Hollyhocks

The annual display of hollyhocks in a front garden in Meadway is now well underway. Snapped from this angle for the shade: at least I could see something of what I was doing.

But sad to report, a little further on, on the way to Epsom, two small cedars had succumbed to something or other and two more did not look very healthy. I don't suppose that anyone will get around to replacing them what with austerity and everything else going on.

Did well in Epsom. Three new pairs of spectacles: long range, short range and sunglasses. Plus an assurance that my retinas are in reasonable nick all things considered, this courtesy of some fancy camera which is so expensive that the opticians just rent it. With rental including a metered component.

A couple of blocks of dates, just to be on the safe side, and some experimental figs from Grape Tree. Experimental as figs of this sort can sometimes be too dry and chewy (for me anyway) - not like those from Clapham Junction on a good day, for which see reference 1.

Bread flour at Waitrose looked as if it was back to normal, so a spot of Canadian wholemeal. With extra stone. Plus a spot of Calvados. Plus our first cherries of the season. A bit dear, but they looked quite good and I didn't fancy queueing at the fruit and veg. stall out on the market square. Where, I might say, the stuff is often very cheap - but also not very reliable.

Last but not least, the moan of the day from Kings Place, to vary the diet of Financial Times. From which I am prompted to wonder when, if ever, we will we next be there for some chamber music. Hopefully there will be a next time as we like both the place itself and the surrounding gentrification.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/kensington.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/kings-cross.html.

Eating outdoors

The tail end of our first lunch taken out of doors for a long time. The first ever in this particular part of the garden, this particularly shady part of the garden, protected by triple nut centre (above the bottles), hawthorn left and double oak right, off snap.

French wine from the Loire via Guildford done, mulling over whether to revert to the Villa Maria from New Zealand via Majestic or to go for a drop of the amber nectar. The telephone certainly knew which bottle to focus on, so I went for the amber nectar.

Curiously, the wine from Loire, which had been new to us on Sunday, tasted quite different from that we had had on Sunday. Still good, but different. So was the change in taste the result of change of context & ambience, or was it that the wine was from a different batch, possible as we have had two deliveries of the stuff now?

Parental card table taken outside for the purpose, plus two substantial cottage chairs from the other side of the family. Substantial and old enough to include what look like shaped elm seats.

As it happens, we discovered only a couple of weeks ago that some people across the road have the identical card table, and theirs still has its green felt on it, our felt being more than thirty years gone. And I may say, higher grade card table, nicely made with good quality fittings. There are lesser tables about, from the same period, say the 1940's.

PS 1: I have a lurking feeling that I have noticed this very card table quite recently, but cannot this morning trace anything. Perhaps it will turn up later in the day.

PS 2: I had been about to correct the 'theirs' above to 'their's'. But Bing assures me quite firmly that this would be wrong. 'Theirs' is correct, despite plenty of native speakers of English, natives of England even, getting it wrong.

Orchid

Believed to date from Christmas 2018 and to have been first noticed at reference 1.

Since then, a whole new inflorescence, after a resting period next door and snapped here in front of the afternoon light - which I believe is all wrong, even though the sun has gone off to the right, off this window. 

Inter alia, an interesting white ribbon at the bottom of the curtain, new since the illustration to reference 1. The aloe visible left is also new, a child of the one in the earlier snap, this last having grown too big and too unwieldy in the interval. And last but not least, the new Blogger client, which seems to be settling down now, both in the sense of the code and that of my use of it.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/week-four.html.

The important things in life

It being Wednesday today meant that BH paid an early morning visit to Sainsbury's Kiln Lane, coming home with, inter alia, our local free newspaper. The Epsom Comet or some such. I was quite surprised to find this advertisement for a car boot sale at Hook Road Arena, noticed only a day or so ago at reference 1. Checking at reference 2, I find that they do indeed plan to reopen on Sunday, complete with social distancing measures.

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall to see how they get on, but I don't think I am going to be able to muster the energy to get down there in person. Plus, it's a bit like a pub or a restaurant: where's the fun if there is no jostling, no hustle and bustle?

But good luck to them! Hopefully I will be back to support them in due course.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/warm-and-peaceful-on-hook-road-arena.html. Curious name of the file/page the result of forgetting to give the post a title first time around.

Reference 2: https://www.hookcarbootsale.com/.

The one that got away

Last week to Ewell Village to see if we could capture the Wellingtonia in the grounds of Ewell Castle School, that is to say the school proper, not the out-house opposite the entrance to Bourne Hall.

Not window taxed

On the way we paused to snap this heritage example of tax evasion by the propertied classes. Nothing much changes in that department.

A view of the target tree through the locked main gates. With the main buildings being very much in the style of the present big house (not the palace that is) in Nonsuch Park. Perhaps it was the same builder.

Then down Vicarage Lane and onto the by-pass where we stumbled on a fine cache of something which was probably illegal. Perhaps one of those tricky illegalities where possession is legal but the wrong sort of consumption is not. From where I associated to the TB fact that growing opium poppies is legal, but making delicate incisions - perhaps with a razor blade - on the ripening seeds cases is not. But then again, perhaps not so tricky or unusual. Kitchen knives are entirely necessary and entirely legal, but there are plenty of things which you can do with them which are not. Flick knives rather different, it not being obvious why a law abiding citizen would want such a thing.

Round to the by-pass entrance to the gate to the sports field there, from where I had first clocked the tree in question, more or less dead centre in the snap above, taken neatly through the bars. Much larger in real life, yet another example of what we see not being what one gets on our telephones. The camera does lie, systematically.

Back to the village up Ox Lane, which took us as close to our tree as we were going to get.

Took in Glyn House, a Victorian pile, now another out-house of our Ewell Castle School. The place which must have given its name to the nearby Glyn School, which took both our sons, for free. At the point of consumption that is.

Clearly the right baronets, but not clear that the house had anything to do with the family as: 'Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Richard Hamilton Glyn, 9th Baronet OBE, TD, DL (12 October 1907 – 24 October 1980) was a British army officer, Conservative politician and authority on breeding pedigree dogs … His interest in livestock derived from his work on the family estates in Dorset, which he farmed from the 1940s'. So entirely proper establishment people, but Dorset rather than Surrey. So perhaps here some family of City upstarts, in trade, who took the name to try and get a bit of class.

We were amused to find this special corner of the graveyard, by the church, for important people. This one being the box for a daughter of the parish, who went on to marry a chap from Staffordshire, before expiring in Bath. I wonder what they did to her body before shipping it back to London? I think Vice-Admiral Nelson, for example, was pickled in a barrel of rum for shipment.

The barn at the back, being the very one which featured in the Holman Hunt pot boilers called 'The Light of the World'. One of which, as I recall, was shipped around the world, collecting shillings from the faithful to support Hunt in the manner to which he had become accustomed.

I close with what appears to be a new-to-me sort of duckweed, snapped just outside Bourne Hall. The stuff in our own (very small) ponds has pairs of round leaves, rather than rosettes of thin ones. A right pain - unless you are growing the stuff in sun-lit lagoons in hot countries for fodder or something.

PS: when I went past the Ewell by-pass gate on Monday, the gate was open and groundsmen were up to something. I did think about asking whether I would be allowed to touch the tree, then accessible, and so score it, but I thought better of it.

Reference 1: https://www.ewellcastle.co.uk/. One of the many schools attended by the late Oliver Reed, whom I now know to come of illustriously theatrical stock.

Group search key: wgc.

Hmmm

Europe and North America may be over the worst of it for now and China has done well, but what about the rest of the world? 

Sadly, it no longer seems that the hot countries of the tropics are going to get away with it, as I had been hoping a couple of months ago.

With thanks to the Financial Times for the graphic.

Winnebago: a diversion

Treffert of reference 1 – an easy and interesting read about people with extraordinary skills – perhaps feats of mental arithmetic or memory – and many of whom were badly handicapped in other ways – cut his teeth at the Winnebago State Hospital – a name only known to me in connection with high-end motor homes. Which prompted a lockdown excursion.

Investigation reveals a Winnebago County in Wisconsin, a little to the west of Lake Michigan, north of Milwaukee and Chicago. Named for the Winnebago Indian’s who once lived in the area.

There was a middle sized mental hospital in Winnebago County, at a place called Oshkosh, a little to the south of the town of Winnebago, on the western shore of Lake Winnebago. 

Furthermore, there seem to be plenty of places in the area with French names, presumably the result of settlers pushing down from Canada to the north.

The hospital started out as Northern State Hospital for the Insane, with around 600 beds, then the Winnebago State Hospital with rather more and now the Winnebago Mental Health Institute with something under 200. A place which has had its fair share of scandals, just like some of the old mental hospitals in this country.

 

However, it turns out that there are several places called Winnebago in the US, and the mobile home people come from the Iowa one, some hundreds of miles to the west, on the other side of the Mississippi.

More precisely in a place called Forest City, highlighted in white, far left, with our Winnebago being on the lake, far right.

Yours for half a million dollars or so. Just the thing to wow the all the people up at Canvey Island – or down at Hayling Island.

While back at the beginning, a little to the south of the mental hospital, gmaps highlights the EAA museum, from where I got to the striking snap above: ‘Frances Green, Margaret (Peg) Kirchner, Ann Waldner and Blanche Osborn leaving their plane, "Pistol Packin' Mama," at the four-engine school at Lockbourne AAF, Ohio, during WASP ferry training. (U.S. Air Force)’. Very roughly comparable to the ladies who ferried aeroplanes about the UK during the second world war – with the difference that these ones had a lot of trouble getting proper recognition, with some the males of the species not being very keen on them at all. For which see the Smithsonian Magazine – finding which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Reference 1: Extraordinary People: Understanding savant syndrome – Darold A. Treffert – 1989.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/some-preliminaries.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnebago_County,_Wisconsin.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnebago_Mental_Health_Institute.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnebago_Industries.

Reference 6: https://winnebagoind.com/.

Reference 7: https://www.eaa.org/eaa. The Experimental Aircraft Association. A home for aeroplane nuts, young and old.

Reference 8: https://www.eaa.org/eaa-museum. Their museum.