Cheese with rabbit

A week or ago, back to London to top up on supplies of cheese, presently Montgomery from reference 1, via Neal's Yard Dairy. On this occasion, the branch in Shorts Gardens by Seven Dials. Weather uncertain so not clear that Bullingdons would be the way forward from Waterloo.

One of the trees outside the station needs a trim after attention by idle youth, dogs or both. I could take a pruning saw down myself, but it is a bit of a way and it is not my tree, not for me to meddle. We shall see.

In any event, onto the train, to be entertained by a party of ladies of middle years, all tooled up for a day on the town. One of them, perhaps the hostess, was very concerned about litter and was making regular trips to the not very big litter bin to dispose of wrappers and containers.

Not raining at Waterloo, so I pedalled off to Seven Dials. Cheese business done, the rain came on. Should I wait or settle for the tube?  I hung around in various pub doorways, thinking perhaps to take a Perrier on the rocks, to find that none of the pubs in the vicinity of Cambridge Circus opened before midday. Hoping that it would let up, I worked my way down to St. Martin's Street, behind the National Gallery and decided to chance it.

[Rotten Row and the South Carriage Drive c.1890-1900, photomechanical print. Ex wikipedia]

So off around Trafalgar Square and down the Mall. Negotiated the various obstacles around the Palace and got myself onto Constitution Hill. Up to Hyde Park Corner, across the junction using the cycle ways provided and found myself in South Carriage Drive, which runs parallel to Rotten Row, once favoured by equestrian toffs and toffesses who liked to show off. Lillie Langtry for one. Lots of space, hardly any traffic, two or four wheeled. Just a line of horse boxes parked up outside the barracks.

I thought they were operated by Oakley, but it seems from reference 4 that they are the builders of these fine horse boxes rather than the operators. But whatever the case, the boxes were not in army colours, so presumably moving the Household Cavalry about has been privatised, along with pretty much everything else that moves.

Hyde Park was springing into leafy life and there were still some daffodils, the pale ones rather than the yellow ones.

Turned into exhibition Road to find monster queues outside the Natural History Museum, apparently for some new dinosaur skeleton. Lots of tourists, lots of school aged children. Some dads not looking too thrilled.

But pleased to be able to park up at the stand next to the queue. Not so pleased, being a touch early, to find that the service in the nearest hostelry - another for Greene King - was slow to the point of being absent, so I pushed onto the rendez-vous at Daquise of reference 5.

Wine from Poland, seemingly unthinkable until recently, respectable Poles drinking beer from Poland and vodka from Russia. Wine, if they drink it at all, from France. From the Adoria operation of reference 6, set up by an expatriate Californian who appears to have emigrated to Poland about thirty years ago. Located at Zachowice, southwest of Wrocław, the city that used to be called Breslau, tucked in close to both German and Czech borders. In what used to be Silesia in Germany. Perhaps not that far from wine growing areas after all. Breslau being a place which I notice from time to time, having once read a fat paperback about its tangled history. See, for example, reference 7.

I took bread followed by rye soup, both good. Followed by rabbit, which would have been better had I asked for the yellow gravy to come in a jug. Followed by a plum cake which was very good. Washed down with an excellent drop of slivovitz, a sort of plum brandy made all over central and eastern Europe and which comes with many spellings. The Czech publican whom I used to work for (more than fifty years ago now) at the 'Hand and Shears' of reference 8 knew all about the stuff. He also made enough money to eat at the Savoy and go to the opera at weekends. In the days when publicans' wives were able to knock out real sandwiches - fine sandwiches long since killed off by the combined forces of health men and tax men.

One of the engaging features of the present establishment was the use of small aluminium saucepans to bring your food to the table. Saucepans which I had thought long banned for catering purposes on account of aluminium, in some form or another, getting into the food chain - and, at one time, Epsom car boot sales were shifting large number of such pans, originally from various schools, hospitals and other institutions in the area. The pans of choice of our early married life. And our cheerful waitress came from the Netherlands.

Still lots of people milling around when we left the restaurant, some time after 15:00.

For a change, took a tube train to Wimbledon from South Kensington and changed there for Epsom. Entertained on the tube train by the cunningly contrived workings of the joints between carriages, only just coming into service on the Epsom-Waterloo line. A smart bit of engineering, no doubt, these days, foreign.

Will I be able to reconstruct a joint from this snap in a week's time? 

While this morning I associated to the late night trains in which, years ago, I used to project all manner of goings-on onto the random dots of floor tiles, very like the ones above. Amazing what a bit of chemical assistance can bring to the tea leaves!

PS 1: from time to time I mention a fairly new to Epsom ice cream parlour called 'Creams', which I now know to be a branch of the operation at reference 2, having read all about them yesterday at reference 3. Apparently popular with young people who do not do bars - for one reason or another - and which, in some areas at least, function in much the same way as bars do for the rest of us. Invented in Southall.

PS 2: the public house to be found at reference 8 might well be a Grade I listed house dating from 1532, but in my day it used to be dingy red rather than a dingy blue, with dingy red being the Courage house colour. Did the heritage people miss a beat when they let the blue paint in? I might add that my then intimate knowledge of 'The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War' stood me in good stead with said Czech landlord, for whom it was, in the original Czech, a sort of bedside Bible. A book I still own, but have not actually read any of for quite some years now. Can't bring myself to retire it for all that.

References

Reference 1: http://www.montgomeryscheese.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.creamscafe.com/.

Reference 3: London’s late-night ice-cream parlours represent the city at its best: The ubiquity of the Creams chain is a sign of the capital’s changing nocturnal tastes - Stephen Bush, Financial Times - 2023.

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

Reference 5: https://daquise.co.uk/.

Reference 6: http://www.adoriavineyards.com/en/.

Reference 7: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/breslau-drain-covers.html.

Reference 8: https://thehandandshears.com/. Once a Courage house serving the then adjacent markets and hospitals. Not the same place at all that I visited twenty years ago, in the margins of an important meeting in the City about data protection.

Reference 9: https://www.kicksbarandgrill.co.uk/crisp-party. I close with a rather different sort of establishment, brought to me by a correspondent. Maybe something for the granddaughters in years to come, should they ever take a trip to the far north, to the banks of the River Hull.