Ognisko

A visit a week or so to a Polish establishment in Exhibition Road, more or less opposite the flashy new (to me) building for Imperial College. With the Poles being given ample coverage at references 1, 2 and 3. And with ognisko having an interesting range of meanings. The snap above gives something of the idea. And with Sykes being a holiday cottage operation I use from time to time; also an operation which pops up on lots of these space-selling websites - although, as far as I can see this morning, they do not square the circle by selling space on their own website.

Having consulted various maps, I had decided that the way forward on this occasion was to pull a Bullingdon from the now much diminished stand at Grant Road at the back of Clapham Junction railway station and head north, over the river and up Beaufort Street, a handsome street where my older brother once had a ground floor bedsit.

A cool and cloudy day. Another of the new trains which are appearing on the Waterloo line. As far as I could see they did not run to charging sockets for phones and laptops in the way of the Southern trains going from the other platform. Furthermore, as far as I could see, they did not have windows that one could open. We shall see if that becomes a problem in the event of more heat waves this summer.

Wetherspoon's Aspidistra house in Falcon Road was still up and running, despite having been slated for sale. How long will Wetherspoon's wait to unload the place as a going concern? Maybe they have a lease which they need to roll over, so don't want to just leave the place empty.

The snap above, taken from the maps from the OpenStreetMap noticed yesterday, shows most of the route. Noticing in passing that asking it for things like 'beaufort steet chelsea' does not work; they have not rolled in the power of a Google search to overlook minor or common spelling errors.

Over Battersea Bridge, across the Kings Road and into what appeared to be a rather swish part of Kensington, or perhaps Chelsea. Despite the housing looking terribly expensive, the area had a cluttered, eclectic, village feel to it. Despite the absence of communal facilities like shops, cafés or public houses. What on earth were the staff supposed to do on their afternoons off?

Kept pushing north until I reached the Cromwell Road, where I hung a right and then left into the southern half of Exhibition Road.

To find that there was still a queue for the new dinosaur outside the Natural History museum and still no queue outside the Science Museum. Being a little early, I parked up my Bullingdon and went to take a look at Imperial College, which seemed to be doing very well for itself. A large bicycle park, although not on the same scale as that at Cambridge railway station, including several cycles like that snapped above. That one being picked out for its impressive looking lock.

Slightly to my surprise, I found I was allowed into a large new building, one function of which was café and sitting around area. Plenty of young and old people milling around. So I sat for a while, taking in the ambience.

Good quality interior concrete. I was rather taken with the detailing enlarged above. There were also refreshments from some meeting or other lying around - table lower right above - from which one could have grazed the odd snack. Unlike one or two of the young people, I didn't muster the brass, and was only partly excused by being on the way to a proper lunch.

And so into the rather clubby atmosphere of the anteroom to the Ognisko restaurant. Which last was quite busy, with mostly rather English looking people. Ladies lunching and that sort of thing. But then, who knows? If you have been living here for years and years, you are quite apt to be rather English looking. Customers apart, my guess would be that most of the front of house staff were Polish.

I took some rather good black pudding to start. Followed by shin of beef with, inter alia, potato dumplings. Followed by apple pie. A good choice of wine, mostly French. They could also do central Europe, but not Poland, and the Adoria of reference 4 was absent from the list. I settled for a modest carafe of white on this occasion, possibly something from New Zealand.

To close, a nicely presented pair of small plummy glasses. Brown to the left, a plum flavoured vodka, tasting not unlike a sweet sherry. White to the right, a rather stronger slivovitz, that it to say a plum brandy. Served with much respect, and I got the impression that the restaurant favoured serious drinkers: they seemed quite disappointed when I passed on seconds. That is to say just a white, rather than a white and a brown.

South Kensington still very busy on exit with lots of people milling around. And the rather flashy Roller snapped above.

And a small washer, maybe half an inch across, to add to my collection. Probably from the vicinity of the entrance to the tube station at South Kensington.

The tube to Wimbledon was busy with lots of children and young people. And, unlike nearer the centre of town, no offer of a seat and I had to stand until the antepenultimate stop. A word which has always stuck in my memory since being used for a rather public school style stunt involving the eating of green vegetables in the antepenultimate row of seats in the lecture theatre used by the debating society at my secondary school, then direct grant rather than fully public.

I got into a muddle about the location of Raynes Park, placing it on the Clapham Junction side of Wimbledon rather the the Epsom side, but I did manage to get there, where the platform library was not void, but nearly so. Nothing worth carrying off. Muddle slightly worrying, considering the number of times that I have changed trains at Raynes Park, not to mention the much larger number of times that I have passed through.

PS 1: Sykes must be paying Google plenty, popping up as they do all over the place. Reminding me of reports of website owners who are not always happy with the use that the likes of Google make of the space that they rent out to them. So a funeral parlour might not be too happy about advertisements for massage parlours finding their way onto their website. To which there is at least one easy answer...

PS 2: as it turned out, I consumed the coronation at some remove by buying a copy of the Sunday Times in the course of a visit to Sainsbury's the following day. More or less what one would expect for the first 12 pages, then on page 13 an amusing and not very respectful piece by one Camilla Long, with title 'a medieval news script, told by vicars' and subtitle 'TV anchors grappled with the bracelets of sincerity while the cameras zoomed in on two slightly unsure septuagenarians'. Anchors who could not have had proper smart phones to hand, as Bing knows all about these bracelets, aka armills. Not to be confused with the Swindon brewer called Arkell's. While a few pages on we had a bit more background on the Gray-Starmer affair, and the page after that an explosive fire in an electrical BMW. Altogether a better read than I was expecting from News Corp.

References 

Reference 1: https://www.ogniskorestaurant.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.ogniskopolskie.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Hearth_Club.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/cheese-with-rabbit.html.