Cheese stock check

Last week, having been a little concerned that the stocks of hard yellow cheese, that is to say cheddar style cheeses, had been looking a little low in Short's Gardens, I thought I ought to check out their shop at Park Street.

Hot goods

The day had started with a visit to the telephone repair shop on Epsom High Street, and while I was waiting to be served I was amused to find that, not only is it very trendy these days to eat salt flavoured chocolate, it is also very trendy to smoke salt flavoured nicotine.

Dry goods

From there to the convenience store noticed at the beginning of reference 2 to buy some more walnuts, ending up with some peanuts and figs as well. In shell, uncooked, untoasted peanuts used to be a regular ingredient of high tea when I was young, but have rather got out of the habit of them since. These ones looked fairly organic, with a fair bit of earth about them and were rather small. But they had a very good flavour, as did the walnuts. Figs still in their packet with some dark talk about them being saved for Christmas Day.

Bullingdons

It had been mild during the day, but it seemed cold by 1630. On the upside, the advertised train turned up on time, strike notwithstanding. Journey enlivened by a group of young ladies from City of London Freemen's (just one of our various private schools) making great sport out of the announcement that trains to Cheam were being disrupted by a dog on the line. What about cats? Or guinea pigs? Or hampsters? They didn't think of goldfish.

Passage through Waterloo Station enlivened by a handsome young lady dressed for partying, with a very challenging décolleté. Hard to see how she was going to get through the evening in one piece.

Ready supply by the counter

Reminded that I don't much care for crossing the roundabout which take one from Waterloo Station to Stamford Street, requiring one to wobble uphill, with vehicles of all sizes behind, some of which decide to overtake - which can be a bit hairy. But I made it to the cheese shop in one piece, where I found that the stock of hard yellow cheese was in fine shape. Clearly ramping up for Christmas, with more of the stuff there than I have ever seen - outside of their warehouse in Bermondsey. My successful visit to which was noticed, back in August, at reference 4. With that snapped above being just the stuff handy to the counter: much, much more at the back of the shop.

The Barrowboy & Banker was very busy and very noisy at 1800, but somehow the staff managed to be both fast and pleasant. Some discussion about insuring medium sized companies against cyber attacks. Given that this was call centre, computer driven business, how much intelligence could you put into deciding whether to take a bit of business and at what rate? Do you ask about threat awareness, precautions, counter-measures and mitigation - in the way that house insurers routinely ask one about things like locks and burglar alarms? Complicated by the fact that it seems that it is not practical to keep changing scripts and rates, with a six month cycle seeming to be the form.

Clear run back to the ramp at Waterloo, clipping nearly two minutes off the outward journey, clearly helped along by the beverages taken. In my defence, a very quiet and simple run at 2100, and the only one likely to get damaged or hurt was me.

Label

Slightly bemused on the train by a very petite young lady from somewhere a long way east getting what two large sandwiches down in quite short order; the sort of sandwiches that come in triangular plastic boxes. Without, as far as I could see without looking (as it were), missing a beat on her mobile phone.

More bemused by trying to remember which way the moon points when it is rising, eventually deciding that it was rising when it was to the left of the sun. That is say when the horns of the crescent point left. Translating this into whether the moon went round the earth clockwise or anti-clockwise was quite beyond me.

Home to find that BH had nipped out in my absence to buy a Christmas tree, but I was pleased to find that both it and its label were suitable for recycling. The label also suggested that, contrary to our usual practise, one did not cut the end off and place in bucket of water until one was ready to move the thing indoors. Some palaver about this, but we have ended up doing what the label suggests. That is to say, nothing.

There was also some palaver about our having a nonagenarian head of state. We came to the view that it was unbecoming, and that it would have been far more dignified had she stood down at 70 or so.

PS: pleased to find that the battery in my telephone is behaving much better for having been taken out and put back in again. Perhaps it had been knocked slightly off its perch. In any event, no need to panic about lack of new battery just yet.

Reference 1: https://www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-inspector-calls-again.html.

Reference 3: https://www.freemens.org/. The school. Yours for £6,000 or so a term, or £10,000 or so if you want to take it with porridge. Music lessons extra.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/east-pole.html.