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Cambridge is a proverbially small place; anything you do, you expect to run into someone from a completely different context doing it. So I was surprised yesterday when this didn't happen.

Kit Marlowe was born about 450 years ago; the Cambridge Marlowe Society, which was founded 107 years ago, is putting on all Marlowe's plays this year in celebration. Last night was Dr Faustus; I'd never seen it performed - I'd never read it - and so I went along out of curiosity.

It started with a wince-inducing undergraduate-luvvies prologue: obviously deliberately designed to induce wincing, but that's not what I go to the theatre for, so I was relieved when it segued into actual Marlowe. It's definitely of Shakespeare's time; it had something of the Hamlet nature where the best lines had become cliches disconnected from the play - "This is Hell, nor am I out of it" "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships". Very good leads; I thought the interaction of lusty Faustus with a silent Helen of Troy who absolutely showed in face and poise how little she wanted to be there was particularly well-done.

I was surprised how bitty it felt: it had the comic-relief scenes that, presumably, an Elizabethan audience expected - I have no idea what mix of comedy and horror a 1595 audience would have felt at Faustus slapping the Pope, but I'm fairly sure the scene where two rustics steal a goblet, taunt an innkeeper, vex Mephistopheles and get turned into ape and dog was nothing but comic relief - but they didn't fit in with the rest of the play in the way that Shakespeare sometimes offered. A bit of me felt that the story would work well as over-the-top cinema - there is a Burton-and-Taylor film from 1967, but it's a film of a stage production rather than something with Cecil B deMille production design.

Really a good evening; if you're in Cambridge without plans, there are plenty of seats for the 2:30 matinee, and some (quite a long way back) for the 7:45 still available today.

Google Maps gives you really unrealistic expectations for what scrolling image viewers can offer you.

The Hubble Legacy Archive contains basically every image Hubble has taken, except those less than a year old where the investigator hasn't finished writing the paper yet. You can view them in a scrolling image viewer: here is the giant elliptical galaxy Maffei 1 in near-infra-red light (represented as orange) and sort of greenish-yellow light (represented as teal). It has a sort of nicotine-stained hue to it, and the brown wisps to the right of the core are dust in our galaxy rather than in Maffei-1.

But that image is really all there is. You can zoom in if you want, but rather than suddenly switching to an aerial view where you can zoom in further and count the cars and believe that you could tell which of the little people below is wearing the red-and-white horizontally striped shirt, the pixels just get fuzzier. Hubble is the highest-resolution telescope we have that can take pictures this wide; Keck doesn't seem to have taken any pictures of this galaxy, it's about thirty pixels across in the image from Spitzer.

It's all that is known; and it's a nicotine-stained oval blob.

Serves four quite hungry people, or one quite hungry person four times; or fills one lunch-box for about a week

400 grams of chicken breast, coarsely diced

200 grams of bacon, finely chopped - my friends all recommend using scissors

Two 400-gram tins of chopped tomatoes

Twenty of those small pitted black olives that you get in jars packed in brine, cut into quarters (that's about two-thirds of a jar; use the whole jar if you really like olives)

Half a small butternut squash, diced neither especially fine nor especially coarse

Half an onion, finely chopped

Dried Mixed Herbs from the Mixed Herb jar

Put a little oil into a casserole pot and put the heat under it; add the onion and the bacon and let it fry a bit, add the chicken and let it fry a bit more, add the tomato and let it bubble a bit, add the olives and let it bubble a bit, add the herbs, add the diced squash, put the lid on it and put it in a moderate oven (gas mark 4) for about an hour.

Take the lid off, stir vigorously to encourage the butternut squash to disintegrate, put the lid back on and leave for about another 45 minutes. Take the lid off, stir vigorously, leave the lid off, put it back in the oven while you make some pasta-that-comes-as-individual-pasts (I used penne; fusilli or farfalle would work nicely; spaghetti or tagliatelle wouldn't). Take out of oven, serve with pasta.

The olives and the Mixed Herbs add a nice pizza-ish taste, the squash disintegrates as you boil it in acid and thickens and sweetens the tomatoes as they reduce; the bacon vanishes leaving its flavour and the occasional meaty speck. It comes out a lovely volcanic orange.

In 2013 I succumbed somewhat to the deceptions of paper wealth; the stock market has been good to me (in ways that the graph doesn't depict), so I spent more than I took in and sold shares to pay for it. 2014 ought to be a bit cheaper - I'm not planning to leave the country quite so often, though I suppose three of the five trips in 2013 hadn't been planned on New Year's Day 2013, and I have no plans to increase my computer farm further.

Last year's is here

Mostly at home in Cambridge.

However:

Three days in January at a boutique hotel in Madrid to go to my nephew's first birthday party

A night on a plane Heathrow -> Buenos Aires

Four nights in the rather fancy Hotel Lancaster in Buenos Aires

Two nights in a slightly less fancy hostel in Buenos Aires

A night on a long-distance bus Buenos Aires -> Cordoba

A night in a hotel in Cordoba

A night on a long-distance bus Cordoba -> Mendoza

A night in a hotel in Mendoza

A night on a super-long-distance bus Mendoza -> Buenos Aires

A night on a plane Buenos Aires -> Heathrow

Four nights in the Istanbul Hostel (it's a hostel. In Istanbul) on a trip with rezendi

One night in a hostel in Split, entirely sleepless owing to a profound disagreement with a fish

One night in an unplanned hostel in Zagreb because the hostel I'd booked at was inaccessible due to the policing for the EU Accession celebrations

Two nights in a planned hostel in Zagreb

One night at the far-too-hippyish Celica Art Hostel in Ljubljana

Three nights at Wombats City Hostel in Munich

Five nights at Hotel Gouverneur, Montreal attending papersky's convention

Four nights at Herald Square Hotel, 31st & Broadway, NYC with aardvark179

Two nights at Loews Hotel, centre of Philadelphia with aardvark179

A night on the red-eye from Dulles to London

Two nights at the Halfway House Country Lodge outside Yeovil, with my family for my cousin Sarah's wedding

Two nights at the Driskill Hotel, Austin, Texas

Four nights at the Holiday Inn, Town Lake, Austin

A night on the quite civilised plane that leaves Houston at 9pm and gets into London at 10am

rezendi

autopope

Lsat Tuesday my manager asked whether I wanted to come along to the project start-up meetings this week. I thought this would be a very good idea to try to get properly acquainted with the shape of the project; the start-up meetings are at ARM's Austin office, so on Saturday I spent twenty-one hours travelling, and have two days to recover in Austin before the meetings start.

It's a Texas winter's day, which reads to me as a balmy UK spring; I'm slightly too warm in cord trousers and a light jumper. At 7:30 on a Sunday you could film a zombie movie downtown without any of the normal issues with blocking off streets, but everything has livened up by about nine.

The first thing that struck me was the birds; there is a common long-tailed crow-shaped bird, slightly glossy if you see it close up, with a loud voice that it's fond of using and a habit of perching somewhere visible, and vocalisations including the classic movie door-squeaks-open sound. There are large white herons. In one of the parking lots I saw a bluejay, which is a distinctly surprising bird to a Briton. In the lake in the middle of town there are wild turtles; I'll admit I stood on the bridge looking down at them with a big smile on my face.

I walked across to the temple of commerce that is the first Whole Foods store, expecting that it might serve breakfast. I suppose British and American retail traditions have had a long time to diverge, but it was a weird place combining absolute absurd abundance with a sort of open-plan arrangement in which you couldn't readily find anything. It didn't serve breakfast; I ended up walking a bit round the lake and eating in a creperie where the language of the staff and the kitchen was French.

I found the fabled bat-roosting bridge, but most of the bats go to Mexico for the winter and come back in March; there was a little of the high-pitched squeaking that suggests the presence of bats on gnat-ridden summer evenings by the Cam. I will be in Mexico in March, but by then the bats will be back in Texas.

I will probably go up and see if I can go on a tour of the Capitol this afternoon; its brown granite was quite impressive in the early morning sunshine. If anyone reading this knows Austin and can think of fun places to eat tonight and interesting things to do tomorrow, please let me know.

Current Location: Austin, TX

You need: 300g shortcrust pastry (the kind sold in the freezer in Budgens is fine), 250g of chicken breasts, a red pepper, a leek, some green thai curry paste, 150g of coconut cream, and some sort of starchy porous roast vegetable - I happened to have been roasting a butternut squash, but I think potato would work as well.

I am sure somebody somewhere in south-east Asia has eaten this, and I couldn't face not using the name, but the curry paste is clearly the only Thai thing about it.

recipe

Take a fairly small, deep pie dish (mine is 6cm deep and 16cm across at the top); line it with 2/3 of the shortcrust pastry rolled fairly thick. Chop the chicken breasts into medium-sized pieces, cook in hot oil until just browning on the outside and put into the pie case. Take the seeds out of the red pepper and discard; cut the rest into medium-sized pieces. Also chop the leek into fairly small pieces.

In a saucepan, heat up a tablespoon or so of Thai Green Curry mix with about 150ml of coconut cream, until it bubbles, and cook the red pepper in the mix for about five minutes; separately, in the frying pan you used for the chicken, fry the leek until fairly thoroughly fried. Put the frying-pan's contents into the pie case; pour over the contents of the saucepan - if it still looks dry, heat up a bit more coconut cream with a bit more green curry mix and add. Fill any spare space in the pie case with bits of roast vegetable; roll out the rest of the pastry and put it on top. Pinch round the edge, because that's half the fun of pie-making.

Bake gas mark six for about 45 minutes, until the shortcrust pastry has gone golden brown. Eat hot. A pie without spare space in is delightful after the commercial kind which are full of air, and the spiced coconut cream soaks marvellously into the pastry.

A little while ago, I bought a thermal-infra-red camera. It was quite expensive, and I was not entirely sure what to do with it.

I was able to take surprisingly unflattering pictures of my friends, some of whom had cold fingers, were handling oddly-shaped insulating objects, or were drinking cold cider:

Normal spectacle lenses are good mirrors for thermal-IR, so everyone appears to be wearing Latin-American-dictator sunglasses indoors.

I could determine the existence of the moon, that my bicycle had not been stolen, and that the houses opposite had had their roofs insulated:

I could observe that black clothes left to dry in an unventilated conservatory in midsummer get really quite hot, that the hot-water pump in my airing-cupboard was connected to a well-insulated tank by poorly-insulated piping, that the microwave melted chocolate very irregularly, and that the USB-to-ethernet chip on my ODROID-X devboard was getting rather hot (see the PCB shot in visible light)

In addition, I could determine where on the rug I had been standing, deduce that at some point in the night my garden contained at least one cat, and conclude that the ventilator in the corner of my living room was letting cold air in.

You can also deduce by looking at the video feed from the camera that glass windows and shiny metal objects are reflective in the infra-red, but it's a bit hard to take a photo to show that.

I would really appreciate interesting ideas of other things to photograph in the ten-micron band; my house doesn't seem to have any particularly exciting opportunities for insulation, but if anyone has a dwelling with inexplicable cold spots or a machine with inexplicable hot spots, I can at least document them in exchange for a small amount of polite conversation. I'm wondering whether there is interest to be had in the depths of the Fens on a cold November night, but would rather not do that alone.

I am not entirely sure how happy this device is to be taken across international borders - it's the 9Hz version, so was exportable from the US to the EU and is happy within the EU, but I suspect taking it to India or China would attract quite the wrong kind of attention from customs.

Neither

pseudomonas nor I had been to Canterbury before, and it's a fairly easy journey on HS1; so, today, off we went.

The convenient station is Canterbury West and the cathedral is on the east side of town, so you start by walking down the high street and through the west gate. This was built in 1370, along with a substantial city wall, as the town feared invasion by the French; two stocky round towers in solid grey limestone with a cars-width gap between them and plenty of loopholes through which to fire on Frenchmen with newly-invented guns.

The high street has a very odd mix of shops, half Whitby (tourist traps, tattoo places and purveyors of Miscellaneous Gothicana) and half Bath (tea shops and highish-end retail), in a wide assortment of styles from authentic Tudor to spectacularly-mock Stuart.

Lunch at Canteen Fresh, purveyors of tasty assorted wraps, and over to the Cathedral Close. It's £9.50 to get in, but worth it. You enter under a statue of the Great Green Christ, and proceed through a portico adorned with what I assume are Victorian replicas of the original statues, to a nave which soars to infinity.

The suggested route takes you up the north side of the nave, and straight into the heart of the late Victorian era; the wall is covered in plaques commemorating the dead of various actions of Empire. Then you reach the site of the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, with a modern monument of jagged bloody swords, and descend a few steps into the ancient, unadorned, slightly damp-smelling undercroft. Parts of this are as Low Church as it gets, wooden chairs in a circle around an undecorated altar-table, with a statue of welded nails hung above you.

You go out into the cloisters, to a not particularly exciting herb-garden, and come back in up the Dean's Steps - stone steps, worn away in the middle by myriads of feet over centuries and then recently built back up in contrasting-coloured and rather coarse concrete - to the area where the great shrine to St Thomas à Becket was. Here there is original stained glass all around you.

As you leave the shrine area you get to the south-east transept. As we were there the sun was shining full on the 1959 Bossanyi stained-glass windows, and the splendour of colour was quite singular and completely unphotographable - a spectacular suffusion of scarlet. The line might not be so great - those faces feel as if they owe a lot to Disney - but the impact of the colour is staggering.

thousandfold-splendour

Then we wandered around the close again and found the main cloisters. The ceiling is decorated with a coat-of-arms on every boss, and I didn't manage to find any repeats.

all-the-shields

Off the cloister is the chapter house, which is another spectacularly big space; this time the roof is in two parts of different slopes, and the ceiling vault is painted with suns and stars

chapterhouse-ceiling

The Frauenkirche dates from the late fifteenth century - it was planned to have an elaborate openwork spire, but they ran out of money and put the pepperpots on in 1525; the Neues Rathaus dates from 1909 but was clearly designed to fit in with the late fifteenth century.

Double-action steam engine, Deutsches Museum, Munich

One of the things I like about working with computers is that you almost never have to oil them

I'm back in England now, and so there is no longer an obvious point each evening to upload photos. But there are lots of photos left; I'll start with this nice iridescent dragonfly that I found in the grounds of Schloss Schleißheim ten miles outside Munich

flything

And, since you probably haven't heard of Schloss Schleißheim, I'd better post a picture.

schloss

The palace was built in 1701-04 by the Elector of Bavaria on a Versailles scale and with spectacular gardens equipped with fountains; this is a shot with a long lens from the end of the formal gardens a quarter-mile away. He was expecting to become Holy Roman Emperor, at which point the palace might well have been as famous as Versailles, but didn't. I was in Schleißheim to see the aircraft collection of the Deutsches Museum, and the Schloss happens to be between the S-bahn station and the museum; it came as a complete and very pleasant surprise.

The aircraft collection had some obvious and impressive things

typhoon-prototype

And some smaller and less bombastic things

wheeldown

The plaque is readable in the original with a bit of processing, and says 'Zur Erinnerung aus meine Landung ohne Räder aus LVUL II.197: Schwerind 19-3-1917'; the clock is clearly mounted on the remains of the propeller hub after that wheels-up landing.

Before the Bavarian Anti-Defamation League hunt me down and I find an angry Wolperting in my hostel bed, I should say that there is at least one really good restaurant here. It's at the Chinesische Turm in the Englischer Garten to the north-east of the city centre

and you are admittedly serenaded with oompah music of the most oompahorrific kind

but the menu is reasonably interesting and very pleasant. Goat's-cheese creme brûlée with a spiced crunchy apple mash and a fresh salad, served with an interesting rosé

fillet of local fish on a bed of spinach with finely-sliced radish bits in, in a fish broth with tasty tomato chunks, served with a vigorous white wine

and a trio of successfully weird puddings: chocolate brownie with apricot, tiramisu made with weißbier rather than the usual espresso soaked sponges, and gorgeous strawberry ice cream rolled in crispy rocket pieces and Szechuan pepper, served with a double espresso.

Current Location: Germany, Bavaria, Munich, Ludwigsvorstadt

From the Jagd- und Fischereimuseum on the main street through central Munich. This is an absurd museum, containing not only a fine collection of crossbows, not only a baronial hall lined with carefully-labelled antlers,

not only a set of stuffed exemplars of the fauna of Bavaria down to the Feldhamster and a pair of feral guinea-pigs that someone found living in a rabbit burrow, but an entire fifteen-metre-long side-gallery devoted to taxidermists' jokes with laborious multi-paragraph articles about the habitats and behaviours of the Wolpertinger depicted.

Current Location: Germany, Bavaria, Munich, Ludwigsvorstadt

On Thursday I took the six-hour, three-country train trip from Ljubljana to Munich.

There is an awful lot of blather written about the British Discovery of the Alps, mostly along the lines of

ELIZABETH Howard, do not these mountains bear an aspect most unlike the pastoral climes of Gloucestershire?
HOWARD Indeed my dear: nor do the meadows reflect the most refined agricultural practices than my uncle Lord Townshend is pioneering in Surrey

ELIZABETH Do not the skies lower most greyly? Might one not feel a certain almost pleasurable anticipation of Peril?

HOWARD Indeed my dear one might. Is it not fortunate that this train is provided with the finest precautions that Man can contrive against such happenstance!

(an AVALANCHE sweeps train, Howard and Elizabeth away)

Current Location: Germany, Bavaria, Munich, Ludwigsvorstadt

To further reduce the already well-contained risk of pig deficiency, you will observe that they have put little shreds of bacon into the sauerkraut itself

The role of the green thing remains unclear; it may be a tribute to the unBavarian culinary tradition of the 'vegetable'. The wise diner would discard it at once.

Current Location: Germany, Bavaria, Munich, Ludwigsvorstadt

From the Mimara museum in Zagreb:

Current Location: Slovenia, Ljubljana

[Poll #1922406]

Current Location: Slovenia, Ljubljana

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Tom Womack

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Tom Womack

Recent Entries

The world: larger than expected

How little we know

Wholesome volcanic casserole

New year, new retrospective pie chart

Overnight meme

Greetings from Texas

Thai Pie

Foolish purchases of the age

An archdiocesan outing

Less of a tombstone, more of a CV

... and on the third volume of his tombstone ...

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Lovely meal yesterday

Traditional Bavarian ferret holster

Across the Alps

A thoroughly German approach

I saw this and thought of pavanne

Jugenstilissimus

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March 2024

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