Before I switched to exclusively using Apple Mac’s I thought that the only web browser available to those poor Apple folk was the - at the time - newly released Safari although I do recall knowing that an old and ugly version of IE (5.5) was also bundled. It was not, of course, true at that time and it is not true today. The Mac platform is as spoilt for choice as users of Windows. All the major browsers are available with the one notable exception of Internet Explorer - a demon which Mac users remain, thankfully, not tempted by.

Personally I have been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days and before the switch. Opera I find too confusing and idiosyncratic. Safari may be relatively fast but I find it’s dark grey toolbars and borders foreboding and just plain ugly and much prefer Omniweb which also uses the same webkit platform. But I have stuck to faithful Firefox partly because of it’s wonderful plugin architecture.

But therein lies, I believe, both the strength and the weakness of Firefox. It can not be denied that with every new update it gets just a little slower at core rendering and while some of the plugins become indispensable, each one adds it’s own overhead. I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to reboot my Mac because Firefox has, to put it bluntly, slowed to a crawl. But I like it - it does what I need - one or two plugins really are indispensable - so I carried on using it.

And then I was talking just a couple of days back to a guy who mentioned Camino. Camino uses the same framework and engine as Firefox but is both optimised for the Mac platform and has dispensed with the plugin architecture. It is a plain and simple browser without all the bells and whistles of it’s bigger brother. I tried it once a couple of years ago and didn’t like it.

I tried it yesterday and was, to put it simply, quite amazed. My own site here was displaying in a fraction of the time Firefox takes to render it. Other sites I regularly visit were suddenly popping up while Firefox was still looking for the progress bar. And the good news seems to be that Camino is not suffering from the same degradation that Firefox regularly displays. This - to me - is a revelation of some magnitude. If, like me, you looked at Camino a few years back, thought the centrally located tabs were a little weird and then dismissed it… load it up and have a go with today’s version. It’s just like the weather here in England today. Hot.

A few days back I wrote an item called The Metal Forest regarding the planting of a huge number of unnecessary signs up a local road where the number of sunken sign-carrying posts had gone from about 4 to 24 in one day.

An update is needed as you may be able to tell from the photograph. We are down to 23 after one of them vanished in the night! I don’t know if this was an irate local or a genuine theft but i suspect the latter. It was, after all, only a few weeks back that somebody stole all the drain covers from the gutters up the very same road.

Ok - so the image is a bit hackneyed and overused but old George knew what he was talking about and whilst he may have got the date wrong he would have been sure to notice how England is slipping pathetically, day by day, into a surveillance society, much of it started under the leadership of namesake Tony Blair.

Once it was, and not so long ago, that the principle tasks of government were national economic stability, defence from foreign aggression and the protection of it’s citizens from each other through a system of justice. It has never been adequately explained to me why today’s government desires nothing more than to know every last bit of information and detail about my life, my relationships with others, where I go and what I do when I am there - all of which is only a stones throw away from wanting to know what I am thinking.

Two items came up over the last week. The more recent was the claim that even though we have more cameras pointing at us than any other nation it has done little or nothing to either prevent crime or to solve it - and remember, helping our boys in blue prevent crime is always the reason for hooking yet another camera up to watch over us. I remember when we used, as a nation, to scorn the tactics of the old USSR yet here we are adopting them without an apparent murmur of protest.

The other item was the disclosure that under a so-called “Children’s Plan”, schools may be asked to monitor, record and report on a wide variety of points such as pregnancy, drug use, bullying and where pupils go when they finally leave. Also on that agenda was obesity - the new scare word that has taken over from smoking. Yes - they want schools to report on pupils lifestyle and general ‘well-being’.

What central government recorded and knew about my father was a fraction of what they know and record about me. What they know and record about my children is an ever expanding mountain of detail. What they plan and will record against my children’s children is even more alarming.

And how long before the posters appear? I can see them now, fridge magnets bearing such strictures as ‘Is your neighbour eating chocolate in secret? Call the ObesePolice NOW and get them the help they need to be a good thin member of society’.

A few months back I mourned the difficulty in finding London Cheesecakes in bakeries anywhere outside of London. I was, of course, rewarded by a friend who comes to stay every now and then and brings me a box!

Now a few comments have been left asking for a recipe and I have even had a small handful of emails with the same request. Fellow commenter on life and friend Mike Power actually provided a recipe within those very same comments but people seem unable to search for it so I have reproduced it below. So…

How to make a London Cheesecake - thanks Mike

1. Buy a packet of ready rolled puff pastry and cut out disks 9 cm diameter (or squares if you don’t want to be a purist) and place on a baking tray.
2. Make indentations in the centre and place a nice drop of jam in the middle of each one.
3. Add a blob of frangipane mix (equal amounts of egg, sugar, butter and ground almonds) or just plain cake mix (as used for fairy cakes) - about the size of a large walnut.
4. Rest for 30 minutes while oven heats up.
5. Bake at 200c /400f for about 15 minutes until nicely done.
6. When cool spread fondant icing or thick water icing on top and dip into thread coconut.
7. Eat them

I asked about the circular nature of Mike’s cheesecakes as I have only ever seen square ones and he had this to say:

Trust me! Square pastries came in to cut down on waste. All pastry was cut in circles in my day (even jam puffs which start out as a large disk which is then folded into a triangle - you don’t see them like that much any more. And triangular apple puffs! No, please!

They are pretty simple to make. They were effectively part of the ‘morning goods’ range which meant they were baked fresh every day ready for the lunch trade. Back in the sixties they were probably the most popular sweet puff pastry item, partly because they were cheap and filling. (I’m talking about London now, obviously. Ooop north it was probably Eccles cakes). The cheese reference probably comes from the days when they would have contained a curd mixture but nobody is really sure.

So there you go.

I have to say I had never heard of Gary Thuerk until today but it is he, I am told, who has the onerous distinction of being the first person to send out ’spam’ emails. Sent May 3rd 1978 via Arpanet - the original network that eventually turned into the internet we have today - Thuerk worked for mini-computer manufacturer DEC and emailed 400 people to inform them of new DEC services.

He was roundly condemned for this by many recipients and junk mail was born and became known as ’spam’ much later in 1993 when it was truly starting to become a nuisance.

It is now reckoned that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

And some days it feels like I received them all.

Cos I never ‘ad no proper educashion I am often fasin.. facinat… intrested in fings that I find everyone else already knows all about.

If any of the teachers in my school knew any Latin they were either Catholic or had strolled into the building by mistake and were being held captive by a headmaster with aspirations. My good wife, who did have a proper education, will already know that the ampersand was not invented by Linus Amper. This is something I did not know but there again, I hadn’t heard of old Linus either.

If asked to guess, I might have said that it came into being along with movable type and I would, of course, have been wrong by at least a couple of thousand years. Which is why I found this potted history of the umble ampersand fasana… facsanait… fascinatin.