Cheese

The time for cheese came round again a few days ago. An overcast day, which would have been mild enough if it had not been for the cold north wind.

No trolleys on Station Approach, but there was a common, that is to say pied, wagtail. And there was a flat dweller, a young man, emerging with a large and powerful looking dog. As usual, one wonders why such people feel the need for such dogs. One wonders about the company that they keep and about their occupation.

Having decided that the cheese shop at London Bridge was the way forward, there had been a suggestion from the TFL website that the Bullingdon stand at the Hop Exchange, the one I usually use at London Bridge, might not be open. Backup stands at Duke Street Hill, just the river side of the station, and at Park Street, Bankside, had been identified and located. The latter at the other end of the same street, as it happens, as the cheese shop, although I had never penetrated that far.

So off to London Bridge, where the journey was enlivened by a loud young man with very short hair and wearing a big brash orange coat, shiny leather-look black trousers and various large rings on his fingers. He was conducting a series of loud conversations on his telephone about the possibly attempted, almost certainly targeted theft of a car, I think a Range Rover, with at least one of his interlocutors figuring in more than one of these conversations. To judge from his talk, he probably spent quality time watching television crime dramas - not that I can complain about that. His telephone may also have been responsible for a background rumble of popular music.

Through the station, through the (tourist) busy Borough Market to the cheese shop where the story at the cheese shop was that the hitherto reliable Lincolnshire Poacher had got older, that for some reason or other their buyer had taken to buying slightly older cheese. Perhaps nearer two years than one year old. While my recent experience has been that I have been buying too much at once, with the result that it does not go the distance. So I have dropped down to one lump from two. Hopefully the upside will be better cheese; a possible downside will be more shopping.

It turned out that, while there was stuff going on in the vicinity, the Hop Exchange stand was open and I was able to pull my Bullingdon there for the run down to Stockwell. With the snap above proving that the registration number does indeed get through to my ride history further above.

Quite a lot of puddles about, but I got myself to South Lambeth Road without incident, and made my way to the Tate library, where I got stuck into reference 1, a more or less random part of my digression among the connectivity matrices arising from resting state fMRI brain scans. It seems that without going to the bother of looking at how these matrices change over time, it is possible to use them to identify people and to determine sex. There is also a plug for something called partial correlation. Which all went to provide a bit of balance to other stuff which I had been grappling with.

And so to the Estrela, where I took something different by way of lunch. I had noticed before that they seemed to do half bottles, and closer inspection of the wine list revealed half a dozen or so of them - unusual in restaurants. I took a two year old Vinho Verde, as snapped above, which did very well. From Muralhas de Monção, and while I failed to track it down to its source I did learn that 'the bouquet shows grass, lemon-lime, and grapefruit aromas. The palate leads with soft lemon lime flavors, the bright acids counter-balanced with ginger snap. Fresh, bright, and just slightly frizzante on the finish'. Some consolation for not being able to run down any arty shots of morning mist over vine clad hills.

More success with Monção, a town in the far north of Portugal, more or less on the border of Spain. A place with, as far as I could tell from Street View, with a lot of relatively new buildings. I failed to find the presumably old walls sketched above.

Having had a meat and sausage festival on the visit noticed at reference 2, I went for skate on this occasion, something which BH used to do from time to time and which I used to rather like. Here one had a whole small skate rather than half a big skate, encased in batter which struck me as being terribly salty, and I did not much care for it at all. And having been impressed that they we able to offer cabbage, disappointed that it was badly overcooked. It had probably been sitting around, perhaps in a Bain Marie, in the kitchen for rather too long.

Wound up with a spot of their brown Aguardente, taken with almond tart. This last was, in the event, improved by asking for it to be served with cream rather than ice cream, even if the cream did come out of a toothpaste tube.

Having sat indoors for a bit, it seemed a cold walk to Vauxhall Station. And I failed, once again, to make it inside the rather florid looking bar noticed after the concrete art at reference 3.

For once, nothing doing at the Raynes Park Platform Library, where the stock was very thin indeed. Not even something to amuse me while waiting for my train.

PS: I was passed this morning by a young man on some kind of power assisted bicycle, heading past Screwfix for the underpass. A bicycle which was as big, heavy and fast as a small motorbike and it seemed quite wrong to me that there was no requirement for corresponding registration and insurance. One could do serious damage with such a thing, particularly on a shared used path. He was not wearing a helmet, and, furthermore, it seemed most unlikely that he would dismount at the underpass, as he would be requested by path-side signage.

References

Reference 1: A Comparison of Static and Dynamic Functional Connectivities for Identifying Subjects and Biological Sex Using Intrinsic Individual Brain Connectivity – Sreevalsan S. Menon & K. Krishnamurthy – 2019.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/new-bag.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/skewered-again.html.