Consistent

Back at the end of August, I asked Google Images about a shrub being grown down the side of the Screwfix shed in Blenheim Road, the side one passes coming out of the railway underpass, the one recently decorated with Epsom Downs flavoured spray-on art work.

This morning, I snapped it again, with the berries being a lot more prominent than they were two months ago, and I am pleased to be able to say that Google Images came up with the same answer, Symphoricarpos Chenaultii. Or at the very least, very nearly the same answer, as some of the sites it finds talk of snowberries rather than coralberries, which last name seem a better fit for the colour. Amazon offers both.

In their defence, I imagine that correctly identifying from a snap all the hybrids that nurseries come up with is quite difficult - not least because you are dependent on people labelling their snaps correctly. In this case, I dare say that snowberry was a clerical error at the snapper or nursery end: the images concerned were red rather than white.

But the proper business of this particular outing was buying two wings of skate. I had noticed skate when I last bought cod from the Lowestoft fish van who attends our market and thought I would give them a go next time around, not having had them for a while. This time I noticed a new to me flat fish called Brill and thought I would give them a go next time around.

Handed the wings over to BH for her attention. Poached in the fish kettle, probably in shifts, the cooked fish being kept warm in the oven. Dusted with parsley and served with something called black butter caper sauce, a confection which also involved vinegar. Knowing that I was a bit funny about vinegar, BH thought it best not to pour it onto the fish on the serving dish, although, in the event, I did take some.

On the plate, before the capers. Very good it was too, much better than the foreign skate noticed at reference 4. A chunk of fish was left over, which BH took cold with salad later on. I had a chunk of warmed-up, left-over potato pie instead.

PS 1: finding the spray-on art work is left as an exercise for the reader.

PS 2: following the post at reference 2, I am getting lots of  shaving kit advertisements from Microsoft Start, presumably triggered by the modest amount of Edge/Bing search activity involved.

PS 3: rather to my surprise, there was quite a lot of skate in the archive, and I dare say some of it is about skate boarding. But the first search hit I looked at was the fishy sort of skate, to be found at reference 3. Seventeen years ago. Didn't make anything like as much palaver about food then as I do now. The next two were indeed skate boards and the one after that was cheap skate. The spelling of which should have been cheapskate. A long entry for cheap in OED, seemingly a very old word, where I found cheapjack but not cheapskate. But it is to be found in both Longmans and Websters - without any indication of where it came from. Presumably a relatively new usage, but frustrating all the same.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/sumac-revisited.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/new-heads.html.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/09/fishy-days.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/03/cheese.html.