On All Fools' Day just past, we drove down to Faketown, aka Poundbury, just outside Dorchester, to position ourselves for a rendezvous at Portland Bill the day following, a rendezvous which has already been noticed, in a roundabout way, at reference 1.
Searching volume 5 on the key 'fleet services' turned up various interesting material, but nothing relevant. While searching volume 4 turned up reference 2, involving another stop at Fleet Services on the way to Poundbury, but as long ago at 2019, a year or so before the onset of the plague.
The form on this day was that I started, taking us about half way, with BH taking over for the second half. My first long drive since my outing to west London at the turn of the year. Long drive for me that is; I have never been much of a driver, although I have managed the odd long drive - for example, to Skye - in years gone by. A handover driven in part, as it happens, by my need to be able to take a call in the afternoon. As it turned out, the call came through just as BH was pulling into our destination, Queen Elizabeth Square in Poundbury, so the force was with us.
Our first stop had been at Fleet Services on the M3. Where, entirely appropriately given our destination, I came across the interesting tiles snapped above. Ceramic tiles shaped and laid very much after the style of parquet-style wood-style blocks you can buy in places like B&Q or Wickes. So many layers of faking!
But the place itself, while rather noisy, both visually and aurally, was smart, clean and tidy, with a posse of cleaners working the space to keep down the inevitable mess and litter.
The milk for our tea came in a plastic sachet and our tea cakes came in paper bags, but both turned out better than they looked.
Pressed on, passing lots of primroses on the banks and lots of small rookeries.in the trees. At Salisbury, scored the Wellingtonia noticed at reference 3. Some bluebell woods.
A road with views from Salisbury to Blandford Forum. In the snap above, Salisbury top right, Poundbury bottom left and Blandford marked with a pin. The road in question being the A354 and some of the views being of Cranford Chase. A name which, for some reason, I am familiar; a National Beauty Spot which rates an entry in Wikipedia, for which see references 4 and 5. The first owner we know of was a Saxon notable called Brictric, not to be confused with Britvic, which came later. It was confiscated from him by the then wife of William the Conqueror, possibly out of spite over some ancient lovers' tiff. Or so the story goes. It then did time as a medieval hunting ground, a larger version of our own Nonsuch Park, once used by Henry VIII. Also a place popular with 19th century archaeologists, before being turned over to food production during the Second World War.
Plenty of carefully maintained hedges, although that did not seem to extend to many hedgerow trees. Maybe getting the flail driver to lift his flail from time to time was too difficult.
We found a quiet bit on which we could pull over to take our picnic. Hedge planting visible in the foreground. Some sort of agricultural pond - the artificial sort, lined with clay - above that?
A little early to check-in when we arrived, so we took a few minutes out for tea and bitter. This last Tanglewood from Hall & Woodhouse - the people who have got a the hotel. Not bad, but a little thick and strong to be taking a lot of it.
Accompanied by a very rich décor, with lots of variety, lots of interest.
Which included a very fat biography of the late Queen Mother, complete with facsimiles of autograph letters on the end papers. Just over a 1,000 pages of text, and a very average bit of book production. Whoever is going to flog through this sort of thing? We flogged through it enough to discover that it contained a version of the snap that we had come across back at the Cock & Lion, as noticed at reference 6.
We also had some art works by a lady who specialised in painting beach scenes on bits of wood recovered from local beaches. I don't think we got to find out how much she charged.
But Gemini does very well this morning, and I learn from reference 7 that we could have had it for £70. Quite cheap for art souvenirs by London standards. I was impressed with how well Gemini was able to deal with the clue I gave him.
While BH did very well with the complicated shower upstairs. I tend to avoid such things, not caring for water spraying in all directions at wildly different temperatures. Bad for my blood pressure.
Later on, some more lush decor on the way up to the main restaurant, open again in the evening. It had been breakfast only on our last few visits.
We were not very sure about the rubber plant, even after feeling the leaves. But I plump for real rather than fake on this occasion.
The menu seemed to have moved down another notch, to more or less standard pub fare. That said, the bread and humus with extra bread was a lot better than I was expecting. The lightly toasted bread worked very well.
I opted for a burger, one of what turned out to be a series of same over the days to come. The only catch was that the proper burgers were all too complicated for me, a sort of vertically organised version of the sort of thing you get from Subway. So I opted for two kiddie burgers instead, with goo on the side. BH went for some kind of healthy bowl food.
The burgers were fine, if a little basic, but there was, perhaps, rather a lot of them. Rather a lot for someone who does not get so much serious exercise these days.
I learned from BH's bowl that raw baby spinach does not taste very much of spinach. Pleasant enough, but with only a fairly faint flavour.
From where I associate to the subs that were available at the canteen at the Standards Institute at Gaithersburg, where I was once told that the names of this particular sort of fast food varied a good deal across the US, to the point where someone had written a (successful) PhD thesis about same. See the rather busy reference 8: they might have been hollowed out, but they still exist.
The subs at Gaithersburg might have been called hogies and were rather good. Gemini does pretty well on this one too, even if I did get the spelling wrong.
He really gets going when I ask him about the early evening eating habits and the absence of bars in Gaithersburg. An extract being snapped above. All this sort of stuff must be very thoroughly documented, for better or for worse, out on the Internet.
Back at Poundbury, the fake gas lights outside looked rather well once it was dark. As did the rather grand dining room inside.
PS 1: there were a variety of wooden tables in the dining room, some quite grand, some the sort of thing you could pick up in jumble sales for a pound when we were young. I used to recycle the tops for book cases and such.
On one of them, I came across a very superior form of rub jointing. This last being the glueing together of two planks of wood, edge to edge. A rather weak form of jointing which needs some sort of support, usually external, but here, unusually, internal as well. Small pieces of batten had been let into the joint - and dowelled for good measure. It was this last, never seen before, which caught my eye. I had never even got as far as battening my rub joints, never mind dowelling the battens.
PS 2: wondering about the topography between Salisbury and Blandford Forum, I got OS to plot the route for me. Starting left at Salisbury, a fairly level stretch crossing the River Avon, heading south, which eventually reaches the sea on the eastern fringes of Bournemouth, where it and the currents are responsible for the famous beauty spot known as Hengistbury Head, a place I used to climb up as a child, in the course of family holidays. A place noticed just three times in these pages, the first notice being back in 2007 at reference 9. No clue either there or in the other two places as to when we might last have been to Bournemouth, so not very recently. Most recently, as I recall, for lunch in the Miramar Hotel, which we had first visited when the Navy put on a small display of ships in the sea below. Some jubilee or other. The only trace of the hotel in the archive being the birthday post at reference 10.
One then climbs up to the top of Faulstone Down, before drifting down to Blandford, dipping down to 50m to cross the Tarrant, before climbing back into Blandford. The Tarrant joins the Stour which joins the Avon, which accounts for one of the other notices of Hengistbury head, just passed over, at reference 11.
Faulstone, aka Faulston, is known to Bing, but is not to be confused with Foulstone, a colony in some computer game. Copilot tells me:
Inside Trinnitos, head over to the planet on the west side and scan it to find Foulstone. Now that you’ve found it, you’ll need to choose the correct dialogue option to unlock it as a colony.
A route now saved for posterity on the Ordnance Survey servers. Or perhaps they have subbed that sort of thing out to Amazon Web Services - along with all kinds of other, odd bits of government.
A route which includes various odd kinks, orange spotted in the snap above. The route algorithm which joins up the dots that you supply is clearly a bit tricky; nothing so simple as following the yellow brick road. Nothing like the 'snap to grid' feature you get in some drawing packages.
PS 3: I had a good conversation with Gemini about rub joints, glue pots and Aerolite. Quite the chap for jogging one's ancient memories. The start of this conversation in snapped above.
Perhaps Gemini is going to become my paid companion when I get old. Even at the price suggested the other day, it would be a lot less than the minimum wages that we pay our care workers. And few of them would know the first thing about glue pots.
PS 4: 'glueing' rates a red underline in Blogger and Bing turns up what seems like a great many web sites which explain the difference between 'gluing' and 'glueing'. The bottom line seems to be that, while the latter looks better to me, the former is more common, particularly in North America. Which is consistent with Webster's International which says 'gluing also glueing' as part of the entry for the verbal use of 'glue'.
OED has, as one might expect, much longer entries. Plus one for 'gluing' , the verbal substantive, and another, marked as obsolete for 'glu•ing', the participial adjective. One gets 'glewing' in the text, but there is no sign of 'glueing'.
I have not checked Longman's, which we currently use for Scrabble, but I now expect that 'glueing' will be disqualified.
Does Gemini never sleep? Lots more of it than I reproduce here. Part of his story being that it is a perfectly proper word for Scrabble.
'... In British English (which Longman documents beautifully), there is a long-standing tradition of keeping the 'e' when adding -ing to words ending in 'ue' (like blueing, clueing, or glueing). While American English almost always drops it, the British "Longman" style typically validates your memory of that extra 'e'...'.
Which does not quite fit with the OED story. More work in progress.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/no41.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/to-poundbury.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/wellingtonia-137.html.
Reference 4: https://cranbornechase.org.uk/.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranborne_Chase.
Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/bennewtiz.html.
Reference 7: https://www.naomiingsart.com/.
Reference 8: https://www.nist.gov/.
Reference 9: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/10/paris-15e-concluded.html.
Reference 10: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/shin.html.
Reference 11: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/04/stourhead.html.
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