Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Learning experiences
In the course of a visit to a den of lawyers, those well known and overpaid agents of well known and overpaid bankers known as S&M, had a bit of a wander around the St Luke's area of the city, an area I have not visited for some time. Interesting mix of old and new, commercial and residential. Passed a specialist supermarket for janitors. Learnt that while Smithfield meat market might not be the hive of carnivoral activity that it once was, there was still activity at 0800 Monday morning. Lots of stands shut up, maybe definatively, but one could still glimpse the odd row of half cow carcases hung up and waiting for buyers. Quite a lot of meat in a more butchered condition and for sale shrink wrapped - which is how I suspect quite a lot of the meat arrives at Cheam. Doesn't look too good in the shrink wrap, but once out and dusted down looks OK.
Also came across large graveyard known as Bunhill Fields. Appeared to be a fairly old place and the star attraction was the chest tomb of the relict of Sir Gregory Page, Bart. Sadly, the this line of Page's appears to have been extinguished, leaving no trace in my copy of Burke's Peerage. Only rather modern creations there. Oxford Dictionnary of National Biography reports a second baronet of the same name dying in 1775, so extinction could not have been immediate. I forbore digging further as ODNB suggested that I got my credit card out at that point.
However, said relict did achieve glory of a sort, the tomb explaining she died in 1728 after having had 240 gallons of water tapped from her over the preceeding 67 months. It seems she bore the tapping with great fortitude and withough complaint. This, allowing 30 days to the month, I compute to work out at 0.955 pints a day. The tomb did not reveal the frequency of tapping operations. But she must have been a tough old bird not to have snuffed it of sepsis.
FIL tells us that this sort of thing was quite common at the time, before chemical treatments for dropsy (aka water retention in soft tissue) were available. People could swell up to impressive sizes, lurid details available on application. He recalls personally pumping 11 pints of water from the liver of a Sikh during the war, using something rather like a bicycle pump, happily with the benefit of anaesthetic.
Then moved north and had occasion to walk up Stapleton Hall Road, which contained the downstairs front room bedsit we occupied for our first months of married life, more than 35 years ago. Having not thought to go armed with the number of the house, could only narrow it down to three; the one I thought most likely looking to have been chopped into six flats, now rather shabby. The bedsit house was remarkable for the excellent hot water system and the bedsit was remarkable for its Baby Belling, being the beast in which we cooked our very first joint of top rib of beef. The local Cypriot butcher - no longer there - being something of an expert on the preparation of joints for an oven of this sort - perhaps a eight inch cube cube inside. I also recall that I built the first of our various bed-head bookcases while there. That is to say made out of the oak bed heads that one could acquired at jumble sales of the time for around £1 a pop. Must have had plenty of time as this particular bookcase involved an impressive number of mortice and tenon joints. All seems a bit improbable now, but that is the recollection. Moved on round into Mountview Road which looked rather more prosperous than I remember, if a little mixed. Lots of TLC gone into the front gardens. Rather differant tone from Epsom, and, I imagine, rather dearer by the square metre.
Last week was the salesman in front room experience. FIL had decided that he needed a proper motorised chair and after a perfunctory market search, we invited a man from a well known motorised chair manufacturer to visit us. He turns up with a chair in his van and proceeds to demonstrate the thing. All very smooth, inter alia explaining that they had tried doing showrooms but, in the nature of the business, rather a lot of potential customers were not very mobile, so the showrooms did not pay. Home visit it had to be. The down side of that is that, having visited, the salesman is very keen to sign you up on the spot and not at all keen that you try anybody else. So he moves into serious flannel mode. Do you know that the usual price of this chair is £10,000 (say). But times are a bit hard, rather a lot of them in the showroom. If you buy today I am sure I can persuade my manager to give you a good price. Maybe as little as £3,000. What is your budget? Are you a time waster? We suggest that he is pushing too hard and better take his chair away while we reflect. He packs up and we go into a huddle. As he looks as if he is about to leave, we say how about £2,000? He looks very solemn. Must go and talk to my manager. He retreats to his van to wait for the five minutes indicated (perhaps taking in a fag) and then comes back and says yes. In view of all the circumstances, just for you, we can do £1,995. OK we say. Just for good measure, we get another spiel about this world beating chair, engine sourced from the finest German engineering companies.
Chair now due in a few days. We think the chair will be a good thing and that we got reasonable value - but why do we have to go through all this rigmarole? As bad as the mobile phone companies and the insurance companies. Makes the whole business feel a bit grubby to me. I remember tales from my youth of people who have shown salesmen who play this game the door. You mean to say that you are now prepared to let me have for £5,000 what was £10,000 a few minutes ago. Charlatan and cheat, do not darken my house any longer. But life is too short, and as it is we soon expect to have a satisfactory chair.
Also came across large graveyard known as Bunhill Fields. Appeared to be a fairly old place and the star attraction was the chest tomb of the relict of Sir Gregory Page, Bart. Sadly, the this line of Page's appears to have been extinguished, leaving no trace in my copy of Burke's Peerage. Only rather modern creations there. Oxford Dictionnary of National Biography reports a second baronet of the same name dying in 1775, so extinction could not have been immediate. I forbore digging further as ODNB suggested that I got my credit card out at that point.
However, said relict did achieve glory of a sort, the tomb explaining she died in 1728 after having had 240 gallons of water tapped from her over the preceeding 67 months. It seems she bore the tapping with great fortitude and withough complaint. This, allowing 30 days to the month, I compute to work out at 0.955 pints a day. The tomb did not reveal the frequency of tapping operations. But she must have been a tough old bird not to have snuffed it of sepsis.
FIL tells us that this sort of thing was quite common at the time, before chemical treatments for dropsy (aka water retention in soft tissue) were available. People could swell up to impressive sizes, lurid details available on application. He recalls personally pumping 11 pints of water from the liver of a Sikh during the war, using something rather like a bicycle pump, happily with the benefit of anaesthetic.
Then moved north and had occasion to walk up Stapleton Hall Road, which contained the downstairs front room bedsit we occupied for our first months of married life, more than 35 years ago. Having not thought to go armed with the number of the house, could only narrow it down to three; the one I thought most likely looking to have been chopped into six flats, now rather shabby. The bedsit house was remarkable for the excellent hot water system and the bedsit was remarkable for its Baby Belling, being the beast in which we cooked our very first joint of top rib of beef. The local Cypriot butcher - no longer there - being something of an expert on the preparation of joints for an oven of this sort - perhaps a eight inch cube cube inside. I also recall that I built the first of our various bed-head bookcases while there. That is to say made out of the oak bed heads that one could acquired at jumble sales of the time for around £1 a pop. Must have had plenty of time as this particular bookcase involved an impressive number of mortice and tenon joints. All seems a bit improbable now, but that is the recollection. Moved on round into Mountview Road which looked rather more prosperous than I remember, if a little mixed. Lots of TLC gone into the front gardens. Rather differant tone from Epsom, and, I imagine, rather dearer by the square metre.
Last week was the salesman in front room experience. FIL had decided that he needed a proper motorised chair and after a perfunctory market search, we invited a man from a well known motorised chair manufacturer to visit us. He turns up with a chair in his van and proceeds to demonstrate the thing. All very smooth, inter alia explaining that they had tried doing showrooms but, in the nature of the business, rather a lot of potential customers were not very mobile, so the showrooms did not pay. Home visit it had to be. The down side of that is that, having visited, the salesman is very keen to sign you up on the spot and not at all keen that you try anybody else. So he moves into serious flannel mode. Do you know that the usual price of this chair is £10,000 (say). But times are a bit hard, rather a lot of them in the showroom. If you buy today I am sure I can persuade my manager to give you a good price. Maybe as little as £3,000. What is your budget? Are you a time waster? We suggest that he is pushing too hard and better take his chair away while we reflect. He packs up and we go into a huddle. As he looks as if he is about to leave, we say how about £2,000? He looks very solemn. Must go and talk to my manager. He retreats to his van to wait for the five minutes indicated (perhaps taking in a fag) and then comes back and says yes. In view of all the circumstances, just for you, we can do £1,995. OK we say. Just for good measure, we get another spiel about this world beating chair, engine sourced from the finest German engineering companies.
Chair now due in a few days. We think the chair will be a good thing and that we got reasonable value - but why do we have to go through all this rigmarole? As bad as the mobile phone companies and the insurance companies. Makes the whole business feel a bit grubby to me. I remember tales from my youth of people who have shown salesmen who play this game the door. You mean to say that you are now prepared to let me have for £5,000 what was £10,000 a few minutes ago. Charlatan and cheat, do not darken my house any longer. But life is too short, and as it is we soon expect to have a satisfactory chair.
# posted by Jim @ 7:38 AM 
