Pub glut

A wet morning, so I though to try a Horton Lane Clockwise instead of my usual spin around Jubilee Way. A walk which started with noticing that the holm oaks - for example those at the junction of West Hill Avenue and Manor Green Road - seem to have shed a lot of leaves in the last few days or weeks. Perhaps don't like the alternating hot, cold and wet.

Then a thin woodpecker, possibly a juvenile green woodpecker which had yet to develop the distinctive colouring of the adult.

Then Horton Heights, now proudly advertising the fact that they were now, after some years, 100% sold. See reference 1.

Registration plates No.28, No.30 and No.33. But No.34 continues to elude me. But by way of consolation prize, plenty of snails had been drawn out of hiding by the rain. BH explained on my return that she had been eliminating any that she caught in our garden. Greedy beggars.

And so to the Blenheim, where we thought we ought to be fine under their big tent. It might be wet, but it was mild enough and there was no wind. And so it turned out to be, and we started well enough with our usual Yellowtail (for me) and white wine spritzer (for her). 

But then we made a mistake. Thinking to have their take on hummus, discovered on the occasion noticed at reference 2, we wound up with a sharing platter which counted as a main course and was served with our two main courses - bangers and mash (for me) and chicken Caesar salad (for her). This turned out to be a mistake on several counts. There was far too much food. The hummus came with a lot of flavouring and with a lot of salad; altogether far too big and complicated. Plus the flavourings did not go well with bangers and mash if you attempted to eat them in parallel. The sausages were plentiful but very ordinary; the sort of thing you might get from Iceland, nothing like as good as the sausages which could be bought from the butchers more or less next door. While the mash had been steeped in something mustardy and tasted pretty grim. A far cry from the Swedish mash of reference 3. BH did a bit better, in that the salad part of her meal looked well enough, but was rather spoilt by there being far too much dressing lurking in the interior. And it came with far more chicken, in rather unladylike lumps, than she wanted. The upshot was that we probably only ate half the food we had been given and I, unusually, passed on dessert. Consoled myself with a spot of something that warms.

Defeated by bad ordering, large portions and too much flavouring. I suppose a more experienced waitress - ours seemed very young to our pensioner years - might have warned us that we were ordering too much. I suppose also that next time we could ask for all the flavourings to be served on the side.

Not a disaster, but the least satisfactory of the dozen or so meals we have probably taken at the Blenheim over the past year or so.

Interesting washer to add to my collection on the way home. About half an inch in diameter. I thought perhaps the cap of the sort of boat building rivet used to clinch the strakes of a clinker build. But how did it get to Manor Green Road?

Wikipedia offers the snap above of clinker build, taken from a rather old model. Agnostic on the question of clinching.

Home to complete what seemed an even more silly survey than usual from YouGov. Probably one of those when you had to score a long series of words or phrases on a five point scale of negative feeling to positive feeling. What might be known in the trade as a Likert scale, not that I ever came across one in the days when I used to talk with the inhabitants of the Government Social Survey Department. Silly because the words in question were all consumer brands or minor celebrities, my awareness of which was and remains very limited.

Moved onto higher things with Scrabble. A comfortable win for me in a game of moderate score. No tricky words requiring reference to the OED or to the rules committee.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/06/trust-again.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/last-orders.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-hunt-for-two-seas.html.