14 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

Less

I recently finished reading Less by Patrick Grant. It charts the rise of consumption as a factor in historic economic growth which leads us in an ever more voracious, ever less satisfying and sustainable relationship to the things we buy and use… or sometimes just buy and dispose of. It turned out to be handy tonight. We were visiting friends who had a copy on their coffee table and, when our conversation turned to socks made in nearby Hathern, I knew exactly where I could find a photo of the business owner producing them (the kind of small scale, local business Grant champions).

Overall, I am very sympathetic to Grant’s argument although he seems to expend an awful lot of ink to say a few simple things. Perhaps fewer words would have been in keeping with the tenor of the book. It would also have been strengthened by replacing some of those words with some measure of counter argument and by supplementing the useful list of local UK producers with a map. It is nice having such a list but hard work to figure out whether any of them are actually near me. I assume the sock factory gets a mention although I haven’t waded through to verify that.

My verdict? A worthwhile tome but one that can be safely skim-read to get the gist.

13 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

Playing for Memory

Tonight we went to a violin concert hosted at Hathern Baptist Church. Violinist Elaine Patience, accompanied by Gill Townsend on piano, played a selection of pieces including several pieces from the music composed for the film Schindler’s List. That is poignant music at any time but more so at this concert because the instrument Elaine played once belonged to another violinist, called Rosa Levinsky. Rosa’s family had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and settled in Leeds, England. However, in the mid-1930s she accepted a role with the Berlin Philharmonic and was captured by the Nazis in 1938.

During following seven years she passed through three concentration camps, including an extended stint at the infamous Auschwitz and a final period at Bergen-Belsen. She survived, in part, due to her musical skills. She played on her precious violin, which her father had once used to teach the Tsar’s daughters (the royal connection being the primary reason for the family fleeing Russia). Although she survived the war, her health had been compromised and Rosa passed away not long after her chance to testify at the Nuremberg trials. The violin went to her brother, himself a musician, and then to his daughter, who wasn’t. Just under a decade ago, it featured on the BBC’s Repair Shop programme and more recently Elaine has had the opportunity to play it in a variety of places.

This is fulfilling the desire of its owner, the daughter, and the express wishes of her father and her Aunt Rosa. The beauty of the music reminds us of stories that should not be forgotten lest they be repeated. This was my sketch from tonight as I listened to those pieces. Lots of motion so I went for the energy and the vision of light triumphing over darkness.

12 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

Curtain Plates

Over the years we’ve lived in our present house, we’ve had ongoing problems the curtains over the french doors. Double glass doors mean there is a lot of space to cover and, particularly with our heavy winter curtains, the supports keep coming loose at the wall. I’ve have expected a nice concrete lintel over the top and I’ve got just the SDS drill to deal with that… but what sits above the doors seems to be mainly plasterboard. Perhaps there is a lintel further back and the plaster board is just to extend the recess but, short of pulling the whole thing apart, we’ve left with a bit of guess work and two screws for each of the three supports not being quite enough for the job.

What I’ve done this week is create some wooden plates. Those are fastened with four screws and the supports screw into them. The theory is that the wood is a much more stable material to bear the weight so, in effect, each support has four screws holding it to the wall and also spread over a larger area. It looks pretty good and feels pretty secure for now but I need to wait and see how it holds up. If it seems to do the trick, I’ve got another curtain pole upstairs which might benefit from an application of the same approach.

11 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

Sun at the Allotment

I was right about the identity of the recovered key was able to pop over to check on my allotment plot at the end of this morning. All was good although it was good to hoe down some of the weeds around my alliums and broad beans. I also got a decent harvest of kale, a wonderfully hardy and productive plant which should keep producing for months to come – one of those contributors which pays for itself and covers the bill of plenty of the less successful plants too.

As a bonus, after a rainy morning, the sun came out when I got there so I could even take my coat off and enjoy my time in the fresh air.

10 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

Gaps Filled

The online music distribution system I have been working on for the training band has been well received but one person did alert me to a file that seemed not to be available. Rather than just fix that problem, I decided it was probably wise to create a way of checking for other files that were also missing. We’ve now got 250 individual music parts available although most band members see a much smaller selection. That is only going to grow and will be increasingly hard to spot by manual checks.

My solution was to write a quick Python script to look for what the database thinks is available and to then test if it is actually named and located as expected. I actually found six items that needed attention. Four were naming failures in the database: both french horn parts were called “French Horn” but should have been “French Horn 1” and “French Horn 2” to match the associated files; alto and bari sax parts would have been inaccessible for another piece because the database was pointing at “Eb Alto Sax” and “Eb Bari Sax”. There were also two files that were simply missing. It looks like that idea of building an audit tool was a worthwhile one.

I think that has done the job for now and I will run it again from time to time as I build the collection. Future ideas include potentially limiting the scope of the checks (if all three bands get on board, that will be thousands of files so it might run slower than the blink of an eye) and a double check that each file is not only on my local system but also available on the website. Job done for now though.

9 February 2026
by wpAdmin
1 Comment

Key Holiday

On Friday I popped down to the allotment after a slightly longer break than I had planned… only to find that my key for the gate padlock was missing! I thought I was going to have to contact the council and pay the fee for a replacement.

After doing a search at home, I remembered that the set of keys the band uses for getting into rehearse at Thorpe Acre church had gained a mysterious extra key two or three weeks ago. At the time, I thought it was odd but, thinking back, I wondered if that was where my key had gone? Since accidentally dropping the band key in a flower pot outside my front door towards the end of last year (it is so light and flimsy compared to the other keys I normally carry) I had got in the habit of putting it onto my key ring if I was looking after it that week.

On Sunday night, I was able to check and the mystery key looks very much like the one I was missing. I haven’t tried it yet but I’m certain that what was lost is now found! I must have accidentally got it caught up sometime after Christmas. I think it was early January when I last visited the allotment and it has either been too cold or too wet to make it worth visiting since then.

Mystery (hopefully) solved.

8 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

Dumplings Sans Suet

Dinner today was a beef and mushroom stew and Jane decided she wanted dumplings with it. It’s an easy recipe… if you have suet in the cupboard. Fortunately, a quick bit of research suggested that suet wasn’t an essential component. In the end, I used plain flour with butter as the fat component (slightly over half fat to flour), a pinch of salt, a sprinkle of dried tarragon and half a teaspoon of baking powder. Actually, they turned out okay; although it it looks like baking, it is a recipe you can treat more like a stew, throwing in what you’ve got.

Since we’re not out of the cold weather yet, I should get some more chances to experiment before the season for winter stews is finished.

7 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

Seeds purchased (2026)

I’ve made my first seed purchases of the year – some chillis and some sweet peas. Both are seeds that I can be starting any time now (although certainly with some extra heating for the chillis). Time to get going on the gardening year.

6 February 2026
by wpAdmin
0 comments

The Shakespeare of Christianity?

Ian and I have recently started reading Augustine’s Confessions together in a modern translation by Peter Northcutt. It will take us a while, not just because it is quite a hefty volume but because we only catch up every month or two. However, both of us were feeling excited about the project, having read and discussed the first book of the volume.

I speculated that perhaps Augustine could be called the “Shakespeare of Christianity”. Just like the Bard of Avon had a huge influence on the English language, Augustine has a reputation for making an indelible mark on the development of Christian theology. Reading the work, it seemed remarkably contemporary, in part a testament to Northcutt’s translation but also because people have not changed that much over the last millennia or two and Augustine wrote things that still echo today.

Earlier in the week, I’d been looking at Microsoft’s Co-pilot AI tool, which it seems keen to encourage you to use at every turn. I have my doubts about AI but I spotted there was a “Deep Research” option so I set that off on looking into whether others had used the same turn of phrase. TLDR; it didn’t find any examples of academic or other published material using the phrase although it suggested that there were several ways in which it could be appropriate.

I’m still not entirely trusting of Co-pilot to do research and it’s sycophantic tone makes me more rather than less suspicious. However, perhaps I have managed to come up with a novel idea. I’d be interested both if anyone can suggest any prior art that proves co-pilot missed something obvious or observations from those better informed than me about both Augustine and Shakespeare on whether the comparison is worthwhile or fatuous.

5 February 2026
by wpAdmin
1 Comment

Here are your parts

We’ve recently had an influx of new people at the Charnwood Training Band, which is wonderful. It fills in some gaps where people had moved on and we’ve also gone from not having any French Horns (for as long as I’ve played with the group) to sometimes having three of them. One consequence though is that we need to make sure new players have music to work from.

Working with the band’s librarian, I have been developing an online system for doing this. My eureka moment this week was figuring out that I can both stop the music being available more widely than it ought to be and not bewilder players with too many choices by ask them to login with just the email address we already use for our third-party online events system. If I’ve got a table that stores their name, the section of the band they belong to and (for security) a hashed version of their email address, I can hook up the email to a suitable selection of parts. It is safe enough for our purposes and means nobody needs to remember an extra password.

Band members probably know the email addresses of some of the other members but we’d share the parts with them if they wanted anyway. Sometimes people do move from one instrument to another – I went from electric bass to tuba although, in that case, both are part of the bass section. I’ll also need to think about whether there is a similarly simple way to give certain people, like the conductor and librarian a “golden key” allowing them to see everything.

Tonight I finished the programming groundwork. Now I need to complete the data table and start filling in the gaps in what is available to share.

Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress