the US, play similar games, although with all the different tax regimes, the details vary quite a bit from country to country. Which is another dimension to the game.

It seems that Trump has cut through some of this by simply abolishing the Section 321 exemptions. On the other hand, he is making very extensive use of his Section 232 powers. See, for example, reference 4 for some chapter and verse.

Which bring us back to Shein, a more or less Chinese company whose hitherto very successful business model has been built on the back of these exemptions. Hence the piece at reference 3.

In the course of all this, Bing/Copilot were quite helpful, proving handy summaries of things like Section 232.

Gemini was even more helpful, with the opening of my discussion with him being snapped above. I suppose that there is plenty of stuff out there on the Internet about all this, lots of stuff for him to train on. And lots of money is involved: business will pay the likes of Google good money for good information - which will save them lots of time and effort from graduate trainees. Maybe even spot angles which they would likely miss.

I don't suppose he is word perfect and the lawyers will work hard to keep their jobs, but he is certainly a great help - certainly for my present purposes.

PS 1: the foregoing is a rather narrow view of the matter. No thought is given, for example, to the advantages of stable trading regimes or multinational agreements. Triangles of trade. Trade in services as well as trade in goods - the big tech companies being good at the first of these. Never mind Free Trade, which no doubt we here in the UK were very hot on in the days when we were good at manufactures and services hadn't been invented. Farmers outpriced by imports of grain from places like Canada could go hang.

Which reminds me that fishing is a smaller industry in this country than UCL is in London. Provided, that is, that we don't scare off all the foreigners. Facts which I have noticed before, but failed to check. Maybe tomorrow.

PS 2: at close of play today, the downstairs thermometer was reading 70°F, despite it seeming fairly cool. Must have adjusted to higher temperatures.

PS 3: Tuesday morning. A few seconds with Bing turns up reference 7 from which the snap above is taken.

And on the clue 'annual turnover uk fishing industry' Bing offered the snap above. So, on the face of it, my correspondent was understating it: UCL is near twice as big as fishing in terms of annual income. But that, needless to say, is not the whole story.

Furthermore, I wonder how much of that income is fees paid by students from East Asia. I dare say tht if I looked closely at reference 7, I would find out. Or are they a bit coy about that?

PS 4: from Sunday morning, from a rather affluent street not far from where we live. One might have thought that someone could spare a bucket of second hand water to help this young sapling along, but no. Someone else's problem. But I dare it will survive if we have some rain soon.

A zoom. Contrariwise, I have not watered the candytuft in our front verge; alive but not very happy. Maybe this morning. The  plant which arrived from I know not where, with the everlasting flowers.

References

Reference 1: India conquered: Britain’s Raj and the chaos of empire – Jon Wilson – 2016.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=customs+revenue.

Reference 3: How Shein’s IPO lost its shine: Once high-flying fast-fashion retailer is listing in Hong Kong at quarter of peak value after years of false starts - William Langley, Arjun Neil Alim, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 4: https://tariffwise.co/news/trump-tariffs-2026/.

Reference 5: https://www.odwlogistics.com/resources/suspension-of-section-321. More of same.

Reference 6: https://www.shein.co.uk/. The people themselves, at least their UK shop window.

Reference 7: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/about/sites/about/files/2026-02/UCL-Annual-Report-And-Accounts-2025-18feb26.pdf.

The Key

 [Image turned up by Bing on the clue ‘shelves full of government files’]

A short story from Ireland, of around 50 pages, published by the Dalkey Archive Press of Illinois and reference 5, in a parallel text with English alongside the original Gaelic. 100 pages in all; just text, no apparatus. The author, Cadhain, was an unusual chap from various points of view, not least for his idiosyncratic use of various Gaelics. He is to be found at reference 4. 1953 is the earliest date in my copy of the story, when the author would have been in his forties.

Rereading this story was prompted during the posting of reference 1 and it was previously noticed, ten years ago now, at reference 2.

The story of a civil service paper keeper who gets himself locked into a room full of files, old and new, and who, after various vicissitudes, is extracted, dead of a heart attack, a day or so later. A story spiced up with a good deal of broad humour, perhaps intended to capture the vernacular of the time – rather in the way that the good soldier of reference 7 had thirty years previously – but I have no idea whether Cadhain knew this book.

With the further parallel of the good soldier being set in what is now the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, another empire full of zealous servants keen on the paperwork. Lots of boozing too.

And then there are the troubles of the Indian Civil Service, as told by Wilson at reference 8, which I happened to be reading at the same time. It’s all connected!

I have no idea how much one is missing by reading the story in translation, but I take from reference 3 the idea that part of the fun of the original was Cadhain’s playing with various dialects of Gaelic. And a better knowledge of the messy innards of Irish politics in the decades after independence would no doubt have helped too.

I associate to an Indian comment which I picked up from somewhere, to the effect that, after independence we might make a bit of a mess of things, at least at first, but it will be our mess.

The first half of the story is all about what happens inside the room; the second half is more about what happens outside, once it has been discovered that the paper keeper is stuck inside. This second half gets a little breathless as it gallops for the both comic and tragic conclusion.

Part of the fun for me was that I was a civil servant for a long time and, at least for a while, I had been involved with records, files and paper keepers.

But another part was the difficulty of grafting the administrative system on one country onto that of another country which may not be too keen on you being there at all, proclaimed good intentions notwithstanding.

What happens when the first country ups stick, and leaves the second country with a foreign, perhaps not particularly suitable administration? What about all the tricky records that may have been kept? Think Stasi in East Germany and the wealth of tricky records that they left for their successors in 1990.

And there seems to be a tendency for first countries, that is to say occupiers, to be very keen on paper based systems and records; an alternative to both trust in their own officers and trust in those being governed. In the olden days, this might have meant careful records of land ownership and land transactions, with a lot of wealth and rent being locked up in land. Think Domesday Book for an example close to home.

A tendency which perhaps promoted unwarranted belief in the power of the written word, of rules. Perhaps pushing the manoeuvres and compromises possible in a more oral system into the margins.

An entertaining and interesting read. Perhaps I won’t leave it for a third outing quite so long.

PS 1: at about the time of posting reference 2, I had puzzled about the word ‘Aryan’. Oddly, a connection to ‘Iran’ had not occurred to me. A connection confirmed, after various vicissitudes, by Gemini. On this occasion, he was rather thrown by the spelling mistake in my starting question – thrown being helped along by the misspelt word being entirely respectable, but quite different, in Turkish.

PS 2: I went on to let Gemini loose on the Indian comment. He did pretty well, although I did not recognise any of the books he suggested. But there must be lots of them, not to mention articles in magazines like the New York Review of Books. Maybe it will come to me.

But the important thing is that the sentiment almost certainly derived from Mahatma Gandhi. And Gemini goes on to observe that the slogan "Good government is no substitute for self-government" was originally coined by British Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1905, this phrase was heavily popularized across the Indian independence movement…’. Not Winston Churchill’s finest hour.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/birthdays-special.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1irt%C3%ADn_%C3%93_Cadhain. 

Reference 4: The Key (An Eochair) - Máirtín Ó Cadhain – 1953, 2015.

Reference 5: https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/. 

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkey_Archive_Press. 

Reference 7: The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek – 1921–1923.

Reference 8: India conquered: Britain’s Raj and the chaos of empire – Jon Wilson – 2016.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages.  

Pinnate

In the margins of the festivities noticed yesterday at reference 1, I took a snap of one of the roses on our back patio, a species rose from Wisley.

Eventually I remembered that the point of the snap was that the leaves appeared to be firmly odd pinnate, with a penchant for five leaflets to the stem.

But I could not remember its name. Search of the archive turned up reference 2. Search of the Wisley shop turned up nothing, apart from plenty of whimsical names of generally the right sort.

While Google Images (GI) scored a bullseye: there are a lot of roses out there and he did not have much to go on - with the snap I gave him having been lifted from reference 2: 'Tottering by Gently' from David Austin. The clue about it being a pot rose from Wisley seems to have got lost, so perhaps it never made it. I remembered the name well enough when told, while BH could tell me all about the magazine side of things before I told her. For which last see references 3 and 4.

Contrariwise, the string 'tottering' does not appear in the archive, very suggestive that the name, as opposed to the purchase, was never noticed.

I learn that there is lots of stuff about this sort of thing out there on Facebook, and to a lesser extent Reddit. Plenty of people out there generating images and text for GI to train on. Some of these people will be careless, but maybe the learning process can ride over a certain amount of noise. An advantage of being statistical rather than analytical?

Looking at the plant this morning, five did not seem so very dominant - in the way that it is with the aggressive, first year shoots of the blackberry - and I could not make much sense of the stem structure at all. I took some more snaps, one of which is included above. Which I fed to GI, with the clue 'Rose 'Tottering by Gently'. It seems to be odd pinnate, with a penchant for five leaflets, but looking at it more closely, I can't make much sense of the leaf & shoot structure, with flower shoots popping out all over the place'.

Part of his reply is snapped above. So maybe what we have is lots of excitable axil buds. With the snag that the two references given for the 'result' tiret were not much help. One was elementary and one was advanced and I so far fail to see the relevance of either.

The start of a second bite at the cherry. I thought a slightly better story. But not sure whether I was using regular Google or Google Images - or indeed if they are very different these days.

I managed to get in a muddle when I started GI on the three and five leaflets of the blackberry, using this image from Rosebery Park, snapped for what I thought was the odd leaf shapes for a blackberry. A failure to take proper notes. 

That apart, all to do with the ability of the blackberry to vary the shape and size of its leaves and the organisation of its shoots according to context. GI also noted the distinctive purple colouring of the first year cane, that is to say the one with groups of five leaflets.

There was also talk of the shape of blackberry leaves (rounded bases) compared with that of rose leaves (more pointed bases). I was not convinced that GI was not telling me what he thought I ought to see, rather than what the images I had given him actually did look like.

Zomlefer (reference 5) offers a drawing of a rose shoot, Rosa palustris (reference 7), looking rather like the blackberry shoots three and five (reference 6 and elsewhere). In which connection, GI suggests that, by some sort of chemical signalling, the flowering shoots reduce input into leaves so as to leave more for the flower.

So all a bit inconclusive so far. Maybe I need to take a cutting from our pot rose and look at it more carefully.

But I have learned that thorns are different from prickles. Thorns are a degenerate branch or stem, while prickles are more a pimple on the skin; the two being quite different from a development point of view. This rose does prickles.

Conclusions

Off to a flying start, but then things got more wobbly, at least for this amateur botanist.

I think the important takeaway is that, if the objective is to test GI on material of this sort, one needs to take a lot more care than I did on this occasion.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/birthdays-special.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/flower-power.html. Which dates the purchase to after October 2021. With this previous investigation getting no further.

Reference 3: https://www.davidaustinroses.co.uk/products/tottering-by-gently.

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

Reference 5: Guide to flowering plant families - Wendy B. Zomlefer - 1994. University of North Carolina Press.

Reference 6: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/modigliani.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_palustris. The swamp rose of eastern North America. A thin entry, but not much more at RHS.

Reference 8: The anatomy of rose shoots - Marina Pashina - 2021. The advanced reference of elusive relevance. The start of it is included above.

Group search key: aisk, GIchat-20260823-01.

Birthdays special

A week or so ago, a birthday special for two family members, an occasion marked by slow roast leg of lamb, served with haricot beans, as advertised at reference 6. And greens, and rice, as I recall.

Further marked by a discrete display across the top of the garage bi-fold.

Discrete, but fully Heath-Robinson'd, as can be seen from the snap above, the idea being to reduce the flapping brought on by the light breeze. Which worked well enough, but not so well as to stop it shearing across the first 'p' of happy before the close of play. Not fatal though; it could be mended.

Proceedings lubricated with a spot of No.1 2022 Valpolicella Ripasso, from Waitrose. On which, an unsolicited comment from Copilot started: 'Valpolicella Ripasso is a red wine from the Veneto region of Northern Italy, produced using the Ripasso method, where young Valpolicella wine is re-fermented on the leftover Amarone grape skins. This technique enhances body, flavor, and complexity while retaining the freshness of traditional Valpolicella...'. Not sure that I did not prefer the days when AI assistants did not speak until spoken to, the mode in which I still use Gemini, at least most of the time. In any event, made for Waitrose by the people at reference 7. Or, as it says on the bottle: 'We have crafted this exclusive wine with the historic and prestigious Fratelli Recchia winery'. Busy chap, the wine buyer from Waitrose. Maybe he gets to go on jollies to Italy and other exciting places - or is Waitrose so important that they have to come to him? To be treated to a spot of English Breakfast in the cafeteria in the basement?

Unusually engrossed in conversation - or perhaps eating - I forget to make a telephonic record of the leg of lamb with all its trimmings, which skips to the dessert. From where I associate to the vagaries of reference 8. Can't get the paper keepers these days, even if you inflate their job titles to record keepers. From where I further associate to the paper keepers of the Free State, noticed at reference 9. I am pleased to say that I can still put my hand on the book itself: I may even read it again later.

At least the steel - probably sourced from a car boot sale at Hook Road Arena - is still there by way of evidence of the main course.

It was also an outing for one of our two trestle tables.

After dessert, there was something of a dividing of the ways. Part of the party was engrossed in the affairs of one Dazzle, a pony from the people at reference 4. The other part moved onto pillow construction using a travelling sewing kit sourced at a garage sale in Brading on the Isle of Wight. The sort of thing that every careful housewife used to take on holiday, just in case. Some of the better chain hotels offer very cut-down versions, also just in case.

I was intrigued to find that the people selling the ponies - along with various bits and bobs for real horses, held a warrant from our King, snapped from reference 2 below. One each, although I might say that the list for our King is a good deal longer than that for our Queen. I don't think minor royals get them at all. The list itself is to be found at reference 3. I dare say there is a master list lurking somewhere in the Royal Household proper, but I have not managed to get sight of that.

But I learn that it a serious offence for a trader - these warrants are about trade - to claim a warrant when he has not got one. For some background, go to reference 1. For the ponies themselves, I think John Lewis will do.

I wonder if, as the Prince of Wales, he awarded one to himself for the Duchy Originals range: the cunning wheeze whereby he sold the use of his name to enterprising manufacturers of food products - sausages, marmalade and stuff like that; the ultimate meeting point of royals with trade. Would Queen Victoria have approved?

At 17:00 the downstairs thermometer was still reading 80°F, despite there being talk of the possibility of rain. Talk corroborated by the scene outside, snapped above - not that it came to much, if anything.

PS: the record did resume with the left-overs the following day, with pride of place going to the stewed celery. Plus butter, onions, carrots, some left over potatoes and a little water. Less than an hour start to finish.

On the plate.

There was also some rather fine damson mousse, although I failed to arrange it properly for its snap. Perhaps I ought to suggest the dish to the Estrela in Vauxhall, people who actually make their own desserts, or at least some of them.

References

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

Reference 2: https://www.royalwarrant.org/.

Reference 3: https://www.royalwarrant.org/media/2986/download?inline=. What appears to be the authoritative list, as of today..

Reference 4: https://www.lemieux.com/. Gemini says: 'The British equestrian and lifestyle brand LeMieux is owned by its founders, Robert and Lisa Lemieux, alongside the private equity firm LDC (lLloyds Development Capita)'. Horsey people.

Reference 5: https://www.ldc.co.uk/. Who presumably provide a bit of help with the cash needed to grow.

Reference 6: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/a-tale-of-two-beans.html.

Reference 7: https://www.recchiavini.it/.

Reference 8: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/legal-eagles.html.

Reference 9: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html.

Reference 10: https://stx-uk.com/lemieux/. STX look to be into the sort of high end horse boxes that event riders might use. There is clearly some tie in with Lemieux, as you can read all about them here.

Beef with a difference

For years I have made a bit of a thing of usually buying fore rib when we have beef - and making a bit of a fuss when the butcher - or his supplier - takes it into his head to go in for trimming or chining. I wanted the real thing.

But just recently, I fell for a joint of beef from Waitrose described as boned beef rib, one and a half kilos of it. Didn't look much on the slab, but I did get a special bag, a relative of the bags in which they sell their kippers, from the counter adjacent. The same counter hand does both, which seems to mean a lot of hand washing.

Plus a couple of bits of short rib for the gravy. I don't suppose the bones from my joint ever left the butchery line in some shed somewhere far from Epsom.

Started the gravy the following afternoon, that is to say Friday. Bones, onions, carrots, parsnip (elderly) and celery. Gave it around five hours, bashing it a bit with the potato masher from time to time, and putting it to strain in a colander at around 21:00.

Put the decent debris with some of the resultant stock through the blender. Some of the product destined to thicken the gravy, some destined for broth.

Moving onto the sums, 1.6kg equals 3.5lbs. Radiation suggests 60+10+20=90, say an hour and a half. 190°C seems to be the form these days.

Joint in the near cold oven at 11:25. Oiled, as not much fat to be seen outside, although it turned out that there was a good fat vein of fat inside.

Skimmed the refrigerated stock, with the fat destined for the roux.

Attended to the veg. Somewhere along the way, BH attended to the damson pie to follow.

Plated and put back into the oven at 12:40. Nothing much had emerged when I speared it. Turned the oven off shortly after. On the table at 13:05.

After some cutting. Most of the juices added to the gravy.

On the plate. Very good it was too, and rather different from our usual on-the-bone joint. Much more like the rather good beef noticed at the Wigmore at reference 1.

We missed out on gravy dipping, there not being any white bread to hand, but th gravy was pretty good too - although I think I would omit the parsnip next time. Its taste was too strong against the other items on the card. Surprising how far one small parsnip went, and how its flavour persisted.

I associate to today to once making the mistake of adding parsnip to lentil and bacon soup. That did not work at all well.

A close up. As at the Wigmore, not as raw as it looked. I liked the loose texture.

Damson pie, with custard, to follow.

On the plate. You need the pastry and custard to cut the damsons a bit, which would be a bit strong neat. I think the French do much the same sort of thing, but upside down. Line the tin with pastry, damsons on top, pour custard - or some fancy French version thereof, perhaps what we call confectioners' custard - on top. Served cold rather than hot.

A couple of days later the cold version, taken with salad, with special potatoes. Beef still going strong, still tasting good.

The strawberries to follow did not look that great, but they tasted OK, certainly on this first outing. But one could see why they might need cream and sugar to tart them up a bit as they aged, not necessary on this occasion.

By the Wednesday, down to white rolls from Waitrose. Pretty good they were too, with a little butter to soften the beef. The day, as it happens of the underwhelming but Heath Robinson'd eclipse; the day also when we polished off the gravy, all noticed at reference 3. 

There was also the matter of the broth, taken as I recall, with a little Bastides saucisson, also from Waitrose. But I forget which day that was.

PS 1: when I ask Gemini about dry aging, he offers a long story. In brief, dry aging is hanging the beef, swinging free, in a climate controlled box, usually with a window, so that customers can admire it. Ginger Pig in Borough Market has a box of this sort, empty when we last went past. The restaurant at King's Place has one. 

Wet aging is jointing and shrink wrapping more or less immediately after slaughter, and then refrigerating. Important advantages of this last are less weight loss (to evaporation) and less weight lost (to trimming on the dry bits). The former tastes better, but the latter is mostly what supermarkets do. 

Aging, inter alia, gives time for a bit of flavour development and a bit of pre-digestion. Easier on the human stomach. Enzymes rather than microbes - although you would certainly get them too in an old fashioned game larder.

If you are being even more foodie, you add Himalayan salt. Gemini explains that this is not to flavour the meat, rather to help with humidity control. Also the punters think it sounds good.

Some of which is to be found at reference 2.

PS 2: wondering whether and how to apostrophise 'Bastides', I looked them up again and tracked them down to reference 4. The family name in question is 'Tournois', while 'bastide' is the name of a sort of fortified town, common in southwest France during the wars of the 14th and 15th centuries. Marauding mercenaries, some of them English, everywhere. So name of a brand, rather than a name of a person or even a company. More an adjective than a noun, so no apostrophe.

Larousse agrees with me about 'bastide', but, oddly, Littré gives a quite different meaning. I then look up Wikipedia at reference 5, where I find the whole story is rather more complicated than I had realised.

Gemini more or less agrees with me, with a few qualifications, in the course of a short essay on the subject of apostrophes. His summary being: 'Style guides (such as Chicago, AP, and standard corporate copy standards) generally recommend treating brand names as attributive nouns to keep product copy clean and avoid awkward punctuation around final s sounds'. Attributive nouns are not adjectives, but they do behave a bit like them. An example of the difficulty of corralling a live language in fixed, simple rules.

PS 3: there is an advertisement in my mail this morning suggesting that I might like to join the submarine service, an advertisement which leads to the slickly produced recruitment website at reference 6. I imagine the Google advertising people know my age, so perhaps the Navy did not pay enough to get these adverts sensibly filtered. Did anything that I did prompt its arrival? Yesterday's interest in belaying pins?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/d960.html.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/big-day.html.

Reference 4: https://www.sacor.fr/. 'Notre entreprise, les Salaisons et Conserves du Rouergue (Sacor), a été créée en 1962 à Villefranche-de-Rouergue, une bastide médiévale d’envergure du département de l’Aveyron...'.

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

Reference 6: https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/careers/services/submarine-service.

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