Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Dorking footnote
Note in passing that it is no longer possible to buy Harley Davidson motor cycles in Dorking. What used to be their large showroom - perhaps a car showroom in some former life - is now boarded up and adorned with the stickers of a demolition company. Did they get stuffed by the bank pulling their loan, the bank pulling the products with which people financed the purchase of their motor cycles or has the market for big motor cycles simply collapsed, along with that for cars? Or maybe some property company had already terminated their lease with a view to sticking a block of flats on the site before that market collapsed. A little while since we have been to Dorking, so this last entirely possible.
On the other hand there is another shop which sells rather fancy looking telescopes. Black or white or black and white jobs, up to five feet long and a foot wide. Mostly with Newtonian optics and equatorial mountings, these last with built in motors and devices to drive them which look rather like the remote control for a television. Where were the batteries? I think the stands were mostly tripods rather than pillars, suggesting that telescope people like to be mobile. I wonder who they are? Who are the people who like to stand around on a cold night and peer at the sky? Part of the fun has perhaps gone, with these new telescopes probably being very reliable and needing very little attention; and far too tricky to need any serious attention. Not so much fun to be had tinkering with them for months in a warm shed before braving the great outsides.
Today we tried another Superfish type establishment, this one called Seine Rigger in Pork, to the southeast of Epsom. Same sort of drill as Superfish places; that is to say fish and chips with trimmings, including alcohol. Fish small but good (and with skin), chips adequate, ambience good. Like the road to Cheam, the snow seems to have found out the road to Pork, with the result that there are lots of rather unpleasant holes in the road. Very unpleasant if you hit one on a bicycle and not too clever in a car. But the council are on the case. On the way to the chipper, we were held up by a council lorry mending a hole. This consisted of stopping the lorry so that it blocked the road. Jump out and tip a bit of black top in the hole from a large white tub. Pat it down gently with a shovel and drive on. Bit of a mystery what they thought they had achieved. An optimistic view would be that they had half a tub of blacktop left over from something else and they though that they might as well chuck it in a snow hole as chuck it away.
A charity shop a few doors down from the chipper with interesting stock - both of things to sell and customers. For the princely sum of £1.50, acquired some Bach violon concertos, Shostokovich symphony number 1 and a string trio by Schubert. Perhaps all from the same music lover as they were all 'Music for Pleasure'. Which Wikipedia tells me is a once big brand which did well out of cheap editions of middle of the road music. And I did well out of the concertos. Symphony and trio to go.
Given pearl barley another outing after a bit of a break. Usual sort of drill: take four ounces of barley, add couple of sticks of thinly sliced celery (cross wise) and water. Bring to the boil. Simmer for a bit. Stand for a bit. Add chopped left over roast should of lamb. Bring to the boil and simmer for a bit more, keeping an eye on the water level. Sticks good if you let it go dry. Good nourishing stuff which was more than enough for two sittings; supper and breakfast. But not as good as the chicken version which was the flavouring for barley's last outing. Maybe this is not the way to make mutton broth.
And to close, I ought to report that my Broadband connection has been behaving itself for a week now, following the week of discussions with Bangalore before that. At the end of this first week, the fault tracking people announced that the engineers had tweaked my connection and it has been fine since. Let's hope they do better than the month or so between failures that they managed last time.
On the other hand there is another shop which sells rather fancy looking telescopes. Black or white or black and white jobs, up to five feet long and a foot wide. Mostly with Newtonian optics and equatorial mountings, these last with built in motors and devices to drive them which look rather like the remote control for a television. Where were the batteries? I think the stands were mostly tripods rather than pillars, suggesting that telescope people like to be mobile. I wonder who they are? Who are the people who like to stand around on a cold night and peer at the sky? Part of the fun has perhaps gone, with these new telescopes probably being very reliable and needing very little attention; and far too tricky to need any serious attention. Not so much fun to be had tinkering with them for months in a warm shed before braving the great outsides.
Today we tried another Superfish type establishment, this one called Seine Rigger in Pork, to the southeast of Epsom. Same sort of drill as Superfish places; that is to say fish and chips with trimmings, including alcohol. Fish small but good (and with skin), chips adequate, ambience good. Like the road to Cheam, the snow seems to have found out the road to Pork, with the result that there are lots of rather unpleasant holes in the road. Very unpleasant if you hit one on a bicycle and not too clever in a car. But the council are on the case. On the way to the chipper, we were held up by a council lorry mending a hole. This consisted of stopping the lorry so that it blocked the road. Jump out and tip a bit of black top in the hole from a large white tub. Pat it down gently with a shovel and drive on. Bit of a mystery what they thought they had achieved. An optimistic view would be that they had half a tub of blacktop left over from something else and they though that they might as well chuck it in a snow hole as chuck it away.
A charity shop a few doors down from the chipper with interesting stock - both of things to sell and customers. For the princely sum of £1.50, acquired some Bach violon concertos, Shostokovich symphony number 1 and a string trio by Schubert. Perhaps all from the same music lover as they were all 'Music for Pleasure'. Which Wikipedia tells me is a once big brand which did well out of cheap editions of middle of the road music. And I did well out of the concertos. Symphony and trio to go.
Given pearl barley another outing after a bit of a break. Usual sort of drill: take four ounces of barley, add couple of sticks of thinly sliced celery (cross wise) and water. Bring to the boil. Simmer for a bit. Stand for a bit. Add chopped left over roast should of lamb. Bring to the boil and simmer for a bit more, keeping an eye on the water level. Sticks good if you let it go dry. Good nourishing stuff which was more than enough for two sittings; supper and breakfast. But not as good as the chicken version which was the flavouring for barley's last outing. Maybe this is not the way to make mutton broth.
And to close, I ought to report that my Broadband connection has been behaving itself for a week now, following the week of discussions with Bangalore before that. At the end of this first week, the fault tracking people announced that the engineers had tweaked my connection and it has been fine since. Let's hope they do better than the month or so between failures that they managed last time.
# posted by Jim @ 10:42 AM 
