Trolley 741

An M&S trolley tucked into the side of the hair operation tucked into the front of T.K.Maxx. Another trolley which I failed to fit properly into its stack.

Odd how the tins that one finds in trolleys are often half full. Maybe they were never paid for in the first place. Fortunately, there are plenty of suitable places to empty them.

Another oddity was the way that this fairly new street food vendor had a wheel lock on each side of his van. As it turned out, my guess that the van was going to be left there overnight was right. Not altogether sure that I approve of such vans taking up residence in this way. But they seem to be popular, so maybe I will come around.

A late afternoon view of the Hook Road car park, which I read recently is due to be redeveloped, with car parking charges in no way recovering the cost of running the place. Which I have a soft spot for, first because I like the two-tone red brick. Second, because I bought my Britannia Atlas from a car boot sale here one Sunday, years ago now. A good, middle of the road atlas and I can claim acquaintance - maybe twenty five years ago now - with the chap who did the handsome double page spread for Spain. Opened up there today to study the basin of the river Ebro.

Finally on the market! The repurposed block of garages at the Epsom end of Hook Road, with the repurposing having gone on for years and years. Not on the not-very-good Bernard Marcus website yesterday evening, but I popped into their shop on the High Street this morning to be told that it soon would be, at £800,000, which seemed a bit strong. I asked about a survey, thinking that perhaps, in all the circumstances, the vendor might have supplied one, but the young lady told me that was not the policy. Survey down to me. And that the repurposing had all been done very properly, not DIY at all. Full quota of building certificates.

I shall take a look at their website again in few days.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-740.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolley 740

Captured yesterday afternoon, après skate, on Station Approach. For a change, a large trolley from Waitrose. But a trolley which I failed to fit into the one on the top of the stack at the entrance to the store. Couldn't see what was wrong and as far as I could see it was the same model and size as the one in front.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/trolley-739.html.

Group search key: trolleysk. 

Consistent

Back at the end of August, I asked Google Images about a shrub being grown down the side of the Screwfix shed in Blenheim Road, the side one passes coming out of the railway underpass, the one recently decorated with Epsom Downs flavoured spray-on art work.

This morning, I snapped it again, with the berries being a lot more prominent than they were two months ago, and I am pleased to be able to say that Google Images came up with the same answer, Symphoricarpos Chenaultii. Or at the very least, very nearly the same answer, as some of the sites it finds talk of snowberries rather than coralberries, which last name seem a better fit for the colour. Amazon offers both.

In their defence, I imagine that correctly identifying from a snap all the hybrids that nurseries come up with is quite difficult - not least because you are dependent on people labelling their snaps correctly. In this case, I dare say that snowberry was a clerical error at the snapper or nursery end: the images concerned were red rather than white.

But the proper business of this particular outing was buying two wings of skate. I had noticed skate when I last bought cod from the Lowestoft fish van who attends our market and thought I would give them a go next time around, not having had them for a while. This time I noticed a new to me flat fish called Brill and thought I would give them a go next time around.

Handed the wings over to BH for her attention. Poached in the fish kettle, probably in shifts, the cooked fish being kept warm in the oven. Dusted with parsley and served with something called black butter caper sauce, a confection which also involved vinegar. Knowing that I was a bit funny about vinegar, BH thought it best not to pour it onto the fish on the serving dish, although, in the event, I did take some.

On the plate, before the capers. Very good it was too, much better than the foreign skate noticed at reference 4. A chunk of fish was left over, which BH took cold with salad later on. I had a chunk of warmed-up, left-over potato pie instead.

PS 1: finding the spray-on art work is left as an exercise for the reader.

PS 2: following the post at reference 2, I am getting lots of  shaving kit advertisements from Microsoft Start, presumably triggered by the modest amount of Edge/Bing search activity involved.

PS 3: rather to my surprise, there was quite a lot of skate in the archive, and I dare say some of it is about skate boarding. But the first search hit I looked at was the fishy sort of skate, to be found at reference 3. Seventeen years ago. Didn't make anything like as much palaver about food then as I do now. The next two were indeed skate boards and the one after that was cheap skate. The spelling of which should have been cheapskate. A long entry for cheap in OED, seemingly a very old word, where I found cheapjack but not cheapskate. But it is to be found in both Longmans and Websters - without any indication of where it came from. Presumably a relatively new usage, but frustrating all the same.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/sumac-revisited.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/new-heads.html.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/09/fishy-days.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/03/cheese.html.

Trolley 739

A lightly damaged, large trolley from Waitrose in a quiet corner of the market square. Slightly damaged and had probably been there for a day or two given the leaves. At least dry dead leaves are not unpleasant handling.

Home via the Screwfix tunnel to beat BH by a satisfactory margin at Scrabble, having been on a losing streak for the past few days. The tabletop dictionary noticed at reference 2 had not brought me luck. Or perhaps I was missing all the obscure words to be found in the outer reaches of OED, less likely to be known & used by BH. I ought to add that browsing during the game is strictly forbidden.

And then to sample the volcano'd loaf of Batch No.32. Which despite appearance, was rather good, with good texture and taste. But it remains true that the problems with second rises seem to have returned, despite the trick of putting the oven on a little earlier, so as to better avoid an overlong second rise. Just as well that BH likes the crispy bits.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/trolley-737-and-738.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/hammond.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolleys 737 and 738

A pair of medium sized trolleys from the M&S food hall captured yesterday afternoon in the Kokoro Passage. Scored as one.

A rare small trolley from somewhere in the M&S empire, with the food hall the other side of the market not making much use of them. But still in demand from older ladies. A stray from their Ashtead store? Captured in the Kokoro Passage again, just behind the Kokoro operation itself. Verging on private land. Slightly damaged.

Joined by a medium sized friend on its way across to the food hall. Easy enough to push the two of them, hanging on to the chain of the one in front. Actually captured outside the Puregym of reference 2, behind T.K.Maxx. Not for the first time, their publicity shots made me wonder about the business model. What if interest rates go up and the repayments on all their equipment go up with them?

While I think the boxes in the snap above were full of plastic trays for the noodle operation behind. Not a very big place to look at, so one wonders where they are all the boxes are going to go. It seems unlikely that there would be a cellar.

Two walks, so two points.

PS: as it happened, the jacket I was wearing at the time came from T.K.Maxx, bought on the occasion noticed at reference 3. As it turned out, a good jacket for the mixed weather of spring and autumn.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/trolley-736.html.

Reference 2: https://www.puregym.com/gyms/epsom/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/03/shopping.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Heroes of bricks

I reported a few weeks ago, at reference 1, of the probably termination of my habit of walking bricks, supported by a very modest collecting habit.

So I was interested to read in yesterday's Metro of a retired policeman, one Mark Cranston, who has collected around 4,000 bricks. I failed to turn him up this morning at the Metro website, but Bing and the Daily Mail could oblige between them, turning up a rather longer piece and the snap above. I have not read the piece all the way through, but I did not find any mention of walking the bricks or counting the bricks, this last in the way that a miser might count his gold sovereigns in a strong box kept under his bed. Or perhaps under a special floor board. For which see reference 2.

Very impressive - not least because the 4,000 bricks occupy a fair amount of shelving, by the looks of things, in some kind of shed. Plus the wall in the snap above.

PS: the Metro might not have been able to turn Cranston up, but it was able to turn up another collector, one Neil Brittlebank, in a piece dating from 2013. He then had a modest 1,000 or so bricks, but he does make collecting a serious business, travelling up and down the country in search of new bricks to add to his collection. I hope he keeps a proper catalogue of them, on a spreadsheet, to make sure that he has not got too many duplicates. And are there swapping fora for brick collectors?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/bricks-off.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/church-two.html.

Morley College

Time for cheese again - and time to get back onto a Bullingdon, after a break of more than three months - what with holidays, back and one thing and another. The idea being to leave the rollator and the Stockholm, but to take a stick instead, just in case. Plus a visit to the Morley College gallery in a converted public house near Waterloo Station. A visit prompted by a number of their magazine found in the margins of the expedition noticed at reference 5.

Pleased to find that the telephone version of the docking station map from TFL was working well, much better than I remembered. To the point where one did not need to download bits of it from the laptop - or even take the paper map. Although, liking paper maps, I dare say I will carry on with this one for a bit yet, tatty though it has become. I don't suppose they dish them out any more.

Nice neat job on the new cover for the gas board hole at the top of Clay Hill Green. Some kind of gas flavoured valve or something? And the lid is quite tricky underneath, although that does not come across in the snap above, even on zoom.

It had been a bit misty earlier and there was still a low cloud hanging onto the top of the Shard when I got to London Bridge a little before noon. Got my cheese and then off to the Hop Exchange to pick up a Bullingdon. It had been a toss up between a luggage strap and a pair of boot laces for attaching the stick to the Bullingdon and, in the event, the boot laces worked very well. Helped along by a handy fixing point at the back of the saddle.

Made it to the Morley gallery after a couple of wrong turns. And plenty of cyclists, mostly young men, appearing to pay no attention at all to the traffic lights - although I dare say there was an element of bravado about it and that some of them were actually looking out quite carefully. Not good enough, even so. For what it is worth, I try to make a point of being quite pedantic about stopping at lights.

A gallery which had been a pub indeed, but which had been nicely repurposed and which was bigger inside than I had expected. Adding in the large cellar helped. An opening sample of the wares is snapped above - £4,000 for a photo print on mounted paper, whatever that might mean. Is one getting one of a thousand prints? Walking round, I was quite struck by the high prices being asked. But then, I have no idea of what the going rate is in the art world.

I liked this wall hanging, better in real life than it is here, but I don't know that I would pay the £8,000 being asked, even if I was in that sort of spending league.

From the studio of Tobias Laurent Belsen, but not for sale. The inventor of samplism, for which see reference 2.

This one, from Armet Francis grew on me. Helped along by the thoughtful provision of seats in the cellar. But, once again, too strong for me at £4,000. 

Prices notwithstanding, an interesting place to have visited. I had seen no red spots and I did not think to ask whether they used them to mark sales.

Onto St. George's cathedral, handsomely rebuilt after war damage in 1958. BH is sure than we have visited in the past, but it must have been a while ago as it did not seem at all familiar to me.

A grand looking grand piano, but with a locked keyboard and I failed to find anyone to ask. So not scorable.

The handsome baptistery. 

And the stations of the cross. A sort of very cut price version of the Gill stations in Westminster Cathedral, the ones that got him out of serving in the First World War. Plus some higher grade joinery to the double doors.

There were some community facilities, but there did not seem to be a café, at least not one which was open, so pulled another Bullingdon and headed for Waterloo, where I remembered a café which did bacon sandwiches underneath Elizabeth House. 

Past what used to be the Bar Kitchen at the back of the Old Vic (reference 3), and for a short while a bar restaurant featuring provocatively dressed young waitresses (reference 4), being redeveloped as a venue to be called Backstage - which last does not seem to have made it to Bing-visibility yet.

Arrived to find that all the retail outlets underneath Elizabeth House boarded up, pending redevelopment, so over the road to the All Bar One there.

For, guess what, a paella. Which seemed slightly wetter than the Regent Street version, but I dare say they all come from the same central supplier drawing on the same central kitchen where entry-level chefs do it by numbers - rather like the curiously lifeless bunches of flowers they sell in supermarkets. At least there was more of the paella than might appear from the snap above; quite enough for a lunchtime snack, given that a proper meal was scheduled for later.

Quiet when I arrived at around 14:00, but it picked up. Pensioners and tourists, not all foreign. Plus quite a number of mums and babies. Clearly some sort of regular gathering.

Still not got a proper grip on these fascinating displays, to be found at Waterloo and elsewhere. But I did catch my train to Epsom.

References

Reference 1: https://www.morleycollege.ac.uk/.

Reference 2: https://smplsm.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/03/r.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-pub-crawl.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/trios.html.