psmv5: Trolley 688

Captured, yet again, in the Kokoro Passage, just by the entrance to the gym, in the shade of the car park roof. A small and a medium trolley, both from the M&S food hall. Returned to a rather untidily full stack, mostly with large trolleys. No other small trolleys.

It had been a late start and by the time I had finished my modest bit of business with Pearl and NatWest it was quite late and quite warm, so I settled for a short walk around the Screwfix circuit. Passing one of those small hydraulic cranes with four wheels and no cab parked in the passage leading to the creationists' residence. No trolleys there though, despite having once been a good place for them.

I next tried searching for an image of such a crane, and failed with both Bing and Google. So I tried Gemini, who looks to be coming on by leaps and bounds. Google must be spending a fortune on this race to produce the best AI assistant. However, at the first round, he failed to understand the qualifier 'with wheels'. Further prompted, he got a better grip on what I wanted and came up with the new-to-me term 'pick and carry crane', which did better than the search terms I had been using. But all these cranes were still either too small with the wrong sort of wheels in the wrong place or with cabs. I had better go back and take another look. Maybe there was a small cab, almost tucked into the body of the thing, almost in the way of a tank.

He did much better with the small lifts I came across, quite a long time ago now, inside casinos in Las Vegas, coming straight back with the term 'scissor lifts', which I had forgotten. He is also getting quite good at holding a conversation, maintaining the thread across several interchanges.

Back at Screwfix, I thought I would do a real search for the pyramid orchids that show up from time to time on the banks of grass outside what was the Tchibo warehouse. Yesterday, lots of wild flowers, particularly various sorts of white daisy, but no orchids.

Hopefully they won't be too quick to mow the grass and the orchids will get a chance to reappear. But council contractors do seem to be rather inflexible: they are contracted to mow every so often and that is what they will do. The efforts, many years ago, of one Leslie Chapman, to slow down on the mowing of grass in place like this notwithstanding.

I tried asking Gemini about him with the prompt 'Do you know anything about a chap called Leslie Chapman, once famous for cutting back on the mowing of grass on military bases in the UK, thereby saving quite a lot of money'.

I got quite a coherent response, but I suspect that a lot of it was the result of what I think of as inappropriate joining up of the dots. Working at it a bit, we got a lot warmer to my memory of this chap with additional help from Abebooks, Bing and Copilot. Gemini closes with the very up to date: 'feel free to reach out if you have any more questions in the future'. All good fun, if also rather scary.

I associate to my mother, one of whose maxims was that what you get out of something is very much a function of what you put into it, this in the context of taking adolescent school children to Shakespeare's plays at Stratford. She was a great believer in serious preparation. Something of the sort seems to be true with Gemini, who responds quite well to informed supplementaries.

BH being in town for the day, so home to a spot of white pudding and greens. The last of the white pudding from Clonakilty of reference 2, the sourcing of which will be reported on shortly, Quite different both from the puddings from Slomers (sold in Manor Green Road) and the sort of thing still actually being made by small town butchers in Devon.