Skate

A few days ago, a couple of skate wings from the fish man in the market. The fish van which says Lowestoft but which actually does its shopping in the soon to be closed or moved Billingsgate Market.

Handed over to BH for processing, and mine served on a serving dish rather than a dinner plate, in the way of places like the Toby Carvery for their large portions.

She did us well, with the skate turning out very nicely. It seems to be a reliable fish. We wondered about the bit in the middle, including the head and the tail. Presumably not enough there eatable to bother with.

Noting in passing that Bing turns up some rather big ones - mostly from the US, mostly Florida, where they seem to be keen on chasing down very large fish for fun. Presumably they go for cat food, dog food and fish processing plants - to the extent that they get used at all.

I also remember reading that some fish never stop growing and barring accidents can reach very large sizes. Maybe skates are one of them?

On which Gemini tells me a good story about something called indeterminate growth which skates have. And a rather more complicated story about the interaction between indeterminate growth and aging. The two things are not as mutually exclusive as was once thought.

It was also an opportunity to try out the new-to-us fish fork from Canada, although there are those who are still punting for cake fork.

There were also some vegetables; potatoes and cabbage as I recall.

Proceedings rounded out with a spot of plum crumble. Plums probably from Spain and they did very well in this format.

We did not quite finish the skate, and the balance did very well, augmented with a few more vegetables, as soup a couple of days later. 

Boiled up a few more potatoes. Chopped the fish and added that some left over potatoes and some fresh cabbage to the newly cooked potatoes and off you go. A simple, reasonably light soup. It did very well.

It was also time to have another go at the mystery grass at the side of the house, last noticed at the end of reference 1.

What does Google Images do with a composite?

He appeared to concentrate on the left hand panel, perhaps because he thought that gave him more to go on. A catch with his new suggestion, lilyturf (Liriope muscari) is the conspicuous blue flowers to be found at reference 2. I think we would have noticed them, even round the side where we do not go that often.

Feeding him the right hand panel by itself and mentioning the dallisgrass of last time around, he changes tack again to wood-rush, one of which is the field wood-rush (Luzula campestris) of reference 3. It also cropped up at reference 5, when this particular quest was kicked off. With Wikipedia offering drawings which I don't think look like the bits and bobs snapped at reference 5 at all.

All of which leaves me thinking that the AI assistant attached to Google Images can be much better at sounding botanically authoritative than his IQ really warrants. Tells a good story, but one which is not very firmly grounded in the evidence or the truth. While sometimes, he seems to do quite well on plants. 

To be fair, there are a lot of different sorts of grass and I dare say, in the absence of flower heads and seeds, it is very hard to tell one from another, even for a seasoned, human botanist.

To close, a snippet from today's breakfast, at which we were looking at the booklet sent to us by Historic Royal Palaces, No.57, featuring a striking image of a lady Beefeater on the cover, not the older number snapped above. A rather glossy & smelly effort of 52 pages, somewhere between A4 and A5. The point of interest being that, while the booklet looks to be held together by glue rather than by old-style binding, it appears to have been assembled from three signatures of 16, 32 and 4 pages respectively. Perhaps for the print runs concerned, it still makes sense to have many customer pages to the print page, in the way of printed books of old.

And the unprompted AI assistant to Google's regular search engine nicely explains why I can't get a pdf of the No.57. A members' benefit which will not be released to the public at large until towards the end of the year. Again, all very plausible, but this time I am not going to bother to check. Time to get up.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/trolleys-983-984-985-986-and-987.html.

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

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

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/booting-up.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skate_(fish). To get back to the proper business of the day. 150 species. Rays are related, but different.