Trolley 769

Another smaller trolley from the M&S food hall, captured in the Kokoro Passage.

Thames Water hole on the other side of the railing, more or less tided away. 99% complete as we used to say of computer programmes, which usually meant they were some weeks off being actually complete.

PS: batch of bread No.734 came out of the oven around 15:30 this afternoon, looking pretty good. Looks like I have got second rise back under control. With turning the oven on in good time being the key, rather than waiting until the dough is more or less ready to go.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-768.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Stuffed

A couple of weeks or so ago, it came to mind that we had not had stuffing for a good while, with search this afternoon suggesting well over a year ago, as noticed at reference 1. Seems a bit improbable, so perhaps I will check again later. Was it so bad that I failed to notice it?

BH had a chicken in the freezer, a loaf shortly thereafter (snapped above), so all that remained was to knock up the stuffing, a knocking up which started in the margins of a visit to St. Luke's, as noticed at reference 2. Managed the necessary bacon, but not the nuts or sage, but on return BH discovered that she had a 100g bag of Turkish hazel nuts at the back of the cupboard, not so many months past their best-before date. They looked OK and the couple I tried tasted OK. While I sourced a couple of packets of Kenyan (leaf) sage in Waitrose. 20g a packet.

On day minus one, I took the crumbs out of the interior of the loaf, a little damp, but they dried off well enough. I used the crusts for cheese and onion sandwiches, something I don't have very often, brown bread not being suitable at all, for which these soft white crusts did very well. Left the crumbs, chopped nuts and chopped sage (half a packet off to the freezer) overnight. In the morning, added onion, celery and two eggs. Forgot about pepper and we don't usually use salt. It filled our white pie dish nicely, after which it was roofed with about half the bacon from M&S. No oil, either in or on the mix, excess oil having been an issue in the past. Serving suggestion: eight portions.

One dodgy looking nut discarded.

The other half of the bacon went on top of the chicken.

BH told me about using extra chicken wings to make gravy, but too late to be able to actually do it. It sounded like a good idea, something to be tried on the next occasion, perhaps at some point during the Christmas festivities - turkeys being a long time in the past for us.

In the event, we had seven servings out of the chicken, plus the soup. Seven servings out of the stuffing, plus grazing. When the stuffing was hot, I did wonder about whether some oil would have been a good idea, but cold it had firmed up and I decided that it would not have been.

With the snap above looking very like that half way down at reference 1, with spot the difference being the beer now instead of the wine then.

On the plate, hot. Stewed plums for dessert, red and foreign, probably from some warmer part of Europe.

Then cold for a couple of meals, the stuffing spinning the chicken out well. Plus a meal for one somewhere along the line.

The soup, more pork and lentil than chicken, came after that and has already been noticed at reference 3.

PS 1: further search only turns up reference 4. On which occasion we declined stuffing, with some talk about it being too hot.

PS 2: inquiring about turkeys, I find from reference 5 that we did do turkey 2006-2009. One of them probably from the butcher in Cheam, a good enough turkey, but rather dear compared with the offering from Sainsbury's. Too dear, given that we are not that keen on turkey. Probably keener on its symbolic value than on its culinary value. Nothing in the next volume, although plenty of mentions of Turkey. And it is not just nuts that we buy from them.

PS 3: another economic puzzler, this one from the September number of 'drinks business', ex Raynes Park. The story is that Jeremy Hunt's hike on the tax payable on spirits - whisky being a lot of this - last year cost the Treasury £300mn in lost revenue. Furthermore, the consequent hike in the rate of inflation cost the Treasury an extra £2.3bn in borrowing charges. Lifted from the Scottish Whisky Association (SWA) at reference 6. I dare say there is a name for the situation in which revenue falls when you raise the rate, but I forget what it is, assuming, that is, that I ever knew. 

I had a little poke, as is my wont, and it seems that the best source for statistics is going to be HMCR, if their detailed guidance at reference 7 is anything to go by. While reference 8, from where the snap above is taken, suggests that the SWA may have chosen the period for comparison with care. There is also the question of the trade betting, in effect, on changes in duty. Or is economics nothing to do with it: just the puritan streak in our governing classes peeking out a bit? Or the health streak? 

On the off-chance I have a go with National Statistics, where the best I could do in ten minutes is the snap above, taken from something called the Retail Sales Inquiry. Nice long series, impressively jagged in recent years, but I have yet to find out what the percentage which it graphs is. 

Then I turn up the publication snapped above.

From which I extract the snap above, in millions of pounds a year. Cash.

So there looks to be lots of data there. Just a question of getting at it. Maybe I will do a bit more a bit later.

PS 4: there is also the SWA puff at reference 9. There is also something called IBIS which produces lots of industry reports  - instantly available at getting on for £1,000 a pop.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/black-legs.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-last-luke.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-758.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/chicken-lite.html.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=turkey.

Reference 6: https://www.scotch-whisky.org.uk/newsroom/hunt-tax-hike-on-scotch-cost-nearly-25-billion-new-analysis/.

Reference 7: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/excise-notice-39-spirits-production-in-the-uk/excise-notice-39-spirits-production-in-the-uk.

Reference 8: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/alcohol-bulletin/alcohol-bulletin-commentary-february-to-april-2022#alcohol-duty-receipts-from-spirits.

Reference 9: https://www.scotch-whisky.org.uk/media/2170/scotch-whisky-economic-impact-report-2024.pdf.

Trolley 768

Captured in the Kokoro Passage, next to a reasonably serious hole in the pavement outside the gym, something to do with Thames Water as I recall. One of a number of water holes in and around town over the past week or so.

Returned to the M&S food hall where I failed to buy the sort of pork I wanted for my lunch, so off to Waitrose where they could do another bit of the pork fillet they fail to call tenderloin.

The first of three helpings of lunch - BH being out and about. Start the pork in a little butter. Then onion. Then left over brown rice and white cabbage. A little water. Then mushroom. Possibly taken with a little bread. Certainly taken with an orange for dessert, this being visible top right. A rather good orange, as it happens, from Sainsbury's, this despite its being a (thin skinned) navel orange, these last having recently reappeared. Must be their time of year.

All very satisfactory and followed by a substantial snooze.

While waking this (Friday) morning it is the turn of the economy. First, if one raises taxes to pay for more health, that will probably ripple through to transfer both resources and activity from the discretionary purchase sector of the economy to the health sector of the economy. Which, inter alia, is likely to make for difficulties in the hospitality, holiday and booze trades. But neutral in GDP terms? Second, if one allows farmers the perk of tax-free inheritance of farms, the influx of mobile capital will mean that the price of farms is likely to rise above the level which sensibly reflects the level of return on farming proper. Which is likely to make it difficult to be an entry-level farmer without capital of one's own. Which I would have thought in the longer term is likely to consolidate farming in the hands of the big farmcos which don't have inheritance tax to bother about anyway. But a rather speculative thought, which maybe someone who actually knows something about the money end of the farming business would correct?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-767.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolley 767

A late afternoon trolley captured in the Kokoro Passage and returned to the M&S food hall.

This after our vegetarian lunch, which had included, for the first time for a while, braised celery. Something that I had remembered about, à propos of I know not what. Onion in a little butter, then celery, then tomato (rather ripe, from Waitrose), then carrot. A little water somewhere along the way. In the event, I should have put the carrot in a little earlier, because by the time it was ready the celery was a little softer than I like.

It being a cold day, the remainder converted into soup after trolley capture and return. Put the left over celery through the food mixer. Bring to heat. Add a little more sliced carrot and celery to give a bit of texture back.

Both versions served very well.

PS: just about a year since the last invitation, noticed at reference 2, an invitation to join the Iranian exile Christmas event turned up today. An event which looks likely to involve an elaborate buffet. Not so festive is the gruesome fact, picked up from their newsletter, that - in a country not that much bigger than our own in population terms - 90mn to our 70mn - they find it necessary to execute between 800 and 900 people a year. With some of the procedures involved looking even more gruesome. I believe that a lot of this is to do with drugs - but it also includes a lot of political & religious offenders. The Wikipedia entry at reference 3 does not attempt a statistical summary.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-766.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/trolley-595.html.

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

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolley 766

After the chowder noticed at reference 1, Saturday afternoon saw the capture of another Sainsbury's trolley in East Street, in the entrance to the creationists' pad. Or perhaps it should be termed holiday accommodation for young people from the Far East on a gap year before they knuckle down to the hard work of life as adults.

The chowder had turned out rather well, albeit with a fair amount of curd - which tasted OK but did not improve the appearance. If we had used as much milk as the recipe suggested, I dare say it would have been easy enough to skim it off. Something to be thought about next time around.

It might be light enough in the opening snap, but it was getting dark by the time - say around 16:30 - that I had got through the Screwfix passage. Slightly puzzled that I had not noticed this tree being given a haircut.

I believe that the owners of the house to which it belongs had got a bit fed up with all the droppings - leaves, flowers and fruits - which meant that they spent a lot of time clearing up. But with haircut, a bit less clearing up for a few years. And a bit less amenity for the rest of us who like to admire the tree - I think a lime - on our way past. Possibly the common lime (Tilia × europaea), a natural hybrid as explained at reference 2. I shall try to remember to pick up some flowers and seeds next year.

Nothing to do with the citrus sort of lime - which is just a coincidence of name.

A homely reminder that there are always conflicting interests and always compromises to be struck. For which see reference 3.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolleys-763-thru-765.html.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/sisson.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Sowing

Waking up a little early this (Thursday) morning, I elected to stay in bed for a bit, rather than getting up for the first tea of the day - as important now as the first fag of the day was in my younger days. And the first tea usually tastes better than those that follow, perhaps three or four of them in the course of the day.

While in bed, the phrase 'sow the fields and scatter' popped in my mind, out of the blue as far as I can remember now, an hour or so later. I thought perhaps a line from a hymn sung at school and that Bing could probably recover the hymn concerned. Which I wanted to do because sowing the seeds and then scattering did not seem right: one sowed by scattering. With even scattering being an important skill for a farmer or farm labourer - as anyone who has tried to scatter lawn seed evenly will know.

A bit later, the amended phrase 'plow the fields and scatter' popped into mind. I suppose the brain had muddled 'sow' with the nearly rhyming 'plow', with there being entry points to both words in the bin in the brain marked 'farming'. I wonder now whether the fact that the pig sort of sow does rhyme with plow (or plough) has any significance?

When I got up, Bing could indeed recover the hymn from both phrases, giving me the website snapped above. Quite an informative website, from which I learned that the hymn I knew had been lifted in the second half of the nineteenth century by one Miss. J. M. Campbell from the interior of a poem by a late eighteenth century German, Matthias Claudius, a chap from a clerical background who became a journalist, but who then found Jesus in the wake of a serious illness.

I think my memory of same must have come from assemblies in my primary school. The daily act of collective worship which was then de rigueur in our schools. Not quite the thing for a secondary school.

Moving on, I started to think about something I had noticed on the train the previous evening. That is to say a chap scrolling through a series of thumbnails - if that is the right jargon - on his telephone. Up and down he went, occasionally clicking on one of them, even more occasionally actually appearing to read the story behind one of them. How on earth does one float to the top of his world? Assuming, that is, that that is what one wants to do.

Checking this morning, I find that the thumbnails on both Microsoft Start and the Financial Times on my laptop are organised in a two dimensional format, rather than a one dimensional format. But the idea is the same: the thumbnail is a taster in the form of an image plus a classifier plus a title. Where in Microsoft Start the classifier is the source of the story and in the Financial Times the classifier is what the story is about. I dare say Chrome is much the same, but I have not bothered to check this morning.

Let us suppose we have a set of aggregators. People like Microsoft Start and the Daily Mail. A set of advertisers. A set of consumers with their telephones. A set of writers who generate the raw material, the stories.

Consumers may pay a subscription to use an aggregator, but generally speaking they do not. But when they click on a thumbnail to see a story they do get advertisements. An advertisement appearing on his telephone counts (very roughly speaking) as a click and aggregators get paid by the click, at a rate negotiated with each advertiser.

Advertisers keep an eye on their clicks and try to work out which clicks are, over time and on average, generating revenue for them in the form of sales. Lots of middlemen in the undergrowth all too willing to help them with this.

Aggregators want to maximise their income too, which may include offering interesting content which does not generate paying clicks, because that pulls consumers onto their site. Lots of middlemen in the undergrowth all too willing to help them with this too. Some of whom might like to liven up their pitches with slides like that above. And then there are the information scientists, aka geeks, who like to play with them, spend quality time with them.

Note that content being interesting is not the same as being true, sensible or helpful. Consumers like all kinds of stuff, a lot of which does not answer this description. And some of them are more interested in the clever advertisements than in the not-always-so-clever stories.

The writers of the stories are a very mixed bag, with some of them salaried by an aggregator - perhaps the Daily Mail again - or perhaps some kind of freelance. Writers who might want to make the world a better place or who might want to make a bigger place for themselves in it.

Clearly a complicated game. First tea done, perhaps I need my porridge.

PS: which duly appeared, a little later.

References

Reference 1: https://hymnary.org/person/Claudius_M. '... Translations in common use:— 1. We plough the fields and scatter, by Miss J. M. Campbell, contributed to the Rev. C. S. Bere's Garland of Songs, Lond., 1861, p. 61 (later eds. p. 27). A free rendering in 3 stanzas of 8 lines, with chorus, entitled, "Thanksgiving for the Harvest." Since its reception into the Appendix to Hymns Ancient & Modern, 1868 (No. 360, ed. 1875, No. 383), it has passed into numerous hymnals in Great Britain, and America. In Thring's Collection, 1882...'.

The last luke

Nearly a fortnight ago now, what has turned out to be our last visit to St. Luke's for maybe a year. See the end of reference 1 for notice of its closure. Beethoven Op.59 No.2 and Mozart K156, given by the Modigliani Quartet of reference 4. French and just over twenty years old.

A day which looked mild and overcast, but I got out my duffel coat just the same, having been cold sitting at Raynes Park the day before.

At one point, it had looked likely that there was going to be a tube strike and we had thought to get a train to Farringdon and walk from there, maybe twice as far as walking from Old Street tube, so not very far at all. And it would have been a change. But in the end there was no strike and we stuck with travel via Balham which we knew and understood. There was also a more or less instant offer of seats on the tube at Balham.

Impressed by this inflorescence on our way to our bacon sandwich for him and toast for her at the Market Restaurant. It took a while to persuade Google Images this morning that I was interested in the plant rather than in the building behind, but eventually one of its suggestions was the grass tree (genus Xanthorrhoea), for which see references 2 and 3. It took a few attempts to get Google to pay attention to the plant, rather than the flats behind - but more work yet to be done on this identification.

The market restaurant managed decaff on this occasion. Perhaps it was being served by the proprietor which made the difference - a chap who remembers me as an occasional customer for a good bit more than a decade now.

While further up Whitecross Street, I had forgotten about the street art underneath the impressive row of chimneys. Unless, that is, that the street art is new.

And the hostel for working men, presumably now repurposed.

Being a little early, we also investigated the green spaces behind the church yard. Inter alia, a reminder that the people who built the post-war estates believed in providing bits of green space.

The oddly asymmetric public baths of Norman Street. Reference 7 does not explain the asymmetry, but I do learn that there are Turkish Baths and that the swimming pool was once important for the sport of diving.

The concert turned out very well, just our sort of thing. I think we got the Beethoven second, which would have been right. Musicians nicely turned out in dark suits, white shirts and no ties. Proper music on paper rather than computers. No encore, which suited us well enough. Why mess about with Beethoven's ending?

For lunch, we returned to Pasta Nostra of reference 5, which we have used two or three times in the past. 

Confused when we first sat down by the rather loud and strange music - which turned out to be the noise of the food mixer behind the counter working away on a large lump of bread dough. I noticed that he slapped the oil onto the kneaded dough, rather than putting the oil in with the flour in the first place. Or perhaps he had done that as well. Whatever the case, the bread which we ordered came as an entire small loaf and was rather good. A DIY version of the small sour doughs offered by Mitchells and Butler in their houses. But give these last credit for doing it at all. See, for example, reference 6.

Bread, as mentioned above, lunch special pastas, three Nastros (Peroni Nastro Azzurro?) for him and something orange and sparkly (S.Pellegrino) for her. My pasta was not veggie, despite the snap above. There was some pale sausage lurking below. All very satisfactory.

On to Old Street M&S to buy some bacon and some hazel nuts against some stuffing. Bacon yes, but no hazel nuts. Fancy nuts yes, regular nuts no. It was the same story in the Aldi more or less next door, a shop which seemed a bit scruffier than the rather newer Lidl in Epsom. It had also moved strongly into cupboards, echoing the ongoing move in that direction in our Sainsbury's.

The eco-roof over one of the smart new entrances to Old Street tube station. Looks good as you head west to St. Luke's too. Lots of pavement, lots of seats and lots of trees.

There had been a person on the line somewhere in the region of Sutton so we changed track to Waterloo at Clapham Junction, which worked fine. A better bet than possibly getting stranded for a bit with Southern. We changed at Raynes Park and there was an instant seat offer for BH when we got the train for Epsom.

Home to a refreshing cup of tea - plus the apple that I had picked up on the train the day before. Quite a large apple with attractive patches of a bright red. Tasted quite good too. But I did wash it, something I do not usually bother with.

PS: this morning I read of Krishna Maharaj, once a self-made businessman in the UK, who fell foul of the US justice authorities when one of his people in the US got murdered in connection with the drugs trade. Fell foul to the extent of a death sentence followed by 37 years in jail. It looks as if he was badly served by his lawyers at the time of his original trial and badly served by the system as a whole after that. I don't suppose that his hands were entirely clean, but it does look like justice running amok for all that.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/property-for-sale.html.

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

Reference 3: https://wildfloweringsart.com/2011/12/07/growing-a-grass-tree-xanthorrhoea-sp/. Some good images to be found here.

Reference 4: https://www.modiglianiquartet.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.pastanostralondon.com/.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/ealing.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironmonger_Row_Baths.