Started off to the unusual sight of maybe fifty gulls flying in a circle above the school end of our road, that is to say an annulus, an open circle with a hole in the middle. They kept it up for a few minutes, then swept away to pastures new; something I don't recall seeing before. Then, a few days later the same sort of thing again over Fore Hill in Ely, maybe a hundred gulls on that occasion. Clearly global warming is getting to our usually well-behaved laridae.
On to Meadway, where I discovered that the corner quoining to the houses was as fake as the Tudor beaming on the upper parts of some of the houses nearer us. Not stone at all, rather cunningly contrived sand & cement.
On to West Hill, to inspect the new tactile stones at the cycle way crossings, by which I mean the dull yellow paving stones, about a foot square and with an array of bumps to alert a blind person to the presence of a crossing. Except that, in this case, the tactile stones actually looked more like linoleum, maybe half a centimetre thick and were stuck straight onto the black-top rather than being built in. Maybe the glue is good, but it will be interesting to see how long it is before the corners start to lift. Will the verdict turn out to be good and cheap to install but not to be good for much else?
Some part of the missing trolley mystery solved when I discovered a collection of trolleys, from all kinds of places, including the rather far-away Homebase, outside the affordable flats which have been built on top of Epsom railway station. See, for example, reference 1.
And so to Tooting where the the first subject was the business of conversing with people who played golf. Who might just as well have been people who played bridge or followed football; indeed any hobby of that sort in which one did not participate oneself. My contribution went along the following lines. Over drink, it was easy enough to keep one's end up in such conversations, provided one was allowed to steer it into management matters. For example, the processes by which the club captain or the grass cutting contractor were selected. The annoyance caused by social members, non-playing members that is, cluttering up the bar. The best way to accommodate the various protected species for which the course was home. This would go along well enough for a while, but eventually your interlocutor would tumble to the fact that you could not give a toss about golf and you did not want to talk about that fascinating long putt at the 17th hole for the 16th time, and would start to get a bit distant, maybe start to edge away along the bar towards a more eligible circle. From where I associate to the fact that if you are a golf bore yourself, you have entry to all the clubs in the land. Your enthusiasm is clear and unfeigned and you are instantly one of them. Unlike your truly who was there, more or less, under false pretences. I remember Francis Chichester recounting something of the same sort about fighter pilots not caring to talk shop at the bar with mere navigators. He was rather hurt, having thought that his fine record as a pioneering aviator exempted him from such considerations.
The second subject was the extent to which artists - novelists, dramatists, painters and the like - were concerned with the way the world was changing, rather than simply painting it how it was, or how it is. I shall return to this matter in a post to follow.
Back at Earlsfield, I scored an instant 3 and an unconfirmed 4. That is to say, I was not sure that the fourth aeroplane, rising to the right on the east-north-east horizon, was joining the queue until after the first aeroplane had dropped below the western horizon. My copy of the rules was not clear about the point.
Spent most of the remaining journey home pondering on the utility of our being given hundreds of slightly different pairs of trainers to chose from. On the importance, in our humdrum and highly regulated lives, of being able to exercise some real choice about something. To be able to make a personal statement about how we wanted to appear, about what we wanted to be. An exercise which did little damage, cost little in this age of computerised production and distribution. How far does such choice go in defusing tensions among the disadvantaged youth of our bog-standard estates?
Does this copy across to housewives who are given hundreds of lines of bottled water to choose from in the course of their visits to the supermarket?
With thanks to Golfers West for their illustration of St. Andrew's old course, where we have the ball taking off from the 17th 'Road Hole' on its way around the hotel and railroad shed. A famous shot, the subject of many a serious discussion over a wee dram.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/trolley-37.html.
Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=chichester+zealand. From which I see that my recollection of the story reported above was warm, but not quite right.
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