Spoons

We thought to celebrate the half way point of our kitchen refurbishment with an early evening visit to Epsom.

The evening started off badly for the telephone. When snapping, I usually take three or four snaps, just in case something goes wrong. On this occasion, all three went wrong, all three failed to focus, which is very unusual, so unusual that I cannot remember when it last happened. Perhaps I was gasping for a beverage, so much that my hands were shaking.

The point of the snap was the round wood posts somebody, probably the council, has put up in the grass verge at the bottom of Meadway to keep Mums and Dads from the nearby primary school and commuters too mean to pay from parking on it. Usually the Council use rather more substantial, square posts for the job. We will see how long these ones last. While residents have a penchant for small rocks from garden centres.

While I was slightly annoyed that I must have passed these posts several times, not to say lots of times, without noticing them. They had not been planted very recently. Annoyed at how easy it is to miss something in plain view. Not quite the same failing as my usually being hard put to say what there was before some new shop went into the High Street. Once the new shop is there, the old one is blotted out, except in the case that I used to use it.

And noting in passing that some of the Dads in question can be very aggressive when you suggest that they don't park on the grass, particularly when the ground is wet. From where I associate to a story about country folk who, fed up with people taking picnics on what was, in effect, their front garden, went and took a picnic on the very modestly sized suburban front garden of one of the offenders. I like to think that these last thought it was funny, rather than getting cross about it.

Onto the the path, once the top end of Pound Lane, where the section of heritage brick wall had fallen down, as first noticed at reference 1.

I would not care for such an ugly contraption in my garden as that to the left. BH assures me that it is a hot tub - and I can't imagine that I would ever have got much use out of such a thing. Probably none now that I am old and moderately decrepit.

Maybe there has to be some agreement with the freeholder to the left before rebuild can start. Assuming that is that the freeholder to the right is not hanging on for their permission to redevelop. That said, I can't compute the boundary: who does the strip between the brick wall right and the panel fence left, before you get to the new flats top left (mixed up with some Russian oligarch according to local gossip), belong to?

Notice the absence of much in the way of foundations for the wall heading for the camera - on a hill known as Clay Hill too. Perhaps the heritage team will try to insist on retaining the heritage foundations too.

Presumably the intended site of the proposed redevelopment.

Pushed on down the hill into town, onto the market square, to be greeted by a pale full moon, rising to the east over the Clock Tower. And so into Wetherspoon's where the noise seemed to be absolutely prodigious. Full of couples of middle years and older enjoying a few early evening drinks before the young folk move in and take the place over.

Crowds of people apart, the service was fast enough when you found the right spot to stand. Not like in the old days when you could wait a while at a Wetherspoon's - and just put up with it because the place was so much cheaper than anywhere else.

We were lucky enough to be offered good seats by a couple just leaving, seats which gave BH a good view of the fishing on the large television behind me. Fishing for very large fish, possibly carp, a sport I have always felt a bit uneasy about. Catching fish to eat them is one thing, catching them just for the fun of it seems a bit off, and it gets offer with the size of the fish. And nowadays there is the additional worry that fish might be conscious, might be aware of pain, be aware of the barbed hooks pulling at their mouths or throats. See, for example, reference 4.

We then pondered about the carpet, which I thought was broadloom, woven in a single piece, wound off a single roll, but tricked out with an edging motif, the sort of thing you might do with Amtico lino tiles. Or, indeed, a genuine wood, ceramic or stone floor. I thought it looked a bit fake; that it did not really work in this context and that they would have done better just to leave the primary pattern - top left - as used on the main stairs - to it, rather than trying to be clever.

I suppose we are a bit sensitised to décor at the moment, having just gone through choosing kitchen units, worktops and floor. With the result that I also noticed that there was what looked like stone-chip worktops in the gents' toilets. Thick black and white stuff, not something that we were offered for our kitchen. 

Always fun to watch such fashions working their way through such places. Last year it was those sinks that sit on top of the worktops, rather than sit in them. While in posh places they affect naked copper piping, which must be a pain to plumb in, it being very easy to scratch copper. How long before that one trickles down to 'spoons?

Duly refreshed, across the road to an about to be busy Cappadocia, with a 40 person 40th birthday party having taken the sun-lounge out front for the evening. Our last visit there having been back in January, as noticed at reference 3.

Moon a bit higher, a bit brighter and moved right a bit in the half hour or so we were in the pub, not that you can tell from the snap above. Above the striped canopy to the right of the red caravan - which I think sells those long chocolate topped pastries they go for in Spain, The ones which look a bit like chocolate éclairs from a distance. All part of Epsom's busy street food offering.

I made the mistake of going for two starters, our usual humus, with extra bread, plus some little somethings wrapped into little parcels, the same format as ravioli and which I can't now find on their online menu. At least not with confidence: it might have been something called Sigara Böreği, subtitled traditional cheese cigar, but it certainly did not come in cigar format.

Once again an error with the wine, in that the wine that we chose was not available and we had to settle for a Pouilly Fuissé from Jadot, a respectable enough brand, the sort of thing you can get from Waitrose. It turned out well enough.

For main course I got the right grilled lamb this time. Entirely satisfactory. BH went for the octopus and artichoke salad, also entirely satisfactory. I associated to the far-off days when I tried to grow Jerusalem artichokes - that is, not the ones in question - on an allotment. As I recall the plants came up well enough, but there was not much in the way of artichoke underneath. An experiment which I did not repeat.

Dessert nowhere near as good as the one which we had found in Whitecross Street, noticed at reference 6, although we did learn that it was of Lebanese rather than Turkish origin. Warmed up rather than cooked fresh and probably not helped by my being too full to properly appreciate all the sugar.

Our meal was enlivened by young people both right and left and, for some reason, a discussion about the sexual and reproductive rights of handicapped (or damaged) people. With our view being firmly that while such people mostly have feelings and needs in that department in much the same way as the rest of us, many of them were vulnerable and many of them were in no position to be raising children, even supposing that there was no genetic impediment. I believe that in the olden days, in the short interval between the invention of the contraceptive pill and the abolition of old-style mental hospitals, the pill was included in the diet of young women patients, a straightforward solution to part of the problem which is probably no longer available. Some Guardian readers might not even think it appropriate. 

There was also the question of the feelings and needs of those who wound up caring for them, people who might well be getting on in years and with problems of their own. All very difficult - and made more difficult by the mostly poor provision for the handicapped, particularly the mentally handicapped, aka neurologically diverse.

Tricky conversation apart, a good meal and a good outing. We even elected to walk home, not to admire the full moon which was, by then, largely lost in the clouds above.

Home to take a picture, for some reason, of the label on the back of one of the reproductions hanging on our walls. Probably something to do with finding somewhere to put the print bought on the occasion noticed at reference 7, but I cannot this morning find the reproduction in question.

While the label on the back of the picture the print actually displaced is snapped above. From the days when one was more concerned to know what was being reproduced than who did the framing. Perhaps from the days when the print cost more, relative to the frame, than it does now, with the price of the frame often being of the same order as the price of that which was being framed.

Hopefully I will find a new home for the Breughel before too long, presently leaned up against a wall in a corner of my study. A picture containing one of the crude bird traps which my father used to claim were to be found in almost every Breughel - in whose time the common people must have been hungry enough to bother with eating the likes of crows, blackbirds, thrushes and starlings. Tough and bony, I would have thought.

PS 1: Bing tells me that 'LVT' might also be left ventricular thrombus or landing vehicle (tracked), neither of which seems very likely in connection with a flooring company. These among a list of equally unlikely translations.

PS 2: it came to me later that the mystery picture was Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne', a copy of the National Treasure which hangs in the National Gallery. The clue which gave it away in the end was the rough side of the hardboard in the snap above - the reproduction having been cunningly transferred to the smooth side, the only such reproduction that we own. Ordinarily, it is the smooth side outside.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/new-restaurant.html.

Reference 2: https://www.amtico.com/commercial/. The last thing in LVT flooring - where LVT might stand for luxury vinyl tiles.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/on-town.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/fishy-pain.html.

Reference 5: https://www.cappadociaepsom.co.uk/.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/cello.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/gnashed.html.