Trolley 622

An M&S trolley from the small car park on West Hill, opposite what used to be the 'Eclipse', now flats. Probably the same trolley noticed a day or so previously but which went missing before I could capture it.

Returned to the stack at the back of the food hall, a stack which only contained large and medium trolleys. I put this one to the side, where it could dry out.

After which I continued on a Ewell Village anti-clockwise.

Past the Cycle Hub at Ewell West station, with its ecological roof, not looking very different from when I last snapped it, back in 2019, and noticed at reference 3. I suppose that whatever it is growing there is content just to stay small. Not very capitalist of it at all.

Kept going, to capture the Wellingtonia noticed at reference 2.

A large lump had been taken out of this tree quite recently, in the parade which is just before the Longmead Road junction. But there was no mess in the road below, so probably not in the storm of the day previous. And there was no convenient shop keeper waiting to be asked about it.

Is the fact that is was rather an overcast day sufficient explanation of the darkness of this snap? Didn't seem dark like that at the time.

Down Longmead Road to come across this rather half hearted dam. Which reminded me that, as a child, I used to be rather keen on building such dams in the streams to be found just outside the housing estate we lived on - doing rather a better job than here, sometimes achieving quite respectable ponds.

Home to a spot of jigsaw, to notice this rather non-standard piece in an otherwise regular and standard jigsaw; non-standard in the sense that the top side contains a hole and a half. Usually the side of an interior piece contains just one hole or one prong, as do the other three sides, so this one is unusual. From the jigsaw of a picture by Garafalo, last noticed at reference 4. A jigsaw that I have done several times over the years.

After that, a quick run-in with the Financial Times, where the piece at reference 5 caught my eye. I read that the exports of this country are dominated by services rather than goods, and that management consultancy figures large among those services. Plenty of financial services, but rather fewer legal services than I was expecting.

I quite often moan about this country's failure to balance its books and its sustained use of borrowing and the sale of assets (like water companies) to pay for far too much of what we consume. With the implicit assumption that we need to make more goods that other people want to buy, we need to find some niche market - perhaps the sort of actuators made by Rotork of reference 6 - in which we can excel. Rather as the Swiss are big into watches.

A graphic which unpicks the 'other business services' of the previous graphic. Notice the modest contribution from the lawyers, near the top.

But maybe I am wrong about that failure, and we can continue to survive by flogging management consultants - until the places we flog them to get around to growing them at home. Rather as our textile industries were largely destroyed when large countries like Indonesia got fed up with buying from Manchester and started making their own. I suppose if corporate life is going to be infested by more or less parasitic consultants, it might at least be your own.

With the other mystery being how we manage to export so many travel services. But then, perhaps we import just as many, so that is not really a plus in the present context. A consequence of the amount of both inward and outward tourism. 

PS 1: I don't think that the chart above is presented on a net basis. Which opens up another can of worms.

PS 2: later that afternoon: the broken tree is not nearly as dark on the big screen as it is on the small screen. How on earth do web designers cope - or not - with all this variation? Is the new WEBP format something to do with it?

PS 3: and after that I noticed that the Garafalo jigsaw is irregular in another sense, that some interior vertices only involve three pieces, rather than the regular four. An irregularity which makes it harder to judge whether a piece is likely or not by the position of a prong (or a hole) along a side. The point here being that extreme positions are easier to pick out.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/trolley-621.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/wellingtonia-109.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/fourth-blackberries.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/room-55.html.

Reference 5: Britain, consultation nation: Management consultancy > basically all other UK exports, sorry - Louis Ashworth, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 6: https://www.rotork.com/en.

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