Collecting

When I was very young, our garage use to contain lots of wooden boxes which had once been the property of East Anglian fruit growers and with the name of the grower stencilled on the end of the box in black. My father used to use them for storing his apples and pears but sufficient time has now passed for these rather ordinary items to have become collectible.

I picked up a rumour last week that fine specimens were to be seen, although probably not to be collected, at the Angel at Henley on Thames (see http://theangelhenley.com/), so off we went.

First call was to Grant Road East where I picked up the Bullingdon to take me to Black Lion Gate in Kensington Gardens. Various items of interest on the way. An illuminated sign in Battersea Park Road warned me that I was approaching a low bridge and that I might do better to try another route. A Bullingdon stand in Battersea Bridge Road looked rather closed and may have fallen prey to the younger inhabitants of the nearby tower blocked nest for affordables. Over the river, through Kensington and up the junction between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, with the opening pull up a slope causing me to puff a little, being very unused to slopes of any sort these days. Walked from Black Lion Gate to Lancaster Gate, where I pulled my second Bullingdon, making it to Winslade Street at Paddington in time to take the penultimate slot on the stand there.

And so onto the first mistakes of the day. I had thought to demonstrate my prowess with ticket machines but managed to get myself an open return rather than a day return, which would have been a significantly cheaper option. Worse, I failed to work out that, as I had already purchased a Travelcard from Epsom, I only needed to purchase the excess from the M25 to Henley, rather than the whole fare from Paddington. Even more significant loss of cash.

Interested to see massive concrete operations at Westway, the site of my own concrete glory days, back in the late sixties of the last century, possibly to do with Crossrail. Passed a quite respectable puffing Poirot in dark green livery, in its shed, perhaps at Southall, aka a 'Braunton'.

Pressing on, got to Twyford (as mentioned on 31st May) where we were able to sit down and admire the rather grand, double-decker cycle racks while we waited for the slow train to Henley. Arrived there to stroll up the river to the Angel, to find a right mixture of boats moored up at what must have been very expensive moorings. Some boats pretending to be launches from 100 years ago, some boats which might really have been such launches, a variety of common or garden motor boats and some which were really quite scruffy. We thought that maybe it was cool in Henley to have a very expensive pad overlooking a very expensive mooring at which one kept a heap of old junk. A heap of old junk to go with one's very old and faded rowing blazer.

Quick spin around the town before actually entering the Angel, where we were slightly surprised to find that we could take lunch at a Wetherspoons senior drop in centre; perhaps the blazer brigade prefer their menials to use Wetherspoons rather than to clutter up their watering holes. In any event, the usual good value, although my usually reliable cod came in two small lumps rather than one large lump, which meant that I got rather a lot of well cooked batter for my money.

Town church big but disappointing; we might have done better to do the town hall at the other end of the High Street. And then, despite having been keen on the stories as a child, decided against getting into first editions of Winnie-the-Pooh books at https://www.jonkers.co.uk/, thinking that fruit and vegetable boxes were good enough for now. Amused by a book, got up like one of those Loeb parallel texts, but actually a parallel text version of Joyce's Ulysses, translated from the paddy into ancient greek. If it had of been a tenner I might have done it, but £30 was a bit much for an impulse purchase of something I was not going to use. Just a bit of fun to show off to suitable guests.

And so to the Angel where we found the rumoured boxes but decided that they had been rebuilt and so were not really collectible. Whoever heard of a box for moving turnips about of such a size (see illustration above)? There was some compensation in the form of a very decent red wine (for a pub), which sparked a debate about the direction of flow of the river below. The flow around the piers of the nearby bridge suggested a southern flow while the various small blobs of foam suggested a northern flow. Shakespeare, it seems, mentions at some point the misleading appearance of flows around piers and he must have known what he was talking about as inspection of the map this morning suggests that the direction of flow is indeed north at Henley, north before looping around to the east, to Maidenhead and Windsor.

On the way home passed what I took to be a very  large, polytunnelled tomato farm outside Maidenhead, complete with a trailer village for the pickers to hang out in, and tweeted a large hawk over what had been a builder's yard near Maidenhead Station. Derelict train sheds at Old Oak Common, another reminder of what must have been the huge cost of moving Euro Rail from Waterloo to St. Pancras. Then on the train to Epsom I was entertained by a prosperous looking chap in a very smart blue tie who was watching a film on his tablet, complete with earplugs, and playing some solitaire game on his telephone at the same time. Perhaps he needed to block out some very bad thoughts about something.

PS: I was impressed while taking notes for this posting by the way that the spell checker in OneNote seems to know both about the sort of words that I use and about the layout of the telephone keyboard, which sometimes makes its guesses about what I intended to type surprisingly good.