Trolley 502

Trolley 502 was captured out the front of the building which contains Majestic Wine and some unused space, having been through various incarnations during our time in Epsom. A Sainsbury's trolley in pretty good condition.

Carried on around the Kiln Lane version of the Ewell Village anti-clockwise, to find lots of spring flowers. To name three, daisies, dandelions and celandines. Quite a lot of cow parsley coming along, with some plants in sheltered spots already in flower. Weather cloudy with sunny intervals, but with a cold south westerly wind. Good job that BH had prompted me to wear a proper coat, that is to say the duffel coat.

At the bottom of Longmead Road, that is to say the West Ewell end, I spotted a new-to-me Apple camera van, very much the same sort of thing that Google to use for their Street View. A van with a funny looking spherical camera mounting on a stick, sticking out of the roof. A black and white lollipop. Reference 2 suggests a serious mapping operation - but one which I cannot get to move beyond the advertisements on my laptop. Perhaps you have to be an apple to get to play.

Retrieved one of those bags that builders' merchants use to deliver loose material like sand and gravel. Bags which hold around a cubic metre and which must be surprisingly strong. I wanted one last autumn, probably for gathering leaves, but found that I had got rid of the two or three that I had had. So now back to one, just in case.

Then I had almost retrieved a brick from the pavement when its owner appeared from behind a gate which I had not noticed. It took me a second or so to realise that he was the owner, but I had desisted and he didn't seem to mind particularly. While I found this afternoon that the line of bricks I use for brick walking, untouched for two or three fairly wet days, had attracted quite a lot of small worms, hiding underneath. Not clear where they came from, given that the bricks are always on concrete.

Back inside, having read some of a review about references 3 and 4 in the NYRB, I decided that while us whiteys may well understate the role of West Indian slavery (then badly paid and badly treated freed slaves) in the UK's rise to power through the 18th and 19th centuries, I did not need to read revisionists' accounts of same. Plus, without having gone into it, it seemed odd that sugar production in the West Indies should have been so important in the scheme of things. There might have been a lot of money in sugar, but it was a luxury consumed in England, paid for with English money. So not obvious that there would be a big impact on the real economy of iron, steel, coal and steam. Not that I am going to find out now.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/trolley-501.html.

Reference 2: https://www.apple.com/uk/maps/.

Reference 3: Slave Empire: How slavery built modern Britain – Padraic X. Scanlon – 2020. 

Reference 4: Empireland: How imperialism has shaped modern Britain – Sathnam Sanghera – 2021.