Air frost

Just about three weeks since the last frost report, which seems like rather a long time. At the end of reference 1. Maybe I have not been looking out of the window first thing in the morning.

That being as it may be, at 07:40 this Wednesday morning, looking out of the study back window, there was a hard frost on the extension roof and on the garage roof.  A slight frost on the back lawn. Nothing that I could see on the hedges adjacent and only a few leaves had come down in the night. Sky overcast.

To be fair, quite a few leaves came down one night getting on for a week ago, so perhaps the next batch is not yet ready.

On which subject I can say that the hawthorn and the ash are done coming down. The hazel is near done. While the beech and the oak have turned yellow or brown, but are only half down. While the much larger oak, just over the fence from the brick compost heap, is still green. 

PS: the images turned up by Bing on the search key 'frost' were all very white and cold looking. The one I actually selected for inclusion above turns out to be a 3d screen wallpaper from reference 2, so it may have passed through Photoshop to get here. Maybe it started there. Is the whitening lower right deliberate or perhaps some trick of the original lighting? And then, whatever might 3d mean in this context?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/wellingtonia-54.html.

Reference 2: https://hddesktopwallpapers.in/frost-wallpaper-3d/.

Sprouts

Happening to be in Epsom market the other day, I passed some Brussels Sprouts sticks at £1.50 a pop, which seemed far too good to pass by, even if BH had made other arrangements. Especially since we have not had any sprouts since last winter, and not that many then.

I prepared the first round this morning, with two rounds to go: one of sprouts, one of tops. So 50p a meal for the two of us.

I was struck how many decent sprouts one got on the stalk and how clean they were. A far cry from the rather tatty things that I managed on the thin ground of my allotment behind Stamford Green School, mentioned from time to time in the early days of this blog, for example at reference 1. Maybe discouraged after the one attempt. Or indeed from the rather unclean sprouts which were sold in Cambridge market when I was young, fresh off the fens.

Taken with boiled potatoes, boiled carrots and fried white pudding (from Slomers). That is to say lightly fried in one centimetre slices. Already cooked, so it is more a case of warming it up to make it palatable.

PS: at least one chunk of our fine new market square has now been dug up, perhaps eighteen months after completion. So not too bad; it is quite a big space and stuff is going to go on. In this case, something to do with blue plastic pipes at the entrance to the Ashley Centre. Maybe an inch or so in diameter. And we are taking bets on how long it will be before someone feels the need to dig up the fine new surfacing of our own road, for which see reference 2.

References

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=allotment.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/trolley-444.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/public-art.html. Which must have been posted about the time the market square project was finished.

Reference 4: https://slomersltd.co.uk/. The white pudding people. Taken in ring form, naturally. Not the same otherwise.

Fake 134

Visiting my hairdresser in Epsom this morning, I was very impressed by the floor covering, which looked like substantial old floor boards which had been cleaned up and re-packaged. Very brown wood. But the hairdresser soon put me right, explaining that actually the floor was a posh brand of lino, much easier to keep clean than the real thing.

I didn't like to take a picture in the hairdresser and Bing wasn't able to find a snap very like what I saw this morning, but the snap above does give something of the idea, albeit rather paler. And complete, in my case, with nail holes and such like. Good for an older room where a sparkling new floor would look a little out of place.

Karndean, the people at reference 2, seem to make this kind of thing. I am fairly sure that it is some kind of plastic, rather less sure than it comes in boxes of planks, rather than in sheets or rolls, so one would need to lay down something good for it to be glued to. Perhaps a cement based screed or some kind of chip board.

And I dare say Amtico, who used to have an outlet on our own Longmead Estate, can do the same sort of thing, although their focus seems to be fake tiles and parquet, rather than straight planks. To be found at reference 3.

PS: we have fancy, non-slip lino in places like the bathroom, where it serves very well. And costs the same per square metre as quite good quality carpet. And, as it happens, it came in a sheet, which was cut into the space, just as carpet or lino would be.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/fake-133.html.

Reference 2: https://www.karndean.com/en-gb/floors/.

Reference 3: https://www.amtico.com/.

More bricks

There have been some changes in the appearance of the Microsoft Office products recently, possibly geared to the release of Windows 11 which I have not yet taken - and which my reasonably elderly computers may not be able to take.

And today, while peering at my brick carrying record over the past couple of years, I stumbled across three features of pivot tables in Excel. Which may actually be new or which may just be new-to-me.

The data in question is stored one row per shift, where each shift carries, inter alia, a date, a time of day and a distance.

First and most important, I can select the whole of the pivot table, date by distance, from the top left of the header row to the bottom right of the grand total row, ask for a line graph and get something sensible. No need to weed out all the subtotals from the data. Furthermore, on the graphic, I can toggle both months and quarters on and off. As shown, they are both toggled on.

Second, I can format the chart area in much the same way as any other graphic, choosing whether or not I want a border and if so what sort of border.

Third, I can store the chart as a graphic, choosing the format to be used. As shown, jpg.

All of which is a big improvement over what I was doing at reference 1.

It doesn't allow week, which I can see would be a bit tricky, with months not being a whole number of weeks.

It does allow time, but does not seem to do anything so simple as morning, afternoon and night - and I can't yet see how to get that from what it does do. Maybe that will come.

So pivot tables continue to improve - while continuing to strike a reasonable balance between you having to learn new features and it working out what you want without you having to do very much.

And brick walking continues to drift slowly down, now running at an average of around half a kilometre a day. Usually supplemented, I might add, by other forms of exercise.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/08/more-than-year-in-bricks.html.

Series 4, Episode I

Polly and her friends woke up the other day for the start of the leaf blowing season, with the second outing of the new leaf blower from Bosch having taken place yesterday, brought forward to beat the rain which never, in the event, turned up. The two trolls did not, for some reason, show.

It being reasonably cold, they thought to hole up in the play house with a carrot by way of a picnic, but they had not thought about leaves getting blown in, and are now a bit non-plussed as to what to do.

PS 1: there might have been trouble holding the telephone up straight, but Cortana managed the focus quite well. But not quite as arty as the job done with petals, last noticed at reference 2. And reading reference 3 today, it seems that the emperor of the petals was a pretty rum cove, even by the standards of Roman emperors. Next stop, Gibbon, to see what he has to say. In the meantime, it occurs to me that those being drowned in the Alma-Tadema painting look improbably relaxed about it all.

PS 2: the big compost heap is now quite big and a bright shade of brown from what is mainly a mixture of foreign oak and copper beech leaves. In order to preserve a good shape, some care is being taken when emptying more leaves onto it.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/series-3-episode-xii.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-contribution-from-google.html.

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

Group search key: wwwy.

Via Sutton

Engineering works on the Waterloo line continue, so last Sunday's visit to London went via Sutton once again. With the plan being to catch a bus from Victoria, deemed on this occasion to be less plague-risky than the tube.

Spotted quite a lot of Wellingtonia on the way into Sutton, relics of the large suburban houses - far too large for the modern, nuclear family - which once lined the roads, a lot of them now demolished in favour of flats. But no time to score any of them and we simply marked the area down for a closer look on another occasion.

On the other hand, we did not spot that many masks at Victoria Station, we we climbed on a bus to take us to Marble Arch, where we got close to the fake grass mound, last noticed at reference 2, passing some action at the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, it being Remembrance Day. Action which I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, one should show respect to those who gave their lives. On the other, it is time we moved on, from what with the passage of time seems like the appalling nonsense of the first half of the last century. How could we have been so stupid?

Decided that refreshment was more important than the view from the top of the mound and that we did not have time to do both. And I have only noticed this morning the M&S food van - which might have meant that we could have had it both ways. Don't think I ever knew that M&S were into street food. We also thought at the time that we would have to pay, but asking Bing this morning, I find that the council withdrew the charge after much comment, not to say ridicule. And then there was the consideration that one does not want to be associated with the whole silly project by making use of it. Perhaps I was being silly, but that was how I felt on the day.

Wandered on into the western end of Wigmore Street, a precinct we have not visited for some time, usually confining our attention to the eastern end.

Didn't get very far with the rather grand looking (Catholic) church of the Assumption in Bryanston Street, where what looked quite a decent congregation, including young families, was gathering. A church which I now know was dedicated just days before the start of the First World War, a dedication troubled by worry about the possibility of a Suffragette disturbance. We had a peep, but declined the invitation of the very pleasant and cheerful greeter on the door to join in. A place to be visited properly on another day. In the meantime, there is always reference 3.

Wound up taking tea, coffee and in my case a croissant at the Soho Coffee Company, just a few yards from the Bulgarian staffed public house noticed at reference 4.

We sat in what in a pub would be called the back bar, complete with a real if blocked up fire place, and convinced ourselves that the area we were sitting in had once been a separate shop of some sort, then knocked through into the corner shop relatively recently. But looking at the snap from Street View that is not so clear at all. Sadly, whoever did the tremendous bit of local history at reference 5, stopped a few numbers short of this particular building, around No.104, so I am not yet any the wiser.

Digging deeper at reference 6 suggests that this building is just on the wrong side of the boundary between Volumes 51/52 and Volume 56, with this last being described as being in progress and presumably not far enough advanced for it to be appropriate to publish a draft. Maybe next year.

A little further east, we were reminded of the rather grander coffee and cake shop called Ole & Steen, and there was one particular pastry which they had very large numbers of, so presumably very popular. Possibly one of the pastries described on their website at reference 7 as a swirl. Next time.

And so onto the Wigmore Hall for some trios from the Smetana Trio. Beethoven Op.1 No.3 and Dvořák Op.26. Both very good and we were reminded that we rather like the piano trio format. By way of an encore we got the fifth movement of the Dumky Trio, Op.90. A trio first heard on the first occasion we heard his most memorable piano quintet, Op.81. A movement which rounded out the present concert very nicely.

The pianist, Jitka Čechová, used a page turner, a young man whom she helped along by giving very clear nods when she wanted the page turned - something not all pianists bother with. While I think the cellist, Jan Páleníček, had moved onto to a computer - although he did manage to get his foot tangled up in the control at one point, fortunately before the off.

Taking our sherry afterwards, we wondered why they bothered taking in our tickets to make sure we weren't cheats. I can't imagine anyone would come in off the street, or that many would go in for seconds. The young lady told I would have to wait to see what happened to left overs - of which I thought there would be quite a few.

BH did not care to pose properly against this nicely polished car, parked at the south eastern corner of Cavendish Square. Given that reference 9 tells me that AMR is a sort of Aston Martin, perhaps this one belongs to the showroom or something like that. While Bing tells me that an AMR is a sort of heavy rifle used for smashing up unarmoured or lightly armoured vehicles - with AMR being short for for anti-materiel rifle.

And so, onto Ponti's of Great Castle Street once again. Not too impressed with my chicken, too much like a large version of a fish finger for my taste. Not getting a proper green vegetable, something like spinach, with it was a mistake. But BH was quite happy with her salad.

I did rather better with my dessert. With the tiramisu following the current fashion for bowl or glass format rather than cake format, which had ruled for some years.

Back at Victoria, after having been led out of the tube to Cardinal Place, rather than to the railway station we wanted, I was intrigued by the sign saying 'market hall', above and to the right of the No.38 bus. I don't remember any such thing, in the fifty odd years I have frequented the place. A rather more seedy area when I first knew it than it is now. I also remember an Oyster Bar or some such thing to the right. And I am pleased to say that the name that pops into mind, Overton's, is confirmed by another branch of UCL at reference 10. Although it does call what I call 'Baby Ben' 'Little Ben'. A Ben which, I am pleased to able to say, has been reinstated after removal for repairs.

Just caught the 14:55.

The day closed with BH discovering at Sutton that she had mislaid her car key, the story of which came to an end at reference 1.

On the upside, a good haul of washers to add to my collection. I explained to the rules committee that the hexagonal washers were not threaded, as one might think on the basis of a casual glance. On which basis they were allowed.

PS 1: the 2 Veneti restaurant (in Wigmore Street) appeared to be shut this Sunday, having been open on Sunday's for a bit. Hopefully there is no trouble brewing there as we rather like the place. Taking a very acceptable Florentine steak on the occasion of our last visit, if not quite up to the one we had in Florence.

PS 2: much later: further investigation suggests that the fancy car is probably a DB11, rather than a Rapide which, oddly for a sporty car driven by wannabee Bonds, sports 4 doors. New, such a thing might cost you £150,000. But do dodgy youths with nothing better to do still go around scratching them with keys? Would you rather have seven and a half of the hugely expensive watches noticed at reference 12? The good news is that we have managed to turn up enough pigs to meet present needs, pending restocking at Bentalls - a matter mentioned right after the watches.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-lost-car-key-episode-2.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/showing-off.html.

Reference 3: https://www.annunciationmarblearch.org.uk/.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/schubert-quintet.html.

Reference 5: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/sites/bartlett/files/chapter09_wigmore_street.pdf.

Reference 6: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/research/survey-london/survey-london-volumes.

Reference 7: https://oleandsteen.co.uk/.

Reference 8: http://www.smetanatrio.cz/en/.

Reference 9: https://www.astonmartin.com/en-gb/models/rapide-amr.

Reference 10: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ramble-london/home/victoria-street-mansion-flats-and-model-dwellings. More interesting London material from UCL.

Reference 11: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/08/to-london-town.html. For Florentines.

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/kingston-one.html.

The lost car key: Episode 2

The tale of the lost car key, started at reference 1, can be quickly concluded. We went to the branch of  Timpson's just to the side of the main entrance to Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane. Not the place snapped above, but near enough.

Yes, said Mr. Timpson, yes I can make you up a new fob key. Not identical to the one from Ford, but near enough. And he appeared to have various electrical and computing gadgetry on the bench in the corner with which to do the business. All he seemed to need was my old style key to work from. Nothing was said about log books or driving licenses.

You come back in half an hour and I'll be done.

So I went off to get a newspaper - a Guardian - downstairs and then we went up to Fresh Kitchen upstairs. A large airy place with plenty of space and a long counter selling a range of snacks - including, I believe - hot snacks and light meals at appropriate times of day. We settled for tea, to which I added a couple of sweet scones, that is to say scones with dried fruit in them rather than the cheese we use at home; the sort of thing snapped at reference 2. The tea was a bit powerful, the power tea-bags favoured by some cafés, but the scones were quite good. Fresh and light. I dare say there was plenty of sugar too.

Our half hour done, down to Timpson's, where the new key was ready to go. I gave it a quick test, thanked Mr. Timpson and off we went.

Job done in less time than it took the Ford Service Centre to book us into their system. The wonders of big companies with a big bureaucracy to feed. And for less than half the price.

PS 1: the old style key works both the door locking and the engine starting, while the key part of the new style key works like the old style key, with the fob part being programmed to work the door locking by pressing buttons. Am I right to deduce that the same code underlies both door locking and engine starting? And that the cut of my old style key can be translated into numbers, or maybe a string of bits, and these bits can then be used to program the new style, fob key. The key might look like an analogue device, but really it is a digital device. Sadly, I never got to find out whether Ford would have managed without an old style key to work from, or whether they had the digits on file somewhere. So there might have been a value add for doubling the price. Or have I got it all wrong, and Mr. Timpson actually had some kind of X-ray machine which could read the lock in the door without taking it apart?

PS 2: we continue to wonder about the economics of Fresh Kitchen. It is a big place and it has not been busy on the few occasions when we have been there. Do the staff use the place as a canteen during their breaks? Does that make up numbers?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-lost-car-key-episode-1.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/patisserie.html.