pumpkinstrokemarrow

Chickened out of returning to the same Post Office (see November 19th) with my second version of the Premium Bond application form and tried my luck instead at a smaller establishment. Where I learned that I might have been wrong about my difficulty being a simple desire to get one over the customer. It turns out that the counter clerk, or rather clerkess in this case, had to copy a large chunk of the form into the Post Office computer before issuing me with my receipt. The difficulty may simply have been irritation have having to do a tedious bit of copying in the middle of a busy Saturday, with all the huffing and puffing in the waiting queue that that was likely to have given rise to. Perhaps the Post Office would do better to install some of those scanners like those installed in HSBC to scan inbound documents for inclusion on receipts. In any event, I now have a receipt and await developments.

Continuing onto Horton Lane came across the flower illustrated, somewhere near the bridge over what used to be the narrow guage railway around the asylums. Looking rather lonely and pretty in the winter sun. Took it home for identification and after much huffing and puffing all around, and speculation about winter flowering exotics, we came down to a unanimous verdict in favour of the common clover. I had been confused by the long stalk and the apparent absence of clovery leaves.

Moving along the Lane, I come to a Tesco which I now learn to be a Tesco Express, rather than a Tesco Metro, the difference according to Google being that the Express stores are small enough to slide under the various regulations about booze and opening hours. Working conditions? Perhaps appropriate that this outpost of capitalist success should be planted on the site of one of the flattened asylums, which might have been state of the public sector art in their day, but have now been flattened in favour of private care in the community. But Tesco are not so efficient as to have put the place in the right place on their natty map: both their map and Google maps have it a kilometre down the road, on the wrong side of the road, opposite a new school. Presumably Tesco had wanted at some point to be convenient for the after school mums' trade but wound up somewhere else. Forgetting to change the map in their store finder along the way. Or perhaps they are just lazy and assume that where the Post Office (my recollection is that it is British Telecom who own the IT part of the postcode address file system. Which perhaps it did, but clearly does not now. I shall take a look at Wikipedia) say the centre of a gravity of a postcode is, is good enough for the location of the store with that postcode. Not good enough for the rather straggly postcodes we have around here.

Continuing in the same vein, the thought came to me that privatisation of everything that moves is a handy way of transferring even more wealth from the poor to the rich. In this case from the low paid dossers who used to inhabit the lower reaches of nationalised industries to the high paid dossers who might have shares in the private sector operators which have replaced them.

I close with the word prize. Which I have just learned, or perhaps just been reminded, is derived from the French prise, the female past participle of prendre, to take. The sort of word which might have been used in the olden days to describe a female found and taken as a prize on the margins of an ancient battle ground. So we retain the active, if tautologous, use of the word in English, taking a prize, but we more often use it in the passive sense of being given a prize.