A large Waitrose trolley captured from an unusual spot, opposite the entrance the Station Approach. With our newest café visible far left. Opened now for a few weeks and I do see customers from time to time. Amazing how many such places Epsom seems to be able to support.
Possibly in the premises once occupied by the Old Guild Bakery or some such when we first moved to Epsom. Not as good as the bread we used to get in Norwich, never mind that in Cambridge. Most recently a tattoo parlour.
Trolley returned in the usual way.
Followed up by a trolley from Sainsbury's in East Street.
Not impressed at Sainsbury's to find a male beggar of middle years, sat on his blanket by the front entrance, together with a large and well-fed looking bulldog. I suppose if you are in his position, probably complete with lack of decent home and mental health issues, you want something to get attached to - but it is a pity such people can't manage with teddy bears or something of that sort.
Down the alley to the footbridge leading to the gas depot, where I picked up my third trolley of the day by a busy blackberry bush and pushed it back up the hill - not a very big hill, but big enough for me to notice these days.
One of the blackberry flowers: five petals and lots of stamens. Presumably you get one blackberry to the flower?
Gemini explained to me that the blackberry is a compound fruit, with each druplet of a blackberry is derived from a pistil, of which there are lots in the centre of the flower, rather obscured by the surrounding stamens. One seed to the druplet - presumably what gives stewed blackberries their crunch. Zoom suggests that Gemini has got it right.
Back home, a light lunch, after which we went over to Stoneleigh for a pork feast, a pork feast which was rounded off by a freshly baked Victoria sponge served with strawberries and cream. A sponge which reminded one that relatively plain, home baked cakes have a lot to be said for them. And I thought that the strawberries from Kent were pretty good too. Much better than the deep pink ones with white cores, which come, I think, from somewhere over the water. Possibly Belgium or the Netherlands.
After lunch we were introduced to the reading habits of the children of today. Allison Uttley (a staple of my early reading) and Beatrix Potter out, someone called Jeff Kinney in. About whom, more in due course.
After that we learned that the otherwise fine cook knives from Sanelli (of reference 3) with the green and red handles do not get on very well with the very hot water in dishwashers, with the handles being badly degraded after a while. Maybe all that detergent doesn't help either. Not really visible in the snap above.
I also noticed that the blade of this particular knife was much thinner and lighter than that of our blue steel general purpose knife, good for carving up both joints and cabbages. With one advantage of this last being that blue steel is a lot easier to sharpen than stainless steel. Visible from various angles at reference 4.
And after that a sample of rocks from the Natural History Museum, which played to my time with reference 2. Iron pyrites at the bottom, quartz on the right.
Working on the associated crib sheet for the other three.
PS: the snap above started life as a new-to-me HEIC file. Some part of Copilot seems to be wired into Bing, which offered the snap immediately above. All looks plausible enough and I have not bothered to check, content that Windows and Blogger can both cope. I just assume that my correspondent is an Apple person. Something I have not been since I left Norwich, where Apple Macs were the height of IT fashion in the late 1980s. Large white, brick shaped things that you could comfortably carry in a back pack on your bicycle and which did proper WYSIWYG word processing before anyone else.
Bottom line, these large language models are coming on fast. They might make mistakes from time to time, blunders even, but they are becoming very useful, often much quicker and more convenient than using a Mark I search engine.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/trolleys-853-and-854.html.
Reference 2: An introduction to the mineral kingdom – Richard Pearl, J. F. Kirkaldy – 1956, 1966.
Reference 3: https://www.ambrogiosanelli.it/en/.
Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/beef.html.
Group search key: trolleysk, 20250524.
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