Trolley 654

Another trolley picked up from the car park noticed at reference 1, this one a not-very-new, large Waitrose trolley. A large trolley which became two on my way back to Waitrose. I decided that while pushing two for 100 metres was OK, I would not want to push them up East Street to Kiln Lane. Two large trolleys would be plenty enough to notice that it was uphill.

While in Waitrose, picked up a couple of Bastides Saucisson Sec à l'Ancienne (200g).

And passing a queue-free Gail's, picked up four of their hot cross buns, at around £3 each, the four of them costing as much as the two sausages. Now a bun at £3 does not sound too bad, certainly not for eat-in which this was not, nor does two for the price of a foreign sausage - which I think of as a higher priced item - but probably a lot compared with a Sainsbury's own brand basic. To be looked into.

And then on around the Kiln Lane-Gas depot circuit.

Geothermal works in the car park done and dusted for days now. Just a few washers to show for their having been there.

Plenty of spring flowers in the banks as I went round, but today I snap the yellow archangel (Lamium galeobdolon) from the bottom of our garden, now in more or less full flower. A handsome flower with a colour which I find very pleasing and which can clearly hold its own against the ivy, at least in this particular spot. A Lamium, that is to say the dead nettle genus in the Lamiaceae family, with nettles proper being the Urticaceae family. The Lamiaceae or Labiatae are a large family of flowering plants including the mints, the dead nettles and the sages.

Not that closely related, so one supposes that the botanists have decided that resemblances are superficial. Saying that they both bear two seed leaves - which approximates the definition of a eudicot - does limit things very much. Nor, would one think, that saying that they both have triculpate pollen - which I think means that each pollen grain has three lobes. Not a property which is terribly accessible to the curious amateur.

Digging deeper, the tabular presentation of the angiosperm clade - flowering plants - on pages 518-521 of reference 5 suggests that the nettles are more closely related to apples than they are to dead nettles. Tricky business, taxonomy - and while the gene never lies, it can lead to some surprising results.

Last year, the archangels were noticed in April, just about a month later than this year, at reference 4.

Back home, BH showed me a spread from the Metro which suggested that not only was there great variety in what was being sold as hot cross buns, a lot of it probably not to my taste, but I could probably buy eight supermarket buns for price of one Gail's bun. A suggestion later confirmed by Bing. 

The Gail's buns were OK, but were made with far too much sugar and were some way from fresh. Probably not that different as far as that goes from the supermarkets. So given their very high price, how do Gail's make it worth their while? Impulse purchases like mine and the eat-in trade?

I asked Gemini who owned Gail's and whether they bought in stuff. To which the answer was that 'Bain Capital Credit and EBITDA Investments: These investment firms own a majority stake in Gail's parent company, Bread Holdings, after a 2021 investment', while the original management team maintained a stake and a presence. While the baking was a mixture of central bakery and in-store. This last being deduced from a couple of stray references in Gail's website, rather than anything more explicit. And I learn in the margins that Gail's is a thirty year old London-based chain. The central bakery remains elusive, but I still have references 2 and 3 to work through. With one curiosity so far being that they have so managed things that nearly all the leading search results are Gail's websites, with nobody else getting much of a look in. And another being that I cannot find the HQ address given, somewhere in the Camden Lock area, in gmaps.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-653.html.

Reference 2: https://gailsbread.co.uk/the-past-present-and-future-of-gails/.

Reference 3: https://gailsbread.co.uk/customer-service/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/spring-is-here.html.

Reference 5: The Tree of Life: a Phylogenetic Classification – Lecointre and Le Guyader – 2006.

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