Back to the Blen

We returned to the Blenheim in the week after we returned to the big island. There had been media stories about Greene King having to close a number of their houses, mainly because of the pingpedemic, so I thought a scouting visit the day before was appropriate. The young lady whom I asked seemed rather puzzled as to why I was asking if they were likely to be serving lunch the following day. Would I like lunch now, to be going one with? This at around 17:00 in the afternoon. I declined this offer, but did think it polite to take a couple of glasses of Yellowtail while I took in the scene.

Only one slumberer, awake when I arrived but head down by the time I left. But not a problem: there were still vacant tables for customers who were still paying.

Back the next day, when BH found a suitable veggie salad and I found a suitable burger on the menu. BH very happy with her salad, and while my burger was satisfactory, having declined cheese sauce and not touched the gravy(!) on the side, I thought that next time I would go for the full DIY specification, available on the last page of the menu. One patty, medium rather than the well cooked of this occasion, two buns rather than one and go easy on the trimmings. Essentially meat ball sandwiches.

The red bag right has served for many years now, having started out as a remnant of a skirt length of Welsh tweed. Skirt long gone. Inter alia, the bag once served to hold cigar case, cigars, matches and cutter. All the paraphrenalia. On this occasion, sun glasses, sun hat, and telephone.

For dessert, a sundae: all cream, chocolate and sugar, but with two spoons it went down well enough. First time I have had such a thing for years. Thinking of the rock hard, complicated, ice cream desserts Indian restaurants used to serve direct from their freezers, we wondered whether the sundae had arrived partially assembled and frozen, then thawed in the microwave and finished off, but the waiter assured us that it had been assembled from scratch, on the spot.

Over the concluding Jameson, I explained to BH that if I were ever to be diagnosed with something like Parkinson's, I thought that I would take up cigars again. I am fairly sure I would still enjoy them. Fairly sure I would enjoy one after a meal now, but it seems a pity to run the risk of getting addicted again. Just one from time to time doesn't seem to stick and the downward spiral kicks in all too soon. Which is not where I want to be just presently.

We had taken lunch in the tent, out of the sun, which worked fine. Not much flapping at all. And there was a reasonable lunch time trade scattered about the place.

For some reason, I thought it necessary to take a photograph of the Araucaria araucana at the top of our road.

While this snap, from Thompson & Morgan, with its regular rows of leaves, demonstrates that there is some regular order about the densely packed leaves, described as spiral at reference 2. Maybe that means that the bases of the leaves form a helix. One day I will get to dissect a branch and find out what is really happening.

And I presume that the range being given as the southern and western fringes of the USA means that it is not very hardy, not able to stand the hard frosts of the interior and the north. The sort of frost that we get, OK.

It seems that the study of the arrangement of leaves is properly known as phyllotaxis, and the Wikipedia article offers the picture above of a repeating spiral. We are told that it all depends on the angle between successive leaves on the helix, for these purposes measured as a vulgar fraction of 1 - in which 'the numerator and denominator normally consist of a Fibonacci number and its second successor'.

PS 1: the serious reader may care to consult reference 4, which appears to join up the dots between the goings on at the level of cells and the spirals that can be seen above. The word 'phyllotaxis' is used a lot and 'Fibonacci' just once - but it is all too strong for me.

PS 2: the Royal Society seemed to want to charge for access, but a bit of poking around and one gets to reference 4b where access is free. All very mysterious.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/pub-glut.html. Our last visit, a bit more than a month previous.

Reference 2: http://hort.ufl.edu/database/documents/pdf/tree_fact_sheets/araaraa.pdf.

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

Reference 4a: The shoot apical meristem: the dynamics of a stable structure - Jan Traas and Teva Vernoux - 2002.

Reference 4b: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692983/pdf/12079669.pdf.