The journey home

This being notice of the journey home from the turning point of the expedition noticed at reference 1.

What sounded very like the Epsom police helicopter. I could not see it, but from the sound it appeared to be hovering over St. George's Hospital.

The next event was the former police station at No.522, snapped above. A building which does not appear from the outside to have changed much, if at all, from its days as a police station and there is still police activity in Weybourne Street adjacent (left in the snap above), probably connected with what was once the back yard.

Regular search today (Tuesday) does not turn up much, just the old snap above, lifted from reference 2. So I turn to Gemini, who is quite convinced that the building has been converted into flats while cleverly preserving its external appearance, no doubt at the behest of the heritage people. He also claims linkage, at least from a planning point of view with the rather smaller, newish development called Waldron Hall, on the other side of Waldron Street.

I try the Wandworth planning search which turns up a couple of very old applications.

A bit more interaction with Gemini and I push my way through to the map version of the planning explorer. I find the building easily enough, but fail to find how to find any old planning applications that might have been made for it.

At which point I gave up. The main building has probably been converted to residential use and the police have probably retained use of the secure back yard. But maybe, Gemini, not finding anything specific about this particular police station, has generalised quite imaginatively about what happened to it from what usually happens to such buildings. With Waldron being a red-herring. And then there is the matter of the front door which does not look like the front door of a block of flats. And then there is the awkward shape and interior layout of the old building. Maybe, actually, the police have retained it for some back-room, back-stairs activity not apt for the full light of day. Maybe I shall have another go at some point.

Various lunch possibilities as I made my way back to Earlsfield Station, but I eventually settled for the Halfway House next to the station, a place I have used from time to time over the years. Another Young's house, as it happens.

And a perfectly respectable burger, chips and pint of special. The burger came with remarkably little goo (good) and the pint came a bit short (bad), but the bar man, quite possibly the manager, cunningly absented himself while I wondered whether to ask for a top up - which I probably would have done when I was younger and poorer.

Regarding the tomatoes of reference 4, the burger included a slice of tomato which was getting on for three inches across and appeared to have five chambers - or locules in the language of reference 4.

A stop-over at Raynes Park, where the only botanical in the platform library was too peripheral and too large, even for me. But I did notice that they looked to be attempting to turn the flower beds back into flower beds. I wish them well.

A bit of trolley action on return to Epsom, in the course of which I stopped some cyclists in the approach to the Ashley Centre, more or less by the side entrance to Wetherspoon's. I got a fair bit of coarse abuse from the school age youths for my trouble. Who knows whether it has done any good - but it seems a bit feeble to do nothing when I am pushing a good sized trolley with which to block them.

Another short pint from Wetherspoon's - but a good deal cheaper than the one from Earlsfield and it was warm enough to sit outside, which was good. 

Rather a sticky hand rail to the stairs leading to the first floor - something which I have noticed before, so clearly not part of the cleaners' duties.

Home to find this crop of very small mushrooms.

And the candytuft was still going strong, as it has been more or less all through the year.

The day's haul. Including a cleaning gadget for BH found on a wall and a couple of small loaves from M&S to go with the cold beef. Cleaning gadget yet to be tested.

With the magazine top right resulting in reference 3 below.

All very satisfactory, short pints notwithstanding.

PS 1: in the margins of all this, I remembered about the parcel that we had tried to send to Canada, back at the beginning of October and noticed at reference 5. It turned that the very day I ask Google about this, the dispute looks to have been resolved, with strike action suspended. We will leave it a few weeks for the system to return to normal and then we can have another go.

PS 2: the planning map has lots of layers, listed down the left-hand side, something that I come across from time to time in other people's maps, for example the map of docking stations for hire bikes - Bullingdons in these pages - provided by TFL. Layers which I have previously come across in software used to describe buildings, the likes of AutoCAD. Layers which I have suggested might be a way to describe the way the brain delivers consciousness, organises conscious content.

PS 3: another problem. My understanding is that a good sized fraction of what is called 'secret intelligence' is assembled by careful reading of publicly available information, by combing the media - and the result of all this reading only gets made secret after the event. When one is at war, for example, there is plenty of stuff that one does not want to become more accessible after having been less accessible - except to those bad actors who are very busy. But where are we left when Gemini and his colleagues are indeed very busy? Hoovering up and collating all kinds of stuff in a way that would be well beyond human capability. And more or less freely available to all.

PS 4: rather later: a correspondent has just reminded me that Gemini already blocks questions about things which it thinks are tricky or actionable, like politics or the health of the person asking the question. Although in the case of health, I think it does allow questions about health in general. I think the jargon for this is guardrails and no doubt it can be trained to test both questions and answers against guardrails. Not quite the same as the previous problem, but clearly related.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/memory-lane.html.

Reference 2: https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/records/police-station.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/marble-lady.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/tomatoes-and-other-matters.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/fake-191.html.

Reference 6: https://www.autodesk.com/. The people that give us AutoCAD.

Reference 7: https://www.drawbase.com/. The product with which I once had a nodding acquaintance. Not as prominent as AutoCAD, but it has survived.