pumpkinstrokemarrow

I was pleased to find that the story is as silly sober as it was when I was on the test on 12th November, with the black magic part having no very sensible connection with the poisoning part. And with the black magic part rather weighed down with weighty information about black magic. And while the adaptation may have stirred in Miss Marple, it was otherwise reasonably fair to the spirit of the original. The one other big concession to telly being the pushing back of the story in time from the late fifties to the late forties or earlier. Get more heritage for your buck that way. More competitive with Downton Abbeys.

Followed up with a walk to investigate the new Tesco at the Horton Retail Park, following my note of 4th October. Also to investigate the seagulls, who, last time we were out, were flying westward in huge arrow heads, the same sort of thing that ducks and geese fly around in, but very much larger, if rather more untidy. Never seen such a thing before. Yesterday the seagulls were missing, but we did come across a clump of trees containing mixed flocks of starlings and parakeets. The starlings not in large enough numbers to make one of those spectacular, slowly throbbing black shapes in the dusky sky, but quite large enough to make a lot of noise. Quite equal to that of the parakeets.

Get to the new Tesco to find that it is going to be quite a large place, maybe occupying half the dozen units on the site. We wondered whether they are going to have to provide a disabled toilet for their staff, something it is alleged is a sticking point in the unit intended to rehouse our neighbourhood butcher a mile or so down the road. What on earth do councils think they are playing at? Small shops struggle to stay afloat at all these days without having to shell out on disabled toilets for the use of their non-existent disabled staff. Or is the next step to insist that our neighbourhood butcher, one of two left in Epsom, has to employ someone in a wheelchair? Having wondered about that, we were lucky to come across a brand new and clean builder's hat which meant that we could retrace our steps to the sloe bushes in Horton Lane which appeared to have been overlooked by both the local birds and the local sloe pickers. Perhaps birds do not do sloes while they still have fire thorn and haw thorn berries. Perhaps they prefer red to blue.

In fairly short order we had picked 1lb 13 1/2 oz of the things. BH now deep in recipe books. Does declining Delia, the delectable Nigella or thin-on-top Blumenthal carry off the sloe gin palm?

To bed, where I subsequently woke up to an unusual-for-me dream. I had been invited to do an hour's interview of David Cameron on the radio. He was his usual well mannered self and I was in serious show-off mode. Far more interested to get my quips in and my points (such as they were) across than in letting him have anything to say. Pointing out, for example, that it was very hard to convince the inhabitants of my local boozer that it was right for a care worker to earn a score of thousands of pounds a year and for a banker to earn a hundred score of thousands of pounds a year. What did he suggest? Slightly puzzled, in the dream that is, at how tired he seemed at the end of the interview.