The first circuit

For the first time since my recent holiday, this afternoon I walked the full Screwfix circuit: over West Hill, through town, down Stones Road and through the passage under the railway to Blenheim Road, across to Pound Lane and so home. To be fair, I left out the Middle Lane loop, but then it was quite late in the afternoon. Not quite up to speed yet, but getting there.

By way of evidence, the Screwfix whitebeam is snapped above, with First Line Recovery No.100 visible right centre, on station outside the Ford Transit Centre.

With a serious bit of kit out back. Good for a bus or a coach I dare say, but what about a tank?

The rest of it.

Thinking to include their website below, I find that it is suspended. But Bing does turn up reference 1, from which the snap above is taken. I can only suppose that the company has been trading for the last six months or so under some kind of interim management.

More drama in Hook Road, where a large water meter leak that I had noticed outside a house - much worse than that which we had last year - appeared to be being mended - with traffic lights around the works, just as the evening rush hour was getting underway. I had thought at the start of my circuit that there had been rather a lot of traffic in Manor Green Road.

Still more drama this evening, with the police helicopter hovering noisily over somewhere nearby, perhaps over Manor Green Road or Court Recreation Ground. Maybe fifteen minutes hovering, then another fifteen hanging about. Can't hear it now, that is to say at around 21:30. No doubt we shall learn about it all tomorrow.

PS 1: less dramatic was the large number of people gathered around the bus stop outside B&M, more adults than school children. Where were they all going?

Bing fairly rapidly turned up references 3 and 4. Reference 3 was an interesting piece of map design, reference 4 was more immediately helpful. Which together with Street View which told me that the bus stop in question was bus stop A, I think the answer is probably West Ewell and beyond, towards Watersedge, Ruxley Lane and Chessington. I wonder now who the users of these two references are; one suspects not many of the users of the buses concerned.

PS 2: another inquiry was the result of a memory lapse this morning. I remembered coming across and noticing a helpful blog in the recent past, but I could not remember anything about it. How could I find it again? I did not have any useful keys to search the blog itself with, although I did know that it was psmv6 rather than psmv5. Maybe wordpress, although I was not sure about that. Maybe searching the archive was the way forward, although that was organised by month and only did January so far.

A few minutes later 'Gilgamesh' popped into mind, which was the right answer, and search for which turned up the right post, reference 5. And, as it turned out, 'wordpress' would have done just as well.

But just to round out the story, I tried searching the archive for January, a Word document, organised most recent first. Again, as it turned out, the post was fairly near the end of the month and I turned it up fairly quickly - although it is hard to be sure how well I would have done had I not known the answer already. My tactic was to look for long references. Maybe there is a correspondent who know how to do that in Python rather than by eye.

Maybe now I will get to take a proper look at reference 6, not something that I do very often.

PS 3: the subject of references 7 and 8 might have gone to Yale and Harvard, but still and all... I wonder how many such people can be found among the graduates of our own Oxford and Cambridge - a well known recruiting ground for our own Foreign Office.

References

Reference 1: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/4927459.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=flr. Lots of first line recovery to be seen here.

Reference 3: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/10737/E-and-E-Bus-Map-April-2024.pdf.

Reference 4: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/10831/Epsom_WTB.pdf.

Reference 5: https://chameleonfire1.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/gilgamesh-and-civilization/.

Reference 6: https://chameleonfire1.wordpress.com.

Reference 7: Trump’s state department nominee Jeremy Carl grilled by US lawmakers over social media posts: President’s pick to oversee UN policy is accused of making racist and antisemitic comments by committee members - Amy Mackinnon, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Carl.

Reference 9: The Little England mindset of the prime minister’s critics: Starmer’s restive MPs should acknowledge that Britain’s fortunes are shaped abroad - Philip Stephens, Financial Times - 2026. Required reading for our Labour MPs.

Group search key: 20260212.