Made it

Having thought about visiting the café next to the butcher's in Manor Green Road for years, we finally made it the other day. A café which, unusually, does not appear in Street View despite having been where the gap is in the snap above, in one guise or another, for some years now. Presently flying under the flag of 'D's Coffee House', and she does have a Facebook page, if not her own website.

Proceedings started by taking a turn around Long Grove Park where there were plenty of dog walkers, nearly all females of middling years. Some dogs jumping up at us, cheerfully enough, but behaviour of which BH, as a fully accredited dog walker, disapproves.

Down past Concorde Hall, once the home for a playgroup where BH used to help out, now the home for some sort of mother and toddler group or operation. Primarily home to the 8th/14th air scouts of reference 1. Have yet to work out whether this means a joint occupancy or an amalgamation.

To the Blenheim, aka TB, which, we learned from a young man there, had been taken back by Greene King in the New Year, was being stripped and cleaned out, preparatory to reopening in the near future. Let's hope so. A local resource which we miss. But I couldn't find it at the Greene King site, not even by pretending that I wanted bar work in KT19.

And so to D's, where we were attended to by three cheerful ladies, seemingly cranking up for the busy lunch period. Toasted hot cross buns with tea for him, some sort of coffee for her. All very satisfactory - even if I had a fancy see through tea pot, designed for the infusion of superior tea leaves, but actually containing a tea bag. One of those pyramidal tea bags which delivers a good punch of tannin and caffeine. See through cups of which, for the purposes of tea with milk, I disapprove. Lemon tea or black tea, fine.

The cheerful ladies assured me that, despite appearances, they would usually be able to provide a bacon sandwich. Dry cured. I shall have to take them up on this one day.

Home to a very late lunch at 14:30. I can't remember when we were last so late to lunch at home. Out, yes.

PS 1: struck this morning over the matinal cheese on toast - a wheeze to eat off both elderly bread and elderly cheese supplies - by a sentence in a piece in yesterday's Evening Standard about HS2. It seems that a design error at Old Oak Common station, the HS2 southern terminus for the time being, means that there will not be level access to trains and wheel chairs & such will need ramps. This at a part of the station not due to open until 2031. I was surprised that such an error gets baked in so many years ahead of completion. I also learned that we are due to get a Euston 2 station, next to Euston 1, but that does not come on-stream until 2041. Well over the horizon as far as I am concerned.

PS 2: on my first attempt, Microsoft's Bing seemed to think that I wanted to buy some timber when I asked it about the Old Oak Common railway depot. Lots of pictures of bog-standard timber - not even old oak. But on my second attempt, with my presumably having visited some railway flavoured places in the meantime, it got onto the right track.

PS 3: the once good quality network rail journey planner (at reference 4) is still not working properly, in the middle of this Saturday morning. Better than it has been, but it is still apt to give up with a bad server error, after which one has to restart one's browser to bring it back to life. What it the matter with their IT department?

References

Reference 1: http://epsomairscouts.org/.

Reference 2: https://www.greeneking.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.hs2.org.uk/. The source of the whizzy looking snap above.

Reference 4: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/.