Trolleys 721 & 722

Trolley 721, a larger trolley from the M&S food hall was captured at the town end of the Kokoro Passage, wheeled across the road for photographic purpose, thus avoiding the lady sitting on the bench near the point of capture.

From there, I headed off to the passage between the railway and the library where BH had reported a trolley the day before. There was also the matter of the trolley I had passed the day before, by the railway bridge, near the East Street end of the passage.

No trolley, but I was struck by the size of these ivy leaves. Not particularly large, perhaps rising to four inches across, but significantly larger than average, this despite the near complete lack of direct sunlight. Further proof that sunny position was not essential to large size.

The missing trolley turned up outside Rock Salt, the younger persons eatery which used to be the Plough & Harrow, a decent enough establishment which served as warm stand-by, called into action when TB was down for one reason or another.

A decent enough trolley which had already been through the mill at the Reviva operation up north, as noticed at reference 1. But it was looking a bit shabby and could probably do with going through it again. However, since M&S did not boast a back door that I knew of, this trolley joined the others on the stack.

I close with a snippet from the glossy magazine, regularly picked up from Raynes Park platform library. That is to say the piece at reference 2, about a pub called the Footman in Mayfair, formerly the Running Horse, described as one of the oldest houses in London. Which looked to be another place where one could buy good quality but expensive roast beef, supplemented by a very mean serving of cabbage - the first being the establishment noticed at reference 3.

Now I used to use the Running Horse occasionally, and had once taken a bad pork pie there. In Davies Street, not far from Claridges. Not far from Hedonism. But the website is blocked and while it is present on Street View, it is described there as permanently closed, which would be a pity, pork pie notwithstanding.

So I move onto the Footman, which turns out to be in Charles Street, not far from the recently noticed Lansdowne Club. And from the menus, much the same sort of operation as that at reference 3, albeit with a rather fancier wine list. I think a place which we need to give a try. Complete with the suggested pairing of sticky toffee pudding with Banyuls Rimage Les Clos de Paulilles, probably from the people at reference 5, who will sell you a bottle at 16.50 euros, plus postage and packing I dare say. Which compares quite reasonably with the £37 here - to be found on the dessert menu rather than the wine list. A modestly fortified red. The only catch being that I do not care for sticky toffee pudding 

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/trolleys-718-719-720.html.

Reference 2: Drinks Business No.250 - Anthony Hawser - May 2023.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/trios.html.

Reference 4: https://www.thefootmanmayfair.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.cazes-rivesaltes.com/.

Group search key: trolleysk.

A good effort

Following my experience with Gemini at reference 1, I thought I would give him another go, on a question which has been niggling me for some days.

In the first ever episode of 'Midsomer Murders', 'The Killings at Badger's Drift', we start off with a hunt for a rare plant called spurge coralroot and I have often wondered whether this plant really existed, or whether it was a plausible name invented by the scriptwriters. More recently prompted to action by reading about some orchids called coralroots and I thought this might be something that Gemini could help with. The opening exchange is snapped above. Which I read to mean that he did not think it was the first episode. More important, he brings yellow bartsia into the frame, a real plant to be found at reference 2, but a plant which I have never heard of before and it seemed a bit unlikely that I was that wrong about the coralroot.

On further prompting, Gemini goes on to waffle a bit and I decide that it is time to look elsewhere, eventually tumbling across a facsimile of the original story at the Internet Archive (reference 4, opening page snapped above), provided by the Los Gatos Memorial Library of California.

And part of the answer was on the very first page and as Gemini had suggested, I had misheard, spurge coralroot for spurred coralroot, with this last, with what I now know about orchids, being a much more plausible name. But odd, given that we have probably seen this episode several times, over rather more than several years, that I carried on hearing 'spurge' for 'spurred'.

A little poking around with Bing and Wikipedia and I learn that coralroots are mostly confined to North America, and the one to be found in England is variously known as early coralroot, northern coralroot, and yellow coralroot; one of the orchids which does not bother much with leaves and makes most of its living sponging off the fungi below, as is explained at reference 5. But turning to reference 6, I find it confined to the far north, mainly to Scotland. While the best candidate for a spurred coralroot seems to be the striped or hooded coralroot of North America, as described at reference 7.

The bottom line seems to be that there are orchids which more or less answer the description offered  by the television series, even if they don't grow in quite the right place or have quite the right name. Caroline Graham, who appears to like piling on the details, was perhaps not able to check this one very easily in the days before the Internet really got going - the story was written in 1987 while she was born in 1931 - and the scriptwriters just took her word for it.

In all of which Gemini was very good at piling on the conversational waffle - but still well able to lapse into gross error. Just like us really.

References 

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/limitations.html.

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

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killings_at_Badger%27s_Drift.

Reference 4: https://archive.org/.

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

Reference 6: Britain's Orchids - David Lang - 2004.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corallorhiza_striata.

Limitations

This morning, I wanted to produce a word frequency analysis on the contents of a (Microsoft) Excel worksheet. I thought it possible that it would be quicker to get some code in, rather than write it myself, which would take me a while. Too much quality time relative to the need at hand.

I then thought that Google's Gemini might help, but he simply declined. This was not something that he was going to attempt to help me with.

Microsoft's Copilot, however, was game and suggested all kinds of stuff including a function called 'FreqWords'.

After a while, I worked out that this meant I needed to crank up Visual Basic again.

And after a bit of playing and a few more interchanges with Copilot, he supplied me with the necessary code in text form. I put this into my workbook.

More playing, more exchanges with Copilot and Bing, and I get as far as the Copilot code not compiling, with some error that is far too deep for me in one of the constituent functions. Ah well, says Copilot, try replacing that bit of code with this bit of code. I get a different error.

At which point, having burned up something over an hour, I retire from the fray, at least for the time being. 

And to be fair to Microsoft, trying to correct someone else's code remotely is a pretty tall order. And my Visual Basic coding is pretty rusty. Not done it in a serious way for several years now.

PS 1: along the way, I notice a slightly worrying behaviour. I am typing away and realise that I have made a mistake. I then go back and start over, only to type in exactly the same mistake again. I have to stop for long enough, perhaps a second or so, to give the brain time to disengage and start over. Perhaps this  is because it has packaged up the necessary motor commands up and sent them on their way. Then, when poked, it just does a 'resend' rather than going to the bother of creating a new package...

PS 2: later: I remembered this afternoon about the fine Tech Support service once offered by BT. Because it was BT, you trusted them to take over your PC - using, as I recall, some version of the Citrix offering - and fix it while you watched. They couldn't fix everything, but I thought they did pretty well, certainly with connectivity and Windows issues.

PS 3: still later: had another go, this time leaving the AI behind, and finding to my own way to what might be the horse's mouth at reference 1. Put that in and got it to work as a function from the worksheet, rather than as a function in visual basic. Worked well enough on a chunk of data - it would do as a one-time thing - but then took a very long time to do the real data, so long that in the end I closed it down in task manager, which seemed to leave Excel in a bit of a state. There is also the question of running unknown code on one's PC. OK, so it is not very much code, it is visible and looks harmless enough - but still and all. A corporate IT department would not allow it.

References

Reference 1: https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/excel-word-frequency-analysis/.

Orchids

Visiting the big hot house at Wisley recently, I spent some time with the orchids there and then realised that I did not know what an orchid was. This prompted me to go along to the splendid library there and borrow this book about them.

A popular and discursive introduction to orchids, one of a number of books of the same kind from Reaktion. A small book of around 250 shiny pages with lots of coloured pictures. A publisher which has drawn two previous notices, at references 2 and 3, one of them feeding an earlier fascination with yew trees. For which last see, for example, reference 4. While the post at reference 5 is very much preliminary to this one.

The author, Dan Torre, is a senior lecturer in design and social context in the School of Design at RMIT, an Australian university of technology, design and enterprise with more than 90,000 students. Not a botanist, but he does write books about plants.

There are lots of striking pictures, a lot of them being the sort of thing that one might find in fancy botany books of old, but I found it a bit irritating that they were not very well keyed to the text.

I read that a lot of orchids go in for rather specialised arrangements for pollination, often involving just a single species of animal, mostly of the flying sort. Also involving flashy specialisation of the lower petal, this being what makes them attractive to both the pollinators and us.

Part of this is the (almost universal) bilateral symmetry of the flower as a whole, which makes it easy for us to project the faces of both humans and animals onto them. Radial symmetry, while attractive in other ways, is no good in that department.

Along with many other plants, the roots of all orchids are closely associated with fungi, with different orchids associated with different fungi – and being rather particular about it. I might say that I first noticed the connection between fungi and trees near fifteen years ago, back at reference 10

Which links to another feature being the very large numbers of very small seeds. Which makes wind dispersal easy – but very dependent on landing on just the right sort of fungus for germination and growth. A fungus which makes up for the lack of the on-board provision which other, larger seeds go in for. No doubt there are people out there writing computer programs to play out the various gaming issues involved here.

There was a wave of fashion for orchids spanning most of the nineteenth century, not quite the same as the fashion of tulips a couple of centuries previously, but along similar lines. One feature being massive orchid stripping expeditions to tropical forests, operations which resulted in chopping down huge numbers of trees and wasting huge numbers of orchids. In parallel, we had lots of lavishly illustrated books, a lot of them from our colonies, perhaps the work of bored and lonely administrators, copies of some of which eventually wound up in one of the RHS libraries.

A fashion which extended to filling one’s house with them and wearing them. I read that cattleyas were particularly popular and then remembered that Proust included quite a lot of them in his famous book about Swann’s love affair with Odette de Crécy. See, for example, page 232 of Volume 1 of the Pléiade edition. Reminding me that the work of Proust, timeless though it might be, also reflects the fads and fashions of his time – a time of excess in Paris, just as it was in London. The literary French at least do seem to be quite keen on flowers, with other authors majoring on daisies or camelias. Not to mention the ostrich feathers once sported by Lily Langtry. But for cattleyas, in botanical terms a genus of the orchid family, see reference 6.

More recently we have learned micro-propagation, which produces most of the huge numbers of orchids sold in our shops, much more cheaply and without damaging tropical forests.

People have been writing about and painting orchids for a long time – in the west, in the east and in-between. Shakespeare, for example, put some into the mouth of Gertrude in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII:

 Where both grosser name and fingers are taken from the curious shape of the tubers underneath the plant.

I started to skip a bit when I got to chapter four, picturing orchids. Altogether too many book, pictures and other works of art and entertainment. OK, so orchids have a pretty big footprint out there, but I have no present need to know all about it. That said, maybe we will make the effort to get to the North Gallery at Kew Gardens, maybe an hour from Epsom, to see the work of Marianne North.

Things picked up again when I got to chapter six, consuming orchids. The root tubers of orchids were once widely consumed, with Australians doing a great deal of it – at least until the Europeans came along with their crops and animals which destroyed much of their habitat. In Australia again, once often called yams, although real yams are from a neighbouring family, the Dioscoreaceae. Literally so at reference 9, where Dioscoreaceae is immediately followed by Orchidaceae.

A hot drink called salep, a concoction of these roots was popular for a bit in the UK, before being supplanted by tea and coffee, and is still to be found in various places around the world. An important ingredient of a popular variety of Turkish ice cream.

While vanilla is made from the seed pods of the orchids of the vanilla genus. Orchids which grow a bit like runner beans and which have seed pods which look like runner beans – without actually being beans at all. A lot of the necessary fertilisation is done by hand and converting bean to vanilla is a reasonably complicated process, albeit one which has been known in its essentials for a long time.

Conclusions

A book which seems a bit long at times and which could have done with a bit of pruning and with better linking of text to pictures. But it very much did what I was looking for, providing me with an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to this large and important family of flowers.

I would think there is something here for anyone with something more than a passing interest. But over to BH to see what see makes of it.

PS 1: lifted from reference 7 below.

PS 2: checking with OED, I find plenty of salep. Said to be from the Turkish or Arabic, a nutritious meal made from dried orchid tubers. We are referred to saloop, where the meaning is extended to a hot drink made of powdered salep, milk and sugar, sold in the streets of London to worksmen, first and last thing. Usage in both senses appears to have been current in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The word ‘slop’, an old word from up north, for which there is a long entry, does not appear to be connected, except perhaps figuratively, with saloop made too thin, slopping around in its (slop) bowl. A word with two major clusters of meanings, that is to say various items of clothing and slopping in the sense most often used today. Plus various odd meanings, for example a charmed bag used to steal milk from cows – a more or less obsolete usage from the very beginning of the fourteenth century.

PS 3: oddly, neither catalyea, catleya nor cattleya are to be found in Littré. Perhaps Littré did his field work before the wave of fashion for them. But the last of these does make it to the 2008 number of Le Petit Larousse.

References

Reference 1: Orchid – Dan Torre – 2023.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-disappointment.html. 

Reference 3:  https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/reaktion.html 

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/albury-two.html. The unusual bottle featured here still graces the windowsill above where I type now.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/who-are-orchids.html. 

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

Reference 7: https://www.rmit.edu.au/. 

Reference 8: https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-in-the-gardens/marianne-north-gallery. From which it appears that the art is hung rather promiscuously. But sadly, on the website, they don’t just show you a few samples, you have to look at an earnest talking head on YouTube. Bing does rather better, and one of his hits is included at the top of this post.

Reference 9: Guide to flowering plant families - Wendy B. Zomlefer - 1994. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

Reference 10: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/06/tree-nuts.html.

Trolleys 718, 719 & 720

Monday morning saw eight trolleys in total, scoring three. Having looped around Station Approach and found them where the Kokoro Passage turns into the ramp. The most popular spot just presently.

First up, four small trolleys from the M&S food hall. I was not carrying my trolleyman's strap but as luck would have it, I was carrying my stick, which did just as well on this occasion. Slightly awkward to walk and a bit of a push up the various modest ramps involved, but I managed without swinging the line into anyone.

Second, a couple of trolleys from nearby B&M, one containing a pound coin in its handle lock. A coin which was not recovered on return to base.

And lastly, a couple of medium trolleys from the M&S food hall.

Discovering on the way that they were not proper trolleys from Wanzl at all.

Only to find this morning that Reviva is a trolley recycling brand offered by Wanzl. See reference 2.

The recycling is done on the Sawpit Industrial Estate, DE55 5NH, Tibshelf, which is just by the M1, southwest of Chesterfield, The nearest National Trust convenience is at Hardwick Hall, one of the first flashy houses to be built in the UK after castles went out of fashion. Home to 1 Para during the second world war. I wonder how much damage they did?  According to Wkipedia at reference 3, the place was pretty much a ruin by the time that the National Trust got it in the late 1950s. One take on which would be that the Duke of Devonshire cashed in, transferring to the great British public the cost of putting it all back together again.

Now in the same league as our own Polesden Lacey with more than a quarter of a million visitors a year. Including works outings from Sawpit?

All very worthy, both on the part of M&S and Wanzl - and means that the trolleys can be Anglicised with a little Union Jack.

Carried on around the Screwfix circuit, turning up the opportunity of a further trolley from M&S which had found its way to under the railway bridge just off the end of the High Street. Perhaps it will still be there today (Tuesday).

PS 1: one of the sights of the morning was a young lady, out with her young man, sporting a short skirt and a couple of matching inscriptions on the back of her thighs, hard enough to read that you had to stare. She was not a slim girl, but clearly adhered to the philosophy that whatever it was that one had, one might as well flaunt it. There will be takers.

PS 2: for once in a while, there were also two medium sized washers to add to my collection. One of them a curious laminated affair, aluminum on one side, some kind of black rubbery stuff on the other.

PS 3: further to Farage funding, an update to reference 5 is to be found at reference 4. Richard Tice being another chap who made his money from property, some of it in Vauxhall. A long time supporter of the Conservatives who jumped ship to Farage.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/trolley-717.html.

Reference 2: https://www.wanzl.com/en_GB/360-degree-service/Reviva.

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

Reference 4: Reform UK bailed out by cross-party group run by Richard Tice in 2020: Pressure group raised funds for ‘Brexit celebration event’, then funnelled cash to the Brexit party - Rafe Uddin, Dan McCrum, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/tripe-and-onions.html.

Victorian Haydn

That is to say a Sunday morning concert at the Wigmore Hall which involved travelling via Victoria Station because lines through Wimbledon were out of action for engineering works. The Wihan Quartet giving us Op.76 No.3 and Op.64 No.5, the emperor and the lark respectively. A Czech string quartet currently in residence at the Trinity College of Music, across the river from the Isle of Dogs, with reference 1 suggesting a fair amount of work in the UK. Seemingly not heard by us despite their 40 years together.

The day was set to be hot, so not a day to be stuck on the Victoria Line in central London, our experience being that this particular line and the passages serving it can get uncomfortably hot.

There were trains running to Worcester Park from Epsom, but the one I saw departing had just one passenger on  it. I then nodded off on the train to Victoria which followed, to wake up at Clapham Junction to what seemed like a sea of people around me dressed in bright yellow. I never did get to find out what was happening. Exit at Victoria to head for the bus stops in Grosvenor Gardens, admiring the quaint garden shed snapped above on the way. The sort of thing I associate with the better class of seaside resorts, places like Yarmouth and Sidmouth.

Took a No.2 bus and found that my telephone was much more helpful about the route to come than the in-bus displays which only bothered with the next stop. I didn't have to do much more than key 'no.2 bus route' into it. Much easier than asking the driver behind his glass screen, even supposing that that is permitted these days.

Past the decapitated horse at Hyde Park Corner to view a great sprawl of tents, booths and fences over a large chunk of park. I would just as soon do without and keep the park, but I suppose being close to a non-user of Hyde Park I don't have much say. I do wonder though, with so many of these sprawls springing up, whether any of them make a decent living. Are all the holiday makers really impressed and entertained by the this sort of thing? Does London really have to go head-to-head with the tacky end of a seaside resort?

Olle & Steen quite busy at 10:45, with a bit of a wait for coffee. And with one rich looking foreign lady with two large boys not seeming to have much in the way of queue manners. It was as if she thought she was the only person in the shop. Or, at least, the only person that mattered. And to add insult to injury, the young lady who served me had great trouble understanding what I was saying and I wound up with a small amount of milk in my coffee, which was not what I wanted. In the event, it mattered less than I had thought it would. Perhaps it was only a dribble before the barista realised her mistake. A job which must be a bit grim at times, with a steady stream of tickets dribbling out of a little machine at one end of your work-station. Is there no end to it? I guess you just have to pace yourself and work to a steady rhythm without paying any attention to how many people are waiting. Or to how rich and important they are.

Concert very good, once again. The wheeze with coffee certainly seems to be working!

All Bar One for lunch, where I opted for prawns to supplement the paella. Which worked well, except that the prawns did not need to be smothered in quite so much oily stuff. BH went for her usual maki bowl plus chicken. Pleasant ambience, neither too busy or too quiet. Pleasant staff. A good value offering. There were even people with real fags on outside.

The only downer was that I learned that the saffron in the paella was a very quick and effective way to stain a shirt. Fortunately it was not a very big stain.

Out to find some rather ridiculous armour on offer somewhere in Margaret Street, with Nos.17&18 being visible in reflection. Possibly Apollo Art Auctions at Nos.63&64, but I could see nothing very corroborative at reference 2. I assume that the armour was made for show and I wonder who on earth would want such a thing in his house now. Bit big and expensive for a restaurant or a hotel. Maybe an oligarch who joined one of those re-enactment societies to occupy his retirement from oligarchy? Would his fellow cosplayers think it a bit OTT? With cosplay being a word I discovered last Christmas and noticed at reference 4.

Into an empty All Saints (of reference 3) to soak up the atmosphere - which on this occasion included a good bit of incense left over from morning service.

I was impressed by the seats which did not look cheap and were in very good condition. But could they match the hundreds to Sunday service claimed for St. Bartholomew the Great?

It might be my favourite church, at least for the moment, even if the snap above captures little of the atmosphere of the place. Would Archbishop Ramsey of reference 5 have approved? He was High Church, was very keen on the Eucharist, liked smells but was not particularly into fancy dress and processions.

Another view. The destination was the cheese shop in Seven Dials, so a matter of heading vaguely east and south.

With the first stop on the way being Dennys, with a window majoring on kitchen knives. Closer inspection however suggested that they were really a catering clothes shop, with a few accessories like glass cloths thrown in. Agatha Christie would have approved as they sell the sort of glass cloths we used to call tea towels when I was a child, with just the odd border stripe by way of decoration. No pictures of pot plants, cuddly animals or anything else. I remember in the story set in Bertram's Hotel, she put words into the mouth of Miss. Marple about the irritating modern habit of printing pictures on everything. See reference 6. But if I am by there when it is open, I might pop in for a natty looking crumb scraper, which would probably work better than a credit card or the edge of a magazine.

Next was a hotel with a lot of very flamboyantly dressed men taking the air outside. Plus a few women. It turned out that they were having a champagne brunch followed by a drag show. I dare say we would have been welcome enough to join in, but the cheese was calling. I dare say also they would have been very happy to have had some photographs taken, even with a telephone, but I did not think to ask.

Next stop was a pleasant garden fashioned in a courtyard just off Rathbone Place, complete with outdoor art. Probably part of the development celebrated at reference 8.

Plus this place, the very flashy looking restaurant at reference 9 - which calls itself a traditional Sicilian trattoria. However, when I get to the menu, no fiercer than 2Veneti, so maybe for trolley No.800?

The back of what was the hospital for women in Soho, where a correspondent once took the odd shift. Long since closed, but I forget what has become of the building.

Next was some rather untidy gardens fashioned out of what had been a bomb site and after that a parking lot, tucked in behind the Phoenix Theatre in Charing Cross Road. Apparently the last survivor of a number of such projects scattered about London. So rather untidy, maintenance of both paths and plants a bit uncertain. Some rather odd people. And we saw one rather tame rat, probably standing in for hundreds of them. But for all that, a peaceful spot in a busy part of London. Good luck to them!

Another view.

And some echiums escaped from the Ventnor Botanic Garden on the Isle of Wight, their proper home.

After which we finally made it to the cheese shop, where chat with a helpful and well-informed counterhand resulted in the fake post at reference 7.

With our last stop of the day being the 'Two Brewers' in Monmouth Street where we took something sweet and fizzy, probably orange in colour. A perfectly decent house of the old style (albeit refurbished and serving food), further distinguished by having the smallest small room that I ever remember using. It was fashioned in a corner of some kind and one had to take care with the order & manner with which one put one's feet through the door. However, once inside, clean, decent and in working order. Should I report them to the Guinness Book of Records? I dare say they have an entry for such places.

Outside the one and only original 'Ivy' restaurant, not to be confused with all the look-alikes which have sprung up all over the place. Perhaps now in the turnover-greedy hands of private equity? The point at issue being that I have never seen Bullingdons just dumped in the street like this. Other brands yes, but not this one, with the mandatory use of parking slots being what keeps them tidy.

Turned up by Bing, from a piece dated 29th January this year at the trade website at reference 11. Caring being an enterprising chap who made his money from clothing. Arab money yes, regular private equity no.

Onto the Northern Line at Leicester Square, where a young man was very quick to offer me a seat in the crowded train. Foreign, of course. Changed at Kennington onto another crowded train. But up on the overground platform, I did manage some rolling twos and at least two threes. My best performance for months. Very few seats on the platform, none at our end, but at least when we got on the train another young man, for once English, offered me a seat fast enough. Perhaps I was looking a bit tired by then. But it had been a good day.

PS 1: pleased to see at Kennington that the Self Winding Clock Company of New York was still alive and well. Finding previous notice of which is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

PS 2: and to indulge in a bit of name dropping for once in a while, I was in an upstairs room in the original 'Ivy', being sold something over a not particularly good meal, when news of 9/11 came through. I forgot what it was that we were being sold, but a lot of those present got very busy on their mobiles. I repaired to TB where I got the full story.

PS 3: copyright protection at reference 11 below was no match for the power of Microsoft's Snipping Tool. But thank you anyway for the use of the material.

References

Reference 1: https://wihanquartet.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.apolloauctions.com/.

Reference 3: https://asms.uk/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/lisiecki-and-raymo-2005-used.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/ramsey.html.

Reference 6: https://www.dennys.co.uk/.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/fake.html.

Reference 8: https://rathbonesquare.com/residential/the-building/.

Reference 9: https://www.bigmammagroup.com/en/trattorias/circolo-popolare.

Reference 10: https://www.thephoenixgarden.org/.

Reference 11: https://www.restaurantonline.co.uk/. Where I was amused to read that the Savoy Hotel is set to auction off some of its furniture and fittings ahead of a major refurbishment project. Regular car boot sale.

Reference 12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Caring.

Reference 13: Keir Starmer accepted £76,000 of freebies including tickets to over 20 football games: Commons register of interests shows Labour leader’s declarations in last parliament spanned concerts to clothing - Jim Pickard, Chris Cook, Anna Gross, Financial Times - 2024. Not really a big deal, but I do think the less of him for being so relaxed about such matters.

Jumpers

I had occasion to test my Samsung telephone on a bug on a plant in the fine Alpine House at Wisley yesterday. Using a magnification of 10×, I went for half a dozen or so shots, of which that included above was the best. The bug in question was about a centimetre long. For some reason, the Samsung did pretty well on this occasion.

Next stop Google Images, which seemed pretty clear that this was some kind of jumping spider. This despite my thinking that it had looked rather like a miniature lobster, complete with claws.

It was quite keen on the tan jumping spider, Platycryptus undatus, but reference 1 suggests that this is North America only. The peppered jumper, Pelegrina galathea, was another North American possibility.

Next stop was yet another jumping spider, Marpissa muscosa, which reference 3 suggests is not common in this country, but present. The catch here is that some pictures of it look too furry and some look too green. But my money is here for the moment.

Might have done better had any of my snaps included a front shot of head and eyes.

Notwithstanding, quite a good show by both Samsung telephone and Google image on this occasion.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platycryptus_undatus.

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

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