Trolley 113

For a change, an M&S food hall trolley with current livery. Rescued from the horse trough end of the Ashley Centre and returned to a crowded M&S food hall at the Wetherspoon's end.

A food hall which actually contained small bags of walnuts for sale, something one does not seem to come across much these days. However, on closer inspection they looked a bit dried up, from Hungary, nothing like as nice looking as the red diamond jobs from California. I shall hold out in the hope of coming across some of them. Maybe a Borough Market thing.

Failing there, I thought to buy an Economist at Smith's, not having bought one for a bit. But they have sunk down to a Christmas Bumper Edition, so I passed. And I had thought of the Economist and the Financial Times as holding out as the last bastions of news rather than sleaze, trivia and padding. With the Financial Time being - for the moment anyway - my fall back position should the Guardian continue its decline into trivia.

PS: as it happens, only the other day, I was reading of Primo Levi, in his youth, buying some kind of chestnut pudding snack from a street vendor in his native Piedmont. Not quite the same as walnuts but tendencies in that directions. And from where I further associate to the chestnut factlets at reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/maigret-meets-marple.html.

Reference 2: The Periodic Table - Primo Levi - 1975. In my case, a rather nice, top-of-the-range Everyman's edition.

Cavern

The cavern at the top of one of the loaves of the 447th batch of bread, baked yesterday, was quite intriguing when inspected by eye at close quarters, and I thought that the telephone did quite a good job on it. I wonder how much better a real camera could do?

I associated to the sort of caverns you might see if you poked a small camera inside a heart - or even a stomach or a large intestine.

The caverns seem to be the result of a switch from Waitrose's own brand Leckford Estate strong white flour to Allinsons. A switch only made because Waitrose had run out of their own stuff a couple of weeks ago. Maybe time to switch back: caverns might be fun, but they do make for a lot of fragments spread around the kitchen.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/background-processing.html. For deep background.

Fake 21

A common enough fake these days, common outside restaurants, not so common in hanging ball format.

In this case the restaurant that used to be the 'Old Bank' public house, the very place where BH and I used to meet of a Friday afternoon before finding somewhere suitable to eat. Perhaps Caspers, a rather good restaurant, said to have been run as a vanity operation for a son in law, now long departed. One part of the complex was a B&B, probably dating from the days when travelling salesmen stayed over, and another was a wine bar, a place which used to do a good trade on a Sunday afternoon. With the restaurant being the place which introduced us to chateaubriand steak and which also allowed one to take a cigar after one's meal. Just presently, possibly going through a Persian phase.

While the master of ceremonies at the Old Bank used to start dropping heavy hints around 1930 about it being time for older people to move on. And we make a fair amount of use of the place in its current format: reliable and reasonable, but it is wise to book for times like early evening on a Saturday. It might be near empty, but then again, it might not be - and we have been caught out a couple of times.

I suppose I show my age by being irritated by plastic pot plants, perhaps particularly because I am rather fond of box (see reference 1). But by the time the children are my age I expect they will be surprised to learn that such things ever were real plants. Just think of all the bother and mess.

And it is not as if fake plants are any more inappropriate that all that architectural trim which faintly echoes building practises of bygone eras. The plants brighten the place up. They probably, for the moment anyway, carry the positive emotional charge of real plants. They make us feel good, provided we do not stop and look too closely.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/buxus-sempervirens.html.

Crumpets

A few weeks ago we remembered about crumpets and since then we have been eating quite a few of them, with Warburtons being the presently preferred brand - available at both Costcutter and Waitrose, so presumably a popular item.

First time around, I went to the bother of grilling them, as I would toast. This produced a rather overcooked crumpet, rather like that served at Poundbury and noticed at reference 1. Then I discovered the merits of the pop-up toaster, which did a much more satisfactory job. Also a good deal quicker and more convenient.

Then I thought it might be a bit of fun to make some for myself. The recipe made this look like a fair bit of bother, but eventually I weakened and was pleasantly surprised to find that I could buy crumpet rings at Lakeland.

Then yesterday I had my first go, with most of the weight being accounted for by 8oz of flour and 12oz of green top milk. Unfortunately, I misread the recipe and used a teaspoon of yeast rather than a tablespoon, which meant the yeast did not froth in the proper way, even with extra time.

Fried in butter, three at a time, in our regular frying pan, ladling the mixture into the rings with our soup ladle. About three quarters full.

Cooked for between 5 and 10 minutes. Rings easily removed with the dental forceps first mentioned at reference 2. Crumpets - sporting just a few of the holes that should have covered the things - turned and cooked for another 5 minutes or so. Looked quite attractive, rather soft inside and did not taste much like crumpets, rather somewhere between the dough balls you might get in a pizza place and English-style pancakes, the sort you fry in lard and roll up with sugar and lemon juice. Maybe we get crumpets with holes next time.

PS: I feel sure that I have posted a picture of the forceps in question at some point, but cannot now trace it. Maybe the necessary search terms will come to me during the morning. Rather unusual forceps with long slender jaws, which I think my dentist told me were for extracting the incisors of children. Just the ticket for extracting the hot rings out of the frying pan.

PPS: it did, and the post in question is now at reference 3. However, memory shown to be defective once again. Not the incisors of children, rather the fragments of upper molars which sometimes snap off, in-situ, during extractions. Google suggests that it is a bit like hammers, with there being a particular sort of hammer for every conceivable job. Once upon a time, big tool shops like Buck & Ryan of Tottenham Court Road, would stock a hundred or more varieties.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/fine-dining.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=kemptown+kit.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/papier-mache.html.

Gull?

An interesting bird noise at about 2200 last night, that is to say Monday night.

The same sort of temporal structure as the hoot of an owl. That is to say, two or three squawks, perhaps a second or so in duration, perhaps separated by a second or so, then a pause, then a few more.

A loud, deep noise, which made one think of a large bird, like a crow, rather than a small bird, like a robin.

It seemed to come and go, as if it was flying around the area in a rather haphazard way.

On the other hand, any one squawk was not like the hoot of any owl that I am familiar with. No ter-wit ter-woo about it at all.

Nor was it the squawk of a crow, the bark of a pigeon or the mew of a gull. Nor the scream of a fox, the scream of a cat fight or the bark of a dog.

So what was it?

Gullible

Yesterday I exhibited incompetence regarding my own razor. While today I exhibited gullibility regarding my broadband connection.

We were phoned up at around 1300, just as we were tucking into our meat loaf, by a young lady claiming to be phoning from some central London address for BT. A young lady with a strong accent, quite possibly sitting in some call centre in the far east. Communication was not easy.

I was a little suspicious, but I vaguely recalled speaking to a BT call centre in the subcontinent or in the far east before and I have certainly spoken about fraud to an HSBC call centre in the subcontinent. So it was not impossible that the call, purporting to be about some invisible-to-me problem with my broadband connection which might well get worse, was genuine.

After a short while I am passed to someone described as a supervisor, but in any event a young man with rather better English.

He takes me through various trickery, involving command prompts and peering at system information. Including him being able to recite to me a long identifier that I was looking at, rather like the license numbers that you get when you buy MS Windows or Office, but not the same. And including looking at a log which was full of errors and warnings to do with the internet connection. Oh dear says the man. I think we need to do a bit more checking. Please use the command line to go to this website.

At which point I start to think that BT would not ask me to do such a thing. So I go to Chrome to find that the site is called TeamViewer (see reference 1) and looks far too tricky for comfort so I tell the young man that I am going to check with BT. At which point he gets rather cross. I have been talking to you for fifteen minutes so why are you getting difficult now. At which point I put the phone down.

Pick it up again to find him still there. Hold the trigger down for a bit, he goes and a dialling tone comes.

In short order I am talking to the excellent BT IT Help Desk (a subscription service) and the young man there knows what is going on almost before I tell him. Nothing wrong with that error log, that is what you would expect. With the wheeze being for you to get the wind up, to get going with a shared session with TeamViewer, probably in itself perfectly respectable, damage your computer and then, amid clouds of waffle, for them to suggest that you stump up a couple of hundred quid for them to mend it. Another time, the man from BT tells me, you will know that it is not us, if only because we use xxx for shared sessions, not TeamViewer.

The call centre number involved has now been blocked using the BT custom call blocker (a free service), a blocker which has reduced the volume of nuisance calls to a trickle.

After the event, BH explains that she thought it was all a bit dodgy all along, but she did not like to interfere in this man stuff.

Quite an elaborate scam with quite a complicated script, one which would only work with a just about IT literate person such as myself. Enough knowledge to follow the instructions, but not so much as to smell a rat. A little knowledge is dangerous and all that. Elaborate and time consuming, but I suppose that if each operator catches one gull a shift, their employer is going to be turning a respectable profit. The operators gets to eat the gulls, fishy taste and all. One almost feels sorry for them.

Reference 1: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/.

Incompetence

For some time now I have been irritated by how long it takes to shave in the morning and by how poor a shave I was getting notwithstanding. It did not cross my mind that a bit of maintenance was in order.

Eventually, BH takes me in hand and we clean the thing, which is then better but not good. So then I took the rather drastic step of going down to Boots.

Where, having been shown where the shavers were, I found that I needed to know the model number of the shaver, which I had, surprisingly, had the wit to take with me. But the model number was embossed on the plastic case, was not given a contrasting colour, was very small and was very hard to read. Spectacles off and hold the thing about two inches from the right eyeball job. But I think I got there in the end as the new heads are now installed and working nicely.

For just half the price of a new shaver.

Followed this morning by a memory failure, with my being quite confident that the shops in Oxford Street opened at 1100 on a Sunday, while BH was voting for 1200. She was right.

Perhaps we have a bit of sexual dimorphism going on here.