No.{41}

Spotted heading east along East Street in Epsom. A small red car with registration plate 'YI41 xxx'. Except that while I think 'YI' (letter) more likely than 'Y1' (number), I don't have enough information to use Carcheck and I certainly don't have a snap. So not even square brackets, just curly brackets.

I did see another No.40 shortly afterwards, but that does help in the present case. See reference 1 for the use of brackets.

They a day or so later, not having made any further progress on the numbers, the central part of the dashboard - this being our now fairly new VW Polo - turned red, which was rather alarming. Sufficiently alarming that my reactions regressed to my long sojourn with manual gearboxes.

I think the problem was that the chap behind me - this being a short and mobile queue at a junction - was too close and the collision detection system went onto red alert. Luckily it cleared of its own accord a few seconds later - and the car had not shut itself down.

A little earlier in the day, I had been amused by the sight of a whole lot of crew from a cruise liner piling out of the shuttle bus used to ferry the passengers from dockside to townside. Off for a no-doubt well earned spot of R&R, before the liner took off for the next leg of its voyage. I imagine that a hundred years ago that they would have had their own bus, or perhaps they would have been expected to walk.

I should add that the reason that I had been able to find the bus stop (in Rodwell in Weymouth) with so little fuss was that I took advantage of gmaps telling me where my telephone was located. Much more reliable than relying on street signs happening to be in view when you want one. A feature last noticed on the occasion of our visits to Harefield earlier in the year - for which see reference 3.

And even earlier, we had been puzzled by the presence of an expensively turned out lady from Mexico in the car park at Portland Bill. A lady who was, I am told, sporting diamonds, but who had also gone to the bother of getting the car park machine to talk to her in Spanish. Which rather confused BH when it came to her turn to pay - but she managed well enough for all that. But what on earth was the lady from Mexico doing there? Apart from probably waiting for a companion who had gone off to the shop or something.

PS 1: not so clever at finding public houses. Portland did not seem to go for them at all - maybe it was once an island of low-church teetotallers - it was, after all the home of a branch of the Penn family, one of whom was the Quaker who started Pennsylvania. But we eventually found the establishment snapped above, at the bottom of Chiswell, where we were able to take both Guinness and a decent warm beer. And park. And the bank of Chesil Beach behind. Presumably Chiswell, both the name of a road and of the eponymous hamlet or village, predated the beach. But it looked as if the trade from the docks across the road, for which it was probably built in the first place, had largely gone. As have the chimneys which must have been there once.

Turning to the old maps to be found at Scottish National Libraries, I find that things looked quite different in 1900 or so. The pub in question is close to the boundary between sheets, so just to the south of that above. But the masonic hall is still up and running, even if the railways are not. I didn't notice whether the line of naval hospitals was still to be seen.

While the pub appears to have started life as the 'New Hotel'. With the district and bay being called Chesilton rather than Chiswell.

Gemini was, once again, quite fulsome on the subject of the 'Little Ship'. Even more so when I told him about the name on the OS map and when he got onto Chesil Beach.

I might add that I have noticed of late that he has quite an eye, quite a penchant, for commercial and branding issues. Does this reflect there being an awful lot of material of that sort out on the Internet, the stuff on which he was trained? An avid reader of transcripts of programmes like the 'Hotel Inspector'?.

PS 2: an advertisement has just popped up in my gmail from people who want to rent me something like the boat snapped above. Maybe I will work out why they might have thought that I was worth a punt. Reference 4 suggests that I might be a bit out of my depth.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/03/no40.html.

Reference 2: https://www.hollandamerica.com/en/gb.

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/denham-grove.html.

Reference 4: https://www.anchor.yt/.