pumpkinstrokemarrow

First, the PC freezes on my first attempt at this post. A freeze out of the blue, something which seems to happen about once a week or so. Hopefully not the tip of the iceberg, or, if it is, no more fearsome than an iceberg lettuce, thinking of the wet lettuce leaves weilded in ritual punishment at one of my former places of work. Second, we learn that, having not attended the last bank holiday car booter at Hook Road due to activities the evening precedent, the next bank holiday car booter, due on Monday, has been displaced by a festival of history. The site is already full of tents containing people getting ready to display hazel wand splitting, sheep shearing, forming squares (as in battles), pig roasts and numerous other wonders. So no chance of getting a bargain book.

A neighbouring site, normally used as a recycling point and the car park for Christ Church, is already lined with small caravans. But I think these are probably real travelling people, the sort that visit Epsom for the Derby, rather than people intent on demonstrating medieval cooking habits. A pity that their number includes some proportion of dirty and violent, the small number of very flashy caravans that turn up on Derby Day notwithstanding. No harm in travelling but it would be nice if they had a bit more civic spirit. I wonder if their numbers are going up or down? I would have thought that the attractions have much reduced over the last fifty years or so. There was more point when the world was more rural and there was generally more space but all seems a bit squalid now. And one might have thought that one would get fed up with being shunned.

Third, we have the disaster of the cabbage. Walking past a Portuguese grocer the other day, noticed some very fine cabbages in their out-front display. Large floppy, dark green things, maybe five inches across and ten inches high. Didn't appear to be hearty like the Portuguese pointy cabbage I have been buying in Cheam. Carefully stood up in a small amount of water in white polystyrene containers to keep them fresh. Buy two of the things for about £2.50. Get them all the way back to Wimbledon where I have to change trains and so visit the Prince of Wales where I manage to leave the things. Don't realise until I am nearly back at Epsom; far too far away and far too late to think of going back for them. But a shame to think of such fine cabbages being consigned to the dustbins of the Prince of Wales. Which is where I imagine they will have wound up, not all that many people being interested in other peoples' cabbages. And now I am puzzling about what sort of a tense 'will have wound up' is. It sounds right but I can't put a name to it. Some sort of future perfect perhaps?

But we made up for this culinary disaster with a culinary triumph at http://www.sreekrishna.co.uk/index2.html. Perhaps the third time I have visited the place in the thirty five years or so that it has been open. The food there was good, of a generally veggie tone. The clientele included some, although not many, who might have been, or whose families might have been, from the part of India in question. But the parathas were really good. And despite perusing a very flashy Indian food recipe site turned up by Mr G., it remains a complete puzzle how the things are made. Circular, about eight inches across and a quarter of an inch thick. Fluffy, in the way of a croissant, but a dull pale brown rather than a bright yellow brown. And they appear to have been made in a roll; the things might have been slices of some exotic swiss roll. Rather in the way that Chelsea Buns are made. And then there was the matter of cooking. Baked, boiled or what? Maybe simpler just to go back there and have theirs.

And then there is a threat. A couple of weeks ago I managed to completely confuse the smell of mint sauce with another common food - which one I forget. And today I managed to completely confuse the smell of boiling beetroot with asparagus. Is the nose giving out? Has the consumption of yeast based products smashed the linings of the nasal passages?

I close with a prohibition of yore, which I came across this afternoon and which just goes to show that the art of nannying is not that new. It seems that as late as the fifties, some public libraries were defacing those parts of the newspapers they had available for reference which contained information about betting. Starting prices and that sort of thing. Partly out of a strictly nanny concern that poor working people should not spend their time and money on betting, a concern possibly nurtured by the parents of those very same people who thought that the national lottery was an appropriate way to collect tax on the quiet. Partly out of a librarians' concern that their reading rooms might be swamped by smelly betters. I wonder if the libraries kept unexpurgated copies which you were allowed to read in a private reading room upon presenting two autograph references from responsible citizens? MPs, bankers, estate agents, that sort of thing. People commanding respect in the community and who could be trusted. On the same sort of basis that exotic porn can be consulted in the British Library or the Vatican Library.