Scone report

I complain from time to time about cheese scones, either their absence from most bun and cake selling cafeterias or the quality of the ones you do get. Nothing much like the ones that I make at home, even when allowing for the fact that at home we mix, make and eat, not much more than an hour start to finish. It is always going to be hard to replicate this in a commercial environment. For a sample of previous notices, from more than ten years ago, see reference 1.

So a few days ago, we noticed that hot cheese scones were on offer at the Puckpool Café, near Ryde, and thought that we would give them a try. They looked fine, but inside the mix was all wrong: BH thought that maybe egg had been used, but whatever the case the crumb was all wrong, more cake than cheese scone.

For the avoidance of doubt, we like this café and will continue to use it. The do a good line, for example, in bacon and egg baps.

With the bonus, on this occasion of a real Chelsea tractor outside, or rather, to be precise, a Chelsea truck, from the people at reference 2. I did not know that such things actually existed; at Epsom they seem to make do with Range Rovers and other SUVs of that sort.

Sadly, after more careful inspection of reference 2, I now know that it is nothing of the sort. The Chelsea Truck Company is simply a dealer for this sort of vehicle, maybe with a bit of customisation thrown in. They certainly charge a lot more than we would want to pay for our wheels.

In this particular case, customisation may have been done by the people at reference 3, who certainly got their name onto the bag for the tyre hanging off the back door. And I wonder now whether the name of this dealer was the inspiration for the widely used phrase 'Chelsea tractor', widely used for large cars driven by pushy mums outside primary schools.

Gemini says not. His story is that the company was set up maybe a decade after the phrase came into use - mainly in a derogatory sense - to sell big, fancy SUVs to people who wanted to look big on city and suburban roads. They deliberately played into the phrase as a marketing device.

Moving on, after a visit to the vineyard at reference 5, to be noticed properly in due course, we thought to take a refreshment at Brading Roman Villa, a place which has served us well, in various ways, over the years. See, for example, reference 5.

On this occasion they offered, inter alia, cheese scones - and rather good they were too. Entire, left above. Detail below.

The crumb was much more like that of one of my scones than that offered at Puckpool. Really quite a good effort. The quiche salad, however, was not so good. Quiche not in the same league as the BH variety. Nor would she put crisps on the plate or goo on the salad.

PS 1: back home I got to wondering about deer on the Isle of Wight, which had come up at the vineyard. I kicked Gemini off with this fairly detailed query:

'A vineyard keeper near Brading on the Isle of Wight told us today that deer were not a pest, in the way that they are on the fringes of the Common at Epsom. Rabbits and foxes yes, deer no. In fact, she thought that there were no wild deer on the island at all. On the other hand, another visitor told us that she had been told that deer swam across from the mainland, sometimes getting into trouble, sometimes making it. What can you tell me about all this?'

To which I got a fairly detailed answer, to the effect that there are very few free running deer on the island, not enough to be a pest for farmers, gardeners and such. 

'... Deer are remarkably strong and capable swimmers. Their hair is hollow, which acts like a built-in life jacket to keep them buoyant, and their powerful legs propel them through the water with surprising speed. They regularly swim across Southampton Water and the Solent to travel between the mainland and the island...'.

And yes, a few did swim across from the mainland, but not in large enough numbers to make a difference.

On a supplementary, he explained that in the olden days, the island was something of a hunting park for the local nobles and gentry. Lots of deer. But they gradually got hunted down, regular farms spread over most of the island and the deer were more or less eliminated by the 19th century.

But he has not yet really explained why the deer population on the Isle of Wight has stayed small, which it certainly has not in Surrey. Maybe it is all down to quirks of local land use and geography. Maybe Gemini would do better if I probed. But he did say that there are two camps on the island: one all for bringing the deer back and one dead set against.

I guess the situation in the US is different, where suburban deer are a major pest which are hard to bear down on, even if animals rights and conservation people did not get in the way. The place is just too big and there are too many natural reservoirs to top up the suburbs, should populations in these last come under pressure. And too few predators.

PS 2: Gemini also offers a version of the snap above, with the caption: 'A roe deer navigating the coastal waters of the Solent. Source: The Independent'. Which is confirmed by Google Images. What he does not say is that this particular deer came to a bad end, an incident from 2018 which Gemini glossed a bit further down in his story. His gloss suggests that the deer was panicked by people on the beach into going back into the water, a bit of information not included in the story at reference 7.

Even assuming he has got his facts right, he would be marked down for not tying the image to the text properly. Notwithstanding, while he may have got some of the detail wrong, he has provided enough background for one to do a better job oneself. I suppose the trouble is that one does not bother and the Gemini story escapes into the information ecosystem, warts and all. 

From where I associated to the days when lots of people used to knock Wikipedia. Bunch of amateurs thrashing about, completely out of their depth. At about which time, I turned up a story about a study which showed that the error rate in Wikipedia was less than that in Encyclopedia Britannica. So there.

PS 3: Gemini knows all about this too, with the report I remember probably being a big effort put on by Nature in 2005, when Wikipedia was young. The result might be summarised by saying that Wikipedia became respectable. Subsequent studies have shown accuracy rates of more than 90% for sciences subjects and around 80% for arts subjects. Where accuracy is measured as the proportion of 'facts' into which articles are boiled down to check out. A time consuming and tricky business which I do not propose to go into further today!

References

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=cheese+scones.

Reference 2: https://www.chelseatruckcompany.com/.

Reference 3: https://kahnautomobiles.com/.

Reference 4: https://bradingromanvilla.org.uk/.

Reference 5: https://www.adgestonevineyard.co.uk/. A site sometimes described by Edge as being insecure.

Reference 6: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/07/roman-villa.html

Reference 7: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/deer-drowns-isle-of-wight-hampshire-southsea-lasso-coastguard-fire-service-a8450946.html. I thought the headline was a bit hard on the chap with a lasso. The deer was in trouble and he was only trying to help.

Reference 8: https://isleofwightdeerconservation.wordpress.com/2021/02/20/isle-of-wight-wild-deer-a-few-myths-by-isle-of-wight-deer-conservation/. A blast from the breed-the-deer camp. Probably the source of chunks of the Gemini story.