Black hooved pigs

Thought to visit the new wine bar in Mitcham Road again yesterday (see 12th June) to see how they were getting on.

The ham was two thirds consumed; there was enough left for me but I think I must have had too much lunch and so did not fancy it. Plus there was no sign of any bread to go with it. On the other hand there were what looked like packets of dark brown cigars, maybe cheroots, in a cupboard below the bar, wrapped in clear plastic in the way of Tenerife cigars and it was just as well that they turned out to be sausages, as by the time we left I might have been tempted to take one into their cosy smokers' den. A reasonable number of punters, proper fodder for wine bars, not the sort of person one associates with the Mitcham Road end of Tooting at all. We joined them with a bottle of something Portuguese. All very pleasant.

On leaving, came across a small building plot, and sight of a number of pile heads (the things with short brown steels sticking out in the illustration) prompted me to think about how you price such a plot. In this case one could see the pile heads, but what else might there be lurking there that one could not see? Maybe lots of utility pipes and cables still connected to their respective networks. Maybe an old cellar which had be filled up and screeded over. Maybe all kinds of old footings and whatnot, concrete and otherwise. How could one price the plot without making a start and digging it up to see what was there?

I met a chap once who made a good living out of researching chunks of building land. He would tell you about tricky covenants, old bottle pits, nasty contamination and any other perils to prospective builders that there might be. But I imagine that his services were quite expensive and would not really suit a small plot such as this one. Maybe the answer is the vendor should do the preliminary work to sort all of this out and make the results available to prospective purchasers. Along the lines of the not terribly successful attempts to make the sellers of private houses come clean about what they are selling.

Made up for missing the ham by buying three little spicy cakes from 'Mixed Blessings', more or less opposite the wine bar, for the large sum of £1. BH thought they were rather good. I am not keen on their bread as they specialise in sour dough bread, which I have tried but did not like all that much. Friendly crew though.