Wine Notes

Lirac - stumbled upon as a bin end. Unusual and complex flavour. Southern Rhone, I believe. Bering French, no idea of which grapes are in it - maybe Grenache. Will look out for it in future. When retired, will drift through Sounthern France discovering this sort of thing.

Rowan Williams - Mangement Guru

A few thoughts from a confirmed atheist:
Williams was that rare bird: a public intellectual. A real bonus at a time of influential though vacuous celebrities and capable though impotent academics. We were lucky to have him.
He disregarded the conventional wisdom from the management textbooks i.e. ensure that you keep stating your uncompromising vision, and that you insist that all your employees share it. To me, this has always been a disastrous outlook in most walks of life, particularly in organisations staffed by intelligent people. If you really push the vision, you might just find out that others don't share it, and then what do you do? If you are brutal or manipulative enough, they might just pretend to agree with you, but what good does that do? Williams was more subtle, working in the grey area between competing visions and factions. For those of us who have to work in this zone, he is a shining example of what can be achieved. His detractors will say that he didn't move things forward, but there are other goals in management. What about avoiding disaster? 

Branching Out

Trying to ring the changes, and give myself an interesting thing to do at the weekend, I tried a couple of recipes from the River Cafe Cookbook. Pork cooked in milk was satisfying, though I overcooked the pork a little. Good to serve a dish where the sauce is meant to curdle. Even better was the potato gratin with pancetta; although it contained a large amount of very thick cream, it was much lighter and fresher than a gratin dauphinoise. Maybe the 'authorities' are onto something when they extol Italian food over French. I'll let you know in due course.

Good news - having read Oliver Sacks's 'The Mind's Eye' I have now diagnosed myself as suffering from mild congenital prosopagnosia. All these years my wife has been telling me I just can't recognise faces very well. The only serious problem it causes me is when negligent TV directors cast two women with the same hairstyle in the same drama. Now I know how the dyslexia victim feels when they have been newly defined as not stupid. I am vindicated, but no better off really. Will continue to read the book in case I have something else as well.

A favourite quote from Borges; not typical of his writing, but it amuses me!

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

A few writers I would recommend:
Jorge Luis Borges (translated from the Spanish) - extraordinary short stories, easier to read than to describe.
Stephen Jay Gould - a real scientist with a real flair for essay writing
John Lanchester - I knew his work before the current hype; The Debt to Pleasure is wonderful

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
Alberto Moravia