Last chance saloon

Just over a week ago we travelled by the Island Line from our base in Ryde to Shanklin, from where we were able to descend Shanklin Chine on the last day of its summer season.

Elaborate bench

One of the many elaborate benches providing rest on the way down the chine. This one did not appear to iron, wrought or otherwise, showing more yellow through the paint. At least I think that was this one. Something to check next time.

View from near the top

I  was not too convinced about the solidity of the timber frame holding up the top of the path. Plenty of timber but what about the fixtures?

All in all, lots to see, including plenty of carex pendula. There were also some strange jungle noises, which we thought might have been a tape, as at Paignton Zoo (briefly noticed at reference 5), but which turned out to be the noises made by some birds in cages, including some handsome budgerigars and finches. We were assured that the birds were all rescue birds, so that was all right.  Tea and cake in the café stroke heritage area, the cake taking the form of a rather unusual, but rather good almond tart. We wondered what was going to happen to the cakes unsold at close of play, it being the last day. Begonias on exit a little past their best but still a handsome display. See reference 4 for the last occasion, back in 2015.

Out to tweet what appeared to be a least one raven, being twice as big as the accompanying regular crow, and several kestrels over the cliffs. Also a rather grand public convenience. I forget whether it was still convenient, but it clearly dated from the glory days of this part of the coast, probably well over half a century ago now.

Public convenience

Quite by chance, we took lunch at the Beach Shack, on the esplanade between Shanklin and Sandown, one of the various beach cafés on this eastern coast of the Isle of Wight which have raised their game. This one served us two very good crab sandwiches. See reference 1.

From where BH thought she knew about a nifty shortcut to Sandown Station, but which actually delivered us to a nearly new housing estate from which there was no exit to the station. At least no longer. Happily a very friendly young couple attending to their front garden took us in hand and we made it to the station in time for the intended train.

Italian wine

The plot had been to have a light lunch, followed by a serious dinner at Michelangelo's, at the bottom of Ryde's Union Street. This turned out to be fully booked, which was a surprise for end of season, albeit on a Saturday evening. Next choice was Olivo's, in the same street but rather nearer Wetherspoon's, where we have eaten well in the past, noticed at reference 3. Also fully booked apart from a bad table near the kitchen door - but at least they told us before taking the booking. So again, quite by chance, we wound up at Ada, advertised as being of a Mediterranean/Turkish flavour. And very good it was too, without being precious about it. For me, hummus with flat bread, sea food risotto and some of those sweet pastries they like in the Middle East. Unusually for such a place, they offered a perfectly decent and reasonably priced bottle of Gewürztraminer, from Italy of all places, albeit the far north. Plus what seemed to be a rather large drop of rather nice brandy. Unusually also, the staff appeared to be entirely male. We shall return next time we are on the island, probably next summer.

Animals

Descending Union Street on our way back to our hotel, I was informed that it was high time I became better acquainted with at least some of the above.

Reference 1: http://www.thebeachshack-isleofwight.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.adamediterraneanryde.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/ryde.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/shanklin-chine.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/holiday-food.html.

Keat's Kitchen

Out from the Mikado, to try the wine at the 'Mad Cow', an establishment without customers when we arrived and with no choice of white wine. The place had been a bank and had the look of a place which could get busy, so perhaps that was later.

Took a look at Daish's Hotel over the road, which had caught our eye on previous visits, but which turned out to be an establishment which mainly catered to coach parties, with coaches, as google now tells us, being very much a part of the Daish empire.

So back across the road to 'Keat's Cottage', a place which BH had noticed in magazines. A place which rather fancied itself, but which did us quite well.

Started off well by being able to offer us a gewürztraminer, or at least something involving that sort of grape. An excellent crab starter, essentially a dollup of white crabby stuff with a few light trimmings. But I came unstuck with the main course, a crab linguini ('crab and prawn linguini in a creamy garlic sauce served with fresh salad'), which was substantial but which was far too rich and saucy for me: I like my linguini to be pasta, a few bits and pieces, the whole only very lightly dressed. I should have been warned off by the qualifier 'creamy'. Nevertheless, despite all the creamy, I thought I would give an interesting sounding cake a try for dessert, but this turned out to be rather too damp for my taste. Possibly involving polenta.

The bread was entirely ordinary, appearing to have been bought sliced. Which I thought odd for a place which clearly thought it was the business.

Brandy satisfactory, from Rémy Martin.

BH did rather better with her 'pan-fried fillet of seabass with rosti potato, asparagus, green beans, carrots and homemade hollandaise sauce', although she did say that she thought that she did a better job on rosti.

Just caught the train home, with the rather pleasant and relaxed attitude of this part of Southwest Trains serving us well on this occasion. Plus there was a young Polish couple with a very cute baby - I no longer remember the sex - who were able to provide in-train entertainment.

PS: I was convinced that the proprietor was the chap who played the struggling antique dealer in Morse's 'Dead on Time', David Haig, a stalwart of ITV3 drama. But while the proprietor is also called David, I think I am now sure that he is not the same person, not least because his wife is Polish. They do occasional evenings with more continental food and I am sure we would support them if we lived nearby.

Illustration provided by google, of what the place was before it was a restaurant. There is a real connection with the poet, with an estate agent through which the property went when it was still a gift shop having this to say: 'John Keats stayed and wrote at 'Keats Cottage' in the room named 'Keats Room' for 3 months in the summer of 1819, completing works such as Otho the Great, parts of Lamia and some of his famous odes'. While wikipedia says that Otho was badly mauled by the critics and languished in a drawer for more than a hundred years, but the estate agent does not go into that.

Reference 1: https://www.keatscottage.co.uk/.

Group search key: mka.

Friuli

The back view of the bottle of Friuli from Rossopomodoro. Very good it was too. Keywords: Grave, Borgo, Magredo, Traminer. In no particular order.

With Traminer being some kind of relative of the Gewürztraminer, of which we were drinking a fair bit a year or more ago. And, according to Wikipedia: '... The history of the Traminer family is complicated, and not helped by its rather unstable genome...'. So now we know.

The same shaped bottle as we turned up in Tunbridge Wells. Maybe it is an Italian thing. See reference 2.

Reference 1: http://www.borgomagredo.it/en/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/tunbridge-tipple.html.

Group search key: kqa.

Back on the Bullingdon

Bullingdon season started last week, but off to a bad start when I lost the apostrophe on my telephone, that is to say on its virtual keyboard. I was absolutely sure it had gone missing, but when I backed out and started again there it was. Clearly either Cortana or I had been having a senior moment.

No improvement when I got to the ramp at Waterloo, say around noon, to find just one Bullingdon there, taking in all three stands. Luckily, by the time that I had found out that this one Bullingdon was out of service, somebody had turned up and deposited one that was clearly in service.

So on the road to Roscoe Street, to find Stamford Street as busy as last time, with the added attraction of an older Bullingdon rider, short gray, grizzled hair and no helmet, who had a very aggressive style at traffic lights and such. All perfectly legal, within the letter of the highway code, but aggressive. Perhaps a chap who needed to prove how fit he was. Took the last vacant slot at Roscoe Street. Perhaps management is having to cut corners, costs or both.

I didn't recognise the fruit & veg. man at Whitecross Street and he had no walnuts, so that was not much good either. But the thin waitresses had returned to the Market Restaurant (café no more, see reference 1), although one of them had metamorphosed from brunette to blonde. Still both from the same country though as they could natter to each other in foreign. Bacon sandwich satisfactory, right bread but a little stale.

St. Luke's more or less full for this opening concert of the season, with people without tickets being sent up to the balcony. Not tried it, but I think I would prefer where I was, downstairs towards the back of the front block of seats.

The Škampa String Quartet were standing in at short notice, which may be the reason we got Janáček's Kreutzer Sonata, a work which they knew well, since their student days with the Smetana Quartet. Both that and Smetana's String Quartet No.1 were very good, with the Kreutzer sounding as fresh and new as if I had never heard it before, which was not the case. See, for example, reference 2.

One connection with the Tolstoy story of the same name, was the passion, with Janáček, as an old man, having an unconsummated passion for the very young wife of someone else. I was slightly puzzled by both the programme and the producer talking of alleged adultery in the story, while I had thought that there was no question about it at all. Checking quickly yesterday, I think the story is that while the husband did not have proof, he had strong grounds for suspicion. So perhaps part of the point of the story is that he could not have been sure. Perhaps also a reading which will not survive the more careful reading to come.

The quartet's seating plan was violin 1, violin 2, cello, viola, with the cello taking the piano stool. And at one point violin 1 stood to turn the page, from in front of the stand, of viola opposite, something I have never seen before. The stringing of the cello was new to me in that the tail piece was cut diagonally. Was the idea to have strings of equal length, something a conventional stringing would not give? Google not help on this occasion, so I shall have to ask next time I pass a violin shop, of which there are a few about in London.

Quick refreshment in the 'Masque Haunt', then picked up the second Bullingdon at Old Street. Having taken wine, I chickened out of the Old Street roundabout and walked the Bullingdon across the road. Cheated further by walking it around the irritating no left turn from Clerkenwell Road into Farringdon Road. Otherwise without incident, apart from noticing one again that I no longer find the shiny black office block at the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge as exciting as I did when it was new. Whatever it was that it had has largely, although not entirely, worn off.

Quick call at Konditor & Cook where I fell for the four for a tenner offer. So four slices of a sort of lemon tart, an almond and continental version of our own lemon drizzle cake. Very nice they were too, if more substantial than they looked. BH said that that was down to their involving almond as well as or instead of regular flour.

Arrived at Waterloo in between trains, so wound up the proceedings with a glass of Lofthouse, a NZ sauvignon blanc, from the wine bar at platform 1, the gewürztraminer which they had offered in the past having gone off-piste. Not sure about the year, but rather good; maybe I shall make enquiries at Majestic. See reference 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/henry-iv-part-i-part-i.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/endellions.html.

Reference 3: http://www.lofthousewine.co.nz/Lofthouse-Vineyard-Our-Wine-__I.96.

Chine time

We may not have made it to Ventnor Botanic Garden, a pity since its dry country plants from places like South Africa and Mexico were probably doing very well, but we did make it to Shanklin Chine, important, inter alia, for the large numbers of carex pendula there. Rather surprised this morning to find that I have only been noticing all the carex for about three years, with an early example being found at reference 2. If I had been asked to guess, I would have said for about ten years.

Took the Island Line train from Brading (now a heritage, not to say historic railway station) to Shanklin, the line being a semi detached portion of the South Western Trains franchise. Rolling stock quite old now, with the roofs as illustrated and the seats as sat on. One needs to be careful when one's carriage bumps over the points. There seemed to be a marked disinclination to take our fares, despite our having bothered to take our senior rail passes on holiday and BH wondered whether there was some low level industrial action going on.

One can see that the line is a bit of an anachronism, but also that we find it very convenient and the few trains that we rode on in the course of the holiday were pretty full. We would be sorry to see it go.

On through the town, with far more retail space than is now needed, so lots of charity shops. Yet another town centre which somehow needs to shrink down to a size commensurate with modern needs.

Tea and cake at Cinderella's, an unusual tea shop which doubles as a sewing shop, with the proprietress working away on her sewing machine between customers. Lots of dainty china and lots of dainty clothes providing the decorative scheme. Plus two very dainty dogs, which we were told were an unusually small variety of Shih Tzu. We learned all about the scandalous matter of some circus people forcing their way into the empty shop opposite to paste their posters on the inside of the windows. The police, it seems, had declined to intervene on the grounds that trespass was a civil matter. The proprietress was worried about what such obvious breaches of good order and discipline would do for rents and footfall.

Looking for the name of the unusual tea shop in gmaps, I was amused to come across this view of a bus in Street View. The camera man clearly had a sense of humour. As it happens, we have eaten in the restaurant immediately to the right of the bus, a place where, as I recall, we took a nice drop of Riesling. And if you look down the street rather than up the street, no bus at all. An illustration of the interesting discontinuities which arise when panning around in Street View, discontinuities which arise from the fact that the view is not taken at an instant in time, rather it is a series or sequence of views taken through time. No amount of careful cut and paste can paper over all the cracks.

On and into the chine, a sort of Victorian relic, with the nearest other such that I can think of being the High Rocks at Tunbridge Wells of reference 3. Perhaps the first time in our history that there were plenty of people with a spot of time and leisure and who wanted something to do with it. So attractions of all sorts.

An interesting plant covering a damp and shady rock face.

A snap of some of the many carex to be seen in the chine, these one also on a rock face.

Some of the residential and holiday opportunities at the bottom of the chine. The glazed addition left usually houses a small but interesting exhibition of old photographs, water colours and the like. Cortana has not done a bad job, but the echium to the immediate right of the addition is a bit fuzzy. And, in any case, not in the same league as those at Ventnor noticed at reference 1 below.

Out to stroll along the beach back to Sandown where we settled for a bus back to Brading. Free with out senior bus passes, so a day of free transport.

On the way, taking in at least one snooze on the beach and the café already noticed at reference 5.

PS: a reminder to the curious: hovering over the telephone snaps, a long file name appears at the bottom of the screen (or at least it does when using Edge from Microsoft), a long file name which includes the original date and time. And in case of truncation the full long name can be recovered by right click, copy link and paste into Notepad. So you can check our movements!

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/07/echium-pininana.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/06/apsley-3.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/10/shorter-notice-2.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/07/keats-kitchen.html. Memory fails again, Gewürztraminer not Riesling.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/things-went-wrong.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/carex-deceased.html. The carex which had featured earlier in the holiday.