pumpkinstrokemarrow

Having got well and truly tangled up in the Soho one way system and tried to check-in at three or four stands before finding a vacant slot in Soho Square, headed south to the southernmost point of the Bullingdon Bike scheme, a place called Bowling Green Street, near the Oval. An interesting part of town with, I imagine, higher than average bike stand maintenance costs. Indeed, chalk marks at Bowling Green Street suggested that fully a third of the check-in stations were temporarily suspended.

Only managed one foul on the way, earning a severe honking from a small grey Mercedes saloon when turning right into Baylis Road at Waterloo Station. Not a clue what I had done wrong and the honker did not seem minded to stop and tell me.

Then having had trouble finding a Post Office on my last outing, I was not best pleased to come across one near the Oval tube station having only just checked in my bike. I suppose in time I will get to know what facilities are available where on the the system.

Back home to dreams about coupons. That is to say that minorly irritating feature of modern life whereby supermarkets post you large numbers of coupons for more or less unintelligible discount schemes. Presumably they think that they can make market share like that, but I think that if they all do it, which seems to be the case, the only winners are the people who put together and operate the discount schemes. I wonder if all the big supermarket chains buy in the necessary from the same outfit?

All of which resulted in a dream about being in a large and not very busy Sainsbury's clutching dozens of coupons, all of which FIL had carefully annotated with the serial numbers necessary to release our gift, discount or whatever. The pretty young check-out girl, not unhappy to spend a quiet half hour sorting all this stuff out, instead of passing heavy green cabbages and cold wet fish fingers across the scanner, gets to work sorting all the coupons into the right piles to be processed. After a short while along comes the captain, a rather older lady, who rather brusquely announces that customers who want to muck about with coupons should jolly well get along to the customer service line and stop blocking the check-outs. Sweeps all the coupons back into a heap and is all set to give them back, when she remembers that this week the proper drill is to process them at the check-out. So she gives the coupons back to the check-out with rather a bad grace and stomps off. Check out girl starts over, now a bit grumpy in that the captain will no doubt find some way to get back at her over the next couple of shifts.

Dream then changes gear and all I have left now is a confused image of trying to make a stew involving something of  lamb and liver of pig. Doesn't sound too hot at all.

Up bright and early to read about the PM's stirring defence of our financial services institutions against interference, if not taxation, from those horrid people in Brussels. All rather ironic given that these institutions are probably equally to blame with Blair & Brown for the mess we are in. One only hopes that Cameron knows what he is doing and that his heart is in the right place. Not sold out, that is, to his mates in the city.