I have been thinking about getting myself a shopping trolley for some weeks now and, doing a bit of shopping in town, I thought again this morning. Maybe I would stroll along to Robert Dyas and see what they could do?
Except that I got half way there when I noticed a couple of trolleys in the window of the Cancer flavoured charity shop. Cheap and cheerful, but just £10.99. Sold to the man in the duffel coat.
The only catch being that a wheel fell off as I left the shop. I was able to push it back on OK, but clearly a stress test was indicated, so off to the library to load up.
Four books for BH and four book for me. I had to stump up a fiver for mine, but they did add a good bit of weight. I also learned that 'godiva' was library argot for a five pound note, one of which, as it happened, I happened to have on me.
It took a minute or two to load it all up, but it did amount to a reasonable stress test. Kippers right - with the fish counter at Waitrose being nicely decorated with lemons cut to look like miniature Halloween pumpkins - and very effective they were too. I wondered whether they had been sent out by HQ but the counter hand told me that this had been her first job of the morning.
I might also say that BH has done quite well out of the fiction section of recent months, which has supplied perhaps half her reading material. Simenon has, of course, been around for years now, but Gouge only crossed our path in July of this year, as noticed at reference 1.
Onto Waterloo Road where the newly cleared site at the end of the parade was busy with concrete pump and mixer wagon. To think that concrete pumps were hi-tech when I was young, only to be found on serious construction sites. Nothing domestic.
The concrete was being used for the footings, trenches maybe two feet deep and a foot wide, lined with cunning sheets of black plastic and filled with rebars. Black plastic a new to me technique: in my time you just cut a neat trench in the clay and filled it up, or failing that, some timber shuttering. And I don't recall seeing such serious looking rebars in footings before either.
The mixer wagon went home via Manor Green Road, a residential road through the middle of the Chase Estate not intended for such traffic - but I suppose the driver was just following the instructions on his satnav. And he would have been caught out by the water works blocking Christchurch Road had it been a few days earlier. For which see reference 2.
The one-time special needs house in Manor Green Road was looking a bit forlorn, now empty for several years. Presumably the back garden is a sea of brambles, providing accommodation for all kinds of livestock. Bit of a pain for the houses on either side.
Back home, I was reminded by 'Accounting: An introduction' how much easier it is, when starting out on a new subject, to have a textbook to work from. And this particular one seemed to have been quite well put together. While the three volumes about the IFRS standards were rather less accessible.
But they pulled their weight. Or rather, I had pulled their weight. Mulling over as I went, the energy saving which resulted from transferring most of their weight from my skeleton, particularly my back and hips, to the wheels. After a while, you did notice that you were pulling something reasonably heavy and you had to watch your feet a bit, but it was a whole lot easier than carrying the same weight.
And the trolley got home in one piece. Both the wheels stayed on. To be fair, I had been quite careful about kerbs and potholes.
PS: perhaps not. Not really my sort of thing, and £150 a head is a bit fierce. Plus I had my own visit, back in 2019, as noticed at reference 3. This one turned up as an advertisement in my mail box, possibly an indirect result of my being a mail order customer during the plague.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/padded-beef.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/return-of-pumpkinmen.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-far-eastern-cheese-hunt.html.
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