I sometimes abuse ampersands

What I read

Finished My Favourite Mistake in a mad whirl, really, it just kept going.

Anthony Berkeley, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) - a group of mostly amateur criminologists sit round discusssing (and also do a bit of freelance detecting) apropos a recent case in which it was assumed that woman who ate the poisoned chocolates was not the target as they were sent to someone else who gave them to her husband: who had it in for the apparent target? - naturally it transpires that massively complicated plot was aimed at the actual victim but the who, how and why remain matters for debate. This was not at all bad, so I downloaded a couple more of Berkeley's Roger Sheringham mysteries from Project Gutenberg.

Unfortunately a bit less prepossessed by The Mystery at Lover's Cave (1927) and The Layton Court Mystery (1925) because we perceive a pattern of Sheringham flailing around and building up theories, coming across clues (sometimes by vast coincidence) and then constructing an entirely new theory, and then right at the end the whole thing turns more or less inside out when the actual murderer is revealed, too late or in circumstances in which it seems prudent to take no action. Do not think I shall proceed with the oeuvre.

Have been thinking for a while of a re-read of Little Women (1868). Alas, these days one does not just glide over the plonking moral lessons that are constantly invoked as one follows the story.

Have just finished Trailblazer, which I was dipping in and out of all week, because I did find the chatty style really rather irksome. Also a few niggly things (e.g. how can you mention Hertha Ayrton without the being rejected for Fellowship of Royal Society because married woman? - surely totally pertinent to the kinds of things Barbara Bodichon was campaigning about???).

On the go

Have just picked up Alison Li, Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution (2023), which I have been meaning to get to for a while.

Up next

Well, one of the books I am reviewing has finally turned up, so that, I guess, is in my future.

So today I, in company with partner, excursed.

We went over to Holland Park - an area I rather seldom visited even in former times - to take in the small Barbara Hepworth exhibition at the Piano Nobile gallery:

Barbara Hepworth: Strings
which has some very choice things from private collections, gosh, I would like to have one of those small Hepworths ‘hand sculpture’ she called them, e.g. this one.

Also features a couple of small versions of the famed Winged Figure that features on John Lewis in Oxford Street.

Other sights of interest encountered included

Pottery Lane, once a 'wretched and notorious slum known as the "Potteries and the Piggeries"' and now exceedingly gentrified.

and

Lansdowne House, which has a blue plaque commemorating its use as studios by several rather second-division late C19th artists. Nothing to commemorate its importance as a recording studio in the 60s and 70s. It now consists of 13 'beautiful apartments' and is Grade II heritage listed.

Why a walk in town can be just as good for you as a stroll in the countryside (Duh).

I was boggled by this: 'I have lived and worked in central London for decades and so I struggle to come up with anywhere new', because it tends to be that one develops runlines like an animal in the jungle, also, there is ALOT of London? I felt quite elated when the rather banal matter of medical appointments took me to Belsize Park and its teeny wildflower meadow beside the walkway to the Royal Free Hospital.

But I am all for urban walking and one of my current woez - has been for some years ahem - is that my urban flaneusing across the Atlantic has been on hold, and even if all the other factors no longer pertained, I am so not going at this present moment.

Sigh.

(Though I have just been looking back to see how long ago were my last visits to a) New York and b) Chicago (that was not just O'Hare for onwards transit) and it was Quite A While. Last Madison for Wiscon trip was 2019.)

This week's bread: a rather basic but rather good wheatgerm loaf: 2:1 wholemeal/strong white flour and a couple of tablespoonsful of wheatgerm, splosh of sunflower oil, nice texture, tasty.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour, maple syrup (I could possibly have used a little more of this), sultanas.

Today's lunch: the Mediterranean roasted vegetable thing: whole garlic cloves, red onion, fennel, aubergine, baby courgettes, half a red bell pepper, Piccarrella peppers, served with couscous with toasted pinenuts and raisins.

There have been several reviews of this crossed my path over the last couple of weeks: The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal: The Observer, Guardian Saturday and also Literary Review (doesn't appear to be one of the ones openly accessible).

I'm not sure I'm up for reading about that amount of medical abuse.

But.

I had to do with the papers of the doc in question, which were donated via a medical historian associated with my former place of work, who was intending writing a biography - this never got completed or published, possibly because the person had a lot of other projects on the go.

I note the reviews mention that the book, besides mentioning the well-evidenced abuse of known patients, goes on into the entirely speculative area of whether Sargant was also involved in Sekkritt Guvment Research, which I had to field several enquiries about back in the day. (I think at least one of these posited that he was conducting this in the basement of St Thomas's Hospital, like nobody would notice???)

One of my personal take-aways from this (and other medical scandals of a similar period) was that our modern ideas of medical ethics (e.g. informed consent to treatment) came out of the disclosure of these and other abuses and they did not exist at the time. Doctors had a quite egregious sense of their own powers and few dared to question them.

'Toad he went a-pleasuring': Toads risk their lives crossing a Somerset road to mate. This year, a patrol rescued thousands:

Charlcombe Lane is closed annually for six weeks in February and March as volunteers patrol every night from dusk to help toads, frogs and newts on their journey to their breeding lake. This toad patrol is one of more than 200 across the country that take part in the national Toads on Roads project run by the amphibian and reptile conservation charity, Froglife. Across the six weeks, more than 50 volunteers on the Charlcombe Toad Rescue group spent more than 648 hours in high visibility jackets, armed with torches, buckets and special gloves, walking slowly up and down the road.
Toads, frogs and newts are carefully picked up and taken safely in buckets to five drop off points to help them on their journey towards the lake.

Awwwww, bless.

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A rather grimmer tale - modern high-tech version of 'ooops the hospital mixed up the babbiez in the nursery and sent the wrong ones home with the parents': Legal and ethical ‘nightmare’ after woman gives birth to stranger’s child due to Monash IVF mistake:

“The evidence of it being an isolated incident is really only because they’ve never had to check or disclose,” said Dawson. “One in 18 births are IVF-conceived children, [and] if these checks and balances are being missed as recently as last year, there needs to be more record-keeping and more information.”
Leading Australian IVF specialist and former Monash IVF director Prof Gab Kovacs said there were over 100,000 IVF cycles in Australia annually, so every few years a mistake is made. “There have been mistakes recognised in the past, it’s more often that the wrong sperm is used when the sperm and the egg are put together,” he told ABC Radio Melbourne.

More on the problems generated by MODERN SCIENCE!!! in this case: Genetic descent: a new challenge for the management of human remains in museums:

Over the past year, an increasing number of UK institutions have received enquiries from customers of commercial DNA companies about individuals in their care who have been sampled for ancient DNA analysis.
Typically, ancient DNA results are published open-access and the data deposited with online databanks.
International commercial DNA companies who focus on ancestry are now using these datasets to match their customers with archaeological human remains – and advising them that they are a ‘direct descendant’ of this past individual.
Some customers, curious about their ancestry, are accessing the publications and then contacting the institutions curating the human remains. Typically, these enquiries ask for more information about the individual and their archaeological context – a request not too dissimilar from the usual range of questions received by an institution about their holdings.
But these new type of enquiry poses several challenges – foremost, that existing guidance and advice about the management of human remains published by (among others) the Advisory Panel on the Archaeology of Burials in England, does not specifically deal with this issue.

Most institutions in the UK do not have a curator dedicated solely to human remains, and many do not have an archaeology curator.
Institutional knowledge about holdings and research activities has been lost due to staff-cuts, and less well-funded institutions have been unable to continue their membership of specialist networks or other professional bodies, who can provide advice and support.
The situation is compounded by rapid developments in the methods and reliability of ancient DNA studies, which means that without specialist knowledge and access to that scholarship, understanding the issues raised by these enquiries may be impossible without help.

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Dept, 'More Money Than Sense' x 2:

Influencers 'new' threat to uncontacted tribes, warns group after US tourist arrest:

Social media influencers pose a "new and increasing threat" for uncontacted indigenous people, a charity has warned after the arrest of a US tourist who travelled to a restricted Indian Ocean island.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, allegedly landed on North Sentinel Island in an apparent attempt to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe, filming his visit and leaving a can of coke and a coconut on the shore.

‘Rachel Reeves is making us move to Italy’. This person is an 'entrepreneur' with 'an MBA and PhD in finance' as well as being a reality TV star, and yet she is terrified that Italian waiters will somehow compel her to ingest pasta and pizza. (Apart from anything else, this suggests a woefully limited knowledge of the range of Italian cucina, no?) Awww, diddums.

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Did I post this before? Seized Books! An online exhibition:

LGBTQ+ books and censorship in 1980s Britain.
On 10 April 1984, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise raided Gay’s the Word bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury.
'Operation Tiger' saw officers seize over 140 titles, worth thousands of pounds.
Bookshop staff and directors were charged with conspiracy to import so-called ‘indecent or obscene’ material.
But Gay’s the Word and their supporters fought back...