Trolley 221

Captured by the telephone exchange in East Street and returned to a busy stack at Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane. The sixth gentleman worked out that the right thing to do was to take the trolley he wanted from me, rather than take another one out of the stack.

On the way home a redwing with a touch of green about it in the bushes at the downstream end of Longmead Road.

And a quirk of memory down Manor Green Road. I have been trying, without much success, to memorise the number of a car there. So yesterday, I tried saying it over and over in my head, eventually committing it to OneNote under Shostakovich.

So today, I was approaching the car, maybe fifty yards short of it, and I started, without thinking about it, rehearsing the number in my head.

The only catch was that when I got to the car, I found that I had got one of the numbers in the first group of four wrong and transposed two of the letters in the second group of three. The OneNote version was wrong too, in a slightly different way.

What I hope is the right number has been filed under Shostakovich and we may have occasion to find out whether I remember the filing better than the number in due course. In the meantime, it is intriguing that approaching the relevant spot should prompt recitation in this way. A mechanism related to that underlying the trick of associating things to places along a route used my memory athletes?

Then, later in the day, there was a further twist in the trolley story at reference 1. Supplies of New Zealand needing topping up, I parked behind Majestic Wine, a car park which they share with Office Outlet, formerly Staples.

As is usual, there was a clutch of other peoples' trolleys stacked up behind the dustbins out back. But then there was a legitimate Majestic Wine stack and a legitimate Office Outlet stack, and the trolleys in the second of these looked very like the one declined in East Street. And they were made by Seigel. While it had not crossed my mind that there might be trolleys from either company out on the streets; they had not entered my calculations at all.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/siebel.html.