Showing off

A week or so ago we thought that we would show our Canadian visitors a very English suburban activity, that is to say visiting a stately home run by the National Trust. That is to say, Polesden Lacey.

With the day starting with showing off the early flowering of the dwarf white cyclamen down the bottom of our garden. Although, checking, not that early. See reference 1.

The first floral puzzle of the visit is snapped above. Google Images suggests small scabious, Scabiosa columbaria.

Wikipedia talks of the plant reaching half a metre, which was certainly not the case here, but this bit of extra information did not disturb Google. Any more than the shade of the nearby trees had.

Bentham & Hooker consistent, but not adding much, short of leaves to look at and of knowledge of the language used to describe flowers. Although the very degraded images of what are probably the leaves belonging to the flower above are consistent with the feathery leaves in the sketch offered by Fitch in Bentham & Hooker.

And zooming in on the ball bottom left in my snap does agree with this one turned up by Bing, described as a scabious seed head.

I go with small scabious for now. Maybe I will remember to look for the leaves next time.

And so inside, to be reminded of the sanitary arrangements in the flat we once occupied in Bury Lodge in Hambledon, in Hampshire. Our landlord, a retired general, was rather proud of the wooden seat, which he found warm in the winter.

The lady of the house, Mrs Greville. Easy meat for Google Images.

Then a display of the sorts of dresses that were all the thing at the time she was giving parties, something which, it seems, she was very good at. Perhaps of more interest to the ladies than the gents.

I was not allowed to touch the books, or sit on many of the chairs, but there were enough. From which I was able to study all the serious joinery which had gone into the second fixing.

There were also a couple of photograph albums, assembled from I know not where, but which I found a lot more interesting than the real thing. The snap above being Mrs Greville before her marriage.

Presumably the sort of person that she liked to invite, although it is not clear whether this one actually was. She may have been a little past her prime by the relevant time.

BH went so far as to try on one the hats available.

One of the various elaborate decorative schemes. I think the form was that she found something she like in some old palace or whatever and then commissioned a no-expense-spared version for her own house. Fake all the way through.

This pot was the real thing though: perhaps Mr Greville had a serious tobacco habit. Our own tobacco jar, from a naval relative who did time in a gunboat on the Yangtze is considerably smaller - but I imagine that his personal space, as a petty officer, even a senior petty officer, was quite small.

I associate to a story about the men of the Red Army, pushing through Germany at the end of the second war, being allowed to send lots of stuff home, using the munitions trains going back empty for a refill, for the purpose.

I also happened to notice the label about special cushions on the billiard table. I was quite impressed that Gemini could dig up records from the National Trust (which I had not told him about) and give me a little story about billiard cushions of the time.

Bing knows all about Burroughes & Watts, to be found at reference 4, and that is about all the checking I am going to do, fascinating though early twentieth century billiard table cushion technology might be. But how many of our school and college students bother to check?

On this occasion I found the dog cemetery a bit mawkish. That, and the rather crude display of wealth in the house, left a slightly sour taste. There were also some rather loud trusties.

Back with botany, a curious fungal relic on a tree stump. Google Images quite reasonably says that it does not have enough to go on, but suggests that it might be one of the polypores, perhaps Meripilus giganteus (Giant Polypore) or Phaeolus schweinitzii (Dyer's Polypore). Without a better picture, I don't think I am going to do any better. Those at reference 5 don't help much at all.

We thought a light lunch in the old stable block. I took a fruit scone while I waited for my red bean stew. All very satisfactory. The other opted for something a little lighter.

After a time out, off to Cappadocia in the evening, last visited 200 trolleys ago in March. It still seems a lot of trolleys to capture in six months, and I continue to hope that there has not been some gross book-keeping mistake.

Started off in the NCP car park off Station Approach, the one which takes one down to the Kokoro Passage of trolley fame. I failed the mobile test - partly because I had failed to take the latest NCP app update, partly because I had to tell it about our new car. While BH failed the machine alternative - but was bailed out by a helpful passer-by explaining that you pay on exit. She subsequently passed on her second attempt. And I was able to sort the app out when we got home.

Much the same sort of thing as on previous occasion, but substituting beer for the wine. Beer, said 'effess', was very good. As was the bread: maybe the best restaurant bread in town.

Occasion livened up by various birthday parties coming to the boil while we were there.

Clock tower with moon on exit. The moon failed to oblige and to emerge properly at this time.

PS 1: along the way we learned about the central heating in apartment blocks of old in Montreal, where, it seems, the arrangements often varied by floor and sometimes involved hot air gratings in the floor of the central corridor of your apartment. I had failed to remember the details and so asked Gemini.

He explains that what he calls forced air systems were and are common in Canadian apartment blocks, although in the early days upper floors would need to have their own (solid fuel) stoves - the sort of thing that Simenon writes about and which Maigret was fond of.

The hot water radiator systems which are common here in the UK also have their place.

As do room based electric heaters, particularly in areas like Quebec, where electricity is cheap.

PS 2: another popular way to do stately homes is advertised towards the end of reference 2.

PS 3: it was also an occasion to show off our old penny, previously noticed at reference 7. To be reminded that zoom with the telephone is a good deal better than my naked eye. Don't know why the left hand came out better than the right hand. Maybe right was zoom on camera rather than zoom on laptop? Maybe I should have used raking light...

PS 4: today, in another connection, nothing to do with the chalk downs on which Polesden Lacey is to be found, I was moved to look up chalk in my new book on minerals, reference 8. To find to my surprise that it is absent. I first thought that the answer was that chalk was not a mineral, while the calcite of which it is mainly made, is a mineral and is present. But this does not work because the same sort of thing might be said of granite, which is in the index. Maybe it is just a mistake. But in the course of poking this around, I turned up the exotic chalk above, lifted from Wikipedia. 'Nitzana Chalk curves, situated at Western Negev, Israel, are chalk deposits formed in the Mesozoic era's Tethys Ocean'. Looks pretty bleak, not like our downs at all. Or even the white cliffs of Dover. The curves are in a national park, to be found at reference 9, but that may be more to do with ancient ruins. So not that bleak.

PS 5: chalk might be absent, but cement is present, the mineralogical aspects of which appear to be important.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/to-holne.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/trolleys-988-and-989.html.

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

Reference 4: https://www.burroughesandwatts.com/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypore.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/trollfest.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/trolleys-956-957-and-958.html.

Reference 8: Minerals: Their constitution and origin- Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Andrey Bulakh - 2016. 2nd edition, 3rd printing.

Reference 9: https://parksofisrael.com/en/parks/nitzana-national-park.

Reference 10: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/chalk.html. A previous outing for chalk.