Trolley 831

The started with recording the capture of a washer in Manor Green Road, the day before. Washer collecting being an activity which started during the plague and which has slowly faded away - with the time for the small children's activity it had been intended to fuel now being very nearly past. But a decent size washer nonetheless, the one in the foreground in the snap above. Maybe there will be activity.

Then off on the Screwfix circuit, starting with this small M&S trolley from the Kokoro passage. Returned to the stack in the usual way and then out to inspect the Saturday market, where I fell for a pineapple, some red grapefruit and some green olives (with garlic).

Far away the biggest and busiest stall was the one at the eastern end of the market, doing bedding plants, small shrubs and suchlike. Crawling with customers. Part of the price is that they are the last away, it taking then quite a while to dress their display in the morning and then to undress it again late afternoon. Market days must be long days for them.

The whitebeam, nearly in flower now.

The haul. Pineapple yet to be tried. Grapefruit impressive in appearance, but the first one was not up to the Waitrose basics standard this morning. Maybe my mistake was taking it after a spot of marmalade (to be noticed shortly) on brown beforehand. Ruined the taste buds. Olives fine, although I dare say they left us both a bit orally stinky for a few hours.

Sun hat a reminder that I managed to lose my much more expensive Nike sun hat along the way. I probably left it in the M&S trolley when I stacked it - the result of my liking to take my sun hat off when I go inside the Ashley Centre or a shop. Bit old fashioned, but there you are. Although, as I recall, ladies were allowed to keep theirs on for some reason.

Gemini agrees with me, fairly emphatically. But I do not like to rely on him and shall dig deeper.

PS 1: BH was reminded this afternoon, by a magazine picked up at RPPL, that she once found tadpoles in a puddle on the very top of Haytor, snapped above. It must have been a very mild spring, as it can be very cold & windy up there and I would have thought that the ponds in the quarry adjacent (to the left in the snap above) would have been a much more likely spot.

I think the snap above is taken from the north, with the land falling away to the southeast to the sea, with the usual path up being from the car park to the south. Much easier climb too. Curiously, OS maps is hopeless on both the search keys 'Haytor' and 'Dartmoor'. Gmaps has no trouble with either of them.

From tadpoles on Haytor, I associate to a correspondent once telling us of the tadpoles he found in a puddle which had collected in the rut made in the mud by the back wheel of his tractor. Presumably this sort of thing helps account for the very high mortality rate reported for tadpoles; a rate which Bing suggests might be in excess of 95%. But then, the mortality rate of the eggs squirted into the sea by fishes must be pretty high too. Never mind that of the seeds of plants - think pumpkins, melons and fir cones - scattered about the place.

PS 2: later on, BH went on to remind me that ladies still wear hats for christenings, weddings and funerals - and for going to the races. She also remembered older ladies in her family wearing hats for more mundane activities like going shopping, hats which were kept on inside the shops. While I can offer dim memories of my mother wearing a head scarf. And more recent memories of men in the building trades from the East End wearing the flat caps sometimes called cheese cutters. BH also told me of an anecdote concerning some descendant of Holman Hunt who was having a tea party or some such in Kensington, but who was too mean to hire a man to mind the door, getting two Boy Scouts instead. They got her into trouble by confiscating everybody's hats on arrival, men and women alike. Gemini did not rise to this bait and attempt to trace the anecdote for me.

PS 3: Monday morning: BH's memory not playing tricks. She was able to put her hand on her copy of reference 3 and turn up the anecdote, starting on page 158, in about five minutes. Her summary of it, her précis, was entirely fair. Ten out of ten.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/trolley-830.html.

Reference 2: https://gemini.google.com/app?hl=en-GB.

Reference 3: My Grandmothers and I - Diana Holman-Hunt - 1960. Our version from Slightly Foxed, 2012.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/form-over-substance.html. The start of the précis excursion. Episode 2 on the stocks.

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