Some geology out of tripe

An early start this (Saturday) morning, and on firing up my laptop, the snap above supplied by Microsoft News caught my eye. Coupled with the alarming headline 'this huge crack in Kenya is splitting Africa in two'. The story came from 'Starinsider' at reference 1, seemingly an online, 21st century version of magazines like 'Titbits' which used to be provided for people waiting their turn at gentlemen's hairdressers.

From where I branched to the story at reference 2, the product of various geology flavoured departments in universities in China. A spin-off from the considerable and growing Chinese presence in Africa?

One of today's big worries is climate change, which generally works in terms of thousands of years, although we humans have managed to rather speed things up. 

So I am now reminded of geological change, which generally works in terms of millions of years. Volcanoes are one sort of change, both visible and violent. The rift valley of Africa, splitting it more or less from top to bottom is another, visible but largely non-violent. With the fissure snapped above being one of a number of such in the floor of the Kenyan section of this rift valley, surface manifestations of much deeper movements of the rock below. Worrying, not so say alarming, if you live near one.

With reference 2 explaining that such fissures are to be found in a number of locations scattered around the world. However, unlike climate change, there is unlikely to be any geological action of this sort anywhere near Epsom, any time soon.

Some accessible background is provided by references 3 and 4.

PS 1: then, over breakfast, my attention was caught by a short item in the Metro about a man caught building a (rather amateurish looking) sub-machine gun in his garage being jailed for seven years. Which seemed to me to be quite a long time to be jailed for getting ready for a crime rather than actually committing one - always a rather grey & tricky area. Poking around, far and away the most useful report of the case that I turned up was the West Midlands police site at reference 5. A man with thoroughly a unpleasant view of the world, obsessed with guns, collecting various materials about same from various obscure parts of the Internet and using special software to cover his tracks. Picked up in 2021, around two years ago. With the borders between being a nasty prat, crime and mental health being another grey & tricky area. I don't suppose keeping him in jail for a few more years is going to do him much good - but what else can one do?

PS 2: a significant plus for the police site was that it was not festooned with distracting advertisements, in the way of most of the others.

References

Reference 1: https://www.starsinsider.com/.

Reference 2: The deep origin of ground fissures in the Kenya Rift Valley - Zhijie Jia, Hongjie Wu, Jianbing Peng, Quanzhong Lu,Weiliang Huang, Chuntao Liu, Feiyong Wang, Yang Liu, Ming He - 2023. To be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9985622/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary. Now to 2.5 million years ago (mya).

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenozoic. Now to 65 mya.

Reference 5: https://www.west-midlands.police.uk/news/man-jailed-after-west-midlands-ctu-investigation.

Cherries

I had thought today was Thursday and so a market day in Epsom, when cherries might be an option. But it turned out to be Friday and so I had to settle for M&S. £5 or so  for something over half a kilo. First two were fine, if not outstanding.

Inspection of the label suggests that they might have come from the large Californian operation at reference 1 - where I learn that 'Primavera growers cover land as far south as Arvin/Bakersfield all the way up to the most fertile soil in the San Joaquin valley, Linden. This span of approximately 250 miles poses many challenges for growers to harvest and deliver their cherries with the cold chain process underway. With the help of our growers and other partners, strategically located hydro-coolers are located up and down the valley not more than a 20 minute drive away from any given orchard. This allows our growers to harvest their crop and pre-cool before delivery to the packing house. Consequently, cold chain management is crucial for cherries. Once picked, every hour above [70°F] shortens the cherry’s shelf life by one day'. Furthermore, of the seven varieties on offer, M&S plumped for the one called Bing. Perhaps I ought to report them to Microsoft for breach of copyright.

One feels a little guilty about the number of air miles involved - hoping, in mitigation, that they were flown in hold space which would have otherwise have been empty.

No trolleys to be seen, but I did recover two washers, one large, one small.

Manor Green Road butcher closed for the day as he has gone fishing. Perhaps he will open on Sunday in lieu to supply impromptu barbecues.

Lastly, in the course of my travels, I came across a post-person having a fag. From whom I learned that the Post Office have taken a leaf out of Amazon's book and use the mobile phones (aka personal delivery assistants or PDAs) that post-persons carry to keep an eye on their activities. Have they strayed too far off their walk? Have they not walked at all for too long? This while their chief executive was denying same to a committee of the House of Commons.

Reference 2 suggests that there was something in this, although I have not done more than skim the first few pages (out of forty). With my closing thought being that all this because the Post Office has to compete with delivery services which call their employees self employed and which are not shy at all about driving the work along with their computers. And, to cap it all, perhaps their vans are equipped with smoke detectors. Health and Safety you know, should anyone ask.

I ought to add that Post Office management do appear to be working with the Post Office union - the CWU - about all this.

References

Reference 1: http://primaveramarketing.com/products/cherries/.

Reference 2: https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/12700/pdf/.

Reference 3: https://www.cwu.org/.

Mid year report

Very close to the end of the half year, it seemed like a good time to update the brick report. With the Pivot Table feature of Microsoft Excel providing the analysis above with only a very modest amount of hand tweaking of the final graph. Plus picking out one date error for me, now corrected.

Carriage holding fairly steady after the busy time during the first lock down: carrying bricks up and down the garden has proved to be a pleasant and durable form of light exercise late afternoons, before Scrabble.

It did not take long to work out how to count the days on which bricks were not carried - having cheated to the extent of including dummy records for those days, this because line graphs by day work better when there is a data line for every day. The total number of null days, something more than 1 in 3, is right, but I am not yet convinced about the 40 a quarter. Checking continues.

PS: the COVID death chart included in the last report at reference 1 appears to have been discontinued at the end of last year. No news is good news - although we never did get to know what the end game was in China, after the rather abrupt lifting of restrictions, also at the end of last year. Presumably not as dire as some commentators at the time were suggesting it might have been.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/brick-life-steady.html.

Group search key: bricksk, FT, graphic.

Gaberdines

Following the Haymarket challenge issued at reference 1, I have now done a bit of digging about the mystery building.

Wikipedia was not much help on this occasion and London history sites were more interested in the 18th century than the end of the 19th. But I kept going and Bing turned up reference 2, from which I learn that the building did time as the headquarters of the people who brought us gaberdine, that is to say Burberry. Gaberdine which was favoured by some of the challengers for the two poles, people like Nansen, Shackleton and Amundsen. See, for example, reference 3.

While, now armed with his name, Wikipedia explains that the architect, one Walter Cave, was an old Etonian who also did gardens, furniture and cricket. Nothing about the grand first floor windows, so I can only suppose that these windows actually span two floors and that a grand external appearance had trumped a sensible interior.

While the best picture was supplied by reference 5. People who I thought were going to charge me, but then offered a download without any pack drill at all. Which came with an informative caption: 'a view of the front elevation of the store built for fashion brand Burberry at 18-22 Haymarket, Westminster, at the corner of Orange Street. The store is five bays wide and has several floors of sales space above the ground-floor display windows. In the second bay the company's royal warrant appears on the first floor. A man can be seen on the pavement outside the shop. Dating from 1912, the Burberry Store at 18-22 Haymarket was Grade II listed in 1987; listing number 1066642. The building still exists, although Burberry has departed'. Having occupied the building for a little under a century.

Departed for Horseferry Road to a building which I knew first as something to do with the police, then as something to do with what was then the DHSS and lastly with the Home Office. Burberry arrived there during my closing stint at the big new Home Office building on the other side of Horseferry Road.

It may also have, at one time, had something to do with Westminster Hospital, most if not all of which was once to be found on the other side of Dean Ryle Street.

A big building, so if Burberry have all of it, they must be a big operation. And Bing rapidly confirms that they are indeed; a proud member of FTSE 100 with a turnover of the order of £2,500m. With one of their foreign outlets snapped above.

PS: not impressed that I have no memory at all of the Burberry operation in the Haymarket, which I must have passed many times when it was up and running. Simpsons of Piccadilly, now Waterstones, yes; Burberry no.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/to-mayfair.html.

Reference 2: https://manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1920/burberry.html. A nice picture of the tradesmen's entrance is to be found at the end of this page.

Reference 3: https://polar-latitudes.com/history/a-brief-history-of-polar-clothing/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cave.

Reference 5: https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/view-item?i=134603&WINID=1687969749099.

A new toy

Following the visit to Ladderland, aka Honey Bros., noticed at reference 1, I have now taken delivery of my fine new tripod ladder from Hendon Ladders and had a play with it. The two step side legs end up about four feet apart so much steadier than regular steps and I doubt whether I am ever going to feel the need to tie it in to whatever it is that I am trimming or cutting back. Solid as a rock even.

Three legs rather than four means that while it might not be quite vertical, it is not going to wobble.

All three legs are adjustable, so it can cope with sloping ground which would be awkward and/or unsafe with regular steps. Rubber feet to fit inside the claw feet when on hard ground or concrete.

Aluminium, so it is a lot lighter than it looks.

A down side is that it takes longer to get it up and down and it takes up rather more storage space.

I did wonder about whether I should have got the next size up, but having had a go, I think that this one is quite high enough for my comfort and quite high enough for nearly all, if not all, our various bushes and hedges. And quite high enough for the garage.

Verdict good - but dear - say something between the price of a Lego bulldozer and that of a Lego mobile crane. So for a toy for Dad, not too bad at all.

PS: OneDrive got in a bit of a muddle with the file name of the snap above, confusing it with that of a file at the other end of the folder. A relative of its reasonably frequent muddle when you click on 'next' on a snap near but not at the end of the folder and it jumps back to the beginning, skipping over the last few snaps.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/ladderland.html.

Reference 2: https://honeybros.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.hendonladders.co.uk/.

A sense of humour

[on parade at an undisclosed spot out in the country]

The book at reference 2, first noticed at reference 1, is a regular treasure trove of all kinds of curious bits and pieces about how we get on with animals. From which I presently offer just one, one which I, in the first instance at least, thought was evidence that a retired Treasury Knight, that is to say Lord Burns, could have a sense of humour - in that the inquiry he led into hunting with dogs concluded, inter alia, that: 'There is a lack of firm scientific evidence about the effect on the welfare of a fox of being closely pursued, caught and killed above ground by hounds. We are satisfied, nevertheless, that this experience seriously compromises the welfare of the fox'.

However, on slightly closer inspection at references 3 and 4 - this last running to more than 200 carefully written pages - I am not so sure. The remit of the inquiry was cunningly worded to avoid the central question of whether or not hunting should be banned and so the report managed to avoided it too. Notwithstanding, hunting with dogs was more or less banned a few years later.

All the same, a conclusion from the same school as the economy with the truth of another mandarin at another time - and I think that I must have read about this compromised welfare at the time, although I have no present recollection of so doing.

PS 1: I suppose, by extension, we might say that torture or capital punishment seriously compromises the welfare of its object.

PS 2: I might add that foxes are quite a nuisance in our part of suburban Surrey. I would be well pleased if there were fewer of them.

PS 3: a sport once characterised for us, by a countryman who had done quality time in the army, as the unspeakable chasing the uneatable. A countryman who, I should add, had no problem with shooting squirrels off his strawberries or rabbits for his pot. Or, occasionally, for our pot.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/paused.html.

Reference 2: Beastly: A new history of animals and us - Keggie Carew - 2023.

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

Reference 4: The Final Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Hunting with Dogs in England and Wales - Burns, Edwards, Marsh, Soulsby, Winter - 2000. Open access at the National Archives.

Reference 5: Humiliated Theresa May finally U-turns on her cruel bid to bring back fox hunting: She will admit there was a "clear message" the public don't want the cruel bloodsport brought back - despite her offering MPs a vote to do so - Ben Glaze, Nigel Nelson, Dan Bloom, Mirror - 2018. The source of the snap above, turned up by Bing.

To Mayfair

The place on the very dark blue that is - although I can't think when we played the great game. I can't even remember if it works very well two handed - although I suspect not. An expedition notable in that I scored a double fake, as already noticed at references 1 and 2.

Bearded indigent on station at the station - as it were - pulling on a small tin - saying Gordons on the front. Maybe it was one of those made up drinks - all sugar and alcohol - which young ladies are said to like. Onto the train, where I had the bad luck to sit opposite someone who sniffed, maybe once every thirty seconds or so. Surprising how irritating such things are. But not so irritating that I did not snooze, and, waking up a bit abruptly, I almost got off at Vauxhall - which would have been even more irritating.

But off at Waterloo after all, behind a gentleman of middle years getting very cross about the number of unnecessary announcements on the train. Perhaps they need to give the job to a computer which one can manage, rather than to some chap who likes the sound of his own voice, who likes his power over the announcement controls.

Quick spin over the bridge, up Drury Lane and onto the cheese shop. Where I was served by a cheerful lady of middle years who was very pleased with herself for cutting my two pieces of cheese, nominally of equal weight, to within a gram of each other.

Pulled a second Bullingdon, rolled down Shaftesbury Avenue, hung right into what seemed like a near empty Piccadilly and parked up on top of Green Park tube station. From where I was able to admire the results of Westminster's no-mow policy - but was not impressed: one might think that we didn't want to advertise the fact we are broke to the many tourists passing through. I also wondered, not for the first time, why this sort of perforated limestone does not suffer more from the frost. One might think that water would get in and, in reasonably short order, smash the rock up as it froze.

Next stop confectionary from the Royal Arcade and after that to Aquavit in St. James' Market. Passing Davidoff's on the way but managing not to go in.

No need to go into Aquavit, it being quite warm enough to sit outside. Warm enough, indeed, that we were glad enough of the umbrella provided by 14:00.

For me, mixed bread (foreign), Gravlax (nicely done, but not , I think a dish I shall frequent) and cheek of beef, this last being a first. Also nicely turned out.

Washed down with something good from Puglia.

All you need to know about it and more from the people at reference 3. Well not quite, as as far as I can tell, we are not told why the bottle is decorated with a sea urchin, that is to say riccio di mare, that is to say, sea hedgehog, as in the French.

And wound up with a spot of their Calvados. Quite cheap for a restaurant, despite the fancy glass, and a lot cheaper than some of their fancy whisky. They also sold cigars, which I have not seen for a while. A flying pig from Nicaragua? Bing offers me a dozen for getting on for £400, so probably not quite the same model as that offered above.

Next to us we had a small group of businessmen, possibly from the middle east, puffing away on large cigars from some mixture of Davidoff's and Fox's. Smelt well enough at the time, but I was quite surprised to still be smelling the smoke on my pillow some days later. Don't suppose I would have noticed in the days when I used to take a puff myself: a reminder that there is no such thing as secret smoking - not unless, that is, you take care of your own laundry!

On exit to the bus, we passed near an establishment which appearing to be selling large white balls. Perhaps they were the sort of thing that one-time aficionados of the cult series 'The Prisoner', having in the mean time become rich, buy to decorate their Surrey gardens with?

Further inspection with gmaps this afternoon reminded me that what I snapped above was actually a sort of old yellow annex tagged onto the relatively new, white main building - perhaps Edwardian - now housing the Dover Street Market. Which is a bit odd in itself as Dover Street is well behind the camera rather than in front of it. But what was it built for? Why the huge upstairs windows? A testing search for later.

Bus down to Vauxhall, past of people in Parliament Square. There were cameras and it was not clear to us whether it was all a put up job for the cameras, rather than a real demonstration, about something that mattered.

Onto the Raynes Park platform library, where the main dish was a book about something called Hadoop - an example of what Californian marketing types calls an empty vessel - which I now know is a language used to describe very large datasets, datasets which are far too big for the SQL queries that those of us that play with more modestly sized datasets know and love.

Accompanied on the left by a booklet from the Soviet Union of 1976 cataloguing some of the many words which Russian learners of English are apt to muddle up - for example pass and past. The instructions at the front are in Russian - of which I just about remember the alphabet, little more - so I have yet to get to the bottom of group 85 snapped above. Luckily, I have just discovered some exercises, in English, at the back, so maybe I will get there.

And on the right by a book which I now remember about. Soon to be on its way to a better place.

PS 1: I have been having some trouble with the words Davidoff (cigars) and Leonidas (chocolates). The former goes missing a lot, the latter not quite so much. On this occasion I have made a bit of an issue of it with the result that, a week or so later, I have got good recall of Leonidas and fair recall of Davidoff. That is to say the latter pops into mind immediately, the latter after a delay of a few seconds. But for the present, they are both getting there. We shall see how long they last.

PS 2: note for the record: the quarter water melon purchased on Saturday, a purchase noticed at reference 4, is now more or less finished, now being Tuesday lunchtime. Both in the sense that there is not much left and in the sense that it is going over, going mushy around the edges. This despite the cling film, despite the refrigerator. I suppose in seriously hot countries you do not buy more than you are going to eat that day. Maybe that's why you see it being sold by the slice in the street in so many films.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/fake-160.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/fake-161.html.

Reference 3: https://www.produttoridimanduria.it/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/cheam-arena.html.

Trolley 574

I almost passed on this trolley, captured in Hook Road on what was to have been a short circuit, omitting the Screwfix underpass. But then I thought that I needed to maintain momentum, gathered up the trolley - from the M&S food hall - and headed back into town. Being reminded on the way that some of the pavements on the outskirts of the town centre are not good for trolleys at all: a pavement sloping down towards the road makes it awkward to push a trolley, apt to veer off towards said road. But I got there.

The conversion of the unfinished block of garages near the Epsom end of Hook Road is either stalled or moving very slowly. Roof unfinished, windows and doors in - but plenty of work still to do. See reference 2 for a previous notice. Or reference 3 for one from more than three years ago. But then I suppose that if the garages sat there unfinished for twenty or thirty years, twenty or thirty months for the house hardly counts at all.

There seems to have been a cull of food delivery drivers in town centre, with the clusters at the entrance to Ebbisham Square and outside the entrance to McDonalds close to extinction.

With Carpet World in Waterloo Road being another extinction. The store has been there for a long time, so maybe the proprietor has retired, having been unable to find a taker. The store which, as it happens, sold us our stair carpet, maybe thirty years ago now.

While the restaurant most recently known as Bills, across the alley from the old public house once known as the Albion, now with an Irish flavouring, remains firmly shut up, despite talk of various chains being about to move in. A restaurant which has gone through quite a few incarnations over the years, with none of them lasting more than, say, five. Perhaps the site is not quite right, despite being central. Perhaps the landlord is greedy.

A spot of colour behind the builders' gear on West Hill. A temporary yard for the people working nights on the rail bridge there. I think the same sort of lily noticed at the by-pass end of Ruxley Lane at reference 4, a bit more than three years ago now. Plants, but not flowers, quite like the ones that BH grows in pots on our back patio.

[Farmers planting soy beans in Luohe. A trade war with the United States that began in 2018 has made it more expensive for China to buy soybeans and other foods from America. Credit: Qilai Shen for The New York Times]

PS 1: the NYT goes in for rather more flashy photographs than the FT. But the ones accompanying the article at reference 5 included two, one of which is included above, of soya beans being planted by hand. A dreary looking task - worse if it was hot - which one might have thought was easy enough to mechanise. So how typical is this scene?

PS 2: of the two Luohes offered by gmaps, one on the river of the same name and one in Hunan, about 200km north of the now well known city of Wuhan, the latter looks a lot more promising, with a good bit of what looks like arable land to be seen in satellite view.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/trolley-573.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/trolley-556.html. Less than twenty trolleys since February. Not good enough!

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/herald-copse.html. Also a mention for the Amber Group who declined (by silence rather by anything more helpful) to put in an electric boiler for us.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/ruxley-lane-anti-clockwise.html.

Reference 5: Extreme Floods and Heat in China Ravage Farms and Kill Animals: China’s leader has made it a national priority to ensure the country can feed its large population. But weather shocks have disrupted wheat harvests and threatened pig and fish farming - Nicole Hong, New York Times - 2023.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Religious freedom

[A Peyote Ceremony Tipi used by members of the Native American Church]

Having thought that the US operated the twin principles of the separation of church from state and the freedom to belong to whatever church you pleased, I was puzzled to read this morning in the NYRB (reference 1) of the passage through the US Congress of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. So I made my way to references 2 and 3, from which I learn something of what this is all about.

First, perhaps because until fairly recently there was a lot of free space, native religious practise in the US was very concerned with place and there were lots of sacred places, with many of those that are left being in what are now national parks or forests. The act expressed the principle that you couldn't just drive a logging road through a sacred site or build a dam that flooded a sacred site. 

Second, religious practise sometimes involved stuff that became illegal for other reasons. So a ritual might involve wearing the feathers of an endangered species of eagle. Or it might involve the consumption of a substance (particularly peyote) which had become recreational. I don't know what the act did about the the eagle, but it did make peyote legal if you were a native American. Which has perhaps spawned a legal industry devoted to ruling - for a fee - who is a native American and who is not. But I don't suppose it went so far as to legalise supply by non-native to natives.

Third, plenty of federal and state agencies were prone to interfere in matters of native religion, and generally to show a lack of respect. They were encouraged to refrain and desist.

All of which is fair enough, but I dare say there is plenty of abuse. Of for example, claiming a valuable bit of urban land as a sacred site until the developer coughs up reasonable compensation. From where I associate to the pain taken by developers in this country if they have the misfortune to stumble on some bit of buried heritage - when the temptation to keep schtum about it must be considerable.

PS: I also read that in the middle of the 19th century it was quite OK for whites to kill natives for sport or bounty, at least in the states of the southwest. From where I associate to 'Blood Meridian', a violent novel of said southwest by the recently deceased Cormac McCarthy, and to once being told of similar practises, rather more recent, in Australia.

References

Reference 1: Reclaiming the native identity in California - Ed Vulliamy, NYRB - 2023.

Reference 2: https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/329airfa.htm.

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

Cheam Arena

More or less by chance, we found a useful shop this morning, a shop which we have probably passed on several occasions, but never got around to stopping, never mind going inside. On this occasion, I thought that some water melon might be the right thing to take after our noontide black pudding and that this establishment might do our business. Convenient as we already had a kitchen flavoured mission to Homebase on the schedule.

Water melon was indeed available, and one could take a whole one, a half or a quarter. I opted for a quarter. Plus five small cucumbers, with the whole coming to just under £6, which I thought very reasonable.

The shop, variously known as Cheam Arena and the Cheam Food Centre, does not seem to have a website but it is to be found at 565-567 London Road, North Cheam, Sutton. There is also a large interior which includes both a bakery and a butchery section. We were improperly parked, so I did not like to linger, but the shop is clearly worth a closer look. Who knows what other treasures there might be?

The water melon turned out well. Not least as an antidote to the black pudding which was rather drier than is usual - or proper.

PS 1: passed three or four previously scored Wellingtonia in Worcester Park on the way home. We also passed the 'H G Wells' a handsome looking red brick public house, all closed up. Inquiry reveals that it is now owned by the Jersey based pubco at reference 1. Seemingly, a large operation which does not care to advertise its activities on the Internet, so presumably they don't pay much tax either, choosing to make a modest donation to the Jersey Home for Distressed Cats instead.

PS 2: There is a local connection as I now read: 'in 1896 Wells and his new wife moved to a larger detached house called Heatherlea in The Avenue in Worcester Park, where they lived until 1899. Wells’s increased income due to the successes of his recently published novels allowed them to afford a larger home that could accommodate Amy’s ailing mother. During his time at Heatherlea, Wells wrote When the Sleeper Wakes (serialized as The Sleeper Awakes in The Graphic 1898-9, collected 1910), and the neighborhood was used as the setting for his novel Ann Veronica (1909). The location of the house on this map is approximated, as no specific address along The Avenue is available. The house was torn down in 1955. (Image [above] from Epsom and Ewell History Explorer website.)'. We must have gone past the site on the way home.

References

Reference 1: Tavern Propco Ltd - 3rd Floor, 37 Esplanade St Helier Jersey, JE1 1AD, Jersey.

Chicken lite

Our last Sunday roast was near a fortnight ago now, and, according to the people at reference 1, just about at the top of the last hot spell.

Given the heat, we settled for chicken lite, that is to say without the traditional accompaniment of bacon surfaced sage & onion stuffing.

On the plate. There would have been some rice lurking behind the cabbage. The trick being to cook the chicken long enough for the skin to be brown and crackly - but the cabbage short enough for it to retain a bit of bite. Easy to overcook this particular sort of cabbage. Taken with our last bottle of Vernaccia di San Gimignano. With the towers associated with same being noticed at reference 2.

Plum crumble for dessert. With yellow custard, naturally. The significance of yellow being that I have been trying to convince one of our granddaughters of the merits of blue custard, without success, for some time now. Perhaps I would have done better had I gone to the bother of making up a sample.

Wound up with a spot of cooking Calvados from Majestic. Stuff which I like - more than a hint of rough cider about it - and which does just as well for me as much more expensive brands.

The day following BH was lunching out, so I made up an Epsom stir fry with the left over vegetables, some fresh onion and chunks of chicken. With a light chicken salad to follow later, which brought us to soup by the Tuesday.

Unusually, having boiled up the stock in the usual way, I added 8oz of red lentils to just two thirds of a saucepan of stock, that is to say more lentils and a stronger stock than usual. Snap above taken just before serving, the mushrooms having been in for a minute or so. Remembering the adage from my scouting days that 'a stewed stew is a spoiled stew'. An adage which may have been misquoted, with reference 3 offering the much improved version 'a stew boiled is a stew spoiled'. I am fairly sure that this last is quite new to me. A year or so ago, I would have been quite sure!

It turned out very well, with both excellent flavour and texture. Potatoes soft, carrots with a bit of bite left in them. The trick being not to take too much at once, a trap which it is easy to fall into.

PS 1: not yet been able to find out much about the people at reference 1, although I have learned of the existence of something called collections in Microsoft Edge, mainly by failing to get a straightforward copy of the image from said reference 1 into it. The point of interest being, where was it? How does one run it down, short of asking enough people to turn up a resident who recognises one of the buildings? There can't be that many large cities with lots of bridges over middle sized rivers running through the middle of them.

PS 2: a snap from Popik below is offered above - with traces of my recent interest in ladders having been inserted right and left.

PS 3: I had thought that braising meant cooking meat - or perhaps a chicken - mostly in water, then finishing in the oven to brown it. Or that it was US-speak for grilling. It now turns out that both were wrong, and that braising means start at a high temperature to brown then slow finish at a low temperature to cook - both here and in the US. A technique which BH does, as it happens, occasionally use. See references 5 and 6. 

References

Reference 1: https://www.accuweather.com/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/towers.html.

Reference 3: https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/a_stew_boiled_is_a_stew_spoiled. Where Popik has gone to the bother of digging up lots of versions of this saying, many turkey orientated.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Popik. Very likely the same chap.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braising.

Reference 6: https://barbecuebible.com/2020/07/24/smoke-braising-technique/.

Outgoing Lord Mayor

It is odd that I have to take the New York Times to read this morning that the outgoing Lord Mayor of Westminster, Hamza Taouzzale, scored two firsts in that he was the youngest person and the first Muslim to hold the office. He was just 22 when when his year started last June. Forty years since the first lady took office in 1983. The Mayor is also the deputy High Steward of Westminster Abbey, which appears to have worked out OK, with tact on both sides.

[Mr. Taouzzale in the Lisson Green Estate in North Westminster, where he grew up and still lives. Credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times]

I had thought that Westminster had teamed up with Camden to the north for most purposes, but as far as I can see from Wikipedia, they are two independent London Boroughs, with the very much smaller City of London to the east. Along with places like Islington and Tower Hamlets.

The once seedy Pimlico is to be found in the south of the borough of Westminster, while Paddington to the northwest has yet to be properly gentrified. While I used to buy both cheese and smoked haddock in Tachbrook from the street market there. Both rather good.

References

Reference 1: The Saturday profile: As Lord Mayor, a 22-Year-Old Vaulted From Public Housing Into London’s Elite -  Saskia Solomon, New York Times - 2023.

Creationists

[the Lord hard at work on the planets, his second attempt, as imagined by one Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, then in the pay of Pope Julius II, born Giuliano della Rovere. A new, but by then important, family in Renaissance Italy]

Creationists is a word which I use to refer to the staff and students of Epsom Art College, more properly now the Epsom campus of the University of the Creative Arts of reference 1. An important source of business for the many fast food outlets and bars of Epsom. With their lodgings in East Street once having been an important source of trolleys, now dried up. See, for example, reference 2.

It is also a word I associate with the curious people living in the southern parts of the US who are big into evolution denial, are big into the Christian divinity having the last word when it comes to the organisation of all our plants and animals. From where I associate to the famous but irrelevant quotation 'God does not play dice'.

All this prompted by a piece brought to me by Microsoft News when I fired up my laptop this morning, the piece at reference 3. It seems that the disease has spread to India and India's leading educational authority, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), is removing evolution from school textbooks, amid some opposition from the Indian science establishment. Slimming down is one story, with things like the Periodic Table getting the push as well. But it can also be seen as part of an anti-western-science drive by Hindu nationalists, led by one Narendra Modi. I associate to my discovery in the basement of the slightly heretical Hindu temple in Neasden that many of the big scientific discoveries claimed by the west really took place in ancient India.

The piece also tells us that New Zealand is infected too, part of its drive to promote traditional Maori learning in schools.

On the one hand, all rather worrying. On the other, it can also been seen as a reaction to the dangers of the western habit of no-holds-barred when it comes to science. It is OK to delve into anything: it is OK to stir up the nuclear pot, it is OK to stir up intelligence itself, to probe the innermost secrets of what it means to be human. An approach which has brought us much that is good. But there are also what one might euphemise as side effects.

PS: the menu card and trimmings for last night's state dinner for Modi at the White House, where they seem to like this rather florid style. Billed as vegetarian, but there seems to be some low-key fish as well. One wonders what the same sort of thing at our own Palace might look like.

References

Reference 1: https://www.uca.ac.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/trolley-451.html.

Reference 3: India removing evolution from textbooks shows we shouldn’t take science education for granted - Georgia Chambers , The i - 2023.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_(newspaper). An online newspaper, once paired with 'The Independent', now owned by the Daily Mail. So tainted.

Reference 5: https://breakingtides.wordpress.com/. It seems that Chambers, a seemingly successful freelance journalist, has quite a big Internet footprint, including a blog called 'breaking tides'. But not this one. A false trail.

Trolley 573

Trolley 573, the first for a couple of weeks or so, was captured tucked in behind Timpson's in the complex which once used to be the famous Spread Eagle, known to serious turf surfers everywhere. A trolley from Waitrose which had been there at least 24 hours as I had passed it yesterday. Today was more convenient. Returned to the small trolley stash by the exit, behind the fags counter, busier this morning with basket cases than with smokers.

A return which involved taking it through the length of the Ashley Centre, where there appeared to be serious maintenance work going on. An outfit called Sovereign Centros is in the chair if reference 2 is anything to go by, so let's hope they manage to find a tenant for the large House of Fraser slot, formerly Dickens & Jones, presently vacant & boarded up. Let's hope the council realise that they can't have both a thriving Ashley Centre and a thriving periphery. Time to let some of it go for housing.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/trolley-572.html.

Reference 2: https://www.sovereigncentros.co.uk/projects/ashley-centre/.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Rose festival

To Polesden Lacey a few days ago to inspect their rose festival, a festival has already resulted in a fake post at reference 2. With our last visit seeming to have been in January, as noticed at reference 1. I wonder why it has taken so long to get back?

A bright clear day and we made what for us was an early start, but the queue for Chessington still stretched almost back to the M25. While before we got to Malden Rushett we were able to admire the fine cow parsley on the northern banks. In flower and with some of them standing well over two metres. So a good bit taller than those snapped above at roadside unknown. Not to be confused with the Asian invader, giant hogweed. While BH remembers how, in our time in East Anglia, the cow parsley used to bring on the sneezing.

I remember thinking, as we drove up the long drive, that it would be something of a pull on a bicycle. And we get there to find that it is something of a destination for the older cyclists, who were able to demonstrate the new-to-me style of bicycle rack. Clearly more relaxed types than I, with none of them bothering with locks and chains while they bought their teas and coffees.

We also had an older lady, smartly dressed, who sported what I thought was called a toque on the back of her head. A bit like the fascinators worn at racecourses, but a bit more functional. But checking, I find that a toque is either a variety of woolly hat or what chefs wear. So what this would have been properly called I don't know.

A fine climbing rose in the entrance yard, once the stable yare. That apart, roses were not that thick on the ground, and the peonies and irises were largely over. But we were impressed how well some of the irises looked, even as their flowers ripened into seeds. Lots of onions of various sorts. Some cammasias (see reference 3). But no wild garlic, despite my being fooled by what to me were some lookalikes. And no echiums, which we have seen in the big herbaceous border in the past.

On this day, for some reason, I found the collection of graves for Mrs. Greville's various dogs a bit maudlin. But maybe as a rich, childless widow, having dogs and mourning them in this way is understandable. And given that he money came from brewing in Scotland, maybe Poleseden Lacey should be twinned with Buckfast Abbey, who sell, or at least sold, a good chunk of their output of tonic wine to the winos of Glasgow. For which see reference 4 - from which I have lifted the snap above. Must look out for one.

View of antique urn from a secluded thatched shed at the top of the rather elderly cherry orchard. A fine place, out of the sun, in which to sit & doze. The urn appears to be unknown to both Bing and Google.

A yellow buddleia, not quite the same as the one in our garden.

A lot of young gardeners about. We thought perhaps some kind of National Trust apprentices, but maybe they were from the Camelia Botnar foundation which we found out about later, for which see reference 2.

We passed on a snack in either cafeteria proper (inside the stable yard) or the snack bar (out front), opting for making do at home.

On the way home, we thought about paying Fowler the fish man a visit, the fishmonger of Great Bookham, from whom we once purchased a fine pair of lemon soles. We eventually decided against, while wondering how long he can survive, given the massive decline in such shops since I was a child. Along with all those butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

With a fishmonger I remember using in Bridge Street in Cambridge, now being something called Poco Kids (disused). At least I think so. A regular street when I was very young, then a tourist street, but including a decent pub - The Pickerel - then decent, apart from a few dodgies from Magdelene across the road (said maudlin), now doing food from Greene King - and a decent second hand bookshop, but now, according to Google, including at least one charity shop and one vacancy. River to the left.

PS: we happened to go past the cow parsley at Malden Rushett again today. Now well past its best, and this lot not particularly tall. But this was where we were stopped at the lights.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/festive-polesden.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/fake-159.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/shoulder.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckfast_Tonic_Wine.