However, I did not feel like walking back there, and so carried on thinking that I would either give it to Costcutter in Manor Green Road, which was en route, or take it home for use in the garden. As it turned out, Costcutter don't use this type of basket at all, having gone for green plastic, and so the basket is now sitting in our garage.
Quite an awkward thing to carry any distance. I suppose my muscles have forgotten my childhood grocery expeditions with large wicker baskets. And it nearly cost me one of my sun hats, carried on this occasion in case of low flying winter sun and blown out of the basket unnoticed. As luck would have it, I only had to walk back a couple of hundred yards to recover it.
Not scored.
The Horton Clockwise (abbreviated) had started with an encounter with a silent car, a silent car which turned out to be a petrol/electric hybrid. First thoughts were first that pedestrians would have to get used to silent cars - a nuisance for me as I mostly rely on car noise to know about cars coming up behind me - and then that why would one bother? One has all the expense of a car with two lots of machinery and one is still generating electricity with an inefficient small engine. Seconds thoughts were that maybe the car can trap waste energy, perhaps when braking or when going down hill. And that one is not incurring the heavy transmission charges involved in plugging one's car into a charging point. Clearly something for my next visit to a saloon bar.
The next event was the western allotments at the Christchurch Road end of Horton Lane, some of which appeared to be sporting deer fences, some high and some low, rather too low to my mind. Clearly something for an inspection on the ground when I have an hour or so to spare. Something in which I took much interest, shortly before the start of blog life. But see references 1 and 2 for the traces. Maybe the wheeze whereby the council - or perhaps the developer - built a communal deer fence did not come off.
Then into Coughlans at Horton Retail, for a spot of bread to bridge a gap in my own supply. For a change, tried a small white bloomer and a couple of rolls to take with the lunchtime lentil soup, the relic of the New Year black legged chicken. Maybe not the finest white bread in the land, maybe not even the advertised 'artisan' bread, but it all went down very well all the same. And I could have had, for £2, a slice of something called rainbow cake, a sponge cake in 1cm layers, each a different colour. Very popular, the ladies' there told me, not just with children. While I continue to have the impression that this place does a lot more business with cakes, pies and savouries than it does with bread, the prices of some of the houses on the surrounding estates notwithstanding.
But by the time I reached Costcutter, not only did they have the wrong sort of baskets, but they also had no Guardians left. I was reduced to the expensive compromise of buying both the DT for the pictures and the FT for the news. Rather better news, I might say, than the Guardian usually seems to manage these days.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=gold+nugget+squash+mammoth.
Reference 2: pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=deer+exclosure+posts.
Reference 3: http://www.coughlansbakery.co.uk/.
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