Dover Patrol Two

Following the first report at reference 1, the number of Screwfix circuits has been holding up well over the holiday.

A quick foray into town around lunchtime on Christmas Day, in which it was established that Wetherspoon's and the Marquis were both open and we had been told that the Marquis would be good for bar service until the first sitting for lunch kicked in at 13:00. In the event, we settled on Wetherspoon's, which was fairly quiet, but with a good mixture of people. Not all old soaks by any means.

And then a proper circuit early evening, when I found that while Wetherspoon's was by then shut, the Marquis still looked as if it would serve me, and a good number of convenience stores and take-away food outlets were open, if mostly fairly quiet. Maybe as many as ten of them altogether. A sprinkling of food delivery riders.

The convenience store in Pound Lane was open, while our trusty Costcutter in Manor Green Road was shut. Furthermore, it was shut on Boxing Day which caught a fair number of people out.

The Blenheim was shut on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day, as was the Rifleman at the start of Hook Road.

And to think that when I was young, pubs were open and busy 12:00-14:00 on Christmas Day, with ambience very Sunday-like, with a fair bit of drink being taken, but all very relaxed and friendly. Both sessions on Boxing Day were apt to be busy: not least because of betting people for the first session and young people escaping their families for the second.

While today has seen a small disaster. Tomorrow lunchtime had been allocated to chicken soup, the sort of soup that I make by boiling up the chicken carcase with some vegetables, possibly left over, draining off the liquor and making the soup with that. Usually involving at least some orange lentils.

I must have been a bit tired, as I put the carcase and vegetables on to boil in the kitchen, on full, then forgot about it, being distracted in the extension at the other end of the house. Eventually I nodded off, to be woken by concerned family members who had eventually noticed that the saucepan had boiled dry and burned. Lots of steam, lots of condensation on the kitchen walls and quite a lot of smell.

Soup a complete write off, but I was able to clean the saucepan in just a few minutes, probably not as many as ten, with the help of one of those plastic pan scourers that look like metal. Although on asking Bing, I find that the ones that look like metal actually are metal, stainless steel in fact. The one in question is probably a cut price version of the one snapped above.

If only I had turned the saucepan down to simmer before sloping off! It would have been good for hours then. As it was, a couple of pints of water boiled off in around two hours. I can't remember doing such a thing before, so if I have, it must have been a while ago.

As it happens, I had stripped a reasonable portion of chicken off the carcase, with the intention of adding it back to the soup in due course. It will now go into something involving butter, onions, mushrooms and soft noodles - probably not Sharwood's on this occasion. Own brand...

PS 1: pictures of household goods seem to be displayed in such a way that if you hover over them, you zoom in. Unusually, this can interact with the Microsoft Snipping Tool, with the resulting image not being quite what you were looking for - with something of the sort occurring with the Fleurie snap at reference 2 - with my not bothering to do anything about it there. While this afternoon, after a few attempts, the Snipping Tool got the idea with pan scourers and got it right, without my seeming to have done anything to encourage it, apart from repeating myself.

PS 2: the day closes with puzzling about how many different sorts of 6 sided dice there are. On a sample of five, we had three of one configuration and then two singles. According to Gemini, the rule is that opposite sides must always add to seven, a rule which allows a clockwise and an anticlockwise version. Both versions are permitted, although one might have thought that respectable casinos would only carry dice of the one sort. I shall check my five again in the morning. New Year's Resolution: putting aside the rule of seven, compute, without using a computer to help, how many permutations there are.

PS 3: progress the next morning. All five dice now obey the rule of seven. The three coloured dice are clockwise 2-3-5-4 (for the sake of argument), the two white dice are anti-clockwise. One of the white dice was a piece of printed cardboard from a Christmas cracker, now bent more or less into shape. And I think one can get to the answer of the resolution by thinking of three dumb-bells, with each bell carrying one of the numbers. Once you have assigned the numbers, it does not matter how you arrange the first two, you always get the same thing. But there are two ways of adding the third, with one being the mirror image of the other.

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/dover-patrol-one.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/canterbury-second-day.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice. A compendium of useful information about dice.