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.

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