Back to the Falcon

Having reclaimed the Falcon on the Monday, noticed at reference 1, back there the following day for a second helping.

The Network Rail Journey Planner, having held up pretty well through the strike until that point, had a bad day on Tuesday. Perhaps the landslip near Epsom was the straw that broke that camel's back. In any event, the timetable it offered was some way from the facts on the ground, at least on the ground at Epsom. Notwithstanding, a train to Victoria turned up shortly after I did, and I was carried off to Clapham Junction in short order. A rather crowded train, lending credence to the theory that more people come to Epsom during the working day than go away.

St. John's Hill

Pneumatiques

To the point where I was a little early, so I took a stroll down St. John's Road, to find it far more London flavoured than Epsom. Part of the big town, rather than just another suburb. I had thought that there used to be market stalls, but nothing about street markets that Bing or Google could find. So perhaps there were just the odd few. But they did turn up a nice heritage shot of St. John's Hill, with the Falcon just about visible left, opposite Arding & Hobbs (as was) and a nice picture of the communications control room in Arding & Hobbs. I can just about remember shops which had such things, while Simenon talks of pneumatiques in Paris, so they must have had a town-wide, rather than a shop-wide system. See reference 2 for some heritage material thereon.

Old-style shop fitting, complete with brown metal

New-style shop fitting, faux warehouse

Punditry on same

I was intrigued by the new warehouse/market format which M&S had introduced into their Clapham Junction store, while leaving some of the old fascia in place at the margins. Note the curved glass - these days more or less extinct. Never mind the trickily curved glass used to reduce reflections from window displays in provincial department stores. Perhaps I need to take BH to Clapham to keep her on-message. Google offers lots more pictures if you ask for 'm&s clapham junction'

Spanish ham

And then one of those expensive ham shops, not the same as, but very similar to the one noticed at reference 3, more than a year ago now - and I had thought that it was this summer. Very few charity shops, so a street which was well and truly alive. The only weak point was that the branch of CEX did very little in the way of ITV3 DVDs: plenty of horror, violence, sex and 'Game of Thrones' but very little Marple or Poirot.

And so back into the Falcon, where I was pleased to be able to take a couple of seats at the side bar, tucked up against the partition separating it from the snug.

Cockroach?

Conversation started with consideration of whether the bar could truly be called continuous, given that while physically continuous, parts of it were colonised by restaurant gear and service was only available from the front part. We then wondered about the optical train inside a projector, the sort which projects your computer screen onto the wall - without getting very far. I reminisced about the chap I used to work with, whose name I could not call to mind, who smoked expensive cigarettes and whose father had been an exponent of the art of public house cut and engraved glass, quite a bit of which was to be seen around us. I forgot what came after that, except that towards the end of the evening a large bug - with a body maybe a bit more than half an inch long - crept across our part of the bar. Cortana, for once did not do very well, being outgunned by the not so brilliant effort from some other telephone, included above. I trapped whatever it was under an empty wine glass and presented it to one of the barmen, who clearly knew far too much about such things as he neatly slid a bit of card under the glass and carried the bug off for inspection by management. I would imagine that it is hard to get rid of such things altogether in a building which is well over a hundred years old, complete with lots of brown wood wainscoting and such like to hide behind and breed in.

A reasonable proportion of the people who had been there when I arrived were still there when we left. I thought that this was a good sign. And I was lucky with my train. And I managed to remember both to take my umbrella home and to take my warfarin when I got home. All those brain waves in one evening - the afternoon snooze had paid dividends.

PS 1: this afternoon I asked Bing about projector optical trains and get nowhere. Google, however, turns up a helpful Powerpoint from the SIM university in Singapore. See reference 4. Lots of good tutorial stuff about image processing generally - as well as explaining that the general scheme is that the computer puts the picture on a small screen inside the box which is then translated, more or less in the way of a fancy epidiascope, onto a large, remote screen.

Reference 5

Reference 6

PS 2: much later: the following morning, that is to say early Wednesday morning, I asked Bing about the curved glass shop windows which did not reflect. This was not much good, so I asked Google. Who could not turn up any good pictures, but it did turn up a couple of books, references 5 and 6, both probably lifted from some obscure library or other, which clearly knew about the stuff. Part of the Google project to digitise every book in the world; a project which I believe eventually collapsed amid copyright problems. With other search results suggest that getting rid of reflections from the sheets of glass in front of displays is now more a matter of cunning coatings, than of cunning curvings.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/pain-one.html.

Reference 2: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneumess.htm.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/ham-and-cheese.html.

Reference 4: Fundamentals of Projection Technology - Alen Koebel - 2014.

Reference 5: Establishing and operating an apparel store - Zelma Bendure - 1946.

Reference 6: Popular Mechanics Magazine - H.H. Windsor - December 1913. A wonderful collection of stuff - both the articles themselves and their advertisement wrappings. Brought to my laptop by the power of Google.