The end of an age?

Many moons ago, when the world was yet young and the nationalistic, right-wing, racist, lower than vermin cretins had not taken over the levers of power a neophyte, newly trained teacher was scanning the pages of the TES (the Times Educational Supplement) and looking for a tasty job to apply for

.

The first job application (and he sent out many) to offer him an interview was in Kettering.  He had never heard of Kettering and consultation of the AA Handbook (these were the days before the web and mobile phones) did not give much information to flesh out the unknown name.

But, an interview was an interview, and so he was determined to take up the opportunity to visit Kettering Boys Grammar School and see what was what.

Being his mother’s son in matters of commerce he stipulated one simple rule: if there was no M&S in the place then he would walk away.

He booked into the hotel that the AA recommended and set off on his adventure.

Kettering, he discovered, not only had a fine parish church, but also had the essential M&S.  It also turned out that there was a branch of Sainsbury’s and, in those dark days, there was not a single store of that name in Cardiff, or indeed in Wales.  So, that was alright.

To apply that simple rule in Kettering on Monday would mean that that young man would have spurned the opportunity.  Today, Saturday 11^th of August 2018, is the last day of trading for the M&S that I used - for as long as the money lasted and then I downgraded to Sainsbury’s!

I had had evening teaching jobs previously.  Indeed, during my training year in Cardiff University (when that university had an education department) I was teaching four evenings a week – but Kettering was my first ‘real’ teaching appointment.

I worked as though possessed during my first year with my lunchtimes and after schools effortlessly filling up with all the things you do until you discover that most of it is wasted effort.  I did insist on one thing: a (working) overhead projector in my classroom.  I must be one of the ¡very few English teachers who from his training year until he retired used an overhead projector.  I have yet to hear of any others!  If there are any of you out there then let me know, it would be good to know that I was not alone!

But my greatest achievement in my first year of teaching was my address:

          Saint Botolph’s House,

          Saint Botolph’s Road,

          Barton Seagrave,

          Northamptonshire.

In the days when you had to write your address on the back of your cheques, that olde-worlde sounding domicile gave the right air of solidity and rectitude!

Although Northamptonshire is now in the news because of the almost (!?) criminal mismanagement of the council finances by the lower than vermin Conservatives who now bleat that they cannot fulfil their statutory obligations to the disadvantaged without immediate national government help – Northamptonshire itself is the home of some very rich individuals, not least among whom is the Duke of Buccleuch with his little residence of Boughton House, and believe you me, ‘house’ it is not!

Although no one else matches the duke for filthy richness, there are a lot of wealthy people and notable pieces of architecture in the county – some of which (the houses not the filthy rich) I discovered with the authoritative aid of my trusty Pevsner during my stay in the county.

Money is certainly there, but not in the hands of those who can help the young, the disabled, the disadvantaged, the chronically sick, the needy.  And now there is no M&S: truly Northamptonshire is becoming known as The Dark County!

I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, I passed my probationary year and moved on to Cardiff where I spent the rest of my career.  Well, until the little bits added on in Sitges, Castelldefels and Barcelona!

In order of importance (though not necessarily in order of use) I would rank the following stores:

1                  M&S

2                  Boots

3                  Tesco

4                  W H Smith

5                  BHS

6                  Howells (Cardiff - House of Fraser)

7                  David Morgan’s (Cardiff independent store)

8                  Second Hand Book Shops (Cardiff – I knew them all!)

9                  Comet etc

10             Other supermarkets

11             Thayer’s Ice Cream (City Road)

12             Local bread shops

As I was typing that list, so I was becoming more maudlin.  So stopped.  Things are not the same.  Some of those shops have closed down, some are struggling.

 

You will notice that Amazon (the scourge of retail) is not mentioned at all and, anyway, I’m living in Catalonia - where they do things differently?

The direction is set!

Adam Elsheimer, self portrait

The hunt is on! The game’s afoot!

There is nothing quite so satisfying as playing at research. I have had numerous opportunities to do this seriously, but have generally squandered those opportunities, and have instead settled for the more mundane and parochial research of Man + computer + limited library.

Having been fascinated by a painting that I saw in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, I am slowly garnering information and indications about the life and work of Adam Elsheimer.


Elsheimer (1578-1610) is a famously un-famous painter, whose work is generally unknown and unappreciated, but a painter who influenced a whole direction of pictorial representation, influencing painters as famous as Rembrandt and he was a painter who counted Rubens as an admiring friend.

Of course, in the world of art history Elsheimer is well regarded and has a respectable number of scholarly monographs and books written about him, but outside this rarefied world his is not a name that comes to mind when talking about great artists.

Adam Elsheimer. Rest on the Flight to Egypt.

Probably his most famous painting is “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” where the Holy Family is depicted in a landscape setting at night. Illumination comes from separate sources: the moon and its reflection on water; the constellations and a depiction of the Milky Way; shepherds around a blazing fire and a torch held by Joseph. This is a small painting of oil on copper measuring only 31 x 41 cm. It is believed to be one of the first naturalistic depictions of a night-time scene with accurate rendering of stars in their constellations. It has been suggested that Elsheimer might have been influenced in his painting by the discoveries of Galileo. It was a painting that Elsheimer kept for himself, in his bedroom and may well have been one of the last paintings that he completed before his early death at the age of thirty-two.

Elsheimer was a meticulous artist whose paintings demand intimate viewing. Indeed, in one exhibition of his work, visitors were given a plastic magnifying glass as part of their admission price so that they could look at aspects of his work that were difficult to appreciate with the naked eye: “Devil in the detail” was the subtitle of the exhibition!

Elsheimer was German, born in Frankfurt and ended his life in Italy. Although he produced a small number of paintings because of his attention to detail and the painstaking way in which he worked, the influence of his paintings was extended throughout Europe by their use as the inspiration for a number of etchings and prints. The influence of his tiny paintings explodes into something more epic in the much larger paintings of Rubens and Claude.

Although Elsheimer was modest about his own ability, he was famous and, what is more, he seems to have been what you might term “an artist’s artist” who was highly regarded and much copied.

Altogether, Elsheimer is a fascinating character as well as a wonderfully gifted artist and well worthy of more study. At least by me.

The first thing to do is (breathe it not to Toni) buy more books. I have no books on Elsheimer, and reading through what I have already written that is hardly surprising. His name does not jump out at you from what is generally a fairly meagre collection of volumes of art history in most bookshops.

I will, assiduously, set about building up a collection of and about Elsheimer that will be the wonder of . . . well, at least my street. And yes, I do realize that owning a single volume of his work will probably allow me to gain that accolade!

If the fates are generous then I should be able to utilize not only my course books from my last OU Renaissance Reimagined module, but also the course books that I have bought from the module that I cannot afford to take about art and its global histories.

Although it seems a simple statement to say that Elsheimer was born in Frankfurt and moved to Rome via Venice, it does not give the requisite detail to realise just what the moves meant and what the places represented.

Italy (Metternich’s famous dismissal as nothing more than a “geographical expression”) was not a country then; Rome was the home of the papacy, but a European power in its own right; Venice was one of the most powerful city states in the world with financial and cultural links to the known and unknown world, a centre where the interchange of cultures could thrive. While Frankfurt, a commercial and intellectual centre by the middle of the sixteenth century, had become crucial in the development of the Reformation linked with the rise of a confident middle class. In other words, there is a lot to think about before you even get to a consideration of the works of art. I do enjoy a good wallow in historical, social, religious and political background!

I am not sure if we have any Elsheimer works in Barcelona, but I will find out. And if not, then I will travel to where there are.

Any excuse!

Resist and Remember!

I am, with difficulty, stopping myself from using the Internet.

It’s not that I am addicted to the damn thing, or that I have to keep accessing it to reassert my essential character or that I need the anonymous accreditation that plugging myself into the world wide web gives, no it’s because it’s all too easy.

It all started with a jingle:

“You’ll wonder where the yellow went

When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!”

              The sort of jingle that has lain supressed for god alone knows how many years and then, apropos of nothing, suddenly springs into the forefront of your brain and then will not let go.  The inane “tune” established itself in my mind and got stuck on repeat.  In a desperate attempt to get rid of it I began to think of other toothpaste commercials from the past.  “Gibbs SR” came and went because there was no tune to it in my memory, though as the first commercial on British TV, with toothpaste and brush embedded in a plastic block of ice, it did provide Media Teachers with a powerful metaphor for the concept of truth in advertising!  The Colgate “Ring of Confidence” briefly surfaced in my memory and then sank back drowned by the repetition of the Peposdent tune.

In desperation I turned to sweets.  I know from excited experience that, apart from physical injuries, there is nothing that people like to talk about with more enthusiasm than “Sweets from the Past”.  And, although I personally might be referencing sweets from sixty-odd years ago, remembering chews, black jacks and sherbet fountains (Barratt's sherbet fountains to be precise, the ones with the liquorish sucking tube) my own wistfulness can easily be matched by eleven or twelve-year-olds reminiscing about the times “When I was in Primary School” as if those were twenty years ago rather than the same number of months!

So, my flittering remembrance lighted on Opal Fruits.  A sweet I never really liked, too chewy and sickly-sticky for my taste, but the advertising jingle still lives on in my musical memory:

              Opal fruits!

              Made to make your mouth water!

              Cool as a mountain stream,

              Four refreshing fruit flavours!

And this is where it gets a bit jumbled.  I think that the “Cool as a mountain stream” is actually a lying line from a menthol cigarette advert, and after the fourth line the individual flavours were lovingly articulated.

The point is, I cannot remember what they were.  They must have been citrus, so lemon and orange should be two of them.  I thought that it might be banana as the third, but that is hardly refreshing.  Lime? hardly.  Strawberry is always popular, or black current or black berry or some woody fruit.

I know that I can type in Opal Fruits and all will be revealed.  I will probably be able to hear again the original adverts on You Tube.  There will be original packets for sale on eBay and Amazon will probably deliver them to my door.

But I refuse to take the easy way out.  I lived through the introduction of these sweets, I am sure that I had my favourites and spurned the “unfashionable” ones.  But, what were they?

And if I look them up will what I find out be a refreshing of my memory or the creation of a false one?  Will I truly remember, or will I convince myself that I do?

If you study with the Open University you are encouraged to be a wide ranging as possible with your range of electronic references, but the Powers That Be in the institution caution you against Wikipedia, like God Almighty warning Adam and Eve about the Serpent.  We are told that we Cannot Trust It, beware, we are told, of the Blandishments of Easy Knowledge from something that seems so guilelessly and gratuitously munificent.

The end result of course, is that we all (ALL) use it, but then look around for something more academically reputable to back up what it told us.

So much of the Internet is not really trustworthy.  My own experience of using a range of totally authoritative websites gave contradictory factual information, and don’t even get me started on my Sisyphean task of finding out the ‘correct’ punctuation in a line of Clare’s poem ‘I am’.  I rapidly came to the conclusion that the only way in which I could be truly satisfied was to see the original manuscript and I discovered that it hadn’t been digitalized and wasn’t on line.  I had various books of poetry in which the poem occurred, but there was not consistency about the way in which it had been written and, to this day, I remain unsatisfied.

It reminds me of the time when I was studying for ‘O’ Level Art in which there was, thank god, a whole History of Art Paper (On Which I Could Get Marks) and which partially compensated for my lack of artistic ability on the other two practical papers.  I had begun to buy Art Books and I realized that I had various copies of Turner’s “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth”.  I laid all these books on my bed, open at the painting and marvelled at just how different they all were.  It was not just the colours, though those were spectacularly different - it was how the publishers chose to size the painting, how they cropped it.  Few of the books actually gave the dimensions of the painting, and fewer still gave you the materials used.  Mostly, it doesn’t matter too much, but in the academic world it matters a lot.

Let me wrench you back to Opal Fruits – which may well still exist as far as I know.  My memory fails to bring too much back.  How can I be sure that anything that I gain about them from electronic media might be absolutely true or absolutely false.  How will I know?

Perhaps TIAT (Take It As True) is now a state of mind for us all.  The musty old libraries full of authoritative books have been superseded and we have instant, overwhelming information flows of truly questionable authority that we perhaps question too little.

Do you remember the flavours?

And, no, I still have not gone to the Internet.  At least not for that.

Rain means write

True to my word: the heavens have opened (momentarily) and I have taken to the keyboard, making electronically concrete my pledge to write more when the weather broke. It is still hot, but there is a fresher feeling to the heat than there was yesterday.

This will be another opportunity for this country to display its usual ability to vouchsafe a little sunshine even in the most unpromising of days. The weather in Catalonia lacks the spitefulness of the customary British weather where the sun can disappear for days on end. Here, it is rare indeed for a single day to pass without at least a moment’s sunshine. The clock is set and I am waiting!

Yesterday was a day of waiting. Well, at least part of it. I was scheduled for a hospital appointment at the unnatural hour of 1.40 pm to get the results of my “sleep-over” in hospital to check on my level of sleep apnoea. The threat was that I would be forced to wear some sort of mask during the hours of darkness to encourage me to have a more sleepfully sleepy sleep. From experience derived from my stay in hospital in January I knew that, as far as I am concerned, a mask (however slight) would result in steely wakefulness.

My appointed time came and went and, disturbingly, not a single person came out or went in to Room 12 where my meeting was to take place.

In Catalan hospitals there is a card reader for patients. You take your medical card and let the machine read it, and a few seconds later it recognizes your existence and shows you your name, appointment time and room location. So, as soon as you use the machine, the doctor knows that you are in the hospital and waiting.

And wait I did. Thanks to my mobile phone I was able to while away the time by a combination of intelligent reading and mindless (almost!) game playing so that I never reached that fingernail-down-the-blackboard furious irritation that comes with endless inaction. However, even electronically fuelled activity cannot keep patience even and I flounced off to an “information” section of the hospital to find out what was going on.

And they didn’t seem to know either. Unanswered phone calls and a group discussion produced nothing, but I was told to go back to where I had come from and something would happen.

I returned to the waiting room and nothing happened.

For a while.

And then, through an unnoticed staff door, the person to whom I had been speaking suddenly appeared, motioned me to change my seat and then disappeared.

And nothing happened.

And then it did. Hearing some mangled combination of my names I leapt to my feet and was eventually seen. You have to understand that, in Catalonia, they assume that my middle name (unused expect as an initial in Britain) is my family name and that my last name (my family name in Britain) is my mother’s surname (as in Catalonia). How my dad would have coped in this country, not having a middle name is something to think about.

Anyway I was seen by two tired medicos who were obviously reading my notes for the first time as I sat across from them.

I had all my notes. In Catalonia you can register with your medical centre and download all the notes that your doctor has. I am now building up an impressive book called, “Stephen’s Health” that contains everything about my condition that I have ever been given or I have been able to download. The results from my hospital sleep over had been missing, but they have now found their electronic way into my records and have consequently been transferred to hard copy and extra pages in the book.

The unfortunate thing is that they are largely meaningless to me as they are couched in medical terminology that is beyond me. This is where the website on which my records live shows its versatility as there is also an opportunity to contact your doctor via email to ask for clarification. And that I have done.

We have just had another sharp shower that means that I will continue to type as the lack of sun means that the lure of the sunbed has no present power.

Showers also limit my bike riding. Although I have a cycling rain jacket, a flimsy thing with slashes whose function seems to let the rain in, I distain to use the bike when the weather is inclement. To be fair I can only think of a few occasions in the past six months or so when I have had to use the car rather than the bike, so I cannot complain – and I might add that I have yet to use the rain jacket as I have not been caught in a storm.

But the non-use of the bike at the moment is because of a flat tyre. I have zero intention of either repairing the thing or changing it, so I am looking for a cycle shop to do the dirty work. But, it is August. And no one wants to be in their shops during this traditional shut down time, so I will have to hunt around for some character who is prepared to work during the non-working time of the year. And that is going to be something of a problem.

Although Castelldefels is a seaside town where you would think that everything would be open to take full advantage of holidaymakers, you would be wrong. There are restaurants here that are now closed for the holiday season! 

We have long ago given up about trying to understand just how the commercial mind of this place works, we simply have to go with the illogical flow!

When in doubt, read about it and write!

If anyone cared, which of course they do not, I could list the excuses that would justify my lack of written blog-stuff over the last weeks and months.  That indolence is in the past (he says again) and today, today is the first of the Writing Days that will see me not only complete my daily thoughts, but also see me complete the work on two outstanding books.  I have to admit that I prefer the adjective before the noun in that last part of the previous sentence because it gives me the personal boost that I need to put finger to key and actually get stuff done.

As is so often the case, my return to writing is as a result of reading, and that reading is a result of my hatred of airports.

I am one of the multitude of people for whom travelling is a chore: I like arriving, not going through the process of getting there.  I am well aware that great travel writers (and my late, lamented, and much missed Aunt Betty) are able to make all aspects of their journeys seem fascinating.  Aunt Betty never went on a boring holiday: yes, there were disasters, including one memorable occasion when the family did not have enough money left at the tail end of the holiday to be able to afford a family meal and so my redoubtable Aunt made the executive decision and went out for a meal for one – her!  But for we ordinary folk, the actually process of getting somewhere is almost always tedious and (for all six-foot people) cramped.

The nadir of the travelling experience is everything to do with aircraft.  At least it is if you are travelling low-cost and the person in front of you thinks that the aircraft seats recline and refuses to give up the idea of travelling prone!

It is not all irredeemably bad: one piece of cabin luggage and pre-check-in at least take some of the horror away and, I have discovered, if you are wearing a blue (one has still to be fashion conscious) pressure stocking and are walking with the aid of a Foldystick (god bless them!) and have thrombosis, embolisms and an over working heart, the lady at the check in will look kindly upon you and give you early boarding!  On the return trip from Edinburgh to Barcelona, for the first time in my life, I was the first person on board the plane – having been escorted to the bottom of the steps (where is an air-bridge when you want one?) by not one, but two (count them!) members of staff.  But, for that moment of isolated triumph you have to endure the seemingly endless waiting.

Now, I am not good at waiting.  I would prefer to be doing.  My definition of doing is flexible and doesn’t actually need to be too physically demanding.  Doing, for me, may well be reading.

So, as our little travelling party making the journey from Edinburgh to Barcelona was overwhelmingly composed of people who believed slavish in the necessity for the full (and more) two hours purgatory in the airport before the flight I had steeled myself to an extended period of teeth gnashing frustration – but I had omitted to realize that I would be waiting not in some foreign airport but in a British one.  A British airport where W H Smiths was open for business and had the buy one and get the cheapest half price offer on books.

Toni’s attitude towards my purchasing yet more reading matter that will not fit into a house pleasingly overloaded with books usually means that I limit my impulse buying in the airport, but this time I was positively encouraged to spend because we were in Scotland.

I can still remember my profound disbelief when I first saw a Scottish bank note – soon followed by my plaintive whine about why we in Cardiff did not have our own versions too.  I was very young, still in the days of the large white fivers, when my dad explained that Scotland had its own version of the currency and it was also explained to me that this Scottish money was legal tender in the rest of Britain.  And that was a fact.

In an early example of ‘facts’ not necessarily being generally accepted, I suggest you try and use a Scottish banknote in Cardiff.  On the, admittedly few, occasions that I have been slipped a Scottish note in my change, I have NEVER had the recipient (outside Scotland) accept the ‘foreign’ note with anything other than healthy scepticism or downright rejection.  I was able to play on this attitude to such an extent that Toni was positively urging me to ‘get rid’ of the notes that I still had in any way possible – including the purchase of books!

In what must be a first, Toni actually accompanied me into W H Smiths (!) to aid and abet me in the purchase!

Nowadays, like my Dad, I find myself drifting towards the non-fiction section of the bookshop to get my impulse buys.  I ended up with two books: the first, “Humans” by Tom Philips which had a graphic of an inky left handprint and a subtitle of “A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up” and the second was “Prisoners of Geography” by Tim Marshall with a graphic of half of the world filled with words, and a subtitle of “The maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics”.

I have to admit that I bought “Humans” on the strength of thinking I knew the writer, Tom Phillips.  I thought that he was the writer who had produced another Mapp and Lucia novel to add to the all-too-brief sequence written by E F Benson.  He wasn’t.  And I really should have known that someone who could publish a subtitle of such vulgarity could not possible have been comfortable with the style of E F Benson!  I am, however, glad that I made the mistake as I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

For years I looked forward to owning a book with the wonderful title of “Great Planning Disasters” in which the site of the British Library; B.A.R.T.; Concorde and of course The Sydney Opera House were all discussed in loving detail.  The fact that, for example, The British Library and The Sydney Opera House are both excellent entities, the first being an excitingly magical place in which to work and the second being an instantly recognizable, iconic masterpiece do not detract from the absurdly farcical way in which they were created.  In the same way, I look forward to the Olympics, not for the sporting excellence that sometimes appears, but rather for the political, social and financial disasters that so frequently follow the awarding of the questionable honour of staging them and their reality.  For me, the games themselves are something of an anti-climax after the unreal shenanigans leading up to the opening ceremony!

So, my mind set is predetermined to wallow in human cupidity and ineptitude, and “Humans” provides dollops of Man’s (and let’s face it, in the history of global incompetence, the use of the masculine is terribly, and I mean that word literally, appropriate!

For those who might find the language used in this book informal to the point of vulgarity, then I would suggest that the sub-title would have given a fairly clear indication of the attitude of the author and they have only themselves to blame.

I think the book reads like an informed comic novel – the text bounces along and ranges freely through history to find the most glaring examples of what can only be described as f*ukupedness!  For me, the whole book was justified by giving much more information about Thomas Midgley Jr. the “genius engineer, chemist and inventor . . . whose discoveries helped shape the modern world to a remarkable degree” – to find out just how catastrophic his “genius” was.  As the author points out, “He’s in this book because, incredibly, being killed in his bed by his own invention doesn’t even make it into the top two biggest mistakes of his life.”!  And if that little extract doesn’t make you want to find out why and read more then you are a person so far removed from my own way of thinking that I wonder why you are reading this blog in the first place.  Read, and enjoy!

The second book “Prisoners of Geography” (which now I come to think about it sounds like the title of a second musical review at the end of the truly excellent film, “The Producers”) is a more conventionally written book, though it is filled with the personal opinions which, refreshingly, make it into the main historical, social and geographical descriptions in the book.  It is packed with information which is compelling by its sheer obviousness – as soon as you have been told about it!

Reading it reminded me of what turned out to be the first mentioned book in the Bibliography under the General references section: Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” published in 2005.  I read Diamond’s book in a state of continual revelation and “Prisoners of Geography” has a real debt to it – but that does not make “Prisoners of Geography” derivative, it ploughs its own furrow and a compelling one it is too.  Well worth reading.

For those academics among you the most pressing differences are: “Humans” has a brief, chatty section of further reading at the end, while “Prisoners of Geography” has a sectioned bibliography and a full index.  But I must emphasise that both books read themselves and I will be returning to them in the sure and certain knowledge that I will be shocked anew!

My other purchases in Edinburgh comprised some short stories by Ian Rankin (two quid reduced, I couldn’t resist, and the book has been read and already given away as a ‘reader’ for English with an Edinburgh background to Toni’s sister for her edification; catalogues to the Nolde exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, the Rembrandt exhibition in the National Gallery, and the gallery guide to the National Portrait Gallery.  I also bought an old catalogue of watercolours of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, because yes, and gallery guides that I purchased second hand on Amazon together with a Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland volume which, as the contents went on tour in the US of A must have depleted the galleries to an astonishing extent, but must also have made a truly startling exhibition.

Books are heavy, and with only one cabin case I had to be especially winsome and “walking wounded” during my early boarding attempt, to deflect anyone from actually weighing my case.  I had to manfully reject any offers of help just in case they realised by the sheer gravitational pull that I might have been just a smidgeon over the approved weight limit.

All the books are safely home and make a truly satisfying ziggurat of colourful information on the coffee table next to my armchair – and because so many of them are catalogues of paintings I have actually “read” them all as well.  Though, I think that I would aver that actually “reading” a painting takes up a great deal more time that a similar allowance made for text.

One painting stands out, for reasons that I am still working on: Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) The Stoning of Saint Stephen.  Not the beggared version of the painting in Cologne, but rather the “magnificent Edinburgh version, far richer in detail and more complicated in composition” and in particular the extraordinary young man in tip toes in the right hand foreground whose upstretched arms are about to bring a rock on the hapless Stephen’s head.  I also find the dramatically up lit dark haired angel (looking more like a disturbing figure from Degas or Sickett) worthy of note.  To say the least.

I am fascinated by the painting and I am trying to find out more about painter and painting and I think I might write a short monograph on the subject, Watson!

So, plenty to do, plenty to read – as long as the enervating heat keeps off.  Which it doesn’t, so my monograph will be in the realms of fantasy until the weather breaks and I return to my desk rather than the sun lounger!