Trolley 624

A brace of small trolleys from the Kokoro Passage. One from the M&S food hall, one from Waitrose, this last configured slightly differently. Scored as one as they could be wheeled together easily enough and the two stacks are only yards apart.

On round the Ewell Village anti-clockwise, but taking in Upper High Street and Mill Road (for a windmill I think) as I had a bit of business that way.

There used to be a long strip of rough ground between Mill Road and the railway line below, rough ground where I once used to pick damsons from time to time, as noticed at reference 2. Now mostly given over to housing, much to the annoyance of the people on the other side of Mill Road who used to have a better view. On the up side, the new houses probably block out a fair bit of the noise from the railway - maybe as much as a dozen trains an hour, counting the two directions.

But the top end of the rough ground survives. Presumably not suitable for housing for one reason or another.

Home to a spot of jigsaw, having cracked out Garafalo a few days ago, with my third go at same - and not necessarily the last - being noticed at reference 3. Co-opted the large drawing board - perhaps sixty years old now - in aid of the card table on this occasion - but for some reason it took me a long time to get the perimeter done. Slowed down by having managed to switch the top right and bottom left corners, which took a while to sort out. And it has taken longer than I think it should to attune eyes and brain to the palette of the puzzle, so that I can, for example, say which sort of flesh tone goes where. Things have speeded up now I am onto the figures, with just two pieces which I think ought to be easy to place, with what look like very distinctive markings, but which I have failed to place.

After the mid-week haggis & neaps, puzzling continued with Scrabble, with the lucky fall of the tiles handing me a substantial victory, although our combined score was still short of 600, not attained for some time now.

BH did not challenge me during the game, but after the game we thought it best to look up 'droves', 'fixer' and 'lipped'. Droves I thought might be obsolete, but it turns out to be an old word, still current at the time of writing the OED, say 1900 or so. Fixer I thought might be slang, but is included both in the sense of a tradesman, as in the modern second-fixer (of a carpenter) or as a chemical used for fixing something (perhaps a dye). First used in the 19th century. Lipped, I thought might be slang, but no. Inter alia, a botanical term used to describe a flower. So my victory was not tainted.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/trolley-623.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/07/hedgerow-jam.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/03/jigsaw-5-series-3.html.

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