Trolley 662

After dealing with No.661, the plan was to carry on up East Street (it really is up heading towards Kiln Lane, up enough to be a bit of a pull on a bicycle on a bad day, enough of a pull that one is quite pleased when the light is red at Kiln Land and one can take a breather).

But then, I caught sight of a trolley parked at the front of the creationists' residence. A trolley which turned out to be a rather battered trolley from Wilko, so no use to me. I can't see the Wilko administrators wanting anything to do with it, so I suppose that somebody else will end up taking it to the tip.

I think there was a short string of Sainsbury's trolleys next to the smoking den, but I didn't care to push in that deep and the string may have been a bit long for me anyway.

So carried on, to be surprised by a Waitrose trolley on the other side of the road. A big deal as not only do I not get a lot of Waitrose trolleys these days, up East Street is more or less unheard of. No question of proceeding to the footbridge leading to the gas depot. It had to be taken back to town.

To be entertained as I waited to cross at the Spread Eagle cross roads by the two mature ladies behind me plotting out their expedition to town. They were really pleased that B&M had come to town and it sounded as if they were going to spend a happy hour poking around in there. Perhaps popping into Wetherspoon's after that for a spot of refreshment.

While I went back over West Hill to admire our new temporary worktops in the kitchen, which we installed in the pause between Day No.7 and Day No.8 of our kitchen refurbishment; that is to say while we wait for the new worktop to be made and fitted. I went the Full Monty with old chipboard, work bench, carpenter's box, the works. Left and centre. BH contented herself with borrowing one of the shelves from one of the new cupboards, not yet needed. Right. We were both very pleased with ourselves.

PS: the chap who came to measure up for the new worktops did not do anything so old-speak as to wield a tape measure or to cut out paper templates for the factory to work to. He just had a laser enabled contraption on a tripod linked to some kind of laptop linked to his telephone. And I just had to make my mark on his telephone and that was that. Hopefully whatever turns up will be the right colour and will fit. 20mm of resin bound stone filings is the plan - the stone equivalent of MDF.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-661.html.

Trolley 661

Trolley 661 was recovered from the car park next to the Kokoro Passage. A shiny new B&M trolley, a shop where both sets of front doors are now working, but where the very modest trolley stand seems to have vanished. It was all too busy to ask anyone what to do with my trolley, so I just left it inside the doors, by the exits from the tills.

Maybe next time I will try a bit harder.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-660.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

We Germans: interim report

A chance pick-me-up from the Raynes Park platform library, still functioning despite the building works sprawled all over the two country platforms. An easy-read paperback of just 200 pages. This by way of an interim report, while the first reading is still fresh.

A made-up story built around a short episode in the service of a young German soldier, who had been on the Eastern front since the very beginning, an episode from the time several years later when the Germans were starting to collapse, towards the end of 1944. Inter alia, a reminder that the Eastern front was not only much bigger than the Western front, but also much more savage. Savagery which might have been started by the Germans, but which had, by 1944, taken over the whole front. A savagery which extended to the savagery (by the military police and their equivalents) needed to enforce and maintain discipline. But a battlefield savagery which, for the most part, did not amount to actionable war crimes.

A story which is partly about that, but also about what happens afterwards, both to the survivors and to their families. How do they live with what has been done? All this from the point of view of the losing side.

Starritt no doubt draws on material from his German grandfather, of an age to have been a soldier in the second war, although we are not told whether he was or not, or, indeed, much about him at all. Maybe he did become the happily married village pharmacist in the way of the grandfather in the story.

Sarritt's provenance aside, my worry today, which will be familiar to regular readers, is a worry about the truth. When one writes a fictional or fictionalised account of events in the relatively recent past, how much can one make up? Should one flag up the bits that are made up? A matter which I last got exercised about in the context of reference 6.

This triggered in part by an anecdote about the end of the Bismark, in which the commander, when he knew the game was up, opened up the stores so that everyone could have a last feast - at least of food, booze and tobacco - before going down in a defiant blaze of glory.

Checking with Wikipedia at reference 5, I find a slightly different story. The commander is killed on the bridge, fairly early in the last battle, and the first officer eventually gives the orders to scuttle the battered Bismark and to abandon ship around an hour later. There were  a little over a hundred survivors from a complement of around 2,000 men.

First  thought was this was all wrong. For most readers this will be the most that they get to know about the Bismark and they will remember the fable rather than the history.

More prosaically, if the author tells us a whole lot of stuff about how the seed drills of the day worked, thriller writers quite often going in for padding of this sort, you expect him to have done his homework and got it right. You are allowed to invent people, but not important stuff about seed drills.

I then remembered about the sinking of the Yamato, the story that I remembered being that the commander summoned the crew before she left harbour and explained that they were on a glorious mission for the emperor, a glorious mission during which they would all meet a glorious end. A story made all the more plausible by the Japanese penchant at that time for suicide bombers and death before dishonour, which last included captivity. Looking that one up, I find that the ship was indeed sent on such a mission, but was battered to death by overwhelming force, mainly airborne force, before she got to her intended beach. This battering took around 3 hours, so the Yamato lasted rather longer than the Bismark. There were around three hundred survivors from a complement of around 3,000 men. A first person account is now on its way to me.

In the meantime, the second thought was that whatever the truth of the matter, the anecdote told by Starritt might well be what a private soldier on the Eastern front might have believed happened. Might well have been what he saw on the newsreels. Might well have been what he remembered years later. After all, the Bismark was sunk fairly early in the war, when Führer-worship was riding high. The commander and his officers at least might well have been full of the spirit of the Nibelungenlied. For see, for example, reference 8.

And what a private soldier might have believed is perfectly respectable material for a novel. The only catch being that the truth might take a bit of a battering on the way.

And then I remembered about the sinking of the Revenge, well over three hundred years later, well before what is now Germany had emerged from the complicated mess of central Europe. My memory was that the commander, one Sir Richard Grenville, a famous Elizabethan sea-dog (aka pirate), stood on the burning deck while his ship went down, screaming abuse at the Spaniards who had surrounded him. While the stories turned out by both Unstead and Hume were slightly more prosaic: he did fight his ship against long odds for a long time, but in the end he surrendered and died of wounds. There were some survivors, but they and the prize crew were lost in a storm a short while afterwards. A line which even Tennyson stuck to in his well known ballad, apart from a significant twist at the end, to be found at reference 9.

So, as the title of the post suggests, an interim report. More thought needed.

PS: I have used the well-known photograph of the Yamato include above before. Finding the post in question is left as an exercise for the reader.

References

Reference 1: We Germans - Alexander Starritt - 2020.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Starritt.

Reference 3: https://www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org/. His prize. All being a bit ironic, given the present state of the world.

Reference 4: https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/news/beyond-good-and-evil-alexander-starritt-discusses-we-germans/. The story from the author's old college in Oxford.

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

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/author-author.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_ship_Revenge_(1577).

Reference 8: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/06/lighting-up-time.html.

Reference 9: https://allpoetry.com/The-Revenge---A-Ballad-of-the-Fleet.

Trolley 660

Trolley 660 was actually two small trolleys from the M&S food hall picked up on the way down through the Kokoro Passage, after a day in town. A day which did not, in the event, involve hiring any Bullingdons because it was too cold and wet. There were some dry windows, but not at the right times.

Additionally, there were three B&M trolleys in the passage, awkwardly tied together by young people recovering coins (or perhaps just tokens) from the handle locks. Not really an issue with handle locks on trolleys from other shops, where they are only rarely used. Left for someone else to deal with.

The M&S trolley stack - trolley park would be too grand a name - contained just one other trolley when I got there. I was even thanked by a busy young team member for my two. The big rush before the Easter shut-down. With Good Friday being a more or less dead day when I was a child: more or less nothing was open. And not coming from a church family, nothing on that front either.

With Easter being much more important for the pious than Christmas. On which reference 2 provides some introductory material, from where the snap above is taken.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-659.html.

Reference 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/holydays/holyweek_1.shtml.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Piano in town

A couple of weeks ago to the Wigmore Hall to hear Elisabeth Brauss give us some Prokofiev (from Op.12), Albéniz (from Iberia, Book 1) and Beethoven (Op.31, No.3, 'Hunt'). Brauss - or perhaps Brauß - is to be found at reference 1. A Radio 3 concert, one of the Monday lunchtime series.

A dull morning which started with some serious damage to someone's fox-proof food waste caddy. The lengths a fox will go to to get to someone's potato peelings and cast-off McDonald's.

Then part of our carriage on the tube to Oxford Circus was occupied by what looked like a young man crashed out, face down, spread over three or four seats, the sort facing across the carriage, by the doors. Not clear what had happened to the arm rests, but he did appear to be breathing, so we all just left him be.

Got to All-Bar-One to find that the tables had been slightly rearranged and a new manager. We had a very cheerful waiter - and a double ration of smarties. After which we took our cheese scones, left over from the day before, previously noticed at reference 2, in Cavendish Square. Enough to tide us over until lunch after the concert to come.

A concert which down very well; we must both have been on form - and I had done a bit of revision on the Beethoven, which seems to be a good idea these days. For an encore I think we had the slow movement from Op.14, No.2.

Out to try for the Mozza pizzeria attached to the Treehouse Hotel in Langham Place, a pizzeria which I rather like. But shut once again - but not closed down. This morning I find that it is open Tuesday to Saturday - which explains why it is never open when we are around. A pity, as I can't see us making a special trip there. See reference 3.

Back across the road to the Wigmore, to find that it was open and ready to serve us. So we finally get to eat there, with my having visiting the place for a glass several times over the years, for example, as noticed way back in 2017 at reference 5. An establishment which still belongs to the Langham Hotel next door if the email address given on the 'Find Us' page is anything to go by. An establishment which, curiously, shuts at noon on Sundays, which explains why we never get in on a Sunday.

I took 'buttered crumpets, steamed cock crab (229 kcal)' to start, while BH just nibbled. What some places call an 'amuse bouche', but I rather liked it. 

I am sure I read in one of our cookbooks recently that hen crabs are best, but reference 6 is not having it, with their story being that 'male brown cock crabs are larger than female (hen) crabs, have large claws, a high white meat content with brown meat that is a little less sweet than the hen crab. The large claws make for easy picking out of the white meat'. This next to an entry for 'W Harvey & Sons', which looked to be selling crabs too, but which Bing correctly flagged as a cover for pornography. Poor old crabs.

We both took the 'slow-cooked beef and onion pie, mash (1157 kcal)', which was decently presented, but adequate rather than good. A bit too rich and a bit too small, leaving one feeling that one had not eaten properly. To be fair, BH was in better case than I as far as that went. No greens to go with it. No Calvados, despite the grandeur of the establishment - including the elaborate wooden floor already noticed at reference 5.

No orange jelly or tinned peaches for dessert - although we could have had three cheeses from Neal's Yard Dairy. Never quite understood why people like to take several cheeses at once: I prefer to stick to the one. Same with bitter beer when I used to drink that.

But we did get a very cheerful young waitress who told us all about the need for foot care in her line of work, this à propos of her smart looking shoes, which went very well with the rest of her outfit. Which included something you sprayed on (the feet) to keep them under control.

Took the back streets to get us to Tottenham Court Road, taking in this line of scooters on the way. Media Lab are to be found at the visually noisy reference 7 and describe themselves as the largest independent media agency in the UK, the catch there being that I don't have a clue what one of those might do, despite their holding an IPA effectiveness accreditation, whatever that might be. In my day IPA was a sort of bitter beer. Why in this day and age of full fibre connections to everywhere and everything do they need lots of people rushing about on scooters? Something to do with needing hard copy of something to be sure of the colours and so forth? Something we know all about in connection with choosing the new lino for our kitchen refit. Fake stone naturally.

We paid a good visit to the flashy gothic revival church - All Saints - in Margaret Street. My carafe of white - possibly 'Picpoul de Pinet, Sel et Sable, Languedoc, France 2022' - plus a spot of Jameson had got me into just the right frame of mind to appreciate the elaborate interior decoration. Not the sort of thing one associates with the stuffy old Church of England at all. No organ accompaniment on this occasion. And there was a young male tourist who was not showing much respect to others. I might, for all he knew, have been praying.

Someone with a spot of bother. Looks like the same sort of fibreglass that large parts of our more modest vehicle are made of.

Some subdued decoration to a building in Berners Street. See, for example, the motif above the big windows. The transition from the elaborate stone trim of the Edwardian era to the flush finishes of blocks of the 1960s?

BH was quite clear that she did not want to visit this establishment, even more visually noisy, at the top of Charing Cross Road. Not quite sure what it was about either.

But the late afternoon light made for some interesting townscapes. For example, the theatre at Cambridge Circus.

Cheese from Neal's Yard Dairy in Shorts Garden. The usual ration of around a kilo of Lincolnshire Poacher, taken in two pieces, wrapped separately. They have a clever way of wrapping the cheese in greaseproof paper (or something) which seems to make it keep pretty well in the refrigerator.

Tube to Waterloo. On which we were entertained by a young lady with extravagant extensions to her fingernails. Elaborately painted, with flecks of purple against a paler background, and with no attempt being made to hide the fact that they were extensions. Got up, in fact, rather as if they were a sort of jewellery.

And so home.

PS 1: this morning, I have failed to find the advice about hen crabs. Not the Boston Cook Book and not the newly acquired Settlement Cook Book, this last acquired after an interchange with Google's Gemini about Pepys and kedgeree, as previously reported. But I have learned that crabs moult their shells, an expensive business which leaves them very vulnerable for the duration. See, for example, reference 8. It doesn't say what happens about the legs and claws, which one might think needed shedding to accommodate growth too.

PS 2: and then to read about yet another expensive pickle that the Serious Fraud Office has got itself into, on this occasion with Russian oligarchs and their mining company. Now moved to Luxembourg where they are even more forgiving than we are. City wide boys seem to be able to run rings around the Fraud Office, it seeming to be just one failure after another.

References

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

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/cheesy-nostalgia.html.

Reference 3: https://www.treehousehotels.com/london/offers/ciao-mozza. The pizza.

Reference 4: https://the-wigmore.co.uk/. The pub.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/wigmore-two.html.

Reference 6: https://www.freshfishonline.co.uk/shop/shellfish/live-cock-crab/.

Reference 7: https://medialabgroup.co.uk/.

Reference 8: https://www.bangor.ac.uk/natural-sciences/news/how-does-the-crab-shed-its-shell-22903.

Reference 9: https://crabstreetjournal.org/blog/2012/10/14/what-is-molting/. A rather more elaborate take on moulting in hermit crabs. Lots of stuff out there, so there are clearly plenty of people who are interested in this.

Memory recovery

Finished reading the Maigret story at reference 1 this morning, for what it probably at least the third time in something over the last five years if references 2, 3 and 4 are anything to go by. Somewhat chastened to find that while I remembered bits of the story, great chunks of it had gone missing - so missing that rereading them did not bring them back. It was nearly as if I was reading it for the first time. Worst of all, the ending had completely vanished.

I also failed to spark on either the merlans or the clous which got me going on previous occasions. With his clou being interesting because of its rather indirect connection with our clue, as in Agatha. This might be due to my getting lazier, less likely to get up to look up the words that I don't know or don't remember.

But I do remember a correspondent telling me that her memory had got so bad that she could get by just reading the novels of Balzac. By the time she got to the end of the sequence - quite a long sequence - she had completely forgotten the beginning and was quite happy to start over. How many years before we are in that happy position with the sort of serial detective dramas which we usually watch on television for an hour or so of an evening?

More good news from File Explorer, in that searching the blog archive for voleur turned up its five hits more or less instantly. Unlike in older versions, which took a while to process new search terms and often required the File Explorer application to be closed and restarted to get at the results. Three of the five being included in the references below and the other two being a different story involving robbers in its title.

PS 1: a restaurant called 'Vieux-Pressoir' had a big part in this one, and the image above was turned up by Bing using that as a search key. The link to source was not very helpful, but it may have been a restaurant attached to the vigneron at reference 5. Rather larger than the derelict cider presses which are sometimes used to decorate public house dining areas in Devon. 

While Google Images suggests an Alsatian restaurant of the same name, with a website which gives a new-to-me error, snapped above.

Also a reminder that when Simenon lived in Paris, I suppose before the second world war, there were plenty of unpretentious, independent restaurants owned and run by people with provincial roots serving good quality provincial food and wine. Quite often getting some of their stuff sent up from the natal village. Not something we see a lot of in the London of today.

PS 2: 19:26: Microsoft Start has just brought me some Wellingtonia news. It seems that Havering Country Park (reference 6) is full of them. A bit to the north of Romford and not far off our way to Cambridge around the M25. Clearly a place to turn into next time we go north.

References

Reference 1: Le Voleur de Maigret - Simenon - 1966. Volume XXIV of the collected works

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/gmaps-collapse.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/11/fish.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/jumping-to-conclusions.html.

Reference 5: https://en.levieuxpressoir.fr/.

Reference 6: https://www.havering.gov.uk/info/20037/parks/723/havering_country_park. 

Trolley 659

Two trolleys of the five available in the Kokoro Passage yesterday, at least one from B&M, but none from Waitrose.

We wondered afterwards why there are lots of M&S trolleys in this passage, but very few from Waitrose. Part of the explanation is probably that Waitrose is not visible from the front of the Ashley Centre and is nearer the multi-storey car park at the back of the Centre. But that does not strike me as good enough. There is a small underground car park next to the passage, and it seems likely that the trolleys come from people who have parked in it, rather than come from the railway station on the other side of Station Approach - although you do get trolleys left more or less outside the station doors too. But why would M&S people use one car park rather than the other? Ditto Waitrose people? Are there socio-economic differences between the two client bases that I have not dreamed of? Are Waitrose just more careful about clearing away their trolleys from the passage, perhaps several times a day?

A little tongue-in-cheek, I tried asking Google's Gemini, who had quite a fair go at saying why this might be, without committing himself. An answer which might well have done quite well as an answer to a GCSE question of a 14 or 15 year old at school.

Then it was the turn of Google Images who did pretty well too on the snap above, prompted by spotting a sprinkling of these pretty mauve flowers - a rather deeper colour than you get in the snap above - in the new daffodil bed at the back of the back garden. A daffodil bed which contained lots of plants but very few flowers this year. No idea why not, but they don't seem to do very well there, despite all the garden compost heaped up behind - compost which seems to suit the honesty very well, now springing into vigorous flower, also mauve. Last noticed at reference 4.

Google Images was pretty sure that they were  herb-Robert (Geranium robertianum), with a rather sketchy description to be found at reference 2. With an unusually feeble illustration, with Wikipedia usually coming up with quite good illustrations for its entries. I was then interested to find that the people who look after the forests in San Juan County in Washington State were not keen on it at all, along with a lot of our other plants and trees which I rather like, like gorse and holly. See reference 5. And a lot of the images turned up by Google seemed to involve one or both of the words 'invasive' or 'weed'.

It seems that the plant has a long history of medicinal use, probably kick started by the medieval Robert who first popularised its use. Some of this is to be found at reference 3.

An identification more or less corroborated by the more botanical Bentham & Hooker.

There was also the matter of its leaves, smaller versions of those of the umbrellas of reference 6. But not a relative: do not be fooled by the similarity of the leaves!

PS: I now know that San Juan County is a group of islands, the San Juan Islands, lying between the Washington State mainland and Vancouver Island. Nothing to do with California, as I had first thought. Presumably the Spaniards got that far north, at least along the coastal belt. I think that we once laid claim to them too but were seen off by the Yankees. And there do appear to be a lot of forests in satellite view.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-658.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geranium_robertianum.

Reference 3: https://permaculturenoosa.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/05-Medicinal-Herbs-Herb-Robert.pdf.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/trolley-639.html.

Reference 5: https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/2054/2014/04/Noxious-Weeds-in-San-Juan-County-Forests-A-Brief-Guide.pdf.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-656.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolley 658

Collected from an elevated flower bed in Station Approach. Not as awkward to fetch down as I had feared - but still not too sure about a big one.

Collected a friend from the Kokoro Passage and returned the two of them to the M&S food hall. Where, for a change, the shutters were down at the front entrance. Sunday Observance I suppose.

After which I carried on around the Kiln Lane circuit, passing a very handsome bank of pink and white blossom, one end of which is snapped above.

I tried Google Images which came up with a good selection, a lot of which were inaccessible to me inside Facebook or Instagram. There may have been the odd X. But enough were accessible that my forced choice would be ornamental apple. Otherwise, certainly an ornamental version of a fruit tree. Closer look next time around.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-657.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Comedy pigeons

At this time of year, we, particularly BH, are much amused by the spectacle of large fat pigeons balancing precariously on very thin twigs while they make grabs for the tasty buds.

This morning, say around 06:30, a couple of pigeons were on the plum tree next door, I think a sucker from a tree which was once cut down. Bounding up and down nicely they were; a wonder how they kept their footing, not that you would know that from the zoomed snap above - although it does show the relative size of bird and twig.

I remember now that my father's plum trees suffered from attack by tits at this time of year, I had thought by stripping off the flower buds, but today's pigeons seemed to be going for both flower and leaf buds. He sometimes tried hanging fluffy white stuff - possibly glass fibre - in the branches to deter them, but it was a messy business and not, as I recall, terribly effective.

While indoors, the triffid continues to make progress, with the lower florets coming away from the stem and nearly in open flower. Last noticed at reference 1.

With the two orchids beyond taking a well-earned rest after a long period, some years, of energetic flowering.

And today we wait to see what Letitia does about Donald. A rum way to run elections. I worry about the the increasing tendency to take politicians to law, rather than simply ejecting them to tend their vegetable gardens (or whatever) by due process of ballot box. A taking which may well be justified in particular cases, but a tendency which can only, to mind, degrade the quality of public life. Decent people are not going to be prepared to go in for politics with the threat of legal action or worse hanging over them when they fail or fall out of favour.

In the meantime, in the margins of bread batch No.714, I have been inspecting the bluebells in the garden. All coming on well, with the English ones (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) a few days ahead of the Spanish ones (Hyacinthoides hispanica). With the ones planted near the house a few days ahead of the wilder ones further up the (back) garden. I suppose one should expect the English before the Spanish, their having had more time to acclimatise to the colder climate.

At least one clump of white Engish, a (usually cultivated) variety of the blue, seemingly with no other common name than the oxymoronic white bluebell. With the 'non-scripta' bit of the botanical name being a relic of some taxonomic battle of past times. 

I note in passing that bluebells are in a quite different part of the botanical world from campanulas or bellflowers, despite some similarity in the flowers. The first being in the asparagus family (Asparagaceae), the second in their own family (Campanulaceae), part of the aster order. 'Campana' being a late Latin word for bell, making its way into a number of other English words, for example campanology, the study of bell founding, bell ringing and church bells generally. OED has about a column and a half of them. Not to be confused with 'companion' which is quite different.

See references 3, 4 and 5.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolleys-650-and-651.html.

Reference 2: Donald Trump’s $464mn bond is due on Monday. What happens next: End of grace period could set off next phase of fight between former president and New York attorney-general - Joshua Chaffin, Joe Miller, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyacinthoides_non-scripta.

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

Reference 5: https://www.rhs.org.uk/weeds/bluebells-as-weeds. For a more gardeners' flavoured view.

Vivipary

Opening up an apple this morning, I found a germinating pip, not something I remember coming across before. Almost certainly a Pink Lady apple from Sainsbury's, an apple with some external damage and a little, faint internal bruising, but quite OK to eat, if not as good as some of its kind, which can taste remarkably fresh, given the length of time which they must have been in store.

The Sainsbury's product details say they might come from Argentina, Chile, France, Italy, New Zealand or South Africa, and given that reference 1 suggests that storage for 8 months or more is possible, these particular apples could have come from any of those places. Storage which might be at only just above freezing, which I did not know.

Next stop Gemini, with the prompt: 'When do the pips germinate inside a still entirely eatable apple'. His first response what that they don't, giving various reasons why they don't, one of which was the need to keep them cold for a bit (stratification). I then told him that this pip had germinated. He replied that this was called vivipary and might have been because the apple was overripe (which one might have thought was excluded by the wording of my original prompt) or because it had been stored in damp conditions. I then pointed out that this apple had probably been in cold storage for a while. Which he agreed was a necessary condition for germination, but not sufficient, sticking with the overripe or damp story.

Next stop Copilot, with the prompt: 'What are the vivipary triggers for an apple pip'. His response was nicely organised, to the point of supplying references as end notes - with three of the four being gardening sites, of which there seem to be lots. However, Gemini was not having it, saying that potassium and nitrogen had nothing to do with it. Both Gemini and Copilot seemed to think that what I was really interested in was growing apple tree from pips.

Time for a bit of digging on my own account. Which turns up reference 3, introducing vivipary in plants. And then reference 4, a rather more detailed account, with special reference to apples. Which I have not yet read, but the whole business of triggering germination looks to be quite complicated. With a simple fact being that a good way to break seed dormancy is to keep them in the cold - while a good way to promote subsequent germination is to keep them in the warm. Maybe keeping them in cold storage and then transferring them to one's fruit bowl on the sideboard is doing just that.

I am reminded that some plants go to some trouble to make it more likely that their seeds will germinate in the right place at the right time. With fire being an essential ingredient in some cases. With deciding the best balance between producing lots of seeds and producing good quality seeds being an interesting problem of constrained optimisation.

I may get to potassium and nitrogen if I persist.

In the meantime, my thought is that Copilot organises its replies well - but they are not any more reliable than Gemini's. While Gemini is inclined to waffle in response to supplementaries - the time-honoured resort of the examination candidate who is stuck for an answer. And neither product really address the point of what might make a pip inside a supermarket apple sprout. 

Neither product appears to be able to drill through the sea of web pages to get to the real stuff, like reference 4, and both are dependent on more or less amateur gardening sites and the likes of Wikipedia. 

Dictionaries

Neither Kew nor Wisley were any help. Kew gave nothing for vivipary in apples, while Wisley gave me far too much. Far too much to wade through and most of which was probably irrelevant.

Webster's has a brief entry for vivipary, while OED has an equally brief one but one which suggests  that vivipary is the term applied to plants which are viviparous - a word which is not restricted to animals - animals like snakes and humans - as I had thought. A word derived from French and/or Latin and which has been around in this country since the 17th century. Viviparous gets about six column inches.

While in 'Brave New World' being viviparous was something disgusting that savages did, before proper hatcheries were invented.

Heritage

There is talk on the Internet of putting apple pips on some damp newspaper in the refrigerator to get them to germinate. After which they may or may not grow to produce the desired apples.

While my father, whose own father grew fruit for a living, never raised apple trees from seed, but always budded, occasionally grafted, them onto a suitable stock. I may have even done the odd budding myself in the distant past and I inherited - and still have - the specialised pocket knife used by the professional budder.

PS 1: I think the house my father was born in in Hemingford Gray is the one in the snap above - a village which he was pleased to remember as a rural slum - but then he was a bit of a leftie. The house is looking rather smarter than when I knew it (from the outside, it having been sold out of the family), complete with fake dormers and now dignified with the name 'Orchard House', with the orchard itself having long gone for housing. Google Image Search has a fair stab at finding houses of this general appearance, but does not manage to run this particular one down!

PS 2: since writing this, I have learned that our government has so managed things that the factories slated to make the shiny new HS2 trains might close down for lack of work before they get around to them. Free market forces have been busy again.

References

Reference 1: ‘Pink Lady’ Apple - J.E.L. Cripps, L.A. Richards, A.M. Mairata - 1993.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripps_Pink.

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

Reference 4: Metabolic control of embryonic dormancy in apple seed: seven decades of research - Stanisław Lewak - 2011. The view from Poland.

Pill not pipe

The MIT Technology Review bring me news (at reference 1) of a new gadget which might, in the future, reduce the need for colonoscopies. Instead, you just swallow a rather large pill and it sends out signals about the state of your gut on its way through. On a quick read, only tested on pigs so far.

The story seems to be that you leverage the ability of bacteria to detect chemicals that should not be in one's gut. One then arranges things for those bacteria to emit light when those chemicals are present. With a light detector close at hand which can send radio signals to the outside world.

All this packaged into something like the device snapped above - a modest 1.5 centimetres across. So quite a big pill, inserted into the pig surgically, but, we are told, quite safely swallowed by a human.

Maybe when they get it down to 0.5 centimetres across I will be tempted.

PS: I should add that it seems that large pills containing electrical wizardry to detect goings on in the gut are already being used in humans. But not in this particular way.

Additional information

Abstract of reference 2: transient molecules in the gastrointestinal tract such as nitric oxide and hydrogen sulfide are key signals and mediators of inflammation. Owing to their highly reactive nature and extremely short lifetime in the body, these molecules are difficult to detect. Here we develop a miniaturized device that integrates genetically engineered probiotic biosensors with a custom-designed photodetector and readout chip to track these molecules in the gastrointestinal tract. Leveraging the molecular specificity of living sensors, we genetically encoded bacteria to respond to inflammation-associated molecules by producing luminescence. Low-power electronic readout circuits integrated into the device convert the light emitted by the encapsulated bacteria to a wireless signal. We demonstrate in-vivo biosensor monitoring in the gastrointestinal tract of small and large animal models and the integration of all components into a sub-1.4 cm3 form factor that is compatible with ingestion and capable of supporting wireless communication. With this device, diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease could be diagnosed earlier than is currently possible, and disease progression could be more accurately tracked. The wireless detection of short-lived, disease- associated molecules with our device could also support timely communication between patients and caregivers, as well as remote personalized care.

References

Reference 1: This microbe-filled pill could track inflammation in the gut: The bacteria light up in the presence of common by-products of inflammatory bowel disease - Soumya Sagar, MIT Technology Review - 2023.

Reference 2: Sub-1.4 cm3 capsule for detecting labile inflammatory biomarkers in-situ - M. E. Inda-Webb, M. Jimenez and others - 2023.

Trolley 657

A medium sized trolley from the M&S food hall, collected from the Kokoro Passage. Carried on around the Ewell Village anti-clockwise without further items of interest and without further snaps.

Although I might say that a walk of something over 90 minutes is more of an effort late in the afternoon than it is first thing in the morning, more or less straight after breakfast.

Day No.7 of the kitchen refit. Moving along steadily without rush or panic.

PS: still getting advertisements from Finning CAT in my email, a fortnight since I first noticed them at reference 3.

Plenty of pictures of big diggers on their site (reference 2) for those of us who like that sort of thing. A Canadian company, the biggest Caterpillar dealer in the world.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-656.html.

Reference 2: https://www.finning.com/en_CA/company/about.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/tweet_28.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

More pork soup

Following precedents at references 1 and 2 - at April and December last year not as thick on the ground as I had thought - 6oz of pearl barley into 3.5 pints of water at around 11:00.

Some time later, add onion and celery. About 12:30 add two thirds of a coarsely chopped pork tenderloin. About 13:00 add quite a lot of white cabbage.

Some left over boiled potatoes.

Saucepan a bit full at this point, so cook the mushrooms in a little butter and water in a separate pan. Mushrooms from Waitrose which seemed to need peeling but which were quite difficult to peel. Cups whole, stalks sliced. Separate cooking seemed to work quite well, with the mushrooms only being lightly cooked, rather than stewed to chewy oblivion.

On the plate, at about 13:30, about half an hour late. We did something over half at the first sitting.

Rounded off with a spot of plum crumble to add a bit more carbohydrate, fruit sugar and fruit acid to the mix.

Not quite so good on day 2, with thicker liquor and softer cabbage, but rejuvenated a bit by boiling the balance of the pork in a little water and adding that in. Cooking the other half of the mushrooms and serving separate, as before.

A good, cheap, two days' eating. Pork tenderloin back on BH's shopping list and one will find its way into our freezer in due course.

Perhaps the fact that this soup does not stand that well once cooked, is part of why you do not get soups of this sort in restaurants, despite their being very easy to make. Or is it that a restaurant keeper could not bring himself to put real meat into a soup? What's wrong with tomatoes, sugar and monosodium glutamate?

A picture of Broadgate Circus, sent in by a correspondent yesterday, now emerging from a very large, round hole in the ground. Given its location near the old Roman city wall, looking appropriately like a Roman circus, the sort which had gladiators and other wild animals. Now, I understand, mainly intended for the nocturnal amusements of city boys and people from Essex, brought in by train to nearby Moorgate, Liverpool Street and Broad Street stations. St. Paul's, horizon centre.

While this morning, I rose early to catch a very yellow, full, or near full, moon just sinking into the trees on the western skyline. While by 07:00, a couple of hours later, I could see the remains of a light frost on our extension roof.

PS: Saturday lunchtime: a sharp shower of hail, lasting about 5 minutes. A shower which both started and stopped very abruptly. The ground dusted with white for a short while.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/pork-soup.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/pork-soup.html.

Trolley 656

Another trolley from B&M from the Kokoro Passage, this one with a suppliers plaque on it.

Waitrose and Sainsbury's get their rather more sturdy trolleys from a German company called Wanzl, but this one was imported from China by Storage Handling Equipment Ltd (SHE), these last to be found at reference 2, where I find that I could buy a small trolley for around £75 and a large one for around £150. Plus £10 for the coin operated handle lock if I want one of those. Plus postage and packing. And presumably a lot less if I am buying them by the hundred or thousand. So not worth that much supermarket staff time to collect them up, at least not unless the council, fed up with all the litter, insists.

The SHE shed, confusing called SHZ House, a little to the North of the River Tees, so in the far north. Looks as if it could be a bit bleak in the winter. Given the location, perhaps in the olden days, they actually made trolleys. Or perhaps the metal bashing industry went down the river before the supermarkets came up it.

PS 1: a lot of the mystery umbrella plants of reference 3 are starting to put out impressively vigorous leads. So maybe this one, down Longmead Road, really is just cow parsley. But with various friends and relatives coming up with it.

PS 2: got to from an email which has just turned up from Surrey County Council. Pity they couldn't manage a single graphic covering all local expenditure in Surrey, but a good deal better than nothing. See reference 4 for the full story.

PS 3: while from reference 5 we get the splendid chart above. I dare say Leader Sunak really believes that all these boxes - job creation schemes for lawyers, accountants and tax advisors - add up to a good thing for the UK at large.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-655.html.

Reference 2: https://she-ltd.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-652.html.

Reference 4: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/finance-and-performance/council-tax.

Reference 5: Rishi Sunak parachutes Franck Petitgas into Thames Water talks as crunch point looms: The prime minister’s business aide is overseeing efforts to avert the utility’s potential failure - Gill Plimmer, Jim Pickard, Financial Times - 2024.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolley 655

It being Day 5 of the kitchen refit, I took a shorter walk, the Screwfix circuit, in the afternoon. A couple of trolleys gathered up from somewhere in the Kokoro Passage.

On the way I had passed something going on at the top of Clay Hill Green, something which looked to be getting underway yesterday (Thursday), featuring coils of yellow plastic pipe, maybe 30mm in diameter. The sort used by the water people to branch off the mains?

Bing turns up images of both water and gas flavoured pipes, while Gemini opts for gas.

I get a rather better reply from Microsoft's Copilot. I feed it back to Gemini, who is polite about it, but I am not sure that Gemini knows what Copilot is, at least not from his reply. He also, like a person, feels the need to cap what Copilot has to say!

Which looks as if it was lifted, more or less verbatim, from the respectable and trustworthy looking site at reference 5. Unless, of course, there is another source behind that. While Gemini was right about Cadent, a large and important gas distribution company of which I had not previously heard. See reference 6. All just like, I suppose, the pupils in a class at school writing quite different but equally valid essays in response to the teacher's one prompt.

Having delivered the trolley, on up East Street, where I found that the one trolley in the creationists' den which I had passed up on the day before had become five. Two, or possibly three, but I was not going to push five of them up to Kiln Lane, nor was I going to break their line. So passed up again.

But there were some flashy camelias on the way out. A flower which BH is rather keener on than I am.

Plus another job for Google Images. I think something like this turned up in the search for umbrella plants, noticed at reference 2. He plumps for the greater celandine (Chelidonium majus) of reference 3. A member of the poppy family, so not a close relative of the smaller celandine which we get in our back garden which is a member of the buttercup family. He mentions various other possibilities, including the US variant the celandine poppy or wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum), improbable in East Street. But then, Google Images does not use that information. 

Google Lens can and when so prompted on my telephone comes up with a rather bigger list of possibilities, including the US variant. But a way to go yet before I am confident using this tool.

So an Image's plumping which looks plausible enough, but I may check further later. Maybe the plant itself will survive to flower.

And to close, a small tree down over the path down Blenheim Road, just past the tip. Not a path which is much used, so the council, quite reasonably, not in a tearing hurry to clear it away. The mast of reference 4 is visible top left in the snap above.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-654.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-652.html.

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

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/trolley-616.html.

Reference 5: https://www.cornerstoneprojects.co.uk/blog/underground-utility-colour-codes/.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadent_Gas.

Group search key: trolleysk.