I've been hung up on the proof of Theorem 10 for about the past fortnight:

https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/hitchi...2_Quadrics.pdf

And I understand what the theorem says. but the "elementary" proof makes no sense to me, and this is all undergraduate stuff. But there's going to be a new, healthier regime where I will understand it coming soon, Phat.

I'd be in for a Holmes tour if I ever get back to London.

There's a new Dan Kitchener on Commercial Street, and of course my standing in awe in front of it provokes an American couple into asking me about Banksy. This is the Main Line, I inform them. You are right now in exactly the right place. This is World Class. 2023. Go on, tell me otherwise.

https://www.dankitchener.com/street-...aItem-ln8b20nc

I mean, assuming Hanratty did it, that is one sick coincidence that Alphon, initially the prime suspect before Hanratty's name was mentioned, was staying at the same, crumby, Maida Vale hotel at the same time. I think the attraction is in that there is an objective reality - somebody was the A6 rapist and murderer - which one can only try to piece together with often subjective evidence. A condensed version of one's perennial struggles. Why, it would take a Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

I looked at ordering that book you posted: In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, by Michael Harrison, but it is unclear to me how to do this without inadvertently signing up for Amazon Prime. I struggle with the modern world.

I can't decide if it's much of a coincidence or not. The hotel called the police when it found the cartridge cases in one of its rooms which it thought had been stayed in by Alphon but then said he and Hanratty had switched rooms for some reason.

If the DNA sample had been contaminated then that changes everything of course, though Valerie was utterly convinced she had identified the right man.

I think Alphon was arrested, after acting suspiciously in a Finsbury Park hotel, named publicly by the police as the suspect, and put on an identity parade, on which Valerie Storie identified someone innocent, before the cartridge cases were found in the Vienna hotel, which was three weeks after the crime. I could be wrong, though.

No, the public naming of Alphon and his arrest and the first identity parade were after the cartridge cases were found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hanratty

I don't think that alters that it was a sick coincidence, though.

Or maybe it does. If they find the cartridge cases first, and pin it on one guy staying there, and it turns out to be another guy staying there, that's not much of a coincidence.

It was Paul Foot's book, Who Killed Hanratty?, which I read when I was 16, and remember vividly reading, that swayed me. ****ing left-wing propagandists.

I'm still not sure.

The most persuasive evidence against him is his identification by Valerie, but she failed to pick him out from the first ID parade and said she identified him in a subsequent ID parade by his voice.

The DNA evidence is dubious as the sample from the 1961 crime scene was likely contaminated by standard police procedures at that time (bundling all the relevant items together).

Alphon went on to attack Mrs Meike Dalal in her home in an incident with striking similarities to the A6 attacks.

Alphon continued to confess to the crimes for 10 years, while both Paul Foot and Richard Ingrams stated he had incriminated himself many times when they interviewed him.

I'm not sure what you're saying here.

On the first ID parade, she not only didn't pick Alphon, she positively identified an innocent party. On the second, she picked Hanratty, including via voice identification, and stuck unwaveringly to that choice throughout the trial and for the rest of her life. Hanratty's lawyers were not informed of the first ID parade, and no mention of it was made at the trial.

I guess I'm saying I find it quite an unsound conviction overall. He may well have been guilty but there still seems to be a lot of reasonable doubt.

I've still got it. I wonder how expensive it would be to ship a book to London?

If I just label it, "charlie's black cab, London, UK", that'll get to you, right?

To be serious, if you want me to investigate and can set a cap on $, there's a UPS office < 1 mile from my house. I can go ask what it would take to ship.

I walked into a McDonald's yesterday and tried to buy a hamburger and couldn't figure out how to do it. I walked out after 5 minutes.

Thanks a lot, but that's such a non-utilitarian solution that I just ordered it. I paid the delivery charge so that means I'm safe, right? It happened once before, and much to my surprise, sending them an email saying I DON'T WANT AMAZON PRIME actually worked.

The book arrived, and I am about 100 pages into it. To learn the geography of London is inevitably to learn something of its history and culture, I found, but the author is coming at it from an opposite direction. A fictional character in a real city; yes, the boundary is probably blurred, and that's interesting, but perhaps not up to the point of obsessing over where, exactly, Holmes would have taken a Turkish bath and purchased tobacco, etc.

The book contains two clues as to the identity of its previous owner. It was sold by S. J. Arrowsmith booksellers in Sunderland, which was the hometown of nearly all my maternal ancestors, going back to about 1730. Second - and this I have interpreted as a sign - it contained a A2-sized page from The Times newspaper, from Tuesday, April 1, 1980, containing a spoof article, in archaically small type, entitled "The shocking case of the unknown Sherlock Holmes", by one David Sinclair. Who, I discovered, wrote a book called "Sherlock Holmes's London", which is presently on order.

Edit: Ah, here's the page itself: https://sherlockholmesportland.com/2...erlock-holmes/

The cab has been in for its yearly overhaul, and subsequent TFL certificate for roadworthyness, for too long, and it probably doesn’t matter in the long run, but I’ve been going stir-crazy waiting around, so today, prompted by Sherlock Holmes’s exploits, I decided to take myself off to Norbury, and retrace some steps. My introduction to South-West London came a decade ago, when I signed up to a tuition agency in Earlsfield. As soon as they realized that I both could teach and needed the money, they sent me all over the place: Wandsworth, Tooting, Morden, Streatham, Mitcham, Thornton Heath, South Norwood, New Addington, Wimbledon, Wimbledon Park, Balham, Clapham, Purley, Sutton, Kingston, Surbition, Tolworth, Raynes Park, … So today I did a walk from the early days, from the Furzedown area of Tooting, near Streatham Common station, down Streatham Vale to a place so nondescript that the first time I saw it I was surprised it even had a name, which is Pollards Hill. Half inter-war terraces, like so much of suburban London, and half some large, post-war, low-rise, almost prefabricated estate, like something out of East Berlin, that not only looks like you can’t walk through it, like most such estates, but actually you can’t, it’s all Closes; you have to walk around it, in order to get to the hidden, uninviting entrance to the hill itself, on top of which is a good view, a classy marker post and an altogether more affluent world. Hardly a soul about on either side. For the real London, which is everywhere and nowhere, take the tram ride between Wimbledon and Croydon.

I hated all the teaching conformity bullshit. Work hard and behave and take your place in society, kids. What does that have to do with mathematics? Not much. Frankie could do math but was too bad even for the special school they put the bad kids in. Younger brother Bradley jumping around, as well as a pitbull and a two-year old, Disney Channel playing full-blast on the HD flatscreen, mum and some cousin smoking weed in the doorway, No one giving a ****. Classic. Half the time, his mum would ring me in the morning with “Frankie’s not feeling well today.” Awesome, I get paid for doing nothing. What are you going to do, Frankie? I’m going to be an electrician, and have my own company with about two vans. I have little doubt of it. You’re probably earning a fortune.

I think the idea that there is no such thing as talent is a worthy and interesting position to take, but after 10 years of teaching math, in varying contexts, that was not my experience, which was rather that some kids get it and some don’t. There is a level to which talent will take you, and then the rest, unless you’re John Daly, is work. One thing about tuition is that it’s impossible to evaluate its effects, because exam results with tuition cannot be compared to those without. I cannot think of another thing you can buy with that property. With one student, even though she liked me and her mother adored me, I don’t believe it made a difference. Adopted kids have it hard, and I think the related statistics are shocking. This one kid I taught for four years got an A at GCSE, but, not uncommonly, at A level he struggled with the work ethic. When he had to retake, and the funding ran out, I just taught him for free anyway, in Victoria library, and afterwards I’d buy him a McDonalds in the station, just to try to help him along. Social services and subsequently my tuition agency didn’t like that. ****, man, I was trying to help him.

To the Arcola theatre in Dalston again, except this time it's in Studio B, downstairs, where all the seats, i.e. chairs, are tiny and uncomfortable and overcrowded, whereas the actors are sitting in settees and one of them is shouting at me. Is this some masochistic, post-Brechtian exercise? What happened to Shoreditch, it's all cocktail bars. I find a cafe, like seemingly everywhere all crumbling bare bricks and cheese plants and rainbow flags and dub reggae, where they serve up a passable double expresso, and I am reminded again that in Paris there is no other conceivable way of drinking coffee. To Wetherspoons in Highbury & Islington, where they have security on the door, and are surrounded by Highbury Fields, Canonbury and Barnsbury. Can there be anywhere on London where the rich and poor live in such proximity?

Maybe. I went to school with people from council estates in Swiss Cottage, bordered as you know by Hampstead and St Johns Wood.

Yes, and maybe Lismore Circus is also in that mix. I have been meaning to say something about the poor areas of central London: Lisson Grove, Somerstown, some pockets of Holborn, etc. Poverty attracts prejudice. When I first started, some old-time cabbie advised me above all to "Beware the Lisson Grove gang, boy." Forget Uber, the gig economy, and the general dark forces of economics; you're more worried about some street gang? My cousin and his wife are down from Suffolk to see the Lord Mayor's Show, but she's worried about the 300 000 protestors in town. People from outside London think it's full of artful dodgers and vagabonds. The idea of a protest that's both pro-Palestinian and peaceful doesn't square. But we have a good drink and I like them anyway. A good day not to be driving in London. These protests every Saturday are going to be a nuisance.

London is full of artful dodgers and vagabonds. You yourself are a prime suspect. Your blog provides all the necessary information and proof. Stand up and be proud old friend, you are a living tradition.

Now you make me want to go to London. You, Lastcardcharlie and Clive James.

Back in the day, there was an ice cream parlour in Chalk Farm called Marine Ices, and that was the place for ice cream. More recently, they moved to smaller premises, but now there is no room for them at all in the tumour that is Camden Market. But they still make ice cream, because they sell it in Toff's fish and chip shop in Muswell Hill; home of the Kinks and Dennis Nilsen and whatever mentality is engendered by living on top of a hill. Chocolate is chocolate, vanilla is vanilla, and texture is the sector-shaped wafer. Like me, they have apparently not moved with the times. They teach you about Toff's on the Knowledge. Take me from Toff's to Honor Oak station. My friend's stepdad used to have a business servicing fish and chip shops. Funniest guy I ever met. "I think it's a miracle, Tel; I think you're the one who's got my genes." You have to something about you, some natural force of nature, to make a living in that world, of Jews and Kurds and Albanians and Senegalese. We have the skate. Old school AF.

Some areas are large and some are small, and Chalk Farm is small. and it contains the Roundhouse, to which I have never been, but some major artists have played there, and my brother saw Motorhead there, maybe more than once. I was driving past it and they were queueing round the block, for something to do with this century, and is this the gig of your lives, I was wondering. Is tonight the night? The night you're going to be talking about 40 years from now?