Trolley 7

I am not sure whether this one should really count, having been retrieved from only just outside the perimeter of the Sainsbury's estate at Kiln Lane, from gmaps reference 51.339491, -0.257245. But I have, anyway.

I learn from this trolley that, first, the wheels can come off. Back right in this illustration. The vibration caused by wheeling off-piste can do the welding in. Or perhaps an axle. And, second, they do bother to mend them. There must be, somewhere in the system, a hospital for sick trolleys.

A hospital run by and for Sainsbury's or have they outsourced this particular function? Do they send them back to Warwick for attention there?

But what they do not do is keep stocks of all the parts of all the trolleys that have ever been, as this new wheel does not match the old. Although, to be fair, one would not have noticed if they did.

Also interesting to find this alley, tucked between the filling station exit and the back gardens of the houses adjoining the Kiln Road exit onto East Street. An alley which I must have passed many times, at least on the Epsom side of the exit, but have never taken proper note of before. A handy place for the residents to park, with parking presumably prohibited on East Street itself. Was there some unseemly wrangle with the Sainsbury's lawyers about rights of way and such when they were negotiating their purchase of the Kiln Lane site (once brick kilns and after that a place for the Civil Defence people to play at nuclear war)?

PS 1: civil defence was big when I was a child, when people worried about nuclear bombs in a way that they do not now, but it does not seem to exist any more. Just a shadow existence in outfits such as that advertised at http://britishcivildefencecorps.btck.co.uk/. And typing this, I vaguely remember a short period as a child, maybe early teens, when I was really worried about such things. Would we still be around tomorrow? This being not long after the missile crisis in Cuba.

PS 2: I did not know until today about the private understanding noted in Wikipedia: 'after a period of tense negotiations an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba without direct provocation. Secretly, the US also agreed that it would dismantle all US-built Jupiter MRBMs, which were deployed in Turkey and Italy against the Soviet Union but were not known to the public'. I had been vaguely aware of the existence of same, but it was more as a point of propaganda than of actual knowledge.