Piano 106

Piano No.106 was what looked like a relatively modern Challen, originally sold by Wilson Peck of Sheffield. So like No.105 (reference 1 below), another piano which has travelled. Captured at St. Andrew's church in Girton. We were told that St. Andrew was a popular saint in East Anglia.

Challen is a brand I have come across occasionally, most recently last year on the Isle of Wight, as noticed at reference 3. Seen apart, very similar, but side by side as above, both carcases and keyboard can be seen to be slightly different, in particular the arrangement of black and white keys at the right hand end. Although both have a longer blank left than right for some reason. Clearly need to consult someone who knows about pianos.

While Wilson Peck was clearly a big operator in his day. Bing knows all about him. See, for example, reference 4, where I read that the firm had a spot of bother around the time of the first war because of their close connection with the Bechsteins (formerly of the Wigmore Hall, now of Wigmore Street again).

The retailing demise came in the 1980s when Sheffield City Hall decided to take its ticket sales in-house, and the emergence of national record chains (HMV, Virgin Records, Our Price etc.) eroded into Wilson Peck’s earnings.

In 1988, the company vacated Beethoven House [above], and H.L. Brown, jewellers, moved in. Wilson and Peck downsized to premises on Rockingham Gate but that proved short lived. I’m led to believe that Wilson Peck ended up in ‘an end-of-terrace’ corner shop on Abbeydale Road that closed in 2001.

A rather sorry end to a once grand and imposing operation. But I suppose that decline and fall comes to all of us in the end.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/piano.html.

Reference 2: https://www.girton.church/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/piano-89.html.

Reference 4: https://sheffielder.net/2024/05/19/that-german-company-the-rise-and-fall-of-wilson-peck/.

Group search key: pianosk.

Wellingtonia 128

This was really two Wellingtonia, for some reason planted rather close together, with one of them looking to have been truncated - by storm, chain-saw or otherwise - at some point.

As it happens, the building to the right started life as a farm house, the farm house for the mixed farm in Girton which took me on one summer to help with carting bales. Which included, as I recall, my first experience of driving. I was sometimes allowed to take the small tractor and trailer on mopping up operations, while the big boys did the serious stuff.

A farm, which I think was owned by one of the Cambridge Colleges, perhaps Trinity Hall, has mostly become housing. A farm house which reminds me of reading that there was a fashion at some point in the nineteenth century for landlords to put smart houses on their farms so as to attract a better class of tenant.

This attempt to zoom into the curious leaves of a Wellingtonia, I think at factor 10, failed completely. While I had thought that it looked OK on the telephone, at the time. Zooming into the snap further above, when it arrived on my laptop, failed in much the same way.

Google Images goes for Wellingtonia on a cropped version of the further above snap:

It is not possible to confirm whether the image depicts a pair of large trees in Girton, Cambridge, UK, based solely on the provided image and available information. The image shows a large conifer, likely a Giant Sequoia or Wellingtonia, but there is no visual or search result evidence to confirm its specific location in Girton, Cambridge, UK.

Getting, on the way, into a muddle with my hint that the trees were in Girton, included as his responses are often rather geared to the US. Furthermore, he does not seem to pick up that we have two trees here rather than one.

On the plus side, he turns up some images of big Wellingtonia in the botanical gardens at Cambridge, sadly not open when I passed the back entrance around 08:00 yesterday morning. Better luck next time.

PS 1: looking at gmaps this afternoon, I find that the house is now called St. John's Farmhouse, so perhaps it was St. John's College, rather than Trinity Hall.

PS 2: adding that snippet and the gmaps reference - 52.2423683,0.0817214 - to the hint, the AI assistant declines to play altogether. Maybe Google Images does not have access to gmaps.

References 

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/wellingtonias-123-thru-127.html.

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

Group search key: wgc.

It can't happen here

[New York: Doubleday Doran & Company, Inc., 1935. / First edition. Signed by author on front free endpaper. [vi], 458 pp. Original black cloth with gilt spine lettering. Front hinge cracked but holding, else Near Fine in an attractive example of the rare silver dust jacket, Very Good+ and unclipped ($2.50) with rubbing, small chip along top of front panel, a little foxing to flaps. / $3,000 from the people at reference 6]

I have finally finished this 375 page book, bought at the beginning of May and noticed at reference 1. As with my previous encounters with the author, it was not read in one go, rather a stop-start affair, but I do get there in the end.

A book which was prompted by the rise of Hitler in Germany and by the various more or less unpleasant groups of both left at right at that time, both in Europe and the USA. Published not long after the very different 'Brave New World' and near fifteen years before '1984', this last derived as much from Stalin as Hitler.

The fictional campaign to get the chap who turned into a dictator elected which occupies the first half of the book is very much the sort of campaign that gave the US President Trump. A dictator who did not, however, last very long, being driven to a comfortable exile by his right hand man, who was in turn shot by a military man. A shooting which I imagine was prompted by Hitler's liquidation of the SA not long after getting into power. The book ends with a not very satisfactory invasion of Mexico. Along the way we have a good number of people escaping to Canada, escapes reminiscent of the underground railway of the last years of slavery - for which see reference 7.

The main character of the book is a decent, ordinary chap - Doremus Jessup - who runs a small-town newspaper in the (fictional) Fort Beulah of Vermont. The sort of fairly ordinary person in whom Lewis seems to major - and we see events largely through his eyes.

Events which include the concentration camps, beatings and executions which characterised Hitler's early years in power, before he scaled up. So unpleasant enough, but a bit more homely than, for example, the camps of Poland. You could bribe the guards. From which I associate to a story told me by someone who had spent serious time with the Military Police, to the effect that no prison is truly closed. There are always going to be guards and guards are only human. You can always find one who will help you get stuff in and out. The being long before the invention of drones and probably before drugs - other than alcohol and tobacco - were a problem.

An interesting read; a lucky find. We will see what BH makes of it, then I might have another go.

PS: and while I did flag a bit along the way, Lewis does do funny as well. So picking page 211 at random we have: ' [a good wheeze for making money would be] getting some real, genuine, old hand-hewn beams that everyone wants so much now in those phoney-Old English suburban living rooms. Well look! Round here there's ten million old barns with hand-adzed beams just falling down...'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-heat-of-day.html.

Reference 2: It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis - 1935.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here.

Reference 4: 1984 - George Orwell - 1949.

Reference 5: Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - 1932.

Reference 6: https://www.burnsiderarebooks.com/.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad.

Trolleys 894 and 895

No.894, a medium small trolley from the M&S food hall was captured at the top of the passage which goes under Hudson House.

While No.895 was two small trolleys from Sainsbury's - they don't seem to do the very small one one sometimes gets from M&S - were captured by the rail at the creationists. It was a warm afternoon, and I thought about just pushing one of them up to Kiln Lane but that seemed a bit mean. Taking one was not going to save the caretaker a job, so I settled for the two. Not too bad as it turned out.

Passing this bit of screening on the way, screening which has been in this condition for what seems like years. Nicely symbolic of the maintenance state of the rest of the Thames Water estate?

Another go at the creeper noticed a few trolleys ago at reference 2.

First up, lots more not very convincing Reddit. But on the hint 'no visible flowers or buds, shady spot in Epsom, UK, climbing off something hanging down from a tree. Convolvulus?', Google Images more or less agrees with me, and convolvulus does seem more likely than a celastrus. He does not think that the absence of flowers is a killer, all the convolvulus flowers round about notwithstanding.

Plus, I now know that the Convolvulaceae are a big family of more than 1,500 species, including the sweet potato and what I call convolvulus, otherwise morning glory (aka Belle de Jour), otherwise bindweed. While what I have always called bindweed has lots of common names, but not this one. Maybe I will go with goosegrass. Sticky stuff which seems to get everywhere - although I don't recall seeing the small white flowers. Must look out for them. See reference 4.

The whitebeam.

What I am pretty sure is convolvulus, complete with flower buds and red stems in among the brambles. Maybe there are different varieties, or habit varies with context?

And above, a sea of blackberries to come. 

What we need now is some proper rain to plump them up a bit. I seem to remember lack of rain at the right time being a problem with the blackberry crop last year.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/trolleys-892-and-893.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/trolleys-886-887-and-888.html.

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

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galium_aparine.

Group search key: trolleysk, 20250624.

Carducci

A week or so ago now, to the Wigmore Hall for our penultimate show of the summer season, before the summer break. The Carduccii Quartet giving us Schubert D87 and Dvořák Op.96. Surprised this morning to find that we last heard this quartet at Dorking, as noticed as reference 1, and that we do not appear to have heard them at Wigmore at all, at least not recently.

Parked at the Eclipse. Getting good with this RingGo lark.

Two non-scoring trolleys on the way to the station, where we took train for Vauxhall and Oxford Circus, toast at ABO being the order of the day rather than bun at Olle & Steen.

Not for the first time, we heard a brass band on arrival at Oxford Circus and this time we actually saw it, although we did not approach. To the immediate left of the head, likely the Salvation Army who have premises nearby - Regent Hall at No.275 to be pedantic about it.

An excellent concert, with my being on form for this occasion. And with the Dvořák working far better on this occasion than it had on the last. Although checking the archive this morning, I find there has been some conflation. The one that didn't work was its next door neighbour Op.97, as noticed at reference 2. The last outing for Op.96 was fine.

Opted for lunch at Olivelli's in St. Christopher Place, coming across this fine display of fake flowers at the Wigmore Street end. There was more of it as one went down towards Oxford Street.

Kicked off with a spot of pecorino for him and something pale & sparkling for her. €10.50 at reference 5, maybe a fifth of what we paid, so markup a touch on the high side. But we had a good waitress and a free grappa so we don't mind...

I then opted for another go at their messy prawns, served with limp leaves. Plus bread, naturally. Messy but good. Would have been even better with a bigger finger bowl and a proper napkin.

Followed by linguine, served with a rich sauce. More filling than might at first appear.

And a pretty dessert, with green antlers, a decorated variety of cheesecake. Maybe a spot of yellow grappa behind.

Interior of the restaurant pleasant and cool. Plus BH had the benefit of a very young child, perhaps four weeks. Umbrellas notwithstanding, we leave the street to others.

Lunch done, down to the tube at Bond Street. There was a rather noisy busker, but I found that, despite the noise, one picked up the rhythm going down the stairs. A rather quicker descent than it would otherwise have been.

We remembered not to jump in a taxi at Epsom, and walking back to the car, we were reminded of the rather casual closure to Amber's yard. The people who put our new boiler in and who have spent quite a bit on their new premises on West Hill. So why don't they invest in a bit of chain - or at least something a bit less tatty looking than this plastic barrier held in place with plastic tape?

Stopped at Waterloo Road for the first water melon of the season. A water melon which was a bit too much for our kitchen scales. 

So a bit of improvisation in the garage was called for. Melon in the brown bag, 6lbs in the white plastic. Taking the mid point of the brown straps, a ratio of 22 to 6, so 22lbs. 

Less the first couple of slices. Very good they were too. It all went down quite fast, the cut covered with cling film in between times and once we were half way down, in the fridge too. Just starting to soften as we finished it.

When will I buy another? It might be a while as 20 lbs is more than I care to carry home these days - so it will have to wait for an expedition with the trolley or the car.

Plus some chickpeas from Iran - so sanctions do not reach down to dried vegetables. Pity about the mullahs though as the chickpeas were good. Dry and rather bland, but one soon got used to that. Easy to keep nibbling at them, rather in the way of peanuts.

PS: BH tells me that FIL had a proper beam balance but we let it go. Whatever was I thinking of? Quite keen on that sort of thing usually.

References  

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/carducci-three.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/bennewtiz.html.

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

Reference 4: https://theamber-group.co.uk/.

Reference 5: https://www.velenosivini.com/en/prodotto/villa-angela-falerio-doc-pecorino/. The almost identical bottle to be found here.

Reference 6: https://velenosivini.com/en/. Misty hills and so forth to be found here. '... Inspired by the desire to create a harmony between taste and colour, the Cantina was born in 1984. Ercole [and] Angela Velenosi, [together] with Paolo Garbini since 2005, combining artisan tradition with modern technologies, they have creatively reinterpreted the winemaking processes. / They gave birth to a company that today brings the scents and nuances of Piceno territory through wines with a unique character...'.

Trolleys 892 and 893

The first circuit started with investigating the sewing shop on South Street. Were they into men's tailoring or did they just alter women's clothes? Shut at the time of the first visit, but I did at least establish that the shop was there and when it was likely to be opening.

On to Ebbisham Square, where, for once in a while, I captured a large trolley from the M&S food hall.

Taking the opportunity while in the food hall to take one of their small pineapples for a pound. It remains a mystery how such a large fruit can be delivered half way across the globe for so little. Furthermore, from quite a small country where one might think that agricultural land was a a premium.

Checking with Wikipedia, I find it has 5m people and 50,000sqkm of land compared with our 70m people and 250,000sqkm. So even allowing for a lot of hills, probably a better off for farming land than we are.

They also seem to have been into stone balls, rather different from the Scottish ones noticed at reference 2. To be looked into later.

It was quite hot by late morning, so I took a sit in Court Recreation Ground on the way home. To wonder why the tree on the left was so much taller than the mature oaks on the right. Must get a bit closer when it is a bit cooler.

The second circuit later that afternoon turned up a medium small trolley from the food hall from what used to be the creationists' smoking den. They now smoke out front, although to be fair, I do not catch them at it very often.

Unusual, in that the creationists usually favour Sainsbury's with their shopping. Looking at gmaps this morning, I would think that Sainsbury's is slightly further away than M&S, so it must be some combination of range, price and opening hours which attracts the creationists.

The sign above. When I was young, art students were very into this sort of thing - from where I associate to that hot bed of revolutionaries known as Hornsey Art College, to be found at reference 3.

Now absorbed into the Coleridge primary school, with the whole now being a rum looking place for such. Perhaps they were not allowed to just knock it down and start over with something more sensible. I remember there being more trees, but that must be an error, as I don't suppose that they would have been allowed to knock them down either.

When will we learn that recreational substances are better dealt with by the health system than the criminal justice one? In so far as one needs to deal with them at all. Maybe a spot of regulation would suffice in the case of cannabis - although, to be fair, the road to legalisation there has proved a bit rocky elsewhere - with Thailand getting into the news most recently. See, for example, reference 4. But I still think that legalisation is the way forward. 

[People walk past a cannabis shop on Sukhumvit Road, one of the most popular tourist spots in Bangkok, Thailand, on Wednesday. Photo: Reuters]

For once in a while, gmaps fails me. It turns out that Sukhumvit Road is a very long road and I have failed to run down the shop above. Which may be on the Sukhumvit 77 Road - which may or may not be the same road. While from reference 5 I get:

'... Rip-roaring Sukhumvit Road is Bangkok’s boulevard of dreams and schemes. It’s not only the city’s longest thoroughfare but, stretching 490km southeast towards Cambodia, also one of the world’s longest main roads...'

PS 1: the second visit to the sewing shop established that they do do men's tailoring and they are now working on a pair of my trousers, by way of a try-out.

PS 2: the pineapple was fine, but we did discover, after a refrigeration accident, that pineapples do not freeze at all well. Just as well that it was just the stump by then.

Reference

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/trolley-891.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-carved-stone-balls-of-aberdeen.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsey_College_of_Art. Long list of alumni and teachers, a few of whom I have heard of.

Reference 4: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/3058697/thai-cannabis-industry-thrown-into-chaos-as-government-aims-to-recriminalise-weed.

Reference 5: https://thailandawaits.com/sukhumvit-road-bangkok/.

Group search key: trolleysk, 20250623.

Trolley 891

No trolley, rather a car who looks to have decided that this rectangle of land belongs neither to the (controlled) car park behind to the left nor to the pavement in front. I think it has been there, perhaps on and off, for a few days. Perhaps a resident of Hudson House who does not care to pay the rent for a proper car parking spot?

There was also the matter of a small white saloon car towing a sort of small extension, a small extension which very much matched the saloon - size, colour, trim and so forth. Could one sleep in it, or perhaps one put the two halves together for living purposes? And where did one buy one from?

Gemini's first offer was something called a tear drop caravan, but Bing's images for that were not right at all. Then his second offer was some kind of customisation of some kind of trailer. Serious stuff for DIY, but entirely possible. Maybe a retirement project.

Then we had a dark low car in town centre which managed to look both scruffy and flash at the same time. Registration R3, which a few days ago Car Check told me was a '2019 grey Aston Martine DBS V12'. Today it denies that this car exists. All very odd. What's going on?

It seemed very warm and sultry, despite being only being around 11:30, with the real heat usually seeming to kick in in the afternoon, so I took a sit in the shade on the south side of East Street. Plus a swig from the water bottle, after which, I may say, I felt somewhat revived. Maybe I had been getting dehydrated.

I suppose the if you are the biggest car dealer in town, you are entitled to be a bit cavalier with your registration plates. Something for the lad to do on quiet Friday afternoons? But not something I have noticed before, despite passing this corner what must be hundreds of times.

The front garden ladies of the Kiln Lane end of Middle Lane are getting underway now and we will probably have flowers well into the Autumn.

While at the other end a bad infestation of some white powdery stuff. Some funny kind of mildew? I have noticed since quite a bit of the more regular sort of mildew in the smaller trees - vaguely ornamental apples or plums rather than evergreens - planted in the verges of our own road.

Google Images turns up lots of similar images from something called Reddit plus: 'The white substance on the Euonymus japonicus plant is likely powdery mildew, caused by a specific fungus like Erysiphe euonymicola. While it resembles mildew found on other plants, it is a type common to Euonymus'. Which would explain why one Reddit person said it had not infected neighbouring bushes of a different kind. See reference 2. While reference 3 suggests that the term 'mildew' is used for a variety of plant pests.

On to take the customary whitebeam snap, on this occasion with a Sainsbury's trolley behind.

Push it under a tree for later, push it home or take it back to Kiln Lane? Bearing in mind the roast chicken to come. After deep thought, settled for Kiln Lane. There should be time for that and a pint.

Passed by two cyclists while I was pushing the trolley back through the passage. Two older people, so they were cheerful and polite. Then by a young man on a scooter, dressed in black on a black scooter, and all he could manage was some adolescent grunts.

At Kiln Lane, I came up behind the lady parking her bicycle. Somehow, I got the very clear idea in my head that she was loading one of the bags onto the back of her bike and I was a bit taken aback to find that she was just parking it. Brain jumping to conclusions on the basis of not enough information.

And then a mechanic outside Halfords squirting something from a small gas bottle, equipped with a pressure gauge, into the coolant part of the top of a car engine. Gemini was fulsome today about the whole subject of pressure testing car cooling systems. I am pretty confident that that is what I saw, even if some of his details are not quite right and despite various lapses of logic and grammar. Confirmed, at least in part, by Bing.

Quite a good day for Gemini. He might not be perfect, but you do get to where you want to be a lot quicker than one usually manages with conventional search. And, in these two examples, it is easier enough to check his answers, if you are so minded.

Back through the Screwfix underpass to find that someone had dumped one of those boxes the food delivery riders use in the half hour or so I had been away. Odd sort of thing to be dumping in the middle of the day in the middle of a reasonably well used path.

Winding up for a drop of Abbott at TB. Not much custom when I arrived, but a very well turned out barmaid. I associate to the days when pubs were busy 12:00 to 14:00 on Sunday morning with family men taking on a few beers before going home for the Sunday roast - not so often chicken in those days, chicken having not by then become as cheap as it has become since. Indeed, when I was a child, chicken was expensive, eaten on feast days only. A busy, cheerful and relaxed session.

I was quite surprised what a good job the telephone did on the star engraved on the stem of my Stella glass, viewed from behind, through the stem. Also reminded that Stella was a star.

And I learned that the Stella people put maize in their beer. Perhaps that provides the sugar needed to get the alcohol level up. This important piece of information must have been somewhere else on the glass.

And then fell to wondering how much of the casing above the bar would have been up there when the house was built, perhaps in the 1930s. Were, for example were the 'stressed' rafters top right original?

1910 or so. Spot marks the spot. Pound Lane school present and correct. Maybe the houses above served the asylum?

1925 or so. The estate we now live on had not been thought of. Epsom College up and running bottom right. And the asylums were probably the biggest employer in town, despite the many racing stables up on the Downs at that time. I wonder if anyone has done an ethnic breakdown of the staff: I dare say lots from far flung parts - say Wales and Ireland - and a good sprinkling from places like Italy and Portugal.

1935 or so. Epsom Court vanished. Manor Green Road more or less up and running. TB just below and a little to the right of the spot. With what used to be the off-license annex to its left? Now doing food to go of some sort. My guess would be fairly new when this map was made.

PS 1: the observant reader might have worked out that I asked Gemini about gas coolers before I asked him about teardrops.

PS 2: I retweet the observation which I think I got from Cormac McCarthy, to the effect that people who do physical work - probably making a lot of use of their hands and their physical senses - say golfers, carpenters or animal trainers - find it hard to believe something which they cannot see and touch for themselves. Perhaps in the context of a detailed account of breaking in some horses. An interesting thought, but I need to turn it over a bit.

PS 3: I have now tried both Bing and Google search with 'ethnic origins of staff at the epsom cluster mental hospitals'. Bing reminds me that mental hospitals took a lot of staff from the West Indies and Mauritius after the second world war - and that the hospitals were built by London County Council to house their lunatics. Not for the locals at all. While Google does rather better, turning up the character books which have survived in the Surrey archives. But no formal analysis by origin, although it looks as if these books would support such an analysis. And I did not notice any mention of the Irish, once the mainstay of the English mental hospitals.

I associate this morning to the piper from a Scottish regiment who featured in 'The Longest Day', who ended up as a charge nurse in one of the hospitals of the Exminster cluster. Bing turns up reference 6: no need for Gemini on this occasion.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/trolley-889-and-890.html.

Reference 2: https://www.forestpests.eu/pest/erysiphe-euonymicola.

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

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erysiphales. More on mildew.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronosporaceae. Still more.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Millin. Actually born in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Group search key: trolleysk, 20250622.