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.
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.
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