At the end of last month we took a short break in Cambridge, opting to use the new-to-us route via London Bridge, which took slightly longer than going via Vauxhall and Kings Cross but involved one change rather than two and a lot less walking with luggage. One can walk a long way under Kings Cross.
On the way to the station, impressed in Meadway by the amount of energy trees put into reproduction at this time of year. Mostly not, I suppose, in a form that can be harvested.
Not appropriate to capture the trolley at the top of the Kokoro Passage.
On the up side, we find that with our senior rail passes, our rail tickets did not cost much more than the petrol would have cost us. Or the battery charging?
Not so impressed by this advertisement in the train. A bit rum that people make a living by extracting it from well meaning service providers - the net effect in this case being to push the fares we pay up another notch. And a bit rum that this service provider seems to think that it has to carry advertisements of this sort. I dare say the owner of the claims company would take a very high moral tone if poked: if it was not for people like me, the service providers would get terribly sloppy. You need people like me to keep them on their toes. Not relevant that I have got very rich. To my mind, it all goes to stoke the excess greed which plagues our society.
According to Companies House, this particular company has only been around since last November and has not yet filed anything of interest. Maybe they have operated under various other names previously. But I have learned that Jonathon Ernest Howarth and John David Johnstone are the chaps in the driving seat. And there the matter will have to rest for the moment.
And then at London Bridge, we move on from the frames of the bodies of buses to the frames of buildings. Some sort of combo of steel and concrete? The project at reference 2, complete with lots of tasteful shots of the completed building. All faked up by the architects? Rather more detail to be found at reference 3, including the information that these are the people who put the Shard up.
Arriving at Cambridge, pleased to find photo booths masterminded from a building next to Screwfix in Blenheim Road, back in Epsom.
Checked into Travelodge Central to find in the square (piazza?) adjacent a collection of fancy looking custom cars & pickups and their proud owners - and a converted container serving pizza. We went in for a spot of both.
Pizza entirely serviceable, once one had got the knack of eating it without spilling hot cheese all over the place.
On this occasion, we took regular Sanpellegrinos, the fizzy drinks in pretty packages, but somewhere along the way, BH tried one which was very dark in colour and which came in a more or less black tin, probably: 'Sanpellegrino Italian Sparkling Drinks Chinotto: Crafted from extracts of carefully selected chinotto oranges from Sicily and a delicious mix of 20 herbs, Sanpellegrino Chinotto is the Italian cult drink with a flavour loved by generations of fans around the world. Taste it and you'll know why'. Read all about at reference 4.
A bit out of our league. We were told that the skirt left provides a sort of hovercraft effect. While Carcheck says that the BMW is a 'I8 225XE PHEV M SPORT ACTIVE TOURER'. A top speed out of the factory of just 125mph, so maybe this one has been souped up a bit.
For those who like something a bit more chunky. With what looks like two exhaust pipes poking out just forward of the rear wheel on the other side.
There was also a black tank, just behind the cab, occupying a good proportion of the space available in the back. I thought fuel, but the owner was not on hand to tell me all about it.
After a spot of siesta, we were due at the pub outside the main station and thought that we would push through by going north, rather than by going round by Hills Road Bridge. If all else failed we could use the space tunnel which I used to use to get to the Argyll, just behind Mill Road.
The Travelodge is bottom left and the space tunnel top centre - the thin blue line - in the snap above.
And so we found ourselves going past blocks of newish build flats with a lot of very new scaffolding around them. What on earth was going on?
There were no early cut throughs to the station and access to the space tunnel was not looking good. Maybe it really was the dead end marked on gmaps. Maybe there was no access to the space tunnel? But we pushed on, just to be sure.
Being rewarded by the first blackberries of the season. A few weeks ahead of those in Epsom and a lot more than that ahead of those on the Isle of Wight. Which I find odd, given that the Isle of Wight is supposed to be a warm place by UK standards.
Got to the space tunnel, to find a young couple underneath it, doing we knew not what. But a young couple who were remarkably unhelpful about how we might get up into the tunnel. So we retraced our steps, until we came to a hole in the fence around the estate.
More shiny new scaffolding.
Add some plant.
And finally we got to the entrance to the space tunnel, just by Rustat Road. Not as hot inside as I had feared it might be and we made it across without flaking out, making it to the Station Tavern of reference 5, a Young's house, to take a well earned drop of their special bitter.
From there to the Maison du Steak, a place we had visited before, on a previous visit. This time I had booked, which meant that we did get a table inside, albeit upstairs, not quite as ambience-full as downstairs. But it did well enough.
The Fleurie was fine and was reasonably priced, even if I have failed to find this exact bottle at reference 10 this (Friday) morning. A near miss comes in at €16.95, which bears a fair relation to what we paid. Plenty of wine babble at reference 10 for those that like that sort of thing.
Noting in passing that the logo is very like that for the Cupra, noticed previously, whatever BH might think about foxes and wolves.
Olives good and bread adequate.
The cow chop for two was big and nicely cooked & presented. Including little tubs of bits and pieces. A chopping board apiece.
But the chop proper was OK rather than good and I thought that they had traded quality for quantity. The chop I noticed at reference 7, for example, was rather better, even if it did not come with a bone and was a good deal smaller.
Furthermore, my salad came covered in goo and I failed to find the energy to get it changed. And the chips were a bit rum, although I think they were at least potato rather than the sweet potato on offer (actually the root of a tropical convolvulus, not a proper potato at all. See reference 8).
In the course of the meal, I leaned that Panther - who had seemed to have got an iron grip on Cambridge taxis - carrying their app on one's telephone was more or less compulsory - had been taken over by the company called Veezu of reference 9, a company which was busily gobbling up taxi companies, rather as Whitbread, in its day, in the 1960s and 1970s, gobbled up lots of regional breweries. We were told the idea was to make them into a one-stop shop, more competitive with Uber - whose app I have yet to use for real, despite having had it on my telephone for some months now. Finding out exactly how many months is left as an exercise for the reader. We were also told that drivers owned their cars, which meant that all that Veezu had to provide was the central service. They got a percentage, but without having to put in the capital cost of the cars. The same as Uber as far as that goes. With one wrinkle being that, in Epsom at least, quite a lot of black cabs are shared between two or more drivers. In any event, I suppose that finance companies actually own most of the cars. Perhaps specialist finance companies.
And in connection with our expiring Ford, we were also reminded of the virtues of nearly new second hand cars. Which are cheap and have had any teething troubles sorted out. I associate today to, many years ago, getting the same advice about houses. Let someone else get the snagging done. But are cars like houses in this way? Made in factories they ought to be more reliable?
On exit, a striking cube of concrete visible above the western parapet of the Hills Road bridge.
PS: in the margins of this post, I found this pop-up from Google a bit aggressive - and I could not get rid of it without doing something positive like accepting or rejecting the offer. An offer which I was not sure about at all, given that I already find Microsoft rather too intrusive in my computing affairs: I would prefer them to take more of a back seat and not to interfere quite so much and quite so visibly. Do I really want more of the same from Google, however clever it might be? And given the forced choice, I went for rejection for now.
Reference 1: https://myclaimgroup.co.uk/.
Reference 2: https://edge.tech/buildings/edge-london-bridge.
Reference 3: https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/sections/long-reads/building-on-the-edge-maces-latest-london-bridge-project-08-11-2024/.
Reference 4: https://specialtyproduce.com/produce/Chinotto_Oranges_11747.php.
Reference 5: https://www.thestationtavern.co.uk/.
Reference 6: https://www.lamaisondusteak.co.uk/.
Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/log-fired-oven.html.
Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/trolleys-894-and-895.html.
Reference 9: https://www.veezu.co.uk/.
Reference 10: https://www.duboeuf.com/fr/?v=82a9e4d26595. Have not worked out what the 'v' bit does, but it seems to pop up, even if you try to delete it.
No comments:
Post a Comment