The format during this hot spell has become doing nothing much during the day, certainly nothing much outside the house, which does cause some inconvenience, but to take a walk early in the morning, when it is still pleasantly cool, and another late in the evening (say after 21:00) when it is at least cooling after the heat of the day. We also have a waxing moon, visible quite hight to the south at that time, maybe 66%.
This morning the task was to return the trolley I had collected from the hill end of Parklawn Avenue the evening before to M&S. At least to return it to its front entrance, the shop itself being firmly shut at 06:00.
Shopping trolleys, with their small hard wheels, are designed for the smooth and level floors of the big stores. Pushing them elsewhere, even in the car parks of said stores, can be challenging. Out on the Chase Estate, a lot of the pavements slope, which makes pushing difficult, and there are lots of patches, ditto. The crest of the road, snapped above at the top of Meadway, looking roughly southeast, are level, but can be bumpy, depending on the nature of the surface dressing. One just has to do the best one can.
That said, I still get a childish pleasure from using the middle of the road, whether I am just walking, pushing or cycling. A pleasure that I was able to indulge on the present occasion.
As I approached the passage under the railway at the bottom of West Hill, a young lady popped out of a side road in M&S livery, presumably heading for the start of her shift at 06:00. And I think I saw a couple of her colleagues headed the same way as I got nearer town. Too far away to even think of trying to hand my trolley over.
A trolley which was followed by another, gathered up from the passage by Viceroy Cars, the freehold of which appears to be for sale. Have they finally succumbed to the arrival of Clocktower Cars?
The only sign of the market to come was the fruit and veg stall. Fully erect, but more or less free of both produce and staff. Maybe these last were visiting McDonald's (of reference 1) for a spot of breakfast. Nothing much else open, although there were signs of life in most of the many cafes.
Through town, up to Kiln Lane, back down Middle Lane and round to Stones Road, where I snagged this fine lily.
Six petals, one whorl of three above the other. Maybe the upper whorl is petals, the lower, subtly different whorl is sepals. Six stamens. Which makes a change from the fives which seem much commoner at the moment. There is talk of sixes for the lily family as a whole in Bentham & Hooker, although I have been a bit baffled by his botanical jargon, glossary at the front notwithstanding.
Zoom also suggested something in three parts at the very centre of the flower, but whether that is something to do with the female part of the flower,a bit of debris or an image processing artefact, I would not like to say.
The Screwfix whitebeam - looking very white indeed in the bright, morning sunlight.
Something going on at Sandie's Flowers, opposite the undertaker in Pound Lane, with scaffolding and skip. A lady whom we use from time to time and does us very well. I remember one occasion when I bought some very showy flowers from her, flowers which I started off by not liking, then flipping over to liking. Has she retired?
Back home I consulted the BH memory bank. She knew what I was talking about, thought it came from South Africa, but could not put a name to it. Turned the pages of the trusty Hessayon to no avail. So tried Gemini with the clue:
A few years ago I went through a phase of buying some showy flowers from our local florist. Bright, deep, topical colours, a single flower a bit like a daisy on the top of a long stem. They came carefully packed in rows, in flat cardboard boxes. Some people floated the decapitated flowers in big flat bowls. A quick look a Hessayon suggests Actotis, Aster and Dimorphotheca: all warm but not quite right. Any ideas?
Which, typos notwithstanding, he converted to a convincing story about gerberas in short order. Fairly sure that that is the right answer. He also turns up a snap of a floating gerbera, but a snap which I am unable to trace to Getty Images. Perhaps he has better access than I do.
Winding up with a reminder of the racing solecism which is the pub sign at TB. 'Blenheim' is the name of a horse which won the Derby in 1930 before going on to a successful career at stud. The problem being that the Derby is a flat race, not over the sticks.
Our fine Costcutter, an hour off opening, behind.
Home to study my fine, single sheet map of India, recently resurfaced. A map from Cartographia, seemingly from Hungary, but more or less invisible on the Internet. Just the odd map from the same series to be had from Amazon or eBay. I thought I had bought my copy from Stanford's, late of Long Acre.
Gemini was able to tell me a long story about Cartographia, at one time, effectively the Hungarian state mapping agency. Heavily subsidised to produce all kinds of splendid maps - and mapping resources - which could be sold to the west for hard currency.
Study of the names of the big cities, most of which have been renamed over the years, put this map to the late 1990s.
I associated to my fine atlas from the Polish army mapping agency, via Permagon and Maxwell.
Whereupon Gemini told me all about all the resources poured into mapping foreign countries in the Soviet era. Part of this was about identifying targets, but I think another part was just eminent cartographers hitching a ride on the defence budget.
Another part was the Cartographia mapping resource called Cartactual and its companion textual review, Cartinform. For which see reference 4.
Noting that plenty of military mapping must go on over here too, in the UK, the US and no doubt elsewhere. Not to mention the very military name of our state mapping agency, not yet privatised. But Gemini did not respond to hints about all this: had I bumped into one of his guard rails?
It struck me that it was a good example of poor allocation of capital under the Soviet system. Musk does things so much better with his rockets and his ambitions to live on Mars. Also that the Soviets were exporting cheap mapping products in much the same way as the Chinese are now exporting cheap manufactures. As we did before them, a long time ago now.
I associate to a story about the naval mapping people in the west country selling all kinds of fine charts about the South Atlantic, to a chap from the Argentine Embassy, just before the Falklands War.
Sadly, Gemini lost his log of the first part of our chat, but I have now learned that there are at least two parts to this. First, one has the more or less raw transcripts of the chats. Each chat is given a title which reflects, pretty well, where the chat started, but not necessarily where it ended. These chats are listed n a left hand side bar and they can be searched. Second, there is some kind of fact base, your 'Saved Information Profile', which is updated as each chat proceeds. Not the raw transcript, rather a precis of the thing as a whole, presumably linked in some way with his wider knowledge base.
Maybe it is all a bit ad-hoc, with engineers bolting new stuff into to the existing Google user-facing infrastructure as best they can. Which can all get a bit messy over time.
One effect of which is that you can start over and cover the same ground, rather more quickly than you did first time around.
Which is good because the raw transcripts do indeed sometimes goes missing, for very geeky sounding reasons. Best to copy and paste the chat into Notepad if you care. Which I have now learned how to do without fuss.
Things are coming on.
After all of which, it being Thursday, it was time for left-overs fish cakes again. As noticed only yesterday. Didn't manage to turn them very successfully on this occasion, but they ate OK.
Lukewarm oranges not as good as cold ones, but we do not have a very big refrigerator. And anyway, who knows what the right temperature at which to store oranges is?
PS: the snap above is lifted from reference 5, part of the part of the Eastern front held by the Hungarian army in 1942. On the Don River, maybe 100km to the east of where the Russians are fighting today. The same scale and remarkably similar in general appearance to one of our Landranger maps from Ordnance Survey.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/mcdonalds.html.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerbera.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim_(horse).
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartactual.
Reference 5: Hungarian Military Mapping Abroad 1919–1990 - László Zentai , László Buga, Gábor Gercsák - 2018.
Group search key: aisk, 20260625.
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