pumpkinstrokemarrow

Grappling with a whole new interface to Blogger, having been hustled onto it rather faster than I might have liked because the old interface started misbehaving, for the first time in months, if not years. Not only is the old post interface misbehaving, but the search button refuses to find any tollers at the post of 7th October of this year. Coincidence? Maybe the indexes will all be put back together one day. Furthermore, the new interface looks to have withdrawn a feature which I rather liked, whereby if you clicked on an image on the blog it got enlarged, so that you could see it properly. So that you could publish small in the knowledge that interested parties could enlarge.

The day had started rather better, resuming my reading of  'I was a German' by Ernst Toller. Where I found the tone of the tale - despite being an autobiography rather than a novel - of revolutionary goings on in and around Munich in 1919 very similar to that of  'The Good Soldier Švejk', written, as it happens, a mere 10 years or so previously and not all that far away. Amongst other things, the same overblown bureaucracy, by turns brutal, bossy, benign and comic. A bureaucracy that kept ticking over as the world went down the plug hole. Let's hope that this is not where we have got back to.

Moved onto the farmers' market in the market place at Epsom. A market staffed up by various characters selling fairly expensive food and very few of whom could possibly be described as farmers. I was rather taken aback to pay £10.90 for two quite small pieces of cheese (not grown anywhere near here according to the label. So it was very unlikely that the stall holder had anything to do with the cows on the case). However, to be fair, when we got home I weighed them and found that I had actually bought a pound of cheese, having thought that I had bought about half a pound. So not such a bad deal after all.

From there onto the Horton Lane circuit to be greeted by massed ranks of 'no parking' cones on the roads around the Hook Road Arena, the site yesterday of the festival of fun and fireworks organised by the Methodist Scouts. Which made we wonder by what authority the cones had been placed. They were anonymous and made no claim to be anything to do with the police, metropolitan or otherwise: but did parking on top of one attract a fine or a clamp? Had the Methodist Scouts sold the contract to police the cones to one of those clamping companies who pay you rent and get what they can make in clamp release fees?

Pushed onto Ewell West where I came across an interesting effect of the winter morning light. There was a large bed of small winter pansies, perhaps a couple of inches high, a mixture of purple & yellow and purple & white, and at first take the bed appeared to shimmer, rather in the way of a pointillist painting. Very striking. A bit further on, in Ewell Village, there was a similar bed but with rather large pansies, just purple & blue rather than being mixed. They did not shimmer at all.

Which makes it time to record two other effects of light. A few weeks ago, I passed some holly one afternoon in the woods which looked dark blue rather than dark green. It was most odd. It took me a few seconds to work out that the stuff was holly and that it just looked blue rather than being blue. And then a few weeks before that, I was up in the middle of the night trying to spot a supernova in the full moon. Which was rather a dead loss, but what I did get was the moon casting shadows from our hedges across the lawn. Never seen moon shadows before.

Undaunted, turned into East Street and then into Kiln Lane to replenish flour and wine supplies. Somewhere in the depths of the store I find some wine from Portugal which should really cost £7.99, but if I buy three I can have £11.97 off, thus near halving the price. I fall in with this idea and buy three and march off to the self service checkout. First authorisation needed to use my own bag in the checkout area. Second authorisation that I am of an age to buy booze on the day of The Lord. After which the thing tells me that I have £26.55 to pay. That's odd I think to myself. I thought this was a bogoff. But rather than abort the purchase I feed my money in, with the idea of making a row at customer service later, to find that it won't accept more than the first £20 note, and that the bill is actually £14.58 not £26.55. Presumably things have been arranged in this stupid way to make jolly sure that you remember about bogoff at Sainsbury's. Rather than bogoff to Sainsbury's.

Carry on down East Street to find that the 'King's Arms' is under new management, again. A pub which I had known as the boozer where I was taught to play spoof for money - with some of the teachers playing for what I thought were rather substantial sums, far too strong for me. From Young's boozer it became a Young's eatery, with, I believe, the new management contributing a large proportion if not all of the £500,000 or so spent on the lengthy refurb.. The new new management is one of the PubCos, presumably having acquired the lease at some knock down price, leaving the new management rather out of pocket. At least it is their pocket rather than ours. It annnoys me when perfectly serviceable pubs spend lots of money on paint and wallpaper and then try to recover the money off their customers who were quite happy with things they way they were.

There was, I am pleased to report, light at the end of the tunnel. One of the two pieces of cheese was a manchego which we had with some of BH's quince jam to wind up our Sunday lunch with. And very well it went down too, aided and abetted with some of the aforementioned red wine from Portugal.