GBK

Just after All Fools' Day - which passed this year without anything unusual happening, home or away - to top up on cheese.

There was a bit of a breeze, but it was probably going to be warm enough in the right spot. Thought about stick, but settled for trolley and London Bridge. Thoughts that I might check up the park around the Imperial War Museum for Wellingtonia. Was it going to take the prize for being the nearest Westminster?

More gas works at the West Hill Bridge, across the road from Station Approach.

More breeze at London Bridge.

But I found the right fish stall for once, and was able to buy a couple of smokies. I was assured that he always had snokies, kippers and smoked haddock. Must try hard in future. Plus a big bunch of flat parsley - a fraction of the price of that from Waitrose noticed at reference 4. A more mature product too, more flavourful as it turned out. Plus my usual quota of cheese from my usual shop. Extra sheets of cheese paper too on this occasion - the result of my observing how well the cheese seemed to last as long as it was kept wrapped up, in its plastic bad, in the refrigerator. A heritage plastic bag, I might say, a model long since abandoned by the cheese shop.

Ditched the museum, and headed back to Waterloo, eying various eateries on the way, but settling, for a change, for the GBK at Waterloo, an establishment which turned out to be far bigger inside than appeared from the outside. I had at first thought to take one of those J2O fruit  - plum, mango and raspberry or some such - cocktails, but took a Fanta by mistake. Plus burger and chips. This turned out to be the best burger I had had for a while - plus it served with a knife which was sharp enough to cut it into bite size chunks, much better than the ugly, elbows down, two handed action favoured by the young.

Fun with the loaded shopping trolley on escalators and when getting in and out of trains, particuarly at Raynes Park - where there were a lot of 'Prospect' magazines, mostly quite old, and nothing else of interest to me. Not done that well there of late.

Good queue for the gas works as I went back up West Hill.

Back home, Prospect looked to be an offering roughly comparable to Newsweek. Perfectly respectable, but I have enough of that sort of thing to read already. The website I first got to was keen to take a subscription off me, but I worked my way through that to reference 5, presumably a cut down version of what subscribers get. Endorsed, if not more, by the Rory Stewart first noticed at reference 6. Inter alia, a keen hill walker.

While GBK looks to have had an interesting journey. The founder is long gone, for a while in the same family as Nandos, overreached itself (in the way of so many successful small food chains) and now part of the Boparan family. While BH reminded me that they gave us burgers in Kingston a couple of years ago, as noticed at reference 7. It looks as if I got a better burger at Waterloo. See references 1, 2 and 3.

PS 1: intrigued today by the number of pills to a pack. For my digoxin, Pearl have moved to a supplier which offers them in blister packs of 30 - rather than the 28 of the previous supplier - which means that I get one unopened pack, plus most of the contents of another pack decanted into a new box, thus making up the prescribed 56 pills. Talking to Bing, I find that pills comes in all sorts of numbers, with multiples of ten being common - whereas I had thought, in my innocence, that four week's supply was the norm. The people in the middle of the snap above, to be found at reference 8, do 30's, but presumably not the people who supply Pearl as they specialise in supplying prisons in the US.

PS 2: a potentially serious problem has come up today: two of my Excel workbooks on OneDrive have lost recent rows from worksheets. Both of these workbooks implement lists of things, simple lists which tend to grow on a daily basis. So a loss which shows - and a loss which might be finger trouble, but which might also be explained by OneDrive mysteriously reverting to previous versions lurking in some cache or other. From early April. OneDrive does a lot of stuff and it is clearly a complicated beast: plenty to go wrong there. Potentially serious for me as most of my files are held on OneDrive and a significant fraction of them are regularly updated, much more often than I take offline copies. Just in case, I suppose I had better think through the implications of moving off OneDrive.

References

Reference 1: https://www.gbk.co.uk/.

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

Reference 3: https://boparanrestaurantgroup.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/tomatoes.html.

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

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/politics-on-edge.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/williams-t.html.

Reference 8: https://clinicalsolutionspharmacy.com/.