Trolley 830

Partly because I was busy in the kitchen with bread batch No.748, it was convenient to take lentils for lunch. Lentils which turned out rather wetter than I had intended, having failed to check the precedents. 8oz of lentils made up to 2l with water. Otherwise the usual thing, including 200g of sausage from Bastides. Went down well enough, despite the two-tone format.

Bread done by mid afternoon, I moved onto the Screwfix circuit. Picking up a small trolley from the M&S food hall in the Kokoro passage, properly known, I now know, as Central Walk. Although I wonder now whether this is the name of the apartments, rather than of the passage in which they are located.

On to admire this fine yellow rose in Victoria Place, a little battered by sun and rain but still looking pretty good.

Once again, I feel sure that I have noticed this rose before, but a few minutes search of the archive fails to turn it up.

On to take the day's snap of the whitebeam. I decided that taking it from the same place as usual was more important than having the sun in the wrong place.

And so to TB, to take my first pint there for many years. Warm beer not an option. They did have Newcastle Brown, which I used to like in the olden days, but thought that might be a touch heavy nowa days and settled for a pint of Peroni instead. Or fizzy as I would have called in when I stuck pretty closely to warm, flat bitter.

The white van trade might have largely vanished, but on this occasion there were at least two small parties of people who appeared to have come from offices rather than building sites. No suits to be seen, but white collar rather than blue collar for all that.

Whereas in my day, suits still ruled in my workplace and when at TB, I sometimes had to explain that it was my uniform.

How long before I am back again? I go past the place often enough, albeit not usually when it is open.

PS 1: in the margins of making bread, as well as cooking lentils, I also turned a few pages of reference 2, still a fairly new book at the time it was originally bought, not many months after I myself was born. The first thing that struck me was the careful mend to the book plate, top right. Presumably a spelling mistake which was not noticed until after the plate had been pasted in. Something else which I imagine I have noticed before, but will I be able to find it, perhaps when there is a bit of slack in the system? The second thing was that while Gombrich clearly knew his stuff, yesterday I found him slightly irritating. A bit too know-all, too smooth and polished. Perhaps I will try again when batch No.749 comes around.

PS 2: as a young man, my father bought a lot of art books, including a fair number by one R. H. Wilenski, to be found at reference 4, a chap whom ones comes across quite often in the better class of second hand book shops. But as far as I can recall, no Gombrich. I don't suppose I shall ever know why now.

PS 3: a bit of slack having arrived later on, I had a look for Gombrich at Twickenham. And I think that all there is is reference 5. I don't seem to have noticed the patch before after all.

PS 4: further checking in the morning did not turn up any more Twickenham, but it did turn up reference 6, from which I learn that I probably first visited Olle & Steen in 2017, taking on that occasion a rather more substantial snack than we do now. I think that then, there was probably a long pause.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/trolley-828_8.html. Clerical error visible in file name: not to be corrected short of doing the post again, from scratch.

Reference 2: The story of art - E H Gombrich - 1950.

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

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Wilenski.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/on-art.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/pot-hunt.html.