pumpkinstrokemarrow

Disregarding this email, off to Horton Lane to see how the blackberries are getting on there. Second serious outing for the new trainers, which, as might have been expected from the netting uppers being without the benefit of gortex, are less waterproof than the last ones but also less warm. On balance, an improvement. On the other hand, they seem to have less in the way of interior springing, so give a rather harder walk. I expect I will get used to that fast enough. But they don't sneak like sneakers are supposed to. They squeak and there is no way you could sneak up on anybody in them. The squeaking seems to arise from contact between the sole and the pavement, rather than anything that might be going on inside the shoe. Perhaps it will wear off with time.

I was also interested to find that I noticed that I was going uphill. In my cycling days, it was very noticeable that going anti-clockwise around Horton Lane, which involved a long gentle climb followed by a short descent, was much harder work than doing the same trip clockwise. I usually walk clockwise and am not aware of slope at all. But today, walking anti-clockwise for once, I certainly was. Perhaps if I had not been sweating inside my stockman's coat on account of the rain, I would not have been.

In the event, the Horton Lane blackberries turned out to be far less ripe than those of the roundabout a few days ago. A few ripe ones but not enough to pick and it did not look as if there would be for some weeks yet. Odd how much variation there is in a small compass. Although I suppose it might be a matter of variety rather than micro-climate. I remember not buying a book from OUP which catalogued several hundred different varieties, rather self-indulgent at £15 or so. Worth it to a botanist I dare say, but not to me.

And then nearer home, following up the geekery of yesterday, I was accosted by the driver of a skip lorry who had lost Epsom Station. His satnav had carried him up to the site of one of the dead & built over mental hospitals rather than the live & being built over railway station. It was not clear whether he or the satnav had the wrong postcode for the station, but for once I was able to provide directions. Never ceases to surprise me how people with jobs of that sort drive around London without an AZ; not, after all, the most expensive item in the world, with our deluxe version from Westfield clocking in at just £22.95 (see February 9th 2010).

Back home, following the acquisition of a foot or so of books from the Isle of Wight, had a look for more things to prune. Took the plunge and let my nice study edition of Juvenal's satires go; a second hand relic of a completely failed urge to revitalise my schoolboy Latin. Can't see it happening now. But I hang onto the Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer (a reprint of what we used at school) and I am thinking about Caesar's Gallic War. This last is not for the faint hearted, being very nearly entirely in Latin - including here both the footnotes and the index. Not to mention the preface. First published in 1900, when people took their Latin more seriously than they do now, and this copy a 1972 reprint. I suspect some sort of photographic job; type face not as sharp as I would expect from a proper job. But I suppose it is a bit of an expense to keep the thing in print all that time. And I had rather grandly thought that I would use this rather grand and expensive version, rather than the much more practical (for me) school study version in three slim volumes which I picked up at about 20p a pop somewhere and then let go of again some years ago.

Slightly later and entirely appropriately, luncheon mince rounded off with blackberry and apple, BH having discovered a stray bag of last year's blackberries at the bottom of the freezer.